On the Passing Scene II

Hey, since the random musings idea was invented by Thomas Sowell, why not name them after his description of them? And yeah, I had more. You can keep your remarks about why I have so many random thoughts to yourself.

• Speaking of Sowell, he's a very thoughtful writer, much moreso than Walter Williams or Larry Elder or most of the other prominent black conservative writers. He's also more thoughtful than Mike Adams or George Will, or most of the other more libertarian-leaning writers. So I'm certainly annoyed when commenters on his articles, wherever you happen to find them, call him an "Uncle Tom"—because, apparently, the only path to authentic blackness is lockstep leftism.
  
  That said, I see their temptation: a black guy who criticizes not only the party blacks (all too) often identify with, but many trends within black America itself, and his name is Thomas. That kind of opportunity for vitriolic wordplay doesn't come along every day.


• "Vitriol" reminds me of all that talk of late, about "vitriolic rhetoric". Leaving to one side the inapplicability to the incident in question, or who exactly has been dishing out such words, I confess to having a thought I haven't seen elsewhere. Namely, the only "vitriolic" rhetoric I've seen, in recent political times, has been from Democrats: specifically that their economic policy would need the Philosopher's Stone to be solvent.
  
  That's an alchemy joke, of course. VITRIOLUM (Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando, Inveniens Occultum Lapidem, Veram Medicinam) is the mnemomic for the Stone: seek within the earth, purifying, finding the hidden stone, the true medicine.
  
  Pfft. You thought you were a nerd?


• So I discovered I can shorten my bull-pup AR rifle even more, by removing the M4 barrel beyond the front sight. At that point the barrel length is 67.8 cm, or shorter than the M4 Close Quarters Battle Receiver (with stock extended). But, being bullpup, the barrel is also 67.8 cm long, which is longer than many sniper rifle barrels.
  
  I also found out there's a thing called the M110 Semi-Auto Sniper System, which is an AR chambered in 7.62 NATO (as was the original AR10). The 7.62 is a lot stronger than 5.56, which'll be important against body armor in the future, but often too strong in terms of recoil, especially on full auto. But there are systems, like the "blowback shifted pulse" used on the Russian AN-94, for getting around recoil.


• So I consider it my patriotic duty to like Eugene Stoner more than Mikhail Kalashnikov. I mean, the one real advantage of Kalashnikovs is, you don't have to take good care of them and they're simple to operate. So they're perfect for the Communist conception of the average person, a proletarian chump who's either a disposable drone for the Revolution, or a class-traitor fighting against it due to false consciousness. The AR family (at least now we've ground the kinks out), on the other hand, are a little more high-maintenance and complex, but they're also almost always more accurate. In other words, they require a modicum of discipline and intelligence, and reward them with a greater precision in working the user's will: plainly, they're the weapon of the 18th Century republicanism that founded America.
  
  Also, Stoner never claimed to have designed his assault rifle "from a blank sheet of paper", as if nobody had ever seen a Stürmgewehr 44.


• So a guy (oh yeah, it was Greg Gutfeld) was saying how a lot of people seem to think anyone who owns a gun is a gun nut. I can vouch that that is not the case: I've seen many a gun owner's eyes glass over when I start geeking out about guns. Okay, two.
  
  But it's interesting because, being the colossal gun geek that I am, I don't actually own one.


• Has anyone noticed, speaking of Gutfeld, that Robert Downey Jr, at least when he plays Tony Stark (and at the Golden Globes), sounds almost exactly like Andy Levy, on Red Eye?


• Here's a party game to play with right-wingers: ask them which rewards personal achievement more, the US or the Soviet Union.
  
  Then ask them who invented the M1911. Or the AR-series. Unless they're gun nuts, they won't know the answer (John Browning and Eugene Stoner, respectively)—but they're a lot more likely to have heard of Mikhail Kalashnikov and Nikolay Makarov.
  
  It doesn't really show anything, but it sure is fun to piss libertarians off.


• Another fun example of that idea, is to point out the utter refutation of environmental determinism. Namely, Holland and Switzerland. Both Calvinist nations that gained independence from the Holy Roman Empire, were largely commercial, and are currently mostly associated with assisted suicide and libertarian attitudes toward guns and/or drugs—and look at their environments.
  
  Quod erat demonstrandum, lupa.


• So apparently it's not widely known that spec-ops don't use silencers for stealth (because they're not great for that), they use them for their own hearing. Because guns are a lot louder indoors; outside, they're actually not all that loud unless you're near them.


• Shifting gears without a clutch, did you know apparently an owl's ear-holes are higher on one side than the other? Yeah, it's for directional hearing, 'cause they don't have outer ears they can turn to locate sounds.


• Finally, so apparently Hu Jintao (whose surname Bill O'Reilly can't pronounce to save his life) said something silly about the dollar's dominance ending, and the yuan (or rather, the renminti) getting stronger.
  
  And I was watching this economist, saying, "Yeah, he wouldn't want that to happen. His country's so geared toward exporting to us, they really want the dollar as strong as it could possibly be, so we'll buy more."
  
  Apparently Hu Jintao never saw that one episode of Cromartie High where Mechazawa explains that idea to that guy who's depressed about the yen being weak.