Quote of the Day - Larry Correia Edition

From Facebook:

If you want to have an economy it is because you want grandma to die, except when Cuomo signed off on an order that actually literally killed thousands of grandmas that is okay because they were going to die anyway, so nobody should be held accountable, and while we are at it should run Cuomo for president because he looks more presidential than Biden, who is senile, and quite possibly a rapist too, but the rapey bits don't count anymore because we only hash tag believe all women when they accuse republicans, because everything is okay when we do it and nothing is ever our fault, even when things directly under our watch spiral terribly out of control, but also how dare you politicize these tragic events, you cold hearted republican bastards who love money more than people, unless that money is being donated to democrat causes, because then it's good again. - sincerely the Party of Science, Morality, and Goodness.

I'm going to call this kind of train-of-logic stream a Walshing, after Matt Walsh who wrote the first one I came across:

Gender is a social construct, but “I am woman, hear me roar,” but anyone can be a woman, but no uterus - no opinion, but transwomen are women, but “I demand women’s rights!”, but men are women, but men are scum, but drag queens are beautiful, but appropriation is evil.

A Golden Oldie

Back in April, 2006 I wrote a piece titled RCOB™.  It was a fisking of an op-ed by a writer named Nina Burleigh, who I later discovered was the bint who (in)famously said that she'd orally service Bill Clinton "just to thank him for keeping abortion legal."  Ms. Burleigh is an alumnus of the University of Chicago - aka "Mordor on the Lake," and is an adjunct professor of journalism at Columbia University, home of the Frankfurt School.  She is also National Politics Correspondent for Newsweek.  And, of course, she's not above making it up as she goes, since a 2019 piece she wrote for the Daily Mail had to be retracted and "substantial damages" paid to the person she slandered - Melania Trump.  That was her second retraction.  In 2018 a piece she wrote for Newsweek was retracted when the editors belatedly concluded they couldn't support her allegations that "Russian bots" were responsible for Sen. Al Franken's downfall.

So we have a woman, given her history, who is anti-theist, ultra-feminist, educated at one college with a reputation for neo-marxism, and teaching at another, yet lives in New York City with a second home in upstate New York.  Must be nice.

Let me give you a taste of that older post:

Glenn Reynolds linked to a Salon.com piece by Nina Burleigh:

"I cringed as my young son recited the Pledge of Allegiance. But who was I to question his innocent trust in a nation I long ago lost faith in?"

Who, indeed? Reader Wagner James Au, who sent the link, writes: "My question is, why do anti-war liberals get so offended when people question their patriotism, when they spend so much time questioning it themselves?"

I read her piece, Country Boy, and my response to it was, almost literally, a RCOB.

Ms. Burleigh and I have worldviews so divergent that we might as well be of different species. There is no common ground upon which we could even begin to attempt rapprochement. And what bothers me most of all is that I see the land that we both live in becoming more and more divided between people like her, and people like me.

Let me fisk, for it is about the only thing I can do to purge myself of the emotions her piece inspired in me:

If you've got a few minutes, go read it.  See if it gives you the same symptoms it gave me.  This is the Left today.  Fourteen years later there are possibly fewer of them, but they are a lot crazier.

Nasim Nicholas Taleb

I first heard about this man on a Joe Rogan podcast where a guest mentioned him in relation to this quote:

With my family, I am a Communist.  With my friends, I am a Socialist.  With my community, I am a Democrat.  With my State, I am a Republican.  With the Federal government, I am a Libertarian.

That got my attention.

Talib is the author of the 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Looking into him a little deeper brought me these quotes:

Only the autodidacts are free.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.

I think I need to read his book.

I Can Find Nothing to Disagree With in This Piece

I am a pessimist by nature, shocking admission, I know.  But being a pessimist I am very seldom disappointed, and occasionally pleasantly surprised.

I do not expect to be pleasantly surprised by the fallout from this:

Forget About Seeing Any Justice For Obamagate

Excerpt:

Allow me to disabuse you of your naïve delusion that we still live in a country with a justice system and break it to you that no one is going to jail for what was done to Flynn, or for the unmasking business, or for the Russia hoax or, for that matter, for any of the corrupt Dem/foreigner collaborations exemplified by the payoffs received by stripperphile and Bolivian folk medicine enthusiast Hoover Biden.

No one.

To quote David Burge, aka Iowahawk: “We live in a nation of laws in the same way people on 'Hoarders' live in houses of cat food boxes.”

Quote of the Day - Matt Ridley Edition

From his recent Uncommon Knowledge interview on his new book How Innovation Works:

The late Hans Rosling, who is one of the so-called Godfathers of rational optimism...he did a poll of a thousand people in the U.S. and they need to repeat it in the UK and a number of countries, and he said: "In the last 20 years, has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty halved, doubled, or stayed the same?  Which of those do you think is correct?"  In the US about 65% of people think it's doubled and about 5% think it's halved.  The 5% are right and the 65% are wrong.

That's striking enough, but then he says- "Hang on.  If I wrote those three answers on three bananas and threw them to a chimpanzee, the chimp would pick up the right answer 33% of the time.  It would do six times as well as human beings at answering a question about human society.  That's the measure of how much we've indoctrinated ourselves into global pessimism.

ABCNNBCBS and all the rest of media, news and entertainment, are to blame for this.  Good news doesn't sell.

Meanwhile, at My OTHER Site

I joined Quora back in 2013.  In late July of 2019 I opened a personal "Space" there, which I cleverly titled "The Smallest Minority."

I noticed this today:

This blog has at present slightly less than 2,000 subscribers.  I'm pretty happy with the alternate.  Yaaay me!

I Missed My Blogiversary!!

May 14, 2003 I put up my first post here at TSM.  That means this blog is now (carry the one...) seventeen years old.

In seventeen years I've hit "Publish" on 7116 posts, including this one.  I've lost my mother, lost my liver (but the new one is working quite well), gained a kidney (I now have three, but two are decoys), and I had a great-grandson for about 10 weeks.

We've had three Presidents in that time period, and been at continuous war with a noun the entire time.  Now we're in the middle of an international overreaction to a pandemic.

It's been a helluva ride so far.  Judging from what I've been seeing, Bette Davis's admonition is even more valid today:

When and How Did I Turn Right Wing?

Another Quora question.  Lots of post inspiration over there.  Here's my answer:

I’m 58 years old. That means that in 1974 I was 12. I vividly remember Watergate, and Nixon’s resignation. I also remember Jimmy Carter’s “American Malaise” period. I think Jimmy Carter is a nice man who was a lousy President. I turned 18 in 1980. I cast my first vote for President for Ronald Reagan. I watched as he, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II rapidly accelerated the downfall of the Soviet Union. It was literally inspiring.

Then George H.W. Bush won the office. He was not Ronald Reagan. He was Establishment Northeastern Country Club Republican. When he ran for reelection I voted for Perot in that one. Perot tried to warn us, and he was right.

Bill Clinton became President. Honestly, Bill (except for being a rapist) wasn’t that bad as President, but his wife gave me the heebie-jeebies. Dead people, cattle futures, sexual abuse, etc. etc. etc. and everything rolled off the pair of them like they were Scotchguarded.

It was about this time that I figured out that the Democrats were no longer “The Loyal Opposition,” they were The Other Side™ and they were out to WIN, no holds barred. And they cared not a whit about what the law said, they just had to find an accommodating judge. The Constitution? P’shaw, merely an outdated guidline. Appoint enough Judges to the Federal courts and especially the Supreme Court and you can make the law mean whatever you want. “Social Justice,” you see. Which is the opposite of actual justice.

Then Bush v. Gore cemented that for me. I watched the press conference where, as I noted at the time:

With the continuing legal maneuvers in the Florida election debacle, I have been forced to a conclusion that I may have been unconsciously fending off. The Democratic party thinks we're stupid. Not "amiable uncle Joe" stupid, but DANGEROUSLY stupid.

Lead-by-the-hand-no-sharp-objects-don't-put-that-in-your-mouth stupid.

And they don't think that just Republicans and independents are stupid, no no! They think ANYBODY not in the Democratic power elite is, by definition, a drooling idiot. A muttering moron. Pinheads barely capable of dressing ourselves.

Take, for example, the position under which the Gore election machine petitioned for a recount - that only supporters of the Democratic candidate for President lacked the skills necessary to vote properly, and that through a manual recount those erroneously marked ballots could be "properly" counted in Mr. Gore's favor. They did this in open court and on national television, and with a straight face.

So, it is with some regret that I can no longer hold that uncomfortable conclusion at bay:

They're right. We are.

And I started seriously wondering how we got to that point.

I could go into vast (and hyperlinked) detail here, but I’ll instead just use one word:

Progressivism.

I’m not really a Conservative. Steven Den Beste (PBUH) said it best, and I’m in complete agreement with him. So I invite you to read his explanation. But I’m not a Progressive.

Quote of the Day - Robert Heinlein Edition (reprise)

There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory. - Robert A. Heinlein

Quote of the Day - Robert A. Heinlein Edition

[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously - after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. - Robert A. Heinlein

We've been seeing a lot of this attitude lately, mostly from entertainers.

The Narrative™

I was recently asked to answer the question: “What do you think of John Solomon? Is he the evil mastermind of the right wing narrative?” My answer in the link basically asked IS there a Right Wing Narrative?

There is definitely a Left-wing narrative. In fact, there are several. Author and former newspaper columnist Stephen Hunter wrote about The Narrative™ in one of his novels:

You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything.
--
The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It's so powerful because it's unconscious. It's not like they get together every morning and decide "These are the lies we will tell today." No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it's a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they've never really experienced that's arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they've chosen to live their lives. It's a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama is a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know that Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up.... Cheney's a devil. Biden's a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.
--
And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don't even know they're true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin'-stroy anybody who makes them question that....

I, Sniper, pp. 231-232

Remember the JournoList? If you think it’s gone, or something similar does not now exist, I’d like to know what you’re vaping.

And if you’d like an example of The Narrative™ please watch this:

More Quora Tolerance

I was asked to answer the question "Is it accurate to say that the left is intolerant of the right's ideas while the right is intolerant of the left's behaviors?"

One of the first answers I saw to the question was by a Scott MacDonald that went like this:

The left is intolerant of intolerance.

The right is intolerant of…

Religions that are not Christianity
Skin colors that are not white.
Political views that are not modern Republican
Sexuality that isn’t hetero
and so forth.

Put it to you this way.

If the left were tolerant, of the right’s intolerance we would be allowing them to walk all over actual minority groups who need protecting, not majority religious groups who want to act like persecuted minorities, just because after a few thousand years people are finally evolving past their ideas.

So I responded in kind:

The Left is intolerant of anyone who does not toe their (ever-changing) ideological line. If you oppose any part of their incoherent philosophy, you must be a:

Racist
Sexist
Gun-hugger
Bible-thumper
Cousin-lover
Homophobe
Islamophobe
Misogynist
Science-denier
Etc.

Oh, and “You want (X-group) to DIE!” (Where X is: old people, brown people, children, homosexuals, etc., etc., etc. depending on the outrage-of-the-day.)

THAT is the “Party of Tolerance and Inclusion.”

Why do I say “incoherent”? Well, consider this “logic” train:

Gender is a social construct, but “I am woman, hear me roar,” but anyone can be a woman, but no uterus - no opinion, but transwomen are women, but “I demand women’s rights!”, but men are women, but men are scum, but drag queens are beautiful, but appropriation is evil. - Matt Walsh.

Note that the people trying to end Freedom of Speech, who protest speakers, who bang drums and fire off air horns to drown out the words of people they don’t “tolerate,” are the Left, not the Right. The Right likes it when the Left runs their mouths. It exposes their hypocrisy and vacuity. And far too often it exposes the schisms between the various victim-groups that make up the Left.

So yes, I think it’s fair to say that the Right does not like the behavior of the Left, and the Left hates the ideas of the Right. Pundit Charles Krauthammer explained it in 2002 - "To understand the workings of American politics you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil."

You do not debate with evil. You do not compromise with evil. You do not tolerate evil. You destroy evil. It’s a religious crusade. They are the Chosen People who will drag us, kicking and screaming if necessary, into their Promised Land. As evangelists, it is not unusual for them to enter careers in education, journalism, and the entertainment media. How better for them to proselytize? And, of course, politics, because how else can they drag us into Utopia unless by force of government? After all, their ideas are so wonderful, they must be mandatory!

My answer was collapsed for violating Quora's "Be Nice, Be Respectful" policy. Mr. MacDonald's is still up.

One of the Funniest Stories I've Ever Heard

Slightly scatalogical. You've been warned.

This is not my story. If it had been, I'm not sure I'd be telling it.

I had a dinner date at a very fancy restaurant. About halfway through the meal, my body informed me that I needed to make a bathroom run - quick. I excused myself and made a beeline for the Men's Room at not quite a sprint, but I was moving with determination.

As I entered, I rapidly surveyed the space: Double vanity, two urinals, and two toilets stalls. No other customer. Unbuckling my belt as I quickly strode to the nearest stall, I managed to get my pants and underwear around my ankles and sat down just as I ripped off a ten-second porcelain-shattering wet fart. I even impressed myself. But as the echoes faded, I heard the bathroom door shut. Someone else had entered in the middle of my performance.

I was mortified. A couple of seconds of silence ensued, then I heard the door on the stall next to mine close, and a voice akin to a movie announcers reverberated off the tiled walls:
"Player Two Has Entered the Game."

If You Need Something Relaxing to Watch - Puppycam!

Quote of the Day - James Lileks Edition

I need to start reading The Bleat regularly again.  Today's gem comes from today's post:

My favorite term is "free-dumbs," which marks the latest continuation of the word "freedom" as a signifier of idiocy. At some point "liberty" fell into disfavor with these people, because the wrong people were insisting that it applied to them as well.

"Anti-Intellectualism"

Those of us on the putative "Right" are often - and loudly - accused of "anti-intellectualism."  One of their favorite memes is this one:

This was most recently illustrated on CNN's Tonight program when two of his guests, well, watch it yourself:


Now, I'm not going to say that there aren't such people on the right side of the divide, but the Left paints us ALL with a brush that should be reserved for a tiny minority. The theme of "anti-intellectualism!!" is wound through their worldview, and I believe it is part and parcel of the Leftist belief that it is they who should be leading us all into a Utopia, if only we'd just stop RESISTING them, and the only reason we resist is because we're too stupid to see that they're right.

Robert Heinlein posited what has been called "The Expert Syndrome."  It goes like this:

Expertise in one area does not impart expertise in other areas, though experts often think so.  The narrower their area of expertise, the more likely they are to think so.

I'm reminded of an old joke:

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in an Armani suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd, "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?"

The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data and, after a few minutes, receives a answer.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized portable printer and finally turns to the shepherd and says, “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep.” says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the shepherd says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep? “

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a consultant.” says the shepherd.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked, and you don’t know crap about my business..."

"...Now give me back my dog!"

Mike Rowe talks a lot about our severe and growing "skills gap," described as a distinct lack of skilled labor, caused by decades of telling our children that their only path to a good career is a four-year college degree. The "intellectual" life. And in doing so, the plumbers, carpenters, electricians, A/C technicians, welder, machinists, pipe-fitters, and on and on get older and retire, and too few follow them into what are necessary and decent-paying careers.

Because we need to work smarter, not harder.

Mike illustrates the difference between office-bound "experts" and someone who actually does the job for a living in a twenty-minute presentation. Please indulge me and give it a watch:


The "experts" tell Mike the "proper" way to castrate a lamb. The guy who actually raises sheep shows him the better way to do it.  It's an epiphany for Mike.  The people who are out there actually doing things understand the real world.  They know how things work.  The people in the high-rise office buildings, capitol buildings or university campus offices know how things OUGHT to work, and we should listen to THEM.  They're EXPERTS.

And if you don't, you're an "anti-intellectual."

On top of that, the intellectuals haven't exactly wrapped themselves in glory, but then they seldom (if ever) pay a price for being wrong.  University professors don't lose tenure, cabinet members keep their jobs, or end up as consultants making more money, etc.  Those of us who follow their lead (willingly or not) are the ones who suffer the consequences when they err.

We would trust the intellectuals more if they had to live with those consequences along with the rest of us.  Or if they acted like there was a crisis when they tell us there's a crisis.  Until that happens, I guess we'll remain "anti-intellectuals."

UPDATE 5/9:  Rev. Donald Sensing points to this piece - The Fallen State of Experts:

Excerpt:

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you’re not paying attention to the experts. Epidemiologists tell us that if we do not hide in our houses with the door securely locked, hundreds of thousands will surely perish. Economists tell us that if we do not return immediately to work, civilisation will collapse. Good luck figuring out which expert has the better advice. Is it any wonder a harried Michael Gove blurted out, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”

Quote of the Day - Democrats Edition

From Jeff Greason, seen on Facebook:

There's a scene in one of the Lord Darcy books, where Darcy uncovers the spy. They are discussing who might have turned traitor, and the other party discounts the suspects, because they have money, and so wouldn't sell out. From this, Darcy correctly concludes the other party must *be* the traitor, and must *have* sold out for money, because he can't think of any other motive for turning traitor.

For decades, the Left has talked about this or that adversary of the moment is to be feared, because they want power, crave power, would abuse power, and would not peacefully surrender power.

From this, you can correctly deduce what the Left dreams and obsesses about.

It's called "Projection," and the Left does it in 70mm IMAX with full Dolby sound.

This is What the Education Bureaucracy is Afraid Of

AITA for showing my 13 year old daughter footage of WW2 concentration camps? Excerpt:

Schools are shut, we’re in lockdown and I’m playing teacher. My daughter is 13 and doing a project on world war 2. It’s basically a critical thinking piece about why it is important to remember the atrocities with also room to argue that we should be able to forget about it and move on.

I feel incredibly strongly about remembering WW2, for a variety of logical reasons I won’t get into, but also I’m quite an emotional person who wants to remember. However for the purpose of this project I tried to stay unbiased.

My daughter who is generally a clever and kind person just wasn’t getting it. I looked at the reading material and it was all very... I don’t know. Dull I guess? Watered down? Far removed?

Later on she was in a video call with some school friends saying learning about ww2 was a waste of time. Essentially the gist was it’s boring, it’s in the past and we don’t have to deal with these sort of things nowadays. I heard one of her friends say “I don’t think it’s even as bad as the text books made it out to be”

In that moment I guess I decided to take a more hands on teaching approach.

RTWT.

I Had No Idea Canadians Were This Well Armed

The list of now-banned "assault-style weapons" has been released. I don't have time to go through the whole list, but in part it includes actual missile launchers:

(z.11) Missile Launcher 9K111 Fagot;
(z.111) Missile Launcher 9K310 Igla-1;
(z.112) Missile Launcher 9K32 Strela-2;
(z.113) Missile Launcher 9K34 Strela-3;
(z.114) Missile Launcher 9K38 Igla;
(z.115) Missile Launcher BGM-71 TOW;
(z.116) Missile Launcher Eryx;
(z.117) Missile Launcher FGM-148 Javelin;
(z.118) Missile Launcher FIM-43 Redeye;
(z.119) Missile Launcher FIM-92 Stinger;
(z.12) Missile Launcher HN-5;
(z.121) Missile Launcher Ingwe;
(z.122) Missile Launcher M47 Dragon;
(z.123) Missile Launcher MILAN;
(z.124) Missile Launcher Saegheh;
(z.125) Missile Launcher Starstreak;
(z.126) Missile Launcher Toophan;
(z.127) Missile Launcher Type 79;

Hell, I’d like one of those Dragons, or a TOW. Maybe a Stinger. Where’s the NRA on this?!?

May Victims of Communism Day

Today is the 13th annual Victims of Communism Day, a day to remember the people murdered by their own governments in their quest to achieve a "worker's paradise" where everyone is equal, where "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is the beautiful dream lie.  R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, calculated that the total number of victims of Communism - that is, the domestic victims of their own governments - in the USSR, China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cambodia is 98.4 million people.  For all Communist governments during the 20^th Century, he puts the estimate at approximately 110 million.  And this wasn't in warfare against other nations, this was what these governments did to their own people - "breaking eggs" for their utopian omelette that never gets made.

Six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and another six million people the Nazis decided were "undesirable" went with them.  "Never again" is the motto of the modern Jew, and many others just as dedicated.  But "again and again and again" seems to be the rebuke of history.

The Communists are hardly alone in these crimes.  Rummel estimates that the total number of people murdered by their own governments during the 20^th Century is on the close order of 262 million, but the single biggest chunk of that truly frightening number is directly due to one pernicious idea:  That we can make people better.

Why do I own guns?  For a number of reasons, but one of them is this:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?  --  Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag Archipelago

--

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. -- Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.

I intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog. 

Several years ago, Sipsey Street Irregulars had a post to go along with this one.  STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

In 2013 Not Clausewitz also made a worthy addition.

And for those who insist that "That wasn't real Communism" -