Category Archives: Freedom

“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.

Quote of the day—Pam Bergren

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Today’s Courant says that there could be as many as 330,000 people with assault weapons who refused to register them according to the law. Then now is the time to increase the penalty and start rounding them up.

Pam Bergren
East Hartford
February 12, 2014
Prosecute Illegal Gun Owners
[Just so you know what they want done to you for exercising your specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.

Ms. Bergren should be careful what she says. It may be used as evidence against her at her trial.—Joe]

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.

Quote of the day—jrharvil

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If one man, or woman, in 3000 can zero in on and ventilate just one of the loyalists who are supporting the unconstitutional government, the war will be over rather quickly.

The power of a single bullet cannot be understated.

jrharvil
January 12, 2014
Comment to Tyrants beware. 4th Generation Warfare: How the next civil war will be fought.
[Interesting reading.—Joe]

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.
Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Larry P. Card

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I sense a great disturbance in the Force…as if a million liberals screamed out in terror, and were suddenly told by the court to grow up already…

Larry P. Card
Comment on Facebook in regard to a comment of mine to the post May-Issue CCW struck down in California.
[But will they grow up now?

No. They will not grow up now. There will have to be many, many, more lessons taught before they will be fit to participate in a free society with the rest of us. And many will never be fit for more than prison.—Joe]

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.

Quote of the day—Paul Koning

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Prof. Randy Barnett, in his excellent book “Restoring the Lost Constitution” talks at length about this point. Briefly, he argues that you have to think of this (as Weer’d mentions) like the rule for reading a contract. A contract means what the words meant to reasonable people at the time it was signed. If the words change meaning later, that has no effect. Never mind if the words still mean what they did but it’s merely the wishes of one of the parties that have changed.

So it is here. After all, the Constitution is the document that most deserves to be called “Contract with America”. So you have to read each article using the interpretation that normal persons reading it at the time of that article’s adoption would have used.

By the way, that means “original intent” is the wrong term. What matters is not the intent of those who wrote the text — often that’s only a guess and some of the people involved did not have honorable intent anyway. What matters is the common understanding of those who APPROVED the text — the voters who ratified it. And that is easy enough to find out, just read the newspaper discussions and meeting minutes of the time.

If you do this, it’s easy to see that those who oppose the individual rights interpretation of the 2nd Amendment are dishonest and use fraudulent argument to justify their anti-American goals.

Paul Koning
February 12, 2014
Comment to Quote of the day—ebola05
[Shorter version: The U.S. Constitution is the original “Contract with America”.

What isn’t said but I think should have been in the contract is a penalties clause. Something like those who passed and/or enforced laws which were later found to be unconstitutional would be held liable for all legal fees and treble damages.—Joe]

Quote of the day—ebola05

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Anyone who utters the words “the Constitution is a living document” or “the Constitution must be interpreted in the context of the times we live in” believes in a society with no governing rules.

These folks are not “Americans”, but true believers in the Marxist cause.
Ignore them or ridicule them.

ebola05
February 9, 2014
Comment to Second Amendment applies to carrying guns in cars
[I’m not so certain you can safely conclude “the Marxist cause” but I’m confident the rest is correct.—Joe]

What we all knew- safety is job #3

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From the Department of “Duh” comes this little Kiwi gem. Seems a researcher ran an experiment on playground rules and child development. Making things too safe, having too many rules, was bad all the way around. Safe=boring and they didn’t learn about natural consequences of acting like idiots.

As a father of two kids, one girl and one barbarian, I see them do things that make me cringe, but I also know they have fun, play hard, and learn fast when you give them a fair bit of rope. Bones heal, bruises are great for showing off to friends. I’m sure I’ve watched them do things that would make the Risk Management head of any school district stroke out. But the kids are the better and healthier for it, and their mom gets a break because she can’t bear to watch.

Quote of the day—Anonymous Conservative

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As the amygdala enters high gear, its flagging and weighing functions will deteriorate, and details and complex thoughts will become much less noticed than grossly perceived, broad-stroke emotional stimuli. This is why decisions to make Civil War, or just go wantonly killing every Liberal you can find in a bloody orgy of violence, will not be made rationally, whenever they get made.

…

This all relates to politics, in that Liberals try to quiet their own amygdalae by getting government to stimulate Conservative amygdalae in some way. They want to make Conservatives pay for their birth control, to tax them, to disarm them so they can’t defend their families, to regulate their businesses into oblivion, to force them to confront sexual themes and activities which disgust and repel them, to prevent them from enjoying something under the guise of environmentalism, or prevent them from forming free associations to get healthcare or economic advantage. I mean, Leftists try to make parts of US parks off limits to humans who just want to peacefully enjoy them. They even insist Conservatives stop publicly acknowledging realities that bother the Liberal, from the failure of the multi-cult, to the bad effects from destroying the family unit, all so the Liberal can more easily retreat into a bubble of fantasy and false reality that will help the Leftist avoid all amygdala stimulation. That leftist behavior is all amygdala-stimulating to a freedom-loving K-psychology, and Liberals know this. Liberals are the people who feel good when others are irritated. That is not as uncommon a psychology as people think.

The thing is, when Conservatives reach sufficient levels of amygdala stimulation, they will let the pressure out, and it will likely be in the form of violence. We haven’t evolved that much in the last 500 years. The same humans who gladly hunted Comanche nearly to extinction, fought the revolutionary war, angrily killed their own brothers in the Civil War, happily flame-thrower’d Japanese in the Pacific, dragged Mussolini’s dead body through the streets, ruthlessly wanted blood after 9/11, and murdered Khadafi after torturing him on the spot, are all still around today. Push the right buttons, and all of that can happen again.

The danger for us K-strategists is, we tend to fight without thinking clearly, when we approach Meat’s level of amygdala stimulation – and that level of amygdala stimulation is almost the only time we will actually fight. This can lead us to be easily manipulated by r-strategists into fighting other K-strategists. Few Conservatives, pissed that the Federal government is seizing their guns, will hunt down the nearest unarmed Liberal rabbit hiding in their bedroom, and kill them in cold blood in their own house, as the rabbit pleads their helplessness and innocence. Rather, K-strategists will tend to fight anybody but the Liberal, from heavily armed government agents who come to take guns, to radical Muslims trying to implement Sharia on the streets of America, to K-strategists of another race who have been goaded into wanting to fight us by the Left. Even though the Liberal is a vile creature, and the source of all our problems, we are almost programmed to fight anyone but them.

Anonymous Conservative
February 7, 2014
The Amygdala Hijack In Action – A Video Example
[I can’t begin to explain how strongly this resonates with me. I could give many personal examples in my childhood and countless examples from both personal and political experience from the last 20 years.

We must learn how to use this power against them.—Joe]

Not so random thought of the day

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The quote of the day by Lyle this morning caused me to do some more thinking.

I’m certain most of my readers already get this at some level but for me putting it in different words made it more clear.

Libertarians will sometimes point out that government and all laws are declaration of intent to use force. From the law that says pay a sales tax on your purchase of a pair of shoes to the law that says do not murder. In the final analysis they all mean that if you don’t do as the laws says people with guns will hunt you down and either force you to do as the laws says or punish you for your failure to do so. And if you resist they will use the guns against you.

This is true. And it is a necessary part of government and probably is a societal requirement in population groups larger than a few hundred. But what I just realized is the same observation could be used in “the other direction”. Government must be controlled so that it does not become a outlaw. This means men with guns must be willing and able to hunt down the agents of government and force them to comply with the law and/or punish them.

The Constitution is the law authorizing and governing our government and the Second Amendment is the ultimate enforcement authorization for the people to keep government within the bounds of that law.

Those that would demand we give up our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms are demanding there be no effective enforcement of the limits to government. This is no different than there being laws and courts but without a police force to enforce the laws and court decisions. And that is another example of crazy talk by those that want to infringe upon our right to keep and bear arms.

What was the objective?

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April 16, 2013 there was an attack on communications in the area near San Jose California. Minutes later there was an attack on a electrical power substation.

Stories on the events are here:

The WSJ February 5 version is the most complete. But it requires a subscription. Some of the most insightful information comes from this article, such as:

“This wasn’t an incident where Billy-Bob and Joe decided, after a few brewskis, to come in and shoot up a substation,” Mark Johnson, retired vice president of transmission for PG&E, told the utility security conference, according to a video of his presentation. “This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components.”

…

Mr. Wellinghoff, then chairman of FERC, said that after he heard about the scope of the attack, he flew to California, bringing with him experts from the U.S. Navy’s Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center in Virginia, which trains Navy SEALs. After walking the site with PG&E officials and FBI agents, Mr. Wellinghoff said, the military experts told him it looked like a professional job.
In addition to fingerprint-free shell casings, they pointed out small piles of rocks, which they said could have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots.
“They said it was a targeting package just like they would put together for an attack,” Mr. Wellinghoff said.

Ry stopped by my office today to discuss something else and we talked about it some. Ry has friends “everywhere”. One of his friends works for one of the companies that owned some of the fiber optic cables which were cut. Indications are the perpetrators had inside knowledge about the communication system.

There have been no arrests to date. The entire operation shows good planning, execution, and post operation discipline at keeping their mouths shut.

But, as Ry repeatedly asked me this morning, what was the end goal? They didn’t really accomplish anything. Power was rerouted and there wasn’t a significant power outage. They knocked out the substation for a month but “so what?”

Ubu52 trolls with:

To me, this sounds more like one of these Patriot militias trying to start something than it does anything else. So where are the rest of the people just itching for a civil war?

Yeah. Right. And how would attacking infrastructure used by everyone help their cause? These weren’t stupid people. Next?

Mark Johnson, quoted above in the WSJ is also quoted in Foreign Policy as saying:

My personal view is that this was a dress rehearsal.

I’m skeptical. If it was a dress rehearsal then why wait so long for the main event? And it wasn’t exactly a ‘dry’ run. A successful dry run would have been undetected. This was not intended to be undetected.

The dominate speculation on the gun email list at work is foreign terrorists.

Maybe. But why not follow it up with similar attacks? It’s been nearly a year now. Does it take that long to train and coordinate a dozen teams to take down a multi-state region?

An additional reason I’m skeptical of any hypothesis of it being a dress rehearsal is that I would think they would have “burned the bridge” to their inside knowledge of the security communications with that attack. They would assume that coupon would expire within a month or two after they used it. The hardening of the electrical power substations to attacks is much more difficult than hardening the communications vaults and plugging information leaks. They would have to do the “live show” within a week or two to use the same methods as in this attack.

I proposed the following two hypothesizes to Ry which he didn’t immediately shoot down:

  1. They had something additional planned but the power didn’t go out in the target area like they figured it would so the end goal was not attempted.
  2. Proof of capability for an extortion demand but they very nearly got caught, were spooked, and chickened out on following through.

It is interesting stuff regardless of the objective.

Update: See also the Infogalactic entry.

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..

Metatdata, meet chilling effect

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A massive crowd of demonstrators gather to protest government actions, hoping for the anonymity of the crowd to help shield them from official retaliation. A while later they receive a text message:

“Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”

Anyone that tells you mass collection of cell phone metadata is benign is a fool, a useful idiot, dumb as a stump, or a government agent planning on using it. Or all of the above.

Coming soon to a protest near you… if it isn’t there already.

h/t to Paul

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.

Waxman to retire

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Relentlessly anti-gun idiot House Representative from California Henry Waxman announced that he’s retiring, after 20 terms trying to take your rights away, in a temper tantrum over not being more successful at punishing working folks, buying off the poor, not being able to control his hatred for those wanting less government, his inability to work with people less liberal than a RINO, and because freedom is still found in some corners of the nation. While I have no doubt that his district will elect someone else just as liberal as he is, and maybe even dumber and more poorly educated, they will not have the same political connections or seniority, so it’s a Good Thing ™.

To demonstrate just how bizarrely disconnected from reality he is (or how far our of the mainstream his values are), the final line from the news article reads:

“I’m proud of the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “I think it’s a terrific piece of legislation.”

Straw purchases legal?

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Well, ain’t that just shiny. Seems the ATF decided on it’s own, without any supporting law, that straw purchases were illegal, and added that question to the 4473 back in ’95. There is now a case before the supremes about it, Bruce J. Abramski v. United States. The potential for an epic spanking of the BAFTE is in the offing. If we needed any more evidence of their lawlessness, we’d have it here.