Socialism, tyranny, and local government San Francisco style

Posted on 2024-07-29 by TPOL Nathan

As her Democrat Party comrades and the media seek to convince us that dear Kammie is better than the Second Coming (the only possible successor to “the best American president ever”), let us take a look at some of her background.

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A Baker’s Dozen (TM) Quotes of Geniuses on Liberty

Posted on 2024-07-26 by TPOL Nathan
We here at The Price of Liberty are far from geniuses.
But we know it is possible to learn a lot by reading and listening to people who are geniuses. Here are ideas from thirteen people most of us consider geniuses.
Not all geniuses love liberty – but those who do have some very important things to say.

Allan Bloom The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.

    Aldous Huxley So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable. Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.

    Albert Einstein Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war. Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it. The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it. Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

    Abraham Maslow I can certainly say that descriptively healthy human beings do not like to be controlled. They prefer to feel free and to be free.

    Arthur Schopenhauer We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

    John Stuart Mill The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it.

    Leo Tolstoy The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens… Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.

    George Bernard Shaw All government is authoritarian; and the more democratic a government is the more authoritative it is; for with the people behind it, it can push authority further than any Tsar or foreign despot dare do.

    Rod Serling The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling.

    Richard Feynman Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity – and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.

    Simone Weil The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State. Conscience is deceived by the social. Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men – oppressed and oppressors alike – the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels. What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.

    Thomas Jefferson I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

    Will Durant Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the “subject” sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the state.

    Think on these things!

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      Where we stand in mid-2024

      Posted on 2024-07-25 by TPOL Nathan

      It is still only a few weeks into Anno Libertatus 248, and just 233 years ago, the following document (unmarked up, of course) was produced. With very high hopes.

      Today, the mark-ups show that document is increasingly “null and void.” Oh, everyone pays lip service to it, but really enforce it? Hardly. And as L. Neil Smith (and others) were fond of pointing out, it had no enforcement clause. Oh, we pretend that the Nine Nazgul (SCOTUS) enforce it. And every military member of the United States Armed Forces takes an oath or pledge to defend it. But then they go forth and act in violation of it – at the express order and with the permission of members of the Legislative and Executive Branches. Who also take such an oath.

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      Conspiracy or merely cooperation and CYA?

      Posted on 2024-07-24 by TPOL Nathan

      CNN has published an article summarizing the testimony of the Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner to a congressional committee on the almost-successful killing of The Donald. The testimony, if accurately reported, seems to contradict several other reports. While we cannot (and may never) know which are honest and which are mistakes or outright lies, what is revealed is a series of serious “rookie” or even “amateur” mistakes and examples of poor communication, poor planning, and poor coordination.

      To us here at TPOL, highly biased and increasingly frustrated, this is just another entry in an encyclopedia entitled Why Governments Can’t Be Trusted.

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      Celebrity-murderer or adult delinquent?

      Posted on 2024-07-23 by TPOL Nathan

      An article from Rob Morse back in April triggered some thoughts about the recent killer in Pennsylvania. And the media (mainstream, social, and alternative) response to it: to say nothing of the usual hoplophobes and hoploclasts in high places.

      We’ve reprinted Rob’s article below. (You will get our point, we think, without having to read his 900+ words – though they are worth the time to read.)

      As near as we can find, none of the usual suspects have blessed us with their usual screams after one man was killed and three wounded before a sniper took him out. (And even Fox admitted, a week later, that the killer apparently died of a bullet to the head, according to the coroner – wow!)

      The usual? Appeals for new and more gun control laws, taking away “assault weapons” (like the one used) from everybody in the country, repeal of the 2nd Amendment, and demanding that “something be done.” Not a single legislator in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has demanded total disarmament of every civilian, or even raising the age to buy and have a firearm to a nice, reasonable 35 or so.

      A few people have commented, even complained, that the killer was shot dead. I suspect it was not the usual “death penalty bad” issue but only the fact he could not be “rigorously interrogated.” There haven’t even been the usual “society made him do it” claims.

      Why?

      Much as I wish, it was not a sudden attack of common sense: that sometimes a honest and non-aggressive, even usually-peaceful man with a gun is the best defense against a would-be murderer or assassin. Nor was it love for The Donald and anger at the shooter who actually tried to short-circuit democracy by eliminating (really) the choice of millions of Americans for the next Massa.

      So why? Readers, feel free to chip in. Was it because many of those hoplophobes and hoploclasts are only concerned about who has the weapons, and think this kid was another John Wilkes Booth but on the “right” side? (Sic semper tyrannus, and all that.) Or was it because he didn’t fit the standard “victim” profile of a would-be mass-killer? (Not a particularly poor or gang-based childhood, not a cross-dresser, not constantly abused and bullied at school, etc.)

      Or was it because of whom he wanted to kill? When you have spent years condemning a POTUS as a fascist, tyrannical, democracy-hating dictator, it makes you even more of a hypocrite when someone seems to have accepted your accusations as honest and sufficient to take violent action to end.

      Dear readers, what are your thoughts?


      Original title: A Forest of Flaws put our Children at Risk, but a Sea of Doubts Might Save Them by Rob Morse

      Maryland police arrested a mass-murderer before “he” attacked a school. The murderer taught us a lot. “He” was ordinary as mass murderers go. What was unusual was that the police in Rockville, Maryland included excerpts from the want-to-be murderer’s manifesto. We’ve read similar stories from earlier murderers, but now we have their statements easily accessible for the public to see. If you read deeply, these statements also show us the difficult problems we need to face in order to protect our children at school and in public.
      Most of us face and solve problems every day. We become at risk when we fail to solve the common problems that keep us safe and healthy. Today, we see our society face similar challenges from the problems we’ve ignored for too long.
      Mass-murderers go through consistent stages. They first justify their actions. In this case, the murderer complained that his teachers were “evil” and classmates were “assholes” even as far back as elementary school. Mass-murderers routinely study other attacks and the news media’s reaction to them. The Maryland murderer wanted a record number of victims in order to get the publicity he craved. Mass-murderers expect to be killed during the attack or to take their own life immediately afterward. In the recent case in Maryland, the murderer worried about spending his life in prison if he survived. These murderers plan their attacks for months or even years. They form detailed plans about which schools and which classrooms are the easiest to attack. They plan the detailed route to the school and the tools they will use. The recent want-to-be murderer in Maryland considered both firearms and bombs.
      This phenomenon of committing mass-murder to achieve notoriety is so new that we had to form new language to describe it. This recent celebrity-murderer was stopped before he went to the school he once attended.
      In the last few years, we’ve seen a new trend with young men and women who feel alienated from their bodies. They try to live as the other sex in order to reduce their anxiety. Some of them then lash out at society. That appears to be the case with the murderers who attacked schools in Isla Vista, California, in Uvalde, Texas, and in Nashville, Tennessee. That was also the case for this want-to-be murder in Rockville, Maryland.
      “He” was born a female and now describes “himself” as male. That leaves us with a lot of problems for us to face.
      We’ve prevented our children from failing and learning hard lessons. Social media now relentlessly compares children to their classmates. We forget that adolescence is hard.
      The attention-seeking news media consistently turns attention-seeking murderers into worldwide celebrities. Unfortunately, we as a society have additional problems to face if we want to protect our children in school.
      We know how to protect our children and we’ve known it for decades. The celebrity-murderers told us how. The want-to-be murderer in Rockville told us again as did the murderer who attacked a school in Nashville. Like those who commit suicide, these celebrity-murderers are not afraid to die but they are deeply afraid of failure. That tells us a lot. We don’t need a perfect defense to protect our children, but any credible defense at a school or church plants a forest of doubts in the mind of the attacker. Those doubts have formed a perfect deterrent so far.\The good news is that mass-murders at our schools are extremely rare. They are also so horrific that we can’t ignore them. Over 30 states allow school staff to be armed on campus. Thousands of school boards have gone through the process of qualifying and trained volunteer school employees to defend their students. We have millions of classroom-days of experience with armed staff at school. The trained school defenders didn’t have an accident with a firearm and shoot someone.
      Fortunately, the news gets even better.
      The best defense prevents the attack in the first place. Mass-murderers do not want to get into gunfight with bullets going both ways. They consistently choose to attack somewhere else rather than face an armed defender at school. We’ve never had an attack on a school campus that had a publicly announced program of armed school staff. Unfortunately, that solution frightens politicians even as it saves children.
      Politicians live in a world where perception is reality. The politician can’t afford a bad headline that says he put children at risk. A headline that says he proposed “More Guns in Schools” could kill his career. The headlines do the damage even if the story describes the perfect safety record a dozen paragraphs later.
      I have to notice how differently the media treats the same politician after they defunded the police and then asked for a larger personal security detail. We don’t see the headline claiming that “More Guns in City Hall” are bad. Why are armed defenders good for the politician but bad for our children?
      Our politicians are afraid of provocative solutions to school safety. So are the news media. Politicians can only consider solutions that the media already accepts. That leaves the real solutions up to us. We have to lead the politicians and the journalists. It is up to us to study and be better informed than our politicians. We need to face our fears and be louder than the news media when we tell our elected officials what to do.

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      Goodbye, Uncle Joe

      Posted on 2024-07-22 by TPOL Nathan

      Well, not quite. That won’t happen officially until 20 January 2025, but we now again have a lame duck at 1600 PA.

      Y’all have probably seen this, but here it is anyway. Another historic first for 2024.

      As resignation letters go, perhaps it isn’t so bad. We wonder which of his inner circle of advisors wrote this – or was it dictated by one of the Powers-That-Be – the puppeteers that have been pulling his strings for far more than 3-1/2 years?

      But like his opponent, The Donald, the thing is full of lies and misdirection and warped thinking. Just as we accept and expect to hear from anyone in politics. The list of accomplishments glows with pride and warped thinking. Or just outright falsehoods: the claim of “strongest economy in the world” in particular rings hollow, as does the generic claims “never been better positioned to lead than we are today” and “revitalized and strengthened our alliances around the world.”

      But here are some specific items we here at TPOL note:

      There is no ringing endorsement for dear Kammi to replace him at the top of the ticket. Nor anyone else, for that matter.

      The bald-faced lie that “we’ve protected and preserved our Democracy” is exaggerated by capitalizing “Democracy” – and we ask does he mean what was once commonly called “The Democracy” (the Democratic Party) or the increasingly-fractured Union?

      And he obviously – clearly states that – he places party ahead of the country. (No surprise, really.)

      At the same time, we pray (sincerely) that he truly benefits from this decision – forced on him though it may be. Not for his own power and prestige but because now he will be less and less abused by those around him – including his wife and the rest of his family – and able to somewhat better enjoy the remaining time he has to live on this planet. We also pray that he might wake up enough to repent of the mistakes and evil he has done, instigated, and permitted. He deserves, as a creation of God, his eternal rest provided by God’s grace and mercy, not the just consequences of his actions.

      And we do admit that we understand the concern and fear of Jill Biden. We know that those who have Alzheimer’s and other senility problems very seldom live very long once they have had all responsibility and decision-making taken away. Once they have no purpose in life, it is too often a sad tale of a spiral into death. But what she did and allowed and cooperated with is very much abuse of an elder.

      So what is next? Do the PTB in the Democratic Party think they have the election already rigged enough to put Harris or some other “deserving” Democrat into power and defeat The Donald? Have they come up with a foolproof Plan B? Or are they going to try and do everything to ensure that they can neuter The Donald by controlling one or both houses of Congress? Or will they simply do away with anything but a Potemkin village of elections? Rumors and theories abound, and many seem truly crazy. But the rumor of Uncle Joe calling it quits turns out to be an accurate forecast, at least.

      Who knows? But leaving the futures of 300+ million of us in the hands of people like this is definitely something to worry about. And work to prevent.

      An afterthought.

      Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota wrote this on her Facebook page:

      “This is the right decision for our nation. Whoever replaces Biden will support the same radical agenda of open borders, unchecked illegal immigration, and woke values that do not appreciate what America stands for.

      “The Democrats’ nominee must answer for runaway inflation, the dismantling of the American Dream, rampant violet [sic] crime, and a disastrous and weak foreign policy.

      “Donald Trump is the leader America needs to get this country back on the right track. Republicans are unified and will work tirelessly to ensure Donald J. Trump wins in November and Makes America Great Again.”

      Clearly, TPOL disagrees as much with Kristi as with Uncle Joe (and The Donald). But at the same time, she reflects what a majority – a large majority – of South Dakotans and other Westerners believe. We know that despite recent defections from the GOP Never-Trump ranks, the GOP is as fractured as the Democrats. And as likely to further mess up our States and the world as anything Joe or Kamela or the dozen other Democrats busy sharpening their knives in their offices and homes would do.

      And apparently, neither Kristi nor her staff know the difference between “violent” and “violet” – even though the WordPress spell-checker does. Denoting an over-reliance on computers, software, and no doubt, most of the graduates of our public schools for the past three or more decades.

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      Lesson not learned from almost two centuries ago.

      Posted on 2024-07-21 by TPOL Nathan

      Nobody wants to learn lessons from Russia or Turkei, do they? But…

      By the time 80,000 Russian troops invaded Ottoman territory in June 1853 at the outbreak of the Crimean War, the imperial finances of the Ottoman Empire were already a complete disaster. The Ottoman Empire had once been the most dominant superpower in the world. But that had been centuries prior in the 1400s. By the mid-1800s, the Ottoman Empire had fallen far behind European powers like Britain and Prussia, and its economy was in such bad shape that it became known as the “Sick Man of Europe”.

      So the Crimean War broke out– one of the most pointless and easily avoidable conflicts in history. And suddenly the Ottoman Empire found itself with no money to fight. That’s when British bankers entered the scene… led by Baron Lionel de Rothschild, who orchestrated a £3 million sovereign bond for Istanbul.

      The bonds yielded 7.5% initially… (definitely high in those days). But it wouldn’t be long before the Ottoman government had spent all the money and needed to borrow more funds. And the Ottomans kept borrowing even when the Crimean War ended in 1856 (Russia lost). They had become addicted to debt, and bonds were sold in 1858, 1860, 1862, 1863, and 1865. By 1875, the Ottoman public debt was so large that debt service consumed two-thirds of tax revenue. A few years later, they had their own version of a government shutdown… because the Ottoman Empire had no money to pay the salaries of its soldiers and bureaucrats. Not wouldn’t – couldn’t.

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      Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun

      Posted on 2024-07-19 by TPOL Nathan

      The attempted killing of The Donald last week brings to mind an old political aphorism.

      Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun (枪杆子里面出政权). The phrase was coined by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. He first used the phrase during an emergency meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on 7 August 1927, at the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. His actions through that war and victory over the Chinese Nationalists and totalitarian, authoritarian, and murderous rule of the Chinese empire demonstrated the accuracy of his observation.

      As has virtually every war and election and change of government in human history.

      Political power is exercised by government – and factions and individuals in power in (and through) that government. Whether it is claimed to be a democracy, a republic, an empire, a monarchy, or whatever. And whatever it actually is. Most lovers of liberty understand the fable of the two wolves and the ewe voting on what’s for dinner.

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      The bitter fruit of politics and parasites

      Posted on 2024-07-18 by TPOL Nathan

      American politics is honestly the pits. A series of cesspools in which idiots, their manipulators, and their clientele and victims splash around, spewing and spreading vicious evil. Some of the occupants of these cesspools are symbolic plants – ugly, bitter, even poisonous, noxious weeds. In fact, the Himalayan bitter goard above might not be the most accurate representation: it has some good uses. Perhaps this one is better:

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      A Baker’s Dozen ™: Why do people fear independence and liberty?

      Posted on 2024-07-17 by TPOL Nathan

      Just a few thoughts. These thirteen reasons are somewhat vague. No doubt readers will think of many other reasons. Or have been told by people they know why those people are afraid of being free. Some of them might seem silly. But know why people are afraid is necessary knowledge we must have, both to free ourselves and to free others.

      Basically, as the thirteen items describe in more detail, that fear of independence, of freedom, and of liberty has two objects. Other people. And themselves.

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