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.

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?

One-Way Ticket to Paradise

As the countdown winds down — only 13630 days, according to the main schedule — we look at one of the interim milestones as well as some of the news items that indicate our species’ desire to divert our attention from diverting our attention from reaching our goals.

  1. First, there is the Mars One mission that wants humans willing to take a one-way trip to Mars, becoming the first to travel to, live and die on a nonEarth celestial body.
  2. Next, there are the theories that lay out theories about theories why we would want to premeditate murder — of course, the real purpose of every conspiracy theorist is to protect free speech, regardless of the theory and the headlines it does or doesn’t generate.
  3. For every conspiracy theory about the government censoring the news, there are verified stories in which mass media mavens actually kept quiet at the government’s behest.  Numerous times during WWII, the U.S. government asked newspaper reporters and publishers to hold off reporting a battle or an invasion and they did.  In other countries, the government simply took the great honour of culling and killing the reporters and their publishers ahead of time because the government never trusted them to begin with.

= = = = =

Like other Presidents who exerted forceful leadership at critical junctures in American history, [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was the recipient of both passionate adoration and blind hatred.

Roosevelt jokes — and jokes about his wife, Eleanor, who was always on the go — abounded.

Some of them Roosevelt enjoyed; others he regarded as beneath contempt.

His favorite cartoon showed a little girl running to tell her mother standing in front of a fashionable home: “Look, mama, Wilfred wrote a bad word!”  The word on the sidewalk was “Roosevelt.”

And his favorite story was about the commuter from Westchester County, a Republican stronghold, who always walked into his train station, handed the newspaper boy a quarter, picked up the New York Herald Tribune, and then handed it back as he rushed out to catch his train.

Finally the newsboy, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, asked his customer why he only glanced at the front page.

“I’m interested in the obituary notices,” the man told him.

“But they’re way over on page twenty-four, and you never look at them,” said the boy.

“Boy,” said the man,” the son of a bitch I’m interested in will be on page one!”

In that vein…

At a Cabinet meeting one day Roosevelt gleefully told the story about an American marine who, ordered home from Guadalcanal, was disconsolate because he hadn’t killed even one of the enemy.

He stated his case to his superior officer, who said: “Go up on that hill over that and shout: ‘To hell with Emperor Hirohito!’ That will bring the Japs out of hiding.”

The marine did as he was ordered.

Immediately a Japanese soldier came out of the jungle, shouting, “To hell with Roosevelt!”

“And of course,” said the marine, “I could not kill a Republican.”

— more stories collected in Presidential Anecdotes by Paul F. Boller, Jr. (Kingsport, TN, 1981)

One more for the Rose Garden

U.S. President Eisenhower was an experienced writer.

He once remarked to Arthur Larson: “You know that General MacArthur got quite a reputation as a silver-tongued speaker when he was in the Philippines.  Who do you think wrote his speeches?  I did.”

Both Larson and Emmet Hughes, who worked with President Eisenhower on speeches, attested to his skill with words.

At his weekly presidential press conferences, however, Ike could be incomprehensible whenever he wanted to be.  He was a masterly performer.  He went to these conferences knowing exactly what he planned to say and what he intended to avoid saying by employing vague and evasive language.

In May 1954, when the Republic of China threatened to occupy some islands in the Formosa Straits, the State Department was worried about public reaction to anything the President might say about the crisis.

“Mr. President,” press secretary James Hagerty told Ike just before his weekly press conference, “some of the people in the State Department say that the Formosa Strait situation is so delicate that no matter what question you get on it, you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

“Don’t worry, Jim,” said Ike.  “If that question comes up, I’ll just confuse them.”

And in 150 carefully chosen words he did just that.

— from Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero by Peter Lyon (Boston, 1975), page 641.

= = = = =

Your bonus…

In July 1923, [President Herbert] Hoover wrote a few powerful paragraphs for President Harding’s Independence Day address, announcing the voluntary abolition by industry of the twelve-hour day and the eight-four-hour week.  His language was so different from the rest of the speech that Harding stumbled over the passage when reading it.  While the audience was applauding the announcement, Harding whispered to Hoover, who was sitting on the platform, “Damn it, Hoover, why don’t you write the same English as I do?”

— from Herbert Hoover: A Biography, by Eugene Lyons (Garden City, N.Y., 1964), page 167.

= = = = =

Last, but certainly not least, at least, the last:

When [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was getting his Cabinet together, labor leaders suggested several men for the post; but he appointed Frances Perkins instead.

She was the first woman to serve in a President’s Cabinet.

According to a story circulating in Washington [D.C.], Mrs. Roosevelt’s commiserated with her husband over the bad hour he must have had with the labor leaders when he told them he had already made up his mind to appoint Perkins.

“Oh, that’s all right,” FDR was said to have replied, “I’d rather have trouble with them for an hour than trouble with you for the rest of my life!”

— from Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash (New York, 1971), page 608.