Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Any questions?

The old joke goes something like this:

Only government would show up at your door unsolicited, break both your legs, cut down the hardwood tree in your front yard, give it to a buddy to make into crutches, sell them back to you at profit, and then say, "But for me, you couldn't even walk!"

You can, of course, rather easily add extra credit clauses such as:
  • send you a bill for the cleanup of the scrap wood and sawdust;
  • fine you for felling a tree without a permit;
and the like.  Take your pick;  this is what is known as low-hanging fruit.

Well, "we" do seem to "progress" onward, don't we?  Today's installment, updated, might go like this:

Only government would go to the trouble of actually trying to kill you (with a "less-than-lethal option" for extra irony points) in order to demonstrate that they can not only save your life, but (cue the "Amen" cadence) bring you back from death.

Hey, you laugh.  Sez here that some badged thugs used that super-trendy, we-swear-it's-not-harmful...compliance tool, that Grigg accurately calls a portable electrocution device...upon yet another nonviolent, retreating victim, under what can only with supreme charity be described as questionable circumstances.  Oddly, when confronted with three high-voltage jolts from Officer Operator* McFriendly's Super Spiffy Sparky Stick, the woman went into cardiac arrest and had to be revived.  Hey, at least they did bother to revive her, rather than stuffing her in the backseat of a squad car and letting her expire...she should be thankful!

And of course the results are perfectly predictable.  By all appearances the victim hadn't harmed anyone, no drugs or booze nor anything else that would have even warranted a "traffic stop" in the first place...nothing except being scared by armed enforcers and inelegantly attempting to assert her privacy.  Over on the side of Team Thug, electrocuting a retreating victim is (yet again) officially held to be fully "within department policy", and they'll say no more because it might interfere with their ongoing effort to further prosecute the victim.  They've got a job to do, after all.

Any questions?



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* Somehow, that vile and disgusting term (which so many of the militarization apologists seem to like), suggesting so strongly an automaton in preference to a thinking human being, seems perfectly appropriate here.  SOBs want that term?  Well, they've earned it.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

A more satisfying day.

Actually got a chance to do something constructive today;  took a bunch of brass that's been in storage for a serious long time and fired up the case tumbler.  This brass was given to me by some folks right before we left Colorado and I'll always take brass.  :-)

Ran three loads today (one more and that segment should be done) and I'm pumped to say that I've got well over a thousand pieces of .45ACP that passed visual inspection.  (Shit ain't cheap, so this makes me happy!)  Also in that group were lesser quantities of .40S&W, 9x19, and .38 Special, a couple hundred .223, and maybe fifty-odd .308.

It's long past time for me to dust off the reloading gear that's been in storage, calibrate it up, and start cranking out some workhorse loads.  Clean brass always puts me in the mood for that, so I'm hopeful to get some momentum up.

Here's to a constructive week.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Is angst. You purge.

Beginning to breathe again.  Please forgive me for needing a little stew time after at least one hundred twenty million people found some reason--whatever it was--to agree that we should keep on pointing guns at everyone (including themselves, if they're even dimly honest about it), and not do anything, you know, different.

Well, shit, it certainly wasn't unexpected...just horribly, ridiculously insane.  But I did know that going in, so it's time to move past it.

Point one:  at least a hundred eighty million people did not vote to bind us all in the same chains as last time.

I'll start with that.


Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Irony meter: pegged.

So, an observation about yesterday's exercise in public masturbation.

"We" elected a war criminal, by any definition that matters.  It's on record*.  He sent lawyers to argue, openly, that it is his full and unquestionable right to (to paraphrase Arthur Silber) murder anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason (or for no reason at all)--and to do so entirely in secret.  And he has done so, repeatedly.  (He also sent lawyers to claim the right to indefinitely detain anyone, anywhere, at any time, etc...but with the right to just whack someone, does detention really matter?)  From all that I can tell, almost nobody seems to care about this, or even acknowledge or know about it.  Even most of the (for lack of a better word) "liberty sphere" seems more agog about the possibility of the detaining than about the actuality of the killing.

Now, consider that the electoral block that got this man elected--either directly via their v*tes, or indirectly because of their pimping and salesmanship.  By their own account, these are people who are "awake", "aware", and otherwise fully in command of their world and how to make it a better place with "correct" politics.  (They'll tell you this.)  They are also the self-appointed standard-bearers for peace in our time, and the irreplaceable bulwark against the total destruction of society by imperious warmongers and tramplers of civil liberties.

Ahem.  (Ping!)

When this block got Obama elected the first time,  the key to his success was entirely his claim to be nothing like his predecessor.  Cries of "war criminal!" were used constantly to attack the truly awful incumbent, and by association his own opponent, chosen by the incumbent's rival intramural gang to continue the horrors.  And, of course, it worked.

Now...you may have noticed that, since Election Day 2008, the term "war crime" has been completely missing in action.  This is well past "curious", since (again to quote Silber, emphasis in original):

Every blogger and writer who is conscious and even fractionally honest now acknowledges that Obama has doubled down on every single policy of Bush's that the progressives had condemned so loudly and for so long. Moreover, Obama has gone beyond Bush's profoundly awful record in certain critical respects. And never, ever forget that Obama and his administration claim the "right" to murder anyone in the world, wherever he or she may be, for whatever reason they choose -- or for no reason at all.

Again, this is all on record.  (Say what you want about the demonically vile Dubya, but at least he had enough of an understanding of basic humanity to try and hide his worst crimes.  This administration argues and defends the same and worse, openly.)

And yesterday, the Defenders Of All That Is Good, the "awake and aware" crowd who Care About You, the ones who most loudly declare "only through your action can you make a difference", protected us from a potential war criminal...by re-electing a proven one.  (For any of those Enlightened Beings who don't understand:  it's just like the re-election of Bush in '04, with the intrasquad teams reversed.)

Oh, I've no doubt that Romney would have made a most enthusiastic war criminal and trampler of individual liberty.  (Those are the only campaign promises that you really can count on.)  But here's "lesser of evils" in the starkest possible relief:  over sixty million people v*ted to elect a known war criminal.  (And almost sixty million more people v*ted for his functional twin with a different team mascot.  That's at least 120 million v*tes endorsing the embrace of war crimes.  Wow!  Do you have any doubt that the Establishment got this message loud and clear?)

Because, you know, if we don't act now! to prevent it, we could get someone really awful to wield Absolute Power on our behalf.

If anyone needs more than this to conclude that politics causes otherwise normal people to completely lose their fucking minds, brother, ain't nothing I can do to help you.


And so now, whether or not "we" deserve what we're going to get, we most certainly will get what we asked for.




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* If any of this is new to you, you really should look it up.  I'd lay it out here, again, but I suspect that the reality is that if you need me to lay it out for you, you'd write off anything I had to say anyway.  Look it up for yourself.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Pick who owns you.

Thanks, Joel.  Grins are needed today.


On this sacrosanct National Masturbation Day...

...I offer only the reprises of what has been said before, since not one single thing of consequence is going to be any different about this year's result.

As before, millions will--voluntarily--legitimize the very system that enslaves them by participating in its perpetuation...and then preen sanctimoniously about, in what must be the afterglow of what George Carlin likened to public masturbation.  (Either click that link to start at the right spot over at YT, or start the below embedded segment and scroll to 2:48):


Miss ya, George.

For myself, I'll simply say, before the polls open:  Congratulations, America, you just elected the Establishment.  Again.

You can now go back to acting surprised at how bad things have become.  How uncivil.  How warlike.  How anti-humanitarian.  "Gosh, wherever did all this ugliness come from?"  And before long you will have fresh, new cause to be shocked, shocked that the people you just put into Current Occupancy aren't really what they told you they would be after all, and you can act surprised about that too.

That article points to the one I wrote specifically to be a reference, How to Vote on Election Day.  Which (s'prise!) needs not a single word changed for this year's episode of The House Wins!  The House Wins!  Snippets therefrom:

...Then, you do the Absolution Shuffle: free your mind from further worry. You have Done What You Can Do. It's in The System's hands now. If things go south from here, you can always absolve yourself further by proving you voted for The Other Guy. You have now validated your License To Bitch.
...For days on end after voting, affix various physical and virtual "pieces of flair" to yourself, sanctimoniously offering to the world that "I voted". Well, good on you. You have discharged the duty you learned about in Civics class, and proven that you know how to take orders and follow the rules. You have played your part in deciding who gets to play with the guns of the state for the next term, without raising any serious challenge to the legitimacy of the very Establishment you are voting to "fix". (Oh, it's fixed, all right: did you not choose from among the Establishment-approved candidates in the Establishment-approved election constructed, monitored and interpreted by Establishment appointees?) Yes, you're a Cool Kid now. Come get your cookie.
...Always interpret any insinuation that you, the voter, may have been deceived within or by the political enterprise itself, as prima facie evidence of simple provocateuring by The Other Team. No other explanation is acceptable. This just reinforces the evidence that your continued participation in the game is more important than ever before. After all, you've got skin in the game now, and have a reputation to protect.

Most of all, hold your head up high. You're better than they are. You've done your part. Now go tell everyone about it.

I suppose I did write a bit more recently in the same vein, and may as well point to that as well:

I'll be staying home, thanks.  And no matter what "official sources" may tell you, it ain't due to some dismissive fifty-cent term like "apathy".  After more than twenty years of defending all the sophistries just like I was trained to do, I simply ran out of excuses, and realized that politics is not the solution to the problem.  Politics IS the problem.

What I really hope people go to and absorb, though, is Arthur Silber's latest brimstone on the subject.  He's recently been a writing madman, and has contributed some real stunners, which for that man is saying something.

If you vote for Obama or Romney, that is certainly your right -- although you will forever forfeit the right to speak of "rights" at all. If a human being can be murdered for any reason, or for no reason at all, merely on the arbitrary order of someone who claims the power to issue such orders, she has no rights at all. You thus sanction the destruction of all rights, of all human beings -- including yours. The victim may be Mrs. Hamilton, or Joanna -- or you.

If you vote for Obama or Romney, do so proudly. I want you to say: "I vote for Obama/Romney proudly. I am proud to be a knowing accomplice to their murders, including the murders of innocent human beings." Say that, and those of us who refuse to surrender our souls will know where you stand.

This is not a complicated issue. It is stunningly straightforward. Those who seek to complicate and confuse it do so because they will not identify the meaning of their support, either to themselves or to anyone else. When they wish still to be regarded as "civilized," murderers and their accomplices will engage in endless irrelevant arguments and invent complexities where none exist. Don't let them get away with it. They are knowing accomplices to murder. Make them say it.

Yesterday he published this excellent treatise on contributing to the legitimacy of a broken system by participation, and on the fallacy of the lesser of evils.  It's blistering:

To return to what may now seem comparatively mundane, the question of voting for national office, even if only for a third-party candidate: It is not simply that one grants legitimacy to the overall system by doing so, although that is true and horrifyingly bad in itself. Perhaps more important is this: all advocates of third-party voting acknowledge its futility. Their candidate is not going to win. They know that.

But let's identify the further meaning of such a vote. They also know that either Obama or Romney will win. That is: a man who enthusiastically embraces the State's murder program -- a program that systematically, regularly, routinely murders innocent human beings, anywhere in the world, for any reason the State chooses -- and who similarly embraces the surveillance and police State, together with endless death campaigns abroad as well as a growing system of oppression and brutalization at home -- will win the presidency. By participating in the election at all, you grant legitimacy to the process that will make one of these two men president. You thereby grant legitimacy to the system itself, to the State, and to all those actions you know with absolute certainty the State will take in the future.

That is what your vote means, even if you vote for a third-party candidate. Perhaps you can do that, and still continue to live together with yourself.

I cannot -- and I will not.

Silber is a national treasure, delightfully enigmatic and directly caustic in a way that we desperately need more of.

Well, that's enough for the record this time.  We'll see, I guess, which of the two proffered monsters we'll have to deal with for the next four years;  there's obviously not a nickel's worth of difference in any way that matters between them, but I must say that Mitthead makes for a much more elegant nom d'ridicule than anything I've seen for BHO, so maybe that would be fun.  (Hey now, it's a difference, and you have to take what you can get!)

Gawd, here we go again.