Category Archives: Politics

A dystopian advocate

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Amazing: Let’s nationalize Amazon and Google: Publicly funded technology built Big Tech

It’s mind boggling to read this crap. One of the arguments is that they are spying on people, which he doesn’t like. So putting them under government control is a good idea? Hasn’t this idiot heard of the NSA in the last few months?

It should come as no surprise he wants to destroy the “pioneer fantasy” of gun ownership.

Either he thinks of The Gulag Archipelago as a utopia instead of a dystopia or he is so naïve and/or stupid that he doesn’t realize what he advocates would create those conditions.

Quote of the day—smileycreek

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Food, water, shelter, and basic medical care are all basic human requirements that should never be withheld in a civilized society.

smileycreek
July 2, 2014
Comment to Income Inequality: A Desperate Situation With Real Solutions
[In smileycreek’s universe a “civilized society” is one where the government takes from each according to his ability, and gives to each according to his need.

I’m reading about just such a place in The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) and The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1918-1956. Tens of millions of people were murdered in an attempt to create such a society and it failed. And that is just one of many attempts that all ended in deaths of hundreds of thousands and in the case of the USSR tens of millions.

Even just this one sentence in smileycreek’s comment reveals the distortion required to believe lie of communism. The lie of communism is that people with no incentive to produce all they are able to will do so anyway. Who would willingly become a provider of “food, water, shelter, or basic medical care” if they could be forced to give it up without compensation by anyone?

The big distortion here is that is if I refuse to give my food, shelter, or (if I were a medical provider) my services to another unless I am compensated is considered “withholding”. That’s a warped definition. Yet that is also the basis of the current uproar about the SCOTUS ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. Nothing has been withheld. But the sound bite is better if it is phrased that way.

Communists like smileycreek can only win by lying. And they have lots of practice at it. It’s how government murder millions of innocent people.

Today people that openly support the beliefs of the Nazis are rightly hounded into silence and oblivion. Yet support for the beliefs of Communists is considered by nearly half of our country’s population to be the mark of decency, righteous, and “civilized society”. But the Communists of the 20th Century proved the Nazis were pikers in the game of governments murdering innocent people.

Perhaps that is the key to understanding those who advocate Communism and yet hate Nazism. To them the Nazis weren’t ruthless enough.–Joe]

Random thought of the day

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Political heresy is more of a threat to the collective than is a thief or murderer. The common criminal only affects a few people. A heretic can affect all of society.

This insight is almost directly from Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1918-1956. This is why the political prisoners were treated worse and had longer sentences than thieves and murderers.

It also might explain why the political left in this country are so violent toward their political opponents. They, at some level, have reached the same conclusion as their political brethren of the former USSR. And that is that independent thought is a threat to the entire power structure and the very foundation of their existence.

Anti gun-rights Microsoft?

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From the firearm blog.

This would help explain the trend toward cloud storage and toward not really owning, but renting your software. It appears that Adobe, for another example, now only provides the latest version of Photoshop as a monthly subscription service, so you’re not the owner, but the tenant, and they the property manager.

If you don’t have exclusive control of your software, user files, or your contact lists, etc., it could all be pulled out from under you, or used for other purposes via remote control by other people, at a whim. Same as your bank account now, by the way. The Endarkenment proceeds apace.

Quote of the day—saintonge235

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Twice in my life I got beaten up because I was in a fight and really didn’t want to hurt the person I was fighting. Recovering from the second beating, it occurred to me that “they don’t matter”, “they” being anyone who attacked me. From then on, I never lost a fight, because when I saw that violence was going to occur, I hit first without warning and didn’t stop till they were helpless. Acquiring that mindset is the most important self-defense lesson I know.

saintonge235
June 14, 2014
Comment to The Naive Idiocy of Teaching Rapists Not To Rape
[One might be wise to apply that mindset to a great many other things as well. Politics and war come to mind.—Joe]

All guns are always loaded

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That’s gun safety rule one. Cooper said that it’s not a guide to behavior but rather a statement of condition. (For those unfamiliar, “condition” in this sense refers to the status of the gun, whether it’s loaded, or cocked, whether the safety catch is on, etc.)

That’s the problem with weapon “safety” isn’t it? If you keep a gun for self defense, and you treat all guns as though they’re always loaded, and it turns put that the one you need to defend your life is unloaded, you’re not at all safe. A gun is supposed to be dangerous! but only to your chosen target.

As a matter of personal taste I prefer the NRA rule “Always keep the gun unloaded until ready to use”. The guns I keep for defense are “in use” all the time and so they are loaded, whether on my hip or leaning in the corner.

I showed a couple how to load a percussion revolver the other day, by “loading” it with powder and bullets, but since we never applied caps to the cones, it still isn’t “loaded” because I won’t fire without caps. I’ll twirl it if I want to, and you can’t stop me, but I generally won’t twirl a loaded gun even it is single action with the hammer down and nothing you do to the trigger alone can ever make it fire.

We’ve come to a point where we’re making too big a deal out of “safety” and admit it– That’s because of lawyers and politicians (two of the more dangerous kinds of people on Earth if we take them too seriously).

Ultimately, “safety”, to the extent that it exists at all, is between your ears. You’re certainly going to die no matter what though, so cheer up! When people, perfectly well-intended, tell me to “stay safe” as an alternative to “goodbye” or “see you later” it sort of disappoints me. “Have fun” or even “be cool” would be better advice. None of the really fun and memorable, or productive, things I’ve done in life were particularly safe, but they always came off better in a state of coolness.

Here’s another important “safety” rule;
“All lawyers and all politicians are always loaded”

I do like that one. As Cooper said; “It is not a guide of behavior, but rather a statement of condition”, and furthermore it would explain a lot.

I think we are done here

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I made a Facebook friend request to someone I have known for over 30 years. I hadn’t had any contact with her for probably four years but it sounds like a mutual friend from our past lost their son and I wondered if she knew something about it.

In response to my friend request I got this:

Hi Joe, I am chair of the Veterans For Peace Environmental Cost of War and Militarism Working Group. Because you have chosen to become a militant enemy of your local environment by exploding bombs on it, I do not want to be your Facebook friend.

Killing everything in that spot of Mother Earth that you choose to desecrate for fun and leaving behind the heavy metals to poison the water of future generations is appalling to me.

I’m not just picking on you personally. I’m against bombs, bombing ranges, chemical and depleted uranium weapons, mining where the people of the land are forced off of their property, and many other things involved with the military-industrial-1% complex.

If you could put some of your intelligence into figuring out how to bring down global capitalism and war profiteering, encourage farming and local food buying, conversion from fossil fuels and endless consumption to conservation and cleaner energy, stopping fracking, nuclear power, and the war against the indigenous, I’d love to hear your ideas.

Helen

I knew she was of significantly different political persuasion than me even when we were close. But wow! Bring down “global capitalism”?

I think we are done here.

Quote of the day—Mayor Barbara Fass

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I think you have to do it a step at a time and I think that is what the NRA is most concerned about, is that it will happen one very small step at a time, so that by the time people have “woken up”—quote—to what’s happened, it’s gone farther than what they feel the consensus of American citizens would be. But it does have to go one step at a time and the beginning of the banning of semi-assault military weapons, that are military weapons, not “household” weapons, is the first step.

Mayor Barbara Fass
Stockton, California
April 11, 1991
ABC News Special, Peter Jennings Reporting: Guns, April 11, 1991
See also The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope
[Don’t ever let someone get away with saying no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]

Volunteers and donations needed in Washington state

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We have a gun rights initiative battle going on in Washington state this year. Read about it here. We can use volunteers and money. Sign up as a volunteer here. Donate here.

If guns cause people to shoot other people…

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Then why are shooting rates among people under the same laws are so disparate?

Look at the Chicago rates discussed in a recently released paper.

To begin with, the dramatic disparities the rates of nonfatal gunshot injury:
overall it’s 46.5 per 100,000 for the city as a whole from 2006-2012.
It’s 1.62 per 100,000 for whites; 28.72 for Hispanics, and 112.83 for blacks.

For all males, it’s 44.68 per 100,000; 239.77 for black males, and for black males from 18-34 it’s 599.65.

All these people are living under the same gun laws, economic system, and mayor. Yet, the rates at which guns are used illegally vary hugely. I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, it’s something other than guns.

Open letter to Eric Holder

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This, from Mike Vanderboegh, is interesting. It represents one of the stated ideas behind the second amendment back in the day– Something about keeping would-be tyrants “in awe”, presenting a force beyond that of any standing army, etc.

I’m not sure what good the letter could do, beyond letting Holder and Company know that we have a fairly good, general idea of what they’re up to, that we’re not all entirely intimidated, blind, cowed, distracted and demoralized. There may be some value in that and there may not, but there it is. I’ve done similar in the past, but I don’t think I’ll be doing it again.

As for the possibility of violence; I do NOT believe that, at this point anyway, Holder and Company are the slightest bit intimidated. Not in the way the author may have intended. I believe it is likely, insofar as I understand the mentality or the occupying identity that drives them, that Holder et al are quite looking forward to violence, that they’ve been getting impatient waiting for it and can’t quite understand why we’re taking so long to get with it (and thus help them fulfill their plans).

It might be more productive to try to convince Holder & Company that they themselves are mere pawns, and that once their role is served and their usefulness expired they’ll be left in the lurch, or squashed like cockroaches, by those they currently serve, but that won’t dawn on them until it’s far too late for them. It almost never does.

And so the value in such letters or postings is, at best, that later on they’ll not be able to say they weren’t warned or didn’t have any choice. In light of THAT, maybe our efforts should include defining for such unfortunates a viable way out.

Quote of the day—Sarah A. Hoyt

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Here’s something for the leftists who really want to do what they can to prevent the next one of these events from happening. How about you all stop with your self-righteous crap about how the NRA has blood on its hands when your side will all but literally stand on the bodies of dead children to politicize any tragedy just because they know it’s the only damn way they’ll ever get any movement on guns.

Accept it. It’s a lost cause for you. If you couldn’t get a change in gun laws like you wanted after Newtown, you’re not going to get it. It’s just not going to happen.

Sarah A. Hoyt
May 30, 2014
Beyond the violence -Tom Knighton
[Once they stop blaming us for things we didn’t do then maybe we can talk about potential solutions to problems we all want solved.—Joe]

Productivism

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I sometimes read or hear of people complaining our society is plagued by (spit, spit) consumerism. This always sounded like some sort of epithet but didn’t really have much meaning to me. It was just a word that every “right thinking” person knew was a “bad thing”.

It wasn’t until I read this article that things started to jell in my mind. It was this paragraph that really connected with me:

Humans are not merely consumers. Every consumer is also a producer as well, and production is how we have improved our standards of living from the dawn of man till today. Every luxury, every great invention, every work of art, every modern convenience that we enjoy was the product of a mind – in some cases, of more than one. It then stands to reason that the more minds there are, the more innovations we will have as well. A reductio ad absudum reveals the obvious truth that a cure for cancer is more likely to emerge from a society of a billion people than from one of only a handful of individuals.

The problem I have with people that whine about consumerism is that they are only looking at one side of the picture. In order for consumers to exist there must be producers. In a free market there tends to be more production capacity than consumer capacity. And that excess capacity makes things more affordable and available to everyone.

Production and market competition yields tremendous benefits to society. Extended lifespans and higher quality of life are just the most obvious. Entertainment via Netflix, MTV, professional sports, and concerts might be considered frivolous and a waste but it is an improvement in the quality of life that is a result of our being able to produce more than what we need for survival. It is our excess production capacity that makes it possible to earn our food and shelter in fewer hours per week than it would have 1000 years ago. Back then a similar amount of effort, unless you were royalty, nobility, or politically connected, would have yielded death by malnutrition, disease, or exposure.

Yes, there must be physical limits to human growth on a single planet. But we don’t yet know what those limits are on this planet. The barriers to interplanetary travel and exo-planetary living are high. But from a simple available energy balance sheet (do the arithmetic on how many Joules of sunlight energy fall on a 40 acre field on a summer day, then extrapolate to the vastness of interplanetary space) it doesn’t seem farfetched to claim that human expansion beyond this planet is feasible.

Continued improvements in the human condition depend on increased production. In a free market producers must always produce goods desired by the consumers. Some of the products will seem frivolous but the net result has always been progress in improving the lives of people and more productivity per person. Moving society toward greater productivity will yield far greater benefits than discouraging consumption. Just look at the benefits of increased productivity of the last 1000 years.

When you hear someone use the word “consumerism” in a disparaging way demand they look at the requirements for it’s existence and consequences of it. And that is “productivism” and vast improvements in the human condition. Demand they tell you what they have against increases in productivity and improved quality of life.

The motivation for evil

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is evil.

This Land is Mine

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…or, the Middle East Explained.

Pop quiz – how many of them can you identify with reasonable certainty, or at least recognize that you knew them for sure at one point?

Quote of the day—Zack Beauchamp

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There is no longer any defensible argument for a constitutional right to own a firearm, if there ever was.

Zack Beauchamp
February 20, 2014
Ban the Second Amendment: Imagine the Second Amendment didn’t exist, and try arguing for a constitutional right to gun ownership. You will fail.
[H/T to Kurt Hofmann.

Self defense, one of the easiest ways to argue it to most people is dismissed with:

The second argument in favor of untrammeled gun ownership, a right to self-defense, is equally incoherent. For starters, there’s no reason that, in a civil society, the right to defend yourself implies the right to defend yourself however you’d like. A basic part of government’s job is to limit our ability to hurt others; assuming the absolute right to self-defense constitutes, in Alan Jacobs’ evocative phrasing, “the absolute abandonment of civil society.”

Here you can see some of his incredibly scary mindset. “A basic part of government’s job is to limit our ability to hurt others”. Wow!

It’s that same old prevention instead of punishment argument. In my mind one of the characteristics of a free society is that you are free to make mistake, or be evil, it’s just that you will suffer the consequences of your actions if you do. Except in extreme outlier cases, such as true weapons of mass destruction, the government should not ever be granted the power to prevent ordinary people from doing whatever it is they want to do. In terms of citizen/citizen interaction government power is only granted to punish those that infringe upon the rights of others.

Beauchamp’s mindset is that of one who yearns for an all powerful, all seeing, all protective government. A government with widespread informants which interrogates and tortures people in response to anonymous or torture induced testimony. That is the only way you can even hope to approach a preventive model for citizens hurting others.

Beauchamp should study history rather than yearn for an utopia who’s quest has resulted in the murder of 10’s of millions by their own government in the 20th Century.—Joe]

Government at work

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This is what happens when the government tries to do something. It is in part because it’s “someone else’s money”:

Employees at an ObamaCare processing center in Missouri with a contract worth $1.2 billion are reportedly getting paid to do nothing but sit at their computers. 

“Their goals are set to process two applications per month and some people are not even able to do that,” a whistleblower told KMOV-TV, referring to employees hired to process paper applications for ObamaCare enrollees.  

The facility in Wentzville is operated by Serco, a company owned by a British firm that was awarded $1.2 billion in part to hire 1,500 workers to handle paper applications for coverage under the law, according to The Washington Post. 

The whistleblower employee told the station that weeks can pass without data entry workers receiving even a single application to process. Employees reportedly spend their days staring at their computers, according to a KMOX-TV report. 

“They’re told to sit at their computers and hit the refresh button every 10 minutes, no more than every 10 minutes,” the employee said. “They’re monitored, to hopefully look for an application.”

Obamacare will make healthcare more affordable. All the government has to do is pass a law declaring something to be true and that is what will happen.

That is what the suckers believe. Historic data to the contrary is always ignored. Present results are ignored. They believe intentions are more valid than results. These people do not operate in a world of facts. They operate in a world of good intentions. Most of them anyway. Some are truly evil and take advantage of this flaw in the nature of many people.

Daniel Webster and Henry David Thoreau both had it nailed over 150 years ago.

It’s time people put their brains to work and stop relying on their “hearts”. If we don’t the consequences may be extremely severe. Their ideology puts millions of people at extreme risk.

Wishful thinking?

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Clearing out my spam folder just now, I spied one from Senate Republicans out of the corner of my eye, way down the list. My first thought was that it said “Why we lose”, which would have been an excellent and highly relevant topic. In fact it said “Lyle, we are close.”

Actually, we are not close. “We” are not even on the right path and so we’ll never be close until we change paths. Since it was titled with a falsehood, and since they’re not going to address the all-important question of why we lose, there was no point in reading it.

That is of course assuming that “We” means “we Republicans” which in my case is big stretch. Since TR, over 100 years ago, “Republican” has meant “Progressive who must pander to conservatives and libertarians for votes, and who therefore hates his job”.

Stereotypes

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Weer’d made a comment in this post that kind of bugged me:

Still I’ve noticed that the more homogenous a population is in an area the more revolting the racism can be. I knew a ton of people in Maine who would drop the N-Bomb frequently, and would make horrible cracks about blacks….but I always wondered if they had even SEEN one.

It’s a LOT harder to make such cracks when you know people of a minority or other groups.

Where I grew up there were virtually no “people of color”. Technically the family farm was (and is) on an Indian reservation but most of the land had been purchased by whites over the years and no Indians have lived there since before I was born. 20 miles away, in Lapwai, the entire town was (and probably still is) essentially Nez Perce. But we only saw them when our schools competed. They were serious competitors just like the kids from Grangeville and Kamiah who also had few, if any, non-whites. Their athletic ability was everything. The only pigmentation that mattered was that of their uniform. The inferiority of that pigmentation did not extrapolate to an inferiority in the pigmentation of their skin.

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Quote of the day—Ludwig von Mises

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The welfare of the nation takes precedence over the selfishness of the individuals … was the fundamental principle of Nazi economic management. But as people are too dull and too vicious to comply with this rule, it is the task of government to enforce it.

Ludwig von Mises
1949
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (4 Volume Set)
[For more context see here.

“Dull and vicious.” That is what they think of you if you do not place the welfare of the nation above that of your own. When people tell you this today inform them there have been a lot of people in agreement with them. It was the fundamental principle of Nazi economic management.—Joe]