Your irony overload for the day.

Palantír?

The company that sells their supercharged eavesnooping analytics system to the Feds (never to be used against us, of course, what are ya, an extremist?) is called Palantír?

What is this, some secret psy-op designed to get students of irony to have spontaneous aneurysms?

Or hell, maybe the reference just naturally draws the tyrants like flies to a blacklight.  Hey, that's it:  someone should develop a total-surveillance system (all your brainwaves are belong to us) and market it under the straightforward name Eye of Sauron.  Anyone wanna bet that the Beltway set would so much as bat an eye before spending your money on it?

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Hat tip to Mike Vanderboegh.

'What if,' indeed.

Yes, the following came from the Faux News folks.  You're a thinking human;  ignore that and consider the content on its own merits.

I admit, even I have to willfully filter out all the gratuitous production paeans to the Founders' minarchy, but again, that's just applying a proper noise filter to get better signal.  You're doing that all the time anyway, right?

The power of this piece isn't in any one thing that Napolitano says;  hell, sadly, nothing there is new.  What works about this, instead, is the breadth of the listing in a single delivery.  Even for those of us whose faith in the political process is slightly dimmer than that of the late Frank Chodorov, it's still all too easy to get mired just in one or two fronts in the State's war on all of us, and forget just how breathtakingly comprehensive the overall assault is.

Consider sharing with those who need to know.  Hell, I could envision this being aired at parties, where contestants would tally up a count of the things mentioned in this segment that started happening within their lifetimes...

Quotes.

Radley Balko:

• Cop shoots at unarmed man, arrests unarmed man. Unarmed man somehow still charged with “aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.”
• 5-year-old arrested, zip-tied at the hands and feet, and charged with battery on a police officer.

Joel Simon:

"I've been waiting for years for the staff of The Onion to just throw up their hands and give up trying to keep up with reality. In a world with such absurd people in it, what use is satire?"

Voltaire:

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Personally, I still think the Voltaire quote may need to be updated to:

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

Props to Sam Wolanyk...

...for putting together the following admirable resource.  Observe:

Now it's not exactly a secret that I've got no faith in appealing to the same system what gave'n us the problem in the first place, for any sort of redress.  No faith at all.  And realistically, let's face it:  most of the energy expended in trying to "work within the system" is pluperfectly entropic.

And yet, I cannot help but admire the dogged attempts of a few truly exceptional people, to till at the windmills nonetheless, unapologetically, directly, and with class.  Right now, my gold standard for that practice is Mike Vanderboegh's and David Codrea's amazing work to keep the Gunwalker Scandal alive despite the Establishment's best efforts to make it go away.  Here, I see the same sort of direct "I see you" approach in Wolanyk's effort to educate participants, and the breadth and scope of his content is outstanding.  (I'll choose to forgive him the teeth-gnashing "sheepdog" reference and any other transgressions that only hardcore non-aggressors would spot anyway, because this hits so hard on so many important points.)

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Hat tip to Yih-Chau Chang, Oakland Gun Rights Examiner, for clueing me in to the video. 

A polite reminder...

...that the Only Ones still, when it's all said and done, "serve" only at our pleasure.

(Yeah, I know it doesn't appear to be the US at all, but what of it?  The whole world is afflicted with Only Ones, and if you haven't noticed, they're the same everywhere you go.)

What's so amazing to me is how polite the public is, and continues to be, in the face of the continued abuse.

Here in the US at least, the posturing will be boilerplate, and of two entirely predictable styles:  1) the statist copsucker will say "it is never okay to resist authority, no matter what," and 2) the statist apologist-defeatist will say "here in the US, the militarized cops will simply kill everyone who resists, so it's pointless to resist authority, no matter what."  (If you're keeping track and wondering about the non-statists:  well, "as everyone knows", all such are known to be batshit crazy, irrelevant and anyway systemically expendable, and so don't factor in to the posturing.)

The result will be exactly as we know it now:  plaintive wailing from the thugocracy about improving their monopoly on force (as always, for "officer safety"), plaintive wailing from everyone invested in the failed political system that the only path to salvation is to continue to prop up the failed political system by any means necessary, and a further disconnect between that system (and its thug-enforcers) and the people it claims to represent afflicts.  (Those non-statists, what of them there are anyway, continue to blabber on about withdrawing support as an option that is actually different, but remember, they're kooks and can just be ignored.)

That pattern will continue--it certainly appears to work, after all--right up to the point at which what happens in the above video, happens here too.   

Thugs are advised to study the aspects of the above video that pertain to their continued claims of a monopoly on force.  (Hint:  if your conclusion is to better arm yourselves, you're not listening.  You can try, but it won't be enough.  Even in Pima County.)  This is a (very polite) learning experience that you would do well to appreciate.


Hat tip to Wendy McElroy and Claire Wolfe.

A resource: 'The Secret History of Guns' from The Atlantic

It was some years ago now that I recall being impressed by an article at The Atlantic regarding "the gun issue".  That was The False Promise of Gun Control, by one Daniel Polsby.  Perfect?  Nah, but what is?  Nonetheless...it was thoughtful, dispassionate, nontrivial, and drew rational conclusions from an analysis of history--hell, it read like actual reporting, which distinguished it from almost everything else at the time (then as now).

Well lookee here.  The Atlantic's Adam Winkler has given us another capital-R resource:  The Secret History of Guns.  For a tease:

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.

There is so much right in this article, it's hard to explain.  Winkler does an outstanding job of cataloguing all the main characters, in context, including most of the substantive warts that partisans of "both sides" continually gloss over.  Just read the whole thing;  it is perhaps the best executive summary of how we got to the sorry pass we're in that I have yet seen.

Another tease:

After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.

Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to the Capitol.” Seale was incredulous. “The Capitol?” Newton explained: “Mulford’s there, and they’re trying to pass a law against our guns, and we’re going to the Capitol steps.” Newton’s plan was to take a select group of Panthers “loaded down to the gills,” to send a message to California lawmakers about the group’s opposition to any new gun control.

The Panthers’ methods provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.

Fantastic.  And these really are little teases;  there's much more there and it's all worth it.

If you already knew all this:  please, recognize it as the resource it is and help share it with others.  The Atlantic can reach an audience that cranks like you and I, though we may say exactly the same thing, cannot reach.

If you didn't already know about some or any of this:  please, digest it all, and reconsider "what you know" about any political issue.  (Hint:  at the level of the incentive-driven ballet among their respective players,  they're all the same.)  If you've ever wondered why an increasing number of "gunnies" now refer to NRA as "the nation's oldest and largest gun-control organization", or why disarmament freaks can actually find some solace in American history*, you will find out here.

Kudos, Winkler.  This is a valuable resource.



Hat tip to Vanderboegh, who would (quite rightly) contest Winkler's statement that the NRA is "the unquestioned leader in the fight against gun control".  Vanderboegh is also savvy enough to call Malcolm X on the technicality of his otherwise admirable statement, "Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun."  (The Second Amendment provides no such thing, it merely recognizes a right that all human beings have already, and simply prohibits the State from infringing it.  It is truly a technicality;  the real point Malcolm X is trying to make is perfectly valid, and I suspect that he would not have blinked at a simple word change making it clear that even without the Second Amendment, every human still has the right to arm in self-defense.)

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* I find it absolutely telling (and delightful) that the disarmament partisans still have no idea how to articulate the sort of historic support for their cause that Winkler effortlessly documents here.

The eggs and ham are really green from the poisonous mold.

From a Facebook friend:

Dr Seuss 2011
I do not like this Uncle Sam, I do not like his health care scam. I do not like these dirty crooks, or how they lie and cook the books. I do not like when Congress steals, I do not like their secret deals. I do not like ex-speaker Nan, I do not like this 'YES WE CAN'..I do not like this spending spree, I'm smart, I know that nothing's free. I do not like their smug replies, when I complain about their lies. I do not like this kind of hope. I do not like it. nope, nope, nope.

Cute...as long as the ending of the book is updated too.  In the modernized story, we have already "tried" green eggs and ham...and, to quote Chevy Chase from Spies Like Us:

So, uh, thanks for the bruises and you can keep the stool samples...

Trust that first thought.  You do not like this Uncle Sam.  You do not like what he has planned.