Tag Archives: politics

Ok then

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Literally the front page of todays local newspaper:

I have no problem with anyone being a Socialist…or a Communist. Or a Democrat, Muslim, Nationalist, Racist, Sexist, or any other affiliation or belief. After all, you are a sovereign individual and can believe whatever you want. I have no right to tell anyone what to believe in the privacy of their own skull. It’s when you try to impose those beliefs on those who don’t share them…..well, thats when the violence starts. You wanna be a Socialist, go be a Socialist. Get all your Socialist buddies, set up your Socialist commune, and live your Socialist lives. Just don’t force me to live by how you think I should live. And that goes for politics, religion, etc. Ron Paul summed it up nicely as such….

So, no…I don’t think you should shoot people for being Socialists. I think you should shoot people for trying to force Socialism onto people who don’t want it.

Link – Beto O’Rourke Goes Off on Gun Control at Debate: ‘Hell Yes, We’re Going to Take Your AR-15, Your AK-47!’

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“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!” O’Rourke said. “We’re not going to allow it to be used against a fellow American anymore.”

Rejoice!

When someone  loudly, unequivocally , clearly, and with no trace of doubt declare themselves as your enemy it is time to rejoice. Why? Because they have removed all specter of doubt that they are your enemy. You can now proceed with a clear conscience and moral clarity that this person is, indeed, your enemy. All doubt is removed, all ambiguity is gone. Would that all of our enemies be so clear and forthright.

So, freely donate to his opponents, disparage him far and wide, shun him and his supporters, ridicule his policies and beliefs….and do it without the least bit of remorse or compassion….the man has clearly said he’s your enemy.

Call it what it is: confiscation with compensation

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I’ve gotten a couple emails from people asking me what I think about this push towards  mandatory ‘buybacks’ of ‘assault weapons’.

First, you can’t buy back what wasn’t yours to begin with, so right off the bat the name is flawed. Let’s call it what it really is: a “confiscation-with-compensation” program. Think of it as a form of eminent domain directed at your guns… like eminent domain against ‘real property’ the .gov gives you no choice in the ‘sale’, hands you a check for what they think is fair, and then say you ‘sold’ it to them.

You know, if I take your car out of your driveway without your permission but leave a check for what I think your car is worth on your doorstep…guess what?..I still go down for stealing a car. It doesn’t matter if someone pays you…if you don’t want to sell something, and they take it a give you a check, to me that isn’t a ‘sale’ … thats a crime. But, of course, the rules are different for .gov.

Laws like this never start on a national level. They are birthed on state levels (NY, CA, IL, etc.) and are then held as shining examples to be replicated on the national level. You’re not going to see a national mandatory buyback before you see a city/state level mandatory buyback. Sure, it’s already happened in some places… somewhere there’s an ancient copy of the letter I received from the NYPD many years ago telling me I needed to turn in my HK93 to the cops, take it out of city limits, or render it inoperable…with no compensation, mind you. But those sorts of things are fairly rare. Expect that to change.

Solution? Well, there’s only two solutions.. first is you politically quash this thing with such extreme prejudice and furious righteous outrage that, to paraphrase Tip O’Neil, gun control becomes the ‘third rail of politics – you touch it, you [politically] die.’

The second solution, which isn’t necessarily a solution as much as it is a personal choice, is to head over to GunBroker, Palmetto State, GrabAGun, and all the usual firearms venues and work your credit cards so hard they lay limp in your wallet like sheets of overcooked lasagna.

I’ve been saying that the sky is falling regarding rifle/mag bans for over fifteen years now and I do not see that belief changing for the better anytime soon. Had I the financial resources, I’d have a case of 50 stripped AR lowers and about 500 Pmags sitting in a Hardigg case somewhere. :::shrug::: But that’s just me.

Anyway, someone asked me what my take is on the ‘mandatory buyback’ threat and that’s it – I see it happening on a local level in some places, but I do not see it on a national level for quite some time. Note, thats not me saying it won’t happen…Im just saying I don’t believe it will be happening (on a federal level) anytime soon. But, I’ve been wrong before so it’s up to you to decide if it’s the jet ski this year or another couple AR’s. Choose wisely.

The circular firing squad

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I made the mistake of watching the Democrat debates the other day and was amazed at how virtually all the candidates not only are no longer trying to hide their extreme leftist views, they are actually stampeding over each other to see who can be furthest to the left. It was utterly amazing. Joe Biden actually came out of it looking like the most centrist of the bunch.

There isn’t a single person in that group of idiots I’d feel comfortable having in the White House. Especially that Elizabeth Ocasio-Warren broad. I mean, sure, she’d be our first Native American president, but….healthcare for illegal immigrants? What the hell?

Wasn’t it Napoleon who said to never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake?

I had purchased a few(!) AR’s earlier this year in anticipation of reselling them for a healthy profit as the election approached. But now…hmmm..I’m thinking I may just keep them. Just in case the Dems get their act together.

Strange bedfellows

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There’s that old expression about the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’. It sounds nice, but in practice the enemy of your enemy is your friend up until your enemy is defeated…then the odds are pretty good that new friend will be your next enemy. (cough*WW2 and the Soviets*cough).

Here’s an article about how the trend towards being a ‘cashless society’ will be racist, classist, and a host of other -ists because poor people and people of color somehow are unable to get a debit card. (“Retailers want to go cashless. But opponents say that’s discriminatory“) So, what these self-appointed guardians of equality are proposing is that it be legislatively mandated that a business must take cash.

Hold that thought a minute, and go read this article. (“New York Times Wants To Have Credit Card Companies Monitor Sales of Guns and Ammo. What Could Ever Go Wrong?“) Here, the NY Times, a bastion of journalistic…uhm…well, something…, feels that consumer credit companies (and I would imagine, by extension, bank debit card holders) flag transactions for ‘the authorities” when a customer purchases certain quantities of guns/ammo.

Many credit card companies already have positions on what sort of transactions they will not partake in. It’s not hard to imagine that with the ‘do it for the children’ crowd leaning on them , that they’d cave and prohibit the use of their services on ‘forbidden’ services/transactions.

So, it isn’t a stretch to imagine the day when many stores are cashless and your only recourse for payment is to use your debit/credit card. Except that when you try to buy a rifle or magazine or ammo….-DECLINED-. And since the vendor is cashless, you’re choices are now pretty severely limited. It’s a tidy end run around that pesky right to bear arms thing. There’s no right to purchase arms…so they’ll simply make the transaction as onerous and difficult as possible: make it so you can only pay with a card, and make the terms of the card such that you can’t buy guns.

Thus, strangely, I’m in the camp of those folks saying that businesses should take cash (although I disagree about forcing them to). Not because I care about some meth tweaker or welfare queen who can’t get a checking account, but because cash gives me a degree of anonymity and privacy that I demand. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.

As a businessman, I recognize that cash presents a bunch of challenges…miscounting, theft, attractive nuisance, disease vector, time sink,  etc, etc. And people paying by card are far more likely to spend more money and do it more often than those who use greenbacks. (Which is why Vegas gives you chips to bet with instead of real money.) But as a survivalist and lover of liberty and privacy, cash possesses some very handy qualities that I desire, not the least of which are privacy.

Its interesting how seemingly unrelated ideas or events – ‘going cashless’ and turning credit card companies into watchdogs of the public welfare – can combine to present such hazards to folks like you and I.

 

589 and counting

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It’s hard to believe, but next year is a Presidential election year. It really flew by fast, didn’t it?

Election day is…mm….well, hell, let’s let the internet do the math:



So 589 days until election. What can you do between now and then? Well, if you can promise to pay back $1 a day until the election you could pick up a midrange AR. Or about five dozen Pmags. Or, if you’re a careful shopper, three cases of 9mm. If you’re willing to save $1 a day until then.

But, what if you’re a tad more industrious than that? Maybe you’re willing to give up Starbucks or something. Pay yourself five bucks a day between now and then and you could have five AR’s, or a couple M1A’a, or four or five Glocks, or about 325 shiny new AR mags. Or a really nice set of body armour with room leftover for ammo.

It’s been 15 years since the sunset of the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban…thats four Presidential election cycles where we bit our nails every fourth November. And .22LR is still not anywhere near its old prices, although it is available.

Am I advocating panic buying? Of course not. Panic buying is waiting until a week before election day. I’m advocating that you get off your butt and finally get it done and out of the way so you can move onto other things in your life.

The reality is that every so often, for political expediency, someone gets thrown out of the sled to the wolves. Next week the ‘bump stock’ fiasco takes effect. That was the short-straw that was drawn to appease the clamoring anti-gunners. But…next time…it might be something else, something more important, something more useful. Thats the political reality. And, as Rand said, while you can ignore reality you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. And for the last 15 years there have been quite a few people ignoring the reality that there is never a ‘safe period’ for your AR and magazines.

Me, I’ve got enough to take care of me and those I care about. At this point I’m just buying extras to sell to the head-in-the-sand ostriches at “Get the Kentucky jelly” prices.

It’s 589 days to the election. Why take chances? If you can keep a promise to yourself to set $1 a day aside until then, you can have at least one AR and/or a buncha mags to set back.

This reminder of the Bad Ol’ Days has been brought to you by this blast from the past:

Fifth columns

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You know, it’s tough enough to be a survivalist when there’s a large demographic that views you as a right-wing, [whoever]-phobe, racist, gun-humping neanderthal. The neighbors with their Subarus and ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers chuckle with their fellow travelers about ‘that guy’ next door who always seems to be up to no good.

Now, it’s starting to trend towards us survivalists living in a world that is, apparently, warming to the consistently failed theory of socialism. Folks, not only am I anti-social, I’m anti-Socialist.

Normally, I don’t care about your religion, who you sleep with (unless, of course, youre doing it outside of your commitments), or what your political bent is – until those beliefs start to manifest themselves as trying to control me and my life. And there are few groups that are about controlling your life more than the starry-eyed morons rallying under the red banner. It’s tragically humourous – the left calls anyone who disagrees with it a Nazi and then embraces socialism and communism. Never mind that when you’re stacking bodies, the Nazis can’t even come close to the stratosphere-challenging mountain that was created under the guise of and guidance of socialism and communism.

I had a survivalist buddy who was a member of The Minutemen back in the day. In those free-wheeling days of the late ’60s and early ’70s, what with groups like The Weathermen and those SLA cats, the notion of some sort of Communist insurgency might have seemed perfectly reasonable. Armed commie takeover of the country seemed more plausible when you had ‘Peoples Army’ of this and the ‘Revolutionary Committee” of that running around shooting cops and robbing banks.

But, as a nation, we’re pretty much fans of bloodless revolution when it comes to our own backyard. The American Revolution and the War of Southern Overconfidence are pretty much the last time we had shooting in the streets over the direction of national government. Thats why we have elections rather than shooting wars. And all you have to do to swing the pendulum from one side to the other is simply convince enough people to march in lockstep to the polls and vote it in someone.

Currently, the contenders for People Most Likely To Ignore Obvious History are Socialist Barbie from NY,  and Bernie Sanders from Vermont. One could be excused for being so divested from reality by reason of stupid youth and the other for age-related dementia. Trouble is, there are legions of stoners, outraged liberal arts majors, and trendy ‘resistance’ types who think socialism is a great idea. And they vote.

What’s this mean for we survivalists? Well, I haven’t seen many socialists who were cool with you owning guns…or, really, much of anything else. As Maggie Thatcher famously opined, ‘the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’ And the ‘other people’ are you and me. Yeah, yeah..they always say it’ll come from ‘the rich’ being made to ‘pay their fair share’, but as Slick Willie showed us, you get a lot more money when you redefine downwards who ‘the rich’ are.

Socialists aren’t going to like you owning guns, wealth, any business they think is ‘too big’, and those sorts of things. And as survivalists, we peg the needle on the ol’  “EnemiesOfTheState-O-Meter”.. what with our guns, gold, cash, property, and rather particular ideas about individual liberty.

Normally, I’d think that ‘useful idiots’ like Bernie and Socialist Barbie were outliers..aberrations…the rounding errors of a political equation. But there seems to be a rush to the left these days on the Democrats side. Everyone seems to be trying to outdo each on who can denounce capitalism the loudest and promise the most government gimmes. They think that the next presidential election will be a rush of people who’ll vote for anyone Not Trump… and that means that every left-leaning politician who has dreams of making the big time is going to throw his (or her) hat in the ring and differentiate themselves by being even more lefty than their fellow opportunists.

Practical result? The things you and I care about most are the sort of things that the socialist democrat-types target as being in need of ‘control’. More gold, more cash, more guns, more mags, more property, and above all – more vigilance that idiots like those people are politically stamped out before they get into positions where they can do some real damage.

 

Trickle down

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I keep meticulous records of my bills around here. Got my power bills the other day and noticed something very unusual. Those idiots were giving me money. Or, more precisely, they were kicking back/discounting a portion of my bill.

Hunh….well, that was cool. Never had that happen under Obama. Shaved $30 off this months bill. Still haven’t gotten my wall yet, though. I’d happily have traded that thirty bucks for a border wall. But…that FTCJA just paid for two Magpul happysticks, or three 17rd Magpul Glock mags, or five AR mags…Making America Geared Again.