Category Archives: Politics

Pure plutonium

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That’s a John Ross term, for something that “nukes” the enemies of freedom. Tonight’s episode of the Glenn Beck program is pure plutonium. The fastest hour you’ll spend this week is the March 13 episode of the Glenn Beck program.

Call in sick, take a vacation, whatever it takes; watch this episode. Hang on every word. Even the commercials, most of them anyway, will have you up, out of your seat. It’s on theBlazeTV.

THIS IS THE (new) MAIN STREAM MEDIA, or medium. If you are not a subscriber, you are missing out. I don’t care who you are, you are missing out. They have a free trial membership, so you have no excuse. Support them.

Tonight’s guests include one Starr Parker. I’ve read two of her books. The other guests are very good also, and it is clear that they love each other. You will get hope from this.

If there was any doubt before tonight, there is no longer any doubt– Glenn Beck is slated for death. Keep an eye out. I think he knows this and he can take care of himself, but keep an eye on it.

This is what can happen when you own your own network, and it’s beautiful. What you may not know are the things Glenn could NOT say when he was on someone else’s network. That’s a story unto itself, but I digress. Go watch, and for that matter spend your sick day, or your vacation day, watching this whole week’s worth of shows.

It’s is an addendum to Joe’s latest post.

To you Progressives out there, and you know who you are, weep. You cannot escape the truth forever. We are WATCHING YOU.

Quote of the day—Clayton E. Cramer

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Trying to argue abstract concepts like right and wrong or constitutionality with most Americans is a waste of time. Few believe in right or wrong, and fewer still have any conception of the Constitution as a contract between the generations.

Clayton E. Cramer
January 18, 2013
Comment to Does ‘Gun Show Loophole’ Actually Result in Gun Crime?–Statistics do not point to criminals using this tactic.
[I can’t say that I disagree. But to agree with him sucks me into depression and despair. If right and wrong are beyond most Americans then are not also facts and fallacies, truth and falsity beyond them as well? Unfortunately I have substantial data to back up that claim.

See also Philosophy: Who Needs It (The Ayn Rand Library Vol. 1). A case can be made, as Rand does, that what Cramer states as fact can be explained by the lack of sound philosophy being taught to our children for the last 50 or more years.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Béla Nagy, et al

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A combination of an exponential decrease in cost and an exponential increase in production would make Moore’s law and Wright’s law indistinguishable, as originally pointed out by Sahal. We show for the first time that these regularities are observed in data to such a degree that the performance of these two laws is nearly the same. Our results show that technological progress is forecastable, with the square root of the logarithmic error growing linearly with the forecasting horizon at a typical rate of 2.5% per year. These results have implications for theories of technological change, and assessments of candidate technologies and policies for climate change mitigation.

Béla Nagy
J. Doyne Farmer
Quan M. Bui
Jessika E. Trancik
2012
Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress
[I have two observations.

One; This is awesome! A variation of Moore’s Law applies to, apparently, all technology.

Two; It looks as if they had to make a tie in “climate change” to get National Science Foundation grant money. That’s really messed up. Government grants should not exist. The politics of research should succeed or fail using the money of someone other than that taken by gunpoint via taxes.—Joe]

Conspiracy to infringe

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At the “urging” of ubu52 I finally decided to elaborate a bit on an edgy meme I’ve been pushing for quite some time. I’ve been saying something to the effect that people advocating for or enforcing anti-gun laws should be tried, convicted, and punished under 18 USC 241 and/or 18 USC 242. These are, essentially, laws that prohibit conspiracy to infringe the rights of others which are secured by the Constitution.

I’ve long known that those laws are not going to be enforced against anyone anytime soon. I’m pretty sure there are even some laws that give immunity to government officials under many circumstances.

I don’t care.

I’m taking a long term view of things. There have been many instances throughout history where activities that were perfectly legal or at least accepted by all “right thinking folks” became politically out of favor. Then, as long as the statute of limitations had not expired, prosecutors found pre-existing laws to enforce and punish those who engaged in the activity. The most famous example of this is probably the Nuremberg Trials.

Examples exist in our country too.

Lynching blacks 75 years ago was technically illegal but the risk of prosecution and conviction was pretty low. Decades later some of those people were convicted of murder.

The perpetrators of the internment of Japanese were never brought to justice but, decades later, payments were made to those people who were put into the camps.

Ubu52’s point in regard to people advocating for gun control is:

But they should have the freedom to do that, right? This is the USA, isn’t it? Joe is saying that they shouldn’t have the freedom to do whatever they want. I think he’s wrong.

At first glance, in this context, I’m pretty certain nearly everyone would agree with her. But, in todays context, what would be the legal response to advocating riots, lynching blacks, and assassinating politicians? Anyone doing that would be running a serious risk of prosecution if they or people they influenced began conspiring to implement some of those ideas.

The bottom line is that there are, and rightly so, limits to free speech. Those limits in general are, in our country and our time*, set at the point where someone else’s rights are in imminent danger of being violated. The classic “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose” says it more succinctly and less abstractly.

Think about that. The limits of free speech are the point at which someone else’s rights are in imminent danger of being violated.

You see where I’m going now, right?

This is a very clear logical path to prosecuting anti-gun people. Those that object to this logic either don’t regard being able to keep and bear arms as a “real right” or they are being logically inconsistent with those limits to free speech in existing law.

I’m not a lawyer but I’ve read enough court rulings to know that judges will almost always give at least lip service to logic. They may have to fabricate a logic scaffolding that only Rube Goldberg could admire but they will rule in a “logical” manner.

A logically consistent case can, and should, be made that advocating for the restriction of the right to keep and bear arms is no different than advocating for riots and lynching. People can and do die because they were denied their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. It is directly foreseeable that people will be injured because of people abusing their right to free speech.

The logic in my example is far, far less torturous that hundreds of court rulings. It could happen.

What I am trying to do with my “That will come up at your trial,”** quip is to change the culture such that it becomes possible to regard the deliberate infringement of other rights as a punishable offense. Yes, it’s sort of twisted in that I am advocating the restriction of one right to protect another right. It is not “twisted” in the sense that restricting the right to some sorts of speech it does not put people in danger of life or serious bodily harm such as restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms does.

Of course no judge today, or probably even ten years from now, will rule in such a manner. But I want the seeds planted. I want people to ask, “Why aren’t these people violating the law?” “Why aren’t these people being prosecuted?” I want the anti-gun people to pause and think about it.

I want to see the day, perhaps 20 years from now, when people are brought to trial for the crimes they are committing today. By the advocating the infringement of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms they caused the foreseeable, needless, injuries and deaths of tens of thousands and they should be brought to justice for that.

Update: L. Neil Smith points out we could, literally, have our own Nuremberg Trials in the U.S.

*Kevin links to a fascinating post which ties into this topic. It makes you think about other times and places if you are interested in a much bigger picture. For example, imagine a cultural shift where the advocating of the right to keep and bear arms is a punishable offense.
**Thanks to Sean for that line even if it was in a completely different context.

Stereotypical disconnect

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At a rally for “gun violence” prevention:

In the middle of the program we had three songs by Eugene singer/songwriter PeterAlmeida, who coordinated the musical portions of the event, including a sing-along with John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Wow! Maybe next time they should also visualize world peace, or is it whorled peas?

These people really are into the “feelings” aspect of things. It’s no wonder they can’t distinguish between making some people feel better and people being physically safer.

The stereotype of them being disconnected from reality has just been validated.

Resorting to the democratic process

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Michael Kirkland writes in The lost fight for gun control:

The National Rifle Association plans to resort to the democratic process to derail those brave enough to support restrictions on gun or ammo possession, targeting Democratic senators in newspaper ads as they run for re-election in 2014.

“Resort to the democratic process” seems like an odd choice of words. What does he think NRA usually does to those that advocate for laws that violate the Second Amendment? I’m pretty sure I would have heard about it if one or more NRA High-power Rifle teams engaged these Senators violating their oaths of office.

Kirkland labels those advocating restrictions on guns and ammo as “brave” but I’m not convinced. It would seem to me the label would be a lot more appropriate if they were taking incoming fire. Until then I think the more appropriate labels are “weasels” and “criminals“.

Quote of the day—TriggerFinger

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It’s nothing more than the alpha bitch baring her teeth and growling at us. She doesn’t want to ban guns. She wants us to submit, to roll over and show our throat and our belly. She wants submission. She wants to be acknowledged as higher status than us.

But you know what makes them come after us again and again? What really pisses them off? What keeps this issue coming back over and over again when any other political issue would be debated, legislated, victory won or lost and then forgotten?

We fight back. We refuse to submit. We refuse to show our belly. We refuse to show submission. We will not surrender. We will not submit. Maybe we lose, and retreat to lick our wounds, but we come back later even stronger than before, and every time that alpha bitch looks away from her nice, comfy top of the pack status, we’re there to steal her food and challenge all over again.

It’s all a status display, and we will not submit.

That’s why they are gun bigots. Bigotry is the ultimate status display.

TriggerFinger
February 27, 2013
Comment to More on that Canton police freak-out.
[TriggerFinger is explaining why anti-gun politicians don’t care that their laws don’t make sense and are ineffective at doing anything more than making us mad.—Joe]

Pushing them down the slippery slope

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My favorite Idaho gun lobbyist, AlphaMike, and I have been discussing pushing this bill for a year or more now. The bill creates a two tier concealed carry structure in Idaho.

The existing concealed carry license is pretty easy. It’s shall issue but the local sheriff can require proof of training. To the best of my knowledge all sheriffs in the state require the training. The training standard isn’t hard to meet and doesn’t even require any live fire. It also, at the sheriff’s option, may be issued to someone between the ages of 18 and 21.

The new license has enhanced training requirements, may only be issued to people 21 and over, and has a mental health check requirement.

I had not been a big fan of it. Constitutional Carry has more my inclination but AlphaMike had me about 80% to 90% convinced to go his route. His reasoning was that it would benefit more people to have the enhanced requirement license in addition to the existing license. Getting Constitutional Carry would be tougher and wouldn’t help that many people because the existing license was relatively easy to get. With the enhanced license people would get better reciprocity than what we have now. The “lax” training, potential for people under 21 to have the license, and no mental health check were blocking agreements with other states.

It passed the house 68-0-2.

What is probably most interesting about the bill is reported here:

Backers also hope these new permits convince Idaho school officials to allow their holders to be armed on school grounds.

We have a slippery slope and we plan to use it.

I’m now 100% convinced AlphaMike was correct.

Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb

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They should take a day off and visit the monuments at Lexington and Concord, and reflect on what prompted those colonists to stand their ground. It was the first time in American history that the government moved to seize arms and ammunition from its citizens, and it went rather badly for the British.

Beneath the surface many Americans are convinced that we may be approaching a point when the true purpose of the Second Amendment is realized.

Alan Gottlieb
February 5, 2013
Firearms ban also attacks the First Amendment
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Andrew Cuomo

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When people understand what the law is really about, and it’s not about taking their gun or a government intrusion on the Second Amendment, they’ll feel better about it.

Andrew Cuomo
New York State Governor
February 27, 2013
N.Y. gun law mandates magazines that don’t exist
[Do rape victims “feel better about it” when they find out their attacker won’t be prosecuted?

Governor Cuomo, this can and will be used as evidence against you at your trial.—Joe]

Graphics Campaign

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A reader sent these to me in regards to the anti-gun owner laws being proposed in Colorado.

candlesCo_dems_bloomberg
exum_hatefields_jail2
hickenlooper_magban5joe-salazar
john_morse-warulibarri_pen

I like the first one best.

This particular reader did not want even a hint of credit being given to them for fear they could lose their job. It sounds to me like someone has a boss that has a problem with diversity.

What they really want

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Every once in a while they admit what they really want:

Nowhere is the defeatist liberal approach to American politics more evident than in the post-Newtown campaign for gun control. Liberals are rushing to repeat, like a devout incantation, hand on one’s heart, that “we believe in the Second Amendment” — in an “individual’s right to own a gun.” Half of the legal and moral battle is lost right there and then.

…

the right to own guns is a communitarian right, not an individualized one.

…

A true liberal position, the place to start, is to call for domestic disarmament. That is the banning of the sale of all guns to private parties coupled with a buyback of those on the street (Mexico just moved to so control guns). Collectors can keep their guns as long as they remove the firing pin or fill the barrel with cement. Gun sports can be allowed — in closed shooting ranges. And hunters can be allowed to have long guns (if they pass background checks) with no scopes, which are not sporting. But, these exceptions aside, liberals should call for a gun-free nation

That individual/collective argument was settled before it was proposed and the Heller decision just confirmed it. This guy, a “true liberal” in his not so humble opinion, has no regard for the constitution or court rulings.

A true liberal is one who wants everyone disarmed? Got it. That can and will be used at their trials.

Quote of the day—John Yowan

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What’s wrong with this picture…

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…is what’s wrong with society. You all have gotten some version this spam e-mail, usually from a .ru domain;

“You know, they are so many people in the world, but some of them are alone, because they didn’t find their halfs yet, as it is so hard.
If you are alone and want to find your love, you can write me and we’ll start communicating. I’m alone and looking for a good man, who will give me his love and care. Who knows, maybe we can fill up our lonely hearts with love.”

If you’re looking for someone else to make you whole, you’re looking in the wrong place. If you want to be wanted, if you desire to be desired, if you need to be needed, you are part of the problem.

I cringed when one my many nephews said, right after he’d been divorced within a year or two of being married, that he’d found this other woman, and how great she was, and how they were meant for each other and he knew it because of some mundane coincidence or other. The ink on the divorce papers was still drying. I didn’t know what to say at the time, but he was running from one hell-of-his-own-devising and straight into another.

No, Young Grasshopper; if you’re not whole, or complete already, no one else can make you whole. If you’re searching for someone else to make you whole, you’re looking for love in all the wrong places. You’ll be let down, because getting what you want, the way you want it, is impossible. You’ll feel betrayed, because what you thought you had was something you can never have. This is the stuff of murder, of self destruction and suicide. It’s what’s wrong with our whole society.

Those in government (and gangs) know just enough about this to take advantage of it. We look to them for “salvation” of one kind or another when all they have to offer is entrapment. They want to own you in the same way you want to own someone else, or be owned by someone else. They want you dependent on them in the same way you want to depend on someone else, or you want someone dependent on you. They want you to need them in the same way you need other people, or you want other people to need you. This is the stuff of mass destruction, war and mass death.

That word we throw around so much in America, Independence, I am only just realizing, has a far deeper meaning than I’d previously suspected, and I think it is extremely important.

None of this stuff is new, and so these words aren’t mine. It’s as old as the hills, and yet we fall for this trap over and over.

Biden may be onto something

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Biden may actually be giving good advice to his audience. Double barrel shotguns are simpler than an AR-15. So simple that given enough time and an instruction video even anti-gun Democrats could probably fire off a shot or two.

His advice is entirely consistent with Security Theater advocated by most government types. He is suggesting people “Do Something” and they will feel better even if it accomplishes nothing that helps your situation.

Or instead of being onto something he could just be on something. Was he in Colorado testing out the local herbs when he shared his stupid thoughts with us?

Quote of the day—Rivrdog

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Do NOT be deluded into thinking that this push for gun control is about CRIME control. It isn’t, it’s about removing the guns from ALL of the society so as to make way for an uncontested dictatorship.

The only thing we can’t know yet is how benevolent the dictatorship might or might not be. In other words, will our enslavement be easy or harsh.

Also, do not be deluded that we aren’t already in the fight. The line between us being considered as dissidents exercising our rights and the putative dictatorship considering us insurgents is but a line in the sand, and the blowing wind will soon cover that line.

Rivrdog
February 17, 2013
Comment to Quote of the day—Nicholas James Johnson
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Nicholas James Johnson

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Without a commitment to or capacity for eliminating the existing inventory of private guns, the supply-side ideal and regulations based on it cannot be taken seriously. It is best to acknowledge the blocking power of the remainder and adjust our gun control regulations and goals to that reality. Policymakers who continue to press legislation grounded on the supply-side ideal while disclaiming the goal of prohibition are deluded or pandering.

Nicholas James Johnson
Fordham University School of Law
December 1, 2008
Imagining Gun Control in America: Understanding the Remainder Problem
[H/T to eriko in the comment to this post.

Just reading the abstract is scary eye-opening. Here are just a couple sentences:

the temptation is to view Heller as the central obstacle to effective gun control. This is a mistake born of our failure to confront the incoherence of pre-Heller supply-side controls. This article elaborates the supply-side ideal as the foundation of our most ambitious gun control proposals, explains the remainder problem and the defiance impulse as both cultural and physical phenomena that block supply-side rules, and evaluates a series of familiar gun-control proposals in the context of these structural barriers in order to identify which can work and which cannot.

Some of our opponents are far more intelligent than we give them credit for. Not all of them are the almost useful idiots like MikeB302000 and Japete.—Joe]

Collective identity

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One shouldn’t be surprised, shocked, or indignant that leftists claim “We are all Chris Dorner.”

Taken out of context his claims of injustice sound credible and if the claims were correct I can understand his rage and could even let pass a statement of “We are all Chris Dorner”. But he murdered innocent people who had nothing to do with his complaints against the Los Angeles police department. He, an individual, did this. He did this to innocent individuals.

People on the left have a mindset bordering on and many times crossing well into a personality disorder such that they cannot readily distinguish between themselves and others who share some or most of their beliefs. “Individual” is a term that, in their mind, translates into “not one of mine”. This is why they are confused by and ignore the concepts put forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

This is why they speak of a “right to health care”, a “right to a job”, and even “freedom from want“. Individuals, for all intents and purposes, do not or should not exist outside of the collective. Leftists cannot easily distinguish between their “one true collective” and themselves. And the collective should care for itself just as we believe an individual should care for itself and their immediate family. Those outside the collective or belonging to a different collective are to be shunned if they are no consequence. If they impede its objectives they should be reeducated, put in mental institutions, or disposed of.

Dorner did not view “the collective” that supposedly wronged him as individuals. The families of supposedly racist police officers and of his lawyer were just as deserving of punishment as the primary actors who perpetrated the injustices upon him. In his mind all members of a collectives, either his or of another, are equivalent.

The leftist collective identifies Dorner as one of theirs and hence “We are all Chris Dorner” makes perfect sense in their mentally disturbed universe. There are tens of millions of examples in the 20th century where leftists used violence to dispose of “not one of mine.” That leftists identify with him and cheered him on should only be a surprise to those that do not understand the mind of the leftist and/or are ignorant of history.

Why are there so few?

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Via email from Mike B. (AlphaMike in Idaho, not the other one) I received a link to this episode of Freakonomics: How to think about guns.

It starts out with a different question about mass murders than the media and most politicians, “Why are there so few?” With 300+ million people in the U.S. and a similar number of guns (not to mention many other ways of being able to commit mayhem and murder) why is it so “far out on the tail” that these incidents occur? Think about that. Typically it is about two mass murders (4+ people killed) a year with guns. Out of 300 million people? Only one out of 150 million people per year go nuts enough to kill a bunch of people? That’s pretty amazing if you think about it.

Notable quotes:

  • “Gun buybacks are one of the most ineffectual public policies that have ever been invented in the history of mankind.”
  • “I think people are confused with respect to how dangerous a particular gun is. If I’ve done my calculations right, any particular handgun in the United States will kill a person about once every 10,000 years.”
  • “In order to prevent one homicide in a year, you would need to get 10,000 guns brought back in a gun buyback. Okay, but the thing is you don’t get 10,000 guns, and they’re not the guns that are used to kill people. So the typical gun buyback program I would guess saves approximately maybe 0.0001 lives.”
  • “But why is it in the context of guns we don’t think of guns as deterrents, we think about guns as, being this, causing the violence. And the idea here comes out of Canada’s book, Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, which honestly I’ll say is one of the best books I’ve read in my life, and if it’s still in print I would just encourage people to go find it. It’s fantastically insightful.”
  • “Anyone with any sense looks at the current political climate, thinks about the kinds of proposals that are being made and accepts the fact that none of these proposals are going to have any real impact at all.”

The recommended book is available via Amazon:

It is next in my queue after I finish The Android’s Dream (son James thinks it is awesome and I’m liking it a lot).

Quote of the day—Bernardine Dohrn

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There’s no way to be committed to non-violence in one of the most violent societies that history has ever created. I’m not committed to non-violence in any way.

Bernardine Dohrn
In the 2002 documentary film The Weather Underground. Get the movie from Amazon here.
[From the Wikipedia entry:

Dohrn with ten other SDS members associated with the RYM issued, on June 18, 1969, a sixteen-thousand-word manifesto entitled, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” in New Left Notes.

…

The manifesto stated that “the goal [of revolution] is the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism.”

Leftists know their agenda can only be implemented with violence. Government is violence and the threat of violence. They wish to use government to create their utopia. To advocate non-violence and have a leftist philosophy is a contradiction. To allow people not of the government to have the means to resist government is to allow their idyllic future to be denied.

The murdering, anti-gun, pro-leftist, ex-cop, from Los Angeles who was killed this week is just one in a long line of his type.—Joe]