Snowflakes in Hell

It’s been interesting to watch what’s been going on in Venezuela. It’s not often we get to see a socialist dictatorship emerge right before our own eyes. Today, Hugo Chavez was given the power to make laws unilaterally, so that he may “impose the dictatorship of a true democracy.” That is, a socialist “democracy”.

Just to give you an example of why I will never be elected president, I don’t see why the proper response to this isn’t to just say nothing, but to frame the noose that Saddam was hung with, and send it to Hugo, with a note attached saying:

Comrade Chavez,

Congratulations on your newfound power. I hope will will take this gift as congratulations, and as a reminder that I really do not like dictators, and those who have decided to cause trouble for us often find their lifespans severly shortened. But seriously, congratulations, destroying five decades of democratic rule in Venezuela is quite an accomplishment. Rest assured that the US stands ready to offer assistance to your country after you destroy its economy, and we’re forced to remove you from power.

Sincerely,

El Diablo

I mean, how could you resist that. Especially when you read stuff like this:

The law also allows Chavez to dictate unspecified measures to transform state institutions; reform banking, tax, insurance and financial regulations; decide on security and defense matters such as gun regulations and military organization; and “adapt” legislation to ensure “the equal distribution of wealth” as part of a new “social and economic model.”

I’ll bet Comrade Chavez is going to be making healthy use of that particular power. Remember folks, you have to disarm people before you can subjugate them. Let’s not help make it happen here too. Oh, but it gets better:

Chavez plans to reorganize regional territories and carry out reforms aimed at bringing “power to the people” through thousands of newly formed Communal Councils designed to give Venezuelans a say on spending an increasing flow of state money on projects in their neighborhoods, from public housing to potholes.

It’s good to see that Chavez has been reading his Lenin. You know what the Russian word for council is? That’s right, Soviet. If the Venezuelans know what’s good for them, they’ll put a bullet in this commie rat’s head before he can do too much damage.

From Jerry Shores in Pinellas Park, Florida, in response to the St. Petersburg Times tirade about Florida’s gun licensing system:

Finally, and again using your reported numbers, there are 408,250 law-abiding, concealed carrying Floridians who have the means to defend themselves and their loved ones (and perhaps you and your loved ones as well) from an attack by an armed criminal. Frankly, I’m much more comforted by that thought than I am by the prospect that all I have to answer a criminal’s armed assault is your paper’s righteous indignation.

Zing! Good comeback.

h/t: Dave Hardy

John Rafferty can now be added to the list of people who can officially kiss my ass. Why? This is why:

The new chairman of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, PJ Stapleton, says the LCB has already approved the transfer of a liquor license to one grocery store that offers in-store dining and will now sell beer, and he says several applications are pending.

Buying beer in grocery stores? Now there’s something I can get behind! In states like Iowa, California, and many many others, you can buy a fifth of rye at you corner grocery store, not just beer. I’m happy Mr. Stapleton is moving Pennsylvania in line with most of the other states in the union. But wait:

But that chairman of the Law and Justice Committee, suburban Republican John Rafferty, says he’s concerned about the number of teenagers who work in grocery stores, and for that and other reasons he’s working on legislation that would close what he believes is a loophole in state liquor law.

Thanks John, for looking out after us, and getting this dangerous loophole that allows beer to be sold in supermarkets, which is clearly turning every other state that does it into a giant drunken frat party. It’s all about the children, after all.

And we wonder why young people are leaving Pennsylvania in droves once they get out of college?

Tom Knox it seems has come from way behind to take the number two polling spot in the Philadelphia mayoral race. This is good news, because it pushes Nutty Nutter out of the number two spot and replaces him with a slightly more sane candidate. Tom Knox is also cooler because he has a blog. Bob Brady, the City’s top Democrat, has thrown in officially now too, but he’s still polling dead last, behind Fattah, Knox, Nutty, and Evans.

Ahab of WWJWD asks an interesting question about C&R carry guns:

After my recent experiment with the Hi-point pistol and the sundry disappointment that followed, I started thinking about “what if someone carried a C&R?” I ruminated on it for a while; and I did have a couple of germane thoughts. A lot of these older guns are military pieces, designed to ridden hard and put up wet. Apart from the abysmal sights on a good percentage of them, you could do a lot worse for a carry gun that packing a Star Model B (or whatever). Again, I’d say wait a month and buy a used GP100 for $300, but if all you’ve got is a surplus CZ50 (.32 ACP) and you can shoot it, it beats a pointy stick.

Makarovs are pretty good carry guns. I carry a Bulgarian Mak loaded with Corbon Pow’rball ammo in 9×18mm in my front coat pocket, or on a belt holster from time to time, as a backup gun, or in situations where I can’t carry my Glock. Most Maks, including the Bulgarian, aren’t C&R eligible, but Soviet Military Maks are. There are some out there on the market. They cost a bit more, because they are more collectible, but you can get it delivered to your door by the brown truck of happiness, just like anything else on the C&R list. You’ll feel like you just joined the KGB!

Bruce’s post about Flutiecare in Massachusetts is a big reason why I’m not sanguine about the prospect of Ed Rendell boldly moving Pennsylvania into attempting to outdo all the other states to show how much we care about our citizen’s health care. We need to see how this works out in other states before we try to one up anyone.

I also notice that Rendell’s health plan includes a state-wide public smoking ban. Ed, you can totally kiss my ass. Remember kids, when the government pays for your health care, suddenly your bad health habits become everyone else’s business. No thanks! Call me a wacky libertarian, but government provided health care has always seemed to be to be the short line to the government controlling way too many aspects of life than any reasonable human being should be comfortable with.

I need a refresher course in exactly how it is I need to vote for Democrats because the Republicans are too busy stomping on civil liberties. Maybe it’s just the wacky libertarian talking again, but as far as I’m concerned, both parties seem to be equally good at trying to run my life, and as far as I’m concerned they can both go to hell.

It definitely seems the media is currently engaged in a full court press against gun rights. But Why? And what does it mean? Believe it or not, I don’t think this necessarily is bad news for gun owners, but that doesn’t mean we can relax and stop being vigilant. It’s times like this that are important, but not because it’s a sign we’re about to start losing.

The main reason we’re seeing this media blitz is because of the Democrats taking over the legislative branch and generally gaining power. The anti-gun groups will be doing everything they can to get the gun issue back into the spotlight, so expect a lot of press releases, deception, and lying. And we must be aggressive about calling them out for it, and not let them an inch of breathing room.

This is an act of desperation, not an act of strength. The anti-gun groups know that if the Democrats actually abandon their issue, they are dead politically for the foreseeable future. I am not optimistic that we have won over the Democrats enough that they will actively work for us, but I think we have scared them enough that they are afraid to work against us, and that’s a tremendous accomplishment. But we have to keep them scared.

Keeping up the fight will mean writing letters to the editor challenging anti-gun editorials, and biased and inaccurate reporting. It will mean writing letters to politicians and your represenatives and making sure they are aware of your opinion on these issues. Probably most importantly, and I know a lot of people don’t like to hear this, it means making sure your NRA membership is current, and if it’s not, joining. Keep up your membership in the other groups if you like (I do) but the NRA is who the politicians in Washington and the state houses pay attention to, and how much attention the politicians pay is directly proportional to how many votes they bring to the table. Who knows, if we’re effective enough, we may even be able to get the Democrats to figure out they have more to gain by working with us than against us. Imagine how demoralized that would make you feel if you were a Brady supporter?

The traffic whore in me is noticing that you seem to be able to get a lot of attention by denying global warming. So I’ll offer a bit of my perspective. I work in a business where we attempt to model very complex systems. We don’t do it very well, but it’s enough that billions of dollars are chasing after ideas which look really good when presented to outsiders who don’t know science as well. Climate is a very complex system, and a lot of the claims that climatologists make do not pass the smell test as far as I’m concerned. I will remain very skeptical of many claims regarding global warming.

I should point out that I think global warming is probably happening, and that we’re probably contributing something to it. The evidence here seems pretty solid. But I don’t find the science convincing enough to start shaping public policy around it, because I don’t think we can really know enough to do it. How much CO₂ to we need to stop emitting to make a difference? How much exactly are we contributing vs. natural contributions? How much can we expect sea level to rise? Temperature to go up? I don’t believe anyone who claims they can answer these questions with any accuracy.

I’ve seen way too many scientists claim to be able to model complex systems, who turn out to be wrong or misleading, to lend too much credence to wild claims. And if you don’t think scientists chase after grant money, you haven’t been around them enough. Don’t get me wrong, we need to keep the process going, keep learning, and keep trying to understand. But let’s not get all chicken little just yet. If we can do easy things to reduce our carbon footprint, let’s do it, but let’s not start talking about restructuring civilization just yet.

Jym: I had a dream last night that i was hanging out with Obama, and Osama kidnapped us with a van full of terrorists
Jym: And that i then single handedly killed them all, including Osama, to save Obama
Sebastian: What did Obama do?
Jym: Just kinda sat there
Jym: I had to do all the work
Jym: Goddamn Democrats
Sebastian: It’s shit like that which makes me feel I just could never support him

While we’re talking about futuristic weapons, how about some rail gun porn? Hat tip to powerlabs.org.

Without a doubt, eventually, someday, we’ll figure out a way to pack enough energy into a small enough space to basically render ordinary firearms obsolete. Indeed, materials technology is nearing the point, probably by the middle of this century, where body armor will be effective enough that standard small arms will not penetrate it, and light enough to be worn without too much burden.

But which technology would supplant the firearm? Well, lasers are one possibility. For various reasons, I think the least likely, but it’s interesting to take a look at the current legal regulations concerning lasers. From Sam’s Laser FAQ, we have:

Please don’t give the legislators ideas. Sales of lasers are unregulated except for medical and laser show systems, and a few systems under export controls. For all other systems, you just have to register as a manufacturer if you’re making them for public sales and submit your product for compliance, and maintain records of who it was initially sold to in case there is a need for a recall.

Of course, this is just the federal level. Apparently a few states regulate lasers.

NOW, where the crap hits the fan is at the state level. New York records the serial number of all lasers and requires licensed operators, transferring a laser in NY above class II to another citizen of NY without reregistering the unit is an offense. Transporting a laser through NY or selling it out of state from NY is not however a offense. Texas and Arizona have user fees to pay for their states radiologic safety programs, etc. I’m told by a friend that AZs fees are quite steep, on the order of $1,500 a year for large industrial lasers and that AZ inspects laser shows rather thoroughly. Other states may vary, but generally unless they have made misuse of pointers a issue, there are no worries except in NY and AZ. Possession is not illegal and they don’t deny permits to register in those states. However, they may disqualify a person who fails to pass the test.

Arizona is surprising. New York not so much, because New York likes to regulate everything. I don’t think you can take a dump in New York without a permit.

As I said, I think lasers are not likely to supplant firearms, because they take a lot of energy to be powerful enough to damage someone or something. Burning a hole through someone, other than through a vital organ, isn’t really all that serious, plus you could armor something just by putting a mirror on it.

What I think will likely supplant firearms are electromagnetic weapons. These are more commonly known as rail guns or gauss guns. While I don’t think these will supplant small arms for quite some time, they will probably start to appear on ships and heavy artillery platforms by the middle of the century. But if we ever figured out how to pack a lot of energy into a small space, in theory you could make a man portable electromagnetic weapon that could punch through tank armor. The ironic thing is, if you did this today, your device, as best I can tell, would be completely unregulated in most states (New Jersey, you’d still need an FID, sorry). But imagine an arm you could adjust a power setting on: low for taking out soft targets, and high for busting through hardned targets.

But I’m sure if you had one of those, it wouldn’t be long before the VPC and Brady’s would start preaching the evils of electromagnetism, and the need to ban assault magnets. It’ll come someday. You heard it here first.  Ooops, maybe you didn’t hear it here first.

Aside from interest in things that go boom, I also have a bit of fascination with lasers. Not the common semi-conductor variety that you see in laser pointers and DVD players, but noble gas lasers. Last night I picked up an old Spectra-Physics helium-neon laser from a friend of mine. It’s nothing really powerful. A bit more powerful than your standard laser pointer, but it’s not a Class IV laser that can punch holes throughi solid steel.

Unfortunately, the thing didn’t work, probably because the gas inside has become too impure. The composition of a laser tube isn’t all that different from a neon sign. You have a cathode and anode, and a high voltage power source pumping the electrons of the He and Ne atoms into an excited state. But it takes more than this to get the gas medium to lase.

To accomplish that, you have to pump a large number of atoms into an excited state, and establsih population inversion. When these exited atoms’ electrons return from their excited state to the ground state, they emit a photon. In a laser configuration, you have two reflective mirrors on either side of the tube. One mirror will be highly reflective, and the other semi-reflective. This forms an optical catvity, or resonator along the axis of discharge. What’ll end up happening is you’ll have photons moving back and forth in the cavity hundreds of times, where they’ll interact with other excited atoms, casuing them to emit photons themselves. This process is called “stimulated smission”. Every photon produced through stimulated emissions will be of the same wavelength and move in the same direction as the stimulating photon. Once you build up enough light radiation within the reasonator cavity, some photons will begin to escape from the slightly less reflective mirror, producing a coherent beam of light that most people are familiar with. Helium neon lasers produce a nice, bright pink/reddish light. You can get other colors using other gases as your lasing medium. Laser pointers use a solid state laser, which operates a bit differently than this, but the principle is basically the same.

But the laser I got didn’t work. Just like a neon sign, after a while you start introducing impurities into the tube, both from the glass, the sealants on the tube, and from the operation of the cathode and anode. Most gas lasers have something in them called a “getter”, which is a device, usually heat activated at the time of manufacture, which sucks impurities out of the tube. There are different ways to heat up the getter to reactivate it, in an attempt to restore the laser function, but the easiest way is just to remove the tube from its power source and microwave the thing for a few seconds until you notice the tube start to come back to life. The microwaves induce a current in the metal part, heating it enough to activate. Sadly, this didn’t work for me. The light show inside the tube was impressive, but still no lasing when I reconnected the tube to the high voltage power supply. Sad.

You can actually build your own Class IV lasers, which can actually cut and burn things. There are kits and plans out there if you look. Generally, it’s CO2 lasers that make the best implements of destruction. The cool thing is, unlike guns, lasers are pretty much unregulated. I will post about that a little later in the day.

I mentioned in my last post about service rifle competition being a legitimate sporting purpose for AR-15s.  But if you have a G3, Kalashnikov, FN/FAL or what have you, you’re out of luck.  For NRA people that might read this: want to do the EBR community a big favor?  Create a class of competition for other military patterned rifles.  Why restrict it to just the rifles the US military uses or has used?

Over on a comment at Uncle’s site, Ron W Says:

It’s always assumed that so-called “assault weapons” are useful only for criminal assaults or military offensive tactics (from whence the name). Military assault weapons are full-auto and have been illegal to citizens since 1934 without an expensive and intrusive fed permit.

But the semi-auto legal weapons are great for personal self defense. They should be called self-defense rifles (or weapons) and those of us who believe in, defend and exercise the RKBA should focus on that aspect and point out repeatedly that armed self -defense is a basic human right.

This reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to blog about. I know the term “assault weapon” is a problem for us. I agree we ought to do our level best not to use it. But all the other terms I’ve heard people wanting to apply strike me as poorly thought out euphemisms.

So what’s the best thing to call an AR-15? Homeland defense rifle? Self-defense rifle? Sport utility rifle? All these terms make me gag, not because they aren’t accurate, AR-15s are useful for all those things, but because no one other than gun blog readers has any idea what the hell you’re talking about. Let’s call them “rifles” or if you want to be a little more specific “service rifles”, of which there is a specific class of competition. A service rifle is any rifle that’s made from a military pattern. For competition purposes, this would be the M1, M14, and M16. The notion that these rifles have no sporting purpose was always a myth perpetrated by the anti-gun groups and people like Charles Schumer and Mitt Romney. Any time you hear someone utter that load of crap, feel free to throw service rifle competition back in their faces. So can we go with service rifle? It’s not scary sounding, because it doesn’t have the term “assault” or “weapon” in it, and there are certainly legitimate sporting uses for them.

Time to make some more blogroll additions. I’m adding Tam’s site A View from the Porch, What Would John Wayne Do?, the Michael Bane Blog, Publicola, and finally Cam Edwards.

The VPC loses any semblence of credibility with this article:

Critics, however, say the NRA pressures lawmakers to ignore the problem.

“The people who are intimately familiar with these laws, the people at the NRA, they know exactly what’s going on,” said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the nonprofit Violence Policy Center. Florida’s gun lobby and the program’s administrators “know they’re permitting some bad people, but they don’t want the general public to know that.”

If criminals records are imcomplete such that some felons are getting permitted, isn’t that the government’s problem rather than lawful permit holders? Last I checked, the NRA, much to dismay of many of its members, was supporting the bill to improve the NICS system, which would fix a lot of these problems. Sorry Kristen Rand, but you’re a liar.

UPDATE: The media apparently doesn’t agree with due process, and many of the folks discussed here were never actually convicted, which means they aren’t felons at all. So it would seem the VPC aren’t the only ones who are liars.

I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.1 as best I can tell. The editor in WP 2.1 seems to be rather disabled, but 2.0’s editor never really worked corretly for me. I was used to writing all my posts in HTML for LiveJournal. I think I’ll have to continue doing that. Either way, at least most things seem to be working. Let me know if anything is broken.

Monday could be a slow blogging day, since I spent most of the night working on a backup script for the blog that would also store a copy offsite remotely, and then upgrading to WP 2.1. If I have time to put up a few things tomrorow, I will, but no promises.

While I’m trying to work out some issues with being able to back up the blog (it runs on my current home server, and the database runs on my MythTV DVR box), I should point to this bit on StrategyPage detailing the Top Ten Myths of the Iraq War. If you don’t subscribe to StrategyPage, I highly recommend it. Glenn’s podcasts with Jim Dunnigan and Austin Bay are always really good as well. Check out Glenn’s podcast archives to find them.

I might try to upgrade to WordPress 2.1 Sunday Evening. The blog might be down during that time. Other than that, it’ll be the usual slow or no posting weekend.

UPDATE: Yep… going to upgrade.  Going to do it now, in fact.  Things may be scary for a little bit.

I’ve been meaning to blog about Countertop’s post from a week ago:

I work with a woman who was abused by her fiance. He happens to be a cop, working here in DC for a federal police force. She left him, and has a temporary restraining order against him (which was issued by a Prince Georges, Maryland county court).

But the anti-gun folks say only the police should be armed, because, in their minds I guess, they are above the same human nature the rest of us are subjected to. Consider this:

Two studies have found that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, (1, 2) in contrast to 10% of families in the general population.(3) A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24% (4), indicating that domestic violence is 2-4 times more common among police families than American families in general.

But they are also, you know, above the law when it comes to domestic violence issues:

Unfortunately, an early analysis of the effect of the Domestic Violence Gun Ban on police officers shows that law enforcement officers have been able to circumvent the ban and retain their weapons. A 1999 survey of the nation’s 100 largest police departments revealed that only six cities acted against officers because of the Domestic Violence Gun Ban and only eleven officers were affected. Part of the reason for the lack of enforcement is that police officers have their records expunged or plead to a charge other than domestic violence.

That being from the National Center For Women and Police. I’m principal, I’m against the Lautenberg restrictions, but I sure as shit think if they are on the book they should apply to the police equally. I don’t mean to malign all police officers, but it looks to me like this is a problem that people should be worried about.  I hope that everything turns out OK with Countertop’s coworker.

Winter has struck hard in Pennsylvania, with temperatures in the low 20s plus wind chills, which means it’s time to whip out my Russian Army Ushanka. I generally remove the stars from them because I have issues promoting a regime that murdered millions of people, but I will admit they are warm. I often get questioned about where I got the hat from, and I’m always tempted to say “I got this hat off a dead Russian major”, but I think only gun nuts raised in the 80s would get the reference.

Over at WarOnGuns, David Codrea posts in response to my post few a few days ago.  I agree with several of David’s points.  Namely:

As for Mr. Sawders’ letter, again, I agree it would not be advisable to send such a missive if the goal was to persuade Judge Hendren to “do the right thing.” What I reject is that anyone is capable of writing such a letter.

The judge has proven he is a creature who considers stare decisis the supreme law of the land. He will be guided on the sentencing by what the prosecution wants and what the guidelines and precedent say.

I essentially agree here.  I do think there are a lot of folks out there who feel, rightly, like they are backed against the wall on the gun issue.  I also agree that there is often no right case, and sometimes you have to go to court with a less than ideal case because it’s the right thing to do.  What I do want to discourage is people getting themselves arrested with the intent of pushing a case through the courts.  There might come a place and time for that, and when it comes, we’ll need folks like Mr. Fincher.  I will post later on what the ideal first case might look like as a theoretical exercise, but David is right to point out you don’t always get to do things ideally.  He’s also correct to point out:

is the court will rule it an individual right, but so narrowly, and with such deference to “compelling state interest” and “reasonable restrictions” as to make very little difference in terms of hampering new legislation to outlaw “assault weapons” again, “close the gun show loophole,” retain and share NICS data, etc., and of course, in terms of enforcing “existing gun laws.”

This is definitely something to be afraid of, and a big fear of mine as well.  I’m not going to say much else about the topic of Mr. Sawders’ letter, because I don’t really want to stir up trouble within the community, and I am sympathetic to many of his arguments.  We’re all on the same side, and while I think it’s good to air out differences in strategy and tactics for time to time, we need to keep our energy focused on the real opposition.  Especially with the media seemingly bring gun control back to the surface in a big way.

I’ve noticed a few hits from Google and a few other sites for the Kriss Super V, along with some speculation about whether there’d be a civilian version. I’ve always been one that, if you take the machine gun out of submachine gun, it just doesn’t really interest me.

I can accept semi-auto versions of assault rifles, because assault rifles are generally most useful with the selector on semi-auto, with burst and full auto mode being only for those oh so special occasions. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather have M16s and M4s in my safe, than AR-15s, but I still think semi-auto ARs are great weapons in their own right, and worth owning and shooting.

But give me a semi-auto version of a submachine gun, and I just want to cry. Same with belt fed, semi-auto versions of classic machine guns. It’s just sacrilege. These weapons are meaningless as semi-automatic arms, and that’s why I don’t plan on making anything belt fed acquisitions until I can collect proper examples, that function the way God, and John Moses Browning, intended them to function.

One thing that’s bothering me about gun blogging, is that I spend more time reading gun blogs to find things to post bout than I spend reading some of my other favorite blogs. So I will highlight them from time to time.

If I had to pick a favorite non-gun blog, I would pick The Belmont Club. It’s run by Richard Fernandez, a Filipino-Australian blogger, who is known on his blog as Wretchard the Cat. In my opinion, he’s one of the clearest thinking and well written invididuals when it comes to the current strugle we find outselves engaged in with radical Islam. Let me find a recent gem to share with you:

Yet the fault does not lie — at least fundamentally — with individual politicians. The world is in the middle of an epochal transition, a transition with various names. It has been known as a Clash of Civilizations; a shift from the Nation State to the Market State; the showdown between McWorld and the New Caliphate or the end times in advance of the Hidden Imam. But whatever the nomenclature, this epoch constitutes a challenge for which no Western leader as yet has clear answers. Not to the question of what to do with Europe’s burgeoning Muslim communities; nor to the deadly rivalry between Sunni and Shi’a across the Middle East; nor to the challenge of radical Islam the world over. Webb is right to expect “sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare” and guarantees of safety from President Bush. But what better satisfaction can he obtain from Pelosi, Obama, Murtha or Hillary Clinton, who may not only not know the answer, they may not even understand the question. Is there no balm in Gilead? None. But that doesn’t mean we can’t start to invent some. Both Iraq and 9/11 are examples of challenges posed by the new epoch that won’t go away. And they will not go away until freedom, at least as expressed as the absence the mental tyranny embodied by the toxic ideology embodied by radical theocracies, is widespread over the earth. Robert Mayer is right. And so is James Webb. Strategy and operational competence are meaningless without each other. A thumbs up for freedom. And two thumbs up for attaining freedom through learned competence.

That is from The lock and key. Also check out, The politics of “Surge”, The Shores of Tripoli, Enough Gas to Get Where?, and Using the Enemy’s Strength Against Them:

Although Muckian’s examples are drawn from Iraq, they might as well have been drawn from the Islamic insurgency in the Philippines. Here if anywhere, the assumption that terrorists are operating according to some strict Bolshevik discipline is wildly misplaced. An individual Muslim terrorist might have multiple associations with one or all of several organizations — the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyaf Group or the Jemaah Islamiyah. And be able to run from one to the other. Counterterrorism tactics which assume the enemy is pursuing the organizationally disciplined “People’s War” model may result in irrelevant “divide and rule” counterinsurgency schemes. For example, the Philippine government is attempting to negotiate a political settlement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, designating them a “peace partner”, providing their personnel with certain immunities and promoted “confidence building” measures among them. It’s a classic attempt to win over the “moderate” rebels and isolate the “radicals”. But the weakness of that approach was illustrated when it became known that the Jemaah Islamiyah had been training its cadres inside Moro Islamic Liberation Front areas. Because the insurgency was based on “narrative” rather than Bolshevik discipline the terrorists could move between organizational boundaries which were really only meaningful to the counter-insurgent. The Western policeman may stop pursuit at an organizational or international border, but a terrorist driven by narrative will walk right through it.

Great stuff. But Great stuff is the standard on this blog rather than the exception. I highly encourage everyone to make The Belmont Club a regular stop, because this stuff is 100x better thought out and more informative than any policy wonk you’ll read in the paper or any dullard talking head you’ll see on CNN or Fox.

Maybe It’s the voices in our favorite Senator from New York’s head that tell him he needs ot take our guns:

Searching for the magic eight words, he turned for consolation and advice to his imaginary friends, Joe and Eileen Bailey. No, I’m not making this up. Sen. Schumer actually says this: “Though they are imaginary, I frequently talk to them. To me, they represent the hard-working and often-ignored families who are not tuned in to special-interest newsletters or editorial pages, but want a little something more from their government and their leaders.”

I can sympathize with Joe and Eileen here, because I want more from our leaders too, like, not being friggin nutcases who talk to voices in their heads. Maybe when Chuck Schumer votes to improve the mental health records in the NICS system, he should make sure he gets himself added too. You never know when Joe and Eileen will start telling him “the blood of the unbelievers cleanses the earth”.