Rasmussen Proves It

My Chinese (of course) carbide indexed cutting tools arrived yesterday. The price was great. But the lid on the little plastic case was smashed. The seller took the whole mess and shoved it in a Priority Mail envelope instead of a box, and naturally, something got crushed. He didn’t even sandwich it in bubble wrap.

I complained. Carbide tools are brittle, and you’re supposed to store them in a way that keeps them from touching other tools. One way to do that might be…a plastic case! It’s important. Granted, I can throw out the case lid and rig something up. But I shouldn’t have to.

What do you think? Am I being too picky? This guy could just as easily have used a box. Priority Mail boxes exist.

No response to my complaint yet. I can’t see giving someone a negative over this, but a neutral might be in order. If you’re going to ship people things, you should make some effort to pack them correctly.

Yesterday, unfortunately, I found something interesting on Craigslist. Another lathe. Wait! It’s not as bad as you think. It’s a little bitty lathe. Like Otisburg. The company that makes it goes as small as 4″ by 8″, and I think their biggest model has a 10″ swing. I’m not sure which model it is, but the description makes it sound really small. It’s a good lathe, too; not Chinese. And it has tooling. And the price is too good to pass up. Dang it.

It would be pretty cool to have a tiny lathe I could store in the closet, for very small parts. I could teach Marv to run it.

He’d make a lot of bells, I suppose. Bells are his bag.

Two disturbing items in the news today. First, only 53% of Americans told the Rasmussen pollsters that capitalism is better than socialism. And 30% of Democrats think socialism is better. Big surprise there.

It looks like the liberals have won the education battle. Socialism has caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, and it has never produced a good standard of living anywhere, and it is the greatest evil mankind has ever encountered. But a fair number of Americans, especially those who were “educated” after our school system was destroyed by liberals, think socialism is…pretty rad. No work! Free beers! Che T-shirts! If you want to be a lazy, flabby slouch all your life, socialism is the bomb. A lot of people are content to live that way. Clip your own wings and belly up to the trough.

This is how the killing fields in Cambodia happened. People didn’t know, or ignored, the clear and obvious lessons of history. They thought they could take something that had never worked anywhere and somehow make it succeed. And they ended up rounding up educated people, lining them up beside big holes, and machine-gunning them to death.

Here is the lesson conservatives should have learned from the last three elections, especially after seeing the impact of swing voters. The stupid are incredibly dangerous. The stupid make totalitarianism possible. Our kids are stupid, and they’re getting more stupid every decade. Look out.

The poisonous harvest of our most toxic decade, the Sixties, is a bizarre notion that the young are smart. In truth, the young are generally fools. I certainly was. But back in the Sixties, the left managed to seize on one or two things the old had been wrong about–things like racism and reckless pollution–and convince the young that the old were wrong about EVERYTHING. Since then we have been producing insolent, unprincipled, overconfident, weak children who think their tiny brains hold the keys to a bright and happy future where everyone eats tofu and and smokes free dope and has sex with no consequences.

It’s amazing; a human being will generally get smarter with age. But our nation, composed entirely of human beings, has gotten dumber. And we’re going to pay. Stupidity is an extremely expensive luxury.

I wasn’t raised very well. To some extent, I am part of the problem. I don’t mean to be disrespectful to my parents, and I don’t blame them for my failings, but they made mistakes. When you have kids, you should give them the same kind of effort you put into your job, at the very least. There should be a plan. There should be discipline and oversight. I didn’t get everything I needed. Thank God, I am able to perceive the existence of the problem, so I can work to improve myself. But many people are not as lucky as I am. They think the neglect they experienced as kids was freedom. They’re grateful for it. They think it allowed them to grow up without the “backward” ideas that made their grandparents so silly. They don’t understand that restrictions can be great blessings. Rules aren’t like shackles, intended purely to deprive you of liberty. They’re like frames that guide tomato plants and help them produce more fruit.

Presumably, every book of the Bible has a purpose. I believe that one purpose of the book of Proverbs is to help people like me. There are lessons my parents failed to teach me. And I’ve absorbed a lot of counterproductive ideas throughout my life. Where do people like me go for guidance? Pastors don’t have the time to provide it. You can’t expect your friends to fill the need. You can’t just think it up on your own. The book of Proverbs can be very helpful. It’s like a frozen bone marrow transplant, waiting to be infused into lost generations, to heal them of the cancer of savagery. Wisdom is supposed to reside in human beings, but sometimes it misses generations, and it has to be stored somewhere so people raised without exposure to it can be reinoculated.

I went through this book systematically. I found that I already believed and applied a lot of it, so I deleted those portions. I put the rest in a Word file. Now I have it to use as a reference. The deletions left me with a targeted version that focuses on my specific gaps. I don’t look at it often enough, but I keep a printout handy. You might give this a try. Wisdom really is power, and it will take care of you.

Sometimes I look at that printout and alight on passages I wish I had read twenty years ago. I think of specific mistakes I have made, and the pain they have caused me, and I wince. That’s the kind of experience parents are trying to spare you when they tell you to pull up your pants, get a real haircut, stop watching MTV, and get your butt to church.

In case any kids are reading this, let me say this. Socialism is a horror, and it will bring only misery and death. And there is no such thing as safe sex. And piercings are generally disgusting.

The other thing that disturbed me today was a ridiculous essay by Juan Williams. Someone sent me a link to it. He comes out and admits he thinks gun ownership should be banned. Like it was in Washington D.C., that peaceful haven where crime is unknown. Unbelievable.

Here’s an incredible quotation:

In fact, in Nebraska there is a big argument in the legislature about guns. It is not about banning them. The debate is whether to allow security guards to bring guns into churches. To my mind the debate should be about how to keep all guns out of churches.

If Mr. Williams had had his way, Jean Assam would not have been able to shoot the man who murdered two people in the parking lot of New Life Church. If, on the other hand, Ted Nugent had had his way, that murderer would probably have been killed much earlier in the day, when he opened fire at another church. A churchgoer packing heat would have laid him out on the pavement. Whose way do you prefer? I prefer Ted’s. When I go to church, I keep a switchblade in my pocket and a pistol in my glove compartment. I’d carry inside, if I had the clothes for it.

Why is there any doubt about a church’s right to have armed guards? We don’t prevent stores and banks from using guns to assure security. Explain why churches should be different. Provide the basis for the state’s right to discriminate against any institution in this matter, based purely on that institution’s status as a religious entity. The disciples would not have been allowed inside a church run by Mr. Williams. They carried swords, on orders from Jesus himself. If Juan Williams ran the Vatican, the Swiss Guard would be ejected from the premises. They carry MACHINE GUNS. Not semi-automatic. Automatic. Most people in the Williams faction don’t know the difference. Their writings prove it every day.

Quite frankly, I find it odd that the Pope isn’t armed. If you require other people to bear arms for you, you are fully responsible for what they do, and you should be willing to do the same thing. If you’re not willing to do that, how are you different from Rosie O’Donnell, who preaches against guns yet pays armed bodyguards? If John Paul II had been armed when Mehmet Ali Agca attacked, he might have spared himself some surgery and prolonged his life.

Says Mr. Williams:

The roll call of death and suffering from guns continued earlier this month with the tragic mass shooting in Binghamton, N.Y. That followed one man killing ten people in Alabama before taking his own life. And that preceded the murders of eight people in a North Carolina nursing home, as well as one parolee shooting four policemen to death in Oakland, Calif.

Excuse me, but how is that “suffering from guns”? Isn’t it actually “suffering from criminals”? And which of these murderers would have obeyed a law banning gun ownership? The laws against murder, which have steeper penalties, didn’t bother them at all. And what do you think would have happened had the first three killers encountered armed civilians? Same thing that happened in New Life Church.

Reading this column, I learn two things. First, Juan Williams is never going to make it as a professional logician. Second, he’s a great target for violent crime. He chooses to be defenseless, and he makes good money. I think that if I were opposed to allowing civilians the means to defend themselves, I’d be smart enough to avoid bragging about it on national television, while working in a city known for street crime. It’s like begging to be mugged.

Williams says no change is in sight. I sure hope that’s true. Barack Obama and his awful Attorney General have done more to arm Americans in the last six months than the NRA could have done in ten years. I’d hate to see that wonderful progress reversed.