Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Dead McDuck

General McArthur McChrystal has bared his life to Rolling Stone magazine. There is little doubt that McChrystal will either have to resign or be fired: a general cannot publicly criticize the president like he did.

Unfortunately, Obama is not Truman either. He does not want to win Afghanistan or Iraq, he wants to survive them. If Vietnam (Beirut, Somalia, etc.) showed us anything, the US cannot fight to not lose. If we are not going to win, then we need to leave. Now.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Dealing with loss

My old friend Jeff at Think Sink hasn't posted on his blog for a year or so, but I kept it in my RSS Reader stack out of a vain hope. Unfortunately, it just died today. I don't know if Blogger killed it or if Jeff finally dropped the hammer.

Either way, it's terribly depressing.

An irrational dislike

As I've mentioned before, I love my Beretta 92FS. It has one big weakness: it's big. Milady can't shoot it comfortably, so we're thinking smaller with her. She likes the Glock 23 some, but I have an irrational problem: I hate striker pistols.

I don't know why, but a pistol is supposed to have a hammer. It doesn't matter if it's the rounded hammer of the 92FS, or the spur design of the SIG P220, if it doesn't have a hammer it just isn't right. I can intellectually justify my problems with Glocks: you cannot double-strike the round in the chamber. Even this isn't terribly rational: most of the time, if you don't go bang, you're either clearing a round or dropping the gun.

I know I'm passing up perfectly good 9mms (Walther P99, Springfield XD, etc.), especially in the "mouse gun" category, but I just can't get past it all. A pistol has a hammer.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

A tragedy? I'm not sure

Abby Sunderland may be lost at sea. Earlier, I agreed with Timothy at Freespace that she should not have been allowed to go, but now I'm not so sure.

We brainwash 18 year olds into becoming killing machines. We give 18 year olds the power to vote, and expect them to be legally capable of rational decisions. Children are expected to have sex, just like adults, and are expected to use methods to avoid the natural results, just like adults do. 16 year olds are now expected to be convicted as adults in most politically-charged crimes.

Jews call boys men at 13. 60 years ago, women not married at 16 were on their way to being old maids.

If Miss Sunderland doesn't know Jesus, this will be a tragedy, but only because she died a sinner.

We expect our kids to live in an adult world, but to be children past 30. The more sheepdogish I get, the more I respect a younger person wanting to be mature. If Miss Sunderland dies, at least we can say she lived first.

Update: It seems that she's OK, just adrift and needing rescue.