Category Archives: Freedom

Veterans Day

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It’s here again. Thanks, all you servicemen, current and former.

Google at least sort of recognized it this year, though they had to give it their PC twist by having the female in uniform standing out front saluting, even though men make up ~85% of the US military.

My kid’s school is starting a new tradition, the “wall of honor,” giving a small paper “brick” for each relative the student has who has worn the uniform. It was interesting looking them over, and seeing a number of name clusters where it’s obviously a family tradition. It also makes you realize how small a percentage it represents.

Looking at my own history, I served in the Army Reserve.
My dad and his brother both served in the Army (drafted in the 50s).
My brother-in-law and another uncle on my mom’s side were career AF.
My grandfather served in the cavalry in the 30s, and the Coast Guard in WW II.
A great uncle served. Another great (great?) uncle was even in the Spanish-American War. A great aunt was in the WAAC in WW II. Considering how few people I know anything about in my family history, an awful lot of them spent at least one enlistment in uniform. No spectacular war stories, just a lot of “been there, done that, did my part, moved on.”

Again, thanks to all those who have done their part in serving this great nation.

Not just anti-gun, anti-freedom

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The CalGuns Foundation, SAF, and California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees filed a lawsuit based on infringement of the First Amendment by the state of California against gun dealers:

Tracy Rifle and Pistol, a firearm retailer and indoor shooting range located in San Joaquin County, was recently cited by Harris’ Department of Justice for having pictures of three handguns in window signs that can be seen outside the store. California Penal Code section 26820, first enacted in 1923, bans gun stores from putting up signs advertising the sale of handguns — but not shotguns or rifles. An adjacent window image at Tracy Rifle, which shows a photograph of an AR-15 rifle, was not cited by the DOJ.

From SAF’s news release:

The lawsuit alleges that the California Penal Code violates the First Amendment rights of the plaintiffs by prohibiting them from displaying images of handguns or even the word “handguns” where they would be visible to passersby. However, anti-gun protesters are still allowed to appear with signs that use the words or images, constituting what the lawsuit calls “viewpoint discriminatory.”

What could make it more clear these people are not just anti-gun but they are anti-freedom? This shouldn’t just be a civil action. They should be prosecuted as the criminals they are.

Quote of the day—Christopher Cantwell

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You give us absolutely no option for escaping this violence. We are forced to choose between the violence of you, or the violence of someone else. You tell us “Love it or leave it!” or “Move to Somalia!” like I don’t have any right to be left in peace in my own home. The fact of the matter is, if you give us a choice of violence or violence, eventually we’re going to give some violence back to you, and making fun of you on twitter will become the least of your concerns.

Christopher Cantwell
April 8, 2014
Top 10 Reasons Libertarians Aren’t Nice To You
[H/T to Say Uncle.—Joe]

Quote of the day—TS

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Democracy allows for criminal code to be passed this way? Not to mention the very abhorrent idea that 51% of the people can lock up the other 49% if they want via ballot initiative.

TS
November 6, 2014
Comment to More on the I-594 Loss
[Direct democracy also allows 50+% to impose oppressive taxes on the 50-% as well. This is why we have the concepts of enumerated powers and inalienable rights written into our constitutions.

The I-594 people do not recognize these concepts.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Geek WithA.45

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This is Election Day.

…

Excuse me while I go barf, and vote tactically for the candidate who I figure will steal the least of my shit, and beat me with the softest hose.

Geek WithA.45
November 4, 2014
Comment to Weaponizing Government
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Midwest Carry Academy

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In the city that was originally built to house a government derived from the consent of the governed comes a plan to distribute a constitutionally guaranteed right unto only those people whom the government deems “suitable.”  Which is, in the mayor’s opinion, no one.  Fancy that.

Midwest Carry Academy
October 29, 2014
Via email from Nick
[With all that power concentrated in one place what do you expect? Abuse of power is inevitable. Which is why the government was created with only enumerated powers. It’s long past time to trim its powers back to the proper legal limits.

The election today is projected to slow down the rush to tyranny but no one has realistic hopes of one election or even ten stopping it. Dreams of reversing it are better characterized as bloody nightmares.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Anonymous Conservative

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That desire to get two people fighting and then hide is a very deeply imbued urge. It is borne of an attempt to make something which stimulates the leftist’s amygdala stimulate their enemy’s amygdala, combined with sheer cowardice making direct confrontation not an option. As with every other leftist tactic, the goal is an outcome which would terrify the leftist, were positions reversed, namely manly men coming to kill them.

From simple social out-grouping, to calling cops to a store in such a way that they might shoot a conservative, to out-right swatting, to deploying various other government agencies to harass and intimidate conservatives, leftists have a burning, innate desire to get K-strategists fighting each other, especially as things get crazy. It is not a coincidence and it is not an accident – it is a long-evolved strategy, and we should all expect to see a lot more of it in the next two decades. The obvious solution is to not fall for it, and instead focus on the leftist themselves as the source of the problem. Very quickly leftists would abandon that strategy.

Anonymous Conservative
October 14, 2014
Amygdalae in the News
[If you want to understand the psychology of our political opponents and strategies for defeating them and just as important how they attempt to defeat us, you must read Anonymous Conservative’s work. He has a book, The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans, which is sometimes available free on Kindle.

One of the more important insights I have gotten from reading him is that, in general, the police are our natural friends. They enforce the rule of law and only enforce the whims of some ruler because the ruler had the authority to make law. Our state and federal constitutions, being higher law than those that would be our unconstrained rulers, gives them authority and license to oppose those rules. See, for example, the opposition to many of the gun laws such as in New York, Colorado, and in Washington State (I-594). At some level our political opponents recognize this and attempt to get us to fight each other, to the death.

Recognizing this we can adopt a much better strategy of encouraging and supporting the police to respect our guaranteed rights and deal with those that would infringe upon our rights in an appropriate manner.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Angela Davis

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I am totally in favor of gun control, of removing guns not only from civilians but also from police.

…

I talked about the fact that my father had guns when I was growing up; our families needed to protect themselves from the Ku Klux Klan.

Angela Davis
May 6, 2014
Angela Y. Davis on what’s radical in the 21st century
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take away your guns.

After reading the article I breathed a heavy sigh. Barb asked what was wrong. I answered, “I just don’t know what to do with this. How do you respond to this?”

At some level Davis understands why gun ownership is important but she also wants to take guns from all private hands.

I guess it comes with the territory of being so crazy that you advocate for communism.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Brandon Smith

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Acts of nature are not things that the common man can easily rebel against. People rebel against governments and corrupt despots all the time, but not the plague. If a viral pandemic strikes, nearly everything a government does after the fact, no matter how corrupt or destructive, can be rationalized as necessary for the greater good of the greater number. If anyone does rebel, they will be labeled as pure evil, for they are now disrupting the government’s ability to stop the pandemic from spreading, and thus, are partly responsible for the mass deaths that follow.

During a viral outbreak, government becomes mother, father, nurse and protector. No matter how abusive they are, most people will still look to them for safety and guidance, primarily because they have no knowledge of disease. What they do not understand, they will fear, and fear always drives the ignorant into the arms of tyrants.

Brandon Smith
October 8, 2014
An Ebola Outbreak Would Be Advantageous For Globalists
[While the article has a fair amount of tin foil hat material in it I think the above is probably true.

I was talking to son James the other evening about our government’s response to Ebola and he said the one good thing that is coming out is that it makes it more clear just how incompetent our government is. My counter to that was to many people that will just mean the government needs still more power. To far too many people the answer to every government failure is to give them more power or to put “the right people” in charge.

And if we wanted to venture into the land of the tin foil hat we could hypothesize that Ebola is a crisis our government is not going to let go to waste.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

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The GPU (secret police) exposed von Meck, and he was shot: His objective had been to wear out rails and roadbeds, freight cars and locomotives, so as to leave the Republic without railroads in case of foreign military intervention!

When, not long afterward, the new People’s Commissar of Railroads, Comrade Kaganovich, ordered that average loads should be increased, and even doubled and tripled them (and for this discovery received the Order of Lenin along with others of our leaders) the malicious engineers who protested became know as limiters.

They raised the outcry that this was too much, and would result in the breakdown of the rolling stock, and they were rightly shot for their lack of faith in the possibilities of socialist transport.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) page 45.
[I was talking about this with son James last night so I thought I would post it too. Basically the lesson is that progressives have a burning desire to eliminate those that point out reality to them. Some of the most visible battles in our country today are the battle over Obamacare and the right to keep and bear arms. They refuse to recognize the realities of economics and human nature and are willing to have us imprisoned and/or killed when we attempt to explain reality to them.

But it is much more widespread than those. Look at the war against Islamic terrorism. Progressives insisted that we are to blame for our conflict despite the very clear words from the terrorists themselves that they will only be peaceful after all people have submitted to Sharia Law. Or look at how they insisted that stand your ground laws were a factor in the George Zimmerman case. Progressives have beliefs which contradict reality and if they have the power they become very dangerous when reality is forced upon them.

The constant conflict between reality and their beliefs is why the book Nineteen Eighty Four resonates so strongly. It brings to light the inherent conflict of the struggle we are facing. It is a battle between reality and their ever changing beliefs.

They insist that if we would acquiesce to their demands of a complete gun ban or a completely “free” government run health care system the world would be a better place. And they call us obstructionist because we insist what they demand cannot succeed. Today they call us obstructionists instead of limiters. I sometimes wonder if that is deliberate because some of them know the Soviet baggage associated with the word “limiters”.

I don’t wonder what they would do to those that insist upon maintaining a close connection to reality. If only they had the political power to deal with us as they wished our fate would be clear. That path has made countless history books of the most unpleasant nature.—Joe]

A Southerner Repents

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Fred’s confession.
Good point, and if I may be so bold, it is right along the lines of what Cliven Bundy tried to say, but stumbled in his inability to articulate and was then pounced upon by all sides. Thomas Sowell said it too, as have many others who never got accused of racism for it.

The truth is a hot-button issue. You have to know what you’re doing when speaking it. It’s not for everyone. Fred can handle it fine.

Quote of the day—Raúl Ilargi Meijer

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The inequality that matters most is not wealth, but power.

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Power buys wealth infinitely faster than wealth buys power.

Raúl Ilargi Meijer
October 18, 2014
Wealth Inequality Is Not A Problem, It’s A Symptom
[Those that seem to be most concerned with inequality of wealth advocate for giving more power to political elites. Which, of course, makes the symptoms even worse.

I do wish I could escape to Galt’s Gulch.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Anonymous Conservative

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Liberals are not designed to flourish under any conditions but free resource availability, and no danger or exposure to reality. Limit resources or add some dangerous reality, and they will begin to drop like flies.

Anonymous Conservative
October 7, 2014
Ebola, Natural Selection, and Facilitating a K-Shift to Conservatism to Save Lives
[I think this is overlooking that fact that liberals (Progressives) seek and hold on to power. In a time of limited resources or dangerous reality they are likely to use that power to take resources through unlawful means. “The good of the many outweigh the rights of the few”, will be the essence of their justification.

I suspect it will only be in a state of partial or full government collapse that his predictions will become dominant. But the interesting thing is that history has shown us that government collapse can occur remarkably rapid.—Joe]

Quote of the day—John Robb

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ISIS has become the leading supplier of the most potent drug in the world:

Zealotry

Further, Saudi Arabia is almost certainly one of their leading customers and they brought it on themselves.

More than half of Saudi Arabia’s men are under 21 and most of those boys have been given a religious education in a strict literalist tradition.  Further, they’ve been kept in time capsule, protected from many of the changes influences the rest of us.

To young men like this, ISIS is pure historical heroin.  It’s a jihad in the medieval tradition.

John Robb
October 14, 2014
ISIS is the leading supplier of the most potent drug in the world
[Robb is not some armchair analyst. Read his biography. If his book (Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization) were available from Audible.com I would put it next in my queue.

We live in interesting times.—Joe]

What pendulum swing?

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Yesterday a totalitarian want-to-be said:

FBI Director James Comey called Thursday for “a regulatory or legislative fix” for technology companies’ expanding use of encryption to protect user privacy, arguing that without such a fix, “homicide cases could be stalled, suspects could walk free, and child exploitation victims might not be identified or recovered.”

Comey said he understood the “justifiable surprise” many Americans felt after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures about mass government surveillance, but he contended that recent shifts by companies like Apple and Google to make data stored on cell phones inaccessible to law enforcement went too far.

“Perhaps it’s time to suggest that the post-Snowden pendulum has swung too far in one direction — in a direction of fear and mistrust,” said Comey, speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington in his first major policy speech since taking over the FBI 13 months ago.

What?!!! The “pendulum has swing too far” in the direction of privacy? I wasn’t aware that the government had backed off even a tiny bit from their insistence that they get access to everything. As near as I can tell Comey wants the “pendulum” welded to the totalitarian wall.

Schneier has it right.

Quote of the day—Bruce Schneier

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We have one infrastructure. We can’t choose a world where the US gets to spy and the Chinese don’t. We get to choose a world where everyone can spy, or a world where no one can spy. We can be secure from everyone, or vulnerable to anyone. And I’m tired of us choosing surveillance over security.

Bruce Schneier
September 19, 2014
Fake Cell Phone Towers Across the US
[A similar statement can be made about gun ownership.

We don’t get to choose between the everyone has guns and only the good guys have guns. The bad guys will always have guns or at least lethal weapons of some sort. And since they get to choose the time, location, and victim they will frequently succeed in their attacks when the innocent are stripped or discouraged from owning guns.

It’s only when the potential victims have the capability of causing near immediate serious consequences that perpetrators give serious consideration to their life choices. If there are not serious consequences then the case can be made they would be stupid to not to take advantage of those who are vulnerable. If the consequences are significantly delayed, as in a possible jail term a year or two in the future, the perpetrators may not be able to integrate those consequences into the decisions being made in the present.

I’m tired of politicians giving us the false choice of tolerating infringements on our right to keep and bear arms in exchange for imagined security.—Joe]

Greatest danger to the world

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I find this chart very odd (from Apart From Ebola (And Inflation), These Are The Greatest Dangers To The World):

20141016_worries1

In the U.S. and several Western European nations what people consider the “greatest threat to the world” is “Inequality”. While many of the nations where I envision “inequality” being the most obvious, like India, Mexico, and South America, other issues dominate. Is it an expression of envy by people with worthless degrees or unable to graduate from high school seeking “social justice”? Are these people willing to bring chaos to the world because they believe they don’t get what they deserve? Or is this some sort of guilt for living in a relatively free society?

If guilt then I guess I don’t have any because if I were doing such a survey it would not have even crossed my mind to have that as one of the options.

Quote of the day—Jane Thynne

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It would be surprising, as Amis says, that such a warped psychology as Hitler’s could ever be “a considerate and energetic lover”. Yet, once I began to write about the Nazi wives, I realised that the ability of mass murderers to compartmentalise their lives is one of their most disturbing aspects.

A new documentary about Himmler’s home life, called The Decent One, by the acclaimed filmmaker Vanessa Lapa, focuses on the tender personal letters between Himmler and his wife Marga, largely about their daughter Puppi, even as he perpetrated daily atrocities. It raises the same questions as Thomas Harding’s book Hanns and Rudolf, about the private life of Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant, whose children played just yards away from the camp, oblivious of the horrors occurring there.

Jane Thynne
October 15, 2014
What Hitler’s sex life was really like
[What I don’t think most people really understand is how easy it was, and is, for people to murder people on a mass scale. Hitler and the Nazi’s are viewed as terrible monsters the likes of which have only been seen once in history. Wrong.

People, across differing societies, accept orders to do terrible things to other people up to and including murder them. Read Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Or The Gulag Archipelago. Or The Rape Of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II. Those are just some of the better known instances.

You can’t imagine our government rounding up people and putting them in camps? “That just can’t happen in this country”? Wrong. It did happen. Read Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps.

The people that inflict these terrible things did not have warning beacons flashing on their foreheads. Many, if not most, were kind to their family and pets and widely admired in society at the time. In both Hitler’s Willing Executioners and The Rape of Nanking, it is documented that the perpetrators sent photos and postcards of their atrocities to their families and the public at large. They were happily doing their jobs for the good of their country and the betterment of mankind.

I think one of the key flags to identify people who do these things are that they believe that the good of society outweighs the rights of the individual. There may be exceedingly narrow circumstances where this is true, Ebola comes to mind but when I hear someone advocate people “make sacrifices for the greater good” I go on full alert. Those are fighting words to me and such a person is, at a minimum, an enabler of, if not an advocate for, the next genocidal tyrant. And as such they deserve all the contempt given Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ron W

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The main aspect of slavery down through history was that people victimized by slavery were unarmed, disarmed and then kept that way. Anyone who wants to disarm you while they remain armed are for slavery!

Ron W
October 13, 2014
Comment to White slaves
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Cody Wilson

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What excites me is giving this world to the politicians. Our strategy is to literalize and reify their nightmare, to give them the world they’re talking about.

Cody Wilson
October 1, 2014
The $1,200 Machine That Lets Anyone Make a Metal Gun at Home
[The options available to the politicians are to blatantly infringe upon numerous other rights or have it clearly demonstrated that they have no practical way to infringe upon the Second Amendment.

That works for me.—Joe]