What in the world?

Went to the petrol station for a fill-up this afternoon.

The attendant ran right up when I’d pumped only for a few seconds.

“Sorry, guv’nuh.  New regulations — can’t put more than seven bullets’ worth of energy in the ol’ tank.”

I couldn’t believe my ears.

I drove home to meet the heating oil salesman.

Same story.  A few squeezes of dinosaur juice in the oil tank and he was ready to go.

I asked if he knew where I could get some coal.  “Sorry, ol’ chap.  Guv’ment regulations and all.  Been sold out since this morning.”

I’ve got me wife and kids bicycling in the basement, charging the batteries for our house since this dad-blasted rain’s been pouring down for days, rendering our solar panels practically useless.

Looks like we’ll be walking from now on, thanks to our government that has to pretend it’s in charge every now and then, glosing over the fact it’s beholden to lobbyists and foreign investors.

Community Standards: If You Do The Crime, Can You Do The Time?

Recently, a young man notorious for breaking laws in order to make a point about monetised public information, decided to disappear from a contemporaneous timeline with his family, friends and colleagues — I honour his decision by neither mentioning his name nor saying more.

But his death brings up a problem I have with projecting back toward 2013 from 3013 — if your species continues to hide information from itself in a dog-eat-dog world, what do I care if you do or do not make it to a point 1000 years into the future?

With seven billion different views about what life should be for the individual, for the family, for the subculture, for the species, for the global economy, for the local/global ecosystem, do I spend time here in any format describing a future that encompasses our thoughts and feelings now as they expand and contract over the centuries?

Or, instead, do I return to the cabin in the woods and record observations about water dripping from gutters, flowers blooming out of season and other simple things that add to my happiness?

It is still perplexing, deciding how to change my life now that my father is gone and I’m the oldest male in his lineage to carry on his strong beliefs and wishes, regardless of them contradicting and conflicting with mine.

I am a product of the “Me” generation and want to pursue personal goals that satisfy my whims and desires in the moment, regardless of their effect on history and/or the ecosystem.

But I am also my father’s son, who was taught that our bloodline is an important thread in the fabric of our species’ place on this planet.

How do I keep these two aspects of my life, this set of states of energy, happy?

Today, I meditate upon the mysterious conundrum that is my life and leave the rest of the universe to its unobserved orderly chaos.

What if…

What if a group of armed citizens set up a protective unit around James Yeager, the protective unit gets its own concentric circular layer of protection, etc., until every armed citizen was backed and protected by every other armed citizen?

Our subsubsubsubbasement supercomputer is having a lot of fun plotting out futures with this scenario in mind.

What if a security company, in order to promote its protective services, offered protection for James Yeager and his arsenal?

What about all the trained mercenaries who have nothing better to do with their time than go to shooting ranges and gun shows?

Would they be willing to take a stand in the name of James Yeager?

Where will the line in the sand be drawn?

What was that old colonial American revolutionary saying about standing together or falling one by one?

Where’s a good buffoonish plot ploy like Janet Reno at a time like this?

What have the enclaves like the Montana Freemen learned in protecting themselves for the last couple of decades?

Who will be the next David Koresh and his Waco followers dying at the hands of an overzealous government?

Vaccinated for diplomatic immunity

SO, here’s the story so far…

The Urbanki Bureaucracy, fearing its populace, has fallen right into the hands of the Ruralites’ plan to demonstrate they’re being oppressed by “The Man.”

How?!, you might ask.

Let us look at the recent facts in the storyline and tell you what could happen next.

First, paranoid suspicion of an indefinable entity such as a large bureaucracy is, like fear of the dark, a natural reaction by many.

The imagined hierarchy of bosses in a large corporation.

The terrible police and paramilitary troops that patrol your province, their faces hidden behind uniforms and equipment.

The social hierarchy and anarchy of insects that swarm in dark spaces underneath your domicile.

These fears are as inbred in us as any tribe isolated in the densest forest.

Where there is fear, there is also the chance for escape.

Let us take two data points from the same source, for an example.

Look at this guy, James Yeager, who exercised his free right to express himself but, the local state bureaucracy, so full of itself and fearful of its people all coming to the same conclusion, decides to take away the guy’s gun ownership permit.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum comments afterward.

James has many options.

First of all, the ACLU can step in to defend James’ rights.

Second, James can accept an offer from the “country” of NSK for immediate citizenship and a diplomatic position in its tiny bureaucracy, which leads to James having diplomatic immunity for ownership of his arsenal.

James might have to give up his U.S. citizenship and move his property into an estate or trust but…

Guess what!

As a martyred exile in his former country, James becomes a beacon of escape for his other oppressed patriots.

As more and more patriotic exiles join NSK for the sake of protecting themselves against the entrenched tyranny of bloated, overtaxing and indefinable bureaucracies, the NSK will be the first nongeographical country to declare war on a geographical country, opening up the door for the Inner Solar System Alliance to publicly announce its existence in order to declare all nonEarth territory offlimits to claims of ownership or protection by Earth-based bureaucracies, to prevent further land-based wars.

Wars based purely on ideology will continue unabated.

Meanwhile, a secret executive committee commissioned for consideration of calamities to cause after the next Urbanski Bureaucracy inauguration has released a preliminary agenda that shocked the pundits who were allowed to briefly glance at the agenda written in 2-point font.

From what they saw but cannot officially talk about, the Bureaucracy plans to incite the anger of the populace more and more and then, at the right moment, divert attention from itself by saying the primary goal of its first administrative term of office was to flush the LGBT and illegal immigrant community out into the open so that angry, armed citizens could easily identify these communities as causes for whatever problems the citizens believe are inflicted on them by the Bureaucracy.  The Bureaucracy will imply but not state that no harm will come to armed citizens if they take the law into their own hands for a brief time to eliminate the “cause of their problems” as long as it’s not directed directly at the Bureaucracy.

The Bureaucracy did not detail whether NSK citizens were included in the announcement.

One of the signals they will send to signify this brief window of opportunity will appear in the classified section of one of the few profitable newspapers still being printed in the U.S.:

“In The Loop” + “Salt” = “Falling Down”

“As God is my witness…”

The year was 2013, the Year of the Underground Gunsmith Shop Revolution.

The rallying cry: “The West wasn’t won with a registered gun.”

Revolutionaries met in secret, creating their own version of the Underground Railroad, hiding from the tyrants of the Bureaucracy, following in the ghostly footsteps of the Prohibition Moonshiners.

The late-night hammering and pounding in front of DIY forges rang out in Ruralite territory.

After building their own weaponry and ammunition, members of the UGSR took the law into their own hands, hunting down the criminals themselves, dumping the bodies for all to see that no longer would the people, the REAL people, not the contented sheep in their flats, semi-Ds and McMansions, no longer would they let the weak and the mentally ill decide the fate of lawful gunowners.

The weak and the mentally ill who used to rely on random violence to give themselves a sense of purpose because they could not stand up to their own internal damnation or physical bullying by those mentally stronger than them would, no more, torture the innocent or make splashy headlines.

The land would soon be free of them and their filth.

Viva la Underground Gunsmith Shop Revolution!

Their logo — Charles Darwin calmly seated in a rattan chair, holding an AR-15 rifle in his hands, the weapon propped on top of a knee crossed over one leg, the motto written in bold type above his head: DARWIN SAYS, ” GO AHEAD…MAKE MY DAY!”

DARWIN SAYS

Take it from a former slave…

Anyone remember Epictetus, the Greek philosopher who was born a slave?

Well, his insights were ageless then and just as poignant now.

However, let’s all pretend that modern psychologists can justify their lofty professional salaries by polling the people and rewording the writing of ancient Greeks, as if there’s something new to be said:

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will. ”
Epictetus

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
Epictetus

“First say to yourself what you would be;
and then do what you have to do.”
Epictetus

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems”
Epictetus

Milking a book dry

And now, the rest of the story you’ve been waiting for…

“Gentlemen,” said General Eisehower to a roomful of reporters during World War II, “I know you’ve all been guessing where we’re going to attack next.  Well, I’m going to let you in on the secret.  Our next operation will be Italy, early in July.  General Patton will attack the southern beaches, General Montgomery the eastern.”

“General,” said one newsman, as the reporters gasped at the revelation, “if one of us leaked that plan, couldn’t it be disastrous?”

Ike nodded.  “The slightest hint in your stories will tip it off to German intelligence,” he said.  “But I’m not going to censor you fellows.  I’m just leaving it up to each man’s sense of responsibility.”

“Wow,” exclaimed one reporter, “what a dirty trick!”

But not a word of the operation leaked out.

— see previous blog entries for attribution, or not; from Battlefield President: Dwight D. Eisenhower (New York, 1967), page 11.

Question du jour

Does American violence — including gun owners’ belief in the right to shoot others when they feel justified — go hand-in-hand with American mass media imperialistic/oversaturation tendencies and lower longevity than other, less dominant, subcultures?

In other words, what is the alpha male/female and how does it manifest its domineering personality in the myriad variety of social settings of our global economy?

Can you have one without the other?

Disarm the populace and the U.S. “eminent domain” mindset gives way to other cultures taking over the species’ sense of direction and/or ultimate purpose?

What are the unintended consequences that we haven’t accounted for in trying to stop our “shoot first and pretend to ask questions later” subcultural habits?

What can we gain by looking at other cultures that have transitioned from warmongering to peacemaking?  Were they ultimately winners or losers on the stage of world history?