Quotulatiousness

December 23, 2020

Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”

Filed under: Business, Government, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:

Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm

Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.

Feh.

As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.

Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.

But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.

Double feh.

Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…

October 7, 2020

QotD: The gullible generation

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

World War II, which I have described (in The Probability Broach) as a struggle between competing brands of fascism, was much the same thing. For the beleaguered people of Europe, it meant being forced to choose between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Would you rather be shot or gassed?

For Americans, it meant looking for protection by a political regime so grossly and criminally corrupt that future historians will shake their heads, wondering how an entire people could be such suckers. “The Greatest Generation”, that miserable collectivist mouthpiece Tom Brokaw has called them. Looking back over what my father told me of his life, how his family suffered in the government-caused Great Depression, how he and his comrades risked unspeakable danger in the war, and how he became a prisoner in Germany — all to aggrandize the virtual godhood of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — I call them “The Gullible Generation”.

On the other hand, people loved the Roosevelt Administration so much that they passed a Constitutional amendment to make sure that no sonofabitch could ever be elected to more than two Presidential terms again.

World War II gave government complete, dictatorial control of American society, control of industry, control of communications, control of the economy, control that Roosevelt had desperately lusted after before the war, but failed to achieve. If anyone objected, or insisted on his rights under the Constitution, all the other side had to say was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

The government enjoyed that level of control. Once the war was won, and people looked forward to a period of peace, the government plunged us into the Korean War, Vietnam, and an increasing number of undeclared and stupid conflicts in order to retain its power. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” never worked quite as well as it had to shut dissenters up, but it’s clear that this scam will go on and on and on until something drastic is done to stop it.

L. Neil Smith, “The Deep State”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-04-14.

September 29, 2020

The Lamprey Party of America

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that we need a modern Thomas Nast to add to the political menagerie of elephants and donkeys:

“The Third-Term Panic”, by Thomas Nast, originally published in Harper’s Magazine on 7 November 1874.

A braying ass, in a lion’s coat, and “N.Y. Herald” collar, frightening animals in the forest: a giraffe (“N. Y. Tribune”), a unicorn (“N. Y. Times”), and an owl (“N. Y. World”); an ostrich, its head buried, represents “Temperance”. An elephant, “The Republican Vote”, stands near broken planks (Inflation, Repudiation, Home Rule, and Re-construction). Under the elephant, a pit labeled “Southern Claims. Chaos. Rum.” A fox (“Democratic Party”) has its forepaws on the plank “Reform. (Tammany. K.K.)” The title refers to U.S. Grant’s possible bid for a third presidential term. This possibility was criticized by New York Herald owner and editor James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
Image and caption via Wikimedia Commons.

The 19th century political caricaturist and editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840-1902) is famous for identifying Republicans as elephants and Democrats as donkeys. He also created the Tammany tiger, and Santa Claus as we know him today.

Mr. Nast was a handsome and clever fellow, a Bavarian immigrant, to whom we all owe a great deal, but I have long thought that more animals need to be added to America’s political menagerie, none of them as wholesome and savory as elephants and donkeys. Lampreys are eel-like fish, sort of vertebrate leeches or underwater vampires, that attach themselves to larger fish with their circular, tooth-lined mouths, hitching a free ride, punching a hole through the legitimate fish’s flesh, and feeding on its blood. They look and feel (I am informed) slimy and disgusting. The freedom movement needs a cartoonist (I can think of one or two) capable of rendering a cartoon lamprey in all of its horrifying malevolence.

What party would be represented by a lamprey? Well, it has gone by several names, and it’s filled with familiar and despicable figures. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, described as “to the left of all Republicans, except Susan Collins, and … Democrat Senator Joe Manchin” is a lamprey, riding along on the Republican party, parasitically sucking its lifeblood, never contributing anything to advance its progress. She voted with Obama a stunning 72.3% of the time. I could say Murkowski is a “never-Trumper”, but she was a lamprey long before the Donald ever came along. My wife Cathy, first made aware of Murkowski’s malevolent role in American politics, exclaimed, “Alaskans! What the hell is wrong with you?”

Another well-known lamprey is Willard “Mitt” Romney, who viciously opposes all of Trump’s undertakings, foreign and domestic, and whose father George was a leader of the cabal in 1964 who betrayed fellow-Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and helped Democrats and the media stab him in the back, electing that murderous gangster Lyndon Baines Johnson. George Romney would have called Barry a “deplorable” if the term had been current back then, for the same reasons the political elites despise President Trump today. They believe only they are fit to determine how to live your life. The delusion seems to be hereditary.

September 22, 2020

An idea for the blighted 21st century — Radio Free Earth and an updated “Liberator” pistol

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the most recent edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith considers a couple of ways to help oppressed peoples all around the world:

An example of the original Liberator pistol from WW2.
Screen capture from a Forgotten Weapons video.

The first is an idea that I originally read about in the 1950s in a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a satisfying irony about using it against the Chinese communists,since Clarke himself was an ardent collectivist (among other nasty things) and wrote about it as a way that communists might bring Western Civilization to its knees. Building on Clarke’s original concept, imagine a tiny radio receiver, tuned only to a single frequency, with no moving parts, small enough to fit almost entirely into the human ear, and with the right coloration to be virtually invisible.

Now imagine a geostationary satellite standing 22,300 miles in space over China. The basic idea is like Radio Free Europe, but with significant differences. Instead of dull propaganda (I listened to some of those RFE and Voice of America broadcasts), there would be readings by celebrities like James Earl Jones and Dennis Haysbert from the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and other Founding Fathers. Nineteenth century thinkers like Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker would be featured, as well, along with H.L Mencken, Ludwig von Mises, Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayeck, and Milton Friedman from the twentieth century.

Very importantly, these lessons in liberty would be interspersed by good, old-fashioned action-adventure radio drama, featuring the works of individualist scribblers like Robert A. Heinlein, H. Beam Piper, Poul Anderson, and little old me, Underdog. Jammed in there just to keep the comrades listening avidly, there would be what I like to think of as “weaponized pornography”, high-quality dramatic readings of Pauline Reage’s Story of O, among others. If it works in Chinese, it will work in Arabic or Farsi, as well.

The geostationary satellite would beam all these offerings down twenty-four hours a day to the millions of little radios that we have air-dropped or otherwise smuggled to the citizenry. Sailors on their brand-new ships would probably listen in, as well. The Chicoms would try their damnedest to outlaw them and maybe even shoot the satellite down, but 22,300 miles is a long way away, and battle-lasers can defeat missiles laboring at the peak of their climb. Such satellites are relatively cheap and replaceable, especially if they can prevent World War III, and we’d keep sending the Chinese those little radios.

That’s Idea #1. Idea #2 involves a World War II project most gun enthusiasts know about called the “FP-45 Liberator Pistol”. A million of the crude, stamped, single-shot firearms, unrifled and chambered for the .45 automatic pistol cartridge, were manufactured by the Guide Lamp Division of General Motors at a total cost of $2.10 apiece (that’s $31.55 today). The whole package contained a few spare cartridges, a wooden ejection rod, and a comic book illustration showing how to use it: sneak up on a Nazi soldier, blow his brains out, and steal his rifle.

You were supposed to throw the pistol away, but me, I would have kept it. You never know when you might need it. The Liberators are so scarce today that the bidding starts at $600, meaning that there are hundreds of thousands of the ugly little roscoes still tucked away in barns and attics in eastern Europe. Wikipedia, no bastion of liberty, claims that they were all rounded up and destroyed by Allied troops (which probably cost more than the guns did). If true, it means that I was right when I wrote in my first novel, The Probability Broach, that WWII was basically a conflict between competing brands of fascism.

August 28, 2020

QotD: Communism and socialism

Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Communism was the most aggressive and (up to a point) successful offshoot of an 18th century idea called socialism. A great deal has been written since the middle of the 19th century — especially academically — about socialism (I once attended a seemingly endless lecture on the orthodox Marxist interpretation of Jean Paul Sartre’s excruciatingly boring 1944 existentialist play No Exit), but in the end, what it all boils down to is nothing more than a fairly shabby and pretentious attempt to make simple theft seem respectable.

If you have something — some money, a car, a house, a plot of land, a factory, a body of literary accomplishments, even things like television sets and devices to play music — you can bet that somebody, somewhere is trying to figure out how to appropriate, expropriate, steal, or simply take it away from you. And most of those schemers will be college professors and politicians.

Under a set of natural laws that can be seen as ethical addenda to the laws of thermodynamics, it is always less effort to destroy than to build, which is what makes war an attractive threat for barbarians and looters to wield, and it is always less effort to steal things than to create or earn them, which is why we have always had thieves of various stripes among us, including college professors and politicians.

Within a democracy, socialism is a cynical con-game that, like all con-games everywhere, can’t operate without larceny in the heart of the “victim” or mark. Convince young voters that they can have a free higher education (regardless of how it’s going to get paid for or who’s going to pay for it), and, having been taught nothing useful by the socialist primary and secondary education systems they were compelled by force to attend, they will ignorantly vote you into office. Convince them that you deserve the power to order private businesses to pay them fifteen dollars an hour (whether their labor is actually worth it and it damages the business or not), and they will stupidly make you king.

That, in a nut-shell, and spread out over the entire culture, is what happened to Venezuela and why they’ve had to eat their pets. It’s what’s happened for three generations in North Korea, and why, it’s rumored, that cannibalism is being practiced there. The history of a hundred other countries that have tried socialism and suffered hideously for it informs us that these kinds of developments are inevitable.

L. Neil Smith, “Bernie Sanders Wants You Dead”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-05-12.

August 24, 2020

How to rectify a serious error the Founding Fathers made in the US Constitution

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that despite his respect for the founding fathers, they made a couple of serious mistakes in drafting the Constitution and it needs fixing quickly:

Founders’ Mistake Number Two: lies in the enumeration of the powers of Congress, to wit:

    “They [congress] shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

With those fifty-four words, the Founding Fathers gave birth to a permanent criminal class, as surely as the city councils of Seattle, Minneapolis. Philadelphia, New York, and Portland. Even “treason, felony, and breach of the peace” are for all practical purposes excepted, now, or three quarters of these miscreants would be languishing in prison. That heinous, stupid clause must be repealed or rewritten at once.

For many years, I have advocated reopening Alcatraz strictly for government criminals, although lately it occurs to me that Antarctica might be even better. Cash-poor Russia and the other two-for-a-nickel satrapies that lay claim to slivers of that frozen continent would give them up for thirty-seven cents and a good bus token. And I kind of like the ring of “McMurdo Sound Federal Penitentiary”.

But, as usual, I have, once again, digressed.

Another cure — with similar delightfully frostbitten consequences — might be to incorporate United States Code, Sections 241 and 242 directly into the Bill of Rights, probably as Amendment Zero. They establish the crimes of depriving folks of their rights “under color of law”, conspiring to deprive them of their rights under color of law, and prescribe extremely specific penalties.

To my knowledge, those laws are never properly applied, and that is a travesty and a tragedy. Make them an Amendment, and they might prove more effective. I would consider every American deprived of his or her rights to represent a separate punishable offense. How about three billion years in the freeze-dried slammer, Nancy, for your decades of malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, upfeasance, and downfeasance as a member in evil standing of the Viet Congress?

July 7, 2020

L. Neil Smith on the Progressive agenda

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

His latest article in the Libertarian Enterprise:

For the full length of the last century, Western culture has been commanded by the blind, deaf, but never speechless entities who see things stubbornly as they prefer to see them, and “dream the impossible dream”, rather than see them as they really are. This mental habit has led to various messes that we find ourselves in today. To any extent that it might help us to get out of those messes, it might help to understand how we got into them.

Don’t look to the wrong assistance. Psychology, for example, is nothing at all like a science and those who practice it are nothing at all like scientists. Mostly they’re hyper-opinionated liberals. No two shrinks ever agree on a diagnosis, and official definitions of various mental illnesses are a grammatical and logical laugh riot. The great truth of life is that understanding character is an art, best left to master novelists and story-tellers.

Although they’ll seldom admit it, even to themselves, so-called Progressives know by now that they are wrong, that they have always been wrong. You might say that their wrongness has stood the test of time. So what is it that they really want? Their high-flown theories and values having failed them embarrassingly — a good example of that is the minimum wage, which destroys employment for entry-level and minority youth — rather than seeking new theories and values that might serve them and everybody better, they have turned to a kind of bitter nihilism. They hate and fear the society that has stubbornly refused to bend to their wills, and so it must die. Every single policy recommendation that they make — like the $15 minimum wage, for example, or defunding the police — is directed to that purpose.

Another good example would be “gun control”, which its opponents correctly label “victim disarmament”. As unconstitutional political pressures on private gun ownership increased, and self-defense culture was forced to organize itself (contrary to liberal belief, gun companies and the National Rifle Association were followers in this, not leaders) existing gun laws were gradually weakened. It became easier to obtain and carry a weapon — and necessary, in the view of those of us “delorables” who were constantly being threatened by left-wing political figures. During the Obama-Biden regime, at least 100 million guns were sold. And as they were, violent criminality began to decrease in double digits.

Today, except for many liberal-dominated hell-holes like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and a dozen others, Americans are headed to 19th century crime levels. Did Progressives ever notice or admit that crime had diminished? They did not. The process conflicted with their erroneous belief system, so they still call today for various measures punishing firearms manufacturers and retailers, and disarming individuals who have solved the problem that the politicians and the police have only made much worse for decades.

And so it goes, in all such matters as economics, education, the environment, nutrition, and everything else. Psychologists (who, like a broken clock, are right just this once) call the phenomenon projection: if Progressives can’t run their own lives (and very largely, judging from the kids they raise, they can’t), naturally that makes them and the rest of the bizarre menagerie that was typical of the Obama-Biden Administration qualified to run everybody else’s lives. And because Progressive policies are (at least one hopes) unconsciously suicidal, the rest of us are in for a rough ride.

June 1, 2020

QotD: The right to keep and bear arms

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The bureaucrat who commands an army of over forty-nine thousand armed men and women (the largest police force in the world, slightly more than three Army divisions) in its century-old struggle against the Bill of Rights, has loftily decreed on 60 Minutes, the famous CBS newsish show, that it is “insanity” to “allow” national concealed carry reciprocity for law-abiding citizens. This according to an article that appeared this week on the Breitbart website, written by their distinguished Second Amendment specialist, A.W.R. Hawkins.

The bureaucrat in question is New York Police Department Commissioner James O’Neill, an individual who clearly believes that his thirty-five years spent plodding unspectacularly up the NYPD chain of command equips him better to tell you what your rights are, and what they are not, than the Founding Fathers of this country and the Framers of its unique social contract.

Well I’ve got news for you, Jimmy, there is no “allow”.

“Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machine-gun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone’s permission.”* That’s the essential freight of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, the highest law of the land, which you and yours have been illegally suppressing since passage of the 1911 Sullivan Act, named for Tammany Hall’s Timothy Sullivan, perhaps the most corrupt, bigoted politician ever to occupy office in New York.

Since the ability to own and carry weapons unmolested by the State is a fundamental right, there can be no thought of any unit of that state “allowing” it or not “allowing” it. Any government employee who attempts to interfere with that right deserves a long stay in prison among those whose rights he’s violated. Note that I am not saying that peace and civil order are a bad thing, just that it has to be achieved within Constitutional parameters. The Founders put them there for a reason; they had seen the rule of law abused too often by arrogant and brutish British authorities.

* “The Atlanta Declaration”, L. Neil Smith, 1987

L Neil Smith, “There Is No ‘Allow’, Jimmy”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-02-18.

May 19, 2020

The Karenist coup

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on our current self-inflicted plight:

We find ourselves here, in this particular time and this particular place in the history of our republic, because of a 239-year-old oversight made by the Founding Fathers, in that the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights (the name itself is a mistake), contain no penalty clause for those — politicians, bureaucrats, policemen — who violate them. I’m not entirely sure it was accidental, but, as a result, they are violated daily, hourly, as a matter of course, and this Corona Virus farce — many others come to mind — is simply the most recent and most preposterous example.

(The name itself is an error because this document is not a mere list of privileges that the government generously lets the people exercise. Quite the opposite, it is a list of things that the government is absolutely forbidden to do It should have been called the “Bill of Limits”. And if the Founders, who had just fought and won a desperate, bloody war against the world’s most brutal and rapacious super-power, hadn’t meant them to be absolute, then why — for all you “living document” idiots out there — would they have even bothered to write them down?)

All over this bruised and battered country, a flock of mean, moronic, petty tyrants have issued illegal orders to those they clearly regard as the peasantry: stay home, avoid your fellow human beings, and above all, shut down the Machinery of Freedom which we know as capitalism. If it’s ever allowed to start up again, it must strictly be on terms that are essentially Marxist in character. No mere individual can ever again scratch his ass without written government approval and permission. In effect, the left has the revolution — as usual, achieved by somebody else — it has wanted for 180 years, since the days of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

What’s more, many otherwise decent and intelligent folks are out there begging for their rulers to let them be free again. I find that repulsive and unAmerican. And to those boobies (including Sean Hannity and Joy Behar) blubbering about patriots bring their weapons to demonstrations, listen up: the Founders meant the government to be intimidated by the people, you hapless buffoons.

My bottom line, here, is that, in the short run, we must free ourselves — now — from what we have to call Faucism. Scientific pleaders like the dictatorial doctor must be made painfully aware that when their pronouncements have clear political and economic consequences, their protests of innocence sound a bit too much like “I was just following orders”.

May 12, 2020

QotD: A jaundiced view of science fiction conventions

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I went to my first science fiction convention […] I noticed a couple of things.

The first was that nobody at these gatherings, at least as far as I could tell, actually read science fiction, or much of anything else.

There were plenty of board gamers. (This was long before computer gaming or even Dungeons and Dragons; the hottest item on CRT was Pong, or early versions of Star Trek eating up mainframe time across the country.) There were plenty of self-proclaimed artists of one kind or another, and hordes of kids — of all ages — who loved to dress up in costumes.

Another thing I noticed was that these conventions, or “cons” as they were called, seemed to be the only social life most of their attendees had, a sort of portable soap opera migrating from city to city throughout the year. The atmosphere was heavy with prehistoric rivalries and hatreds, grudges and vendettas, sometimes going back decades.

Actually, the first thing I noticed — although I was too polite to put it first here — was that the vast bulk (and I use the term advisedly) of female attendees could have used a carload of deodorant and long-term memberships in Weight Watchers. Which, of course, was why events like these were the only social life they had. Nobody else wanted them hanging around.

L. Neil Smith, “The Security Syndrome”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-01-15

April 15, 2020

“Experts” and their “models”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, after offering us his current favourite mixed drink recipe, L. Neil Smith gets around to discussing our modern dependence on “experts” wielding their intricate and convoluted computer models to guide our lives:

My preferred variant of Mott’s Clamato … I’ll have to try it with tequila as Neil suggests.

Start with a tall glass of Mott’s Clamato over ice. Many people can’t stand the idea of tomato juice enhanced with sweet clam juice (and some spices), and I won’t try to sell you on it, here. But if you relish it the way I do (I used to buy it by the gallon), then bon appetit! Throw in a healthy shot of tequila — mine is Cuervo Gold, but your mileage may vary. Add a fat slice of lime on the edge of the glass, a slice of lemon, and a slice of orange. The citrus really dresses it up. These are all ingredients I like very much, and together, they take the edge off a day I spent writing 1000 or 2000 words (my record so far is 3200) and let me relax.

At the end of that day, when my lovely and talented wife quits work and comes home — from the dining room, these days — we have a nice, comfortable cocktail hour (she drinks Cuba Libras) and watch Tucker Carlson. Ordinarily, three giant cans of the Budweiser concoction (which is also made with Clamato) will make me the tiniest bit silly. This drink, the Bloody Mermaid (ick) is surprisingly gentle and I have had two and a half so far without embarrassing myself. I love the taste of tequila neat (many don’t), and I would still be doing shooters, except that my loving bride of 36 years won’t let me eat that much salt.

Please enjoy this silly little drink if you can until we’re all free again.

Oh yeah — I couldn’t resist after all. There’s something I need to get off my chest. I’m sure you remember the way “experts” with computer models warned us all about Y2K, and the way it meant the end of Civilization-As-We-Knew-It. Then there was Global Warming — more experts, more computer models — there are still gullible morons out there who believe it’s not an obvious hoax. Now experts and their — increasingly failing — computer models are all telling us we are in the middle of the worst health crisis since the Black Death.

I happen to be, as you know, a lifelong libertarian and the most fervid advocate of the First Amendment that you will ever read. Therefore, I cannot endorse the suggestion I’ve heard that whenever an “expert” testifies about anything before any legislative body anywhere, and the words “computer model” come out of his mouth, the Sergeant-at-Arms should smash his face in, drag him out into the street, and shoot him him the back of the head. Perhaps millions of lives could be saved that way, but, as a lifelong libertarian and the most fervid advocate of the First Amendment you will ever read, I cannot endorse that position.

So drink up, my dear friends and readers and have the best time — under house arrest — that you possibly can!

February 29, 2020

Dardick Model 1500: The Very Unusual Magazine-fed Revolver

Filed under: History, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Nov 2019

This is Lot 1953 in the upcoming RIA December Premier auction.

The Dardick 1500 was a magazine-fed revolver designed by David Dardick in the 1950s. His patent was granted in 1958, and somewhere between 40 and 100 of the guns were made in 1959, before the company went out of business in 1960. The concept was based around a triangular cartridge (a “tround”) and a 3-chambered, open-sided cylinder. This wasn’t really of direct benefit to a handgun, but instead was ideal for a high rate of fire machine gun, where the system did not need to pull rounds forward or backward to chamber and eject them. In lieu of military machine gun contract, Dardick applied the idea to a sidearm.

The Model 1500 held 15 rounds, inside a blind magazine in the grip. It was chambered for a .38 caliber cartridge basically the same as .38 Special ballistically. A compact Model 1100 was also made in a small numbers, with a shorter grip and correspondingly reduced magazine capacity (11 trounds). A carbine barrel/stock adapter was also made. The guns were a complete commercial failure, with low production and lots of functional problems. Today, of course, they are highly collectible because of that scarcity and their sheer mechanical weirdness.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85704

I’ve always had an interest in the Dardick, from their appearance in some of L. Neil Smith’s science fiction novels. I linked to an earlier article of his, and commented:

As Neil pointed out in one of his books, the Dardick was the answer to a bad crime writer’s prayers: it was literally an automatic revolver. (For those following along at home, an “automatic” has a magazine holding the bullets which are fed into the chamber to be fired by the action of the weapon: fire a bullet, the action cycles, clearing the expended cartridge and pushing a new one into place, cocking the weapon to fire again. A “revolver” holds bullets in the cylinder, rotating the cylinder when the gun is fired to put a new bullet in line with the barrel to be fired. The Dardick is the only example I know of that combines both in one gun.)

February 11, 2020

Animal “rights”

Filed under: Food, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith republished a short essay he wrote for the March 1996 edition which is still fully relevant today:

An olive ridley sea turtle, a species of the sea turtle superfamily.
NASA image via Wikimedia Commons.

Last Friday I watched an episode of X-Files in which innocent zoo animals were being abducted — apparently by benign, superior UFOsies (the ones who mutilate cattle and stick needles in women’s bellies) — to save them from a despicable mankind responsible for the erasure of thousands of species every year.

Or every week, I forget which.

I was reminded of a debate I’d found myself involved in about sea turtles; I’d suggested that laws prohibiting international trade in certain animal products be repealed so the turtles might be privately farmed and thereby kept from extinction. After all, who ever heard of chickens being an endangered species? From the hysteria I provoked — by breathing the sacred phrase “animal rights” and the vile epithet “profit” in one sentence — you’d have thought I’d demanded that the Virgin be depicted henceforth in mesh stockings and a merry widow like Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

That debate convinced me of two things. First: I wasn’t dealing with politics, here, or even philosophy, but with a religion, one that would irrationally sacrifice its highest value — the survival of a species — if the only way to assure it was to let the moneylenders back into the temple. Its adherents abominate free enterprise more than they adore sea turtles.

Second (on evidence indirect but undeniable): those who cynically constructed this religion have no interest in the true believers at its gullible grassroots, but see it simply as a new way to pursue the same old sinister objective. A friend of mine used to refer to “watermelons” — green on the outside, red on the inside — who use environmental advocacy to abuse individualism and capitalism. Even the impenetrable Rush Limbaugh understands that animal rights and related issues are just another way socialism pursues its obsolete, discredited agenda.

In my experience, those who profess to believe in animal rights usually don’t believe in human rights. That’s the point, after all.

December 23, 2019

Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”

Filed under: Business, Government, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:

Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.

Feh.

As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.

Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.

But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.

Double feh.

Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…

Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm

November 25, 2019

QotD: The origins of the state

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Taxation most likely began ten thousand years ago, when nomadic hunter-gatherers gave up their wandering ways — and the tools associated with them — settled down, and started growing crops and herding livestock, which requires an entirely different suite of tools than hunting. The hunter-gatherers’ tools could be used as weapons because that’s essentially what they were — ask any mastodon — the farmers’ could not. As a result, anti-productive marauders who had been held off by the hunters’ tools (or the ability of the hunters and their families to escape and evade) took advantage of those who were stuck to the plots of land they had learned to farm with clumsy agricultural implements (which could not be wielded as easily by females, relegating them to a subordinate role for fifty centuries), and forced to to pay tribute to the bandits. Go take another look at the 1960 movie masterpiece The Magnificent Seven for illustration. The thieves eventually learned to call themselves “government” and the goods they stole, “your fair share”.

L. Neil Smith, “What Would Real Tax Reform Look Like?”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2017-10-29.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress