Christ Is Risen!

Psalm 51, Catholic Style

This wonderful tune was composed by Gregory Allegri, about 400 years ago. The piece was composed for the Pope. The Pope was so impressed that he considered the music sacred. He kept it locked in a vault and would listen to it only on Ash Wednesday. Examining the manuscript was strictly forbidden.

Mozart went to Rome to listen to it, and he was able to copy the work from memory. That's why we can listen to it now.

I first heard Miserere at the Anglican Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York City, where it was performed only on Ash Wednesday and the Wednesday during Holy Week.

Enjoy!

Christos Anesti!

Happy Lent!

I won't be posting or commenting during Great Lent.

Glock 27 Update

Even though I have been in rehab for over six months, I have still been alert to opportunities.

My Glock 27, which I featured earlier, fires the wide and short .40 S&W round. This combination allows the shooter to carry a subcompact 9mm sized gun with ammo trending in the.45 ACP direction.

Here's even more good news. The Glock 27 will fire .357 Sig rounds after substituting a .357 Sig barrel. If you're wanting to hose something down, you must substitute a .357 Sig magazine as well.

Why is this good news? Some of us want the flexibility of shooting a high-velocity, slim bullet over long distances because of its flatter trajectory. Also, the .357 Sig hits HARD. Expect a loud blast and a bright flash, but no mechanical problems. The .357 Sig round hits just as HARD as the legendary .357 Magnum 125 grain hollow point. I'm used to shooting the .357 Mag round from a 2" snubbie, and I'm used to the flash and blast.

TEAPARTY HEADQUARTERS

Christ Is Risen!

Happy Lent!

^{No blogging or commenting during Great Lent.}

⁹ For zeal for thy house has consumed me,
    and the insults of those who insult thee have fallen on me.
¹⁰ When I humbled my soul with fasting,
    it became my reproach.
¹¹ When I made sackcloth my clothing,
    I became a byword to them.
¹² I am the talk of those who sit in the gate,
    and the drunkards make songs about me.

Psalm 69: 9-12 

RSV

...Plus C'est La Meme Chose

Moscow, March 14, Interfax - The Moscow Patriarchate has not ruled out a possible meeting of the new Roman Catholic pontiff and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, but said that disputes between the two Churches should be settled first.

'In my opinion, such a meeting is possible, but its time and place will depend primarily on how fast we will be able to resolve the conflicts dating back to the 1980s-90s,' head of the Department for External Church Relations Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, said at a press briefing in Moscow on Thursday, answering a question from Interfax.

These conflicts 'caused a major setback in the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue,' he said.

Stretching The Consitutional Privilege

Searching for relevance and an competitive advantage among consumers aged 18 to 44, the United States Postal Service is taking requests for celebrity stamps and rolling out postal fashions.

The Post Office has outlived its usefulness and should be shuttered. A view on the unconstitutionality of the Service is found here:

In his pamphlet, ;The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails,' [Lysander] Spooner highlighted the inefficiency guaranteed by the act of banning competition in postal service. Once there was an enforced monopoly, he stated, postal officials would 'feel few quickening impulses to labor' or 'to move at the speed that commercial interests require.' The consequence would be 'a cumbrous, clumsy, expensive and dilatory government system' that would be 'nearly impossible to modify or materially improve' except by opening it up once more to 'rivalry and free competition.'

But Spooner objected to a postal monopoly not merely or primarily because it cheated the public by requiring an extravagant fee for an inadequate service. His main objection lay in the argument that the monopoly violated individual and constitutional rights in at least three ways. First, Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution authorized Congress 'to establish post offices and post roads,' but it didn’t bar others from doing so as well. The power to create was not a power to prohibit. The Ninth Amendment states, 'The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.'

Second, freedom of the press included—and, indeed, required—the right to privately distribute material to whoever wished to read it. A government postal monopoly would be able to ban periodicals from using virtually the only legal channels of distribution. This control constituted a direct affront to the First Amendment.

Third, a monopoly post office that can control the flow of information inevitably would be used to political advantage by those in authority. In 'Private Mails,' Spooner argued, 'Its immense patronage and power, used, as they always will be, corruptly, make it [the monopoly post office] also a very great political evil.'

Ecrasez l'infame!

"Fire Two Blasts Outside The House"

Joe Biden becomes even more bizarre in his love affair with double-barreled shotguns:

Biden, the owner of two shotguns, has often used his firearm ownership in debates of the practicality of assault weapons. In a particularly offbeat moment today, he explained an imaginary scenario where trouble would come to his Delaware home:

'I said, "Jill, if there's ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony here, walk out and put that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house."'

Continuing the trope, Biden stated a shotgun would be easier to fend off an intruder than the civilian variant of an M-16 assault rifle.

'You don't need an AR-15,' he said. 'It's harder to aim, it's harder to use, and in fact you don't need 30 rounds to protect yourself,' he said.

'Buy a shotgun,' he concluded.

Luby's Massacre Survivor Testifies

Size And Republicanism

More Praise For "Stop And Frisk"

Yes, one could hypothesize, as Joe Biden does, a shooter, forced to reload after seven shots rather than 13, being tackled by a bystander. One could equally hypothesize a citizen with a seven-round clip running out of ammunition before stopping a mass shooter. This is why Congress, for good reason, usually prefers to pass laws in response to systematic evidence rather than hypothetical anecdotes.

The Sandy Hook problem is the suicidal, disturbed young male looking for a large number of defenseless civilians to mow down. The Chicago problem is crime-ridden neighborhoods in which gangs murder each other and anybody who gets in their way. These aren't the same problem, and possibly gun control offers no practical handle on either. But if you accept the unlikelihood of ridding America of its guns, as the gun-control movement now says it does, then one systematic proposition links the two.

That proposition can be stated as a question: In an America where at least 43 states now let a law-abiding citizen carry a concealed weapon, how should we protect ourselves in the fewer and fewer places where we are required to be unarmed?

This is from Holman Jenkins' latest opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. He repeats what everyone else knows:  Enforcing gun laws against bad guys keeps unarmed good guys safe.

Quoting Jim Grant Is Always Worthwhile

'I think the Fed's actions are counterproductive,' he says. The Fed's intentions to jump start growth are actually working against the economy, Grant argues.

'If it were as easy as printing money or creating credit to levitate an economy or to reactivate business activity the world would have been richer many generations ago,' he says...

'It is not a characteristic American economy,' he explains. 'What we are missing is a dynamism, the entrepreneurial zest and vigor that has characterized this country'...

In fact, Grant believes the Fed's perpetual low-interest rate policy will lead to the next big economic crisis in this country: the bursting of the bond bubble.

Joe Biden, Self-Defense Expert

'Guess what? A shotgun will keep you a lot safer, a double-barreled shotgun, than the assault weapon in somebody’s hands [who] doesn’t know how to use it, even one who does know how to use it,' the outspoken vice president, a shotgun owner himself, replied. 'It’s harder to use an assault weapon to hit something than it is a shotgun. You want to keep people away in an earthquake? Buy some shotgun shells.'

Maybe someone should refresh Joe's memory about his double-barreled's manual of arms after the second round's been fired.

Sheriff Joe Rides To The Rescue, Again

CAVE CREEK, Arizona (Reuters) - Retired salesman David Bennett sits in a patrol car, armed with a semi-automatic Glock pistol and a shotgun, watching as parents drop off their children at a kindergarten in a desert community a few miles north of Phoenix.

Bennett is volunteering his time to join a posse organized by controversial lawman Joe Arpaio, who styles himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff."

The mission: to deter a repeat of last month's school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

'Hopefully we are letting the bad guy know that this school is being watched,' said Bennett, peering through the windshield as a mother led her daughter by the hand through the school gate.

Maricopa County Sheriff Arpaio, who is best known nationally for targeting illegal immigrants, started school patrols earlier this month in the wake of the rampage that killed 20 children and six adults in Connecticut.

Michael Bloomberg's Radiation State

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is defending the NYPD's testing of a high tech device capable of detecting concealed guns at a distance. 

Speaking Wednesday morning at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science in the Bronx, the mayor compared the scanners to the metal detectors that people have to walk through every day to get into buildings or board airplanes.

'That's something we just have to live with,' Bloomberg said. 'The alternative is intolerable. You cannot let people walk in and potentially carry weapons or bombs into buildings or on an airplane, and we've got to get guns off the streets.'

On Tuesday, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the NYPD is working with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop the device that reads a form of natural energy akin to radiation. If something is obstructing the flow of that energy, like a weapon, the device will highlight the object on a person's body.

Civil liberties advocates counter the technology would subject anyone on the street to a virtual pat-down.

So far the technology utilizing terra-hertz imaging can detect weapons from about 13 feet away. Police want to put the device in a vehicle and scan an area for weapons as far as 80 feet away.

Water absorbs the terahertz radiation, and metal reflects it. Concealing a gun behind Granny's hot-water bottle or a piece of mylar painted with metallic pigment would defeat Bloomberg's plan. Short of total concealment, one could break up a gun's outline. Please keep in mind that I'm not suggesting that anyone illegally conceal firearms, yadda, yadda, etc.

Here's my burst of creativity. I'll be fashioning a sheet of aluminum foil into an extremely artistic representation of commonly-used hand gesture that displays a single finger. I'll wear the foil somewhere on my upper abdomen and beneath my outer garments for the benefit of Bloomberg's minions. I hope that Hizzoner will enjoy viewing my artistry as much as I'll enjoy expressing my delight with the inefficacy of his Radiation State.

An Orthodox View

The findings of two criminologists – Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser – in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:

Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not.

The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).
For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns. As the study’s authors write in the report:

If the mantra 'more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death' were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)

Finally, and as if to prove the bumper sticker correct – that 'gun don’t kill people, people do' – the study also shows that Russia’s murder rate is four times higher than the U.S. and more than 20 times higher than Norway. This, in a country that practically eradicated private gun ownership over the course of decades of totalitarian rule and police state methods of suppression. Needless to say, very few Russian murders involve guns.
The important thing to keep in mind is not the rate of deaths by gun – a statistic that anti-gun advocates are quick to recite – but the overall murder rate, regardless of means. 

The Vatican Speaks

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican praised President Barack Obama’s proposals for curbing gun violence, saying they are a “step in a right direction.”

The Vatican’s chief spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Saturday that 47 religious leaders have appealed to members of the U.S. Congress “to limit firearms that are making society pay an unacceptable price in terms of massacres and senseless deaths.”

“I am with them,” Lombardi said, in an editorial carried on Vatican Radio, lining up the Vatican’s moral support in favor of firearm limits.

“The initiatives announced by the American administration for limiting and controlling the spread and use of weapons are certainly a step in the right direction,” Lombardi said.