Category Archives: Uncategorized

SMASH-MOUTH, head-to-the curbstone pushback on privacy, now more than ever. As Roger (L) Simon points out…

What we have now discovered about Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s America, if we didn’t already know it, is that any belief in a benign and decent government in this country is absolute horseshit. Liberalism has been revealed as a fascist joke.

A sick fascist joke at that.

The regime and everybody in it needs to pay and pay dearly. But it can’t stop there. We the People need to reclaim the country in a serious, substantive way, and do so pointedly. Democrats must be removed from office until they demonstrate they can be trusted near the levers of power. (Yes, I’m being politically ecumenical. My personal belief is that, in a republic, anybody who calls himself a democrat is starting out acting with bad faith intent. This country is explicitly NOT a democracy for some very good reasons, amply demonstrated by the party of the Left for a very, very long time.) And Republicans need to be put on notice. Rubio and Cruz and Paul are right and McCain and Toomey and Collins are wrong, and we need to stop attacking patriots and start defending American liberty or the GOP will join the donks on Reagan’s Ash Heap.

People argue and assert that freedom of speech is the cornerstone of the nation. I submit it is not. It’s only one more brick in the wall, built on a foundation of individual sovereignty, of which privacy is an integral component, right there alongside self-ownership.

TO BE COVERED under the so-called “Affordable” (What a larf!) Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare), I have to conclude that this bundling scheme was…

Wait! “Bundling?”

Yeah. That’s what the mandated coverage provisions are — bundling. They make single males in their 20s pay for female contraceptives, mammograms, prostate checks, and Parkinson’s coverage (for examples), which he won’t need or even want for some time down the road, if ever at all. In aid of making those goods “affordable” for people who will want or need them at some time in their lives. And they make females in their 20′s pay for low-T treatments and flu shots for middle-aged diabetics, and aging grandparents pay for pre-natal care, and all the other distortions of the market.
Bundling.

But they want cable companies to unbundle their channels!

Dolly, you can’t expect consistency from people who think that there’s a moral dissonance between opposition to abortion and support for the death penalty. You just can’t. They probably can’t do math without taking their shoes off, either. You can’t expect adherence to rules from people who think that people who insist on following the rules (i.e. the Constitution) are extremist nutbars. You just can’t.

SPAM. Article Glenn Beck reads on the air Tuesday morning reports that the NSA hoovers up 1.7 BILLION emails every day.

Which means that 1.53 BILLION of those are spam.

ABOUT THE REGIME’S spin on the IRS scandal is that it’s probably true. It probably was some young punks, drunk on power, deciding to strike a blow for the Revolution, who decided it would be appropriate and/or fun to set in motion audits of patriot groups for the sole reason that they were patriot groups. And I can easily imagine that senior figures in the regime would like to strangle the young idiots for the trouble they’ve caused.

That doesn’t change the fact that it’s collectivism on display and we need to take the lesson from it that you can’t trust collectivists on anything and they need to be kept as far away from the levers of power as can be managed. And not just the young punks, but the old silverbacks and gray-muzzled hyenas, too.

ABOUT THE WHOLE ITAR and the plastic pistol mess on somebody’s blog, the madder I get.

If I get this right, there’s this government law — constitutional overreach, I think — that says you can’t export certain arms. Nukes. Radar tech. Command and control systems. Which makes sense if stuff is the property of the government or intellectual property of government contractors held as official secrets. And I think that was probably the original intent.

And then we get into the unintended consequences. And you know what I think about those.

This is the danger if you let power just lie around. Sooner or later, somebody’s gonna use it. Abuse it, I mean. As the saying goes, power corrupts and power attracts the corruptible. Put the two together, you’re gonna get corruption. Oppressive behavior. Stuff you don’t want.

So these guys — doesn’t matter who, really, just sumdoods — develop a way to print a plastic pistol using a 3D printer. It’s a really clunky thing. Uglier than even a Glock. And, if I get this right, you can only fire a few rounds before it gets too dangerous to shoot. But, as the saying goes, it’s early days, yet. Given time, the bright boys will knock down the problems, one-by-one.

There is some discussion as to whether the thing even comes in for government scrutiny. After all, the Constitution guarantees both freedom of the press and the right to keep and bear arms. So, if the press manufactures a weapon, WTF business is it of the government? Seems to me that here’s the slam-dunk case for why the BATFE-I-E-I-O shouldn’t even exist. It’s entire raison d’etre is to infringe on the rights of the people and it ought to be abolished and extirpated, root and branch.

What’s that? Alcohol? Ever hear of the Ninth Amendment? The People have and assert a right to own, make, and sell booze without let or tax, and — slam dunk (or it ought to be) — that’s the end of the government’s power to do fuck-all about it. Same for the rest of it. And any proposal to the contrary amounts to war on the Constitution and is thereby treason. At least, it is the way I read the Constitution. But the Left these days is getting adept at telling you the sky is green and the grass is blue.

…

But, having a little expertise in this 3D thing, I can tell you this: the particular wireframe model is the LEAST important factor. The software to make a new model and the printers are all available worldwide. Which means that, even if there are technology embargos on, say, AutoCAD or 3DS Max, they’ll be obtainable on the black market. I will also bet you whatever cash I have in my pocket that, even though it was Americans who developed this first (or so they think), there are people in Manila or Islamabad, or Bangalore who are assiduously working on their own home-grown versions.

Don’t kid yourself. This IS aimed squarely at YOUR 2nd Amendment rights.

…

I’m also thinking it’s time we stopped enumerating the rights we claim or assert. There were even those among the founders who believed we shouldn’t have a Bill of Rights because they could anticipate idiots and tyrants saying, “It’s not in the list, so it doesn’t exist.”

Like: doesn’t it hit you like fingernails on a blackboard when Rush Limbaugh asserts that, because there’s no specifically-enumerated Right to Privacy in the BoR, that’s why Roe v. Wade is bad law and there’s no right to abortion?

(No, you can’t have a right to kill someone untrammeled, which is why there can’t be a right to abortion, because you’re infringing on somebody else’s right to life. But there IS a right to PRIVACY for grid’s sake!)

ARRRGGGHH!

And, just because there’s no Right to Booze in the BoR, the gummint can’t limit your access or ability to afford it. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Booze ain’t on the list of things the government is allowed to muck with, so they have to keep their filthy paws OFF.

Same with guns. Same with 3D printers.

And that’s what the Ninth Amendment means. I simplify it thusly: Article 1 specifies the (limited) powers of the government. If it’s in there, it can be considered mandatory. If it’s not, it’s forbidden. Period. Discussion closed. Not up for a vote.

So we should stop talking about First or Second or Fifth Amendment rights like those articles circumscribe our rights and start referring to Ninth Amendment rights, asserting that those are unlimited and un-enumerable.

How you gonna make that stick, smartass?

Well, we start by asserting it as fact. And then we fight, inch-by-inch, until we win. Capeesh?

APOLOGY INSUFFICIENT

SO APPARENTLY THE reading of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa (note: a volcano) passed 400 parts per million here recently.

This is some kind of a milestone, or so I’m given to understand.

Meanwhile, back at the climate, global temperatures continue to fall unexpectedly. For the twelfth year in a row. Nope. Sorry Fifteenth. (Hard to keep track.)

And, in other places (like — the rest of the world), CO2 concentrations … vary widely. But they only report the one reading that they take … on a volcano.

Here’s a quick one. Do you know where most atmospheric CO2 comes from? That’s right, volcanic action.

Funny how that works.

And they cite that high reading — maybe one of the higher readings on the planet — like it was a bad thing. Forgetting, of course, that the plants on which the entire food chain — including us — depends thrive on the stuff.

And they expect you to panic.

WOW! YOU REALLY know how to give a guy a bad case of buyer’s remorse.

I remember when you were a freshman Congressman and came down to join the first TEA Party by the river, ‘way back in ’93, when we were fighting against the Clinton tax increases. A lot of us believed that you could be a stalwart for liberty. And, whenever you ran for office, we voted for you. And, when you got sucked into the bureaucracy or an administration and we lost our representative, we cheered for you anyway.

Because, you know, we thought we could trust that you knew and believed in the Constitution and your oath of office.

More the fools we.

Internet sales taxes? Really? Did you miss Article I, Section 9? Did you really not understand that, case law notwithstanding, it was intended to obviate the very actions you voted for in the Senate this past week?

I’m sorry, Senator. Over the years, you’ve managed to trim your sails and skirt the edges of unconstitutionality, and you’ve offered rationales that were believable, if still somewhat suspect. But this is the last straw.

The saying goes: “Fool me once, shame on you…” In these days, you don’t get to fool us twice.

I’ll be supporting and voting for your opponent in your next primary battle. And I’ll be urging others to do the same.

TO BE A SIMPLE Quote of the Day, but it does deserve that kind of up-pointing. Our Curmudgeon, in full cry…

[...A]sk yourself, “Why does the Left strive to delegitimize those who speak for the Right, if the Left has a set of rational arguments for its positions?”

The immediate conclusion must be that the Left’s strategists consider this tactic practically superior to all others. That conclusion, all by itself, is an important one that deserves independent reflection. But behind it lies another of even greater import, which comes most plainly into view when one realizes that the next electoral battle is still seventeen months away:

The Right is winning all the premier policy arguments of the day on grounds of better logical substance and greater evidentiary support.

An old trial-lawyer’s maxim has much point: “When the law is against you, pound the facts. When the facts are against you, pound the law. When both are against you, pound the table.”

The Left cannot compete with the Right on logical grounds, nor can it muster evidence in support of its theses. Therefore it must “pound the table:” it must deflect the public’s attention from both evidence and logic to make room for whatever other assets it can bring to bear. But to do so without addressing the Right’s arguments and evidence requires that those “pounding the facts and the law” be delegitimized in the eyes of those who might otherwise attend to them.

RTWT.

ERIN DELIVERS yet another righteous ass-kicking. (Her second, according to the tally.) Read. Chuckle. Enjoy. Respond.

OBAMA ONCE AGAIN reveals just how out-of-touch with America he is.

It almost really doesn’t matter where he was born, (although there appear to have been British records that indicate he really was (as he claimed in an early bio) born in Kenya), this man is not an American. And leftists try to mock us for our mistrust of him.

I FEAR THE PEOPLE WHO really need to see this will fear to watch it — in case it might change their minds, challenge their prejudices. But I pass it on in hopes that one might.

BUT I REMAIN SKEPTICAL. It appears that there is a proposal on the table which promises to end the climate-change debate — if the proponents of CAGW are acting in good faith. It is a verifiable and peer-reviewed calculation that “fixing” the problems of climate change will cost fifty times what it would cost to adapt to it.

I don’t doubt it’s being put forth in all sincerity by Lord Monckton and others. All of the data and process is publicly available (unlike the data and models arguing for massive remediation).

But the rub is in the first paragraph above: If the warmistas are acting in good faith. And, of course, they’re not. The whole CAGW dodge has been a bad-faith effort from the start, a stalking horse for international revolutionary Marxist seeking to loot the treasuries of rich, Western countries. That’s why they can’t allow honest reviews of their data and processes, why they can’t engage in an open debate — their motives are about as ulterior as they can get.

But I’d love to be proven wrong.

AUTONOMOUS CARS WILL NEVER HAPPEN? Look in your email InBox and count the spam messages. The ones that get past your self-training, Bayesian-filtered, white-and-blacklisted spam filter. Those. Total up how many you see in a day. A week. A month. A year.

Imagine they’re highway fatalities.

Tell me that, if they can’t teach an email client to recognize spam, how are they going to teach a car to recognize the threat from a farding, cell-phone-talking, gesticulating, talking-to-her-girlfriend-in-the-back-seat — yes, woman — driver? (And, no, guys, you’re not off the hook. I’ve seen way too many of you cruising down the Interstate, straddling lanes, yakking away on your cell phones, utterly oblivious to what’s going on around you.)

And following distance? How many times will Biff Trustafarian’s Volvo have to slam on the brakes or Siri a warning at him, “You’re following that truck too close! Brake! Brake!” before the following-distance warning gets disconnected by a duke-’im-a-fifty, not-so-ASE-certified mechanic?

PLAN B WITHOUT A prescription, but I can’t get insulin?

And people wonder why so many of us think government is broken.

FOR PRIVACY. Bruce Schneier lays out some of the points in issue.

There have been a lot of excuses for this sad state of affairs. You asked for it — or, at least, accepted it (the vast impositions against privacy in business, banking and all the rest of our private affairs) in exchange for convenience. It makes modern business operations possible; without it the world wouldn’t go. And the most despicable of all: privacy is dead; get over it.

(Assertion of that last should earn the speaker a righteous bitch-slapping at the very least.)

All of which have the sulfurous reek of totalitarian stalking horses. Just as with the subject of gun control, the issue is not guns but control, so, too, the issue with the exposure of private information isn’t the exposure, but who has the right to expose it.

In a free society, if you own yourself (and how despicable is the opposite situation), then how can you not own the information about you? And, that being the case — that you manifestly do have exclusive ownership rights in the information about you (a truth which is tacitly acknowledged in the waivers and disclaimers they make you sign in order to get access to their goodies) — how can those whom you trust with that information treat it other than as a fiduciary confidence which THEY MUST NOT BREACH?

Well, because they’re despicable trimmers who seek to get away with as much as they can, greedily grasping for any gain — even that not rightly theirs — they can realize. If you own the information ABOUT yourself, then how is the sale of that information not the fencing of stolen goods?

Well, Mr. Smartass, how would you fix the situation? Well, first and foremost, anonymization. In most cases, there is no need to tie your identity to information about you. Schneier himself, in the period immediately after 9/11, outlined a series of protocols by which trust data could be handled anonymously (and, incidentally, probably at significantly lower cost) and actually enhance the reliability of it. In the case of access to the secure areas of airports, there is no need for the state to know WHO you are, merely that it can be reliably demonstrated that you are trustworthy. Which, as I say, does not require proof of identity.

And that would be the initial approach I would recommend. Identify and remove those markers of identity which are not necessary to the trust-verification process at hand. Beyond that, I would recommend a return to the view that the Bill of Rights are sacrosanct, and that they MEAN WHAT THEY SAY. The Fourth Amendment, for example, says nothing about “agents of the state.” It instead absolutely proscribes the violation of a right to privacy without a stringent due process having been hewed to. And that includes the #%$*!&@ IRS.

At least, I don’t see an “except for tax collectors” in the text of the Amendment. And I suspect that James Madison would have bitch slapped you had you proposed that interpretation at the time. I mean, considering that they’d just fought a rebellion against taxes and all.

And… why “inverted”? Well, the original Haymarket Riot, as Wikipedia put it… The Haymarket affair is generally considered significant as the origin of international May Day observances for workers. … and, as such, is a point in favor of totalitarianism. (What? You don’t think Marxist are totalitarian?) (What? You don’t think trade unionists are Marxist?) (Whyever not?) We certainly don’t want that. But we need a similar impetus and rallying point to make of privacy an issue of the scope and urgency perceived by trade unionists back in the late 19th Century.

How we get there, I have no clue.

You cannot destroy an idea, not even an obviously bad and evil one — witness collectivism in all its forms.

– Mike Vanderboegh

Read the linked article. Long, but invaluable.

WITH ALL OF THESE SO-CALLED “security” technologies is that, at the end of the day, they all rely on bitmaps.

And I know too much about manipulating bitmaps to ever really trust a security technology based on trusting them.

I KNOW ALL THE KEWL KIDZ have already read this, but if you’re a stick-in-the-mud oddball like me and don’t yet have your veriest ownly copy, you might take a gander at it now. I think I see the same bargain price I got in the listing of available bindings at Amazon.

And, by the way, you should be disclaimed that this blog is an Amazon affiliate, though we’re not as aggressive about it as Professor Reynolds. When ever you make a purchase after having clicked through one of our Amazon links, you help defray the costs of operating this here free gelato machine at no additional cost to your charming self. Verb sap, as RAH used to say.

See? I told you so.

–Rush Limbaugh

– Oh, and me, too

Check out this article on the internet sales tax and how it’s illegal. I made that.

Really? You wrote it into the Constitution?

Well, no. But I was on the Article 1, Section 9 thing a couple of years ago and was beginning to despair of it’s ever getting any traction, despite the fact that it ought to be a dispositive slam-dunk.

(Hat tip: Everett Mickey on Facebook.)

ON WHICH, FROM TIME-TO-TIME James Patterson appears in a cameo as one of a gang of writers who play poker at Castle’s (Nathan Fillion) swanky Tribeca apartment. Patterson and Stephen J. Cannell and others are seen giving plot advice to Castle.

I’m sure that Patterson doesn’t really care, but part of the credibility his character has is that its attached to a real, successful writer. And that credibility fades away like Jimmy Webbs MacArthur Park cake in the rain when I read of stunts such as ol’ Jimmy pulled the other day.

Joe Konrath eviscerates the idiocy so I don’t have to. RTWT.

THAT THE FEDS SPIRITED out of the country, and about whom Glenn Beck is so wound around the axle, was an intelligence agent of the Saudi royal government aiding us in anti-terrorism operations.

I mean, if I were writing this story, that’s how it would go.

MOSTLY BECAUSE, they claim, it takes money away from public schools. Sure, the money follows the student, and gets a child educated, so why should it matter? And, still and all, when all’s said and done, if the reason a parent wants to send a child to private school is that the local public school is failing him, shouldn’t the public school lose the money?

OH! NO! Have to defend the system at all costs. Even or especially if the system is failing so badly as to be actually causing massive harm.

But also, possibly most important, the real reason rich and privileged people send their kids to private schools is to keep them away from all that lower class riff-raff. Can’t have them sullying our hallowed halls!

…[S]o we’re to believe that the more you advocate freedom, the more you support the American founding principles of liberty, the more you support the concept of minimum government and maximum individual responsibility, the closer you get to Nazis and Islamofascists. Stupid as that is, there are those who believe it. And so they keep beating that drum.

–Lyle, at Joe’s Place

ARTICLE 1 SECTION 9 of the Constitution forbids the taxation of interstate commerce.

No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state.

Congress does not have the authority to permit the states to collect sales taxes on goods traveling between states. Note that the actual text of the Constitution refers solely to the goods themselves and make no mention of the location of the businesses or individuals shipping or receiving. Only that the goods be carried out (that’s what “export” means — to carry out) of one state.

It may be argued that “export” refers only to the transporting of goods between countries or nations. To which the response is that, in the original conception, the states of the United States were sovereign nations. And nothing has been done to amend the Constitution to change that. No, not even the vaunted 14th Amendment. (As a close reading of that Amendment shall reveal.)

It might be argued that states may collect taxes on goods imported to the several states, except that only Congress has that power, and may not delegate it, and, at least for commerce within the United States, any good imported to one state must first be exported from another, and the taxation of that transaction is forbidden by the above provision.

It most certainly will be argued that states will suffer reduced revenue from this. The response is that that is not a bug, but a feature. It is not a detriment, but a desideratum. All governments in this day and age spend profligately. Worse, they ignore or abdicate their primary fiduciary duties and hare off after the pet projects of corrupt officials. And, when the citizenry dares to object, officialdom threatens to cut back on the fiduciary responsibilities, but will never cut the pet, pork-barrel projects. The people have little or no prospect of relief from excessive taxation save to forbid taxation altogether whenever the opportunity to do so presents itself.

And it will be complained that all scofflaw tax evaders will have to do to dodge these new taxes is to move goods across state lines. My answer to that plaint is, “Good. Do without for awhile and maybe you’ll mend your ways.” Well, not that I believe they will or would, but the point needs to be made and keep being made until it can no longer be brushed aside.

Amend it or No tax

I KEEP POUNDING these points. Some day they’ll enter the mindstream:

The purpose of government — says so right there on the box — is to preserve the rights of the people — of individual people.

There is no such thing as a collective. Anything. Individuals are all.

There can be no compelling public interest which overrides the rights of individuals, Sandra Day O’Connor notwithstanding. The very notion is a contradiction in terms.

The public interest is (see above) the preservation of individual rights. Period. Full stop.

There is no such thing as “The Greater Good.” The so-called greater good always comprises a greater evil. Otherwise, it’s merely good.

–Me, over at Gerard’s

Staircase wit: I’m sorry, but I don’t see an “exigent circumstances” clause in this:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

(Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution)

So, if you want to add one, you need to amend the thing. Without it, shut the front door. Come back with a warrant.

I really hope those statist fucks in Boston get their asses sued to Kingdom Come. None of them are worthy to serve in my country’s birthplace.

This is stupidity on a governmental scale.

–C.G. Hill

An excellent description of, not just stupidity, but more generalize FAIL.

*Teri Hatcher, as Lois Lane from Lois and Clark on discovering that Clark Kent was Superman all along.

YEAH? Well… You’re gonna hear it again. Hit “Play”!

BUT I CALL IT fleeing the scene of the crime. Max Baucus’s hasty departure from the Senate, after having thrust this “train wreck” of a law on us (Obamacare).

We so rarely get to express our feelings toward a politician who is instrumental in passing an epochal law. They usually die before the FAIL becomes so obviously manifest to those who didn’t see it coming in the first place. We should take advantage of this one.

As the puppy-blender has been known to put it: tar, feathers: some assembly required.

SO I’VE BEEN SEEING this commenter on Facebook and blogs, Erin Palette. Her avatar reminded me a bit of Yulia Nova. (Don’t ask.) But it caught my attention. As did, in short order, her words. Wonderful. This woman has her head on straight and her heart in the right place.

Then, yesterday, BP points to a brilliant post — a polemic addressed to the victim-disarmament crowd and their moral failings. The pull quote is tasty enough, but, when BP advise RTWT, I’ve learned it’s sage advice. So I went. And R’d TWT. Lemme tell you, the pull quote was only a taste. The whole thing was at the very least an excellent entree, if not a whole meal. (That would be the rest of the blog.

From the title “My So-Called Rights” to the takeaway nut quote, “Because ‘Fuck you.’ That’s why,” the post is just perfect. To quote BP, RTWT.

Then I scrolled down and started reading the comments. And there was Erin Palette! A familiar face! Kewl, I thought, and read her comments first.

I say of myself that, like Barleyman Butterbur, the proprietor of the Prancing Pony in Bree, (as described by Gandalf in Fellowship of the Ring), I am slow, but I can see through a brick wall, given time.

And then, as they say, the penny dropped. This is Erin Palette’s blog! Way cool. It’s called Lurking Rhythmically (which my punning mind will inevitably twist to Writhing Lyrically, with all attendant follow-on puns, such as the reeling and writhing under the sea line from Alice, so we might as well get it out), and, based on that one post, I feel safe in recommending you follow it.

OK, so I’m seconding BP’s recommendation. Like I said. Slow. Brick wall.Time.

HOW I CAN BE — in the words of one acquaintance, “The most connected man in Rock ‘n’ Roll” and not hear of artists for fifteen or twenty years, but then be bowled over by them when I finally do.

Case in point, Dutch singer Anouk Teeuwe, who I sort of tripped over on Spotify when I started a radio station based on Melissa Etheridge.

And — bonus points — this picture (album cover) reminds me of Dolly in my head a little. It’s the gun.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Commemorating the Battle of Concord, April 19, 1775
Considered to be the opening battle of
the American Revolutionary War

APPARENTLY, EMMA WATSON stripped down — or, at least, wore an off-the-shoulder something and stood under a glycerin shower for a photo shoot celebrating…

Lenin’s birthday!

Well, she claimed it was for Earth Day. Which shows the extent of her knowledge on the subject.

And, since we here at BTB love to celebrate ignorance on any subject, wherever we may encounter it, a hearty salute:

Hey, Emma! Nice tits!

WE CAN’T LET THIS STOP US! We have to enslave the whole country, deny its fundamental rights! We can’t let a silly little thing like the founding principles of the Republic get in our way! (–The President)

Traitor!

Why he is not up on charges…

On the gripping hand, it’s possible he wanted this defeat, in order to use it as a club to beat Republicans next election.

In which case, he should be thanking us.

Do you really think he’s that clever?

No. I really think Republicans are that hapless that what should be a slam-dunk, in-your-face, broke-the-backboard victory will be turned into them stepping on their cranks.

THAT SENATOR SCHUMER (Fuckface of New York) finds it “a struggle” to INFRINGE ON CIVIL RIGHTS!

Asshole!

And then the President throws a tantrum. Poo’ Bebbeh! Somebody call the bitch a wa-a-ahmbulance. Bitches love wa-a-ahmbulances.

Keep tellin’ ‘em. If they want to infringe on the rights of the people, they have to amend the Constitution. But do they listen? Noo-o-o-o!

That, Baby Doll, is a bug, not a feature. To them. It’s one of the reasons I say they start out operating with bad faith intent.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. WHAT. Everrr.

BAPTISED IN THE Old North Church. My father’s family is a Mayflower family on his Mother’s side. (Not that rare in Boston.)

Next person who tries to blame ANYbody for the atrocity — not tragedy, atrocity — at the Boston Marathon in advance of hard facts gets a kick in the nads. Are we clear?

IN FACT, BASED ON the Twentieth Century body count alone (100-200 million citizens killed by their governments NOT in war time), collectivism is the greatest evil ever encompassed by the mind of Man.

‘S truth. Not “my” truth or “your” truth, but Capital “T” Truth. Carved in stone on a pillar Truth.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. The facts are there, the reasoning laid out for you to follow or investigate to your own satisfaction.

For example, take the contention that individuals belong to the collective, as infamously advanced by MSNBC host-ette Melissa Harris-Perry (Hyphenated surnames used to be an indicator of bastardy; has that really changed all that much since the practice became a parlor-pink fashion accessory?). The question may be couched as: do they? And the answer is obviously: No. (Or, if you prefer, Oh, HELL no!) And further, the contention is evil and ought to be met with infinite opprobrium.

However, there are those who are willing to put forth greater effort of dispositively stomping out the notion. Such as Brandon Smith of Alt-Market blog, guest posting at Zerohedge.

They promise community, and they give you isolation. They promise prosperity, and they give you servitude. They promise safety, and they give you a land of perpetual terror. They promise purpose, and give you insignificance. They promise peace, and they foment war after war after war, reaping turmoil all around us, as well as within us.

RTWT.

THAT THE SCHOOLS are indoctrinating children to state, “I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights if I can be safer.”

As well he should be.

But that misses the point. Rather, as I say to my congresscritters all the time (in my fantasies and emails, ’cause I never really get to talk to them), YOU don’t get to waive MY rights. That is, as a matter of fact, a violation of THE fundamental principle — the principal principle, if you will — of America. In fact, it is the equivalent of original sin in this place.

And THAT, Gentle Reader, is what is REALLY happening. You are not giving up your rights, they are being taken away.

Resist.

BEAT JACK RYAN, and how Sherrod Brown beat Josh Mandel, and how both Gore and Kerry tried to beat Dubya, Democrats have absolutely no room to talk about Mitch McConnell. But, of course, they’ll whinge about it if they think they can gain some advantage to it. But it wasn’t a Republican who coined the phrase, “Politics ain’t beanbag.”

AS THEY SAY, you cannot make this shit up.

We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.

– Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC anchor.

Words cannot convey just exactly how terribly despicable this is.

Not only that, but the really steep decline in American public education began almost exactly when the per-pupil expenditures began to balloon.

…

HERE’S YOUR TAKEAWAY FROM THAT ::SPIT:: DESPICABLE statist nanny wannabe who started out saying, “We never have invested enough in education…” and went on to claim ownership of children for the state.

First off, fuck her with a chain saw. She is despicable. Worse, she’s dangerous. And, frankly, hanging’s too good for her sort.

First principle: in a free country nobody owns anybody. All individuals own themselves. And good free people recognize that and respect the sovereignty of the individual.

Children are a special case. They must be civilized and made fit for society. They need to be educated to certain minimum standards. And, within very narrow moral strictures, they must be protected from the dire results of their own innocence.

That’s it. And, once a child is capable of making decisions for himself — and thus capable of making and absorbing the consequences of hard decisions, (and it’s generally earlier than parents like to admit), the only proper strictures a parent may or should lay on him are those which fall under the rubric of “house rules” — limits which protect the safety of parental property and those other people living in the house, and those things which might bring unearned consequences down on the owners of the house — such as drug trafficking or other illegal activities. Not that such things are necessarily approved or disapproved of, but that they put the owner (parent) unwilling at risk.

From birth, up to that point, children are the responsibility — not the property — of their parents, and it is despicable, reprehensible, and downright evil for any other person or group or the state to meddle in or interfere with that primary, fiduciary duty.

And if the children end up fucked up, all the state can or should do is shrug and remember that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. And those sins are myriad and manifold and extend far, far beyond the proper brief of the state.

I would add that those who would vitiate liberty using children as a stalking horse are a clear and present danger to public safety and should be — not opposed, but destroyed. As you would destroy a rabid dog, with as much dispatch and as dispassionately. And for the same reasons.

HE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND why those wacko birds in the tea party gang are threatening to filibuster threats to the Second Amendment.

I’m sure I don’t, either, but probably not for the same reason.

You see, McCain is a statist. (And, as I have long urged, statism should be a dirtier word than racism, on the comparative body counts alone.) So he doesn’t quite get why a notionally free people should resist the importunings of a government grown too big for its britches.

Me, I’m more liberty oriented. I find it surpassing strange that there’s even a need for said filibuster. Why should the Senate even consider such a bill, let alone need to filibuster it? Why are not those proposing it summarily drummed out of the Senate?

WHENEVER REVOLUTIONARY change threatens, (which is — like — all the time ), the Old Guard whistles in the dark past the graveyard. And, for a time, their self-deception seems to be borne out. The scorn with which members of the ancien regime deride the new seems fair to blister the finish on the hardest of power coatings. To little avail. Change is not necessarily a human choice, but a natural phenomenon, and admits to control by no one.

The metaphor I like to use is a comparison to the advent of steamships in intercontinental trade.

It was not until 1869 that steam power was finally established as the queen of the seas. But prior to that, there had to have been warning signs. After all, American shipyards stopped building clipper ships in the late 1850s. From the advent of the clipper in the years before the American Revolution (and contemporary to the development of steam) to the time of the American Civil War or shortly thereafter, there was a competition between the two in long-distance trade, with steam eventually winning out upon the opening of the Suez canal in 1869. Even today, the China clipper remains the pinnacle of beauty and function in wind-powered vessels of its size.

But we no longer power our civilization with fitful, unreliable, inefficient wind (except in the fevered backwaters of lefty brain fart pipe dreams). All during that time, there had to have been proponents of steam proudly proclaiming that “wind power is dead!” and those in favor of wind “you’ll never make China in x weeks with steam!” Both were eventually proven to be wrong. Today, only nuclear ships run on steam, and wind probably powers more recreational vessels than it ever did working cargo ships. But nobody back then could have ever predicted either, and more the fools they for trying.

But Alger, (she says, playing the good little shill like a cute and sexy doll should), you’re the one writing science fiction, which is all about predicting the future!

Well, no, Dolly. Actually, it’s not. Science fiction is about playing with ideas. Throwing the setting into the future is seen as potentially liberating, but not absolutely necessary. And, I might remind you, that the stories about you are set, now, fourteen years in the past. So your point is…?

Barefoot.

Bare…?

Bootless.

Well, see, there you go again. If you don’t have boots doesn’t mean you’re unshod. It just means you’re… Well. Bootless.

ANY way…

Anyway. Nobody back in the early 1800s could have predicted the way things worked out between steam and sail — not even Jules Verne — and their efforts to do so might have… You know when you were a kid, first learning to play baseball, and you kept fouling out down the first base line, and they told you, “If you can just straighten that out, you’ll have a home run”?

Well… No.

Oh. Was that just me? I never knew. The point is that I wasted a lot of time and energy hitting those long balls out-of-bounds. Well, as it turned out, the effort spent learning baseball was pretty much wasted anyway, but that’s another story. Which makes the point that, if all that effort that went into predicting how things would turn out in the competition between steam and sail were converted to, you know, developing new inventions or new businesses instead…

It probably wouldn’t have changed things much.

Well, there is that.

…

ANY way… I tell you that to tell you this: Today, the powers that think they be (TPTTTB) in the publishing world are whistling in the dark past the graveyard of independent publishing. They want to persuade themselves that they can control it, that they can survive the change it presages, that it’s a short-lived phenomenon — a fad — and all the similar wheezes you’ve heard and read in recent years. Must feel about like the carriage trade did when the wits on the sidewalk were snarking at the fools puttering by in Model-Ts, shouting, “Get a horse!” Warmed the cockles of their hearts, it must have, to hear their chosen mode of transport thus defended and even praised.

Yeah. Right. People have always been so capable of self-deception. And always will be.

But, me, I’ve seen this happen before — in my own lifetime — and I’m here to tell you, don’t nobody know nuffin’ about what’s to come. About all that can be accurately said is that things will never be the same again. But then, they never are. Or, as Dolly put it…

See, she was heading through a perilous, strait and narrow place, and a grizzled old gaffer of a Lesser Elf was sunning himself on a rock by the side of the road and tried to warn her off. “Dinna gang in there, lass. Folk wit gang in there dinna coom oot th’ same.” (All my elves are from Glasgow — not.)

And Dolly barely paused in her headlong progress, and says…

“Oh, that’s alright. I haven’t been the same for years.”

… and plunges on.

When I started out as a young tad, knee high to a very tall grasshopper, one of my mentors said to me — this would have been in 1981 or so — to watch out for ink jet technology. Because, as he said, “In ten years, you’ll be able to walk into Kmart and there’ll be a kiosk where you can get anything printed on the spot, using an ink jet printer. It’s going to put us (commercial offset printers) out of business.”

Now, at that time, Kinko’s was an established brand, and so-called “quick prints” were mushrooming everywhere, so the wary, sleeping-with-one-eye-open, reliant-on-big-iron printers of an earlier age (offset printing dates back to the 1870s) might be excused for feeling a bit nervous in the service.

But, what very few people saw coming, even at that late date, was microcomputers and what desktop publishing would eventually wreak on the graphic arts industries. The Mac was introduced in 1984 and PageMaker in 1985. But, in 1981, it looked as though minicomputers would rule the day, still calling for investments of big capital, yes, but different kinds of big capital, and probably in addition to the millions of dollars in press and bindery equipment a typical small job shop would have.

In those days, there were all manner of service specialties that surrounded printers.

There were color houses, which specialized in making color separations and laying up platemaking film for complex jobs. There were type houses, which had massive libraries of very expensive type faces and the ability to set type in any form or format from one-word headlines to the galleys for book printing — and could provide you with hot metal, cold metal, negatives, or veloxes. There were specialty platemakers and engravers who provided the dies and plates for letterpress operations — diecutting, dry embossing, hot foil stamping, or just plain ink-to-paper. There were binderies, which could perform all manner of post-press operations from die-cutting, scoring, perforating, folding, and padding to case-bound books and beyond. And there were various types and specialties of trade print shops, large press, web, flexo, silkscreen — each serving a particular niche and the jobs appropriate to it.

Fast forward, eight years, to 1989, and people were beginning to see the tsunami of change far out to sea and starting to scurry — either for the exits or for a new position, to be assumed in hopes of surviving. Two more years and it was done. Fait accompli. Stick a fork in it. Whole swathes of the graphic arts were gone — to dust, like the buggy whip manufacturers of another age.

People took early retirement or went into tending bar. Driving taxis. Some of the change is still shaking out. We at the Patch Factory sold off our last big iron offset press only a year or two ago. We were fortunate in having managers with the foresight to understand the absolute necessity of riding the tsunami, (not attempting to withstand it or get out of its way), and the willingness to capitalize the changes required. We were at the forefront of the change in our area, and ran, for the time that it mattered, the most cutting edge shop in town.

(We’ve outgrown that need, now. It’s no longer that the best available is barely adequate to our task. Commodities will do for us, and the bleeding edge is elsewhere. The wave has come in and receded in our immediate neighborhood and we have a breathing space — though not for long, I’m sure.)

The experience has both tired us and taught us to be wary of complacency. We understand that we must stay abreast of developments in a wider variety of fields than ever. We need to be out there actively looking for tools and opportunities both, or somebody younger, more nimble, or just better at what we do than we will eat our lunch. And I’m too old to go hungry ’til dinner. So I step lively.

Now, the literature industry…

::wobbita:: What’s that? “The literature industry…”?

It’s more than publishing but less than printing? Just acquiring and putting out books used to be the business model. And the powers that think they be (TPTTTB) are trying mightily to force the entire business of producing and selling letters (which is what “literature” means) into that mold. But it’s already broken out of it and the toothpaste just will not go back in the tube. And trying to get it to is a chump’s game. The energy would be much better spent on figuring out how to better provide “value-added” to independent authors. Because, while I can’t predict the shape of the business in the future (but neither can TPTTTB).

But what I can tell you for sure is that, once an author experiences a 70% royalty per copy on an e-book, or receiving the publisher’s cut AND the author’s cut on a trade paperback, he or she is NOT going to go back to 5% hardback or 7% paperback or whatever it is that “traditional” publishers dangle in front of needy, desperate-for-publication authors. And, if the publishers Amanda Green is calling “legacy” publishers want to stay viable, they’d better have a solution that — for a significantly lower percentage of the take and no control over accounting — provides services such as mass market printing and rack jobbing on books that are, essentially, print-ready packages, including covers, typesetting, page design, and the lot from the author on the front end.

Because, if they don’t, somebody smaller, younger, hungrier, smart, faster, and nimbler will come along and eat their lunch.

And, I suspect, they’re too old and fat and lazy to go hungry until dinner.

WELL… ACTUALLY through the aether, Marko Kloos’ first novel, Terms of Enlistment.

And the story of how he came to self-publish — thus doing a 180 from prior expressed beliefs — is both tutelary and cautionary.

And the boilerplate reminder: this blog is an Amazon affiliate. When you purchase from Amazon through my links, you help defray the costs of operation at no additional charge to yourself. Please patronize our advertisers, and thank YOU for your support.

‘N’ OTHER STUFF recently. Sorry for the lackobloggage.

SO LEMME GET THIS STRAIGHT. If you’re a licensed dealer, and you’re selling guns at a gun show, you have to perform a background check. But, if you’re just a private individual, and you’re selling your personal property to a private individual you don’t? And the people who wrote this law were NOT strung up from the nearest lamppost on PROPOSING it?

There is something in a cat which cannot abide a closed door.

–Me

THAT EARTH HOUR COMES on a Saturday this year. March Twenty-threeth (that’s today), so keep a close eye out. Those leftist shibboleths can be sneaky critters.

But. all you sinners. put your lights on. Put your lights on. ‘Cause there’s a monster under your bed and it’s called International Revolutionary Marxism in environmentalist clothing, a.k.a., a watermelon.

The rest of you, use all the ‘lectric you want. We’ll make more.

IS ON THE WARPATH about Republican stupidity. Her column this week takes the GOP to task for running stupid candidates. Really? Looks to me more like the people who step up are stupid. How about getting less-stupid people to step up?

Wellll…?

“Well…” what?

You are, as Mycroft put it, not-stupid.

I’m flattered. But… no. I wouldn’t do as a candidate. Not even in a suit. I’ll just say that southwest Ohio is mostly lucky in the kind of people who step up. No, Josh Mandel didn’t win. And the nation is all the poorer for having Sherrod Brown shoved down our throats for another 6 years. But Mandel is a good guy and he’ll be back. Or the Second District’s own Brad Wenstrup — stepping in to replace Jean Schmidt — that was a win, wunnit?

But we really need to get rid of this notion that, because the Republicans won’t run liberty-oriented originalists, the People lose.

What? Third party? That makes a fuck of a lotta sense!

No. I’m thinking more along the lines of a good second party. Or, actually, first party. Relegated the Dems to second place.

AND LACK OF REST gets to me faster than when I was younger. I apologize, but I was not able to finish Chapter 3 of the Cover Story before bedtime Thursday night. And, as it’s grocery week, I won’t be able to get it Friday night, either. It will have to wait until Saturday morning, so I’ll be publishing sometime Saturday afternoon. Chapter 4 is already written and will run on Sunday. I hope this won’t happen too often, but it’s almost inevitable, given my age and infirmities.