Category Archives: Freedom

The problem with experts

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Plenty of research, plenty of information, zero mention of the second amendment or the core principles behind it;

http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2013/01/with-megyn-kelly-on-fox-news.html#comments

In other words, he didn’t make the case.  Instead he argued purely within The Enemy’s framework, proving who had all the control over the conversation.  Human rights, and the power relations between citizens and government, were apparently not even worth mentioning, yet those are THE points to be made.  Listen to their words very carefully.  Lott and Kelly both took the bait, hook, line and sinker, and ran with it.  It’s sad.  The term, “too clever by half” comes to mind.

In fact, a fundamental human right is being impugned and attacked without being mentioned– as though it didn’t exist– as though infringements on that right aren’t specifically prohibited.  “Machineguns are already highly regulated, and aren’t used in crimes” as if that would matter– as if your rights depend on statistics– as if a certain set of infrigements to your rights is all we’re going to talk about.  It would be like discussing how to cook your mother for dinner, with no mention of the mother’s moral right to life or the legal prohibition against killing her and eating her.  Cannibals are arguing over the cannibal pot, and the audience is to see one chef as the more clever culinary tactician than the other.  No doubt many of us on both sides are cheering along like mindless sports fans at a game.  We are better than this.  It’s not a goddamned game.

Quote of the day—Martin Luther King, Jr.

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A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Gerry

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You’d think they would know their American history. Taxes started the debate, going to take the colonials firearms started the war.

Gerry
December 27, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—Alan.
[This may become the quote of the year or the decade. It might even be quote of the century. The next few months or maybe year or two will tell.

Rivrdog has thoughts on the comment as well.

At the highest levels of the gun control movement the people are generally not stupid or ignorant (there are some exceptions). A case could be made that these people know that in the present political climate of oppressive and unjust taxes the confiscation of firearms will be a spark in the tinder box that ignites a rebellion. Furthermore a case could be made that such a rebellion is exactly what they want so they can rid the country of “those troublemakers” that hinder the implementation of their utopia.

If such a disaster occurs I hope the case is proven at their eventual trials.—Joe]

Quote of the day—World of NewsNinja2012

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At the end of 2010, there was an estimated 17.5 trillion dollars in United States retirement assets, including 3.1 trillion in 401k’s and 4.7 trillion in IRA’s. The idea that those who thrive on money and power would permit such an alluring trove to go untapped is laughable.

World of NewsNinja2012
December 25, 2012
Full Steam Ahead On Obama’s Theft Of IRA’s And 401k’s
[H/T to a Tweet from Adam Baldwin.

I think the “Full steam ahead…” title is an exaggeration but I do think long term there is a significant threat that politicians will claim IRA’s and 401k’s will “have” to be confiscated “for the good of the country”, “social justice”, or some other buzz phrase. “Complications” will ensue when they find very few buyers for the confiscated stocks, bonds, and precious metals. In the following political seasons similar justification probably will be given to private ownership of homes, land, and other private property. If the “complications” don’t reach “interesting” levels after the confiscations of the retirement funds they will when they start confiscating homes.

The “fiscal cliff” of next week is little more than a road turtle compared to the Grand Canyon at the end of the unfinished bridge our financial train is headed for at full speed and full power.

“Interesting” times are ahead.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Brent Budowsky

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Military-style assault weapons should be banned in ways that honor the Second Amendment…

Brent Budowsky
December 19, 2012
The NRA and the USA
[And:

  • Our governments should censor and ban religions in ways that honor the First Amendment.
  • The military should be housed in our private homes in ways that honor the Third Amendment.
  • The police should search and take money from random pedestrians in ways that honor the Fourth Amendment.
  • The police should beat confessions from suspects in ways that honor the Fifth Amendment.
  • Slave owners should treat their slaves in ways that honor the Thirteenth Amendment.

Brent buddy, You need to rethink things. Think about being gang raped in a way that honors your body then get back to me. It just doesn’t work that way.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Krishna Murthy

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except army and police no one should have a gun;violent films should be banned;constitution should be amended accordingly;

Krishna Murthy
December 20, 2012
Comment to After Newtown, Gun Control Steps We Can Take
[Why not do away with due process and the right to not testify against yourself since you are gutting the Bill of Rights anyway?

Not just anti-gun. Anti-freedom.

We are better than this.—Joe]

What he said

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This makes sense and is valuable information:

The soft-spoken academic interrupted the conversation about the nuances of gun control to point out that random mass shootings are typically suicides augmented with multiple murders as a way of dramatizing the shooter’s pain and self-hatred. Copious amounts of research show that media publicity of suicides leads to copy-cat crimes. “It seems to me,” the professor politely interjected, “that the more we report that this sort of assault weapon was used, that this person had this kind of bulletproof vest, that this person entered the school this way—that gives other people who are depressed and suicidal and want to take a whole bunch of people with them the knowledge on how to pull it off.” The media, Bell said, should self-censor their sensational, detailed coverage of mass shootings.

But as Barrett (yes, Paul Barrett from Business Week, Gun Blogger Rendezvous 2011, and Boomershoot 2012) points out:

That’s not going to happen—for the same reason that the inevitable commissions and hearings on violence in films and video games will conclude that there’s little for government to do about bloodshed in entertainment. The First Amendment protects a robust right to expression. A parallel exists with the Second Amendment, another emblem of freedom, forged in the 18th century yet still hallowed generations later. These uniquely American rights come with tremendous responsibilities—and haunting costs.

Self-censorship isn’t going to be effective in a free market. The temptation to increase readers/viewers/listeners with “uncensored” coverage will result in fuller, more sensational coverage by a few who will gain from it. There competition will either pay a heavy price in the market place or end the policy of self-censorship.

Censorship will last only if there are direct costs such as fines or prison terms associated with such coverage.

There are haunting costs no matter which direction you go.

Quote of the day—Brennan Bailey

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[A]nti-gun laws don’t reduce violence.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.  Their repeated failures are what enable them to come back demanding more.

Brennan Bailey
December 14, 2012
[From the gun email list at work.

From listening to nearly all anti-gun politicians and most anti-freedom activists it’s very clear they know, or at least strongly suspect, the laws they demand to be passed will not increase public safety. They will say things like “We need to protect our children!”, not “This will make our children safer!”. Or “We should not have to fear gun violence!”, not “Restrictions on gun sales will make us safer!”

Read the CSGV media release on the Newtown Connecticut shooting. Read the Handgun Control Inc.’s Brady Campaign media releases on almost anything. They do not claim their defense of, and avocations for, more restrictions increase public safety. Even Dennis Henigan in his own book Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy admits that it is difficult to determine if gun control decreases violent crime.

It gun control cannot be shown to reduce violence yet people who know this continue to advocate for it then it would appear Bailey is completely justified in saying, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” Whatever their motivation might be we know the motivation is not to reduce violence. And if their motivation is not to reduce violence we are completely justified in not only demanding the repeal of existing gun control laws but calling them out as evil scoundrels.—Joe]

Quote of the day—David Hardy

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Not all the media is in the tank for Obama. It’s a heck of a situation, though, when Pravda is the one hold out.

David Hardy
November 26, 2012
Not all the media is in the tank for Obama
[Even excluding Pravda it’s a slight exaggeration to say that all the media is in the tank for Obama. But it’s close enough to be funny.

The most interesting part of the article is that Pravda is touting the free market and criticizes Obama and the U.S. for repeating the USSR mistake of going down the Marxist path.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Kit Carson

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The Left insists the Nazis are a great evil. It is misdirection. They are the same –Totalitarians. We must resist them both, communists and fascists. They will always be with us. We must never relent.

Kit Carson
November 22, 2012
Comment to The “Hollywood Holocaust” and Other Cold War Myths
[H/T to Glenn Reynolds who was going to get QOTD with his post but a lot of other people already quoted him.

Reynolds claim brings up an interesting thought:

Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis. Which is to say: It’s a good and admirable thing.

To the best of my knowledge it is not against the law in the U.S. to discriminate in hiring based on the politics of the job candidate. The communists and Nazis both used party membership in hiring to great effect. I wonder how much it is being used by the left now in jobs and if it can be openly used. I know one rabid Obama supporter who changed her name on Facebook because she believed it was making it difficult to get work.

If employers openly hired and purged existing employees based on their politics what would be the result? Could that turn our collapse into socialism around? Or would it inspire laws such that employers could not discriminate or even required discrimination based on loyalty to the socialists in this country?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jeffrey Singer

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Health insurance will soon be extinct. Unlike other members of the species – property and casualty insurance, life insurance, liability insurance, auto insurance – political predators have been steadily killing off health insurance over the years. Soon it will cease to exist, allowing for more intrusive regulation of behavior.

Jeffrey Singer
November 16, 2012
Jeffrey Singer: Health insurance an endangered species
[H/T to Barb L. via email.

I’ve heard it claimed that Obama Care has to have been specifically designed to destroy the health care industry. Singer explains why the health insurance industry will be destroyed.—Joe]

Putting setbacks into perspective

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Whenever I think things are going badly, and I’m bummed about
the prospects on the political scene, I think the barbarians are
winning, and it’s all going to hell in a hand-basket, I take solace in history.
Rome was the most powerful empire the world had ever seen, had built amazing feats
of engineering, and been sustained by astonishing feats of logistics, and had
many stories of unimaginable bravery and personal strength. It has existed
nearly forever, it seemed. Rome Was Eternal.  

Until it was sacked. And repeatedly taken over by a
succession of military despots, kings, generals, armies, Senators, and foreigners,
and was sunken into the darkness of barbarism and illiteracy, even as each new replacement
empire claimed the mantel of “Rome’s successor.” Some people fled the invaders,
and hid in the nastiest and most inaccessible of the local swamps and fens,
amidst the islands and channels where cavalry and armies couldn’t go after them.
They fled the easy (but crime- and corruption- and invader-infested) life of the
hills and fertile soil of northern Italy. It was a hard life, with no powerful
protector, difficult farming, lots of places to wreck your boat, fetid water and disease, and no time
for anything as non-essential as high culture or art. They clung to life, remembered the best of Rome, and
did the best they could.

Nearly a thousand years later, the city-state of Venice was
one of the most powerful in the world, and its fleet (with help from Spain and
the Papal States) crushed and halted the fleet of the powerful Imperial Ottoman Turks at Lepanto. Ideas are powerful things, and humans are resilient. We may
not fight our way out of the darkness before we die, nor may our children, but
we pass on the good ideas and knowledge to them, and instill in them a sense of
history, and, one day, it WILL happen. Property rights, individual freedom, limited
government, and free markets work.
They will, eventually, take over, because they are more powerful than the
forces trying to limit them… but it may be a long, long slog, and will most assuredly
NOT be a straight line.

 

(History geeks, take note: this is the simplified version of
things, where the essence is correct, in the interest of telling a good story
with a powerful idea to put current events in perspective.)

Quote of the day—tdiinva

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Since nanny Bloomberg has chosen to limit his citizens self defense option his failure to call in the Guard is failure to live up to his obligations as their nanny.

tdiinva
November 19, 2012
Comment to Bloomberg F-Bombs Request for National Guard Aid.
[Via a link from Sebastian.

It’s a fundamental problem of being a nanny with a scope larger than a few children. Just because a nanny is an appropriate solution in some situations does not mean is is possible to scale it up and make it work at a much larger scale. If it did work we would see both biological and manmade systems organized much differently than we do. Both evolution and the free marketplace would have created systems with central control to dominate over those systems that pushed the decision making to the lower levels rather than pushing it up. Your brain doesn’t control the details of cell metabolism and your web browser doesn’t control how the mouse determines if it has been moved.

I’m channeling Thomas Sowell as best I can with the following.

The problem is one of information. You, a fully functional adult, know more than anyone else about your situation and what is best for you. You know a lot more about your family than people not in your family. You know more about how to do your job than people that don’t do your job. You know more about your community than people outside your community. And you know a lot more about your situation than does the mayor of your city, the governor of your state, and the president of the country. Central planning fails because the people with the most information about the situation are not making the decisions.

Even if it were possible for all the information needed for making optimal decisions were to be communicated to the central planners they cannot process the information nor come up with innovative alternatives that the individuals and small groups closer to the problem can.

One might be tempted to say that central planning failed in the past because of this fundamental problem but we have much better communication and processing power than we did even a decade or two ago. Central planning can work now that we have computers. Those people are wrong.

Even ignoring the obvious SkyNet dystopian scenarios look at the way engineers solve control problems in complex systems now. Heinlein was a visionary in many ways but “Mike” the computer in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress will never be implemented as Heinlein envisioned it—handling payroll, air flow, mass launchers, communications, and a thousand other things.

Whether it is a large software program, a cell phone network, or a sewage treatment plant the far cheaper, better performing, and feasible solution is to delegate “authority” to very small subsystems to solve the issues that are local. The video driver in your computer is given a command to set the background to a color and output text at certain coordinates on the display. The video driver “knows” how to control the chips of the graphics board to change the color of the display and what address in memory corresponds to the coordinates of the screen. The local cell tower “knows” signal strength of your phone, the number of other cell phones it is handling, and communicates with nearby cell towers to enable a clean handoff such that you don’t have a service interruption as you move from location to location. The components of the sewage system control air and water flow rates, agitation, and chemical balances without knowledge of the price of electricity or the growth rate of the town it serves.

At each subsystem level the information and the resources are available such that they can do the right thing to operate their area of responsibility in a manner that is a tradeoff of performance, time to implement, initial cost, and operating cost.

Bloomberg and other central planners do not and cannot have the information to even approximate optimal decisions and they deny resources to those that do have the information. The result is a dystopian world that has the potential to be just as catastrophic as one where “SkyNet” has all the information and resources to create Elysium but instead makes the decision to destroy humanity.—Joe]

The First Amendment was supposed to protect…

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…your right to speech, religion, assembly and redress of grievances.  The Second amendment was supposed to protect the First.  Both will be tested in ways you are not expecting.  You will be blindsided.  Expect it.


When someone doesn’t like what you’re saying and tries to do something about it, your Second amendment right says, “I don’t think so, Skippy”.


Uncle’s post here, if you listen to the broadcast, reveal a looming contest.  There is an on-going attempt to marginalize you, through legal, economic, social and bureaucratic pressures.  Pay attention.  Pay attention also to who stands their ground and who caves.  Don’t bother with the rationalizations, but stay focused on principles.

Middle East heating up

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My dad asked me what my thoughts on the Israel / Palestine
issue were, and why it could never seem to get a lasting negotiated peace
agreement of some sort. My answer was:

As long as there were people at the top who had a personal
vested interest in keeping it going, it would never stop, and pretty much all
the leaders (both secular and religious) in the surrounding Islamic nations
find having a Jewish state nearby to blame everything on very useful. So, IMHO,
it will never have a negotiated peace
for any significant period of time.

Historically, negotiated peace treaties are worth
less than the paper they are printed on; they are merely used to play for time.
War (on some scale) seems the normal state of most people of the world, and the
only time there was peace was when someone big and strong came through, crushed
all rebellion or dissent utterly, and made it clear that fighting was NOT going
to end well (i.e., heads on pikes, razed cities, leaders hunted down like dogs,
etc). The Mongols, the Huns, Alexander to Great, the Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians,
the Ottoman Turks, the British Empire, Germany and Japan post-WW II. The list
is seemingly endless. Peace of a generation or longer comes not from negotiation
and good will. It never has. Peace comes from having strength and will enough
to make the cost of NOT-PEACE prohibitively high to the leaders that would ask for war. I say let Israel do what it needs
to do to expand and secure its borders, and if that means we can’t count the
dead in the radioactive wastelands of its newly established border-land DMZ
& Nature Preserve, well, so be it.

I thought I took care of that

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Roberta, Sebastian, and Tam report on the nanny’s in Indiana getting their panties twist over Tannerite.

A few years ago almost exactly the same thing happened. A T.V. station (WSBTV) made a video whining about, as Roberta said, “Scary–Go-BOOM!” They got a politician to talk about how terrible it was and how he was “going to do something” about it.

I sent them an email and within 24 hours the video was taken down and we didn’t hear anything more about it. Not even from the politician.

This is a little different case in that they didn’t use any of my video for their whine piece but the same principles apply. Here is a starting point for your letter to the T.V. station. Modify it a bit and you have one for your legislator:

You recently produced a video about a legal product used by thousands of people every year and found people willing to say it scared them and you. For you to engage in a such a biased and even bigoted attack on a legal product used in a legal manner is exceedingly offensive to me and thousands of other people.

I can’t imagine what you were thinking. Would you show video of people using guns to legally hunt, shoot tin cans, or put holes in paper targets and then contact the opportunist politicians because you were worried someone might use their guns to commit a terrorist act? Or how about showing someone having a glass of wine with dinner or drinking a beer in their backyard? Would you demand the government do something about this because of your concerns about drunk driving?

When I was growing up my family was able to, and did, buy dynamite, blasting caps, at the local hardware store with no special license or transportation requirements. We paid for it, picked it up out back, put in it in the trunk of the car and drove home with it. That the average person can still acquire explosives easily, legally, and safely is a testament to what a great country we have. It shows that not only the government is subservient to its citizens but that its citizens are responsible and can be trusted.

If you had demonstrated these explosives were used in thousands of crimes each year I might think you had reason to be concerned. But you did not do this. You could have used that same product and those same video to show what a great country we have. You could have shown what unique freedoms we have and how those freedoms are not being abused. Seattle King 5 Evening Magazine did that with this video: http://www.boomershoot.org/2005/KING5.wmv. But you didn’t do that. You merely demonstrated you are a Puritan–afraid that someone, someplace, is having fun.

Winning the culture wars

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A few days ago one of the women I met online in my nine dates with six women in nine days adventure sent me an email asking information about a local gun range and instructor for a female friend of hers.

Yesterday I had my semi-annual eye exam (yes, my eyesight is quite good). I wore an Insights Training sweatshirt. As I walked in the door a female patient looked at me and said, “Insights! Are you an instructor?” “No”, I told her, “I’m just a student of theirs.”

It turns out she had worked at Weapons Safety Inc. (a gun shop and range) when Insights did a lot of their classes there and hence was quite familiar with Insights. The female optometrist asked the other patient a little about what it was like to work there and then it was back to business.

As I was waiting the female receptionist was talking to still another female patient about LASIK and told her that her ex had bad eyes and wore very thick glasses. He then had LASIK and the next year was able to win a rifle competition he had no chance of winning with his previous eyes. The woman she was talking to didn’t seem the least bit fazed.

This was all in the Seattle area. Historically Seattle is very anti-gun.

We have essentially won the culture war on guns. We need to keep taking new people to the range (I had another one scheduled for 2:00 PM today but she became ill and we are rescheduling) but short of a major screw up the worst case in the next decade or so is that progress toward our end goal is halted.

But there is another culture war that looks every bit as bad as things did for gun rights advocates 15 years ago.

We have long known something was very wrong with our country. The gun issue was/is just one symptom. TSA is a big deal. The war on drugs is a big deal. The government involvement in health care is a big deal. The welfare state is a big deal. The government involvement in education is a big deal. The national debt is a huge deal.

Looking at the bigger picture there are just so many things wrong that it is easy to want to just run away, create Galt’s Gulch, or encourage secession. 15 years ago the gun rights situation looked hopeless too. As Tam said if you arrived as a time traveler at a gun store in 1995 and told them the future of gun ownership in 2012 they would have found the time travel part the most believable part of your story.

I’m not saying “everything is going to be okay”. In fact in at least one way we have essentially a mathematical proof that it’s game over and we are just watching the clock run out. But the question is, what do we do about it?

Some people are buying gold and silver. Lots of people are buying guns and ammo. But you can’t eat gold or silver. You can eat a bullet, but one is your lifetime limit and few people consider the Smith and Wesson retirement plan the best they can do. Stockpiling food and water in the city, at best, will only get you by as long as your supplies last. And even if you join up with a like minded tribe deep in the woods it’s going to be at best a couple of generations until the latest fashion debate is about how to arrange which type of bird feather on your fur coat and there is talk of an “assault weapon ban” on crossbows with the real agenda of getting rid of all bows and arrows and maybe spears too.

I think there may be a better way. I have the big vision but I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to implement it. It’s sort of like I know I need a bridge across this dangerous ravine. I know a fair amount about different types of bridges but none of them seem to be feasible. I suppose it’s possible the “ravine” is actually the “Grand Canyon” and we simply don’t have the “technology”, money, and/or time to build such a bridge in the time we have left. But if you consider 1995 the darkest days in the gun wars and a win being clearly visible by 2003 (most people predicted the AWB probably wasn’t going to be renewed) then that only took eight years.

One way to look at that is those eight years is that they were essentially a politically delaying action until we got our culture war game on. I claim a similar situation exists today. I’m sure freedom has not yet reached it’s nadir but there is a fair amount of political action that will slow the descent. If we can get our culture game going for freedom then we might be able pull out a win before the clock runs out.

The problem is I don’t see how to win the culture war. I don’t see that we have effective weapons in this culture war. I don’t even see how to fight the culture war. People are certainly trying but we are rapidly losing.

With guns we could take people to the range and the anti-gun people didn’t have anti-gun ranges to compete with us. The anti-freedom people have “free stuff” and “security” to offer. It’s all a lie in the long, or even intermediate, term but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is here and now. The media shows the sick getting treatment, the hungry being fed, and the TSA proclaiming the world is a safer place when they find eight ounces of toothpaste in grandmas carryon luggage. The hidden costs and the cancerous belief that more government is the solution to every problem are difficult to see and in the “distant” future of a few years from now.

What are the freedom games that would be the equivalent of USPSA, IDPA, Steel Challenge, and Boomershoot? Something that quickly engages people and gives almost immediate feedback would be ideal. It is a video game? But maybe the definition of “immediate” can be stretched a bit. Perhaps it is an experimental city with no taxes on income, capital gains, or sales. Or maybe it is teaching philosophy in our schools.

The way I see it we can win the culture war in the next few years or we can say George Orwell was off by two generations.

Quote of the day—George Orwell

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If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part 3, Chapter 3.
[A good case can be made for this claim.

Prove him wrong.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jenna Myers Karvunidis

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We need gun control. Obama, if you’re reading, which I know you are of course, it’s time to tackle gun control now that your second term is in the bag. Be a badass. Do it.

I got carded at Dominick’s the other day for buying natural cough medicine. Ingredients? Honey and eucalyptus – a real meth lab waiting to happen. We live in a world where cough medicine is regulated, where you need a license to fish and in most states, women have to endure mandatory waiting periods for a certain medical procedure. Our cars have to pass emission inspections. Restaurants have to adhere to health codes. But guns? Oh, you just buy those and toss ’em in your closet for your kids to find, sell them on the black market or twirl them around your thumbs like Yosemite Sam. Root ’em toot ’em! Guns are dangerous and yet remain highly unregulated.

Jenna Myers Karvunidis
November 7, 2012
Obama second term: Gun control
[

She recognizes being carded for honey and eucalyptus is silly but rather than call for an end to that she demands guns, a specific enumerated right, be more regulated than they already are.

From a legal standpoint governments have the power to, and do, regulate honey and eucalyptus. There is even a good chance they could ban both and no court would overturn it (the voters probably would be different story). A specific enumerated right such as your religion, speech, reading material, firearms, a speedy trial, right to legal counsel, and right to not incriminate yourself? Not so much.

But she is from Chicago, you shouldn’t expect her to understand freedom and rights.—Joe]

Take a look

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I’ve said before that if you look, I mean really look, for the meaning in ads, political speeches, or anything else, you often come up short because there isn’t any, or it may be a clever deception, or purely an appeal to emotion.  Often it works so well that people will attribute words to a message that weren’t there, and different people will attribute completely different meanings to the same message.


Look at how much of media (movies, books, music, all of it, even news) is an attempt to arouse emotions, and how little of it is aimed at calm awareness or true interest in a subject.  That statement all by itself might even make you uncomfortable.  Aroused emotions drive out calm awareness, don’t they?  And yet we seek the emotional stimuli, and try to keep them going in other people.  So what are we trying to drive out? 


This post is aimed at reinforcing Rolf’s post below.


I watched a newish movie the other day. It came highly recommended.  “Battleground LA” or something like that, it was called.  There was so much emotional appeal, the story had to take several time-outs just so all the characters could emote at each other, even in the heat of battle with an RPG in midair, they took time out to emote.  Get blown over a wall by that RPG, take more time out to emote, etc.  I’ve complained for years now that every time I look to some program or other for information of interest, it turns out to be another damned, stinking soap opera.  Soap operas with guns, soap operas in a machine shop, soap operas about nature, politics, you name it– emote emote emote.


Our culture has become one of buzzing emotions, looking for more buzz, reinforcing the buzz, getting buzz from others while trying to get a buzz going in someone else.  It happens in our homes, at school, on the job, everywhere.  Police (the little girls) love to emote, both at each other and at their prey, and they get us emoting back at them.  Our local cops got all the kids at school at each other’s throats last week and this.  It happens on both sides of the political divide, too, and it ain’t good.  I don’t need to site any examples, because you can think of dozens without even trying.  You’re probably emoting at your spouse or roommate right now.  Most of us with an agenda spend most of our time preaching to the choir, rousing their emotions, while at the same time rousing the emotions of our opposition against us.  What are we trying drive out of other people with our appeals to emotion?


So we have a problem.  Is a good solution more likely to come from buzzing emotions or calm awareness?  I don’t know; sometimes I have something “all figured out” because I wasn’t able to stop thinking about it, because it was knawing at me, only to find later that I had the much better answer come spontaneously after I’d quit fretting over it.


If your house is on fire, you have an immediate problem that needs an immediate response.  If you’ve ever been in any kind of similar situation, and you ended up doing exactly the right thing against poor odds, and you still have a hard time explaining it, you will remember that what did the trick was focused awareness taking control.  You know of what I speak.  If you ended up handling it very poorly, you will probably remember that an emotional state took control, preventing you from focusing properly on the task at hand.  I’ve gone both ways, so I can speak with some experience.