Tag Archives: politics

Strange bedfellows

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There’s that old expression about the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’. It sounds nice, but in practice the enemy of your enemy is your friend up until your enemy is defeated…then the odds are pretty good that new friend will be your next enemy. (cough*WW2 and the Soviets*cough).

Here’s an article about how the trend towards being a ‘cashless society’ will be racist, classist, and a host of other -ists because poor people and people of color somehow are unable to get a debit card. (“Retailers want to go cashless. But opponents say that’s discriminatory“) So, what these self-appointed guardians of equality are proposing is that it be legislatively mandated that a business must take cash.

Hold that thought a minute, and go read this article. (“New York Times Wants To Have Credit Card Companies Monitor Sales of Guns and Ammo. What Could Ever Go Wrong?“) Here, the NY Times, a bastion of journalistic…uhm…well, something…, feels that consumer credit companies (and I would imagine, by extension, bank debit card holders) flag transactions for ‘the authorities” when a customer purchases certain quantities of guns/ammo.

Many credit card companies already have positions on what sort of transactions they will not partake in. It’s not hard to imagine that with the ‘do it for the children’ crowd leaning on them , that they’d cave and prohibit the use of their services on ‘forbidden’ services/transactions.

So, it isn’t a stretch to imagine the day when many stores are cashless and your only recourse for payment is to use your debit/credit card. Except that when you try to buy a rifle or magazine or ammo….-DECLINED-. And since the vendor is cashless, you’re choices are now pretty severely limited. It’s a tidy end run around that pesky right to bear arms thing. There’s no right to purchase arms…so they’ll simply make the transaction as onerous and difficult as possible: make it so you can only pay with a card, and make the terms of the card such that you can’t buy guns.

Thus, strangely, I’m in the camp of those folks saying that businesses should take cash (although I disagree about forcing them to). Not because I care about some meth tweaker or welfare queen who can’t get a checking account, but because cash gives me a degree of anonymity and privacy that I demand. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.

As a businessman, I recognize that cash presents a bunch of challenges…miscounting, theft, attractive nuisance, disease vector, time sink,  etc, etc. And people paying by card are far more likely to spend more money and do it more often than those who use greenbacks. (Which is why Vegas gives you chips to bet with instead of real money.) But as a survivalist and lover of liberty and privacy, cash possesses some very handy qualities that I desire, not the least of which are privacy.

Its interesting how seemingly unrelated ideas or events – ‘going cashless’ and turning credit card companies into watchdogs of the public welfare – can combine to present such hazards to folks like you and I.

 

589 and counting

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It’s hard to believe, but next year is a Presidential election year. It really flew by fast, didn’t it?

Election day is…mm….well, hell, let’s let the internet do the math:



So 589 days until election. What can you do between now and then? Well, if you can promise to pay back $1 a day until the election you could pick up a midrange AR. Or about five dozen Pmags. Or, if you’re a careful shopper, three cases of 9mm. If you’re willing to save $1 a day until then.

But, what if you’re a tad more industrious than that? Maybe you’re willing to give up Starbucks or something. Pay yourself five bucks a day between now and then and you could have five AR’s, or a couple M1A’a, or four or five Glocks, or about 325 shiny new AR mags. Or a really nice set of body armour with room leftover for ammo.

It’s been 15 years since the sunset of the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban…thats four Presidential election cycles where we bit our nails every fourth November. And .22LR is still not anywhere near its old prices, although it is available.

Am I advocating panic buying? Of course not. Panic buying is waiting until a week before election day. I’m advocating that you get off your butt and finally get it done and out of the way so you can move onto other things in your life.

The reality is that every so often, for political expediency, someone gets thrown out of the sled to the wolves. Next week the ‘bump stock’ fiasco takes effect. That was the short-straw that was drawn to appease the clamoring anti-gunners. But…next time…it might be something else, something more important, something more useful. Thats the political reality. And, as Rand said, while you can ignore reality you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. And for the last 15 years there have been quite a few people ignoring the reality that there is never a ‘safe period’ for your AR and magazines.

Me, I’ve got enough to take care of me and those I care about. At this point I’m just buying extras to sell to the head-in-the-sand ostriches at “Get the Kentucky jelly” prices.

It’s 589 days to the election. Why take chances? If you can keep a promise to yourself to set $1 a day aside until then, you can have at least one AR and/or a buncha mags to set back.

This reminder of the Bad Ol’ Days has been brought to you by this blast from the past:

Fifth columns

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You know, it’s tough enough to be a survivalist when there’s a large demographic that views you as a right-wing, [whoever]-phobe, racist, gun-humping neanderthal. The neighbors with their Subarus and ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers chuckle with their fellow travelers about ‘that guy’ next door who always seems to be up to no good.

Now, it’s starting to trend towards us survivalists living in a world that is, apparently, warming to the consistently failed theory of socialism. Folks, not only am I anti-social, I’m anti-Socialist.

Normally, I don’t care about your religion, who you sleep with (unless, of course, youre doing it outside of your commitments), or what your political bent is – until those beliefs start to manifest themselves as trying to control me and my life. And there are few groups that are about controlling your life more than the starry-eyed morons rallying under the red banner. It’s tragically humourous – the left calls anyone who disagrees with it a Nazi and then embraces socialism and communism. Never mind that when you’re stacking bodies, the Nazis can’t even come close to the stratosphere-challenging mountain that was created under the guise of and guidance of socialism and communism.

I had a survivalist buddy who was a member of The Minutemen back in the day. In those free-wheeling days of the late ’60s and early ’70s, what with groups like The Weathermen and those SLA cats, the notion of some sort of Communist insurgency might have seemed perfectly reasonable. Armed commie takeover of the country seemed more plausible when you had ‘Peoples Army’ of this and the ‘Revolutionary Committee” of that running around shooting cops and robbing banks.

But, as a nation, we’re pretty much fans of bloodless revolution when it comes to our own backyard. The American Revolution and the War of Southern Overconfidence are pretty much the last time we had shooting in the streets over the direction of national government. Thats why we have elections rather than shooting wars. And all you have to do to swing the pendulum from one side to the other is simply convince enough people to march in lockstep to the polls and vote it in someone.

Currently, the contenders for People Most Likely To Ignore Obvious History are Socialist Barbie from NY,  and Bernie Sanders from Vermont. One could be excused for being so divested from reality by reason of stupid youth and the other for age-related dementia. Trouble is, there are legions of stoners, outraged liberal arts majors, and trendy ‘resistance’ types who think socialism is a great idea. And they vote.

What’s this mean for we survivalists? Well, I haven’t seen many socialists who were cool with you owning guns…or, really, much of anything else. As Maggie Thatcher famously opined, ‘the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’ And the ‘other people’ are you and me. Yeah, yeah..they always say it’ll come from ‘the rich’ being made to ‘pay their fair share’, but as Slick Willie showed us, you get a lot more money when you redefine downwards who ‘the rich’ are.

Socialists aren’t going to like you owning guns, wealth, any business they think is ‘too big’, and those sorts of things. And as survivalists, we peg the needle on the ol’  “EnemiesOfTheState-O-Meter”.. what with our guns, gold, cash, property, and rather particular ideas about individual liberty.

Normally, I’d think that ‘useful idiots’ like Bernie and Socialist Barbie were outliers..aberrations…the rounding errors of a political equation. But there seems to be a rush to the left these days on the Democrats side. Everyone seems to be trying to outdo each on who can denounce capitalism the loudest and promise the most government gimmes. They think that the next presidential election will be a rush of people who’ll vote for anyone Not Trump… and that means that every left-leaning politician who has dreams of making the big time is going to throw his (or her) hat in the ring and differentiate themselves by being even more lefty than their fellow opportunists.

Practical result? The things you and I care about most are the sort of things that the socialist democrat-types target as being in need of ‘control’. More gold, more cash, more guns, more mags, more property, and above all – more vigilance that idiots like those people are politically stamped out before they get into positions where they can do some real damage.

 

Trickle down

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I keep meticulous records of my bills around here. Got my power bills the other day and noticed something very unusual. Those idiots were giving me money. Or, more precisely, they were kicking back/discounting a portion of my bill.

Hunh….well, that was cool. Never had that happen under Obama. Shaved $30 off this months bill. Still haven’t gotten my wall yet, though. I’d happily have traded that thirty bucks for a border wall. But…that FTCJA just paid for two Magpul happysticks, or three 17rd Magpul Glock mags, or five AR mags…Making America Geared Again.

 

Putting the goober in gubernatorial

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Our Democrat governor has come out in favor of the usual ‘assault weapons’ ban and is spewing the predictable balm of how he’s pro-Second-Amendment and he has a family history of hunting to back it up. Not sure that the one has anything to do with other but, hey, if I pose for a picture while wearing orange and holding an elks head that must mean I’m a foe of tyranny.

It’s so predictable…”I grew up around guns, BUT…….”, “My family has hunted for generations, BUT………”, “I’m a strong supporter of the right to bear arms, BUT………” and then it’s usually followed up with some inane free association exercise involving deer, AK-47’s, and the words “Don’t need” and “to hunt”.

Likely, this Quisling is posturing for some sort of potential political advancement come 2020. What he has done, though, is crap the sheets in his own electoral bed. I will personally make sure that this statist nonsense is not swept aside when the elections roll around.

Does he have a chance of making his dream come true in Montana? I doubt it. But the problem is that, like bedbugs and other vermin, he isn’t alone. You get enough political opportunists like him in one place and you get a synergistic form of stupidity that feeds on itself to be more than the stupid sum of its stupid parts. Scientists call it ‘critical mass’, most folks call it ‘Congress’.

And this, my fellow survivalists, is why you cannot let your guard down. There are always people like this who, while entitled to their opinions, believe their opinions need to become your opinions….whether you like it or not.

Vote early, vote often, and stock up just in case.

Politics and volcanoes

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In typical fashion, Montana pretty much skipped spring and dove straight into summer. Summer means time to do some outdoorsy things like shoot, fish, shoot, hike, shoot, hunt, and maybe shoot some more.

Unfortunately, I am busier than I care to be. I’ve three jobs/business concerns going on and an educational obligation that takes time. But I really, really want to just spend an entire day being lazy at the range and shooting rifles.

Midterm elections are coming up and I was discussing them with someone. We both agreed that the notion that the midterm elections will be a weathervane on national mood. I wonder if political polsters and pundits will have learned their lesson from the last election. I am of the opinion that the people in the last election who went to the polls quietly and avoided/lied to pollsters will be out in even larger numbers. My track record for political predictions is pretty awful, but I think the left whines about their ‘resistance’ but isn’t as motivated to actually get out there and vote as the right. We shall see.

I watched Trump’s speech the other day on pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. While watching that, I also watched a monitor showing live market and metals prices. A few twitches here and there but no real big changes. Either no one was surprised by his actions, or no one really thinks it was a bad idea.

This has been an utterly fascinating presidency so far. There are things I don’t like about Trump but it’s hard to disagree that he really does make stuff happen. He’s not my ideal president, but he’s a lot closer to it than that entitled harpie he ran against.

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Talking about politics is a guaranteed way for me to get frustrated. Swithcing gears…

You see Hawaii is having a little episode at the moment? Here’s a question that I never knew the answer to until recently. Lets say you own a piece of beachfront property in Hawaii. A flow of lava rolls across your property to the sea. As it rolls into the sea it cools and, bsically, becomes new land. Who owns that land? First person to go file a claim or stick a flag in it? Nope. As it turns out, it belongs to the state. I suppose I should have expected that given Hawaii’s fabulously left-leaning policies.

Volcanoes are fascinating players in disaster planning…while you know where the volcano is sitting, you usually don’t know when it’s going to go off. Oh, sure, there are signs but sometimes they go off like a nuke and no one was really expecting it. The Yellowstone supervolcano is always a topic of conversation and speculation when you talk about this sort of thing. I suppose if there’s a volcano anywhere in the continental US that’s likely to go, it’ll be there.

Other than a full tank of gas and a map showing three alternate routes, I’m not sure how you’d best prepare for a volcano. Staying put is probably out of the question. I suppose splitting up your supplies and being ready to completely abandon your location on a few hours notice is all you can do.

 

Article – Getting ready: Pentagon to protect electric grid from massive attack

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Amid warnings that North Korea and Iran have plans to take out parts of the U.S. electric grid through a cyber attack or atmospheric nuclear blast, the Pentagon is taking steps to both protect the nation’s communications and power lifeline.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has charged BAE Systems to map a system that can detect a cyber attack and gin up an alternative communications network for military and civilian use if the grid is fried, according to Defense Systems, the online newsletter.

Interesting article. A lot of people forget that the internet was originally envisioned for exactly this sort of scenario – a resilient communications system that could operate even with chunks of it destroyed. It’s decentralized nature increased survivability and resiliency.

I find it interesting that the focus is on the East Coast which has gotta be a lot tougher for the NorKs than getting a warhead to the West Coast. But, here in Montana we’d be relatively insulated from either coast getting whomped on.

War on the horizon? Nope. I’m putting it right up there with the return of Xenu or Planet X. But, remember, there doesn’t have to be a war to screw up your plans…all that has to happen is for enough people to believe that there’s one on the way and it becomes virtually self-fulfilling. Don’t be surprised if gas prices go up and the metals market does some weird shimmying.

I liked the emphasis on EMP in the article. It’s something that has still never really been done, as far as I know, on any researchable large scale….kinda hard to set off a high altitude nuke these days without someone getting their panties in a twist. I think EMP is a tad overrated in terms of potential damage. Fiction would have us believe that planes will fall from the sky and even your Casio G-Shock will stop working. I suspect that smaller, simpler, electrical systems will probably work just fine. The planes? Mmmmm…(waggles hand).

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes, but I think this is such a non-event that I’m not really doing anything special…but then again, life is always a “DOUBLE TAKE” around here anyway.