Tag: Good Guys

Welcome To The Club, Huskers

Good Stuff, The Gun Thing

Finally, some good news for the Second Amendment:

It’s a new day in Nebraska, where after years of struggle lawful gun owners can now bear arms in self-defense without having to first obtain a government-issued permission slip.

Gov. Jim Pillen signed LB 77 into law back in April, declaring that the bill upheld the promise made to voters to “protect our constitutional rights and promote commonsense, conservative values” and praising state Sen. Tom Brewer for championing the bill year after year, slowly making progress until the legislation finally had the votes to cross the finish line.

“Nebraskans should not have to pay the government a fee or ask permission for constitutional rights,” said Senator Brewer. “This bill finally delivers on the promises in Nebraska and United States constitutions. I am proud to help Nebraska join twenty-six of our sister states in removing this obstacle to the right to keep and bear arms.”

While the bill was signed into law months ago, its provisions didn’t officially take effect until today, making Nebraska officially the 27th state to recognize the right to bear arms in some form or fashion without the need for lawful gun owners first receive a license.

Why did it take so long?  After all, one would think that in a rural state like Nebraska, they would have been one of the first, not twenty-seventh in line.

Alas, as with so many — maybe even all — states, Nebraska has to deal with two large socialist enclaves:  metropolitan Omaha (home of, for example, devout anti-gunner Warren Buffett), and the college town of Lincoln, home of the Usual Wokist Academia.

I’m just glad to see that the gunnies (take a bow, Tom Brewer) took a leaf from the anti-gunner assholes and never gave up, chipping away at the gun nannies’ position until victory came a-calling.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

Sent to me by several Alert Readers, there’s this happy tale.

Two masked men were shot and killed during a botched robbery in Houston’s East End on Wednesday, according to the Houston Police Department.
A preliminary investigation revealed the business owner was coming back from a bank when he was hit in the back of the head. When he turned around, he saw two masked men wearing gloves and he immediately opened fire. An employee came out, saw what was going on and also fired shots at the robbers.

There’s nothing quite like a two-fer, is there?

Proving that nobody’s ever completely satisfied, however, there’s also this:

Police said a third suspect heard the shooting and took off in a newer model black Lincoln Navigator with Texas license plate RTS-3919.

Never mind.  They’ll get to him later.

Normally I’d want to get details like guns used by the good guys, caliber etc., but I think I’ll just have an extra breakfast gin to celebrate because… two-fer.

Disturbing

Music, Tragedy

I’m a little worried about all the hoopla surrounding the songs of latest phenom Oliver Anthony.  (For those who don’t know who he is, here is his story, and here are his two latest songs: Rich Men North Of Richmond and I Want To Go Home.  Listen to all of that, and what follows may make more sense to you.)

There are two points to be made here, the first being the more important.

Jeff Reynolds at PJM says that Anthony’s voice is evocative of American singers like Levon Helm, B.B. King and John Fogerty.  I am fans of all of them, but I can listen to them sing all day.  I can’t do that with Oliver Anthony, because there’s too much pain there, and it hurts to listen to him.  His voice reminds me of Amy Winehouse, whom I also find difficult to listen to for precisely the same reasons.

It’s clear that Anthony will run the risk of ending up like Winehouse (whose tragedy I explored here):  manipulated by others for their own purposes and benefit (whom, thankfully, he’s so far managed to keep at bay — not the least by telling the music industry to fuck off with their multi-million-dollar poisoned apples).  I hope he stands firm.

The second part of this is that the agony of which this young man sings is clearly resonating with millions of Americans, because what he’s talking about is real.  People are being fucked over by government and people who control the media, people are being fucked over by companies, and people are facing a future that is, frankly, as bleak and horrible as he sees his own.

And here’s where the second bunch of bloodsuckers come into the picture.  Expect soon that the political types will step forward, trying to claim the ground that Anthony and so many others like him are standing on, and making politicians’ promises to fix the circumstances that they — all of them — have been complicit in the creation thereof.

I hope that Oliver Anthony tells them, too, to fuck off.

Here’s the takeaway from all this.  The reason for Anthony’s runaway success is that millions of people not only feel his pain, but share his pain.

And unless I miss my guess, come 2024 those millions of people are going to vote for the candidate whom they think will best help alleviate it.

The political establishment had better hope that they do it through the vote, by the way, because the alternative is kinda messy.

Calm Invective

Culture, Writing

Here’s a little oeuvre which deserves airing, despite the appalling grammar:  Indiana Jones And The Last Franchise.

Even though I was not familiar with about 60% of his cultural allusions, the writing was enough to engage me.  After all, you don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that combat is awful, bloody and destructive.  I especially liked this little turn:

And, if you ever haul yourself out of bed and find that you have little to smile about… just look up Disney on Google News. It may not bring you joy, but the schadenfreude will most likely bring a smile to your face. At least a little grin.

That happens early in the piece, and it gets better.  Here’s the pre-climax exposition:

My great-grandfather was a mason. A brick-layer, I mean, not the… well, you know the other type. He was a master of his craft. Back in the 20’s, his skill was in such high-demand that he was paid to travel the world and build structures in places like Shanghai and Glasgow that stand to this day. In an age of cheap, third-world labor, it can be a bit difficult to imagine the artistry, skill, and talent of a good mason. There’s more to it than slopping mortar onto a brick and stacking another on top. You just don’t see a lot of work like what he was doing, these days. Men like him labored to build cities not just for themselves, but their descendants. They spent their lives – some of them gave their lives – so that their descendants would live in a world that they themselves could scarcely imagine. They build us sprawling, glittering skylines of glass and steel and lights. Man-made miracles of engineering and architecture that would be, quite literally, incomprehensible to most humans from before a certain time.

Yet, the cities they built for us, that they left us, are no longer ours. My great-grandfather did most of his work in Pennsylvania and the North-East. He lived in Philadelphia, in a neighborhood his descendants can’t walk through, day or night. His house is still there. I don’t know who lives in it now, if anyone does. I don’t really want to know, either.

All I know is the fruits of his labors, his house, his city — it’s not just that they don’t belong to his descendants, and, arguably, the country he built them for. We can’t even enjoy them. They were wrested out of the hands of the people, and, without consent, broken, smashed, and destroyed by wicked people, who now hand us the smoldering ruins of our predecessors’ lifetime of work, and say with a smile, Here! We made it better! And, if you dare say otherwise, you’re an ungrateful asshole who should be grateful that they’re deigning to give you a damn thing.

Excellent stuff, and well worth the long read.

But Of Course

Good Stuff, Legal Stuff

You will remember last week’s post wherein we all giggled upon seeing some shoplifting scrote getting his just deserts at the hands (stick?) of a shop owner who was fed-up by having said scrote stealing from him for the third time.

Well, because this happened in Cali-fucking-fornia, we now have this development:

Apparently, while many California cities have no desire to actually enforce the laws against people who steal from business owners and put them in financial peril, they are interested in enforcing battery laws involving the protection of said businesses. According to a new report, the Sikh man is now facing criminal charges as local police investigate the incident.

My own modest suggestion would be to borrow the man’s stick and beat the shit out of whoever actually charges this hero, but no doubt somebody’s going to have a problem with this.  (Just nobody, I suspect, among my Readers.)

But here’s what gets the RCOB moving:

Some are making the argument that the force used on the shoplifter in the video was excessive, and as a purely legal matter, that may be true. The shoplifter was begging for mercy while the store owner continued to swing back and strike him. The question is at what point the store owner is expected to disengage, and he likely passed that point.

The store owner “disengaged” before breaking any bones or causing any lasting damage to the asshole.  All he did was deliver a sound beating, and only in today’s pussified society could this be termed “excessive”.   Nobody cares if the scrote was “begging for mercy”, especially after the store owner tried his best to stop the overt shoplifting in a non-violent manner before resorting to the stick.

I am so glad I’m going to the range this afternoon with the Son&Heir…

Highly Recommended

Heroism, History

I just finished reading Lynne Olson’s Citizens Of London, and all I can say is I wish I’d read it before Tony Judt’s Postwar (which I recommended earlier).

Of course, as a keen student of 20th-century European history, I’m very familiar with the WWII period — or at least, I thought I was.  In fact, I’ve always been more interested in the military history thereof rather than the diplomatic side… and Citizens Of London  took care of that for me, in spades.

Oh, good grief:  how could I have been so ignorant?  Of course I knew about Edward R. Murrow (“the voice of the Blitz”), and Averill Harriman (more so for his post-war career).  But Gilbert Winant?  All I knew about him was that he was successor to the horrible-in-every-way-imaginable Joe Kennedy as U.S. Ambassador to Britain, and I vaguely remember him as one-time governor of New Hampshire.

Olson’s book has set me straight on that, and if you are similarly ignorant about this period and these characters, it will do the same for you.  Run, don’t walk, to your favorite bookstore or to Amazon, and buy this book because it will change your perspective on WWII completely.

I should point out in passing that in this history, Franklin D. Roosevelt does not come out well (not that this is a Bad Thing, of course), and nor does his successor Harry S Truman.  And I have never read so personal and compelling a story about not just Winston Churchill, but also the entire Churchill family during this period.

It is clear that but for Murrow, Harriman and Winant — with an excellent assist from Dwight D. Eisenhower — there may well have been a completely different outcome to the events of 1939-45.

And if that doesn’t get you to read Citizens Of London, we can’t be friends.