When Jon Richelieu-Booth boarded a plane home to England after a Florida vacation, he had no reason to believe a simple photo — a harmless picture of himself shooting a legally rented shotgun at a gun range — would soon turn his life upside down.
…
The message is always the same: give up a little freedom now…we promise it’s for your own good. Richelieu-Booth’s arrest shows exactly where that road leads.
The truth is simple: freedom dies gradually… until it dies suddenly. That’s why the fight for the Second Amendment isn’t just about guns. It’s about the entire structure of American liberty. It’s about ensuring that no government — federal, state, local, or foreign — can do to an American what British authorities did to that IT consultant.
Our rights are exceptional. They are fragile. And they survive only when the people refuse to surrender them.
If we want our children and grandchildren to inherit a free nation — a nation where a photo of a gun is just a photo — then we must fight harder than ever to protect the liberties that make America the last stronghold of individual freedom. Because what happened in England must never become normal here.
But let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you – and why?
Our country has prospered by providing individuals with the opportunity to get ahead and to enjoy the fruits of their success. Consequently, we have out-performed and out-grown every developed country on earth.
We must not allow today’s socialist fever to wreck the American dream.
How much knowledge there is in a given society, and how it is distributed, depends crucially on how knowledge is conceived and defined. When a social justice advocate like Professor John Rawls of Harvard referred to how ‘society’ should ‘arrange’ certain outcomes, he was clearly referring to collective decisions of a kind that government makes, using knowledge available to surrogate decision-makers, more so than the kind of knowledge known and used by individuals in the population at large, when making their own decisions about their own lives. As an old saying expressed it: ‘A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him.’
Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, expressed the same sentiment spending probably an entire chapter on it. He described it as an information problem. People close to the problem are in the best position to solve the problem. Free markets and free minds outperform highly regulated markets and constrained minds.
The correctness of this should be obvious to almost everyone. The implications are broad and damning against central planners and big government in general.
The proverb “A fool may put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him” (or close variants) is a traditional Dutch proverb, first recorded in the 16th–17th century.
The earliest known printed source is in the 1621 edition of Carolus Tuinman’s “De oorsprong en uitlegging van dagelyks gebruikte spreekwoorden” (later editions more famous), but the saying already appears earlier in Dutch and Low German proverb collections.
The closest early attestation is in Jan Gruter’s “Florilegium ethicopoliticum” (1610–1612) and other 17th-century Dutch sources, where it is presented as an already established saying:
Original Dutch form (c. 1620s–1630s): “Een dwaas kan zijn jas beter aantrekken dan een wijs man hem die aantrekken kan.”
A very similar version also appears in German collections around the same time (e.g., Lehmann’s 1639 florilegium).
So, there is no single named individual who is the “first” to say it. It is an anonymous folk proverb that crystallized in the Netherlands/low German-speaking areas in the late 1500s or early 1600s, with the earliest surviving written records appearing around 1610–1630.
No evidence attributes it to any famous writer or philosopher before it appears in these printed proverb collections. Variants later spread into English in the 18th–19th centuries (sometimes misattributed to figures like Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain, but those attributions are false).
Copilot is adamant that Grok is wrong:
That claim is false. Let me break it down carefully:
Carolus Tuinman: Tuinman was a Dutch scholar who indeed published De oorsprong en uitlegging van dagelyks gebruikte spreekwoorden (The Origin and Explanation of Daily Used Proverbs), but not in 1621. His works appeared in the early 18th century (1710s–1720s). So the date 1621 is anachronistic.
Jan Gruter’s Florilegium ethicopoliticum: Gruter (1560–1627) did publish collections of sayings and moral excerpts in the early 17th century, but no attestation of the “coat” proverb exists in his florilegium. Searches of digitized editions show many proverbial contrasts of fools and wise men, but not this wording.
German collections (Lehmann 1639): Lehmann’s Florilegium politicum (1639) is a real work, but again, the coat proverb does not appear in it. German proverb collections of the 17th century contain many fool/wise man contrasts, but not this specific imagery.
It’s baffling that Americans are falling for such a dangerous ideology. But they are.
A recent poll of likely voters from The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports showed that 51% of young Americans, ages 18-39, would like to see a democratic socialist in the White House.
Mamdani and Wilson have put a shiny bow on their socialist ideas, and voters bought it.
Perhaps she is unaware of the state of government schools. How else could she be baffled?
Everyone with half a functioning brain knows what comes next. Hence, I do not believe the “beware” warning is needed for the Second Amendment people. This is more appropriately a warning to the socialists.
You can vote your country into socialism. You have to shoot your way out.
In his role as Deputy Director, we have worked closely with Robert Cekada to ensure law-abiding gun owners have a seat at the table in shaping policy.
If confirmed, he would be the first ever truly pro-Second Amendment nominee to head the agency. By nominating an ATF Director who understands our community and respects our constitutional rights, President Trump and his administration are further underscoring their commitment to standing up for the Second Amendment and gun owners. We urge the Senate to confirm him without delay.
Unless they can privatize the ATF and make it into a chain of convivence stores, I can’t consider anyone nominated to head the ATF to be “truly pro-Second Amendment.”
Whoever (the “elite”, a super AI, The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, etc.) has or acquires the power to pull the plug is likely to at some point in time come to the conclusion most other people are “just parasites”. From there the obvious conclusion is that the world would be a better place without “those people.”
I am listening to a fascination book, On Tyranny (Expanded Audio Edition): Updated with Twenty New Lessons from Russia’s War on Ukraine by Timothy Snyder*. Snyder is a historian and makes the claim there is a frequent crossroads in the late history of an empire. This is my paraphrasing so I may misrepresent him some… The controlling elites get tired of giving so much to the far reaches of the empire and decide it is time to collect on their investment. At about the same time the far reaches of the empire get tired of the controlling elites taking all their resources and decide it is time to get something in return. For some reason the resulting resolution does not go well. I could see Universal Basic Income arriving at a similar crossroads and those involved do not see the humor in the situation as much as I do.
Prepare appropriately.
* You may wish to skip the book part where he makes his case as to why President Trump is a tyrant, and get to the history of Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Vikings, and Russia where the good stuff is.
My message is, I can see in my mind’s eye those rows and rows of white stones and all the hundreds of my friends who gave their lives, for what? The country of today?
“No, I’m sorry, but the sacrifice wasn’t worth the result of what it is now.
…
What we fought for was our freedom, but now it’s a darn sight worse than when I fought for it.
He is talking about the U.K. I cannot help but conclude this means people must be thinking their government of today is tyrannical. With the surveillance society, restrictions on free speech, firearms ownership, and even knife ownership I can see how a strong case can be made for that.
Burning your own fuel in your own house is about far more than the “aesthetic of it”, no matter how hard the papers try to tag it with that superficial label. A wood burner offers energy independence, and for that reason, like everything else that offers any kind of independence, they are considered a threat.
The existence of anyone or anything outside of the system, even in token or vestigial ways, threatens the idea that the system is even necessary. Therefore they must be attacked.
It’s an autoimmune response, a reflex; they can’t help it.
They need to know everything you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and why.
And, more importantly, they need you to be OK with that, to welcome it, even thank them for it.
They need you to know that is the safe; the normal; the only way the world works.
So, expect this messaging to continue until the ban is in place, or licenses are required, or they manage to wire a smart meter to a wood axe.
While the article is referring to potential U.K. regulations it would only take an administration change in D.C, for the U.K. craziness to be imported with similar motivation.
She uses an interesting collection of labels. I’m not sure they are all compatible. Pure communism not tolerant of religion. But then, coherence is not a defining characteristic of any of them.
My expectation is that within a few years New York City will be a shining bad example for the rest of the world to see. It is also my expectation that most people will look at the mess without seeing the root cause.
There is virtually nothing I can do about the problem, so I’ll get back to work on preparing my underground bunker in Idaho.
It is amazing to me how reframing things makes such a huge difference in not just the point of view, but in the conclusions about reality. Here is one such example (via Sarah A. Hoyt):
I spent nearly four decades in a relationship with a woman who had problems with depression. When she got depressed any evidence of her/our situation would be rationalized into justification for the hopelessness of things.
For example, if we were tight on money because of an unexpected car repair or some such thing my pointing out that we both had steady jobs and would be back to normal in a month or two. But she could not see “the light at the end of the tunnel.” It was a catastrophe. If a depressive episode occurred when things were going well, she had rationalizations to justify her depression “This is just temporary. It will get worse tomorrow.” “It is all downhill from here. This is the best it will ever be.”
This affected even the most ordinary of things in her daily life. And the really sad part was the self-fulfilling prophecy of it. This literally happened more times than I could count… She would be driving down a street free of traffic with a green light ahead. She would start slowing down as she approached the light. She did this because she was afraid the light would turn red, and she would have to stop. Of course, this increased the chances the light would turn red, and her concern would be justified.
I could see the future as awesome with a “clear road ahead”. She could only see the bridge ahead being taken out by a meteor.
Or another reframing, after your wife has just had sex with another man:
With most men, assuming the wife didn’t get killed, it would mean a divorce. Yet, another set of men think this is awesome and something to be enjoyed. How can these two framings be compatible with the same data? Yet, they are. These are alternate, very real, realities.
From the engineering world one of my favorites is to tell people to solve tough problems by looking for a different point of view. Imagine never having seen a wheel before and viewing a heavily loaded cart from a distance moving straight away from you pulled by a single horse. How can that be? That just can’t work! But if you look at the cart from a 90 degree again to its direction of motion it is incredibly simple.
Politics are filled with examples. One of my favorite examples is destroying the “right” versus “left” view of politics. People tend to believe that if you are opposed to a few of the left-wing policies that you must be in favor of all of the right-wing polices. In essence, many people will shout, “There are only two choices!”
<heavy sigh>
No. There are many ways to view the political world. A simplistic way of understanding my view political ideal is, “Free markets, free minds.” With this point of view, you see people on both the right and left as incoherent and something to be opposed. Both “wings” want some things controlled by the government and other things free from government interference. They just want government oppression for different things.
And on a whimsical note, there are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
If you look for these alternate framings/realities, you will soon see them everywhere. And in doing so, just as with the wheel example, you will find better solutions to problems of all types. Psychology, sex, engineering, politics, almost anything can be seen from different viewpoints. And finding better solutions to problems in all domains makes the world a better place.
When the political left claims their opponents are Nazis fascists there is more than a little projection.
Right-wing and left-wing labels do not matter. What matters is, do the policies violate individual rights? If so, then those policies should be opposed.
Whether the gods are spiritual, tyrants, or political beliefs it probably always has been a crime in one form or another. And as demonstrated last week, it carries a death penalty in certain social circles.
People do not like having their most cherished beliefs challenged. Especially when the challenger is correct.
got a call from a criminal defendant I believe is innocent. Before calling me, he voluntarily participated in a police interrogation for several hours. He believed that “I have nothing to hide” and that he could explain to the police why they had the wrong guy.
Defense attorneys might call this naïve, but look at the responses to Fleishman’s OP. Even high-IQ people really believe this is how law enforcement works.
Here’s the problem. When you agree to a police interrogation, you and the police are playing two different games.
As the suspect, you believe you are playing a multiplayer, collaborative game.
But the police aren’t even playing a multiplayer game. They’re playing a one-player game, like Tetris.
As the suspect, you’re not a player in the game. You’re more like the game environment, producing falling blocks for the player—the police.
The police play this game by collecting your statements like blocks and fitting them into a picture that incriminates you. When enough blocks have fit together, the police have won the game and refer the case to a prosecutor.
You believe that, once you convince the police that you are innocent, you will all win. But that’s not a real outcome of the game. “Evidence that I am innocent” is not even a game element. From the cops’ perspective, if they fail to assemble the blocks into an incriminating picture, they have lost the game.
Suspects who think “I have nothing to hide” are always surprised when the interrogation lasts several hours. “I’ve already explained everything – why am I still here?” they think.
That’s because the longer the game goes on, the more falling blocks the police have to assemble their case. It’s in their interests to keep the game going long past what your game required.
All suspects eventually sense this on some gut level and become frustrated. You think: “Wait a minute, – all of their questions are subtly premised on my guilt! But I can prove to them that I’m not guilty. I need to appeal to them to really hear me out.”
I.e., “Let’s start over with a different game where we can all work together.”
But even as you’re trying to change the game, you are speaking and therefore generating more blocks.
Here’s the only solution. The moment you have any reason to believe you’re a suspect, exit the game. Politely ask if you are free to leave. If they say “no,” calmly tell them “I invoke my right to remain silent and my right to counsel.”
If you’re in custody when you say this, the cops will actually physically stand up and leave the room as if you’ve just uttered a magic incantation.
I have never heard it explained like this before. This is awesome!
I have had similar thoughts, but I had no idea how to explain it so well. And my thoughts were more based on the assumption that the police were outright evil. It goes like this…
Every bit of information I give the police could be used to construct evidence and motivations that is consistent with my alibi and innocent reasons for my actions such that my alibi and reasons are neutralized.
Exercise your Fifth Amendment rights. Do not talk to the police if you might be a suspect in a crime.
The Trump administration has bent rules and pushed interpretations in new directions. But after digging into the source evidence, I haven’t seen anything that qualifies as “tyranny.” That said, people shouldn’t ignore the political shifts or assume everything is perfectly fine.
Government should never be trusted. Always be on guard and prepared to respond appropriately.
Today is a great day for freedom and the American people. The dismissal of this appeal should be the final nail in the coffin of this unconstitutional Biden ATF assault on gun owners. As we explained in the case filings, braced pistols are not ‘short-barreled rifles.’ But either way, they are unquestionably arms protected under the Second Amendment. We are thrilled to have secured this important win for liberty and excited to take on even more unconstitutional laws so you can exercise your rights when, where, and how you choose.
It is not huge, but it is another brick in the wall. Each time a case is concluded our team learns a little more. The arguments are tuned to match the precedents of the previous wins. The reluctant judges are herded into corners by the previous decisions on less important cases. They have fewer and fewer options to rule in favor of the dark side. We are winning but it is still a long hard grind to something approximating a total victory.
Name three things that the government does cheaper and better than private individuals and organizations. It would be no trick at all to name dozens of things that the government does worse and at higher costs.
I’m certain this is not literally true. But I don’t think is entirely wrong either.
We were headed down that path, but we have reversed course to a certain extent. It will be interesting to see how much our path diverges from the U.K. path in the next few years. And most importantly, is our recent reversal temporary or permanent?
