Dec 01 2011
Well…. I didn’t think it happened ON PURPOSE
Man is accidentally shot by his own dog |
And strangely enough, that’s what really happened to a hapless dog owner in Brigham City, Utah. The man in question–a 46-year-old hunting enthusiast who is not named in local news reports on the incident–got a behind-full of birdshot courtesy of his loyal canine companion when he was out duck hunting over the weekend.
KSL.com reports the man and his dog were traveling in a canoe-like boat when the man stepped out into a shallow marsh to set up some decoys. His left his 12-gauge shotgun resting across the bow of the boat, according to Box Elder County Sheriff’s Deputy Kevin Potter.
That’s when the dog “did something to make the gun discharge,” Potter said. “I don’t know if the safety device was on. It’s not impossible the dog could have taken it off safety.”
Apparently excited to join his owner in the marsh, the dog jumped up on the boat’s bow and stepped on the gun. The gun was fired, hitting the man in the buttocks with 27 pellets of birdshot.
UPDATE: The man lived, so no Darwin award here…. though I assume he won’t be doing much sitting for awhile.
UPDATE II: You don’t suppose his last name is Cheney, do you?
Dec 01 2011
In hock for diversity
Here’s an article from Heather McDonald in National Review:
As protesters festively (oops! I mean “heroically”) rally on college quads across California in the wake of the gratuitous macing of a dozen Occupy Wall Street wannabes at University of California–Davis last Friday, UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion declared that the rising tuition at California’s public universities is giving him “heartburn.” It should, since Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and his fellow diversity bureaucrats are a large cause of those skyrocketing college fees, not just in California but nationally.
Yep. Given that the real costs and budget allocations are often pretty opaque even to university “insiders” like faculty, it’s pretty hard to know just how much the essentially leftist political goal of diversity is costing higher education under the guise of fairness, or openness, or whatever. I suppose it’s different in different places. But private schools certainly have their share of this problem, too.
This paragraph is especially on point:
The Big Lie of the campus diversity industry has been that without constant monitoring by diversity bureaucrats, faculty and other administrators would discriminate against minority and female professors and students. In fact, anyone who has spent a day inside a university knows that the exact opposite is demonstrably the case: Hundreds of thousands of hours and dollars are wasted each year in the futile pursuit of the same inadequate pool of remotely qualified underrepresented minority and female applicants that every other campus in the country is chasing with as much desperate zeal. The hiring process has been thoroughly corrupted. Faculty applicants are brought onto campus who have no chance of being hired, either because the hiring committee incorrectly assumed from their names or résumés that they were the right sort of minority (East Asians don’t count) for a position set aside for just such a minority, or because, although they were the right sort of minority, their qualifications were so low that their only purpose in being interviewed was to fill an outreach quota.
The whole thing is worth reading. Click the link at the top.
One thing I have to point out, in all the diversity talk: I haven’t heard any real concern expressed over the disproportionate female tilted gender balance of incoming students. It’s 60/40 female to male in lots of universities, and 55/45 almost everywhere else.
I haven’t heard anything about affirmative action for admissions of white male students. But numerically speaking, in the quota-think of the left, such a thing is surely needed.
But maybe that time will come.
Or not.
It’s much more fun to prattle on about white male privilege than to wonder why more white males aren’t in the university to hear themselves being accused of being white males.
Nov 29 2011
Forget “green” jobs: real energy sources create real jobs
Ohio shale drilling spurs job hopes in Rust Belt
A rare sight in hard-luck Youngstown, a new industrial plant, has generated hope that a surge in oil and natural gas drilling across a multistate region might jump-start a revival in Rust Belt manufacturing.
The $650 million V&M Star mill, located along a desolate stretch that once was a showcase for American industry, is to open by year’s end and produce seamless steel pipes for tapping shale formations.
It will mean 350 new jobs in Youngstown, a northeast Ohio city that is struggling with 11 percent unemployment.
There’s a lot more at the link above, detailing many different ways that the going after shale oil in the midwest will create real jobs, not loony-toons-pie-in-the-sky “green” jobs that Obama has been selling out of his trunk (at a huge markup) after stealing them from industries that were doing something useful and marketable.
How did he steal the jobs? If you have to ask, you haven’t been paying attention. When you over-regulate, over-spend, and over-borrow, you steal jobs. It’s very simple.
Obama’s policies have helped to create a thousand losers for every winner he personally picked. And even his picked winners are losing. When generally supporter-of-all-things-liberal Google is pulling out of an obvious Goongoggle (read it out loud) because it’s a loser they picked in a moment of obvious miscalculation, it’s clear that everyone is catching on, except maybe Obama.
In the meantime, it looks hopeful that some people in Ohio may get to go back to work. And Obama will have had nothing to do with it other than to just get out of the way.
If he does.
Nov 26 2011
From Conception to Birth
It is a rather amazing fact that the more science learns the harder it is to deny a Creator. We are now able to look inside the womb in ways that have never before been known. What is being revealed is but a confirmation of those words penned a very long time ago, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Psalms 139:14). What the author, King David, clearly understood is being underscored for us now through science. And if the case is so clearly made then it demands of us to reassess what we believe to be true about life and ending life though abortion. This is, as Alan Keyes so often states, an absolute moral imperative. But before the issue can become an imperative for our society it must become one for us as individuals. I hope you will consider this while watching and listening to this video.
Nov 12 2011
It’s about values, not party
Garlow Presents “Courage Award” to Sen. Ruben Diaz
Dr. Jim Garlow, Chairman of ReAL, on September 22, 2011 in New York City, presented to Democrat New York State Senator Ruben Diaz the “Ruben Diaz Courage Award” for his exceptional defense of moral principles in the midst of forceful opposition. Senator Diaz had to stand against the massive pressure of the Democratic machine and the June 24, 2011 behind-the-scenes shenanigans of Republican Senator Leader Dean Skelos and several GOP Senators who sold out their values, violating the promises they made during their campaigns regarding defending traditional, natural marriage. The “Ruben Diaz Courage Award” will be presented periodically to other elected officials who demonstrate unusual fortitude when defending biblical and moral values.
The next time someone claims to you that conservative Christians are really just Republicans first, and see their religion as a way to gain support for their party, refer them to this story.
How many Democrats have had the courage to stick to Biblical values in their political efforts? In the end, not many. But when they do, conservative Christians applaud them, out loud and in public, even when it is Republicans who tried to stop the right thing from being done.
Nov 10 2011
Communication with the comatose
Test Shows Awareness, Consciousness for Brain-Damaged Patients
New research using a portable electrode test suggests nearly 20 percent of those previously determined to be vegetative state may be consciously aware of their surroundings and even able to communicate through easily detectable brain signals.
I could have told them that. I go to faculty meetings. I’m certain there are some broccoli in the English department.
Nov 07 2011
Don’t Sweat It
It’s getting cooler in the USA, not warmer. See discussion in Watts Up With That.
Exit question: will all the people who signed onto panic stricken policy solutions to the non-existent problem of global warming recant someday? Or is the science so conclusive in their minds that they can afford to ignore the science? What, that last sentence didn’t make any sense?
Neither do they.
Oct 24 2011
Hollywood’s ambivalent relationship with guns and gun owners
I just watched an episode of “The Mentalist” which featured yet another deranged gun owner willing to commit mass murder to satisfy his dark inner demons that led him to obtain guns in the first place.
It featured all the usual cliches. There was the scene at the firing range out in the boonies somewhere, where lots of crazy people were all lined up shooting TVs, bottles, old computers, various other defunct appliances, watermelons, and so on, using shotguns, rifles and handguns, and even one belt fed machine gun (which led all the other folks at the informal range to cheer and applaud).
Here’s the thing: I’ve been at many different firing ranges, both regulated (with a range master) and unregulated (with no range master, and everyone simply applying common sense). I have pretty much never seen a bunch of people all side by side firing such a mixed array of firearms at such a mixed array of targets. Nearly everyone shoots rifles and handguns at paper targets in firing ranges, even unregulated ones. That’s because they want to know how accurately they are shooting, and you really can’t tell any other way. Generally, there is a section for handguns, a section for rifles, and a section for shotguns. This is because handgunners are shooting at different ranges than rifle shooters, and because shotgunners are often shooting at clay targets. People practicing with self-defense shotguns are usually using paper targets as well, typically at handgun ranges.
I have never seen a machine gun at an unregulated range. I have seen them ONLY at special shows where people line up to pay for a short period of shooting time under highly supervised conditions. If someone opened up with a machine gun in any other situation, especially without warning, the rest of the shooters would not applaud. Some might call the cops. Nearly all would be likely to back off, pack up, and leave. No one wants to be associated with a nut-case, or be around one… and only a nut case would do that, even if he owned one legally. (For the record, machine guns are so highly regulated that legal owners of them are just about the most trustworthy people you’ll ever meet, and the LEAST likely to do such a thing.) So that means someone who did such a thing would be highly suspect in the eyes of the shooting community.
Finally, the bad guy in this story had a concealed carry weapons permit in California, apparently in the Bay Area, if I understand how the show is based. This is truly unlikely. The Bay Area is just about the hardest spot in a difficult state to get such a permit. They go to famous movie stars, millionaires, former police chiefs, and so on…. only people with pull in the system. Normal people can’t get them (we can talk about the unconstitutionality of such discrimination later). Certainly, out of work people down on their financial luck (the case in the story) are not going to have one.
The incidence of criminal behavior on the part of concealed carry weapons permit holders in ANY state is very, very low, and it’s even lower in California, where it is so difficult to get such a permit in most places.
So, let’s just say that this episode of The Mentalist was written by someone who is mentally challenged…. and obviously knows nothing about guns and gun owners….. and who has an axe to grind.
How do I know the script writer knows nothing about guns, as well as being ignorant about gun owners? As a ploy, the police are supposed to have snuck into the bad guy’s house and replaced all his ammo with blanks. Furthermore, these had to be blanks that would cause a fully automatic weapon to operate properly, so they could catch him in the act of trying to mow people down with a weapon filled with blanks, and then arrest him.
Since they didn’t know WHICH of his weapons he’d be using, they would have to have replaced ALL his ammo for ALL his weapons with blanks. Outside of the unlikelihood that he wouldn’t notice the replaced ammo, and the impossibility of being certain they’d FOUND all his ammo to replace it, self-loading semi-automatic and automatic weapons mostly won’t operate with blanks. But this guy is shown emptying an entire magazine of them with narry a malfunction. This gives thin plot devices a whole new meaning.
Does anybody think the California Bureau of Investigation has thousands of rounds of blanks in all calibers just sitting around in case they need to fool some criminal gun owner? Linked up in belt-fed form for machine guns? Since, in the story, they couldn’t have known which weapon he would use, they would have to have planned for that one, too. I can just see some flatfoot sitting at a desk laboriously building chains of linked blanks. Maybe he’d get done in a week or two.
I’m still laughing. Hollywood is indeed fantasy land, filled with dupes and dufuses. What morons.
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