Libercontrarian

Crushed between the wheels of capitalism and big government.

Maybe I'm Not As Much A Libercontrarian Than I Think I Am?

You are a Social Conservative (36% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (75% permissive) You are best described as a: Republican Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

posted by: underwhelmed at November 24, 2005 10:06 | link | comments |

Congressman Murtha - Read Some Kipling, Please

OK, so you're an Old Soldier. You fought in the Wasted War, for a nation that made the judgement that a halfway-fight was the solution to the threat of Communism. You're evidently bitter about it, I as we can see from your obtuse suggestion that the we should mimic the French Surrender Monkeys and abdicate the fight at once.

What you are suggesting is that we now pay the Dane his geld of victory against The Great Satan (the Dane being Islamofascism) in order to somehow "unconvince" him to quit attacking our soldiers, in the hopes that Allah's Mercy will be extended to the next set of terrified commuters on the targeted airliners, subway trains, or cruise ships that the Dane has in his blood-drenched (and possibly radioactive) sights. That worked for about nine minutes with both the Spanish and the French. I doubt it would last half as long were the target Americans.

You need to read up a bit on the Dane, and what he has in store for us, penned by a very prescient man named Rudyard Kipling - an Old Soldier himself, and one who would never be possesed by your particularly indefensible need to use this war to attack his home nation.

Danegeld

"It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
  To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
  Unless you pay us cash to go away."

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
  And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
  And then  you'll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
  To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
  We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
  But we've  proved it again and  again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
  You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
  For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
  You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
  No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
  And the nation that pays it is lost!"

Please re-read that last paragraph, Congressman Murtha. It should strike a chord with you, even though you've become a Demokratic Party apparatchik - remember that over 3 million Cambodians died when the people from your generation decided that it was cheaper to pay the Danegeld of Soviet Communism than to face it down. That the Communists died of their own internal cancer some 15 years later is unimportant - they would have vaporized you and me and 250 million other Americans if they thought they could get away with it, and by my recollection, they were actively planning just such a little party for our soft-headed, greed-focused nation when a man named Reagan rose to power and woke us all up about the true cost of the Danegeld.

The Murtha family motto? Perhaps it's, "When the going gets tough, the tough become used as political fodder by The Left."

posted by: underwhelmed at November 20, 2005 09:12 | link | comments |

Review of Unintended Consequences

Finished the book about a week ago, and as I promised I'd write a review, here it is:

It's an entertaining read. Ross is a supremely knowledgeable guy with guns, and he has an additional ability to describe history and current events with clarity and to deftly weave them into his tale to add content and bring an emotional response in the reader. I learned a great deal about what has happened to America's gun culture, and how people who have attempted to make their living in that field have been pursued, harassed, regulated, and in some cases, literally killed by the Forces of Righteous Socialism who the voters have allowed to have taken up residence in our government.

I especially like the resolution of the character who represented the Dishonorable Senator from New York, Charles "Chuckles" Schumer - a first-class nanny-stater, anti-gun bigot, America-hating moron. His character comes to an unhappy end that serves to discredit his "co-religionists" (that religion being NannyStatism, not any valid belief in the Supreme Being) and forces them to recognize the Second Amendment as a valid civil right.

That being said, I thought the book was overly long-winded, that fully 400 pages of the 893 could have been edited out, and that frankly, Matthew Bracken's Domestic Enemies series is far more entertaining, being less about gun arcana and more about the frighteningly believable tale of the destruction of our civil liberties from creeping Socialism. Bracken's characters are more human, better drawn, more fully felt, than Ross'. Bracken likes to put his characters into the grinder and let their weaknesses be explored, both good and bad. It is sometimes a wrenching journey, but the reader is better off having experienced it.

I am now reading Boston T. Party's (I just LOVE that name!) Molon Labe, and while I have only gotten about 50 pages into it, I have to tell you that his writing style is simply superb - even though it's his first novel (as was both Bracken's and Ross') he's as practiced as anybody I've ever read. Furthermore, Mr. Party (see? How would YOU like to be called, "Mr. Party" everywhere you go?) signed my copy at a recent gun show, so I have had the honor of meeting this fine gentleman as well, which is something that has not happened to me.

I have been having a bit of an email exchange with Bracken, and he has told me that he's entirely on his own with the Domestic Enemies series - he's sent no copies to the trade publishers, as he is thinking so far outside of the box that he intends on becoming a success without thier particular brand of "help." His dedication to his craft is exceptional.

I would recommend the true gun enthusiast to read Ross' book, and folks with Libertarian leanings to read all three. You'll learn a great deal about the events of the last fifteen years that our Minders in Washington would just as soon forget, or at least have us remember the way THEY say they happened.about the events of the last fifteen years that our Minders in Washington would just as soon forget, or at least have us remember the way THEY say they happened.

posted by: underwhelmed at November 19, 2005 23:50 | link | comments |

Che Hamburga

Go here.

Laugh.

Cows with guns.

posted by: underwhelmed at November 19, 2005 22:45 | link | comments |

Veteran's Day

Nothing prophetic to say here, except the usual which needs to be repeated: THANKS for your service. My own short and somewhat unfulfilling military career did little to serve the public trust; as with everything else in my life before 30, I can truthfully say that the pursuit of The Bearded Clam and self-fulfillment/ego gratification did not make me into a Good American. This came later, after marriage, and was destiny for even a feckless youth like me, as I was born of good stock and was raised well.

For you people that sweated out the hails of lead, for you Patriots, for guys like my Dad and his generation, who kept the Rape Machine of Soviet Communism from taking up residence in Grand Isle, Nebraska, THANKS!

For you people that are currently in the service of this great nation: do your jobs with your usual amazing competence, and know you are the finest soldiers, sailors, Airmen, Marines, or Coast Guardsmen in the world. Only liberal, tolerant, diverse democracies produce such magnificent Warriors: slow to anger, quick to react, disciplined, well-educated, superbly trained, success-oriented, more battle-efficient than any other fighting force on the planet. In the coming years you will be veterans too - your sacrifices will not be forgotten by a grateful America when this war is a distant memory.

posted by: underwhelmed at November 11, 2005 22:17 | link | comments |

Unintended Consequences

Picked up, at the Aurora Public Library, at the urging of Jed at FreedomSight, Unintended Consequences - it is a fictional work that addresses the American gun culture, but incorporates tales of the influential real characters in the 20th Century drama of industrialized America who shaped the private ownership of guns, and what the responsibility of Free Men are when their society is threatened from within and without.

I am 1/3rd of the way through the book, and I shall issue a report here on this blog when I have completed it. Many reviewers of the book describe it as a life-changing read - Enemies Foreign and Domestic was like that for me. Matthew Bracken wrote one of the most powerful tales I've ever read - disturbing and frightening... and totally believable - at least the part about the ATF plot to ratchet up the machine to marginalize gun owners.

posted by: underwhelmed at November 09, 2005 20:50 | link | comments (4) |

Once Again, Communists Rear Their Ugly Heads

I was watching Fox News on Friday night after I got home from a particularly long day at work, and was amazed to see the protests in Argentina aimed, weirdly enough, at President Jorge (Son-Of-A) Boosh. I had seen these groups of people hard at work, protesting the First Mexican-American Presidente's appearance there, assumedly for some international summit on trade. Before the shouts of protest come from the Boosh Protectorate, you should remember that DemTalkingHeads routinely referred to Clinton as the First Buh-lack President, so someone like Boosh, who has let in more foreign nationals from South of the border than any 20 previous Chief Executives combined, HAS to be the first Mexican-American Presidente.

Anyway, there are a cadre of professional protesters that travel to these events. The folks that arrived on Friday were a little more impressively professional than the previous protestors, as they were from...

The Communist Party!

They were waving the Soviet Communist flag (red field, hammer and sickle) and... you guessed it, throwing Molotov Cocktails, and proceeded to systematically destroy everything that was in their way, setting alight buildings that had people in them. Last time I checked, this was some kind of a crime - arson, I believe - and illegal in darned near every country in the world. The Argentinean Policia looked on in mute horror, unable to control the situation.

Yet another fine display of tolerance and open-mindedness from the Left. I am forced to laugh at the TV when I see a group of sociopaths, bearing the flag of a nation that no longer exists because its own citizens rejected its ideals, using the memory of Communism as a motivator to burn property and attack people, although there's a viable connection between the destructive tendencies of the clinically insane and the 100 million murders perpetrated in the name of Marxist-Leninist philopsophies. As I was not watching the event on CNN or MSNBC, I am left to wonder if they excised the scenes where the image of the Soviet flag was being violently waved by these miscreants.

Now, if they had been waving the swastika, I am sure it would have been all over every channel for every minute of the "protests."

I am the only person I know whose family had members killed or attacked by both Communists and the Nazis. I am disgusted almost beyond words when I see a bunch of filthy hippies or skinheads bearing the flag of either of these two dead despotic beliefs being allowed to foment destruction and threaten peaceful people with their lies and violent actions. Didn't we defeat both of these ideals in the last century? Isn't everything they represent an abomination to the good peoples of the liberal democracies around the world? Why does the news media see fit to editorialize when the demons come from the Right, but not from the Left?

posted by: underwhelmed at November 07, 2005 06:48 | link | comments |

My Sister Sends Me This

My beloved sister, a Music Education teacher in the Great State of Florida, got this in her email box and forwarded it to me:

 Last week I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58.  The counter girl took my $2 and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed  her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help. While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she stood there and cried.

Why do I tell you this?  Because of the evolution in teaching math since the 1950s:

Teaching Math In 1950
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production  is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?


Teaching Math In 1960
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production  is 4/5 of the price, or $80.  What is his profit?


Teaching Math In 1970
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production  is $80.  Did he make a profit?


Teaching Math In 1980
A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production  is $80 and his profit is $20.  Your assignment:  Underline the number 20.


Teaching Math In 1990
A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands.  He does this so he can make a profit of
$20.  What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question:  How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no
wrong answers.


Teaching Math In 2005
Un hachero vende una carretada de madera para $100.  El costo de la produccion es $80 ...........

posted by: underwhelmed at November 04, 2005 18:52 | link | comments |

I Sent This Email To Hugh Hewitt About Publicola's Interview

Whoa!

I knew that overcompensating for Bush's foolish ham-handedness with the Miers nomination was part of the Hugh Hewitt Job Description, but you've really got to lay off, man - I heard you dismissively shut down a blogger-friend of mine, Publicola, in the clip of the show he sent to our group, the Life-Liberty-Property people, about three weeks ago. The interchange has been stewing in the little walnut that is my brain, and tonight my thoughts about it have sort of popped out of their own accord.

P'Cola's a pretty special guy to us, and I was not at all amused at your lack of consideration for his gently-stated argument. P'Cola is one of the group of Americans who are defenders of a "Third-Space" in the domestic political arena - silent sometimes - but their voice was heard 5 x 5 when they came out in force to vote Reagan in for a second "Morning In America." I feel like you used your position as Radio Show Commander and Con-Law Prof to bully him into a corner while you joked and hammed around with the other blogger, who was essentially there to back-slap you and double-team my friend.

Your brand of "Practical Republicanism" will be the undoing of the Conservative/Libertarian movement in this country, as it continually looks to validate the image of a "political center-right" that keeps getting redefined by the illogicists from the Left in a (predictably enough) "Lefterly" direction :-/. Yep, laugh it up, Fuzz-Ball - if you don't stand with us, on SOMETHING... you'll fall for anything.

I won't be surprised if P'Cola resists standing in as the Gun-Nut Punching Bag on the "Hugh Hewitt Bush Enhancement Tour" again.

posted by: underwhelmed at November 03, 2005 23:23 | link | comments |

Twelve Planks Of The Platform

I was thinking about what would happen if a candidate ran for office with these planks for his platform:
 
1. Close the borders, immediately. Give everybody who isn't supposed to be in this country 6 months to get out, or to register as a temporary worker. Anyone found falsifying documents about his citizenship or nationality gets deported immediately, and if found in the U.S. again, receives a minimum jail sentence of 20 years with no parole in the newly created Federal Alien Prison system.  Every employer with a Federal Tax ID number would have to submit documentation of every employee they have upon demand to surprise inspections, and any corporate officer found in violation of the laws would personally face felony charges for illegal hiring and taxation practices. The government would create the standard by which citizenship is verified, so as to standardize the process and shield employers from risk when hiring workers.
 
2. Create a guest worker program so that honest people who are here to work can do so, with clear  limits to the number of times they can come and go - and they have to have a job waiting for them,  unless they're on vacation here. Pump up the machine by which foreign nationals are able to legally enter the United States to become U.S. Citizens, and make them pass a high-school-level English equivalency test. No persons born here where neither of the parents is an American Citizen shall be an American Citizen. No person in the U.S. who is not an American Citizen will be able to avail himself of any public service, unless he is able to prove his legal status as a Guest Worker, a vacationer, or a Resident Alien. Persons found in violation of the laws and in need of emergency services will be sent to a prison hospital, whereupon they can serve the remainder of their sentence in the prison, after which time they will be deported. Any person who has a violent criminal history in his home country will be summarily denied entry and citizenship to the U.S., permanently - and this includes foreign heads of state.
 
3. Take the lessons learned from the Israelis about erecting and maintaining the security fence they have placed in the West Bank region, apply them to our southern border, and then create an Iraqi agency with their oil money to create and maintain two fences, one on the Syrian border, and the other on the Iranian border. Utilize cheap RC drones with cameras to monitor the fences to keep the manpower requirements low. This will reduce the number of foreign terrorists looking to cross into Iraq AND the United States.
 
4. Tell the pinheads who will call you a "racist homophobic Nazi" to PUBLICLY go shove it where the sun doesn’t shine. Do this on national TV, and don't use any of those hokey political slippery-isms that water-down the intent of your words. Tell the hate-mongers that they're HATE MONGERS, and that  they need to shut-up, and NOW, or we are going to have a nation that gets mowed down by cowards,  Communists, America-haters, the hangers-on, the under-producing, and the ignorant. Tell the whiners that if they're just going to whine, without offering any solutions, they are going to be IGNORED in the political debate.
 
5. Study and debate the top three taxation models for our country. The debate will go on for one year   - draft at random a 1,000-man think-tank of American citizens over the age of 30 to pick the top solution out of three, and disband the federal agencies that utilize political and paramilitary means to enforce compliance of the tax code. Make it all fair, simple and easy on the people making less than $30,000/year. Eliminate all regressive federal taxes for the people who are the least capable of paying it, and eliminate every possible loophole for everyone who is obliged to pay. This will remove the gigantic opportunity cost of tax avoidance on the economy, and greatly reduce the cost of goods and services to consumers as there won't be layer after layer of tax-raised prices involved in the creation of the goods and services.
 
6. Closely investigate the oil companies for complicity in what I am sure of is a gigantic scam - the oil industry's phony price for oil. Drill in ANWAR, put more rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and off California, and study the shale oil deposits in Colorado. Force the auto manufacturers to increase  CAFE standards to 2X where they are today, and create an independent body of scientists to carefully  study how to make Hydrogen in mass quantities from geothermal, solar, wind, and hydrodynamic power,  all of which are renewable, and in lieu of being utilized, go to waste anyway. Give GIGANTIC tax  breaks to both the consumers and manufacturers of the first fuel-cell powered car, and force the oil  companies to have a hydrogen fueling system at 30% of their stations by 2010, or they will lose their  permits to refine, transport, or sell oil in the U.S.
 
7. Force Congress to study a bill which requires that every law they make be studied on a regular  basis for its actual effects on society - no more "creeping Communism" whereby laws are built on  false premise after false premise to slowly morph society into a model of some Lefty-kook's paradise.  Every law would have a sunset. Such a law would have likely kept Congress busy making sure the stupid  laws that were passed preventing motor-cars from scaring horses by going more than 5 m.p.h. would not  have been in the books after, say, 1898.
 
8. Tell Islamofascists all over the world that if a nuclear bomb goes off inside the borders of the U.S., or Americans become sick and die from some terrible biological weapon, that Mecca and Medina will be vaporized, and that any country that has given aid to terrorists will have the choice of being turned into a smoking parking lot, or become the 51st, 52nd, 53rd, 54th, etc state, and all the oil/riches/gems underneath will be ours too. The state religion will be Judaism (just kidding, it’d stay secular). Muslim mosques will be watched more closely than the Ottomans watched the Orthodox Christians for 400+ years, and will be opened upon demand for regular inspections, as there is a 600-year-old tradition of imams hiding weapons in mosques to empower Islamist radicals to foment trouble in every non-Muslim society they've ever infested.

9. No more Federal involvement in public education. Let each state decide what programs will give the citizens of that state the best advantage in life. The cost savings alone for U.S. Citizens resulting from tax breaks may be enough to send children to private schools, where there is the same competition model that exists in the real world for the school to emulate.

10. Stop criminalizing people's recreational drug use. It's just stupid, and the cachet of using an illegal intoxicant causes much idiotic glamorization of the act, which predictably attracts teenagers.  Use the funds generated from the taxation of the sales of these drugs to locally fund drug/alcohol awareness training in schools.

11. Disband the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Remove all the Federal portions of the 22,000+ gun laws that infringe on the right of the American Citizen to keep and bear arms. Recognize that every honest armed citizen is a stanchion against criminality and terrorism.

12. Reduce the malignancy of illegitimate lawsuits by forcing the party who loses the case to pay for court costs. This will shepherd the rise of non-judicial negotiations via magistrate, and free Americans to once again innovate in business to the benefit of society without the worry of frivolous lawsuits brought by sleaze-balls looking for an easy buck.

Not very Libertarian or Republican positions, are they? I'd bet that a plurality of Americans would embrace a candidate with these views. Too bad the politicos from either party keep offering more and more Left-leaning namby-pamby ass-kissers to the great confusion - and the great disinterest - of the American voting public.

posted by: underwhelmed at November 03, 2005 21:16 | link | comments |

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