Well, that seems responsible, doesn't it?

Another day, another kid blown away by a responsible gun owner, this one a cop. STILL MORE Well, there's been a wealth of examples of responsible gun ownership since this post went up a few hours ago, but I like this one. Dumb quote:

she stressed that she was following safety procedures. "I was going through the process as I have been trained to do."

Gun safety procedures. You gotta love 'em. What other safety procedures have a kill rate?

The police can't do that

Every now and then, I crosspost an item from my commercial blog, Kamaaina Loan blog, to RtO. The interests of the two blogs don't overlap much, but here is one that does.

Gun nut ethics

There was a short version of this story yesterday in The Maui News. The longer version -- and the comments following -- fail to capture the irony. In summary, a Utah company refused to sell $15 million worth of man-killing firearms to Pakistan because they might be used to kill Americans. This was presented as an ethical stand. The company, Desert Tech, will be happy, however, to sell its guns to Americans so they can shoot other Americans. Let's be clear. That's the sole purpose of these weapons. Nobody is buying them to hunt rabbits or to shoot paper targets. They are mankillers, first and last, and nothing else:

The SRS Covert sniper rifle was purpose-designed for Police and Military snipers needing ultimate concealability and maneuverability.

I'll let the gun nuts among RtO's readers explain why police would need a sniper rifle with a silencer.

Creative spelling

OK, I've been an editor for half a century, and I take a small pride in doping out what people mean to write, even if they didn't come very close to the standard form. But the following threw me. Even though I knew the context, I had to read it three times to figure it out.

One time I was looking for a socket toremove a spark plug on my weed eater we dug true the bends for five minuets are more .

"true the bends" is "through the bins," but without the context I never would have figured that out. The author identifies himself as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division.

Where are the paragraphs?

Durned if I know. RtO was quiescent over the holidays and now when I post, blogger won't make paragraphs. Dunno what went on while I was away.

Is Islam compatible with democracy?

I do not think so, but Bangladesh has been one of the examples tending to say I am wrong. One thing Osama bin Laden succeeded in doing was destroying whatever small progress various Muslim polities had made toward modern popular government. It may have been that all he had to do was stick one in the eye of the dominating western paradigm to give new heart to the suppressed feelings we call salafist, but whatever the mechanism was, the status of Muslim governments has deteriorated steadily in the past dozen years. At the beginning of that period, perhaps 5% of Muslim-majority societies were failed or failing states. Now the proportion is much, much higher. Bangladesh, once the east portion of Pakistan until a murderous war separated the states, had apparently followed a different course from (West) Pakistan, whose descent into chaos contrasted so strongly with that of secular India, independent from the same moment. The Bengali social experience, so different from that of the Pakistanis, seemed to account for some of the difference. And possibly the Ismaili form of Islam dominant in Pakistan was important \in the different courses the two Muslim states took. In any event, Bangladesh did not threaten war with India all the time, and although it went through periods of military usurpation like Pakistan, by the '90s Bangladesh seemed to have emerged as a Muslim country with a functioning electoral mechanism for choosing governments. Maybe this was not much, but it was different from the rest of Islam, described in 2001 by Bernard Lewis as showing "the cult, without the exercise, of freedom, and the almost universal holding of elections, without choice." Since then, Turkey, never really the democracy it pretended to be, has become openly theocratic; and the false Arab Spring led merely to a summer of increasingly antidemocratic discontents. Now Bangladesh has joined the reversion to frank medievalism,if a BBC report (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25588564)is accurate, leaving only Indonesia as perhaps a Muslim-majority state showing a successful transition to modernity of some sort. There are political atrocities in non-Muslim democratic or pseudo-democratic countries, but the form they take in Muslim states have a special flavor, hard really to imagine in, say, Belarus: "The BNP and its allies - including the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party - have been conducting a violent campaign of strikes and countrywide road and rail blockades (to enforce a boycott of national elections). "The protests have left more than 100 people dead in recent weeks. "Scores of opposition supporters have died in police shootings and dozens of commuters have been burnt to death by protesters throwing petrol bombs at strike-defying buses." In no other part of the world would burning potential voters alive be thought to be an effective party strategy, but I think the explanation is that the BNP does not care about votes or elections. Speaking specifically of Arabs, the political scientist Bassam Tibi stated flatly that Arabs are not interested in democracy. Events have shown he was correct, but events also suggest that it is Islam, not Arabism, that is the antidemocratic seed.

Make your own egg nog

Egg nog is so easy to make, it's hard to understand how the wretched commercial imitation finds buyers, but apparently egg nog has a reputation for being time-consuming. It's not. You can make any quantity in 15 minutes. You get a smoother result using a whisk, at least on the whites, but that takes just a little longer. I used to make egg nog very sweet and very stiff – so stiff you had to eat it with a spoon – but my current thinking is for a slightly sweet, more fluid drink, though still a lot stiffer than commercial egg nog. The basic recipe, easily scalable, calls for 6 eggs, half a pint of heavy cream and a quart of light cream, and powdered sugar equal to half the volume of the yolks. Separate the eggs, and put the whites in the refrigerator in a china or stainless steel bowl to cool. Whisk the yolks in a small bowl, then whisk in powdered sugar. If you want sweeter egg nog, still limit the sugar to about half the volume of the yolks. Otherwise you get a gluey mixture that is not easy to mix with the whites and cream. You can add more sugar while you are whipping the cream. Let the yolk-sugar mixture stand a while, 30 minutes or so. In a medium bowl, beat the whites, just until they begin to hold a shape. Using an electric mixer gives a slightly coarser texture. Combine the yolks and whites. In a chilled large bowl, whip the heavy cream just until it holds its shape. Add to the whites and yolks. Add light cream. You can thin the egg nog to any state with whole milk. I think it tastes better after sitting in the refrigerator overnight, but it will separate and have to be remixed. If you add alcohol, do it far enough ahead to let the flavors blend. You can add rum, brandy, bourbon or blended whisky; or any of the sweet brown wines like sherry, Madeira or Marsala. If you use nutmeg, grate it fresh. I prefer mace. For a modernist touch, grate some hard chocolate flavored with pepper.