Author Archives: Lyle

‘Fascinating…’

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…said First Officer Spock as he raised one eyebrow.

It may be that some people in the government class are beginning to “get it” but we’ll have to remain vigilant and see. An “emergency bill” in Idaho to nullify federal gun laws has passed without a single “nay” vote. It’s now up to Governor Marshmallow.

“It is the intent of the Legislature in enacting this act to protect Idaho law enforcement officers from being directed, through federal executive orders, agency orders, statutes, laws, rules, or regulations enacted or promulgated on or after the effective date of this act, to violate their oath of office and Idaho citizens’ rights under Section 11, Article I, of the Constitution of the State of Idaho.”

News article here.

The act applies only to future federal encroachments, and so the language, “…protect Idaho law enforcement officers from being directed…to violate their oath of office and Idaho citizens’ rights…” has a grandfather clause in effect. It means, quite literally and specifically, that violating the Oath of Office and citizens’ rights is perfectly OK (and maybe even laudable) so long as said violations have existing laws, etc. as a pretext.

I suppose we can take this as a sign of progress, but we need to be careful and not celebrate too enthusiastically. Happy Days are not here again, innocent people are still in jail, the guilty are still being paid out of our pockets, and the skies above are rather cloudy. I don’t believe that anyone in government “gets it”, so much as they’re merely able to see which way a gale is blowing. Still, there is hope.

Um…

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A man saw our ad in a magazine, got onto our commercial web site, had the wherewithal to find and click on “send us mail” at our web site, and then wrote the following;

“I saw your Ad in a recent issue of Shotgun News Mag. Please…let me know where I can purchase your products.”

Avoiding the urge to launch into scathing, blistering sarcasm requires patience and understanding. I’ve not always been patient or understanding. In fact I’ve actually taken pride in NOT being patient or understanding, if that makes any sense, and have often taken pride in my ability to express sarcasm in the most eloquent, mean ways with maximum insult, puffing myself up at someone else’s expense. The first step is recognizing the urge for what it is, and then realizing that my job is customer service, that I’ve been contacted by a perspective customer, which is the only reason why I am here. I’ve often said that we should be heartened by the fact that we are inspiring people to get onto the internet for their very first time (and yet even in that statement there is a twinge of sarcasm, no?).

Hello. My name is Lyle and I am a sarcasmoholic…

One day at a time.

Butt out?

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Well now this is interesting.

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Wyoming, a deeply pro-gun state, has taken the lead in the case, spurred by Gov. Mead, who called the New Jersey law a threat to citizens’ freedom everywhere.

“This decision out of New Jersey impacts the right to keep and bear arms outside the home,” Mead said. “So I felt it was necessary to have the [state] attorney general support a petition to the Supreme Court to hear this case.”

Some in New Jersey are pushing back on the intervention from outsiders. A Feb. 18 editorial published by the website NJ.com called on them to “butt out.”
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“Butt out.” The Southern states said very much the same thing back in the middle 1800s, claiming the right to enslave other people and the right to be “free” from outside meddling in that endeavor. There is of course no such right, as there is no “right” to violate any right. That simple and obvious concept is what brought us Incorporation Doctrine.

I don’t like that term “deeply pro-gun”. It’s not quite as bad as “severely conservative” but it is barking up the same tree. How about simply “pro-human rights” as in, “Wyoming, a more pro-human rights state”…? Better yet, “less intrusive upon human rights” or “a less coercive state” would provide a more realistic perspective. That is if we care about perspective with regard to basic principles.

Daylight savings

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Our culture (root word being “cult”) is insane. Our government types apparently believe it is in their power to re-order the very rising and setting of the sun. They’re gods, and we’re insane enough to go along with it.

My brother sent me a text from Kalifornia on Sunday, asking me if I was saving any daylight at that very moment. I told him that it was beyond my power to do so, that I had called the bank asking to open a daylight savings account and they just laughed at me. That sparked quite the conversation.

I eventually told him that I could in fact save daylight using PV panels and storage batteries. He then told me that that wouldn’t do, because using stored electricity to make artificial light wasn’t saving “actual daylight”. I then said that we could, in theory, with the right technology, reproduce the same spectral content of the sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface, that energy, like currency, is fungible, that conversion to stored energy in batteries and subsequent re-conversion to artificial sunlight is in fact “saving daylight”, and that since this is daylight savings time, this then is officially the time to be working on such technology.

Regardless; if you want to get up and go to work or school at a particular time, that’s entirely between you and your associates. Government certainly has no business getting involved.

As it is, when a business says its hours are such and such, you don’t know what that means until you have their address, get out your time zone map, and then call the governor’s office in their state to see of they participate in “daylight savings time”.

We’d all be better off it it was the same “time” everywhere. You already know when the sun rises and sets during certain times of the year where you live, and that isn’t going to change significantly in your lifetime. If you’re unsure, look out of a freaking window.

Maybe I should start posting my business hours in UTC and leave it at that, but how many people even know what that means? As often as not, when I tell someone during a phone conversation that we’re on Pacific Time, their reaction is one of incredulity; “Oh…Really?!” (surely I must be mistaken). I’ve only lived here my whole life, but then the particular time zone I’m in is purely a matter of legislation and as I said; we’re all batshit insane, so my time zone status could have been changed without my noticing.

“Gun control” in a nutshell

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This in response to Uncle‘s post about NJ banning tube-fed 22s;

Well sure. If criminals already enjoy a government-enforced monopoly on more powerful guns, why not grant them a government-enforced monopoly on some of the most popular rimfire 22s as well?

It makes perfect sense to me– A corrupt government has more to fear from honest citizens than from other corrupt individuals, and so they’ll invariably attack, impugn and attempt to weaken honest citizens in every way imaginable. It comes from a simple and obvious (and entirely correct) threat assessment.

“We struggle not with flesh and blood, but with Principalities, and corruption in high places.”

That’s the long and short of it. It’s all you need to understand about weapon restriction (and politics in general). To put it even more simply; To consolidate power you must weaken the individual.

If there is a Prince of Darkness, this is his motto. So what then is the antidote? Strengthen the individual of course, and it starts with you.

More on single action v double action

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This is in response to Uncle‘s response to this article.

First, we don’t need the new term “TDA” (Traditional Double Action). That’s the same as DA, which we’ve been using for a long time, as opposed to DAO. So we now have DA, DAO, and TDA. See the problem– So what does DA mean anymore? Do we now have to go back and revise all the old texts, adding the “T” in front of “DA”?

Anyway; I’ve never really understood the debate. If you have a DA and want to operate it as a SA, to avoid the “transition” then nothing is stopping you. Load it, put it on safe, and holster it cocked and locked, or ease the hammer down and then cock it before you shoot, just like your trusty, rusty old 1911. You need never encounter a DA pull unless you want to.

And for some reason this subject only comes up in a discussion of auto pistols. With revolvers, I don’t hear anyone complaining about all the double actions out there (and they’re always carried hammer down and have no safety switch). Does the “transition” no longer matter after you’ve thumbed the hammer back as opposed to having it cocked automatically? And you want to talk about light trigger pulls– you won’t find a lighter SA trigger than the one on a good factory-stock DA revolver.

I’ve never understood why SA v DA is this huge f’ng issue when we’re talking pistols, but it never comes up with regard to long guns. The most popular sporting and defense rifle in America is SA, with no de-cock, and no one blinks or ever thinks to consider thinking about it. Same with the Mini-14, 30 Carbine, M-14, M1 Garand, AK, et al, ad infinitum– The hammer’s out of sight, so it’s out of mind, just like the Ruger Mark II/III which we also never discuss as being a SA with no de-cock.

So REALLY this is more of a public perception issue than anything else— If you can SEE the hammer AND it’s on an auto, we’ll argue about it, but if not, “derp”. I guess that’s why Daewoo came up with their goofy action such as on the DP51– It’s cocked and locked, just like your AR-15, but it LOOKS like the hammer’s down. The old Lever action rifles are of course single action, with no de-cock and no safety per se. It’s also a training issue, so make sure you practice with what you have.

One of the coolest designs I’ve owned was the Beretta TomCat. It’s DA and has a de-cocker, but with its tip-up barrel you can load or unload it without cocking the hammer, so I always carried it like a revolver (hammer down, off safe) and to un-load it you just tip the barrel up and drop the cartridge out. The little 32 ACP scared me though, so I traded it away.

At one time I thought it would be cool to have a DA AK or AR. You wouldn’t operate it or carry it any different from the SA versions, but the only difference would be that it would give you a second strike capability. Then I realized that cartridges that actually do fire on a second strike are a sub set of those that fail to fire on the first, and so in many cases you’d be wasting time on the second, or third, or fourth strike compared to chambering a fresh round. On several occasions I’ve hit primers so many times that they were mashed WAY into the primer pocket, or rotated rimfire rounds to hit another part of the rim, and they never did fire.

Coyote attack

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Going down the youtube rabbit hole I came across this. It was in Northern BC, where it’s far, far less populated than around here. Here the coyotes tend to keep their distance, or they generally get shot. Or they get shot from long distance. The closest I’ve ever got to one, that I knew about, was around 30 yards– Three different occasions in winter while I was out hunting. Their heavy winter coats are quite spectacular, and I’ve yet to have the heart to kill one. Beautiful or not though, if a ‘yote were putting its teeth on me, even my boot, it’d be dead right quick I think. If the bugger is that bold, I may respect it in a way, but it’s going to be causing serious trouble for someone if it isn’t stopped. Kind of like Progressives– They’ll push things until someone gets hurt.

Well there’s your problem right there

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As a constituent I get regular e-mails from WA State Rep. Joe Schmick (legislative district 9 – the Far East Hinterlands of the state [FEH]). Here’s a sample from today;

”We are now two-thirds of the way through the 2014 legislative session. We spent much of the past two weeks on the House floor debating and voting on House bills. The floor cutoff was this week, meaning any House bill that hasn’t passed the House by now is considered dead (unless it is “necessary to implement the budget” – NTIB). The same goes for Senate bills in the Senate. As of today, the House has passed 333 House bills and the Senate has passed 189 Senate bills. Monday was a very long day that actually stretched into the wee hours of Tuesday as the House passed 100 bills and the Senate passed 21.”

333 bills passed in one session, in one state, announced with no sense of irony– just letting us know that they’re working hard and being “productive” I suppose. Care to guess whether any of those new bills were repeals of previous ones?

With the proliferation of the word “sustainable” in politics, no one has yet considered a sustainability study when it comes to passing so many laws each year for hundreds of years. If this was an average legislative year, and counting from Washington statehood in 1889, that comes to 41,625 bills, not counting local statutes, ordinances, rulings and other bureaucratic restrictions and requirements, nor any jurisprudence concerning any of the same, or anything whatsoever on the federal level, or laws from other states that one might should know about if one were traveling or doing interstate commerce. Washington is one of the youngest states, so others back east have had a lot more time to create more gunk to complicate, distract, hinder and waste people’s lives.

The rest of his letter is inside baseball stuff, shout-outs, name-dropping, awards announcements and the like. I can’t read that stuff without getting a serious case of cotton-mouth and then kicking myself for having wasted so much of my time. It’s like staring at that debilitating, mesmerizing, sickening light you weren’t suppose to look into in that movie “Cowboys and Aliens”.

Zombies. You can’t be around them for long without being infected yourself.

Gun Poetry

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With a tug on the PUG, the slug dug snug in the smug thug

Say that ten times as fast as you can, or add to it if you like.

That’s all I have. Whadaya want for nothin’ on a Friday night?

The PUG is one of NAA’s mini revolvers.

Joe has no category for “poetry”, which is probably a good thing, so I put it under “home life”.

Extermination Order in Missouri

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There was an extermination order against the Mormons in Missouri. It was an executive order by Governor Lilburn Boggs in 1838 and it was technically in effect until 1976.

More on all that here. Something leads me to believe that the story of the Mormon War is relevant to today. Anyway, you might want to read up when you have some time.

Maybe you all knew about it, but I was unaware of that executive order until recent months. Hat tip; Glenn Beck

The Dump

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When we were kids, one of the many interesting places we’d go to play, in addition to the abandoned Brick Yard, the Old School Building, the Big Pond, the Little Pond, the Clay Pitts, Billy Beeton’s, the Haunted Woods and Big Daddy Mountain, was The Dump.
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Pride

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Since making this post I’ve been seeing references to pride everywhere. Parents attempt to instill in their kids “a sense of pride”, schools promote school pride, manufacturers advertise their products as being “proudly made in the U.S.A.”, the U.S. Marines are “The Few, The Proud…”, American Indian tribes are said to be “a Proud People” and so on and on as though it were a good thing. Even otherwise pretty good Christians speak of their pride as though it were a virtue, and yet pride is right there among the seven deadly sins.

We may as well be bragging about our lust, our greed, our gluttony, wrath and so on, and promoting those things to our kids.
“That’s a good company– they’re gluttonous Americans.”
“Bob here is a good guy– he’s a slothful member of our team.”
“I like Jane– she’s a wrathful, envious person.”
“The few, The Greedy, The Marines.”

It strikes as funny is all, but maybe I’m missing something. None of those would be taken as compliments. Is there another definition of pride that makes it a good thing?

Massive non-compliance?

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It seems so. I just wonder why anyone assumed it would be any different– They’re either liars or they’re as ignorant as a rock, or both. I suppose they never bothered to look at Canada’s idiotic long gun registry. They certainly never looked at our constitution, or don’t give a flying crap about it.

In fact, this is an example of the willful creation of new “criminals” so they can have some form of legal justification to harass innocent people, and nothing else. It’s a class D “felony”, they claim (oooh! scary!) if you don’t roll over and act like a Soviet citizen/sheep, standing in line to have your name put on a list.

What kind of felony is it when you willfully and wantonly violate your Oath of Office, acting in flagrant opposition to the United States constitution and to the basic human rights of American citizens?

I’m in favor of giving the politicians a fair trial, and then taking away their pensions and sending them all to prison, and banning them from any public position for life. That would be kind. We can make plenty of room in the prisons by pardoning all non-violent drug “offenders” and gun law paperwork “violators”.

Something to ponder while we’re working on “shall issue”

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I pointed out some years ago that the left, even the most radical, fringe, America-hating communist revolutionary leftist (like some of those in the Whitehouse) understands exactly how a right is supposed to work. We know they fully, completely and thoroughly understand because they’ve spent decades strenuously SHOWING US that they fully understand how a right works, that it means HANDS OFF, NO MATTER WHAT, END OF DISCUSSION, PERIOD!

They therefore can never, ever claim that they just didn’t get it, or hadn’t though enough about it, or didn’t have it presented to them in quite the right ways, or they were too busy, etc.

They’ve even taken their definition of a right beyond mere, total and absolute non-interference no matter what, ever, don’t even THINK about it, and into encouragement and even subsidy of the exercise of a right.

Keep all that in mind during their trials.

If bearing arms is a right, and of course it is, then any permit requirement or any special tax, or any special paperwork, licenses, lists or permission requirement of any kind, ever, is a violation.

To hell with permit reciprocity. The second amendment and incorporation is your legal, reciprocal carry permit, and if ANYONE attempts to hinder or discourage you in that right in any way whatsoever (infringe) they are a scum-sucking criminal, a threat and an enemy, and should be in jail, right now.

This is the Progressive/leftist’s own definition of a right, and I agree with them.

Sure; you can get your permit (I have one) but to fight for the “right” to pay the government for a “permit” to exercise your guaranteed rights is a bit like Jews fighting for the “right” to wear yellow arm bands in 1930s Germany. So I’m a German Jew, proudly wearing my yellow arm band and dutifully showing it any officer of the law who asks, “papers please” and if I don’t happen to have it on me because I forgot or lost my wallet somehow, I get a “beating” for it.

And for THIS sack-of-shit situation we celebrate! Imagine homosexuals celebrating that they can now walk around in MOST public places (but only in their home state and maybe a few others) ONLY SO LONG AS they’re registered with the government as homosexuals and have their homo-card on hand to show police at any moment’s notice for any reason. And as gun owners we celebrate exactly that situation for ourselves.

We’re all damned.

I want to stop arguing over this crap and JUST GET ALONG WITH MY LIFE, UNMOLESTED, but I know that will not happen. You stupid criminal motherfuckers doing the dirty deeds had best be begging for forgiveness from God, because I know it’s not within my power to give it to you and I won’t even try.

The news is what isn’t news

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How often do we hear news reports of cold weather or a snowstorm in Canada or Alaska, or the Rocky Mountain States, and how it’s disrupting everyone’s regular lives there and…Oh the horror!? I can’t remember for sure whether I’ve ever heard or seen even one such report in my 55 years.

Yet if we HAD been hearing of these regular winter events which are not at all unique and therefore never considered “news”, AND had reports on how the people there were COPING WITH IT JUST FINE, maybe more people in Georgia and Tennessee would understand how to cope with such things themselves. Hmm?

So I think we can define news, not as something merely unusual, but something unusual and gloomy, or unusual and horrible– something that shows helpless people succumbing to their weaknesses.

To me, “News” would give you helpful, actionable information, such as how the Alaskans deal with 40 or more below zero temps for weeks on end, how those in Truckee, California deal with ten feet of snow falling within a week or two and go on about their daily lives, or how the poor can become successful and go on to help others. THAT would make interesting investigative reports AND it might help a few million of the clueless and helpless become a little bit less helpless and clueless. The closest we get to helpfullness in the news is when they’re being condescending, “teaching” us how to eat, how not to fall off a ladder, how to find government services and so on.

Only white men get asked…

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…this sort of question.

Ergo it is a disingenuous question, and/or the person asking it is a blithering fool. QED.

Bill Cosby, for example, never gets asked why white people are under-represented in his show, nor should he ever be asked. What a stupid question.

BTW; I had watched Cosby’s shows (including live action – the cartoon came later) on TV since I was a little kid, and I never knew he was black until I heard someone say so. It surprised me, in a way. That happened when I was entering adulthood, so my “ignorance” lasted through quite a few years of watching him. He never made an issue out of it, so I never noticed. The Cosby Kids cartoon showed kids just like us and our friends, doing crazy stuff just like we did. Same with Sanford and Son for the most part. They were a fairly typical father and son, much like the first-generation European immigrants and their kids that I grew up with in my home town.

Now you get crap if you don’t tow someone else’s agenda line or something. So ignore the crap and mind your business– It’s not that difficult, as Seinfeld points out..

Hydraulic ram pump

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A friend tried to describe it to me a year or so back, but his description didn’t make sense to me. When I saw the “hydraulic ram pump” for sale in the Lehman’s catalog it got my attention.

I’d call it a “reverberatory ram pump” but regardless; it is fascinating. You can google it yourself, or look it up on youtube. In short; it uses a larger flow volume by setting up a resonance to create pressure spikes that lift a smaller flow volume– No power input required beyond that of the kinetic & potential energy in flowing/falling water.

The design and construction is so simple that it could have been done in ancient Roman times. Though I have yet to look up its history, I’m guessing it’s development is much more recent than that.

There are other ways to skin that particular cat depending on the circumstances, but this one wins in the cool factor. What I also find interesting is the small scale on which some of these run. One of them on youtube shows a system running on little more than a trickle.

Cold Call

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It happens over and over, and over again. Note to sales people in all fields; you might want to learn at least something about a business, or at least take a cursory glance at their web site before you call them and offer your services.

Today I got a call from a company that makes enhanced web site features for the visually impaired. I asked him if he (who offers web services) looked at our web site, “…because I don’t think you have.”
He says “Well, that’s something we would do…”

We sell gun stuff.

I’ve gotten several calls from advertisers asking for our address (?) asking what kind of business we’re in (?) what kind of corporation we are, etc., all of which is public information and most of which is blatantly and repeatedly displayed on our web site. I get several calls a month from various “yellow pages” companies (people still use those?) asking what business we’re in.

Sorry, but if you’re that unobservant I don’t want to do business with you even if you’re offering something I might want. It’s an extremely simple and highly relevant filter. Same goes when someone wants my vote or other political support. It usually only takes a few seconds to know who’s done their homework and who is just playing a game they don’t really understand.

Then there was the guy who called me last week, openly and for no practical reason telling me he was willfully breaking the gun laws in California and wanted my participation in the form of selling him stuff to help him break the law. When I explained it to him in just that way, and said I’m not doing business with him for that reason, and apologized to him saying none of this made any sense, I understand, and it makes neighbor suspicious of neighbor but unfortunately there it is, he asked me what I was talking about. “I’m not going to argue about it. Bye” and that was that.

I may really like your spirit, but… geeze.

Making the enemy’s argument

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Now I feel dirty. Last week I was playing devil’s advocate with Joe, making the left’s arguments the best I could, seeing what he’d come up with in response. I think it’s important to have the ability to argue the points of the other side at least as well as those True Believers (useful idiots) that the power brokers rely on to maintain the rank and file. It is my thesis that once you can do a good job making the left’s case, you’ll have a better understanding of the fundamental differences in world views, and can then focus on those differences and bring them to light efficiently.

I wrote this last week, but hesitated to post it. Well here it is anyway;

Joe; Secondary or even tertiary point: Everyone can express an opinion. But until you express it in numbers which actually represent
the benefits and costs you haven’t proved anything beyond that you can string words together and form sentences.

Me; You want to limit the manner in which I may speak. People are not numbers, nor are they statistics. The starving people of the
world, the hopeless and the desperate, do not need statistics to know that they are hungry, and neither numbers nor your fake intellectual arguments for “freedom” will feed them.

Joe; Primary point: Government is force. At the most basic level it is the power to kill people that oppose it. Who granted and where
and when did government get this power to compel the whole of society to work for the “common good” instead of protecting the individual ability to make their own decisions and chart their own course in life?

Me; Yes; government is force, and you are as willing as anyone else to see that force used, so long as it is used to further your
ideals at the expense of other’s ideals.

Who granted, and where did you get the power to decide that people should NOT work for the common good, that they should instead be concerned only with themselves at the expense of everyone else, at the expense of the entire planet, and at the expense of everyone in the future? You are ignoring the grave and destructive consequences of that which you advocate.

Joe; It is immoral to force another to do their bidding for the good of another when their previous actions harmed no one. Your
“greater good” argument is nothing but a weak justification for slavery by another name. Advocates of such a society deserve all the scorn, revulsion, ostracizing, and political as well as physical resistance due any other slaver.

Me: You free-marketers use some form of this argument frequently, but is a false and blatantly hypocritical argument. First; who gave you and your cronies the exclusive power to define for everyone else what is and is not “moral”? It seems you are manipulating that definition to suit your own selfishness and convenience. You often use your “morality” as a weapon against people you wish to suppress, causing them harm.

You are perfectly willing to use force to protect your property and your comfortable way of life, even to the point of owning guns yourself and training to kill people, and yet you complain when government uses force, in a democratic republic which you claim to advocate and which is merely doing the will of the People? Could there BE a higher, more virulent form of hypocrisy? No, Sir; don’t tell me you’re against using force while you simultaneously brag about walking around with a loaded gun. “Disgraceful” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

An don’t speak to me about capitalism having “harmed no one”. The “free market system” (a disgusting term) of greed and opulence for the few is in fact, to put it in your own words, “forcing some to do the bidding of others” as people trapped in poverty are forced to work as wage-slaves for the people with the money and property. Further, when a more powerful corporation puts a smaller one out of business (because they never understand when enough is enough and they always want more more more) they have harmed that smaller business and everyone who depended on it for their sustenance. They’ve been put out onto the streets, and you claim “no harm”? The extent of your denial is fascinating, and very telling. Explain that to the family that’s in bankruptcy court because the parents lost their jobs due to “free market competition” from a Big Box store chain. Capitalism is constantly harming other people, and in many, many ways, and yet you blindly hold it up and cling to it as though it were the greatest thing ever.

Yet I can forgive you– You’ve been conditioned all your life to believe this gunk, and it’s extremely difficult to overcome one’s life-long programming without some kind of shock to initiate the process of waking up from one’s materialist fever. Well I have news for you. I’ll have the courage to say it if no one else will; you had better start waking up because your time is running out– You represent the past whereas We the Citizens of the World represent the future.
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I think that pretty well represents the mind of the useful idiot. I could go on and on of course, and adding more layers of complexity, more erroneous assertions and accusations, and appeals to envy, anger, victim mentality and other emotion is all part of the game, but that’s a good sample. Those at the top of the political power food chain benefit greatly from this kind of thinking and its proliferation, but they don’t believe any of it for a second. It’s a tool. A big part of the game lies in putting the freedom advocate off his game with endless accusations and insults, never allowing any issue to come to resolution. The crazier the assertions, sometimes, the better– Whatever it takes to hijack someone’s emotions thus throwing them off balance, while taking advantage of any self doubt or insecurity, with the oft used grand finale of putting the capitalist into a pathetic minority, opposed to a glorious and energetic majority. It works extremely well on young people of course, and so they have been a perennial target. We usually fall for it too. Republicans (the ones who may not actually be Progressives) fall for it practically 100% of the time.

Where we often fail is in forgetting that the ideal of freedom appeals to people’s strengths and potential, whereas the leftist tactics appeal to our weaknesses, our emotions of envy, insecurity, fear, anger and so on.

Therefore it’s an entirely different argument with an entirely different set of appeals, with virtually no overlap. What works for the Dark Side cannot, will not, work for human freedom.

Another quote of the day – Thomas Jefferson

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“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’, because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

“No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” [Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, 1816]

There have been volumes written about it, but that’s all that needs to said on the subject of liberty. Truth requires few words.

I’ve heard all of the “Yeah but…” arguments, so don’t bother. Those all come from people who see themselves as would-be social engineers (obstructionists).