Category Archives: Freedom

Quote of the day—ISH (Mininerd)

Posted on by

You smell that? Do you smell that? Schadenfreude, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning. You know, one time we watched the “great communicator” liberal president bomb, on live tv. Read the transcript. We didn’t find one of ‘em, not one stinkin’ anti-gun talking point. When it was all over I walked up to the podium. The smell, you know that patchouli and tears smell? The whole hill. Smells like … victory.

ISH (Mininerd)
October 4, 2012
Comment to Watching the Twitter Debate Meltdown.
[Someday, in the not too distant future, one of my grandkids will be reading the archives of my blog and ask, “Grandpa, what is a ‘Brady Campaign’?”

I will then explain to them about the KKK, the Aryan Nations, Handgun Control, Inc., and other organizations that tried to infringe upon our natural and constitutionally protected rights and how many thousands of people spent millions of hours and 100’s of millions of dollars defeating them. And how they are now nothing more than a sad footnote in history. And I imagine them saying, “That’s boring. Can we use the M-16 to blow something up with Boomerite?” And with tears streaming down my cheeks I will say, “Yes. Yes we can. You are welcome.”—Joe]

But I only paid X for the gun!

Posted on by

I’ve brought this up before, but I keep hearing that assertion.  It says you can never pay more to accessorize a gun that the price you paid for the gun.  It should always be less.  I’ve had people mention their free guns– gifts.  “I didn’t pay a dime for the gun, so how can I justify X?” or “I only paid 100 dollars for this Carbine back in the ’60s…!” (Never mind that it may now be worth 800 or more)


There are high-end optics that cost more than almost any firearm made, except for some of the fine double rifles, and you aren’t going to be using these optics on a fine double rifle.  Ditto for some of the hand-made flintlock longrifles and such, and a few boutique rifles.  There are also sound systems that cost more than a lot of used cars, so I guess you have suffer with an inferior sound system until you can afford a more expensive car to put it in.  A friend of mine once had a $50K sound system in his apartment, so I guess he was really breaking the rules.


The way I see it, if you paid some low price for your rifle, and it does the job you need of it, then you now have more money to spend on a good optic.  I don’t see a conflict here.  It’s all about the setup you want, not some spreadsheet of arbitrary rules based on relative prices of the components.


If it makes anyone feel better, I once had a 150 dollar stereo in a 100 dollar car, with a 500 dollar set Michelins under it.  Can someone make the case that I should have restricted myself to crapy tires because I only paid 100 bucks for the car?  I put over 100K miles on that car too, which included some rather long road trips – you want to me run retreads on it?  Uh; no.  It had well over 200K on it when it finally died a violent death, otherwise, 20 years later I might still be driving my 100 dollar 1963 Dodge 330.  What’s your problem?


ETA,  From comments;  “You are not accessorizing your rifle, you are accessorizing your SCOPE!”  That is a better way to look at it.  Get a great scope and find a rifle that’s good enough for it.  Then you have something.

Back to the basics

Posted on by

I’ve been debate the pro-rights side on guns for so long that I sometimes forget that it is easy to leave newcomers behind. Tonight was a case in point.


I left the following comment, via Facebook, on a “Think Progress” article entitled “An Aurora Shooting Survivor Makes A Powerful Gun Control Ad:



We had the debate. Your side lied, cheated, and took unfair advantage at every opportunity. But still your side lost. Big time.


You side lost the safety argument and your side lost the legal argument (see the U.S. Supreme Court decisions D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago). You have no arguments left. The conversation was over years ago and all you are doing now is whining about the outcome. Go tell your problems to a therapist because the adults in this conversation aren’t interested in your delusions of relevancy.


Yes. It is recycled from a blog post I made a while back.


A former manager of mine at Microsoft (a really nice guy BTW) responded with:



Joe, If I were to support the idea of a civilian carrying a gun, you’d be one of the few people I would trust with one. Because I think you know what you’re doing. However, I don’t get why the law allows any average Joe (pun intended) who has no f*ing clue — or worse, has dangerous intent — to easily carry one as well. It makes no sense to me.


Okay. Time to get back to the basics. Shyam is a naturalized citizen from Sri Lanka. He doesn’t have the full history of gun control, gun ownership rates, and crime statistics in this country at the tip of his tongue. And probably 99+% of the native citizens don’t either. My original comment presumes too much. So I followed up with the following:



First off, you missed an important concept. The law doesn’t “allow”. The law has relatively few restrictions. Freedom is the default position rather than “allowed” or “granted”.


Getting past that point there are two reasons there are relatively few restrictions: 1) There is no data to indicate it makes the violent crime rate worse; 2) It is a specific enumerated right just as is the right to free speech or freedom of religion even if the speaker/writer has no clue what they are talking about. A case can be made that certain books (Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto as well as certain religious texts come to mind) are responsible for more deaths than private ownership of firearms. Yet we “allow” free speech.


Another way to think of this is that violence against an innocent person is already illegal. Making the possession of a tool that enables such violence illegal is not going to increase the barrier against the more fundamental crime. And furthermore even a complete ban on firearms cannot be expected to be any more effective than a complete ban on certain recreational drugs are now. Which is to say, “Completely ineffective”. But what such restrictions do accomplish is create a black market for such items and nearly completely eliminate any good that can be accomplished by the use of such items. Hence law abiding people who need to defend themselves are prevented from defending themselves with the best tools available while those with criminal intent get full advantage of such tools against disarmed victims.


There. I hope that helps.


Update: Shyam replied a few minutes later:



You had me, up to the point about self defense. I once had a manager at MS who carried around a Rambo knife, for self defense. He even once took it on the plane, on a work trip to Arizona (usability study of some educational software we were building) and San Francisco. Long story short, someone in baggage handling stole his knife .. and he was very uncomfortable being out in the open, walking around sfo that night… we should get lunch sometime. No guns or Rambo knives 🙂


My reply:



I work downtown near Westlake Park. If we are close enough to walk name the time and the place for lunch.


Interesting about self defense being the place that I “lost him”.

GRPC day 1

Posted on by

Yesterday was the main day for the Gun Rights Policy Conference. It was wonderful meeting and listening to all the big names of the gun rights movement.

The thing that struck me most was that it would appear that we had more speakers at our conference than everyone that attends the Brady Campaign meetings. I count nearly 70 speakers.

Another thing of particular note is that the attitude at GRPC 2012 is much different than the last one I attended in 2000. The feeling was of confidence and reports of winning on multiple levels and in so many jurisdictions. There are more than 8,000,000 active CCW licenses out there. There are 200 campuses that do not infringe upon the rights of the students to defend themselves.

Alan Gura was not able to attend due to the birth of his son a week ago. But he did send us a report telling us that there is a good chance the next 2nd Amendment case to reach the Supreme Court will be one regarding the right to carry a firearm in public. In 2000 we were having trouble getting a majority of states to recognize it as a privilege.

Last night at dinner I found a small table with some room at it and asked if the chair was taken. It wasn’t and I was welcomed to sit down. After a bit one of the people introduced himself as Fran Becker the Republican challenger to Carolyn McCarthy (of “shoulder thing that goes up” fame). Wow! As we chatted about McCarthy I said something about it seemed that those most ignorant about firearms are those most opposed to firearms ownership. He extended that thought and said liberals seem to be ignorant on nearly all issues. I told him of my recent date with a liberal being like a visit into an alternate reality and he started taking notes. He said he really liked how I expressed a particular thought.

Wow!

I emailed him a link to the post where I had developed the thought in more detail.

I have a plane to catch now but there will be lots of pictures and other content to post about GRPC 2012 in the coming weeks.

Free speech as a revolutionary tool

Posted on by

H/T to Bruce (Squirrel Hunter) who sent this to me via email.

There may come a time when speech isn’t free and/or nearly all freedoms are gone in which case you or your descendants have little choice but to make like you are George Washington. Don’t jeopardize the last ditch option just because you don’t need to exercise it today.

WashingtonFreeSpeech

Of course this reminds me of something Weer’d Beard said.

Brace For Impact

Posted on by

I was asked by Gresham Bouma’s PR guy to speak at a press conference held last Monday.  I had all weekend to think about it.  The idea was to have some local Business people talk about their challenges in running and growing a business in this economy, with emphasis on the old “jobs” meme (a meme I find ridiculous simply because jobs are the side effect of creation and production, which in turn arise from inspiration, which can’t blossum without liberty. If we seek to add “jobs” without addressing all those prerequisites, we’re completely missing the point and if we allow the prerequisites to exist, we don’t have to worry about “jobs”).


It was only as I was driving to the conference that this little thought came;


A lot of people are not so much thinking of hiring right now as they’re just Bracing For Impact.


I wanted to keep it really short, so I just laid out the two visions of government.  In one, I said, the government’s job is to reign us in, control us, direct us, redirect us, tell us what to do and what not to do.  It starts with the notion, which comes to every one of us at some point as we watch other people speaking, debating, or running a company, that WE could do a better job if only WE were in charge.  I made the point that in a free society, that confidence, justified or not, is what inspires us to go out into the market and prove ourselves.  It’s the motivation for the engine of prosperity.


It’s when government comes along, appeals to the spirit that tells us “I can do better”, then promises to take the reins and use the coercive power of government to FORCE people to “do it the right way” that we step off into the abyss.


The other vision of government is that its job is to protect our rights– our property rights and freedom, rather than to direct us.


I looked the press people in the eyes and asked them, personally; “If you were starting a business, under which model of government would you prefer to do it– the one that says government’s job is to rein you in, control you, direct you, pile on requirements and restrict you, and then tax you to pay for public works, or the one in which government is there to protect your rights?  “I think it’s pretty obvious” and I left it at that.  It only took two minutes or so.


I was watching an old episode of Glen Beck a few nights later.  It was almost year old and I’d never seen it, but I was randomly searching the site– something I’d never done because I don’t have the level of subscription that allows me to watch much on there.  But there was that old episode under some other heading, way down on the menu, and in it were those exact same words that Beck said had come to him last summer;  “Brace for Impact”.


So what if things aren’t going to get all that bad.  Maybe we somehow can avoid hyper-inflation, energy and fuel rationing, and all the unrest combined with blatant and not so blatant attacks from all directions by multiple enemies of liberty.  If you’re somewhat ready anyway, the worst that can happen is that you’ll have some extra food, backup power, expanded capabilities and overall greater independence.  That doesn’ seem like a bad thing.

Quote of the day—Roberta X

Posted on by

Mitt’s probably the best practical hope — and a thin, thin reed indeed. Changing the slope isn’t the same as reversing the slope.

Roberta X
September 27, 2012
“Not Getting it” Less Is Not The Same As Having A Clue
[I agree. And as near as I can tell the slope is such that sliding off the “cliff” is pretty close to inevitable. No set of viable politicians will be, or can be, elected that have the political capital to reverse the slope. Approximately 47% of the population is dependent upon the slope remaining the same or increasing. Reaching them and getting them to vote against their own short term best interest is extremely unlikely.

I see the communists and socialists passing out flyers on the street corners and signs, speeches and chanting in the park across the street from where I work. I feel a chill up my back when I wonder if these are the same indicators that foretold the coming to power of the tyrannical governments of the USSR, China, Italy, and Germany and the deaths of 100+ million people in the last century.

I understand the psychology of postponing the chaos, hardships, and horrors of the “safety net” (it’s really more of a trampoline that bounces people up and then off into the dirt at a later time) and the “guarantees” of other “free” stuff people have come to depend on going away. But it’s going to happen. The only questions are when, how massive the disruption will be, and the form of society as we reboot. Is postponing it going to make it less painful or more? Without data and very little rational thought to support the belief I believe it will make it more painful.

I will vote in a few weeks but without passion or even “practical hope”, as Roberta put it, the elections can change much. I’m betting my best interest is in continuing to invest in copper, lead, brass, nitrogen based chemicals, food production, and smart capable friends as my hedge against inflation and the big “splat” at the bottom of the cliff.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Bubblehead Les

Posted on by

If there’s any conflict between Hillary and the Chicoms, it’s kinda like the difference between a Maoist and a Trotskyite.

Bubblehead Les
September 26, 2012
Comment to She’s a libertarian all of a sudden.
[In political philosophy anyway. Hillary wouldn’t want to play second fiddle to Mao or Trotsky.

I’ve read a fair amount about Hillary. She is smart, extremely ambitious, craves power, and the ice water in her veins is pumped by a heart of steel.—Joe]

She’s a libertarian all of a sudden

Posted on by

Seen at Tam’s;



U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in turn urged China and its Southeast Asian neighbors to resolve disputes “without coercion, without intimidation, without threats and certainly without the use of force”.


I wish she’d seen the light 40 years or so ago.  I wish the U.S. government would treat our citizens the same way.  I was at a press conference Monday to say the same thing for Gresham Bouma, but we got thrown off the front porch of the Idaho Department of Labor (which will cease to exist if Hillary gets her way with her new-found policy of eschewing all coercion, intimidation and threats).


Hillary is of course a die-hard Progressive (incremental comminust) and so she is all about using coercion, intimidation and threats.  Her quote above does prove that she at least understands coercion, intimidation and threats to be bad things, even if she’s been advocating them all her adult life.  There wouldn’t be a Democrat Party without coercion or threats, and only about 3 or 4% of Republicans could exist in their current iterations.  It could be said that the main purpose of today’s Democrat Party (together with their media allies and the government education complex) is to rationalize the increased use of coercion, intimidation and threats, and I suppose the purpose of the Republican Party has been to make it possible for the Democrats.


But talk about brass.  She’s made a career calling for coercion and threats in nearly every aspect of American life, and now it’s not to be tolerated from communist China.  Wow.  They must be laughing pretty hard at her right now.  You’d think she would lay awake nights thinking of her wild contradictions.  That is if she had a conscience.  Even if she were only concerned about her reputation for the sake of her position and power, caring nothing for the truth, maybe she’d want to think a little bit before opening her mouth.

Random thought of the day

Posted on by

If people “are crazy, can’t be trusted, and need to be regulated and controlled”, as one Socialist recently told me, then doesn’t that mean that government which are made up of people need the same type of supervision?

It would seem to me that, if you value consistency and hence truth, you must conclude that either both people and governments made up of people need to be controlled or governments/supervisors must be made up of greater beings.

Governments which rule by divine authority have an extremely poor record of generating peace, prosperity, and happiness. Hence I think we can dismiss them outright. That leaves us with governments which have some degree of control over their actions or no control.

Again it would seem the choice is clear. Governments with no controls upon them are historically hostile to peace, prosperity, and happiness. Hence the only question would seem to be how much control. What is the optimal amount of control for a government and it’s people such that some measure of “public good” is optimized?

I suspect we have all the data we really need to answer that question. We have 50 states with various amounts of controls upon the government and the people living in those environments. The question can thus be refined a bit more. How do you measure “public good” and how do the various states rate using that system of measurement? Do there exist states with too much or too little control of government and/or their people? Or can it be shown that all states have too much/little control over government and/or the people and we need to increase/decrease the scope of the regulation of government/people in our experiments to find the optimum?

I think I know the answer but I’m willing to look at the data to see if my hypothesis is correct.

Or course there is also the valid concern of natural rights and where government gets it’s authority to regulated and control people. That is my preferred domain to have a discussion about limits on governments. But it’s challenge enough to get people to think about facts and results. Getting them to think about fundamental principles is generally an advanced topic beyond the scope of ordinary discourse.

What would YOU do?

Posted on by

Someone I Know (hereinafter refered to as SIK) related an incident at his home that occurred some weeks ago, and I thought that this blog would be a good place to mention it.


In the wee hours of the morning, SIK woke up, went to the living room for some reason or other, and found a stranger passed out on his couch.  He tried rousing him to no avail.  Shook him a bit, even, as you would do to wake up someone for an urget conversation.  No response.  The stranger was breathing, but obviously very drunk.  SIK went back to bed.  In the morning SIK’s wife went to the combination room to make coffee while SIK managed to rouse said drunk for a little chat.  Mr. 20-something-year-old Drunk didn’t know where he was at first.  He apologized for the intrusion.  SIK offered him a ride.  Drunk declined, and went on his way.  Wife said that she thought she’d seen him at a nearby house before (nothing suspicious – just there, like a neighbor or friend of a neighbor) but wasn’t sure.  SIK and his wife have guns in the house and know how to use them, if that matters to you.


End of story.


What would you do?  What is the right thing to do?  SIK has no small children or anyone else at the house.  Just he and his wife, if that matters to you.  I think it would matter to me, as I am something of a mother bear if you will.  I don’t know the answer for my sake.  There are many, many situations that are extremely difficult, at best, to second-guess if you’re not there– if you’re not the person responsible for making the decision.  So don’t.  You weren’t.  Just think about it.  I can tell you from experiences (though very different from this scenerio) that I have a hard time going counter to my “instinct”, which ever way that “instinct” might go.  Or is it “conscience”?  That could be a strength or it could be a weakness.  I admit that I don’t know.  Reason, alone, as I believe most people think of it, doesn’t always provide the best answer, but then maybe it depends on the depth of the reason.  In this case I think it could be argued that SIK made the worst possible decision, from a “tactical” point of view, and that at the same time it had the best possible outcome.  But what if the guy had been in a diebetic coma or something?


Edited to Add; The front door was unlocked, so the guy just walked in.

Who wants to move to Honduras with me?

Posted on by

Via Say Uncle.

This is very appealing to me. It almost sounds like Galt’s Gulch:

Small government and free-market capitalism are about to get put to the test in Honduras, where the government has agreed to let an investment group build an experimental city with no taxes on income, capital gains or sales.

Proponents say the tiny, as-yet unnamed town will become a Central American beacon of job creation and investment, by combining secure property rights with minimal government interference.

“Once we provide a sound legal system within which to do business, the whole job creation machine – the miracle of capitalism – will get going,” Michael Strong, CEO of the MKG Group, which will build the city and set its laws, told FoxNews.com.

Strong said that the agreement with the Honduran government states that the only tax will be on property.

“Our goal is to be the most economically free entity on Earth,” Strong said.

…

The laws in the city will be separate from those in the rest of Honduras. Strong said that the default law that will be enforced in the city will actually be based on Texas state law, which has relatively few regulations.

“It will be Texas law with more freedom of contract. Texas scores well on state economic freedom rankings,” he explained.

Hmmm… I wonder what I could build and export using native labor and materials.

Quote of the day—Atlas Shrugged Part II Trailer

Posted on by

If you think you have the right to use force against me bring guns.

Atlas Shrugged Part II Trailer
September 5, 2012

That really resonated with me. But then the entire book did.

There are a bunch of other good quotes in there too.—Joe]

In the search for meaning

Posted on by

We often come up empty-handed.  There are always a lot of words being said and written, but the far less meaning.  Our job is to search for the meaning.  It’s fun.


Seen on a paper grocery bag;



“[Big grocery chain] has partnered with [presumably Obama stash money-funded green energy company] to convert their waste into power for the community.


This initiative will help produce 3 mega-watts of power.  Enough to power 3,000 homes for one year!”


What does that mean?  It’s only a one-year project?  What happens after that?  Or is it that someone flunked their high school physics classes and doesn’t know the difference between power and energy? 


Then there’s that all too convenient, catch-all word in there; “help”.  Let’s say for sake of argument that all the Columbia hydroelectric projects combined produce on average 100 gigawatts.  All by myself then, I could help produce 100 gigawatts by pissing in the river.  I could help produce 100 gigawats for one year, each year, by pissing in the river once per year.  Hope and Change.


In fact it doesn’t mean anything as written, but either we are supposed to believe that it means something anyway, and love them for it, or the people who wrote it are ignorant and can’t be bothered with looking things up, or both.  And among the listed items of “output” from this “initiative” are “green power” and “carbon credits”.  Oh goody.  I guess the recycling of the paper into new paper is no longer good enough, and the use of food waste as animal feed is no longer a good thing.  So we can burn this stuff, cut down more trees and use more farmland.  For carbon credits.  Hope and Change.


Then there was this “Halftime in America” ad from Chrysler that many people thought meant something really great.  It’s one of the more artfully meaningless, and/or misleading bits in television.  In fact, if it means anything at all, it means that the government bailout and takeover of Chrysler, using taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to hand a company over to the unions, is The Way to get out of an economic downturn.  It also implies strongly that if one auto company goes into receivership, we stop making cars– a wildly ignorant idea if ever there was one.  In fact there is the very real and very well-proven concept of “creative destruction” wherein one badly-run company goes out, making the way for the next, better-run company to flourish, the end result of which is more and better, and more affordable cars, with more stable car-making jobs as a side benefit.  “Halftime in America” conveniently ignores all that, instead using pure (false) assumption and building on it with innuendo.  And if there is a “halftime” provision written into the U.S. constitution, at which time we were presumed to have entertained the Central Planners for 100 years, started going broke as a result, then regrouped with more central planning to fix the destruction from the earlier Central Planning, then I am Karl Marx’s uncle.  In fact we are under attack by the Progressive movement and the only way out is to rid ourselves of it and get back to our beautiful American Principles of Liberty.


The arena with probably the least meaning of all is politics.  When millions of people were swooning over Sarah Palin during the Palin/Whatshisname campaign, I went over to her personal web site to see if I could find any meaning.  I have to hand it to her– she is very, very good at combining words, thousands of them, into sentence after sentence, without a scintilla of meaning.  Total blank-out.  Very impressive.


At the same time, Obama told us he wanted “Redistributive Change” and that “When you spread the wealth around everybody benefits” out of one side of his mouth, while telling us he would have the most transparent, open and fiscally responsible administration ever.  Right there, at that moment, he proves to the whole world, with just those two assertions, that he is a lying piece of shit.  Then we elected him.  I guess searching for meaning isn’t a hobby for many people.


Make a point of it.  Next time you see a politician speaking, or an advertisement, or anything really, try to see if there is any meaning, and what, exactly, is the meaning.

Central Planning in a nutshell

Posted on by

First;



Then;



Those are the burnt out ruins of Berlin, after Central Planning had run its course.


The lesson?  Mind your own business.


On the other hand; if mass destruction is your end goal, then by all means centrally plan to your heart’s content, but of course you’ll need your own army.  And it had better be one hell of an army.  You see what happened to that son of a bitch in the photo, and he had, in say 1940, the best army and the best air force, and prossibly the best navy in the world.  He did accomplish plenty of destruction, so you can look up to him I guess, as one of the greatest Central Planners in history.


He, like all Central Planners, of course naturally assumed that he was smarter than all of the People of Europe, or of the world, combined.  It’s always like that– they’re so shockingly ignorant and/or stupid that they think they’re smarter than everyone else, and they are furthermore shockingly stupid enough to think that their towering genius automatically gives them the right to tell us lesser creatures how to live (or not live).


Here’s the clue that maybe you are one of those twisted, nasty, retarded fools.  It’s very simple.  If you see someone minding their own business, and you hate them, and you want to do something about it, you’re a Central Planner.  As a Central Planner, you are of course too fearful to actually do anything yourself about these people who mind their own business, so you’ll seek some official position, or a gang or committee or some such, so you can have other people do your dirty work.  That way you don’t feel like the criminal you are, because other people are carrying the guns for you.  If you had the guts and the initiative to act on these hatred impulses on your own, you’d be what we call a common criminal.


If you had guts, self initiative, and a little bit of decency, you’d be too busy minding your own business to worry about stopping or redirecting someone else’s.  That, and you’d have a vested interest in protecting property rights.

Quote of the day—Lyle

Posted on by

Special Interest; any interest with which communists disagree.

Lyle
September 11, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—Suzanne Langland.
[This didn’t really catch my eye until Windy Wilson commented, “Lyle, ‘Liberty shouldn’t be a special interest’ does fit on a bumper sticker.”

I’m inclined to respectfully disagree with that being on a bumper sticker. I think the proper phrasing should be “Liberty is not a special interest.”—Joe]

The view

Posted on by

It has been suggested (by Barron and Janelle) that I change the name of this blog from “The View From North Central Idaho” to “The View From The Clock Tower”.

While I got a chuckle out of this it is just a bit too over the top for me.

Besides, in addition to being afraid of heights should things go sufficiently “pear shaped” that a clock tower view might be of interest I think I would prefer a view from a R/C vehicle (air, land, or water) loaded with Boomerite.

Happy Commie Day

Posted on by

Today is a national holiday celebrating the European, and very un-American, idea of the Balkanization of society into classes, and specifically celebrating the “labor class”.  I won’t bother trying to unpack all the layers upon layers, and the sub layers upon sub layers of false assumption behind it.  Instead I make the very American assertion that every one of us, regardless of circumstance, is an autonomous entrepreneur.


We aren’t born into classes or groups.  We are born, or immigrate, into the American Experiment.  We may decide to sell our “labor” (and in this case I use the word as a practical noun or a verb as opposed to a classification) to someone else as a part of our life plan, or we may decide to go more or less directly into our own businesses, but neither choice is one that is foisted on us by society.


Actually; whether you are selling your labor to someone else’s business, whether you’re selling products or services under your own personal business banner, or whether you serve on the board of directors for a large corporation, you are in fact your own business.  If your name is Billy Bob and you shovel manure for a dairy farmer, you should think of yourself as Billy Bob’s shoveling service.  You are your own boss (to the extent anyone is his own boss, which is small).  Anyone serving as his own boss needs customers (they’re the real bosses don’t you know – they control the money you’re looking to get) and in this case your customer is that farmer.  You serve your customer and in return you get paid.  That’s a business you’re in, whether you understand it or not.  You’re an entrepreneur.  Get your head straight and make the best of it.


“Labor” in the communist sense is something altogether different.  In that case, as a laborer you are in a group pitted against the other classes in a political struggle for resources and perks.  Your class or group is in direct competition with all others, for a piece of the confiscated booty.  It’s gang against gang.  Your gang is the only one that counts and all other gangs are your enemies.  The pinnacle of success for your gang is when you take over full control of the government.


In the American model on the other hand, you are an autonomous operator– a business consisting of one individual.  You compete for the favor of potential customers in a system of property rights protection.  Your only method of success then is to do a better job in serving your customers.  Lobbying, or the brute strength of gangs (or labor unions) then has little or no place, because there is no power in government to lend favor to your business at the expense of others.  Government has no rights to itself – only the responsibility to protect every individual’s property rights.  Cooperation in the form of combined resources (the corporation model) does have a place, because the economy of scale (usually but not always) allows a larger business to produce better goods or services at lower prices.  It is the height of a polite and just civilization.


Too bad the American system has been corrupted by the Progressive communist movement into something ugly.  They make it ugly by getting government’s coercive power involved in it, then use that ugliness to tell us that “capitalism” doesn’t work.  Lying scum.


I’ll call this Lying Scum Day then.  Have a happy one, suckers.

Quote of the day—H. L. Mencken

Posted on by

The theory behind representative government is that superior men—or at all events, men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity—are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honesty. There is little support for that theory in the known facts…

H. L. Mencken
From Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, Knopf, 1956.
[And, sadly, representative government is better than all other forms attempted.—Joe]

The Clint Speech

Posted on by

No one can honestly say Clint Eastwood isn’t a great actor.
Nor can they say he’s a bad director. He has acted in, directed, produced, produced
music for, or even three all four of those, in seven movies in just the last four
years. His most recent interviews have shown him to be sharp, eloquent, and
engaged. If you saw Gran Torino in
the theater, you could watch a movie he wrote, directed, produced, and made
music for, and watch a trailer for an upcoming movie he directed and produced. His
brain is fully functioning.

So, why and how did his speech at the RNC seem so… rambling, unfocused, edgy, and odd? If we KNOW he’s mentally all there, what
was he doing? If we assume he was doing exactly
what he intended to do, what was he intending?

I think that the republican base is going to vote for Mitt,
some enthusiastically, some holding their nose, but they’ll vote for him
none-the-less. The Dem base will likewise vote for O. No-one on a national
stage will convince that 90% of the electorate of anything different, only
personal experience or epiphany will change anything for them. I think he’s
smart enough to know that, so he wasn’t talking to any of them. He’s an actor and director – focusing on reaching the target audience is what he does.

But, if the R convention attendees and typical convention watchers and committed D or R voters are not his audience, then who was he speaking
to? Perhaps it was the very-low-information voter, the apolitical working-stiff,
the disengaged voter, who recognizes a movie star but has nary a clue who their rep
or senator is, who ANY of the SCOTUS are, and don’t normally watch conventions.
Perhaps he chose to speak in a way that makes all the well-scripted speakers and high-information voters cringe, but in a way that
was different, weird, and odd, but also put humor and the strange right next to the
hard-hitting stuff, so when it got played and replayed and discussed by various
folks in all sorts of outlets, both by those who agree AND those who disagree,
it will get those fundamental facts, like highlighting there are 23,000,000
unemployed, out to many of those low-info voters, and will sway them. It got
the movie-going-but-not-political voter to tune in, and stay and watch Rubio. It
created an instant icon for the politically-absent president, the empty chair. He used unexpected and oblique off-color humor that perfectly captured the essence of the trash-talking Chicago bully in the White House. It
is possible, when we look back on that moment three months from now, that it
will be seen as an absolutely brilliant piece of seeming scatter-brained-improve
that shifted that all-important indecisive, low-information, non-ideological
middle, the folks that vote with their hearts but not their brains. Either that, or it’s one of the fasted pieces of rapid-onset dementia
ever.