Category Archives: Freedom

Some writers can write

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Well no duh! I can hear you say. Every different community has its issues, events, and disputes. Being somewhat more than a mere spectator but less than a main combatant is an odd and interesting place to be.

The recent and ongoing kerfuffle in the sci-fi community between the SJW’s and and the Ilk of the Evil Legion of Evil has been educational, and many fascinating words are being spilled. Take, for example, Brad Torgerson, one of the principals in the whole Sad Puppies affair. His recent post titled Flaming rage nozzles of tolerance is great. Kind of long, but he does a good job of breaking down the current “we must blame ourselves for everything” SJW narrative-driven mindset as a modern secular take on Original Sin, and the competing with the free minds of people responsible for their own actions and nothing more. Well worth the read.

Quote of the day—Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

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My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
October 7, 1952
Speech in Detroit
[At first glance this appears to be a decent one line definition. Some simple tests are as follows:

  • In some societies it is unpopular to be of a particular religion/ethnicity/sexual-orientation. But in a free society such people will not be harmed as long as they do not intimidate or harm others. In an non-free society they may lose their jobs, socially shunned, their property destroyed, or even killed for merely for being suspected of matching an unpopular attribute.
  • In some societies it is unpopular to be a gun owner. But in a free society such people allowed to go about their business without restraint as long as they do not intimidate or harm others.

It is clear that the U.S. is not a free society. It has various degrees of freedom depending on the relative popularity of the activities of the person. 100 years ago gun owners were relatively free but today in certain political jurisdictions we are at great risk of going to jail if we attempt to go about our business even though our actions harm no one.

100 years ago to be homosexual in many locations in the U.S. was very risky and Christianity very low risk. Today homosexuality is much lower risk and Christianity is at some risk.

Stevenson definition is a pretty good for those issues. But as you dig into things more your realize Stevenson definition is not really adequate. What about alcohol production? Beer and wine are quite popular but highly regulated. Cars are very popular but highly regulated.

I have a half-baked hypothesis that total freedom in our country is a near constant. As it increases in one area it decreases in another. People demand control over something.

In the beginning it was black slavery, indentured servants and intolerance of non-Christians. Then as those went away it was regulation of things like alcohol, guns, drugs, business, tobacco, and a million little things. It doesn’t seem to have any relation to public safety, economic prosperity, or anything of importance. It’s just control.—Joe]

And then there were…five?

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Kansas Gubnuh signs “constitutional” carry bill.

There’s also talk about lowering the legal age for open carry to eighteen, some citing the fact that eighteen year-olds can fight for their country. Well, yeah. I havent seen any age restrictions in the second amendment, but maybe I didn’t look close enough. That sort of thing (for those under 18) should be up to the parents, and Uncle Sam is not my daddy or my kids’ daddy.

ETA: If we didn’t think she’d be arrested for it, my daughter would be packing right now. Instead we’re forced to decide whether we’re more concerned about her being judged by twelve (actually since she’s under age it would be judged by one) or carried by six.

“I believe we can lower the age to 18 at some point in the future. I think after everybody sees that there are not going to be any of the dire predictions coming true, and they relax a little bit, then we can talk about that.”

OK; why do some people need to be “relaxed” before others can exercise their natural human rights? Where in the constitution does it say that? There must be one hell of a long list of qualifiers that I haven’t seen yet.

I’ve mentioned “control by freakout” before, and this is an excellent example – media get people all hyped up and “un-relaxed” and our rights are violated as a result. I must say it is a brilliant tactic.

Quote of the day—Eliot Engel

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This legislation is not stopping hunters from continuing to participate in legal sporting activities. What it does is make the rational point that “green tips” are not necessary for those purposes. While some argue that these bullets have not been used to kill cops, I say why should we wait around for that day to come?

Eliot Engel
U.S. Representative
March 27, 2015
View: Deer don’t wear Kevlar
[While some may argue that Engel should be gagged, removed from office, and prosecuted before he says something even more stupid and attempts more criminal acts I say we can only prosecute him for acts committed. The principles our country is based upon say that, yes, we do need to “wait around for that day to come”. To do otherwise is called prior restraint and is, rightfully so, illegal.—Joe]

Quote of the day – me

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“I don’t see it like that. The way I figure, the various anti libertarian government entities are violating my rights three times per day, and more. Don’t tell me I’M the felon, see. That puts the attention in the wrong place.”

Seen over at Uncle’s.

Quote of the day—Robert J. Avrech

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Obama and the EUs policy of appeasement is nothing less than submission to Islam.

Until the West can bring itself to identify Islamism as the enemy, the blood soaked harvest of death will continue.

Robert J. Avrech
January 7, 20154
IslamoNazi Terror in Paris With Obama Flashback That Helps Set The Bloody Scene
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Frank Jardim

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The sniper is an incredibly efficient fighter, compared to the typical infantryman. Consider that in World War II, American infantry units fired 25,000 rounds to kill just one enemy soldier. By the Korean War, that figure jumped to 50,000 rounds, and the select-fire M14 and M16 infantry rifles of the Vietnam War only seem to have produced more misses, requiring the expenditure of 200,000 rounds to kill one enemy combatant. Nowadays, it’s a quarter million rounds of spraying and praying to kill a single Taliban. By comparison, on average, a sniper requires only 1.3 bullets to kill an enemy. During the Vietnam War, it was noted on many occasions that a handful of snipers accounted for more enemy killed than the entire infantry battalion (and sometimes even regiment) they were assigned to.

Frank Jardim
February 27, 2015
History of the Sniper
[250 K rounds to kill one Taliban? Can anyone who has actually “been there and done that” recently confirm this? It seems like a lot.

And of course bullets and kills are not necessarily the appropriate measure of battle efficiency. You could consume 0.9 bullets per dead enemy by firing nine rounds for ten kills where one bullet killed two of the enemy and lose the battle because your enemy fired 10,000 rounds and killed 1000 of your troops.

Or you could roll your 1000 tanks supported by 10K troops into your enemy’s capital and the enemy gives up without firing a shot and no one dies.

But still, there is something to be said for one person being able to take out a selected enemy at will with a good chance of escape. This makes moderate numbers of individuals without a lot of infrastructure supporting them very powerful.

This is Why Boomershoot.—Joe]

Exactly like an Obama ad

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This Ted Cruise ad could be an Obama ad, except for one single word (and the face). It may in fact BE a recycled Obama ad, with the tiniest bit of editing. Check it out.

Someone needs to be fired, and right now too. The same old crap such as this won’t do this time around. It won’t do at all.

Ted declares his candidacy

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The Democrats are totally ill-equipped to defeat him. He simply doesn’t fall for their game, and so it will require the combined efforts of Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, the American Communist Party, et al, plus Jihadists and other foreign interests, to defeat him. This will be interesting.

The predictable, or rather a common, outcome would be that someone would get to him and convince him (threaten, bribe, cajole, lie, intimidate, mesmerize, etc.) that “For the Greater Good of the Party” he should quit before he does too much damage to the 2016 prospects. That or they primary him right out.

The most transparent administration

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When Obama was campaigning in 2008 the one good thing I thought might come out of him being elected was better support for FOIA. My experience with FOIA and the Federal Government is that they completely ignore you unless you get a lawyer involved. That’s just wrong. If the people don’t comply with FOIA they should be prosecuted. That’s not what happens. If Obama could make some progress on getting better compliance with FOIA I would have praised that achievement.

It was just another Obama lie.

We are sliding further down the slippery slope into a police state:

The White House is voiding a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA  (incidentally the same act that discovered none of Hillary Clinton’s “personal” government-business emails since they were not even stored on government property!) which as USA Today explains, makes “official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that office.”

Update: More evidence:

The Obama administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.

It also acknowledged in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law — but only when it was challenged.

Its backlog of unanswered requests at year’s end grew remarkably by 55 percent to more than 200,000. It also cut by 375, or about 9 percent, the number of full-time employees across government paid to look for records. That was the fewest number of employees working on the issue in five years.

Quote of the day—David Hackett Fischer

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Race slavery did not create the culture of the southern colonies. That culture created slavery.

David Hackett Fischer
1989
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History)
[See also this post about the same book.—Joe]

The leader of the free world

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I have nothing to add.

Quote of the day—Bruce Schneier

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It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

Bruce Schneier
2000
Page 53, Secrets & Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
[Schneier was referring to a national registry of encryption keys but it also applies to a registry of guns, printers, computers, and their owners.—Joe]

Stolen government money

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It seems that someone just embezzled three billion dollars from the US treasury. Well, actually, it was some insurance companies, and the Treasury just cut them checks. And it wasn’t authorized by congress. And the treasury told congress to go piss up a rope when they said “you can’t do that!” That story and other bureaucratic contempt for the law here.

The rule of law is dead, unless some pols and appointees start going to jail, or otherwise paying for their crimes against the people.

Quote of the day—Graeme Wood

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The Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims.

Graeme Wood
February 2015
What ISIS Really Wants: The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.
[H/T to Sebastian.

Everything I read in this article is consistent with what I have read elsewhere about Islam. This includes but is not limited to the following books:

Read the Atlantic article this QOTD came from. It will take you less than an hour and you’ll know 100% of what you need to know to make good decisions about them and 80% of what you need to know to understand them.—Joe]

Quote of the day—John Randoph

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I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.

John Randoph
US congressman from Virginia from 1799 with various absences until 1827.
From Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: A Cultural History)
[I was struck by this because I wondered if the same sentiment is shared by many of our current politicians. When they speak of liberty are they referring to their own liberty but not liberty for all?

One the primary revelations I had while listening to this book was the extreme differences between different settlements in North America. For example the Quakers in Pennsylvania were, essentially, Libertarian. The people in Virginia were an extremely status/class driven society who demanded the liberty to own slaves.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Bruce Schneier

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I prefer to conceptualize privacy as a right to be respected and not a commodity to be bought and sold.

Bruce Schneier
February 24, 2015
AT&T Charging Customers to Not Spy on Them
[SoWhatDidYouExpect comments, ‘Replace “prefer to conceptualize” with “DEMAND”.’—Joe]

A day away from fundamentally transforming the internet

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And hardly anyone is noticing, apparently. This is one of the biggest power grabs regarding free speech in the history of history, and it seems to be going through without much discussion, or even much notice.

I’ve been saying for years that the left really, really MUST gain control over the internet, and right now it seems they’re just a day or two from initiating their Solution; FCC control. Goodbye Wild West. Hello Federal Department of the Internet. I hope you like your new overlords.

Smart bombs and stupid people

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How Dumb Cluster Bombs Are Becoming Heinously Smart is a fascinating post on smart cluster bombs. For example:

Once these 64 pound, 31 inch long submunitions are released, each will deploy a parachute, slowing their forward movement and orientating them vertically in relation to the ground. Then, a rocket motor fires and forces these cylinders into a slight climb, although at a distance it would look like the BLU-108s are hanging in mid-air. This rocket also causes the BLU-108s to spin rapidly.

As the submunition spins while almost hovering in mid-air above the target area, each BLU-108 cylinder will throw four individual sub-submuntions, known as ‘Skeets,’ from its body. Each Skeet is slung in a different direction at a 90 degree vector from the now empty BLU-108 cylinder. As these hockey puck-like Skeets fly through the air while rapidly spinning, a small infrared imager and laser ranging system activates on each one. The infrared seeker rapidly scans the ground below for an enemy vehicle or weapons fixture that it can recognize, while the laser ranger provides a ground contour map.

…

the Skeet fires off its 2lb explosively formed penetrator along with a fragmentation ring, sending a molten spear into the target along with a handful of dense shrapnel covering the area around it. The idea is that the penetrator kills the vehicle from top, where even main battle tanks are vulnerable, while the shrapnel kills who is inside (if it is a lightly armored target) and anyone in the targeted vehicle’s immediate vicinity.

…

the Sensor Fuzed Weapon’s unique discriminating abilities, and its WCMD delivery system, will most likely morph into even more dynamic submunition capabilities. Ones where taking out individual soldiers via large-insect sized flying explosives, capable of loitering above the target area for long periods of time, could become a reality. Or even a future where small nano-robotic mites are dropped using a WCMD-like dispensers over a convoy of enemy armor, their mission to destroy vehicles’ electronics from the inside out without causing so much as a single explosion, may also become a real capability one day.

In many ways conventional warfare is obsolete because equipment on the ground is so vulnerable. Unless a force can successfully challenge the air superiority of their opponent wars will (and are) be fought using Fourth and Fifth-Generation Warfare.

The most naïve and stupid comment I found on the post is the following:

Why can’t we use this technology to deliver food to hungry people? Smart fruit, laser guided bananas. Something positive, and far cheaper.

Nevermind, answered my own question. There’s no profit in peace or help, only in violence and destruction.

I would try to explain it to them but I don’t think we have enough in common to form a means of communication such that they could understand what I was saying.

The role of the government education complex

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How much more clear can it be?

University of Michigan Activism class.

Just heard about it on Rush.

The university goes on to say that they’re not exhibiting any political bias. In Left-Speak that would be true of course, because “Bias” means any opposition to the Progressive authoritarian system.