Author Archives: Lyle

Because That Would Make Him a ‘Gay’ Basher

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That’s the answer to Billy Beck’s question.

I’ve criticized your religion, certainly your politics, and the inconsistency behind the idea of women’s equality.  Why not criticize your thoughts on homosexuality?

We’re not supposed to talk about it, right?  It’s a taboo subject.  For one thing we’re supposed to shut up out of fear– fear of being ostracized as a ‘gay’ basher or a homophobe.  So when a man sees another man raping a boy, he clams up.  If he’d beat the shit out the rapist as he should have done, he’d be the one charged with a crime and no one would say anything in his defense for fear of being labeled a ‘gay’ basher.  Same as when a black, homosexual, Democrat man in Congress (probably the most protected class of humans, unless you’re talking of a black, lesbian Muslim extremist) running a homosexual prostitution ring in his basement.  What?  I suppose you’re a racist homophobe with a political agenda.  Shut up.  You Suck if you criticize this hard-working American who cares about kids, the poor, race relations, union workers and the environment, you racist homophobe.  Neanderthal!

Sure; the witness should have done the right thing and kicked the rapist’s ass, even if he knew full well that he’d be the one prosecuted.  But our cultural insanity makes doing the right thing just that much more difficult.  And that, I submit, was the whole purpose of what I will call the insanity movement the first place– what’s good is bad and what’s bad is good.  What’s wrong is right and what’s right is wrong.

How else do you get 300 to 400 million people to tolerate being treated like sheep?

I put the word “gay” in scare quotes because it doesn’t mean what most people today think it means.  I try to use the language properly, so using “gay” to mean homosexual requires the quotation marks.  He’s a bit “queer” is of course a euphemism.  Lots of things are queer, but we’ve lost track of the word’s meaning.  “Gay” is the same sort of euphemism, as is “fag”, as applied to a homosexual.  If we’re going to use the terms in their true meanings, or understand them when we encounter them in classic literature, we have to be aware of this, and talk about it.  So there you have it.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to suck on one of the nice faggots I usually keep with me right now.  And by the way; I suppose I could sue you if you criticize me for smoking.  If it’s an addiction, or a disease, you’d be harassing or “bashing” a person with a disability.  Shut up.  You have no right to talk about it unless you give me lots of money.  Oh, and stop taxing me because of my disease.  Would you propose a tax on “gays” who get AIDS?  Shut up.  Now I’m thinking of closing comments because no one is supposed to talk about any of this stuff.  Shut up.

Women’s ‘Equality’ and the Offendedness Movement

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We’re not even supposed to talk about this, I guess, because it proves we’re sexist.  Too bad.

When the Flappers painted the town red in the 1920s, we were told women had achieved equality.  When women hit the factories during World War Two, we were told women had achieved equality (see the trend yet?).  When women burned their bras in the 1960s, we were told women had achieved equality.  When the pill came out, we were told that women had finally achieved equality.  Women’s suffrage happened somewhere back there too.

A hundred years of non-stop achievement of equality later, we’re being told how sexual harassment is a problem in the workplace, and it’s 99.999% men doing the harassing and women, still, are the victims.  Because they haven’t achieved equality I guess.  What’s the message to men with ambitions?  If you’re going to be running for high office ten or twenty years later, you better keep women out of your workplace so they can’t come back when the time is right and destroy your campaign.  Don’t hire women.  Don’t work with women, because all it takes for a women to destroy you is for her to point a finger at you.

If men and women were equal, there’d be roughly the same number of men complaining about harassment by women as the other way ’round, or at least it wouldn’t be so overwhelmingly one-sided.  A high school aged male I knew was getting rather steamy text message from a far older, married woman employer.  It was fairly apparent that sex was happening between them.  An experienced  lawyer said that maybe he should count himself the luckiest kid in school.

That’s the double standard and it’s everywhere.  At the same time we’re being told that women are strong, that they can not only take care of themselves they’re capable of doing anything a man can do at least as well as he can do it, we are simultaneously asked to believe that the slightest gesture can turn a strong, capable, professional woman into a quivering blob of dysfunctional, sobbing, frightened, victimized jelly that only huge sums of money, or certain political outcomes, or both, can cure.

When I was interviewing a college-age woman for a bookkeeping position at my small business, she asked if there was enough work there to actually keep her busy full time.  Fair question.  In addition to telling her that although the business was small, it was complex, and that furthermore, being small, there were a lot of other things she could do besides keep books.  What I meant, and I expected it to be as obvious as the rather prominent nose on my face (she was a business major after all) was that total specialization is something a small business cannot afford, therefore we all have to pitch in with cleaning, stocking shelves, receiving shipments, answering phones, and hundreds of other tasks that are involved in keeping a business running properly that don’t warrant separate employees.  Her response caught me off guard.  I was accustomed to working in the real world, unaware of just how bat-shit insane the world of leftist political academia had become.  Condition white;

“WELL…just what’s THAT supposed to mean…?!!”  Gawd.  She’d apparently been to one of those “How-to-know-when-you’re-being-sexually-harassed” classes they offer to women on college campi these days as part of the “Women’s Studies” curriculum.  Interview over.  Don’t call us, we’ll (not) call you.  We have enough problems without having to deal with stupid shit like this.

Which is it, then, ladies?  Are you capable of standing up for yourselves, strong, and proud to play a vital and dynamic role in all the action, or are you perpetual victims, bent on being perpetual victims for social, financial and political gain?  Do you want to be taken seriously or do you want to be a poor little victim, ’cause it sure as hell can’t be both.  This bi-polar premise is running rather thin and I for one quit falling for it sometime back in the 1970s.

This is Sort of Cool

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I guess.  It’s an electric milti-copter.  It has one thing going for it that a number of flying machines don’t have– it’s actually gotten off the ground with a human aboard.  I don’t know what it has to offer that a regular helicopter or auto-gyro doesn’t.  Maybe it’s the power transmission system being electrical wires instead of drive shafts and belts.  I immediately though of a hybrid (gas/electric) system, and they talk about that on their web site.  Great as batteries have become, they’re still no match for gasoline.

Still, the main obstacle to wide-spread (affordable) personal aircraft is the FAA and similar, tax-payer-funded authoritarian gangs.  Note that one of the benefits to the multi-copter sited is the fact that it can be flown as an ultra-light– it gets past a lot of the aviation regs.  In a free market we’d all have viable, affordable options for our own aircraft right now.  Poor college kids would have them, as easily as they now have old beat-up cars.

I suppose that would scare the pee out of the authoritarian cowards, so maybe it could be said that we have our current, restrictive system as a means of avoiding the embarrassment for certain people who would soil themselves in public, falling into the fetal position and sucking their thumbs, or simply getting angry and losing control that way.  Frankly, I’d kind of like to see that.  Not in that it would be pleasant, mind you, but it would indicate that we’re on the right track.  In a society where cowards are given any notice other than to receive our contempt, or where cowards actually run things, there will be much impediment to real progress.

HT to the Blaze

They ‘Looked the Other Way’

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That’s the reporting in the Old Media of the Fast & Furious (or Gun Walker) program against the second amendment, even now.  FBI and F-Troop “Looked the other way” as guns were being sold to gangs…

Wow.  They “Looked the other way” in the same sense that Al Capone “looked the other way” while prostitution, gambling, rum-running and violence were taking place in Chicago, and as Ted Bundy “looked the other way” while serial murder was taking place.

It’s a sort of out-of-body experience I guess, as one’s conscience “looks the other way” while one is engaged in criminal activity.  Maybe they’re posturing for an insanity defense.

Now I’ve been thinking; if the intent was to “track” criminals, why didn’t they give them GPS-equipped cell phones, or rigged car stereos or LoJack rigged cars, etc., etc., instead of guns?  Hmm?  They didn’t because that wasn’t the intent.

For that matter, if the intent were peace and prosperity, there wouldn’t be this war on drugs that created the narco-gangs in the first place.  The Al Capone reference above was not chosen randomly– he was “made” by Prohibition, first and foremost.  Before that he was a petty nobody.

It Isn’t Complicated

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It’s pretty common to get a response similar to; “I didn’t want to spend that much on an optic setup, since I only paid X for the rifle.”

A customer today said he has a WASR AK he keeps for defense, but can’t justify the price of a good optic.  That’s a contradiction in terms, see– you’re going to count on this weapon, possibly, to save your life but anything more than 60 or 75 dollars for a sight that you can rely on is just too much?  “I have another rifle that can put five rounds into a half minute or arc, so…[I don’t need a good optic on this one]”  He said.  So your 3 or 4 MOA Kalash doesn’t warrant an optic that will withstand a few knocks and hold zero, and has a battery life better measured in years than in hours?  Why not?  What is your life worth?

I don’t know if many people are aware of the number of thousand plus dollar scopes that are currently sitting on five hundred dollar rifles.

It’s not about matching the price of the sight to the price of the rifle.  It’s about the setup you want, and you should want something on which you can rely.  Reliable rifles with decent accuracy aren’t expensive, but good optics are.  If your optic costs multiples of the price of the rifle, so be it.  You have a good setup that didn’t have to include a super expensive rifle.  Be happy.

I recently saw an article about some AR or other and the writer had one of the new Leupold Mk 8 variables on it.  It seemed like just the thing I’ve wanted on my (700 dollar) Colt HBAR, so I looked it up.  Four Thousand Dollars!  Will I have to spend an additional 3,000+ dollars on a rifle only so I can justify a good optic?  That sort of “reasoning” doesn’t make any sense to this shooter.  It’s only a matter of coughing up the cash if you can (I do very much like the Trijicons too, and they’re not near 4K, but they don’t do all the same tricks).  Choices choices, but the price I paid for my rifle won’t even be thought of during the process.  I’ll only be thinking of what I can do with it once I have this rig setup nicely.

Disclaimer; …No– On second thought I don’t have to disclaim squat to anyone.  I’m sick and damned tired of the notion that we have to qualify ourselves, or document any aspect of our lives or explain our behavior.  If you can’t take my words at face value, or reject them purely on merits, that’s your own problem.  Live with it.  I’m not demanding anything of you, so stay out of my face and leave me the hell alone.  Or else.  This is the last discussion I will ever have with anyone on the matter of disclosure.

Where Has This Newt Been All Our Lives?

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I’d commented just this morning that I’d seen more than enough of Newt.  Then this was sent to me by a relative of a relative;

Not too shabby for a Republican.  The problem for Newt though is that we know Newt.  He has a history.  I can only assume that this was a trial balloon for him– to see how this sort of thing sells in the marketplace (in the minds of people like him) in which the industry of political rhetoric sells its wares.  He’s a craftsman in the art.  I still think the world is better off with Newt as a history teacher.

“Isolate and crush the secular socialist left” he says.  The only reference to liberty he makes is to religious liberty.  OK, what about the religious socialist left?  Why bring in the “secular” bit when you could just say “crush the socialists”?  He still talks about “running” the country too.  That bugs me– Raise your hand if you want to be run by someone in Washington.  See?  Didn’t think so.

‘Universes’ Isn’t a Word

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I don’t know.  I like watching The Universe series on The History Channel (once I get past the stupid graphics and the talking-down-to they give us) but this guy, a frequent contributor to The Universe, seems a little too full of himself for someone who apparently doesn’t understand the words he’s using.

Just as there are many solar systems in our galaxy, and many other galaxies in the universe, there may be, we find, other somethings (he uses “soap bubbles”) in the universe.  “Universe” has it right there in the word– Uni.  There can be only one.  What all it may include is a subject for further study and discovery, but there is only one.  Please.

Maybe this bugs me more than it should, but I don’t think so.  When it comes to cross-culture or cross-generational communication it is critically important.  Simple things like the meaning of “the People” and of “…shall not be infringed” have been under assault for example.  If we’re not constantly on our guard we lose our history.  When we lose our history we lose our culture and our freedom.

For the Sesame Street audience, “soap bubble” works OK, but surely there’s a better choice.  I’ll take it over “multiple universes” any day though, as the latter is a direct contradiction of terms, hanging right out there in your face.

Encarta offers this definition of the universe; “the totality of all matter and energy that exists in the vastness of space, whether known to human beings or not.”  Well there you have it, see?  You might want to alert the theoretical physicists and the astronomers you know.  That last clause is even better than I’d hoped.  I’d figured on something more like “everything that exists everywhere, period. No, really– everything. Seriously. Dude” but that definition has a bit of a problem built into it.  Ten points if you can describe it.

How We Lose

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…when we do lose, and we’ve been losing, on balance, for over 100 years so this matters.

Kevin posted this as an example of truth, which of course it is…as far as it goes.  Excellent as his points are, Epstein doesn’t wrap up the argument.  He gets the ball to the goal line and then punts.  Excellent drive, but we never score.  The enemy gets the ball at the 20 yard line.  As I told Kevin, Epstein ignores the elephant in the living room;

Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Did you notice the omission?  That is a fairly classic example of an argument between what I call “tweakers” (I know– the term is already taken, but it fits here).  It’s like two dairy farmers arguing over how to get the most milk from their cows.  “Tweak the cows (people) this way, and you get x result, tweak the cows that way and you get y result, etc.”

The discussion went as far as it could without actually mentioning the fact that we aren’t cattle, what we achieve or own is none of the government’s business, and that the United States was created as a place where rights protection was the government’s main job– not tweaking people.  Id est, there is no moral or principled argument unless you count material result or statistical result as a principle, which it isn’t.

As Ayn Rand so eloquently stated some 50 or so years ago– the self appointed champions of conservatism are often the worst enemies of liberty.  By failing to make the moral argument, while the enemy has plenty of (false) moral arguments, we often appear hollow and even hypocritical to the less attentive.

They’re the ones motivated by compassion.  We only have only the cold steel nuts and bolts– economic theories that help the rich while ignoring the plight of the poor and desperate.

Epstein’s cross examiner knew he was scoring points with his audience when he repeatedly used the term “inequality” to falsely describe what Epstein was advocating.

Here’s the elephant in the room– human rights protection.  That one thing that’s so lacking everywhere else in the world.  The banishment of coercion.  The American founding principles.  The shining torch of Liberty that has brought so many people here from all over the world.  The unleashing of the human spirit.

Wrap it up.  Cross the goal line, or we’re doomed.

Good Point

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About Pres. Reagan.  I recall that he added an extra 5 cents tax per gallon on our fuel, ostensibly to repair the failing highway system, because the gazillions they were already collecting and wasting weren’t enough.  Reagan then held that extra tax money over the state of Idaho’s head, saying we had to change our drinking age from 19 to 21 or we wouldn’t see any of the money they were taking from us.  Idaho caved.

That radically changed the economies of all Idaho border towns.

No one seems to have learned anything from that– when our drinking age was lower and our sales tax far lower than bordering states, we got tons of business from those states.  We don’t have that so much anymore, so now our idiot Republican Governor has his thooper thpecial “Hire One” program– you’re supposed to call the state apparatchik and see if your business qualifies to be part of a state government jobs program.  Oh goody.  To call him a fool is being generous.  Right– I want to put my capital at risk, create new products, bring them to market and worry my ass off the whole time while getting robbed by this mutherfucker, so he can take credit for my work.  I think I’d rather die.

Kind of like our country as a whole.  Some educated kid from Germany was complaining to me recently about the “Fat Cats” sheltering their money in other countries (other than the United States, where he lives).  Those dirty bastards who won’t hold still and let us rob them…how dare they?  I asked him if our country shouldn’t be the place people from all over the planet come to secure their property rights.  That’s what we were supposed to be.  Remember?  He stood up and left, saying he didn’t want to get himself in trouble.  Good riddance.  I have that effect on a lot of people.

Clearing Some Old Files

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I found this old letter to the editors of a local paper.  I don’t think I posted it here;

Dear Editors,

Regarding Mark Winstein’s letter entitled “Lets Not be a Big Box Town” printed in last weekend’s edition:  I will point out to your good and thoughtful readers that in Mr. Winstein’s opinion, the last people who should be making decisions about land use are the actual land owners, the last people who should decide what is and what is not a “sustainable approach to the economy” are those who have their own capital at risk in a given venture, and by rights, the very last people on Earth who should decide where to shop are the shoppers themselves.

Apparently, there is a new field of study at the U of I, known as “Helping Make the Economy More Reflective of Ecological Values”.  I might like to meet one of the Doctorate Professors in this new Helping Make the Economy More Reflective of Ecological Values Department.  However, between taking care of my family and minding my own business instead of advocating the use of force in minding other people’s business, it would be hard for me to justify the time.

Now I want to propose an entirely new concept– one that Winstein may not have ever considered:  Maybe we could advocate the protection of other people’s rights (even if we dislike them).  It might be interesting if people could make their own decisions in what I will call a “Free Society” (I might enjoy entertaining the Dean of a “Free Market Solutions to World Problems” College).  I understand that this is a new and terrifying proposal (for some) but it may be worth considering, given that if our neighbors have the Right to Choose, perchance it would follow that we too would be afforded the same right at some stage.

Sincerely,
Lyle Keeney

That was several years ago, and I had been accosted in a parking lot by a petitioner that same year, too.  The argument was; “Look how big it’s going to be.”  Big is bad, I guess.  People are supposed to be small.  Or else, and that reminds me of a bumper sticker quote from Dennis Preger; “The Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen”.  Someone called the show to tell us that their car had been keyed after putting that sticker on it.

I started to argue with them, but it quickly became an obviously pointless exercise and I drifted away.

Today we have that Super Wal Mart the communists were trying to kick out of town by force of law (fairly and equitably of course).  I do a lot of shopping there.  It’s good to live near a big box town.  It’s the next best thing to living in a big box town.  The hippies pay something like eight dollars per gallon for milk at the Hippie Haus (our nickname for the local food co-op).  The supermarket Rosauer’s now has a hippie section, so you can pay three to four times as much for your food there too.  It’s for The Children, somehow, I guess.  And world peace.  And LSD, and stars per gallon.  When I was a kid, we bought milk directly from the farmers for next to nothing, and it wasn’t processed in any way except for already having been sucked from the cow’s teats.  When I was twelve years old or so, I’d take the family car several miles, usually running at ~0.5 Mach* along the narrow country roads, to get unpasteurized milk.  I suppose the hippies would be envious as hell to learn about that, until they realized that these farms were (gasp) private (gasp) businesses working for (gasp) profit on (gasp) private land, and (gasp) not charging us any tax for milk that was (gasp) never inspected by anyone except for the farmer, who (gasp) knew ten times more than any inspector ever will.  Poor communists– they never see anything that happens as a result of private initiative and free choice without getting all pissed off and bent out of shape (unless it’s an abortion or a pot party**).  I will feel sorry for them after we’ve crushed them into the dirt and no one else remembers them.  Maybe it’s because I have a soft spot in my heart for ignorant, vacuous, ridiculous, embarrassing hippies (i.e. hippies) having been one myself in a former life.

ETA;
* I believe that was the only time in my life I ever tested, and later verified, the actual top speed of a medium to lightweight, V8-powered motor vehicle on flat ground.  I suppose that may have something to do with why they don’t typically license 12 year olds to drive alone.  Back then though, I was only vaguely aware of the notion of “licensing” in any sense.  The subject of licensing was among the largely esoteric or academic (of no consequence) concepts in our lives then.  Any mention of it and we would have ignored you, not out of malice or disgust, but because it simply had no meaning for ordinary people who lived in the country unless a “fuzz” or a “putch” (a degraded abbreviation of the word “patrol”) happened by on the off chance, in which case we left.

** Jam sessions and music festivals come to mind, but those are a subset of “pot party” and so they are covered.  Protests where thought of, but ditto, and other than the very smallest protests that you’ll scarcely ever see and never hear of, hippie protests are not the result of private initiative.  “Hippie” and “private initiative” have only the very thinnest excuse to exist in the same sentence unless it be, “A hippie has almost no private initiative”.

Homemade Rocket to the Edge of Space

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This was pretty inspiring.  I didn’t catch whether it had any guidance or whether it was just a dumb rocket.  Note the epoxy camera cover melting as it approaches Mach Three.  Things get pretty quiet after MECO at that altitude.  Retrieving it a few miles from the launch site was pretty amazing.  It must have had a pretty quick descent after climbing nearly 20 miles.

My junior high school rocket club never did anything nearly so cool, but I did once built a small, very sleek wood, plastic and paper rocket, powered by two “D” engines grafted together by turning them on the lathe to produce a tight socket & tenon joint, like a clarinet body– two “D” fuel charges stacked under a delay and ‘chute charge in the same case.  It went out of sight and stayed there for quite a while- well over 1,000 feet– 1% of what those guys did.  With the longest delay I could get in a locally available engine, it was still going so fast upon ‘chute deployment that it ripped most of the shroud lines.  That was before I found out you could get “E” engines.

Style Thwarting Function

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It used to be that your car’s horn control was a 360 degree, or near 360 degree chrome-plated metal ring.  It didn’t take much time or effort to find it when you needed it.  My Ford pickup has two horn buttons– tiny rectangular surfaces in the wheel spokes that are stylistically flush-mounted, much like the controls on an iPod.  Just as the iPod looks cool but can’t be very well controlled by touch due to the carefully flush-mounted buttons, so too the horn buttons for my pickup are designed as if to challenge the driver’s muscle memory and pin-point precision in a desperate situation.

Driving home in the dark last night I noticed a car in front of me swerve into the on-coming lane.  “Idiot” I thought, “probably texting or something…WHOA!”  After driving this pickup for many years, I am now able to stab the horn button in about a tenth of a second.  I am proud of that fact.  It has taken all those years practicing with the same rig to learn to do it.  Of course I wore out one engine at around a quarter million miles, and am well into wearing out the second.  I figure that by the time most people learn to find the horn button in the dark in a panic, they’ve already trashed the vehicle and are on to the next one, having then to start all over with the process of learning to find the horn button in the dark in a panic.

There was a deer, hell bent on crossing the highway ten feet in front of me while I was doing 60 MPH.  Stupid animals.  I’ve found that the white-tailed deer responds very well to short horn blasts, at around 3 to 4 per second.  It mimics the universal alarm sound in the animal world.  A full sized pickup whooshing along at 60 MPH doesn’t give them pause, but that horn will send them into hysterics and they’ll stop whatever they’re doing.  You should have seen the look on that deer’s face.  It looked as though it had been lassoed and yanked backwards, eyeballs bugging out, which is much preferable to having it crawl through my radiator and into the front of my engine at 60 MPH.  Sometimes if the car in front of you swerves, there is a good reason.

My next thought was to look in the rear view mirror.  No traffic.  If I’d hit the deer, at least I could have had time to heave it into the pickup bed without encountering any traffic in my lane.  If you’re going to have your radiator destroyed, at least there could be some compensation in your freezer the following week.  And yes; I can drive without a radiator (or a water pump, or an accessory belt).  Can’t you?  You go until the engine temp red-lines, then you stop and wait for it to cool down.  Restart, repeat as necessary.  I’ve had to do that on two or three occasions, for different reasons.  Drag racers don’t have trivialities like a cooling system and they do just fine.

But enough with the flush-mounted controls, OK?  Engineers; can we agree it’s a dumb idea?

Put Words in Our Mouths, Give Us Orders

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Ht; the Blaze;

I’ve seen this before, in films taken in the 1930s.

The communists are doing a careful little dance.  They know they can’t accomplish anything without government cooperation (and that so far requires some cooperation from the voting public) unless they get violent.  If they get violent all on their own, they lose.  They’re primed and ready however, just waiting for the spark.  Piven knows all this, wants very much to be that spark, but she knows she can’t provide it without bringing trouble on herself.  “Top Down, Bottom up, Inside Out” is all very well and it’s worked several times, but it requires our cooperation.  Remember that.  The Inside Out part is where we are so fed up with the chaos that we’re begging for “something” to be done.

These poor kids.  This is all they’ve ever known.  They’ve been taught this gibberish all through public school and university.  All they need right now is for someone acting ostensibly on behalf of the teaparty or some such to start cracking heads.  Then they’ll get their days of rage.

Time for Change in which You Can Believe

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…and better grammar.  I can say that I’m college educated, but barely.  I can however recognize that words mean things.  I’ve learned orders of magnitude more about language and writing from reading things outside of academe than inside, yet I can’t claim to be literate in the way that a person considered literate in 1900 would be literate.

The use of the double “is” has become a disease, and has infected all parts of society.  I wonder if the CDC has been looking into it, but then I realize that their job is to get money.  The double “is” has become so common that it now has its own contraction among the smart people– “The thing is’s…that…the sky is blue.”  That’s three applications of “is” when one would have done better, yet we have people with advanced degrees, those with careers in journalism, and holders of public office saying crap like that.  I wonder when journalists and commentators will start typing “is’s”.  I suppose it’ll be a while before Bill Gates puts “is’s” into the word processor spelling dictionaries, and I figure most journalists haven’t figured out how to put it in themselves, so we may overcome this virus without “is’s” becoming “proper English”.  It could just as well be, “The thing is; the sky is blue” but even that is silly.  How about, “The sky is blue”?  It takes less energy, it actually means something, it requires thinking for a millisecond or two before you speak, and I won’t walk away thinking you beneath my 1.5 years of trade school.

Still I see horrible misuse of the language.  We can stop, right here and now, using the term “liberal” to describe an ideology that isn’t.  Really.  It isn’t difficult.  Other people may misuse and torture the language, but you aren’t held to their standards.  I’m a liberal.  I can say it and mean it without permission from those incapable of telling the truth.  Referring to a statist/socialist as “liberal” is to embrace a lie.  We can stop that right now.  These things matter.  You’ll find yourself thinking more clearly, with only a few little adjustments like that.  It is a Change in which You Can Believe.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going home, hopeful that I might have gay intercourse over the dinner table with my family.  I might pick up some faggots along the way though.  See?  Things that were written not long ago (as recent as my grandparents’ time) have had their meanings corroded.  Our Constitution is one of them.

The Mind of the Left

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North Carolina Democrat Governor Beverly Perdue gave us a rare moment of honesty as she called for a suspension of elections in order to Get Things Done.

Hat tip to the guy filling in for Michael Savage today.

This confirms, once again, my definition of “Divisiveness” in the language of the left– “Speaking ill of or disagreeing with socialists or socialism.”  She didn’t use the “D” word, but used “partisan bickering” instead, which is the same thing.  When they win an election, it is the beauty of democracy in action– the will of the people expressing itself in the best of ways.  When they lose, democracy itself is under attack.  Things can’t get done due to political posturing and gridlock, the American People are throwing a temper tantrum, etc., etc.

The assumption is always the same with communists– the stupid little people don’t know what’s good for them.  They don’t appreciate all the great things we smarter and better people could do if only they’d stop asserting their will and submit to ours.  In its naked form, it is a cult of mass destruction.

The mindset is nothing new of course.  What’s unique is the blatant honesty in Governor Perdue’s statement.  It’s very, very rare for a socialist to say something so direct in public in an official capacity  They very much love hiding in complexity and have said exactly so.  This only shows us that they’re beginning to feel comfortable, and that tells us something.  It means things are getting more dangerous, but I suppose that anyone who’s been paying attention already knew that.

We’re now being told it was all a little joke.  Reading the quote I don’t see it as a joke.  I see it as a trial balloon.  Leftists can get away with that.

Where is the Beef?

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It leaves me somewhat dumbfounded in a way, and yet it’s thoroughly normal and predictable.  What leaves me dumbfounded is that fact that it is so normal and predictable.

“Where’s Waldo” was one title that occurred to me, but there is no Waldo.

I have a challenge for you.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find one thing that Rick Perry actually said in this ad;

Just one meaningful statement– one example of what he’s done to further some goal or other in the past, one guiding principle, one thing that would suggest what he actually wants to do as president.  Anything.  I only watched it twice, but I don’t think you can do it.  Right now as far as I can tell, this ad is recycled from an old Obama ad.  As I said in comments over on Uncle’s blog, it was probably produced by the same people, who did Bush’s and Clinton’s ads.

And yet there are people who really love this ad, and that is the rub.  Are we as a society capable of thinking critically anymore, or is it simply over and done for us?

We need to able to watch something like this, looking, probing, asking ourselves; “Where’s the meaning.  Where’s the substance?  What’s actually being said here?  Anything?”  It should be automatic – you’re waiting for something to be said.

Now I don’t want to hear about Perry.  For all I know he’s the greatest defender of liberty the world has ever seen, but if so he would tell us in his very own words.  However, there is nothing here that would tell us one way or the other, and the fact that he can’t actually say something in his own ad already tells me he’s not my man.  Don’t defend him.  If he were the leader we need, he would never allow an ad like this to be produced in his name.  If he comes out tomorrow and tells us it was done against his wishes, and that those responsible for it have been fired, I might change my mind, but not before.  When ads like this one are soundly ridiculed in the public arena, by all sides, that’s when I’ll know we’ve made progress, yet we are nowhere near that now.

He did say that the greatest deeds are reserved for future generations, but like all the other statements, that one has no substance.  No indication of what he thinks is a great deed, but the strangest part about that statement is that it makes no reference to current generations.  What about us?  Why can’t we be doing any of the greatest deeds?  Why are they reserved for someone else, and who is in charge of reserving deeds these days, and why?  Who appointed this new “Deed Tsar”?  See; you can go crazy trying to infer meaning where there is none.

Stumbling Into the Hard Truth

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…and then denying it.  Pete Sessions, NRCC Chairman, sends out regular e-mail alerts.  Every single one of them can be interpreted as “Look at those dirty rotten Democrats!  Give us money!”

Today’s e-mail alert title was “Threatening is Not Governing”.  Even though it’s completely wrong of course, I might be tempted to see that title as a sign of some positive development in Mr. Sessions’ understanding in that it touches upon an important point, but I know him too well.

What he referred to as “threatening” was Obama’s “threat” to “…veto any plan aimed at fixing our budget crisis that does not include his demand for a new $1.5 trillion tax increase.”  That contains so many layers of idiocy that I won’t even get into it.  Forget the president and that it’s fully within his job description to “threaten” to veto anything Congress pukes out.

The point is that any and all governing is threatening.  Every law, rule, ordinance, every tax or restriction, every subsidy– they’re all backed by threats, and all government threats include a group of people with guns who are ready, willing, and I dare say eager to make good on those threats.

I’d say I’m hopeful that even Pete Sessions has stumbled upon an important truth, but he of all people will never admit to understanding it.  Maybe, since he has broached the subject, more of us can expand on it.

Mr. Sessions; I see your accusations in much the same way I’d see a drunk sitting at a bar with a martini in his hands accusing the drunk next to him of being a drunk.  Only worse– the typical drunk probably isn’t going to work every day to find new ways to formulate threats against the whole of The People.

Fundamentally Transform This

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Our second amendment protects a pre-existing, fundamental human right to self determination and self defense, including defense of one’s community and of liberty in general.  The American Founders understood all of this very well, and specifically added that, practically speaking it would deter (“hold in awe” I believe were the exact words) any army that our government could muster for the purpose of tyranny against the general population.

The phrase “…a rifleman behind every blade of grass” is often attributed to Imperial Japanese warning their own against an open attack upon the American mainland.  The story of Sergeant York was widely known at that time too.  Whether it was actually said, the reality was there and no doubt it was, and is, a deterrent.

In my neck of the woods, there may not be one rifleman for every single blade of grass, but school teachers, housewives and mothers, grandmothers, farmers, business owners and professionals in large numbers tend to own and regularly use firearms.  As for the socialists, general leftists and other nitpicking, envious busy-bodies who are incapable of minding their own business, who strive to use the power of government to beat back the American Principles of Liberty and self reliance – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kids;

Photo by Oleg Volk.  I generally don’t believe that saber rattling is good politics, but then I didn’t start it either.  Too many people have fallen for the deep lies that form the rationalizations for Central Planning, and make no mistake about it – Central Planning (or Redistributive Change, or whatever the hell it’s called this week) by government relies purely on threats against peaceable citizens.  This has gone on far too long.

All I want to do is mind my business.  I avoid getting into other people’s faces as long as they stay out of mine.  I’m ready and willing to help out when need arises, and I understand that my own success, such as it is, in addition to setting a good example, increases my ability to help those in need.  But that is my prerogative and mine alone.  That goes for me and several million of my closest friends who favor liberty over tyranny.  So go ahead and march for “One Big Global Union”, screaming for revolution, carrying your picket signs attached to baseball bats.  Go ahead and plan ’till you’re blue in the face, and plan to carry out your threats.  I’ll be sitting here quietly minding my own business and respecting other’s right to do the same, until it comes time to act.  I hope you’re not that stupid, but I know from experience that I can’t count on socialists having a lick of sense, even when it comes to self preservation.  They tend to get themselves in far, far too deep before they even begin to understand the implications.

I’m reminded of a saying from the movie Broken Trail – “There are things that knaw on a man worse than dyin’.”

Living With Sclerosis

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In this case, the sclerosis of the USPS.  My wife thought I’d taken care of it, and I thought she’d taken care of it, so neither of us took care of it and our P.O. box rental lapsed.  “No problem” says the postmaster to my son on Friday, “you can still renew it on-line by the end of day Saturday.”

After much searching I find the PO boxes link in that grey fine print at the bottom of the page.  Then I have to create an account.  Funny – I’ve never run into this hurdle before, “profanity in the password. please choose another password”.  I always figured no one would ever see your password, so why the hissy fit?

After much fussing around, I finally get to enter my particulars.  “Street Address”  That’s an easy one.  It’s been the same for decades.  As far as I know it’s been the same since the house was built, more than 100 years ago.  “Invalid Address.  Please select from the the alternatives below.”  There were none, so I click through and this time it accepts it.  Next is “Post Office Box Number”.  So I enter that along with my zop code.  That box number with that zip code has only existed since that post office was built, sometime in the mid 20th century, so I can understand how they might not have gotten it entered into their database yet.  So it comes up “invalid Post office box”.  I quit.  I did get a nice e-mail notice this morning though, thanking me for setting up an account.  It listed four or five things that were really super great about having an account with them, one of which was “manage or renew a post office box”.  Super.

So I went in to the post office this morning, saying I’d tried the on-line thing and failed, explaining in detail.  “Oh, No!” the flabby man behind the counter says, “you should have entered your PO box number, not your street address…”
“It asked for the street” and I spell it out for him “Ess Tee Awr Eee Eee Tee, Street Address.” He ignores that. “So what can I do”  Now this is the Monday after the Saturday that was our last day to renew.
“I have to change the lock, and you’ll have to pay the fee. How many of the new keys do you want?”
“I’d rather keep the same keys if it’s all the same to you. Charge me the fee and you can avoid the absurdity of changing the lock” Well that put him all in a pother.
“I’ll have to fool the computer….” and he pittered and pattered around the office for a bit, printed something off, cussed, threw it away, printed something off again, I wrote the check, thanked him, and was on my way.

All I could think of after that ordeal was the old saying among business owners everywhere; “If they ran a business like that, they’d be bankrupt.”  Oh wait.

It also reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Vogons, or of Ayn Rand’s description of the Soviet Union as a “morbid absurdity”.

Seldom Do I LOL…

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…even when I’m watching good comedy.  Maybe it comes from growing up in a large family.  If you LOL, shut up already.  I’m trying to listen, and anyway, how can you listen while you’re cackling?  (In a live social situation, at least the deliverer of the comedy usually has the sense to wait for some degree of quiet, so that’s different)  Stuff like that.  But I LOL’d at this, from Tam;

Meanwhile, I’d like to offer my services to moderate the next GOP debate:

“Now, if you will all look down at your podiums, you will notice that you’ve all been provided with a short document. A few of you might even be vaguely familiar with it. If you don’t mind, could you each just look in the part headed ‘Article II’ and point out to me the sentence or phrase that indicates that ‘job creation’ or ‘the economy’ is within the presidential purview?

We’ll start with you, on the end, with the hair. No, not you… the other one on the end, with the hair…”

It’s absurd in its truth.  Funny and sad.

When thinking of the most recent, absurd rationalizations and excuses for government meddling, and the obvious expectation from politicians that we revere them (why is never explained) I find, more and more frequently, the phrase, “None of your filthy, stinking, rotten business, you sniveling, made-up, hairsprayed, lying piece of shit with the painted-on smile” comes to mind, followed by the thought that if you actually told them to mind their own business they wouldn’t understand– they actually believe that your business IS their business.  Tam made it funny is all.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I should clean my guns.