Stewart Rhodes continues to impress...

...with this recent take on the Guereña hit (because that's bloody well what it was)

This policy of using SWAT to serve search warrants on gun owners simply because they are armed, and where there is no long history of violent crime, has got to stop. I think taking a stand over the use of SWAT against this young Marine in Tucson is a good place to start. And we also need to demand some answers from Pima County Sheriff Dupnik about exactly why this young Marine was left to bleed out while paramedics were prevented from treating him for an hour and fifteen minutes. Jose would have had a better chance if he had been shot in Iraq, where a corpsman would have braved enemy fire to treat him.

As we head toward Memorial Day, I find it disgusting that this young Marine survived two tours in Iraq and returned home to a family who was no doubt relieved and grateful to God that he had survived war, only to be gunned down in his own home, by his own government. As a veteran, I am just plain ticked off. But also as the Founder of this organization, I am convinced that we Oath Keepers veterans need to step up with as much resolve as we expect the current serving to do. We ask them to “steel their resolve” to do what’s right by their oath. We veterans need to do the same, and we Oath Keepers need to take the lead on encouraging other veterans and veterans organizations to step up.

As I've said before, I can't get behind the OK for philosophical reasons, but if it's going to exist, I'm pretty happy that someone like Rhodes is at the helm.  I suppose I might yet have to change my mind about that, but not yet.

Hayek v. Keynes

Hat tip to JD Tuccille on this;  I missed it the first time,

but caught it the second.

Worth watching.  Both cover almost all the nuances of the, ahem, "conversation", and do it well.  As Tuccille put it originally:

Explaining the massive hurdles you'd have to overcome to impose a "rational" controlled society to people -- the sheer impossibility of substituting government planning for the values and preferences of millions of people -- is often a lost cause. Eyes glaze over, yawns are politely stifled (or not stifled at all), and the virtues of freedom and dynamism get lost in the vast disinterest many people harbor toward matters philosophical. Frankly, people want bad times made better -- and they're not interested in hearing anybody tell them that the cure is usually worse than the disease.

So, don't waste your time boring your friends. Instead, point them toward this video, the work of economist Russ Roberts and creative director John Papola, in which free-market economist F.A. Hayek and liberty-distrusting economist John Maynard Keynes lay down their opposing views in rap form while out on the town.

No, really -- it's good.

Yeah, it is.  A nice resource!

But see, it's different: BHO, unlike GWB, wouldn't lie about OBL. (Or WMD, for that matter.)

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

So, did you get the message in OBL's death?

It seems that OBL is now officially dead.  Well...at least: proven, habitual liars have now declared that he is dead.  Just as the same gang of proven, habitual liars brought him to our attention in the first place, and told us all just exactly who he was, what he had done and how dangerous he was.  And what we could Do About It.

But now, this news...Do you understand what this means?

No, seriously:  did you get the message?  Its importance really cannot be overstated. Here it is:

You can now stop criticizing your leaders.  They have Come Through For You.

See how that works?  Now is the time to Pull Together, people!

Now is the time to drop any petty squabbles like...oh, let's see, what's going on right now, that a cashed-in chip or two would really help the Establishment out with...hey, here's one:  how about Mexicans and Americans murdered in the service of a cynical political positioning ploy gone "wrong", starting at ATF and going up through Main Justice, almost certainly State, and very likely (in one of those "either knew, or should have known" ways) the White House itself, with classic stonewalling and cover-up behavior at every level?

That's just one example, today.  There are other things, too--there always are--financial insolvency despite ongoing claims of improvement and health, continued worldwide marauding (in the name of "peace"!), the perpetually escalating war against all of us through building the modern police state (as always with tyrants, "out of necessity"),  and the ongoing leaks and discoveries that those pesky little people make (despite the best efforts of today's "open and transparent" governments) which continue to prove that there is nothing, nothing that the state can tell you that you can be certain is the truth.

Yeah, now is the time to stop talking about all that.  Just STFU.

And know--know--that since they "accomplished" this critical mission, that now is the time to write the next mission's blank check.  Do it...before our "enemies" strike again--and before all this petty bickering tears "us" apart.

Write the check, pay it, and STFU.  That's your job, people.  It is now time to let your betters do theirs.

(Didn't you know?  That's the way all protection rackets work.)

Yet another Voltaire moment.

You pissed off yet today?  No?  Then stop reading.  You won't remain that way for long.

Via Radley Balko, we learn of two more cases of a disgusting trend that is becoming more and more common:  the State not only protecting its enforcement thugs from anything resembling accountability (this now being so common it's passe), but rewarding them with trophies, over the dead bodies of those they "protect and serve" to death.

No, I'm not making this shit up.  Yes, nobody would believe it if it weren't true.  But here ya go:

Cop shoots, kills unarmed Pace University student. Months later, he gets the police union’s “Cop of the Year” award.

and

Two Las Vegas police officers who shot and killed Erik Scott in the controversial Costco shooting last year have received honors in a national officer of the year award.

In that latter case, how about this zinger?

“I don’t see it as a controversial shooting,” he said about the Costco shooting. “What potentially could have been a bad situation they brought to an end with no citizens being hurt.

"no citizens being hurt".  Roll that thought around in your mind for a little bit.  If you weren't pissed off yet, betcha are now. (Told ya.)

And so we arrive at today's Voltaire moment.  The relevant quote is "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," but we're just so past that now, apparently.

Atrocities are happening now, every day, against ordinary people like you and me.  (Yes, many of them are a lot more "just like you and me" than you may know.  Erik Scott, as just one of hundreds of examples, only got reclassified as a "non-citizen" when he became a non-human, on account of being shot to death for...oh, who the hell knows what the reason is today?  As Pete at WSRA says, "Do you understand yet?"

And so, perhaps the Voltaire quote needs to be updated:

Those who want you to believe absurdities, have already committed the atrocities.

For a well-adjusted human being, that should probably produce an instant Condition Orange situation.

Claire Wolfe on Atlas Shrugged, Part I

Once again, Claire simply nails it.

And how did so many media folk, including movie reviewers, get the notion that Ayn Rand and the Tea Party are in bed with each other? Probably 1/3 of the negative reviews make that connection. Yegads. Rand? and the Tea Party? That’s so shallow and simplistic it’s more like a cartoon than an actual thought.

Of course it is.  Talismanic incantations of "Tea Party" affiliation are simply the newer, hipper way of saying "9-11 changed everything".  Instant absolution continues to get cheaper and cheaper.

Claire's article, as usual, is worth the read in full.  She insists that it is not a "review" itself, but rather a "review of reviewers";  whatever it may be, it's indispensably relevant, and just might pick up your day.

'An Armed Society Is...' by Joel Simon

Many thanks to Joel at TUAK for re-posting something I don't think I'd read before--it's from a few years back--except that you can also read it in most of the things that Joel says now.  (That's gratifying.)

From The Libertarian Enterprise, the article is worth the read in full.

I'll offer a teaser, but with a hitch:

And so at the very spot on which I had been welcomed to the town decades ago, I was welcomed back in the exact same manner after many wandering years.

Afterward I walked downtown for a while and thought about Heinlein's Dictum, that an armed society is a polite society. He was right as far as he went, but he didn't go far enough. The statement implies that armed people are polite because they are afraid of each other, and that's wrong.

An armed society is a friendly society. The people there can afford to be friendly, because they have nothing to fear from each other.

Now that gets right to the core of why so many don't get it.

The hitch is simply this:  the best writing is before that.  Joel has a gift for both writing, and for reflection.

Go.  Read.  Enjoy.