Wednesday, October 31, 2007
I Finally Got Around To....
reading this Tom McClintock speech on the true impact of global warming.
Hint: The truly scary stuff isn't happening on the weather channel. It's happening on c-span.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45  
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
By Odin's Beard...
What an excellent opportunity for the youth of Delaware!
If they had tried this nonsense when I was in school, I would have had fun with it, running rings around them until they cried.
Youths of Delaware, this is your chance to distinguish yourselves from the hive mind.
Show them how their nonsense is incompatible with a free society. Show them what an truly freethinking, autonomous human looks like.
Pepper them with questions they can't answer until they back into a corner and cry.
There are a small number of high impact life experiences with which you can fully grasp the mantle of the self-authority of a free human, and facing down the borganistic collective is one of them.
Go get 'em!
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Jawdropper...
Apparently, some people really do believe that there actually is virtue in allowing yourself to be killed.
Go see fer yerself. ;)
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Quote of The Week...
Quote:
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"THERE IS ONLY ONE THING THAT WILL RELIABLY STOP EVIL MEN WITH GUNS, AND THAT IS GOOD MEN WITH GUNS. "
John Farnam
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Sunday, October 21, 2007
An Excruciating Truth…
Prelude and Sidebar:
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Every once in a rare moon, I end up writing something that takes on a life of its own, taking me into various strange directions, which aren't necessarily where I wanted it to go.
This is one such piece. I wrote it months ago. The initial center of it was the segment on "The Lightning", which was originally written standalone. After Rudy (cursed be his dark, statist heart) righteously smacked down RonPaul in the first debate, well, that became the lead in, which was balanced on the way out on the rant concerning Libertarianism. The original stand alone was lost in the process. {damnit} I'd have forked to a different document if I'd truly understood how far afield what I had originally thought to be a brief snarky intro was to take me, or how it would be woven into the main piece like glittering threads.
The end result had such a strange, alien feel, that I just parked it for months, not quite sure what to make of it. Even now, I have a good mind to strip out the RonPaul Libertaria bookends, and rework "The Lightning" back onto standalone terms, because I think it's important that "The Lightning" be well understood. After all, it illuminates and explains the entire history of the 20th and 21st centuries.
In re-reading and reconsidering the other elements, weighing them in the balance against the magnitude of work needed to strip them out, and the possible illumination to be gained from leaving them in, I've decided to go ahead and post this up as-is, despite my reservations.
I'm also going to put up a bit of a warning: Despite appearances, this post really is less about RonPaul, the LP, and Doctrinaire Libertarians than one might think. The substance of the work lays elsewhere. As such, I'm not going to have a whole lot of tolerance for RonPaulBots, LP shills, and Anarcho-whateverists in comments.
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Pull up a chair! Free Ice Cream Being Served!
I want to start this essay by reminding folks of my small l libertarian nature, which is tempered with an engineer’s sense of "if it doesn’t work now, save it for when it might".
In that context, with some reservations, I generally like Dr. Ron Paul in Congress. I disagree with about 35% of what he says, which is par for the course for most politicians, but the reason I like him is because the other 65% he’s saying desperately needs to be said, and nobody else is saying it. I honestly wish we had 100 Ron Pauls in Congress.
The parts that I do take exception to have given me grave pause as to whether Ron Paul is presidential material, and his abysmal performance in the Republican debates a few nights back have utterly convinced me of it. Ron Paul would be a unmitigated disaster as President of the United States.
I like Ron Paul, and 100 of his clones in congress, where what he does right can do us some good, especially on the domestic front, but his individual flaws, and the systematic flaws in the libertarian dogmatic puritanism he espouses, and the related political naiveté and general inability to make shit happen are kept in check by the rest of the congress, before it get us all killed.
It is an uncomfortable truth that way, way too many of my liberty oriented brethren do not understand that Ron Paul got his ass handed him in that debate. (That the bitch slapping/coupe de grace to his political career was administered by the dark, creepy authoritarian Giuliani is completely irrelevant. It could have been anyone. Rudy was simply quicker and more decisive on the draw. )
They do not understand that Dr. Paul beclowned himself, or why, or even that he soundly deserved it.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go hit youTube, search on "Giuliani Ron Paul", watch the clips for yourself, and read some of the supporter’s comments to get a taste.
I’m not going to get into a blow by blow or a "he said she said" post mortem analysis. To do so would be to exactly replicate Ron Paul’s fatal error, which is the same fundamental error of all "root causes" approaches to political dynamics.
At the end of the day, "root causes" in world politics is exactly like my squabbling preschoolers shouting "Mom! She hit me!" "No! She hit me first!", (Except of course that world politicians play that game with guns and bombs and economic sanctions, rather than small fists.) Any experienced parent will tell you that most of the time, once that pattern is fully manifested, forensically determining who, as a matter of realityFact®™© hit who first is a pointless academic exercise without bearing on dealing with that particular moment. It may or may not have value and bearing later during the "come to Jesus/Vishnu/Odin/$DEITY" phase, but it sheds little light on how to handle the present outbursts.
Like a game of Go (or the lesser game chess), the previous board states are not the pattern of force that exists on the board NOW. Successful players read ahead, to get AHEAD of their opponent’s OODA loop. Intentionally taking action that places yourself BEHIND your opponent’s OODA loop is suicidal, as eventually, the board will enter a state in which one party or the other CANNOT win.
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Sidebar: The other common flaw found in "root causes" arguments is that while they analyze the impact of the selected choice at the fork in the road, they do not deal with the likely consequences of the other paths. Root cause arguments are nearly always partisan, and the analysis of the other branch of possibility is usually inconvenient, and often fatal to the partisan’s cause.
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The reason Dr. Paul beclowned himself is twofold. The trivial reason is that he shot himself in the ass by giving an answer that was indistinguishable from blaming the victim, that victim being us. Any damned fool can tell you that’s not going to fly, and that all the explaining in the world isn’t going to help. Calling for acknowledgment and repentance of sins real or imagined is a job for prophets, who usually come to gruesome ends, not politicians, and Ron Paul ought to have at least known which of those he was.
Had it simply been that, I simply would have rolled my eyes, groaned about libertarians tripping over their ideologically pure dicks, noted my disagreement, and moved along.
The significant reason that Ron Paul got his butt whipped was because his response demonstrated that he did not have an understanding or command of the monstrous, overriding Excruciating Truth that it is rarely uttered aloud.
That so many liberty oriented brethren don’t understand that Ron Paul has fatally screwed up tells me that they don’t grasp Excruciating Truth either.
(Hmmmm….am I a prophet, or a politician? At least I’ll confess confusion on that point. But then again, I’m not in congress, running for president. I’m just a sleepy guy who has to get up for work in the morning.)
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So, here’s the Excruciating Truth:
Whether America remains free and prosperous will be determined by whoever controls The Lightning; which is some critical portion of war suitable energy resources.
And it damned well better be us.
Let’s talk a little while about The Lightning, so that we understand what it really is. There are a lot of high yield energy resources on the planet; nuclear, coal, gas, oil and oil distillates, hydraulics, and a pile of what are currently low yield types, such as wind, geothermal, solar, and the like.
All war is logistics, and all logistics is resource allocation and delivery, and it all takes energy.
In order to prevail, the warfighters, their support supplies, their weapon systems and their munitions must be delivered to the theatre and positioned such that they can effectively used to defend or take and hold their objectives.
Of these energy types, most are simply not suitable for war. They may be useful for economic and private consumption, perhaps, but not useful for war.
Of the energy types currently available to us, coal, crude oil, and nuclear are useful only for naval and railroad purposes. By naval standards, we have the sleekest, fastest fleet on the water, but it is ponderously slow by any standards other than Naval, which is why we keep our ships stashed all over the globe. (A carrier task group’s published max speed is 35 mph or so.)
Although our navy serves as the walls of fortress America, and are critical to any military endeavor, as it stands, oil distillates are the only energy sources both portable and sufficiently energetic to power aircraft, tanks, and the myriad vehicles that get things to where they need to be, and to actually perform the fighting once they get there.
I’m going to spend about as long discussing railroads as they would last in an all out war. They go quickly, as blowing them up is a military solo and team sport with 150 years of tradition behind it.
Without oil, our ability to conduct warfare is limited to within 20 miles of our largest naval rifles, and wherever we can trudge on foot or animal drawn cart. No oil means we essentially roll ourselves back to war as practiced in 1890 or so, albeit with better guns. Yes, it’s true that in 1890, or 1850, for that matter, we had an effective energy source for manufacturing and other predicates of war, and even trains to get supplies to the staging areas, but trains were not driven into battle. Guns were carried to battle by men on foot, wagon, and horseback.
So, to reiterate: the choice is war as fought with petrochemicals and machines, or horses and carts.
While we’re talking about The Lightning, let’s make another thing absolutely clear: merely possessing The Lightning in no way ensures that America will remain prosperous and free. We can certainly be our own undoing. Possessing The Lightning simply prevents another party from making that decision for us, with or without our consent.
This is simple, inescapable truth: the party who can make war can prevail over the party who cannot at will..
There are no credible alternatives to this. No amount of amity, goodwill, trust, oaths, treaties, handholding, kumbaya singing, or inter/trans/meta national trade/peace/mutual defense agreements can alter that bedrock reality one bit.
Here’s a real world example. To the extent that any nations can be "friends", it is the United States and the Anglo sphere countries of Canada, the UK, and Australia. As far as we know in all of human history, these national relationships represent the ultimate amount of trust, oaths, treaties, handholding, kumbaya singing, or inter/trans/meta national trade/peace/mutual defense agreements that has ever existed, ever.
We would not conquer any of these countries. That would be unthinkable. We have millions of reasons not to, in the form of literal familial bonds, shared language, base culture, and shared economic, artistic and scientific interests.
But if tomorrow all those reasons magically disappeared for the sake or argument, (or if they fell off, one by one over time) we could conquer them, smashing them flat, and they couldn’t do a damned thing about it. To be certain, they control their own portion of The Lightning, but they do not control "some critical portion" of it, such that they could hold out against us long term.
Heck, we were able to win the battle of the bulge, against a superior force riding better tanks simply by virtue of the fact that we could run circles around them, causing them to expend fuel they couldn’t replace, while we could resupply at need.
We had some critical portion of The Lightning. The Nazis didn't, and eventually we could make war when they could not.
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As it stands, the only energy source suitable for war are petroleum distillates, and these are distributed around the world in a fashion dictated by geological process and circumstance, which is to say, they are finite, unequally distributed, not commonly available, fixed in position, and require at least a moderate level of technology to obtain them.
This has not always been the case. For the bulk of man’s history, the war suitable energy source, the Lightning, was food transformed by human and animal processes into war. The places to grow food, men and animals were widely distributed and commonly available.
Furthermore, this may or may not be the case with future sources of energy.
If they have the same attributes of being finite, unequally distributed, not commonly available and fixed in position, the geopolitical dynamics will remain the same, but be transferred to different fronts. Alternately, some forms of energy might be rendered from advances in commonly available, widely distributed elements, such as hydrogen, or some breakthrough in a wildly hypothetical source of energy such as Zero Point, which taps the seething quantum foam stuff of which the universe is made. If this ever becomes the case, the paradigm could shift completely, no longer would men and nations contest against each other for "some critical portion" of THE Lightning. They would merely need to attain "some critical level" of Lightning, after which the dynamics are a subject of speculation.
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Even the string of internationally feeble Democratic presidents had enough understanding of The Lightning so as not to lose our national grasp of it. Even the feeblest of the feebs, Jimmy Carter, who squandered the opportunity to nip the jihadist mess in the bud had he installed his balls an spine in dealing with Iran, might have lost a squadron of marines, the respect of the world, and 27,972 man days of American freedom (444 days x 63 hostages), but even this complete disgrace of a President did not lose his grasp on The Lightning.
Dr. Paul’s may know his history, but he repeatedly demonstrates that he does not understand it, nor does he have a grasp of The Lightning. His repeatedly demonstrated inability to apply the reality of The Lightning to his understanding of that history and the current situation makes him dangerously inadequate as President of the United States.
His response to the issue of oil is to pose the classic doctrinaire libertarian question. "Why not trade with them for what we need?"
It’s a fair question. When analyzed in the context of both history and The Lightning, the answer departs the orderly, fairy tale of the free market and enters the dirty murk of the real.
Long story short, the bulk of the 50 years of abuse that Dr. Paul and other Leftist aligned "root causers" implies we visited upon the Middle East took place during the Cold War, during which we maneuvered against the Soviets to secure our own portion of The Lightning.
The short answer (which compresses many pages into a paragraph or two) is that you don’t trade with people who aren’t able to deliver the goods, and the Middle East simply was in no position to deliver. They weren’t in the position to deliver technically, being dependent on western technology and know how to locate and extract the oil, and they weren’t in a position to militarily secure their grasp on their own goods, because the Soviets could make war on them and take their goods at will.
A doctrinaire libertarian with a clue might then continue, to discuss how parts of the trade package would be structured so as to address these deficiencies. There would be a transfer of tools and knowledge, as well as arms and international defense agreements, so that the end result looked more like national trading partners, and less like colonies with resources to exploit.
Which, oddly enough, is more and less pretty much what actually happened.
The nature of the oil work itself and the criticality of it to vouchsafing our own destiny precluded it happening in chaotic, disorganized countries. If the work was to proceed in any meaningful manner, the countries at question had to be relatively stable and unified as an opening ante. To try the oil operations in a state of tribal chaos would have been a stillborn effort, and to absent ourselves from the proceedings in some sort of misguided "prime directive" way of letting the countries evolve politically without "outside interference" would simply have been an invitation for the Soviets to intervene, perhaps militarily. Accordingly, the most credible existing powers consistent with our own goals were uplifted, and given what they needed to consolidate their power and stabilize their nations.
But, oh, wait.
Isn’t that outcome called "propping up tyrannical regimes?"
(And isn’t it odd how resonant the libertarian criticisms of American foreign policy are with those of the Left in the last couple of years? I sniff a shared script somewhere…)
The entire line of reasoning goes cyclical from there, becoming a snake eating its tail. There is no permutation of the line of thought that is both consistent with reality and libertarian ideological purity in which we walk away from the thing with a firm grasp on "some critical portion of The Lightning". As a direct consequence of that, our fate, the future of the freedom Libertarianism treasures, passes from our hands to our rivals, which at the time would have been the Soviets. The Soviets could hardly be characterized as adequate, credible or appropriate guardians of the rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
But that is what the likely outcome of the rigorous application of libertarian principles would have been.
While libertarian purists would stridently argue the elegant perfection of their principles, if the outcome of a process is broken, then either the process itself is fundamentally broken, or the input was garbage to begin with.
The bottom line is brutal and excruciating: the issue of living a principled life is fundamentally paradoxical. Strict, mindless adherence to even perfect, worthy principles will get you killed or enslaved by those whose only principle is their own power. The paradox, then, is that you must sometimes depart from your principles in small ways to preserve them in big ways. It is your willingness to depart from principle in some ways that defines your ability to effectively defend the principle, and most importantly, your loathing of that departure restrains you from do so more than is absolutely necessary.
Such is the nature of a moral, principled man in the world; he answers the call to obtain real results in the world, knowing full well that he will get his hands dirty in the process. He finds the monastic life, offering the spiritual and ideological purity of the ivory tower to be unsatisfying thin gruel.
The world is an inherently dirty place; the only ones with truly clean hands are those who have not actually touched it. The true measure of a moral man who must touch the world is that he strives to keep his hands as clean as possible, for that is all that he can do. The alternative is to lay aside the world entirely, and let the devil take the innocent.
This is a path that we as a people have done imperfectly, but well.
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Now, having said all that and reflected a bit, I amend myself.
I do not want a 101 doctrinaire libertarian dogmatists like Ron Paul in congress.
Yes, 65% of what he’s said still desperately needs to be said, and it still needs to be heard, but the libertarian dogmatists have had their day.
Well, let’s face it, they’ve had their decades.
They’ve had nearly 40 years of spinning wheels in the mud, and have damned little to show for it. What liberties that have been preserved, and the precious few we’ve regained was the result of the labors of others.
It’s time to end all that.
I call for the end of the libertarian dogmatist. It is high past time to pull down the walls of the ivory tower.
I’m not interested in winning a shiny debate trophy to cram in my china cabinet to gather dust.
I’m interested in living in a society of greatly enhanced and secured personal liberties, and the libertarian dogmatists (never mind the anarchists of various stripes) simply cannot deliver those goods. (Have I mentioned that it is an axiom of business that you don't deal with those who cannot deliver the goods?)
Incidentally, the free markets they worship know this, and have spoken definitively on the subject at the bank, in the polls, and on the party registration rolls.
Face it. Vegans outnumber Libertarians nearly 3:1. How embarrassing is that?
Furthermore, no self respecting business of merit would have tolerated 4 years of consistent failure, never mind 40.
Doctrinaire Libertarians, you are so FIRED.
Actually, you can't be fired, because, come to think of it, y'all have never even made it past the first interview to land the job.
What you're being dismissed from is the positions you formerly occupied in mindshare.
You're being traded in for upgrades.
Whatever the answer is, y'all ain't it.
WANTED:
Upgraded liberty oriented leaders and politicians who are well versed in the classical nature of our Republic, and who seek to (re)establish and enhance the maximum liberty of the people within that framework.
Candidates will understand that coercing all choices into binary bright line "all or nothing" principled/unprincipled categories is inherently unnatural and a counterproductive absolutist simplification, and that the genie will not be stuffed into back into the lamp overnight or purely as the result of virtuous, principled thinking.
The upgraded, smart and pragmatic libertarian will recognize that choices are "more principled", and "less principled" as they pertain to the liberty of the people, and will strive to obtain actual results in the world, even if those improvements are incremental, by consistently, prudently and relentlessly promoting and selecting the most principled choice that is feasible under the totality of the circumstances.
Above all, you must DELIVER THE GOODS.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Friday, October 12, 2007
I agree: something smells fishy in Plymouth Meeting.
Dave Markowitz throws a flag on the play.
Is the mom getting railroaded and knifonged?
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Monday, October 08, 2007
An Oldie But A Goodie...
A long while ago, when I began researching the 2nd Amendment in earnest, I came across this linguistic analysis of the text of the Second Amendment:
The unabridged second amendment.
With Heller coming up for review, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that we stand on very solid ground.
Quote:
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[Schulman:] "(3) Is the right of the people to keep and bear arms conditioned upon whether or not a well regulated militia, is, in fact necessary to the security of a free State, and if that condition is not existing, is the statement 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed' null and void?"
[Copperud:] "(3) No such condition is expressed or implied. The right to keep and bear arms is not said by the amendment to depend on the existence of a militia. No condition is stated or implied as to the relation of the right to keep and bear arms and to the necessity of a well-regulated militia as a requisite to the security of a free state. The right to keep and bear arms is deemed unconditional by the entire sentence."
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
Documenting A National Disgrace...
I rarely publish things that get tossed in over the transom, but I think this one's worth a public service announcement.
It's kinda hard to say "Remember New Orleans" when half of gunnydom doesn't know what happened there.
I'm grateful someone took the initiative to dig in and preserve the details for the historical record that would have otherwise been swept under the rug.
Quote:
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neworleansgungrab.com
Greetings... This is Gordon Hutchinson, co-author of the soon-to-be-released book entitled "The Great New Orleans Gun Grab."
I've seen your blog before, so I know where you stand on the issue of gun rights. And I am glad to see you moderated the discussion of the question of what happened in New Orleans.
Every question asked in the string is answered in our book, which will be coming out on or before November 15...Tom Gresham mentioned it in the string...I thought I would contact you and give you a bit more information.
I'm new to this chat room business, so I don't know how to get into all this, but we would appreciate your getting the word out about the book--it not only tells the complete story of Patty Konie, and what actually happened to her, but to about a dozen other people who were brutalized or harassed by the police, and in many cases, had their guns confiscated. It also tells the stories of a number of people who managed to survive the anarchy only because they had a gun. In some cases they got in gun battles with looters. In one case, they killed a looter.
In addition, we look at the entire situation and examine in a closing chapter "What Went Wrong in New Orleans" listing the reasons the cops and federal police slipped into Gestapo tactics and anarchy.
Finally, it details the court battle and our final success at getting into the storage facility where NOPD had approximately 1000 guns stored that had been confiscated during that time. I led the team of experts that went in with Dan Holliday, the NRA/SAF attorney who had been battling New Orleans through the federal courts, attempting to gain access to the guns to inventory them and get them back to their rightful owners. We finally got into the storage facility, after over a year of legal infighting, on April 18, 2007.
I detailed this battle and the story of the inventory in the August issue of America's First Freedom magazine.
The story can be seen by following this link:
http://www.nrapublications.org/first...Neworleans.asp
It's a heck of a story, and I'd appreiate you getting the word out to your many readers, and the folks on this forum for me.
Again, the website is: www.neworleansgungrab.com
The book, again, will be available by November 15...but if they order by October 31, the publisher will give them free shipping and handling.
You can post the above message if you like...my forum name is Shootist1
if you'd like to know more, contact me at:
{redacted}
Thanks for your help...you can check my bona fides with Tom Gresham if you like.
Gordon Hutchinson
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
There are at least three separate, and really good reasons...
To post this story.
Quote:
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Russia is a failed society in nearly every way. Its population is dying off at an alarming rate, and repeated surveys by international experts have placed the quality of its government on a par with Africa. China will surely begin to take over Russia’s territory in the Far East, Russia can do nothing to stop that. But Russian tactics of repression and propaganda, just as in Soviet times, remain devastatingly effective, as long as they are backed up by the will to terminate human life, a flow of ready cash from the oil markets, and above all a craven Russian population unwilling to stand up for human rights and democratic values.
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1) To honor Anna Politkovskaya, a brave journalist from Moscow who documented Putin's Stalinesque depredations, and paid for it with her life.
2) To illustrate the importance of having and maintaining a critical mass of brave, outspoken and audacious individuals who have each other's back, and who make it plain as day that they can and will stand together should certain lines be crossed.
3) To once again remind people, especially the Bu$shitler Imminent Police State! crowd what a real police state looks like.
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Posted By: geekWithA.45
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