A Few Random Thoughts...

I've actually agonized, as much as I'm likely to agonize that is, over mentioning the death of Edward Kennedy. I finally decided to say this: my grandfather told me early in life that there were only two kinds of people in the world, people who stood up and people who didn't. That simple. Stephen King expanded on the subject in his classic The Stand, where he postulated that the Great Mainspring That Powers The Universe — call It/Him/Her God, Allah, the Lord and Lady, the Great Big Turtle, whatever — will at some point in every beings' life require that being to make a decision to stand or not. When Edward Kennedy's time came to make a choice, he chose to crawl. Whatever he did or tried to do in the remainder of his life is paled by that singular decision. I would not want to face Whatever Comes After knowing that I had been weighed and found wanting, knowing that there was a hole inside me that no amount of "soaring rhetoric" or "voter referendums" cold ever fill. The end of a dynasty indeed...

And while the Dems are bleating for socialism as the idea legacy for the Last Knight of Camelot, here's the best piece I have read in a long time on where this country is headed. It's from Victor David Hanson on NRO:

We can discern this same mandated egalitarianism beneath many of the administration’s recent policy initiatives. Obama is not a pragmatist, as he insisted, nor even a liberal, as charged.

Rather, he is a statist. The president believes that a select group of affluent, highly educated technocrats — cosmopolitan, noble-minded, and properly progressive — supported by a phalanx of whiz-kids fresh out of blue-chip universities with little or no experience in the marketplace, can direct our lives far better than we can ourselves. By “better” I do not mean in a fashion that, measured by disinterested criteria, makes us necessarily wealthier, happier, more productive, or freer.

Instead, “better” means “fairer,” or more “equal.” We may “make” different amounts of money, but we will end up with more or less similar net incomes. We may know friendly doctors, be aware of the latest procedures, and have the capital to buy blue-chip health insurance, but no matter. Now we will all alike queue up with our government-issued insurance cards to wait our turn at the ubiquitous corner clinic.

None of this equality-of-results thinking is new.

When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.

The modern versions of much of the above already seem to be guiding the Obama administration — evident each time we hear of another proposal to make it easier to renounce personal debt; federal action to curtail property or water rights; efforts to make voter registration and vote casting easier; radically higher taxes on the top 5 percent; takeover of private business; expansion of the federal government and an increase in government employees; or massive inflationary borrowing. The current class-warfare “them/us” rhetoric was predictable.

Read the whole thing!

And on the gun front, I do have an Alaskan .454. the ultimate back-up gun, which I carry in a Loaded Pancake holster from Rob Leahy. Great little gun that will undoubtably be going with me to Africa if I go. FWIW, Ruger never made a Blackhawk in .454 or .480 Ruger. The .480 was a pretty interesting, if failed, experiment. The idea of a ".475 Special" was actually a pretty good one, but it never caught on...I don't think Ruger even catalogs a .480 now. I liked the idea of a .500 Special, which Corbon loaded for a while. I've still got a couple of boxes lying around somewhere. Maybe it's the "Special" moniker...it hasn't seemed to work since it was attached to .38...