Dadman over at Cosmic Conservative often posts YouTube performances by musicians from the 70s. He and Cosmic have a friendly debate going on about which decade, the 60s or the 70s, produced the best music. I choose to stay out of that one, because I love music from both those eras (as well as all the later ones).

Today Dadman puts up one of my favorites of all time, Steely Dan's Do It Again. As I was listening to it, I started to wonder why I hardly ever listen to music, despite the fact that I have a deep and abiding love for it. I didn't linger too long on the thought, because I wanted to get back to listening to Steely Dan. And after the song finished, I had to ask myself the question, "Self, if you say you love music so much, why do you listen to music so little?"

After going through a few surface rationales that just didn't seem to fit, I thought about how I had just listened to Do It Again: I had tried to scroll down to read other posts at CC while the YouTube video was playing, but I couldn't get anywhere with that because I was too involved in listening to the music. I was either singing along in my head (I sound much better when I sing in my head than when I actually let air vibrate my vocal cords), following the bass line, or maybe the plastic organ solo, or the percussion.

But whatever part of the music I was concentrating on at the time, it consumed too much of my attention for me to do much of anything else. When I listen to music, I'm immersed in it. My very soul resonates with the music.

And if I can't do it right when I'm listening to music, I'd rather wait until I have the time and concentration I need to listen the way I want to.

I had to see this article in the Toronto Star a couple of times before its impact finally sunk in (and thanks to Kevin for putting the right emphasis in his post to get me to RTWT). Follow the link, and don't just read the top two or three or five or even seven paragraphs like I did at first. Read it all the way to the bottom.

The problem I've had with a lot of the gun control vs gun rights debates is that, all too often, the positions are, respectively, "ban all the guns" and "lock up all the criminals." Even if we all wanted to, we can't get rid of all the guns. Not only is it impossible, it's not even desirable. And not to be contentious, but if you think it is desirable, you're not thinking it through.

But then there are the guys on my side of the argument who say that we need to lock up the criminals instead of letting them stay free, or sending them to prison with short sentences. They need to be locked up long enough that they won't be able to cause problems with guns. This argument has always bothered me. While I agree with it in principle, we've got a lot of people in prison in this country. Sure, a significant part of that is because we lock up a lot of folks for a long time for relatively trivial offenses. It just seems to me that just segregating the evildoers after they've done their evil isn't the optimum approach. Yeah, we need to lock 'em up after they've committed their violent crimes, but...isn't there something more we could do?

And here I find it, in that Star article. It seems to me that limiting the number of people who commit violent crimes in the first place should also be one of our goals here. Y'know, so there aren't so many folks to charge, prosecute, convict and imprison to begin with. Yeah, throw the book at 'em after they commit violent crimes. Yeah, those of us who wish to defend ourselves and our loved ones (and even just nearby bystanders) should always and forever have the unimpeded right to do so as armed citizens. But maybe there's something else we can do to address the problem. It sounds like The Boston Gun Project, Cincinnati's Initiative to Reduce Violence and now Chicago's Project Safe Neighborhoods can be a part of the solution.

The Sci-Fi Channel recently ran all eight hours of Stephen King's The Stand back to back...to back...to back. I wasn't able to watch it at the time, so I recorded it on my DVR.

I recall having watched it back in 1994 when it first aired on ABC, and I enjoyed it at the time. It won a couple of Emmys that year and was nominated for several more, including Outstanding Miniseries. They assembled an impressive cast, including Gary Sinise, Molly Ringworm Ringwald (sorry, old habit), Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Rob Lowe, Miguel Ferrer, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (!), and even Stephen King himself.

But despite all that, as I watched the first two-hour episode, the consistent thought going through my mind was how absolutely awful it was. Not only was the acting from the "unknowns" horrible, I was extremely disappointed in the performances by actors whose abilities I greatly respect, including Sinise, Lowe and Ed Harris. On the other hand, Kathy Bates was very good in her brief appearance.

As a layman uneducated in the intricacies and details of producing a movie or a miniseries, I choose to lay the blame at the feet of the director, Mick Garris. There appeared to me to be many, many bad decisions that Garris made, making the acting look even worse than it was. And don't even get me started on the cornfield where various characters went to meet Mother Abigail in their sleep.

I don't know if I'm going to bother to watch the remaining six hours. It's taking up a lot of space on my DVR, so I may take the expedient (and mind-saving) step of just deleting the rest. We'll see.

On April 15, 1969, the North Korean Air Force shot down Deep Sea 21 (PR-21), a Navy reconnaissance aircraft out of Naval Air Station, Atsugi, Japan.

The Lockheed Super Constellation EC-121, also called the "Willy Victor," went down in the Sea of Japan. The 30 Sailors and one Marine aboard were all lost in the crash.

Thank you, gentlemen. Words can't express our appreciation of your service to, and ultimate sacrifice for your country.

I used to buy all my practice ammo from Wal-Mart since they have very reliable Winchester White Box ammo for a very good price. That ends today.

Wal-Mart plans to film all gun purchases in their stores, succumbing to pressure from Bloomberg's evil cabal. They're free to choose to invade my privacy should I choose to patronize them. I'm free to not buy anything from them.

And that's what I choose to do.

Hat tip: Robb.

Update: Sebastian agrees.

'Nother update: Caleb McAhab agrees.

Inspired by this posting, I want to use this line the next time I'm carrying my pistol, openly on my hip:

"Are you a policeman?"

"No, I'm just taking my Second Amendment for a walk."

Classic.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Heller case tomorrow. (Permit me a minor digression here. The linked Kansas City Star article provides a pretty objective report on the case, outlining the various positions at stake here. The one exception to this that I noted is the following sentence: "Justices first must interpret the famously opaque Second Amendment." The only reason the Second Amendment could be considered opaque is because of the obfuscation thrown in front of it by the anti-civil rights crowd trying to disarm the public.) As a result, lots of folks are talking about gun rights and gun control right now, and I have a few thoughts of my own.

There are quite a few reasons why people want to interpret the Second Amendment in such a way as to make it meaningless. Many ordinary folks are just flat-out afraid of guns. They don't know anything about them, they've probably never seen one "in person," and many undoubtedly have never even touched one.

Others have some familiarity and even respect for guns, maybe even own a gun or two of their own (but only for hunting or some other sporting purpose), but they believe that some guns are just too dangerous to allow the common folk to own them, such as handguns and the mythical "assault weapon."

The most dangerous anti-gun rights people are the statists. These are the people who believe in the supremacy of government over the individual. They're afraid of the "unwashed masses" having guns, because that's the final backstop to preventing governmental tyranny. With nearly 300,000,000 privately owned guns in America, there's no way that these people can turn us into an oppressed society similar to those of recent memory: the Soviet Union, Nazy Germany and many, many other, smaller tinpot dictatorships that have plagued our world. To expand governmental control over the people beyond a certain point, they'll have to make sure we don't have access to our guns anymore.

I know, some folks regard the previous paragraph as paranoid and delusional, and I've now identified myself as a crackpot. I can't stop anyone from thinking so, but I can't ignore history. Those who believe "it can't happen here" are hiding their heads in the sand.

The only reason it can't happen here is because we won't let it. And keeping and bearing our guns are two of the primary factors in that effort.

David Codrea, proprietor of The War on Guns blog, reports that he's being threatened by a federal law enforcement officer with the intent to intimidate David into not posting about the shortcomings of BATFE and other law enforcement agencies. As protection against retaliation or other unwarranted action against him, David is trying to focus a very bright light on this issue, so as many folks as possible are aware of the situation, and will look skeptically on any evidence produced against him to ensure it's not fraudulent.

In whatever small amount I can support him in this effort (his readership being vastly larger than mine), I offer you this post. This situation bears monitoring by everyone who cares about our Civil Rights in general, and our rights protected by the First and Second Amendments more especially.

I read much of The Volokh Conspiracy because I find their posts mostly interesting, even to a layman. There are times when their discussions of the law and courts and appeals and dicta and so on and so forth gets a bit tedious to me, but I understand that the law can be complicated (mostly because the legislators who draft laws unnecessarily make them complicated, IMHO) and so when that happens, I acknowledge it and move on.

There are times, though, when it seems to me that lawyers take the simple and make it complicated. I'm of the opinion, for example, that if there's a simple interpretation of a phrase or article in the US Constitution, that it should be favored over a more complicated, "legalistic" interpretation. So when The Head Conspirator links to a lengthy Note from The Yale Law Journal (PDF document), I just had to shake my head in despair. I really wish you guys would not try to over-complicate things.

There's a lot of hand-wringing, "it's never been defined," "this hasn't been tested in court" lawyerese in that Yale Note which makes me just shake my head. Why does our Constitution have to be complicated? Sure, I'm undoubtedly naïve on this, but this whole thing seems to me to be pretty simple:

• The Constitution says only "natural born Citizen" may be elected President
• The plainest interpretation of "natural born Citizen," it seems to me, is someone who was a Citizen at the instant of their birth
• Since no further definition is provided in the Constitution, it then falls to Congress to say what defines a "Citizen." If that's what someone is when they're born, then they're a "natural born Citizen."

Why do they make this so complicated?

On this date in 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texas, those 60 intrepid men declared the establishment of the Republic of Texas. The rest, as they say, is history.

The New York Times has once again stirred the pot by speculating that perhaps Senator John McCain is not a "natural born citizen," a requirement to become President of the United States, because he was born (of American citizens) in the Panama Canal Zone.

Poppycock. Not everyone agrees with my insightful analysis, though:

In a paper written 20 years ago for the Yale Law Journal on the natural-born enigma, Jill Pryor, now a lawyer in Atlanta, said that any legal challenge to a presidential candidate born outside national boundaries would be "unpredictable and unsatisfactory."

"If I were on the Supreme Court, I would decide for John McCain," Ms. Pryor said in a recent interview. "But it is certainly not a frivolous issue."

I think this is indicative of where lawyers separate themselves from society because they make things more complicated than they need to be (of course, they make (lots of) money because what they do is so complicated).

But to me, a simple layman who has a passing understanding of the English language, the interpretation is simple: if you were a US Citizen at the moment of your birth, either through your presence within the United States or by dint of having at least one American parent, you are a "natural born citizen." If you had to petition to become a citizen, you are a "naturalized citizen." To my mind, the universe of citizens is broken in to two parts: natural born and naturalized.

I'm sure it's more complicated than that. But it shouldn't be.

First, Flashdance was released 25 years ago (on April 15th...got your taxes done?). Has it really been that long?

Second, Jennifer Beals is even hotter today than she was back in 1983.

See what I mean? Not bad for 44, eh?

I'm sure this question must have been asked somewhere by now. Shoot, I probably read it myself and forgot that I read it. But if McCain has effectively won the Republican nomination, and he doesn't (yet?) have the support of conservatives, what does this say about the role of conservatism in the Republican Party?

First off, where were the conservative candidates for President? I maintain that Huckabee and Romney have been no more conservative than McCain. In fact, I consider Romney to be even less conservative, along the lines of Giuliani. I consider Thompson to be conservative, and would have like to see him as the Republican nominee, but he never caught fire among Republicans, and his leisurely approach to campaigning isn't entirely at fault here. Ron Paul is running a clearly Libertarian campaign.

So, how influential are conservatives within the Republican Party? To me, it's starting to look like the answer to that question is "Not very."

Bill Dyer has, as usual, a well-thought-out and insightful post up, this time concerning Republicans, conservatives and their relationship with John McCain. Bill has articulated exactly how I feel about the upcoming Presidential election, but haven't been able to put it into words.

Here's my bottom line for those of you who say you can never vote for McCain for President: if you think there's no difference between McCain and Clinton/Obama in our war against Islamic extremists, you're dead wrong. If you think the US will be better off with Obillary as President than with McCain, you're dead wrong.

And, quite frankly, those of you who express the sentiment along the lines of "I'd rather get stabbed in the front by a Democrat than in the back by a Republican" are just being foolish. Sorry if that's a little harsh, but as your friend, I have to tell you the truth. :)

Oh yeah, one more thing: where did the idea that Romney is conservative come from? In the context of Massachusetts, yeah, he's conservative. But compared to any of the current or former Presidential candidates this cycle, the only man he's to the right of is Rudy Giuliani. Vote for Romney if you want, but don't do it because he's a conservative, 'cause he ain't.

I'm unable to subdue a bout of narcissism inspired by Uncle, so according to this, I'm the same age as Mel Gibson, Bill Maher, Joe Montana, Tom Hanks, Larry Bird and The Price is Right, and the year of my birth saw the sinking of the Andrea Doria off of Nantucket, the Soviets crushing the anti-Communist uprising in Hungary and the conflict over the Suez Canal in Egypt. Racism was still rampant in America, and surprise, surprise, the Yankees won the World Series.

I wasn't surprised by Gibson or Maher, but I thought that Montana, Hanks and Bird were younger than me.