The perfect post-apocalyptic personal defense weapon

Benelli M2 Tactical

Whether you are being attacked by a horde of zombies or a horde of Obama’s Civil Defense Corps personnel, the Benelli M2 Tactical is one of the best urban defense weapons you can currently buy in the United States.

Remember, a 12-gauge shotgun is a crowd control weapon for close range operations. Urban clearing, mowing down undead shamblers and close quarters defense against advancing hordes of hostile fleshy creatures are the correct uses for a weapon like the Benelli M2.

The key factor that makes the Benelli a reliable and lifelong keepsake to hide from the gun grabbers – it’s not gas operated. Instead, it is recoil operated. That means you won’t have to do a critical functions check or clearing operation right as that zombie who used to be a postal worker is about to bite into your forearm. Simple engineering and reliable operation are what make the AK47 and its many variants the most popular assault rifle ever. The Benelli is designed on the same principles. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking is the most appropriate anachronism that springs to mind.

The tactical model is much better for stopping the advancing minions of the forces of entropy than the field model because you can fight your hopeless battle against overwhelming odds with style. A flashlight on your Benelli will allow you to see the cold whites of those dead eyes just before that rotting, stinking corpse explodes and is flung backwards across the room, knocking over at least a half dozen fellow brain eaters and allowing you to cycle the chamber and load another delicious helping of buckshot into the barrels full of second death. Yes, zombies have to die twice. I don’t think Tritium sights are really necessary, but you could mount those on this fabulous and stylish instrument of destruction as well.

At only $1,200 (soon to rise to about $12,000 on the black market), the Benelli M2 is an excellent value. After all, your intact body and beating heart are certainly worth more than $1,200 aren’t they? Buy a Benelli M2 while you still can. The zombie hordes are on the march. A plague of giant locusts is imminent. All hell is breaking loose. The end is nigh. Get a decent combat shotgun.

Source: Guns and Ammo magazine. For some reason, they didn’t publish the review on their web site.

Bailouts, bailouts and more bailouts

Confusion over the continuing impact of the federal government’s “bailouts for everyone but taxpayers” program continues. Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution pontificates:

In my view the real bailout is the existence of the FDIC which, like it or not, is not a commitment we cannot walk away from.  Had nothing been done, the required FDIC bailout of bank depositors would have been enormous, given frozen interbank credit markets plus a certain level of panic.  So in reality I favored a smaller bailout than did most of the “purer” libertarians, although MR commentators rarely frame it as such.

A combination of bank recapitalization (which I was first skeptical about and thus have changed my mind on) and a greater emphasis on an “identify and isolate the bad banks” approach was the right bailout to do, not to allocate $700 billion for TARP.  I agree with everything Arnold writes in this post, but still in my view “doing nothing” wasn’t really an option, again if only because of the preexisting FDIC commitment, not to mention the disaster associated with a plummeting money supply.

Now that financial confidence is partially restored, we can hope that the Obama administration redoes the deal.  But the money is being committed rapidly and the demands of the interest groups are piling up, so I hardly expect much ex post improvement.

Here is what I think about the bailout. The people responsible are criminals and they should be locked up. They should be stripped of all offices and titles and possibly tarred and feathered. We are talking about thieves.

The money is all made up anyhow, but these people are cheapening our lives and the lives of future generations by spewing out devaluments that will cause massive inflation in coming months and years. A business that cannot make a profit should be allowed to fail – this is the natural course of things. When you don’t allow that business to fail and go even one step further by rewarding the people who are responsible you are setting up a wider failure.

That’s what is most likely to happen in the next decade – a national and possible global economic crisis unlike anything that has happened in my lifetime. Sure, you could label me as a paranoid doom and gloom type, and I expect that some of you will. No matter how you label me, your government is still robbing you and refusing to act in a responsible manner. You should be worried. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

A tsunami doesn’t do any damage until it hits the shore. You might want to get to higher ground if you can.

It’s the culture stupid

Gun control advocates should take a long hard look at Great Britian, which by all accounts is not so great anymore. Unless you place high value on living in a crime ridden surveillance society. I realize that saying so will like offend many readers from Great Britain and would remind you that you are free to criticize the United States – I live here and I think we have a lot of our own issues to solve. Nevertheless, Great Britain is becoming a cesspool of bad social policies and resultant social tensions and afflictions.

On a June evening two years ago, Dan Rather made many stiff British upper lips quiver by reporting that England had a crime problem and that, apart from murder, “theirs is worse than ours.” The response was swift and sharp. “Have a Nice Daydream,” The Mirror, a London daily, shot back, reporting: “Britain reacted with fury and disbelief last night to claims by American newsmen that crime and violence are worse here than in the US.” But sandwiched between the article’s battery of official denials — “totally misleading,” “a huge over-simplification,” “astounding and outrageous” — and a compilation of lurid crimes from “the wild west culture on the other side of the Atlantic where every other car is carrying a gun,” The Mirror conceded that the CBS anchorman was correct. Except for murder and rape, it admitted, “Britain has overtaken the US for all major crimes.”

In the two years since Dan Rather was so roundly rebuked, violence in England has gotten markedly worse. Over the course of a few days in the summer of 2001, gun-toting men burst into an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five women and three men wounded; and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential neighborhood of north London. And on New Year’s Day this year a 19-year-old girl walking on a main street in east London was shot in the head by a thief who wanted her mobile phone. London police are now looking to New York City police for advice.

Guns are tools designed for a specific purpose – to expel a projectile with explosive force. Anything in the path of the projectile is in jeopardy of being damaged or destroyed. When a society becomes obsessively focused on the wrong things it loses. Instead of worrying about the projectile we should be worrying about the mind that pulls the trigger that activates the mechanism that launches the projectile.

A human mind, when aimed in the wrong direction, is much more dangerous than any gun. It’s the culture stupid. This is a reminder to our new director of fixing everything, Lord Barack Obama. Fix the cultural problems and you’ll be able to stop worrying about how many guns are out there.

Please remember this as well. There are at least a few million Americans who believe that the right to bear arms is more important than anything. Be very careful how you use your unconstitutional agencies – the ATF and the DEA – because a few million new political prisoners would not help you implement positive cultural changes. Don’t make rules that men of conscience will not follow. Don’t create new classes of criminals out of people who would otherwise contribute more to your society than they would take out over a lifetime.

On my way to work this morning, I listened to Dan Carlin’s hardcore history episode Punic Nightmares III, in which the Carthaginians are tricked into giving up their means of self-defense by the Romans. Their city is sacked and they are wiped out. Mr. Obama soon to be President Obama, I would remind you that it is immoral to take away a human being’s means of self-defense. Do not focus on furthering the immorality of the government you lead or you will merely be creating a further divided nation. Instead, I would ask you to focus on fixing what is broken in the culture. Teach self-reliance, individual responsibility, civics, sound economics and minimal government interfence in a private citizen’s daily life. Emphasize community and local autonomy. Don’t get stuck on stupid. Don’t focus on trying to control us by taking away our guns.

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman

For the last several weeks, I’ve been digesting the audio version of Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat and Crowded. My commute is 130 miles round trip so I get a lot of audio books.

Friedman’s postulate that we need to focus on more green energy is dead on track. I completely disagree with his methodology. I don’t want or need a bigger federal government or one world government – we have enough bureaucrats controlling enough areas of our lives.

Is green energy critical to ensuring a sustainable future for coming generations? Yes. That alone makes Hot, Flat and Crowded worth reading or listening to. However, I would suggest to Mr. Friedman that we have to change the memes from the bottom up and not the top down as he suggests. Voluntarism is the right way to get people to change bad habits.

Freidman disparages magazine articles that give householders 10 easy ways to go green but those articles are changing memes without anyone needing to use a gun to force change. I would like to see more voluntary community programs and more cooperation between states to create environmental energy incentives. It is demand from the public that will force companies to change.

Let’s focus on incentives and not penalties, on cooperation and not regulation. This is the area where I find Friedman to be least helpful. In providing statistics and a clear and compelling case for us to change our habits and consumption levels though, he is spot on. On the whole the book is well worth your time.

Citigroup rethinking foreclosures

We should always look for alternatives to the bailout mentality, where made up money is thrown all around at random in hopes of “stimulating” the economy. Citigroup appears to be taking a measured approach to the current mortgage crisis.

Citigroup says it is imposing a moratorium on most foreclosures as part of a series of initiatives aimed at helping at-risk borrowers remain in their homes — making Citi the latest big bank to announce sweeping efforts to try to curtail losses from souring mortgages.

Citi said late Monday it won’t initiate a foreclosure or complete a foreclosure sale on any eligible borrower who seeks to stay in a home if it is the borrower’s principal residence, the homeowner is working in good faith with Citi and has sufficient income to make affordable mortgage payments.

Citi said it is also working to expand the program to include mortgages the bank services but does not own.

Additionally, over the next six months, Citi plans to reach out to 500,000 homeowners who are not currently behind on their mortgage payments, but who are deemed as potentially needing assistance to keep current with their payments. This represents about one-third of all the mortgages that Citigroup owns, the bank said.

Citi plans to devote a team of 600 salespeople to assist the targeted borrowers by adjusting their rates, reducing principal, or increasing the term of the loan, steps known in the mortgage industry as a workout.

Irresponsibility should not be rewarded. The other side of the coin is that our society does a terrible job of teaching individual responsibility. We teach the exact opposite from the top down. Congress steals from the people and redistributes the wealth however they see fit. They claim this is their mandate. Maybe it is their mandate. Nevertheless, when the power structure is designed to foster irresponsible fiscal behavior, it is nice to see some signs that common sense is being used, at least on a limited scale.

If people can be kept in their homes their lives are somewhat more stable than they would likely otherwise be. Citigroup benefits from less foreclosure losses. I don’t see any losers when it comes to taking reasonable steps to keep people in their homes.