Not one for kidding myself, I've been far too busy offline to barley even check my email anymore; you can thank the sudden turn of luck I encountered recently in this worsening economy, forcing me to switch gears to another job.

If I have any free-time, I will most likely devote it to another blog project I had been planning for sometime with a friend of mine, & this only because it will not be a solo project (I don't have the time for such right now).

The online ideology chair was getting boring enough, anyway.

Labels: commentary, stand alone complex

Found an interesting bit of slight (but understandable) paranoia, but then again, this administration has been all about not letting a good crisis go to waste, so perhaps it's just ahead of the curve...

The original post can be found here

The fear on the street is palpable.

Ever since the election of Barack Obama as President of these United States in November 2008, coupled with the election of a democrat party majority in both the U.S. House and Senate, concern for the United States and personal safety has ignited like a fire in dry grass.

Sales of guns – black guns, rifles, shotguns and handguns (particularly 9mm) everywhere, have gone through the roof.

AR15s have literally flown off of dealer shelves, and only now in the spring of 2009, have I seen the display samples of ARs begin to reappear on the wall of my favorite shooting emporium after the initial post election rush.

Manufacturers of ARs are still working to catch up and some of the major suppliers are as much as 150,000 guns behind.

Not only that, ammo is in the shortest supply I have ever seen in the 43 years of my shooting life. Have you recently tried to get 5.56mm, 9mm or even 380 ammo?

Supplies of 5.56mm and 9mm ammo are in short supply due to the black gun buying craze; .380ACP because of the rise in people getting concealed carry permits and the resurgence of interest in convenient 380 handguns like the fine Ruger LCP.

In fact, in doing a review of the Ruger LCP, my gun store only had a small supply of ONE .380 round on hand, the Winchesters 95-grain SXT, which they had just gotten in. Unfortunately, I had to do a 30-round review of that pistol. There was none other to be found.

What is odd about this new fear is that it is not coming from the average citizen gun owner out there, but it is coming from what to me is an almost shocking source: street cops.

Street cops and SWAT cops that I know from various agencies – rural, suburban and metro – in my area are scared. Cops that before November 2008 never gave much thought (that I knew of anyway) to politics or more importantly to gun rights.

For the most part, these are the guys that didn’t generally have any interest in shooting or gun ownership beyond keeping track of where their duty gun is, and a few of them didn’t even do that so well.

The guys I am talking about now are some of the same guys who used to not even carry off duty on a regular basis- but not anymore.

They don’t scare easily, defenders of the Constitution of this State and the United States (as our oath of office reads), have been buying ARs, survival gear, and all the ammo they can lay their hands on.

All of them (or I should say “us”) have been discussing and have been acquiring guns to provide a layered perimeter defense.

What are we suddenly so afraid of? Well in our discussions it seems to boil down to four areas.

First, fear of federal government intrusion into our lives.

Every time I look at or listen to the news, there is something new and intrusive coming out of the Obama administration and this Congress.

New tax schemes, government-run Canadian-style healthcare, a volunteer citizen defense force (whatever that is, what happened to the National Guard?) equipped with funding similar to our military, forced voluntary “service” after retirement, a lack of a southern border with hordes of illegal and criminal aliens pouring over our border.

The swine flu scare as well as government forced closing of thousands of privately held Chrysler and GM dealerships, which will be the final nail in the coffin for these companies and the list goes on and on.

But these items in the news are just the tip of the iceberg.

We can’t see the full impact of these actions yet, but we don’t know what was added into the thousand of pages of stimulus package bills in the dead of night yet.

I predict however that when the plans contained in the stimulus packages go into effect, a lot of us are going to be surprised if not shocked by what has suddenly and sweepingly changed.

What also scares us is the second, well-founded fear that there is an assault weapons ban looming, one that would make the Clinton Ban appear like a look of disdain in comparison.

I remember well the 1990s and the Clinton years: the rise of militia groups, the “black helicopter” rumors and paranoia, all of which was motivated by the Brady Law and the Assault Weapon’s ban.

What if a new ban comes requiring registration or confiscation and turn-in of banned weapons as what happened in Australia?

...I foresee much civil disobedience coming down the road. Americans are citizens, and not subjects like the British, Canadians or Australians.

They just don’t always obey the law blindly and not one officer or citizen that I spoke to said anything like “I hope I get to keep this gun for awhile before they are banned; They are fun to shoot, so I would hate to give it up.”

It isn’t going to happen, so the cop on the street and the soldier on the base needs to think now what he will do if the orders come down.

I think you all get what I am saying here.

Which leads me to the third fear, that there is a revolution coming, yes, a revolution on the scale of the original American Revolution.

You can hear this topic discussed on many of the talk radio shows by even the big name hosts.

The possibility of an armed revolution against the U.S. government being discussed, albeit very gingerly and fleetingly and as something to be avoided, which it is.

I never heard this mentioned in the 90s. One of my quietest, low profile officer friends brought it up the other day.

He said that at some point in the near future, he felt there is going to be an armed revolt if things keep going the way they are: something has got to give.

I was shocked. Yes, I had heard this from some of my more radical cop friends in the past, but to hear it from a guy like this was unprecedented.

Now, these guys are not saying this will happen to foment revolution, preach sedition or to even participate. They just want to be ready if it happens, to at least defend their families, because number four on the fear list is general societal chaos.

Cops fear for their parents, wives, children or grandchildren more now than ever before. Most cops are encouraging their spouses and loved ones to get concealed carry permits.

Not only that, but some of these same cops are buying gun mounts for their personal cars so they can carry an AR in the family ride at the ready all the time.

They are also strapping on heavier forms of off-duty hardware. I have other friends that are issued ARs or subguns for tactical team use, who always have their gear with them and are planning on just commandeering these weapons for personal use in defending hearth and home.


Final Notes

This is pretty heady and maybe even dangerous stuff. Know fully that I am not advocating anything here. I am reflecting to you what I see and hear going on around me, and maybe saying things that haven’t been said in the open, until now.

It is something to think about.

Written By:

Scott Wagner is a Police Academy Commander and Professor at Columbus State Community College in Columbus Ohio, and Commander of the 727 Counter Terror Training Unit.

A 29 year law enforcement veteran, and current Deputy Sheriff, he is the Precision Marksman for the Union County Sheriff’s Office SRT Team.

It is a bit of a relief to know that some cops are remembering what it is to be human, & not an automaton following every order, but I'll remain skeptical of such until I actually see it: cops are still cops, after all.

Quite frankly, since cap-n-trade went through, with some projecting unemployment will shoot up to 20% (the real rate, not the glaze over reports in the media), it's not unreasonable at all to guess that some amount of civil unrest is going to occur.

Moving out of the country is looking like a better long-term plan. But to where...?

I probably won't even stop by NH unless some sort of time is bought to stave off the incoming insanity (which we probably couldn't predict without hindsight, anyway).

Labels: commentary, politics

I normally wouldn't post so much as a link to a Wired.com article, but since it was posted on /., figured it would be worth posting the news item, as /. typically has some intelligent commentary.

from the wired article in question:

"Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others.

Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property.

Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once.

The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together.

Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates."

Nevermind the concept of the third-way popping up yet again, thus rendering the old debates still entirely relevant.

Thankfully, one of the comments on the article over @ slashdot (properly titled "The Invisible Gun", sans spell-check) has managed to get enough upvotes to be read:

from user: thtrgremlin's comment

Middle ground? There is no middle ground.

What DOES exist is different questions, but not middle ground. If one tends towards a better society, than a mix of both is certain to be a failure.

The problem I see is that people (of certain political tendencies) give government certain god-like qualities, most common believing government has perfect knowledge, or that anything the government does is "free".

Government is simply a business that "we" have authorized a virtually unlimited use of force.

Beyond that they have no special super powers.

Government can help organize a military to protect against foreign invaders, police that can neutrally handle disputes over violations of social contract, courts to handle issues of contract law and establish statutes regarding the interpretation of contract language to help encourage mutually beneficial voluntary exchange of goods and service.

To say "we need the government to blah blah blah..." is to say that violence is a necessary means to an end. To paraphrase Jonathan Gullible, the penalty for all crimes against government is death / loss of life.

This is the difference between taxes and charitable donation or voluntary exchange; people will be most compelled to be charitable with a gun to their head, how could we ever expect to get so much from people on a voluntary basis?

If it is a one time thing, I would be inclined to agree, but can you really argue maximum net production through such means?

This implies that a robber could keep robbing the same home repeatedly and that their gain will be proportional to the number of times they rob the house.

Does knowing which houses are the richest change much?

The "problem" with the government trying to regulate the Internet is where do you point the gun, the governments only tool?

The government does not do work, it only consumes, with the intent and strength to intimidate by threat do do what it desires... but it is ok because it is the will of (51% of) the people, right?

Mind you, not everything he says is on spot, but one must cheer when & where one can as much as possible these days.

On an ending note, I would like to point to the following links for better coverage on what actually is communism, & how it can be viewed that communism & anarchism are by no means, the same thing, despite the quizzical tolerance of communists by some anarchist communities, like say, the anarchist sub-reddit.

Additionally, some links provide arguments that quite the contrary, the Internet is far anarchistic than communist, & even if what one would dub the "first" Internet were to be regulated into a pathetic, hyper-television existence, the very idea & concept of the social enviornment such as the Internet, & it's use as alternative & stateless-society friendly infrastructure, will most assuredly press on, in some form or another, in the grey & black markets.

Paternalistic political parasites be damned, I say.

"Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright" by Eben Moglen

"The Future of Copyright" by Rasmus Fleischer

"Anarchy & The Internet"

"What Is Communism?" by Paul Bowman

"Why Communism Failed" by Bettina Bien Greaves

"Communism, Copyright, & The Internet" by Campbell Vertesi

Labels: commentary, statism

My first stab @ meta-blogging is with an excellent rebuttal by David Z. of No Third Solution to Critiques of Libertarianism: A Non-Libertarian FAQ by Mike Huben, concerning libertarianism, which some may have had either the pleasure or the groaning over reading.

I remember getting a link to this FAQ a while ago via an email, back when emailing random links was considered "cool" and possibly even efficient (circa -2000 A.D. ?).

Web 2.0 kiddies: this was well before the invention of mass blogging & social networking (Huben's FAQ originated in 1997).

This was also before AOL & Compuserve lost their collective balls in a few rounds of roshambo with ConCast & Spyrizon ;D

Written intercourse aside, here are some notable excerpts:

Huben also thinks that Taxation is theft is a lousy argument.

The first is that property is theft. The notion behind property is that A declares something to be property, and threatens anybody who still wants to use it.

Where does A get the right to forcibly stop others from using it?

...This justifies property taxes or extraction taxes on land or extractable resources if you presume that the government is a holder in trust for natural resources.

Ah, yes… “If you presume [insert inter-subjective assumptions, here] then you must agree with me!”

When property is claimed by a first-owner, no threat is made or implied.

No force, no threat of force is needed, until someone else attempts to forcibly relieve him of his enjoyment of that property.

This can only be justified by a belief in property. As Friedman notes, the argument that “theft” can exist absent a coherent definition of “property” is patently retarded.

...

Huben believes you should “love it, or leave it.”

This is a distinction that seems too subtle for a lot of libertarians: the difference between having a choice and having to leave.

For example, let’s say you live in a condominium…

Not this again!

Of course this is a “love it or leave it” argument. I prefer to couch it in less friendly terms, since it’s actually an “If you don’t like it, get the f**k out!” argument.

The dissenter is always presumed wrong, even though it is (arguably) his country, too (at least partially).

There are two sides to any disagreement. That one side happens to be popularly held does not substantiate it morally, ethically, etc. I do not like certain aspects of the social contract, other people do.

Or, to put it another way, other people don’t agree with my social contract. Why don’t they have to leave it?

If you start by evicting everyone who disagrees, all you’re left with is people who agree, which virtually ensures the State’s perpetuation, and further impedes the (misguided) notion that reform can happen from within.

Everyone who wants meaningful reform has been shown the door.

Charming way to run a society, isn’t it?

So, why should we be obliged to accept the social contract? Why can’t we be left alone?

You are not coerced to accept US government services any more than you are coerced to rent or purchase a place to live.

If pretty much all territory is owned by governments, and pretty much all houses and apartments are owned, well, did you want them to grow on trees?

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

The government owns everything, and we are merely tenants. Thanks, you just gave everyone the Reader’s Digest definition of feudalism.

Who owns the government?

Some contend that, OK, we’d leave but there’s no libertarian state, so we’ve got nowhere to go.

This concedes the basic challenge to the “love it or leave it” argument, and as such, it’s another bad libertarian argument.

Huben picks the low-hanging fruit:

There are roughly 200 nations to which you could emigrate.

They are the product of an anarcho-capitalist free market: there is no over-government dictating to those sovereign nations.

Nice try.

With few exceptions (Sealand, anyone?) all of these countries were established through violence and conquest.

None of them were founded on anything remotely approaching a “free market”, and none of them recognize an individual’s right to sovereignty, as would a free market.

The free market of government services essentially guarantees that there is no such thing as the free lunch libertarians want.

It’s not competitive.

Stop poisoning the well with terms like “the free market of government services.”

The only people who want a “free lunch” are those who seek to offload the costs of their lifestyle choices onto others.

In economics, this is now as a negative externality, and it is commonly associated with the so-called tragedy of the commons.

Again, you can read the rest of the FAQ here: http://www.nothirdsolution.com/non-libertarian-faq/.

Also recommended for any curious Democrat / Republican / Apathetic Voters out there.

I'd think a good place to start strengthening (or challenging?) your own arguments would be with the aforementioned FAQ's in the above.

I mean honestly, libertarians are just getting tired of the "what about the poor?!?!" arguments; here's your chance to make the dialogue a little better next time you log on to Reddit, & flaunt those Positive Rights of yours.

* I took the liberty (more puns to come) of adding Wikipedia links for better hallway vision.

Cheers,

N

Labels: commentary, libertarianism, promo