Category Archives: Freedom

Quote of the day–Michael Beard

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I often find that true wisdom comes from simple stories, and one of the great story tellers was the one called Jesus of Nazareth.

According to the writer known as Luke, Jesus was traveling through the borderlands of Samaria and Galilee on a journey to Jerusalem. He stopped in a village and told his listeners a story about a widow and an unjust judge.

He said that in a certain town there was once a judge who cared nothing for God or man. There was a widow in that same town who constantly came before the judge demanding justice against her opponent.

For a long time the judge refused to grant the widow justice. But in the end he said to himself, “True, I don’t fear God or care about men, but this widow is so great a nuisance that I will see her righted before she wears me out with her persistence.”

In this simple story there is a great political lesson that is often easy to overlook. The persistent widow is a reminder to those who seek justice that we should never lose heart. We must continue to press on, and will be rewarded if we do so.

Michael Beard
October 12, 2009
Wear Them Out
[Good advice. The anti-gun bigots have nothing but hate and fear to sustain them. That is very draining. It saps their energy. It is depressing. It is lonely. It is a very anti-social mindset. They are very unhappy people.

Freedom loving people have a myriad of social outlets and rejoice in competitions. They acquire new skills. They learn about the mechanics and physics of simple but incredibly clever and precise machines that can propel small pieces of metal at Mach 3+ across distances that take you 10 minutes to walk and hit objects that are impossible to see at that distance with the naked eye. They hunt and bring food home to their families. Guns are part of the Olympics. What do the anti-gun people have to show to compete with the thousands of competitive events each year and the Gold, Silver, and Bronze metals that are recorded in the permanent history of mankind? Nothing but news releases that dance in the blood of innocents killed and maimed by criminals.

The People of the Gun know history is made with guns and love to learn that history. They know it is guns in the hands of everyday people that keep the would be tyrant from attempting to gain power and brutalize them, their family, and their neighbors because they happen to have the wrong skin color, the wrong religious beliefs, wear glasses, or own property. They know the gun is civilization and although it can and has been used for evil it is far more often used for the protection of innocent life and property against those that do not respect life or the property of others.

Because gun ownership is a positive thing it makes it easier for us to be persistent over the long haul. The Million Mom March was founded in August 1999, reached their peak in May of 2000 with, according to their own (probably inflated) numbers consisted of nearly one million people. Now they don’t even have a website of their own — http://www.millionmommarch.org/ redirects to the Brady Campaign. They were a flash in the pan because it’s hard to hold onto hate for very long. The Brady Campaign is 35 years old but even after merging with the MMM have so few adherents they don’t even bother to have a way to join their organization. They have nothing to offer prospective members except hate and fear. The NRA is 138 years old and has thousand of instructors, millions of members, a history of competitions, they helped blacks protect their communities in the darkest days of the KKK, they teach hunter safety, and helped Great Britain prepare for the expected invasion from Germany in WW II.

Make the most of that persistence. The other side frequently has an unfair advantage with the assistance of a duplicitous press and their own willingness to twist the truth and ignore the facts but our numbers, our love of people and freedom, and our righteousness give us the long term advantage. They made a big play for the win during the Clinton years and many or even most gun owner rights activists thought the bigots had won. But they ran out of steam and we are now winning.

Let’s keep doing what we do best. For some people that will be a great gun blog, mocking those that hate freedom, playing the political game, teaching new shooters, teaching experienced shooters to be better than they ever thought was humanly possible, getting good press for gun owners, or it might be just being a proud and responsible gun owner who takes a new shooter to the range every once in a while.

Michael Beard is right that persistent is important and that characteristic will enable our eventual win. But I suspect it was some sort of Freudian slip that resulted in that recognition of his. Michael Beard is on the losing side of this epic struggle for freedom. He recognized the persistence of his opposition and envies it.–Joe]

Ambush ahead?

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Sometimes when your battles are going too well you have to wonder if there is an ambush being prepared. We won Heller, incorporation looks like a shoe-in, we (will soon) be able to take guns in National Parks, and the police, in some jurisdictions, can be sued if they even temporarily detain someone for openly carrying a gun. Except for Heller all of that occurred since “the most anti-gun administration in U.S. history” took power.

As thrilled as I am about all the progress we have been making it also makes me a little bit paranoid. Certainly the administration has lots of other high priority tasks facing it. The economy, the war, and the self-flagellation of advocating more government control of health care probably does distract from their campaign promise of attacking gun owners. And certainly a case could be made for incompetence for accomplishing anything other than getting elected. But could it be the administration have some clever, nefarious plan to make all our civil rights gains moot?

If so, it probably can’t be through the legislature and the courts. It would have to be something like martial law, emergency powers, or possibly an international treaty. Such a treaty is being discussed again:

Seven countries have launched a campaign for the U.N. to start negotiations on a new treaty regulating the global arms trade to help prevent the illegal transfer of guns that kill and maim thousands every day.

…

According to a report published this week by the British relief agency Oxfam and 11 other non-governmental organizations, some 2.1 million people — overwhelmingly civilians — have died either directly or indirectly as a result of armed violence since the General Assembly first voted in December 2006 to work toward a treaty regulating the growing, multibillion dollar arms trade.

This is the equivalent of more than 2,000 people dying every day — worse than one person killed each minute, the report said.

“There is an overflow of government sponsored and private illegal armies, ethnic militias and non-state guerrilla forces,” former U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland, who now heads the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, said in a forward to the report.

“And they are supplied as never before with lethal weapons by reckless states,” Egeland said. “Only a forceful, unambiguous and verifiable convention can control transfers and do away with the networks of illegal arms brokers that supply our generation’s weapons of mass killings and mass misery.”

Duncan said that after three years of discussions, Britain, Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, Japan and Kenya have proposed a resolution establishing negotiations to draft and agree on a treaty.

The idea of a treaty “is still contentious,” Duncan said. But supporters are hoping the disarmament committee will support the resolution and the 192-member General Assembly will approve the measure later this year. That would pave the way for negotiations leading up to an international conference in 2012 that would hopefully adopt the new treaty.

Last year, the assembly overwhelmingly endorsed a working group to move toward negotiations by a vote of 147-2, with the U.S. and Zimbabwe casting “no” votes. Others were either absent or abstained.

Whether President Barack Obama’s administration will now back negotiations remains to be seen.

Gun control is a hotly contentious issue in the United States, where the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizens the right to “keep and bear arms,” and powerful lobby groups routinely oppose almost every effort to restrict gun sales and ownership — and usually win.

Supporters of a new treaty stress that it will not interfere with legal arms sales but will target illegal weapons transfers.

What these people apparently fail to consider is the number of people that are killed because of gun control. Even in their own numbers above they are including deaths by governments intent exterminating people because of racial and/or religious differences which could have been prevented had the oppressed been able to defend themselves.

Probably the biggest risk of the treaty to U.S. gun owners is such a treaty will almost certainly require that guns be registered so their movement can be carefully tracked. Registration must never be allowed. The risk is just too high. Remember my Jews In The Attic Test and just say no until you are out of ammo.

Quote of the day–Lyle @ UltiMAK

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In reality, you either do or you do not advocate government control over the right to keep and bear arms, you either do or do not support the second amendment, and you either do or you do not advocate a nanny state– you either do or do not embrace the principles of the Left. Any attempt to place yourself “in the middle” puts you in agreement with the basic principles (rationalizations) of those who would violate your and your neighbors’ rights.

Why can’t we all just get along? Because some people want their liberty and others want to control everyone. Are you going to stand on the side of liberty or on the side of the aggressors? Pick one, or stay the hell out of the way.

Lyle @ UltiMAK
October 10, 2009
Comment on Quote of the day–John Hardin
[Actually I put myself “in the middle”. But that is because Lyle is using a different definition of “the middle” than the one I use. In actuality a strict and literal interpretation of the Second Amendment is “the middle ground“.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Lew Daly

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We’d like to retire that word [redistribute] from the political vocabulary because you can’t redistribute something that is already highly socialized, and wealth and income in the “era of knowledge-based growth” (whoever ends up “owning” it) is indeed highly socialized. Most importantly (and more to the point), individual productivity is increasingly dependent on what can only be described as a collective good, a common inheritance of knowledge. No one deserves to benefit from this common inheritance more than anyone else, by moral definition, because it’s not created by any individual. So, to the extent that inherited knowledge (“technical progress in the broadest sense,” as Solow termed it) is increasingly driving economic growth, the fruits of knowledge—the wealth being generated by knowledge—should be more equally shared. Wealth that is commonly created should be equally, or at least more equally, shared.

Lew Daly
Via AmericanMercenary in the post What the hell is “Social Justice”?
[This is very scary stuff. Strip away just a little bit of the fluff and it’s, From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Just reading the praise for the book you realize these people not only have zero respect for the right to own property but they don’t believe you even have a right to your own thoughts. This is what inspires thoughts of Atlas Shrugged. In this book the people of the mind went on strike. Those that contributed through the power of their creative minds declared those that demanded the product of their minds through the force of government had received their last handout. You can force someone to work but you can’t force them to think.

After reading of people like Daly I don’t just long for a John Galt but a Ragnar Danneskjöld as well.–Joe]

Quote of the Day–Ayn Rand

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Just so we’re all clear;

Such is the state of today’s most critical issues: political rights versus “economic rights”.  It’s either or.  One destroys the other.  But there are, in fact, no “economic rights,” no “collective rights,” no “public-interest rights”.  The term “individual rights” is a redundancy: there is no other kind of rights and no one else to possess them.

Those who advocate laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights.

Ayn Rand – from the appendix “Man’s Rights” in her book “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”

If you don’t have a copy, get one.  The first copy I saw had every other sentence or paragraph highlighted by the owner.  It’s that kind of book.  It was written back in the 1960s, though it seems to be directly addressing our current crop of idiots, moonbats, loons, thugs, bounders, cads, hucksters and charlatans in Washington (to say nothing of the Democrats).

Ethical blogging

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The FTC has declared they are the ethics police for bloggers:

Certainly, it seems like this is an update that’s time has come. While most well-run social media programs already include appropriate disclosure, there’s still no shortage of unscrupulous marketers using deceptive practices to sell products. Now, with the threat of serious fines, those who look to push the boundaries of ethical blogging will be doing so at their own risk.

I wonder if those advocating more government regulation are required to disclose their voting history, tax filings, and political donations.

Quote of the day–Will Haun

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So no matter how the incorporation debate shakes out, an endorsement of originalism would be a victory for conservatives who prize intellectual honesty in constitutional interpretation.

Seemingly aware of these implications, the Left is trying to preserve the contrivances of “substantive due process” in an originalist guise. They want to define “privileges” and “immunities” as broadly as possible, to include what Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center calls “very important progressive values,” such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage. The goal is to continue expanding “individual rights” while permitting restriction of property rights and economic freedoms.  So if the Supreme Court decides in McDonald’s favor, it could end the controversy over gun rights but begin a host of new battles in other areas.

Yet Robert Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, is not afraid of opening a can of worms. He says that libertarians see McDonald as an opportunity “to resurrect economic liberties suspended by the Court under the post–New Deal version of substantive due process.” Conservatives should see this case as a rare opportunity to base any incorporation of the Bill of Rights on originalist grounds — an opportunity they should waste no time in seizing, for it may not come again.

Will Haun
June 08, 2009
[I find it very interesting that the phrase “conservatives who prize intellectual honesty” is used. What does this mean? Does it mean that most conservatives are not “intellectually honest” but liberals are? Or does it mean that no liberal can be considered “intellectually honest” but some conservatives are?

Regardless, there are those that have high hopes for the Chicago Gun Case to get us started on the path to liberty again. I admit to seeing a glimmer of that possibility but know that economic liberty is going to be a much tougher war than guns are and don’t have very high hopes. Even if the current system suffers a complete meltdown (and there are lots of indications that it will) there will still be strong resistance to liberty from those that will claim the collapse justifies even less freedom and a much great role for goverment to take in implementing a “planned economy” than it already has.

H/T to ubu52 for the link.–Joe]

Testing the response?

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One of the ways skilled attackers can get through security is to probe the defenses and see what the response is. Once they know the response they can plan an attack with a high probability of success. I wonder if that is what happened here:

A suspicious package found outside an eastern Minnesota high school Wednesday contained an incendiary device, the school district’s superintendent said.

Princeton schools Superintendent Rick Lahn said he learned that in a meeting with Police Chief Brian Payne on Wednesday afternoon.

“He said it was some kind of incendiary device, but it’s being investigated now and they’re taking a look at it,” Lahn told The Associated Press. “And he couldn’t give me details. He just said it was very suspicious and it contained some explosive material. I don’t think it was a large device, but I really don’t know what kind of damage it could have done.”

The package, which Lahn said was discovered by a custodian outside the school, was one of three found in Princeton on Wednesday morning.

…

Officials gave the all-clear late Wednesday morning after law enforcement officers and explosive-sniffing dogs combed the town of about 4,500 people about 50 miles north of Minneapolis.

“The entire town was searched for suspicious devices with negative results,” Schmidt said.

Along with the Princeton Police Department and ATF, agencies joining the investigation included the FBI, the St. Paul and Crow Wing County bomb squads, the Sherburne and Mille Lacs County sheriff’s departments, and postal inspectors, Schmidt said.

Interesting. They searched the entire town. This pulled police from multiple jurisdictions into the response. This probably left weak spots in other areas with increased response times and feeble responses had an attack occurred in these other locations.

I hope it was just some kid wanting to another day to study for a test rather than someone with serious intent in harming people.

That would last me about 30 seconds

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I guess it’s just what socialists do–they disarm their victims. In Venezuela:

This envisages what Mendoza called a “specific prohibition under which any person cannot buy more than 50 bullets a year.” Mendoza, a middle-ranking member of Chávez’s governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), said the proposal represented “a form of reducing the parameters when it comes to the use of firearms and ammunition.”

The deputy said the proposal had been drawn up in collaboration with the scientific and investigative police, CICPC – the equivalent of the FBI in Venezuela – the state security service, DISIP, the National Guard, and the Procurator General’s Office. As far as is known, none of these organizations are known to be staffed by innocents.

Mendoza said that under the reform, “nobody will be able to carry more than two clips and these must not have more than 34 rounds or bullets for personal defense.”

It depends on what I’m practicing but I could go through 50 rounds (an entire years allotment of ammo in Venezuela) in less than 30 seconds. It certainly would make my practice sessions shorter and cheaper. Of course if such a law were implemented in my political jurisdiction I probably would spend my remaining ammo shooting for real instead of just practice.

Air gun control

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Registration then confiscation. She barely conceals her agenda:

She added she would like to see a step-by-step programme involving all sales and transfers of air guns to be registered initially.

“After that there should be an amnesty when people can hand in air weapons that are not registered. After that we need to carry out universal registration with campaigns making it clear that air guns are not toys, they are lethal weapons that can kill.”

Don’t just laugh and poke fun at “where Great Britain used to be”. Remember that in Seattle you can go to jail for having a slingshot in your pocket even though you are legally carrying a .45 on your hip. The bigots will encroach on our rights in any way they can.

Quote of the day–Marko Kloos

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Once again we see that a “no” tends to be far more effective against rapists, thieves, and other freelance thugs when it is spoken over the sights of a firearm.

Marko Kloos
you go, girl.
September 29, 2009
[Which, of course, reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by John Fogh.

H/T to Say Uncle.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Lyle @ UltiMAK

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Every part. Every last little bit of it, from its inception, from the thinking behind its inception, to all of its variants, to every attempt to implement it in any form, any time and anywhere it’s been foisted upon anyone. I consider socialism to be more offensive, more disgusting, more sickening, more dangerous, more deadly and more virulent than any disease– more destructive than any force known on Earth. Sold to the unwary as the warm-hearted answer to the suffering and problems we all face in life, it is the poison pill, cleverly slipped into all our forms of sustenance: our very food and drink, our homes, our schools and our institutions by the sick, the envious, the jealous and the hateful, who would be our masters and we their playthings.

Lyle @ UltiMAK
September 2, 2009
In response to the question, “What part of socialism do you disagree with?”
[One friend was a bit more succinct but only for those that understood the fundamentals, when he told me it was like a sugar pill that caused cancer twenty years later. “Here, try it! It’s sweet. Just a little bit…”–Joe]

Quote of the day–Thomas Jefferson

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A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt…If the game runs sometime against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

Thomas Jefferson
[President Obama and supporters, please meet my hero, Thomas Jefferson.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Wayne LaPierre

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The Second Amendment is a constitutional right, not a carnival ride. How could the right to keep and bear arms ever be exercised in Rachel Maddow’s world, a world in which “keeping” arms wouldn’t be allowed? Would Ms. Maddow also like to see a world in which the First Amendment could only be exercised under the bright lights of a television studio? I suppose since she has her own show, she might not object to that either.

Wayne LaPierre
NRA Executive Director
September 24, 2009
[This tends to be an all too common theme–the constitution only applies if it doesn’t get in the way what someone wants the government to do. That’s not the way it is supposed to work and in fact things get really screwed up when this is the mode of operation.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Milton Friedman

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The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.

Milton Friedman
[So… Why is it that so many people demand more and more centralized government? Is it that facts are irrelevant to people? Is it that despite a hundred years of statist and socialist failure people still don’t see the pattern? Or is it that Labrat nailed it with Parasite memes and monkeyspheres?

And if you don’t have good answers to those questions I’ll still give you an A+ if you can tell me a simple and clean way to dramatically reduce the size of government.–Joe]

I wonder if this is my fault

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I appears there is an interesting new show coming soon to a security theater near you:

First it was shoes, then water bottles and snow globes.

Now dried baby formula, makeup, talcum and other powders have joined the long list of seemingly innocuous household items drawing closer scrutiny from airport screeners as potential security threats.

Federal authorities haven’t banned powders toted by passengers or set limits on the size or amount they are allowed to carry on planes in their hand luggage.

But the Transportation Security Administration is now paying closer attention to common powders and has outfitted O’Hare, Midway and other airports around the country with new kits to test them for explosives. Passengers should be aware that after belongings are X-rayed, TSA officers may test a small sample of any powder in their possession.

I wonder if my post contributed to that. I know it got some attention by “government employees”.

If it was my fault I’m not going to say I am sorry. One of the ways you get people to rethink their security systems is to overload them with false positives. If I could only demonstrate that it were relatively easy to bring down a plane by grinding up you hair into a fine powder and making an improvised explosive device out of it using a couple coins as tools…

Only one move ahead

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Sometimes it boggles my mind just how stupid some people can be and still be able to write complete sentences and breathe–and apparently at the same time. Case in point:

Free marketers don’t care much for bank bailouts so long as they’ve gotten their money out the bank before it fails.

But when it’s health care? I think you will find that teabaggers everywhere will have a very different perspective when they find themselves out there alone with no way to pay for their family’s medical costs.

Who will need the save the day when this happens? The government will – and that means a single-payer system.

Whether the result fits your ideology or not, the numbers would seem to make clear that it is only a matter of time before private health insurance prices itself out of the market, leaving only the government with the capability to insure the nation’s health.

“Leaving only the government with the capability”? And just where does he think the government will get the money that private health insurance companies and individuals couldn’t?

When I used to play chess a lot (high school and college) it was very rare that someone couldn’t see pretty clearly two and usually three moves in advance. And the better players would have a pretty fair view out six or seven moves on some critical branches. But this guy apparently can’t see even one move in advance. What would you call someone like this? In my chess playing days we would call those people losers.

Update: He makes an “interesting” comment in response to another commenter to his article:

I rarely watch CNBC and, anyone who reads this post knows I wouldn’t be caught dead watching Fox.

He admits he studiously ignores data considered to be fair and accurate by millions of people? This isn’t someone concerned with knowing the truth. This is someone who has a deep and profound commitment to some sort of cult.

Quote of the day–Linoge

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I think there are more than a few anti-rights advocates I will start referring to as “the woman with the earrings”.

Linoge
September 18, 2009
uncannily appropriate
[You must read the rest of the post for the context–unless you remember the woman with the earrings at the party in the book Atlas Shrugged.

There is a reason the sales of this book skyrocketed last year.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Ronald Reagan

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You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets, in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we’re the generation that is going to see it come about.

Ronald Reagan
[I’m reminded of this by the articled titled Iran reportedly able to make nuclear bomb and the fact that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he wants Israel wiped off the map.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Milton Friedman

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The power to do good is also the power to do harm.

Milton Friedman
[There is also a variation of this attributed to Barry Goldwater (probably false), Thomas Jefferson (probably false), and Gerald Ford (probably correct), “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

Regardless of who should get the credit the idea is correct and people advocating for health care involvement by the government need to realize the terrible risk they are advocating we all take by giving the government control of our health. They can “give” but they can, and will, take it away as well.

Similar cases can be made for government involvement in weapons ownership, the banking industry, and just about anything the government was not given specific enumerated powers in the constitution.–Joe]