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You have probably noticed that television
and movies now show people holding pistols sideways.
They hold the gun in the same way a monkey would
grab one.
Look at all the tapes of live action shooting that
have ever been taken. You will never see one single
person using this monkey grip on a real gun in a
real fighting situation.
In the movies, everybody who has a pistol is an
expert. According to television, anyone can hit
his target if it's close. Anyone can therefore afford
to hold his gun sideways in a fighting situation.
Actually, no matter how often you have done it,
you can miss anything in a fighting situation.
That is why, in the real world, a professional will
use a two-handed grip on his pistol.
That is why, in the real world, nobody uses the
monkey grip.
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BILL PRESS
JUMPS ON STEVE FORBES
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Steve Forbes was on CNN's Crossfire.
As soon as he mentioned his flat tax idea, Bill
Press pointed out that his staff had studied it.
He said that they had found out that Forbes would
save tens of millions of dollars under the flat
tax. Press said that was why Forbes wanted the flat
tax.
Like all liberals, Press plays for blood. He knows
how serious political power is. He gets personal
any time he feels that will help his cause. For
a liberal his principles come first, and respectability
be damned. Press made one conservative walk off
the show by accusing him of being a hypocrite. Press
plays hardball.
All this is fair. The show is called "Crossfire."
But what I want everybody to notice is that no conservative
will ever use such hardball tactics against Press.
Bill Press is always against mandatory sentencing
for rapists or killers. And Bill Press always says
that he is in favor of gun control, but not against
legitimate self-defense. But every place people
like Press are in power, they pass laws which give
MANDATORY one year sentences to anyone who carries
a gun or a can of mace for his own defense.
This is true in New York. This is true in Washington,
DC. This is true wherever people like Press gain
power.
Has any conservative, including Pat Buchanan, ever
mentioned this? Of course not. It would offend Press.
No professional conservative would
ever play actual hardball with his liberal master.
Principles are not that important to ANY professional
conservative.
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In a radio interview a couple of weeks ago, I was referred
to as a Ph.D. Southern Events referred to me as "Dr.
Whitaker." For the record, it isn't true.
I am one of the legions of people who went through all
the course work for the Ph.D., passed the comprehensive
examinations for the doctorate, went off to teach in college,
and never finished the degree. It is probably the best
thing that ever happened to me.
It was not the best thing that ever happened to the University
of Virginia, where I took all that graduate work. The
reason it was bad for the University was not because I
didn't get MY degree. It was because of the REASON I didn't
get it.
Like about forty percent of the other people who do all
the course work and go off to teach in college, I never
finished my doctoral dissertation, or "thesis,"
as it is it often miscalled (a thesis is for a master's
degree). The dissertation is a piece of original research
or theory, usually a hundred pages or so long. All my
graduate courses had been taken and my comprehensive exams
had been passed with some to spare.
Even the hard part of my dissertation was over. I had
presented my topic to the graduate seminar, where all
the professors and graduate students heard my topic and
cross-examined me on it. I had written a major part of
it.
The last obstacle had been breached: I had gotten my first
and second readers. These are the two graduate professors
who are your sponsors. They accept your topic and sign
off on the dissertation after it is finished. Both my
readers were part of an independently funded section of
the economics department called The Center for Public
Choice.
While I was away teaching, a political science professor
became Dean of Arts and Sciences. His first action as
the new dean was to kick The Center for Public Choice
out of the University of Virginia! So my dissertation
was kaput. A better man might have gone back and started
again. I was too lazy.
I was, in fact, notoriously lazy. In graduate school,
we had almost no regular textbooks. Instead, each class
was given a thick list of the latest academic articles
to read for discussion in class. The year after I left
the University of Virginia, one of the graduate professors
was handing out his list of articles to read for the course,
and some students complained about how long it was.
The professor said he knew of one student -- meaning me
-- who had made it all the way through all the course
work and comprehensive examinations without reading one
single article in any of his courses. He told the class
they were welcome to try not reading any articles, if
they thought they could get away with it. As I say, I
was not only lazy, I was famous for it. There was no way
I was going to go back and start my dissertation over
again.
But in the end, I cannot blame others for my failure to
finish my degree. The simple fact is that I did not want
it badly enough.
In any case, this situation cost the University of Virginia
far more than it cost me. My second reader later won a
Nobel Prize in Economics! If he had been at the University
of Virginia at the time he won that Nobel Prize, it would
have been one of those huge boosts for the school that
universities dream about.
And, since The Center for Public Choice had its own grant
money, the University would have had a Nobel Laureate
without even having to pay his salary!
Public Choice finally won acceptance, but not because
academia ever grew up enough to accept it. Public Choice
became legitimate because those who DID get their PhDs
in the field were enormous successes. One of them, James
Miller, succeeded David Stockman as Director of OMB. Another
was for many years editor of the editorial page of the
Wall Street Journal. Several Nobel Prizes were awarded
in Public Choice, two of them to former professors of
mine. One was kicked out of the University, as I said.
Another had left earlier on his own. If he lived to see
it, the dean who booted The Center for Public Choice out
of the University of Virginia was humiliated.
I could say that this experience soured me on academia.
Unfortunately, the record shows that I had never been
sweet on it in the first place. The professors who got
me my fellowship and brought me to the University of Virginia
were openly contemptuous of regular academic opinion.
They probably felt that my main qualification for graduate
work with them was the fact that I had always been down
on the academic bureaucracy. I gave academia hell while
I was in college.
Academia likes to think of itself as a collection of true
intellectuals. But our society has allowed social science
professors to create a completely inbred bureaucracy.
In the real world, it would be astonishing if social scientists
had turned out to be anything BUT an inbred bureaucracy.
If a physics professor has a theory that doesn't work,
experiments will soon show him up. If engineering professors
are allowed to push idiotic ideas, bridges fall down or
planes crash. In the real sciences, there are practical
limitations on silliness.
But in the social sciences, Political Correctness rules.
Nothing a social scientist says has to work. His only
job is to please other social scientists. In the social
sciences, experts choose other experts, and the only thing
anyone has to satisfy is fashionable opinion. The result
is an inbred bureaucracy. How could it be anything else?
Social science professors are the only people who decide
who will become a social science professor. There is no
outside control, because nothing they propose ever has
to WORK.
Every group of humans which is given money and power,
and is subject to no outside control whatsoever, has always
turned into a self-serving bureaucracy. Those who insist
that social scientists are "intellectuals" have
never explained why this same degeneration should not
have occurred among them.
The big problem here is that the study of bureaucracy
is part of the social sciences. A student of bureaucracy
who was also an intellectual would ask, first of all,
whether he himself had become a bureaucrat. But, precisely
because it IS an inbred bureaucracy, the social science
establishment will never ask that question.
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