Quote of the day—Rivrdog

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What happened since the 1960s is that capitalism morphed towards socialism by accepting all those rules on enterprise which the gov’t wrote, and socialist governments got used to the capitalist bribes, and learned to relax the rules at the right times to promote “welfare capitalism”.

A third political force, libertarianism, sprang up to replace pure capitalism with it’s property rights-driven theory, and a fourth force, Marxism, arose to inject pure collectivism back into what used to be socialism.

The entire process is like watching clouds form and dissipate over the mountains.

Rivrdog
November 2, 2012
Comment to Capitalism v. Socialism
[I really like the metaphor.—Joe]

The world’s best gun salesman

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If you own stock in a gun manufacturer you might want thank President Obama:

RugerRevenue

From Chart Of The Day: Sturm, Ruger’s Revenues.

Some people just don’t understand unintended consequences (from October 13, 2008):

Sarah and Jim Brady and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence with its network of Million Mom March Chapters endorsed Senator Barack Obama for President and Senator Joseph Biden for Vice President today, and urged Americans to vote for them.

From looking at the chart and the date of the Brady Campaign endorsement announcement it’s clear the Brady Campaign causes gun sales.* Lots of gun sales.

*I’m just mocking them. Of course I know correlation does not necessarily mean causation.

Nice

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From NRA Recovers 1.3 Million Dollars in Attorneys’ Fees For Work on Supreme Court McDonald Case and Related Cases:

NRA has now recovered fees in excess of 1.3 million dollars. So for losing the cases, Chicago and the other cities involved paid a total of over 1.7 million dollars to firearms civil rights groups.
In September 2012, the NRA filed another Motion for Supplemental Attorneys’ Fees. By that motion, the NRA is now seeking attorneys’ fees and expenses incurred in litigating its original motion for attorneys’ fees. Because these fees and expenses were not included in the amount of the August fee award, Chicago and Oak Park will most likely be writing more checks to the NRA!

The wages of the sins of Chicago and other cities are to pay those that represent their victims. I would prefer the individuals that made the stupid decisions to use the power of government to infringe upon specific enumerated rights had to compensate the victims directly and then spend time in prison as per 18 USC 242. But it is a huge improvement over the situation of 15 years ago.

Interesting

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I’ve been getting a few quasi-random hits on my post “Why are liberals so violent?” It turns out that if you do a search for “why are liberals so violent” (without the quotes) Google gives my post the number two ranking. Bing gives it number four.

Quote of the day—Mark Alger

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I wish we In the Right could/would stop using the term “capitalism”. It’s a Marxian canard, founded in the notion that what we’re about is a system of belief, rather than free markets, and free commerce, which are the natural, self-organizing systems that arise spontaneously when individuals are left in liberty, each to pursue his own enlightened self interest.


Nor is “socialism” the only evil of the Left. Together, the lot of them all bear a single earmark: they are collectivist in nature and deny the sovereignty of the individual. The rest is just persiflage, allowing leftists to pettifog minor distinctions of no matter or moment, rather than getting to the basic point.


Mark Alger
November 2, 2012
Comment to Capitalism v. Socialism
[A very good point. The problem is, of course, that “free markets and free commerce” is not as succinct. And “Liberty” and “Freedom” are too vague. On the other side I think “collectivist”, “collectivism”, and probably even “statist” and “statism” work adequately.


See also his blog post on this same topic here where he says, “Joe is brilliant”. He forgot to mention that I admire myself for my modesty as well.—Joe]

Capitalism v. Socialism

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There are at least two ways to interpret Americans Aged 18-29 Have A More Favorable Response To Socialism Than To Capitalism. One is that the young are inclined toward socialism and as they age they will become more capitalist. The other is that capitalism is on it’s way out and as the current capitalist age out socialism is inevitable.

I’m inclined to believe the first hypothesis is more likely to be true than the latter. One of the reasons is that young socialists have been predicting the imminent collapse of capitalism for decades if not longer. Here is one example:

In the last week of May 1968, a rallying call to the working class to take political power into their hands would have tolled the death knell of capitalism on a world scale.

In rural Idaho at the time, and a bit too young, I was too far removed from ground zero of the socialist movements of the 1960s. But I know people who were near the center of those times and places. They too believed within a few decades capitalism would be dead and buried.

I won’t deny that capitalism is weaker and is more likely to be crushed now than at any other time in the last 50 years, but it is far stronger than its detractors of the 1960s thought it would be at this time. Many of those sympathetic to socialism at that time became more capitalist as they grew older.

Perhaps socialism will temporarily bury capitalism in the next few years or perhaps decades. But I believe the young will continue to mature and become more capitalist as they age. Socialism will succeed only because we grant them power based on their stated intention rather than based on the fruit they bring. And results versus stated intentions are becoming more and more clear with each victory the socialists make.

It is those stated intentions that are so seductive we can almost taste the sweetness of the candy. The candy that is laced, by it’s very socialist nature, with carcinogens. What the socialists don’t really understand, and why I say any burial of capitalism is temporary, is that as the cancer takes hold and destroys a society it destroys the great mass of the socialist advocates at a faster rate than it does the capitalists. The capitalists will move to protect their “capital” whether it is their tangible wealth or the intellectual and physical skills that made them more productive than the socialists to begin with. As the socialists rot from the cancer of their own making the capitalists will be the ones to recover and rise from the ashes of the civilization the socialists destroyed.

I don’t know the time scale. There are just too many variables. The elections next week, as important as they are, are probably a minor player in the big picture. The economic collapse of Western Europe and perhaps Japan and China will play a major role. Add in the price and availability of oil and the possibility of glass pockmarks replacing the cities of Iran and/or Israel and you have such huge variables that making such predictions is impossible.

But I believe that even if  it has to be resurrected from the ashes capitalism, particularly the right to property and all that derives from that, will rise because it is a natural law recognized and defended by nearly all animals and even our very young. I’ve talked to avowed Marxists and others who looked me directly in the eyes and said, “What’s wrong with socialism?” Their logic is non-existent, their data is cherry-picked, and their arguments are both fragile and brittle.

They can only succeed through deception and force. And at some level they know that too. This is why they have such violent tendencies. This is why they are genocidal. They can only succeed if they can kill off their intellectual competition. But as they run out of places to loot there is a “little problem” waiting for them. Their final, intended, victims are armed.

It is only as we humans go through the process of maturing in the teenage years that our brains turn to mush and advocate for socialism. Most recover but some do not. It is my belief that socialism is now making it’s final push to kill capitalism and although those with mush for brains might actually succeed in the end mush for brains will always lose to superior firepower.

Contrast

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This is the doormat of the nearest neighbor to my clock tower home in the Seattle area:

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This is the doormat to my clock tower:

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I was a little concerned the first time Barb L. saw it but without any prompting from me she has twice mentioned how much she likes it.

Son James and his wife Kelsey gave it to me for my birthday. Thanks again James and Kelsey.

Quote of the day—Alan Gottlieb

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Mayor Emanuel, like his former boss in the White House, doesn’t have a plan that works. Since he seems unwilling to follow the court’s wishes, and appears unable to lead his city out of despair, perhaps he should just get out of the way and give his citizens a level playing field against violent criminals.

Alan Gottlieb
October 30, 2012
CHICAGO MAYOR SHOULD SHARE BLAME FOR MAYHEM, SAYS CCRKBA
[I take a minor exception to the word “give.” I think it should have been “let.”

And if I were to have my way I would go further than Gottlieb and demand Mayor Emanuel be prosecuted under 18 USC 242. But I’m an extremist who believes those who violate rights protected by the Bill of Rights should be punished.—Joe]

Protest Songs

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Advertising is expensive, and people are good at tuning it
out. Memes catch on because the are pithy and may be hitting at a core truth.
Music can carry a message, tell a story, or just get into someone ear and buzz
there for a while. To get a message across, to teach, you can use massive repetition, or strike an emotional chord
in someone’s brain to trigger a this is
important signal, or massive repetition. Political advertising goes for the
massive repetition, from both sides. But protest songs are almost almost exclusively
a tool of the left. I think it’s because artists tend to be on that side of the
spectrum. What we (the conservative / right) need are some good protest songs to reach the young and the undecided’s in the middle.
The thought came to me that

“Four dead in Benghazi” sounds an awful lot like “Four dead
in Ohio”

A person could either make the song to Neil Young’s tune,
and change the words appropriately, something like:

Two soldiers and no-one’s coming
We’re abandon, on our own
This winter I’ll hear the piper
Four dead in Benghazi

Gotta get to the annex
Terrorists cut ambassador down
We warned higher ups long ago
If you knew him
And found him dead on the ground
How could you tell us to stand down?

SEALS and marines are ready to go
Jets are fueled on the strip
Targets are all lit up
AC130 overhead being called
On for help
Need some rounds on the ground

Two soldiers and no-one’s coming
We’re abandon, on our own
The winter I hear the piper
Four dead in Benghazi

Or they could make a mocking, sarcastic, satire, something
sung to the tune of “Hero of Canton” from firefly, which was (in the show) a
serious folk song, but to us (the audience) is was hysterical because it
misrepresented the facts and Jayne so badly. For that, something that mocks and ridicules
the entire Obama presidency would be best. Something like:

O, the man they call O! / He robbed from the children / and
he gave to the old! / Stood up to the kings / Then he bowed to the floor!

It could reference many of the different doings, from
fund-raising scandals, “green energy, deficits, no budget, Benghazi, etc.

 Know any bored song-smiths?

Moral Issue

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Posit; Your kid is suspected of having knowledge of other kids smoking pot.  Your kid’s school wants your kid to talk to some lying, immoral cops who lie every day as a matter of course and brag about it.  Your wife says No– that we aren’t going to talk to cops like that.  What about talking to some other cop from another jurisdiction?


I say that it is none of any cop’s business whatsoever.  If we’re going to talk morals, a teenager trying pot is no business of anyone on Earth except for the kid and the parents.  Further; the fact that pot was made illegal is in and of itself immoral, and unconstitutional.  The cops’ only possible interest in “talking” with said teenager is so they can harm other people  besides.  There is no victim  except for the “perpetrator” himself, and hence there is no moral obligation whatsoever to talk to cops and possibly thereby to allow them to harm other people.  All the parents in town already know.


Now say that the school threatens to suspend said teenager if said teenager does not talk to some cop or other.  What then?  I say that doing the right thing isn’t always the easy thing.  I say to hell with all of them– let them suspend said teenager.


We had a kid in our community kill himself a while back over this exact sort of thing, and with this recent case there is talk of it again.  There is talk of other kids beating the crap out of one of the kids for “snitching”, and talk of him committing suicide.  All because you nasty, sick, evil, broken, twisted sacks of shit maintaining our drug laws, enabling and enriching violent criminal trafficking networks and torturing innocent kids for being curious, and you in the public schools playing right along with it, going straight to the cops at the drop of a hat.  Shame on you all.


You cops out there; you had better think long and hard about the damage and destruction you’re perpetuating.  Make the right choice– knock it off or get out.  I have no sympathy for you, as you knew you’d have to hurt innocent people as a regular part of the job.  You were set up just as all of us have been set up, but you KNOW IT.  So FIX IT!  You’re as guilty as any drug gang kingpin unless you knock it off right now (they couldn’t exist without you).  The law doesn’t make you right and you know it.  Plus you swore an Oath, remember?  I’ll hold you to it you stupid bastards.  Don’t give me the crap about the thin blue line either– YOU are making the trouble here.  You want to be treated like a damned hero?  Fuck You, then act like one.  Stand up for what’s right even if you pay a price for it.  THAT’S a hero.  Turds.  You really are dispicable.


We’ve already had the talk in our home about how evil laws result in people suspecting each other, fearing each other, hating each other, in violence, in ruined lives, the militarizaion of our law enforcement and all the rest.


Washington state a measure on the ballot.  Best you look into and right now.  I deleted the stuff I wrote about shooting cops in the face.  For now.  Anyway; shooting cops in the face is probably not the best way to get people to understand.  For now.  And so I will speak out against it unless there becomes a time wherein there is no other choice.


ETA, 11-01-12;  The cops, through a round about set of circumstances, including a parent telling the school principle that there’s no way their kid is talking to the cops, have stood down.  They’re leaving the matter in the hands of the school admin.  So I have to hand it to them– for whatever reason, they’ve done the right thing.  For now.

Mocking the Brady Campaign

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Barron continues our video series and posts mocking Brady Campaign Board member Joan Peterson with Pumpkins for Joan:

Think about this… The Brady Campaign wants to, and has tried for decades, to get various types of guns banned. Handguns were their first target back in the 1970’s. They were originally the National Council to Control Handguns (NCCH), then the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence (CPHV), then Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI) in 1980 and finally The Brady Campaign in 2001. And as recently as the brief they filed for the DC v. Heller case in 2008 they claimed the Second Amendment did not protect an individual right and even if it did it did not extend to handguns. Not only have they failed in their decades long mission the U.S. Supreme Court has explicitly said handguns are protected. And using the phrase “in common use” the court strongly implied that the secondary target of the Brady’s, “assault weapons”, are also protected. They have some extremely high hurdles to overcome to even get back to the position they were in as late as 2008, let along where they were when they were founded in 1974. And today on our side we use not only “assault weapons” but explosives to mock them.

When guns and bullets just aren’t enough aren’t you glad we have Boomershoot?

Push / Pull (Remedial Physics)

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There is a theory that gravity is a pushing force.  That is to say that gravity is a property of space and not matter.  I say fine; it’s entirely plausible, but that for all purposes we can understand at the moment it makes no difference, and there is currently no way to prove it one way or the other.


An idea that never seems to die (millions of people believe in it completeyt) is that we can extract electrical power “from gravity”.  I can’t believe I wasted an hour on YouTube on something that sounded interesting, but ended up as another of millions of perpetual motion energy system assertions.  I’m not linking to it.  Stay away.


Again; No, Little Grasshopper.  Gravity is a part of the mechanism by which we might extract energy for our own purposes, but in and of itself it isn’t energy in the sense that we can “extract” power from it”.  Hydroelectric uses gravity, but the energy we’re extracting came from the sun (sun heats ocean water, water evaporates as a result…you know the rest).  It’s like a spring in engineering.  My Victrola phonograph’s turntable isn’t powered by spring energy.  You have to put energy in before you get any out, and there’s loss along the way.  The spring stores energy from the muscles I used to wind it up, my muscles get their energy from the food I eat, and the food I eat gets its energy from the sun through photosynthesis.  The Victrola is powered by trillions of tons of exploding hydrogen nucleii, which I suppose you can call “the energy of the universe” or “God Power” if you like.  But it isn’t spring energy anymore than hydroelectric is gravity energy.


But everyone wants desperately to believe that they’re smarter than all physicists and engineers, past and present, combined, and that they have The Secret to endless, essentially free energy.  Tidal power (extracting some of the energy of the Earth’s rotation), hydro power, solar power (photovoltaic) and all the rest are all perfectly viable but certainly not free and some of them require massive engineering projects.  You are never going to build a “gravity power” machine without some source besides gravity, at least not until we can figure out what gravity is, and exactly how it interacts with matter.  So far it’s a mystery, and I assert that it will remain a mystery for a very long time, or until some “quantum leap” of understanding of the nature of the universe is achieved.


In the same YouTube piece they, again, for the nth time, brought up the suppressed technologies meme– Big Dark Corporation buys up patents for endless free energy machines and locks them away from human eyes forever, so they can continue to make BIG BUCKS POLLUTING THE EARTH.  As if there is no money in selling and maintaining endless free energy machines.  Naw; it’d never sell, and for sure no government or other company could ever find out about it, no matter what.  Ever.  And someone with more power than anyone else snuck into the patent office and erased the patent before anyone, including the patent office workers, ever saw it.  That 100 MPG carburator we heard about back in the 1960s (you just bolt it onto your Chrysler 440 V8 and presto, your 5,000 pound 1966 Town & Country gets 100 MPG) was suppressed by the Big Oil Companies more effectively than any secret in the history of history.  And I am Karl Marx’s uncle. (Hillary Clinton be goin’, “I can’t believe you’re Karl’s uncle because you’ve obviously been bought off by the oil companies!”)


While we’re dismissing silly ideas; that asteroid belt out there is constantly, almost universally, being referred to as “leftovers” and suchlike, from the formation of the solar system.  That’s a misunderstanding or at best a disservice to the students.  Those hard, dense, nickel/iron chunks we keep finding can be only one thing– planet core material.  If the Earth were smashed all to hell, resulting in another asteroid belt for a time, and you somehow managed to survive, would you want the pieces referred to as “leftover flotsam from the formation of the solar system”?  One could argue that the asteroids are “leftover” in the sense that total planet annihiliation is part of solar system formation but the implication has  been they just never ended up as anything and so there they are, still out there.  Maybe I’ll start referring to the asteroid belt as “collateral damage”.  And now that I think about it I’m sure Bush had something to do with it.


Please, because this needs to be said until it is understood;  It is entirely possible to be a towering genius in one field and be a blithering idiot in another.  It happens to me all the time.  So for you blithering idiots out there (you know who you are because you think you’re a towering genius); you just need to get into some other field.

Looters and the right to keep and bear arms

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There are reports of looting in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy. The National Guard has been mobilized to help stop the looting but what I don’t see or mentioned are people defending their homes and stores like what we saw after hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Most people in New Jersey and New York probably do not have a firearm which would give them a decent chance against the supposedly planned “flash mob robberies”.


I wonder if this will change any opinions on the right to keep and bear arms. Will more people purchase a firearm and get some training so that next time they will be better prepared? Or will government workers with guns do such a wonderful job that people will see no need for private citizens to own guns?


A search of Google news for hurricane sandy gun turns up nothing of interest. I wonder why that is.

The Setup: Explosions Don’t Just Happen, You Create Them – Boomershoot

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This is the fourth in the series of ESS Boomershoot videos.

The first three, and my comments, are here:

This one features me doing a lot of talking. I’m so pleased they edited out all the “umm”s and “ahhh”s.

There is also Rolf juggling the targets, scenes from our target/explosives production facility (Mecca), bowling ball mortars, anvil launch, Ry‘s fireball, both long range and High Intensity events, and people pounding stakes and putting targets on the stakes.

As I have said before ESS makes good stuff. They gave me a couple pair of their glasses and I use them whenever I need eye protection or even sunglasses.

I expect Barron will have something up with this video soon as well.

There are still 16 Boomershoot positions open. Sign up and be a part of Boomershoot 2013 here.

Quote of the day—Denny Bonavita

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We have guns, and we have violent crime – just as we have deer and we have trout. They both live hereabouts, but one doesn’t breed the other.

Denny Bonavita
October 25, 2012
Hey, gun control boosters: Gun sales soar, but murders don’t. Why?
[I like the way he expressed that.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Stanley G. Buford

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The Second Amendment clearly states that citizens of the United States have the right to “keep and bear arms” for “traditionally lawful purposes.”

Stanley G. Buford
October 29, 2012
Why Gun Control Has Nothing to Do With the 2nd Amendment.
[It would appear Buford has a reading comprehension problem. There has been some debate over the existence of commas in the Second Amendment but Buford had to be closing his eyes and imagining things or spending time in an alternate reality to come up with what he claims it says. The Second Amendment in my universe as passed by the Congress:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

As ratified by the States and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

But one should not be surprised. The anti-gun people are used to lying. In order to have any hope of winning they have to.—Joe]

Quote of the day—GiGi

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@linoge_wotc I can see from your stockpile of guns and photos of guns that you have a VERY SMALL PENIS!

GiGI (‏@gigimorgan10)
Tweeted October 18, 2012
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

H/T Linoge via Twitter.

Her statement presumes facts not in evidence. I think a citation is needed. Or, more likely, she has crap for brains.—Joe]

Hiking in the Cascades

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I had originally planned other activities but the weather forecast said “0% chance of precipitation” for a few hours today. The forecast beyond that looks a lot like rain until the end of time.

With a few seconds of conversation Barb L. agreed to go on a hike with me and suggested a place she had been a few years earlier. I got a little winded climbing up to the top of the waterfalls but it was more than worth the effort:

IMG_3484_Corrected

IMG_3498

IMG_3509

IMG_3515_Corrected2012

IMG_3516

IMG_3520

It reminded me a lot of another hike I went on five years ago and told the gist of the story to Barb as we hiked. This is not Missouri.

Modern parables regarding self reliance

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My brother Doug sent me an email with a link. This gives you a hint of what it is about.

Professional trappers don’t catch fast-breeding and destructive feral pigs using hunting dogs and guns, or in little traps one or two at a time. The wily pigs quickly learn to evade humans after such fleeting contacts. So how do the pros trap entire feral pig herds, eliminating them all, from granddads to piglets, in one go?

They feed them, most generously. They kill them with kindness.

…

The moral of the story: If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t go inside the “free corn” pen, not even when all the doors are open. Free food is as dangerous as the sirens’ song to ancient mariners. It is all too easy to get used to being fed, and then to miss the exits closing one at a time.

I read the entire post and all the comments. Most will stop after the first parable which is probably enough to get the point across. Just to make sure read the second one also.

Quote of the day—Thomas Jefferson (NOT!)

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All the terrible instruments of war are the Natural Birth Right of the American citizen.

Attributed to Thomas Jefferson
[Awesome quote!

I received this in email recently and it looked just a little too good to be true. I went searching for it and was only able to find one instance of it. This instance does not appear to be supported by any reference to any of Jefferson’s writings or speeches. I did extensive searches on http://www.monticello.org which I have found to be a good source for Jefferson quotes in the past.

I must conclude this is not correctly attributed to Jefferson.

While searching I did discover two other quotes I had attributed to Jefferson are probably bogus as well. I have update my posts here and here.—Joe]