Back when I was a rookie cab driver in the late 70s, I picked up this drunk from some shithole bar. I was driving a Chevy Impala ex-cop car with a bench seat in the front. The guy sat directly behind me, then put his feet on the backrest in front of him, right beside my head.
I asked him a couple of times to put his feet down and he refused. Not wishing a physical confrontation with the guy, I took him to the central police station and asked them to remove the guy. A paddy wagon showed up. He was arrested for being drunk and shipped off in the wagon.
Big Fucking Deal!
Are you saying that if the guy were black I should have put up with it for fear of being called a "racist?"
By the way, you learn a hell of a lot about racism when you drive a cab. There are reasons for disparate outcomes that correlate with race.
Thursday, November 8, 2018
Mass Shootings
When I hitch-hiked across the American south back in 1976, from Florida to California, mostly along Highway 10, it seemed that every vehicle that drove by was either a transport truck or a pickup truck. And every pickup truck had a gun rack in the cab and many of those contained rifles. It was definitely a gun culture.
Was I worried? Not in the least.
I was thumbing with Ed. We got a ride from these two guys from Arkansas. Talk about your country boy stereotypes. They had a car, a beat up old Caddy or something, and when we got into the back seat, our feet were resting on the two rifles that were just sitting on the floor. But I wasn't nervous. They were just a couple of good ol' boys, with a pronounced southern drawl, probably farmers or ranchers. The trip was uneventful.
And of course, I grew up across the street from a guy whose father was a hunter and who had a small, deadly arsenal in his basement. It never bothered me. Nor, as far as I know, did it bother anyone else who lived in the neighborhood at the time. Mass shootings were extremely rare.
When I stayed at the farmhouse near Bel Aire MD around 1966, where my father had been a guest as a German POW from about 1945 to 48, there was a double-barrel shotgun leaning in the corner by the kitchen door. (And a neato Civil War saber in the living room sitting with the point in a spitoon by the fireplace. I picked it up. Man, it was heavy.)
Gun culture was obviously integral to American history. But you hardly ever had mass shootings in those days. The one exception that stands out in my mind was the Texas bell tower sniper, who had a brain tumor.
"Gun culture," has been a part of U.S. history since the beginning. The elevated frequency of mass shootings seems to be a relatively new phenomenon. A lot of it is fueled by mass media. Most recent mass shootings seem to involve the use of SSRI's (anti-depressants.) I think the epidemic of depression and social isolation wrought by excessive digital distraction via smartphones and social media can only make the problem worse.
Oh, Ed and I did meet one potentially homicidal maniac in Galveston TX during that trip. We spent three days drinking with him at his stilted house. He was a Viet Nam veteran, Navy Recon he told us. If he wasn't full of shit, he had been through some serious stuff over there. He had a small arsenal, including a Tommy Gun, an M1, and a 9mm automatic pistol. And a BB gun. While Ed and I were out on the balcony shooting "love bugs" with the BB gun, he burst out of the house with his M1 and fired a live round into the ground. That, and some of the political conversations we had with him made me leary of the guy.
Now we have another vet, highly decorated it seems, whose vocation involved the skill of killing people. Frustrated with life and suffering from PTSD he acted out in the way he had been trained to do.
It's not gun ownership, per se, that is at the root of these mass shootings, IMHO. It's the result of a confluence of negative influences stemming from the welfare/warfare state, mass media broadcasts of these acts, along with an apparent epidemic of mental illness exacerbated by pharmaceuticals and digital media dependence.
Tuesday, November 6, 2018
You are right. Socialism will ultimately prevail.
Actually, it already has prevailed. In the west, it started to gain steam in the 1960's. In Germany and Russia, it started about 50 years earlier than that. If you take academia into account, it probably started a further hundred years back. In the early 1800's, Frederic Bastiat was already debating the communists. In one form or another, it goes all the way back to the caveman, as Kubrick suggested in the opening scene of "A Space Odyssey."
Popular music and popular entertainment were the first signals that culture had fully adopted all the premises of socialism, along with a burning hatred of capitalism and everything that symbolized capitalism. (The United States, Western Civilization, cheeseburgers, central heating and the automobile.)
The protest songs of the 60's and 70's smeared capitalism for creating too much wealth. Wealth was hated because it resulted in disparities. Producers tended to get rich while everyone else tended to get richer too, but at a slower pace.
"You paved paradise and put up a parking lot."
"We got the aeroplane, we got the automobile
We got skyscraper buildings made of glass and steel
We've got synthetic food that nearly tastes real
And a little white pill that makes you feel
Hey, A whole lot better when you get out of bed
You take one in the morning for the lovelier head
We got everything everybody needs to survive
Surely the good life has arrived
I think your atmosphere is hurting my eyes
And your concrete mountains are blacking the skies
Now I don't say that you've been telling me lies
But why do I hear those children's cries "
"Sign, sign, everywhere a sign." remember that song? It was a protest against private property and negotiated exchange. I.E. - Capitalism.
"He said 'you look like a fine young man, I think you'll do.' So I took off my hat and said, 'imagine that! Me working for you!'" -- or working for anyone for that matter. It was obvious that, since this guy hated private property, didn't want to cut his hair for a job, and didn't have a penny to contribute to the collection plate when he went into the church, that he was a born liberal. (A.K.A. - socialist.) He knew that eventually, there would be a guaranteed basic income.
How much you wanna bet he was also the guy that was always in the washroom when it was his turn to pay for a round?
Archie Bunker the Republican, made out to be a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, insensitive, CO2 spewing buffoon, was contrasted with Michael Stivik - the visionary SJW Democrat who "cared" about everything and everyone, though never enough, it seemed, to actually find himself a job and contribute a drop of his own blood or sweat into solving any problems.
Stivik became a role model for aspiring presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders.
Yep. The fix was in.
The Moody Blues,
"Men's mighty mine-machines digging in the ground,
Stealing rare minerals where they can be found.
Concrete caves with iron doors, bury it again,
While a starving frightened world fills the sea with grain. "
Right.
As if the earth could give a rat's ass about capitalists penetrating its crust to find the stuff that improves the human standard of living.
Then they pull a typical socialistic bait and switch by conflating Roosevelt's socialistic farm policies with laissez-faire capitalism.
"It was a bitter pill for farmers to swallow. They had worked hard to raise those crops and livestock, and they absolutely hated to see them killed and the meat go to waste. Critics charged that the AAA was pushing a "policy of scarcity," killing little pigs simply to increase prices when many people were going hungry." -- source
Musicians should stick to music. I think there is some truth to the right hemisphere-left hemisphere thinker theory. Musicians, though creative, tend to be complete idiots when they try to pretend they are analytical thinkers.
And non-analytical thinkers tend to be attracted to socialism. The age-old idea about getting something for nothing is extremely seductive, especially for those with lower IQ's, or government jobs.
I visited the McMaster University bookstore sometime back in the 1980s. I was interested in finding materials written by free-market economists whose names I had become familiar with. I was wondering if I could save a few bucks by buying books there instead of going through the rigamarole of ordering from those few places in the U.S., like Laissez-Faire Books and The Fee Foundation, and paying the exchange rate plus postage.
I was disappointed. Most, and I mean most, of the books for sale in the political science and economics sections, were written by leftists. I don't think I bought a single book. Oh wait, I might have bought Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" there, though I'll admit, that was one book I never read all the way through. I found it rather tedious. I think he lost me with the part about the pin makers.
It's not important.
But whenever I hear some leftist MSM pundit smarmily mention that Democrats and Liberals tend to get more electoral support from people with "higher educations," I laugh, because what they really mean is that they've had more leftist brainwashing than the so-called, "deplorables" who voted for Trump. They tend to vote left because they have "degrees in worthlessness" as Gerald Celente might say.
Fuck me.
So when it comes down to the question, will the last bastion of hope for those who believe in capitalism, equal rights, private property, voluntary exchange, and now, even, freedom of speech, go down the historical sink-hole of socialism? The answer is inescapable.
"But Trump? If he wins the house!"
"Trump buys you time, but minutes only."
"But this ship can't sink!"
"She's made of capitalism, sir. I assure you, she can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty."
Friday, November 2, 2018
Political Rock Concert
I know I am getting old when I get as much of a thrill from watching a political debate, as I used to get going to a rock concert.
Keep in mind, this is the debate those of the leftist persuasion, including NDP leader, what's her name? And that Toronto Star purveyor of anti-western hatred and demonization, Shree, wanted to shut down because, they claim, Steve Bannon is a "racist."
And then watch the debate. And then ask yourself, are you willing to let people like Andrea Horwath and Shree Paradkar decide what you should see?
Or would you rather be given the dignity, and the RIGHT to make that decision for yourself?
Censorship isn't just about shutting down the speakers. It's about deafening the listeners.
Just ask any current Gab subscriber. Or any potential subscriber .... like YOU.
Endorsement of Jagmeet Singh for the Federal NDP Leadership
I commented on Matthew Green's latest video. He'll probably delete it as soon as he sees it.
I said,
"Instead of trying to turn Canada into another Venezuela, why don't you form a Canadian socialist migrant caravan and march down there? I'm sure you and Jagmit will be able to fix things in no time. All they need is "real socialism." Right?"
