Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Worst Prick/Playboy I Ever Met

Back in college I knew a guy who was not a friend, but a friend of a friend. We weren’t enemies but I did not like him, and he didn’t much like me. Since we had a friend in common, we were cordial to each other.

This guy was fairly good-looking, so what he would do is target vulnerable women – not very attractive, pudgy, sometimes not all that smart.

He’d convince them he wanted a serious relationship with them, have sex with them two or three times, then dump them. I have no idea how many times he did this, but it was a lot.

He had what was apparently a permanent leer on his face, which, it appeared, many women could not see. I didn’t like him long before I knew what he was doing. There was just something about him that rubbed me the wrong way.

After college he became a podiatrist, and used to place ads in the personals. Of course, he always mentioned he was a doctor.

He’d date these women until he had sex with them, then not see them anymore. Some of them called him up and cursed him.

One woman in particular had made a fatal mistake – she’d had a kid by black man. Of course, he was gone five minutes after she was pregnant, just as Obama’s drunken kaffir of a father was gone five minutes after he impregnated his white trash mother.

It’s a fatal mistake because any white woman who had a kid by a black man has immediately, permanently removed herself not only from the marriage market, but the dating one.

My player acquaintance saw this woman long enough to have sex with her, then dumped her.

This guy was of course a prick, and still is, but I cannot let any of the women off of the hook. A friend of mine once told me, “If Julia Roberts wanted to date me, wouldn’t you think there is something wrong, somewhere?” Answer: yes.

These overweight, unattractive women apparently really thought that a guy who was much better-looking than them was truly going to be interested in them. Pardon the pun, but fat chance of that.

Then there is the “doctor” scam. If a guy who advertises he is a doctor instead of a nurse, he’ll get more responses. Why? Do these women think he’s rich and going to support them? If he’s mercenary, then aren’t they?

In college he did meet one woman in whom he was truly interested. She never dated him, but did meet him for a study date at the library. After that, she never saw him again, since she almost immediately saw into his wizened soul.

Our friend in common knew this woman, and told our Lothario than she was seeing me every once in a while. Our mercenary friend was crushed. The one woman he was interested in for a real relationship – and she was seeing me, and wouldn’t see him.

It isn’t surprising he was devastated, but it is ironic. And the fact she went out with me and not him is why he never much liked me.

Men are much better judges of men than almost all women are. If a woman has any sense, she will ask several guys what they think of who she is dating. If she gets a bunch of negatives, she might want to pay attention to their opinions instead of her own.

If I had told any of these women this guy was a prick and using them and would be gone in three days, they would have not believed me and gotten mad at me, and told me what a great guy he was, and and probably run and told him what a horrible person I was. Then, three days, some of them probably would have come sobbing to me looking for sympathy. Sorry, I'm all out. Which is why I never told of them what he was. It's their problem, not me. Stupid can't be fixed, except possibly by the School of Hard Knocks.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Awful Cheap Awful Wines

When I was in high school there were two wines we drank: Annie Green Springs and Boone’s Farm. Both cost 98 cents a bottle, which is why we drank them. They were terrible wines.

We once tried MD 20/20, which was weird colors like orange and blue and tasted like mouthwash and was lots worse than Annie and Boone’s. Other horrible wines, such as Thunderbird (“What’s the word? THUNDERBIRD!”) we never saw since they were sold in places we did not frequent.

We also once ran across some Everclear, which we heard would burn, so we poured some out and lit it. It burned with a blue flame. When I drank a swallow, I found out exactly where my esophagus and stomach were, because they were outlined with a distinct burning sensation.

I never drank any good wine until I was 26, when I woman I was dating introduced me to some good German white wine. The difference between it and my high school escapades shocked me – just as I was shocked when I realized my mother’s percolated boiled cheap stale Folgers was not how all coffee tasted.

Annie Green Springs is no longer made, which is too bad, since it was a great name. I wish I had at least kept a bottle, although I’m sure I can find an empty bottle with a tattered label on the internet, probably for an outrageous price.

Boone’s Farm is still made, since I saw some bottles at the grocery store, on the bottom shelf, where the cheap stuff is put, because the store wants you to buy the expensive stuff they place at eye level.

The bottles I saw were $2.70 a bottle. I thought, good Lord, when you factor in inflation, if I was still in high school, this junk would probably be selling for about a quarter a bottle!

Wine a quarter a bottle!

I still can’t stand cheap wine. I couldn’t stand it in high school, although once you started drinking it, it didn’t taste so bad. These days, I still drink German white wine, which is about $8, and also mead, which is pretty expensive at $16, but mead is what the Vikings drank out of the skulls of their enemies, which is what I do. Which I why I no longer have any enemies!

Don’t get me started on cigars.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Feminism Born from Boredom, not Oppression

Feminism was born not of the oppression of women by a non-existent patriarchy, but from the boredom of left-wing women, which they blamed on a quite-real capitalism.

It was “capitalism” (in my opinion, misnamed) that freed women from a lifetime of cleaning, sweeping, laundry, sewing, cooking, canning and the rest of the day-long drudgery involved with keeping a home. It also freed them from unwanted, sometimes dangerous and occasionally fatal pregnancies.

The fruits of political and economic liberty resulted in the burdensome necessities of life not being eliminated, but greatly eased. After that advancement, with life being so much easier, the next step should be the improvement of minds and lives. That was the problem: what to do with the challenge of all that leisure.

Unfortunately, when it comes to leftists, this material abundance results, as it always does with them, in spiritual poverty. I not believe there could be a Marquis de Sade or a Herod when men spent their days hunting game to survive; only “aristocrats” who never had to work a day in their lives could turn into bored leftists who whiled their days away with sex and drugs and partying.

Boredom, quite correctly, was considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins: ennui, to be exact. That is, being unable to find meaning, importance and community in your life.

The word “sin” comes from the word “hamartia” and is derived from archery; it means “to miss the mark.” Those who cannot find true meaning, importance and community in their lives have missed the target.

Since no one can live without meaning, importance and community, leftists, since they almost always reject traditional religion, end up worshipping themselves. Only in leftism can Man be considered a god.

Bored by the advancements and leisure generated by political and economic liberty, and at a loss what to do with their lives, leftists misinterpreted these things as oppression. Bored people always feel oppressed, and being the first defense of people is to blame their problems on others, they looked around and decided that “capitalism” and “patriarchy” were to blame.

Leftist critics did diagnose the problem, but not only was the diagnosis terribly skewed, the cure was deadly: the destruction of society and the (impossible) remaking of human nature so they men and women would be exactly equal. Only then, they claimed, could “patriarchy” and “capitalism” be overthrown and destroyed.

In a perverted and limited sense, these critics were correct: these material advancements were generated by men (specifically white men), which was misnamed “patriarchy,” and also by science and political and economic liberty – misnamed “capitalism.”

The Stalinist Betty Friedan, one of the founders of Sixties feminism, wrote in The Feminine Mystique there was a problem that “had no name.” The problem did have a name: that missing of the mark known as ennui. Friedan, not at all surprisingly, was an atheist who was married to an extremely wealthy man and lived a life of luxury in a mansion on the Hudson River in New York. The housework was done by maids.

She was another bored, wealthy, self-appointed aristocrat without a religion, one whose suitcase once fell open at an airport and spilled her sex toys on the floor.

Her leftist “religion” promoted the elevation of women, the denigration of men, and the hoped-for destruction of “patriarchy” and “capitalism,” to be replaced with primitive tribal matriarchal equality and fraternity.

One way to overcome women’s “oppression” was for them to enter into men’s occupations. This didn’t mean entry into any hot, dirty, dangerous jobs: it meant entry into the much easier, highly-paid ones, a path smoothed by Affirmative Action (“white men need not apply”).

It also meant the denigration of motherhood and marriage. Gloria Steinem throughout her life never had a good thing to say about romance and marriage, even though they were the most importance things in her personal life, and she never practiced what she preached to other women.

These self-appointed elites, the vanguard of a hoped-for New Society, gained meaning to their lives – and importance and community – by trying to destroy the existing social order. It must be heady to think you have that kind of god-like power, and to get that kind of money and attention.

It is a sad fact of life there are people who get meaning to their lives by trying to destroy a society they hate, however incorrectly, as being little more than crushing and oppressive.

The intended goal of these people is a complete equality between men and women. Unfortunately, they never take this belief to its logical conclusion: if men and women were totally equal, they would be totally identical and interchangeable.

Men and women have to be totally alike, in the way two nickels or two quarters are alike. We’d have to be hermaphrodites, or totally sexless, with babies grown in jars. We’d be much like ants or termites, I suppose. Or worse, amoeba.

Since such equality is impossible, society would instead form along the lines of what Hans Prinzhorn called “the tyranny of a clique in the name of the equality of all.”

It is, of course, supposed to be leftists who are the wealthy and political powerful clique, and the mass of people who should have “equality” forced on them, whether or not they want it. They just need their consciousness raised by their betters.

The eternal delusion of the leftist is for people to be checkers that can be moved around, or perhaps just mud that can be shoveled into whatever shape rulers want. Only the intellectually and morally superior know what is good for the unwashed masses.

Their Nietzschean Will to Power is cloaked by the belief in their own humanitarianism – the humanitarian with a
guillotine, as Isabel Patterson noticed.

This desire to remake people and societies is how leftists find meaning and importance in their lives. Perhaps it does make them feel God-like. It certainly a religion to them, as Arthur Koestler clearly documented in his book about those disillusioned by Communism, The God Who Failed.

If feminists did succeed in imposing their beliefs on society (which can only be done by the force of the State, being their beliefs run opposite to human nature) what kind of world would we have?

Since men, specifically white men, are responsible for modern civilization, if feminists were in charge of civilization we would, as Camille Paglia so correctly noted, be living in grass huts. Or, as the humorist P.J. O’Rourke once wrote, without men civilization would last until the next oil change.

Men have created civilization; women are the ones who made it comfortable. Many men, left to themselves, live like utter slobs. Some would wear their underwear until it fell off.

One ironic way to deal with leftists is to exile all of them to an island, where they would find rapidly their ideas of how society should be run won’t work.

Of course, they would blame their problems on the residue of the false consciousness inculcated in them by their former society. Perhaps in a few hundred years, I’m sure they’d say, – or maybe a few thousand – would all those bad ideas finally be eradicated.

Perhaps if they were denied the comforts of science and technology, and had to spend their lives eking out a living (so much for Rousseau and his Noble Savage), could they be neutralized. They certainly wouldn’t be bored anymore.

They might even end up like some of the blacks in Africa who, after running the white man out, begged him to come back.

People, unfortunately, are not that hard to mislead. Just keep repeating the same propaganda over and over: white men and capitalism bad; everything that is not those two things, good.

Today, through the media and schools, people are being inundated with ideas that don’t, and won’t, work. Not that leftists will ever believe this, except for the few who successfully graduate from the School of Hard Knocks.

Leftist ideas, manifested in society, always blow things up. I doubt anyone will be bored by that process – just pained. “May you live in interesting times,” goes the ominous old Chinese curse.

Leftists, not merely misunderstanding human nature but not understanding it at all, have failed at their attempts to cure society, at defining the relationships between men women, at finding the truth. Instead they have opted for simplistic, narcissistic – and wrong – answers. It’s a shame for all involved.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

The Stupid Don’t Know They’re Stupid

One curious thing many people have noticed throughout history is that stupid people do not know they are stupid. Worse, they generally think they’re not only smart, but smarter than other people.

It goes with the territory that stupid people are also incompetent, so society is stuck with people who are stupid, don’t know they’re stupid, think they’re smarter than other people, and are incompetent and don’t know it.

Arrggh! What a mess! Many of these people end up in prison, but others end up in worse positions – bureaucrats.

Intelligence ranges among a bell curve, so since the average IQ of prisoners is 93, a noticeable number of people on the left side of the curve are going to end up in prison.

Just as ominously, some of those same people on the left side of the curve are going to end up as bureaucrats, having often been given political patronage jobs. I’ve seen it, most especially in big cities. I dreaded having to go to City Hall and deal with the morons there (before these days of Political Correctness, a moron was someone who had an IQ of 85 – on the border of dull normal and moron).

All of these bureaucrats I dealt with were stupid, didn’t know it, thought they were intelligent and weren’t, and were incompetent and didn’t know it.

These people were more of a minor annoyance than anything else. What they were, as that old saying tells us, were big fish in a little pool. At least they thought they were big fish, even though they weren’t.

Stupidity and incompetent really causes problems when the possessor (or maybe I should say “sufferer,” even though we’re the ones who do the suffering) have great political power. Then they can really cause problems!

What causes this blindness? Narcissism, I’d guess. Humility is defined as having a realistic appraisal of yourself – that’s all it means. It has nothing to do with hanging your head and scuffing your toe in the dirt and saying “Aw shucks.” Being humble just means knowing your strengths and weaknesses.

The stupid, and incompetent, for some reason, don’t have a realistic appraisal of themselves. The grandiose, if they’re stupid and incompetent, don’t know they’re stupid and incompetent.

Why are so many stupid people grandiose and have such an unrealistic view of themselves? I think a clue lies in the fact that excessive pride is often used to cover up shame.

Stupid, incompetent, grandiose people are often very touchy. They can’t stand to be laughed at or not taken seriously. They blow up.

Their “self-esteem” (ugh, how I despise that word) is fragile. They can’t stand to be dissed (and that is a word I like).

The psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spend his career dealing with murderers and those who committed horrendous batteries, when he asked them why they did it, always heard, “He dissed me.” He disrespected me, he insulted me, he diminished my self-image.

Gilligan said what he repeatedly heard was the story of Cain and Abel.

These people, on some level, must know what they are, and are ashamed of themselves. Unable to tolerate what they are, they cover it up with excessive pride – grandiosity. Thus, they lack humility and don’t have a realistic view of themselves. They don’t know they’re stupid and incompetent.

Not only do they suffer, so does society.

One of my friends, who was head of security in a bad part of town, never had any problems with the drug dealers, pimps and other criminals swarming his area. He told me it wasn’t that hard. Even though these people were losers, the dregs of society, he treated them with respect. And he had very few problems with them.

The way my friend dealt with these people takes care of how to deal with criminals, but what about bureaucrats? The only way to deal with this problem is to shrink the size of government.

It has never ceased to amaze me that some people want to increase the size of government when in their dealings with it they have nothing good to say. Does anyone have a good opinion of the DMV?

When the stupid and incompetent gain any kind of political power, they don’t treat the public with any respect. And no one, no matter how stable and slow to anger they are, when treated disrespectfully by bureaucrats, sooner or later reaches the end of their fuse.

Bureaucrats – as stupid, incompetent and grandiose as they are – are always surprised when the public turns on them. There is another old saying that illustrates this – “The stupider you are, the more surprised you are when someone kills you.”

Friday, October 15, 2010

The Good Wife Who Did All She Could

Driving a taxi was much like being a priest or bartender. Strangers would just tell you everything, spill their guts to those had never seen before and would never see again. Why did they want to unburden themselves to me? Even today, I still don’t know.

Maybe it was because they were staring at the back of my head.

I can’t remember where I picked her up, but I took her to her house. She told me she was divorced. She told me the story of her marriage and how it didn’t work out. I usually don’t feel sorry for people, but in her case, I did.

She told me she had prayed to find an answer to if he was the right one or not. She married him.

She had a bath drawn when he came home, a hot dinner on the table. My God, I thought, what woman does that? I’ve never met one.

Still, the marriage did not work out. Feeling pity for someone is an awful feeling. I don’t like it.

“You’re so easy to talk to,” she told me. I’d said almost nothing, but I wondered why it didn’t work out.

I watched her get out of her car and walk into her house. Even today, when I think about it, I still feel sorry for her.

I hope she found someone else.

I Encounter a Bunch of Hookers

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Guy Who Fell Off of his High Heels

Early one Friday evening I was heading home in my taxi when I heard from the sidewalk, “Yoo hoo, yoo hoo, taxi!”

I looked over and saw heading towards me a rather attractive, six-foot-tall woman, tottering across the street on her high-heels, which she almost fell of off. She was dressed in a tight red dress.

She got into the back seat of my taxi, fanned herself with her hand, and exclaimed, “Thank God you were here! Who know what these men out here would do to a poor defenseless woman like me!” The voice sounded like a woman’s…sort of.

I turned around and looked….it was a man dressed as a woman. Nice tits. Only they were fake. Hmmm…what with hormones and whatnot these days, maybe they weren’t. I suspected his dick was as shrunk as his tits were big. Them hormone shots’ll do that to ya.

Inwardly I rolled my eyes. Outwardly I kept the poker face. I’d seen stranger things. At least this one didn’t have a mustache.

There were two transvestites who lived a mile or so south of where I had picked this guy up. The dispatchers called them “Neil and Bob,” because that’s what they did for a living.

What the guy in my back seat did for a living I didn’t exactly know, but I had an idea. Fortunately, it didn’t involve propositioning me.

I was able to take him where he wanted to go, he paid me, and got out of the car with no problems.

Well, hell, at least he wasn’t dressed as Judy Garland. Although I did once pick up one dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Or maybe it was Jane Mansfield. It’s hard to tell the difference at 3 a.m. when your car is full of singing, dancing, drunken transvestites.

When you work at night, you see some unusual things.

Monday, October 11, 2010

I Multitask in the Bath

Me: Dum de dum dum.

New Girlfriend: What are you doing?

Me: I’m taking a bath in your bathtub.

NG: I can see that. I can also see that you’re drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigar. But why do you have your shirt in the tub with you?

Me: I’m multitasking. I’m washing my shirt along with me.

NG: Do you do this a lot?

Me: All the time. I buy a gallon of Dr. Bronners citric liquid soap and I wash me, my hair and my clothes in it. It’s dumb to buy shampoo for your hair, soap for your body and detergent for your clothes. It’s a waste of money. Instead I use Dr. Bronners. A gallon costs like $50 but I dilute it and it goes a long way.

NG: Don’t you think you’re kinda weird?

Me: Some people think that about me, but I see myself as logical and saving a lot of money. I don’t use toothpaste, either, but baking soda. All those corporations try to brainwash people and take their money -- they try to make you think you are benefitting yourself when you’re really diminishing yourself. I have better things to spend my money on than the over-priced crap created by those Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations. I hate them.

NG: You think you’re logical?

Me: I’m a combination of Spock, Captain Kirk, Scotty and Bones all rolled into one.

NG: Is there anything else I should know about you?

Me: I buy all my clothes and shoes at thrift stores. The only things I buy new are socks and underwear. There’s a thrift store four blocks from where I live that supports a no-kill shelter and I shop there. Save the pugs! I got a Gevalia coffee-maker for two dollars and a brand-new pair of Nikes for four dollars. I consider myself brilliant. Don’t you?

NG; Well, you are smart but you’re still very eccentric.

Me: You want to get in the tub with me?

NG: Your cigar stinks.

Me: (throwing it in the toilet): There!

NG: You just threw your cigar in my toilet!

Me: Your point?

NG: (rolling eyes) Forget it.

Me: You ain’t lived until you’ve been scrubbed with Dr. Bronners. I even got a washcloth. I got it at the thrift store, too. Climb in here, honey bunch.

NG: God, you are so weird.

Me: But lovable! And cute! And adorable! And oodles of fun!

NG: You can stop anytime now.

Me: Okay.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Guns and the Dumb

Since I was raised with firearms, I've never been afraid of them. They're just tools to me, not much different than a hammer or a saw. I do, however, to use a phrase told to me by an electrician about electricity, respect the hell out of them.

I'm more afraid of a power saw or a nail gun than I am of any firearm. Actually, I'm quite a lot afraid of power saws. Actually, I dislike them a lot and never use them. I used to be a carpenter and have seen people run power saws over their hands. One guy accidentally nail-gunned his boot to a plywood deck. Twice. Each time the nail went in between his toes, which greatly relieved him after we pried his shoe from the deck with a crowbar and he developed the courage to take off his boot and look at his foot.

I got very good at putting Band-Aids on wounded carpenters.

When I was 12, my neighbor next door took me skeet-shooting, which was the first time I fired a shotgun. It wasn't a big one, just a 20-gauge that I used to blow up a bunch of clay pigeons. None of the men there gave a thought to a 12-year-old blasting away with a shotgun. At that age, I thought it was about the coolest thing I had ever done, even if the kick did hurt my shoulder.

When I was 13, my father bought me a single-shot .22 rifle with a telescopic sight. I would have preferred a semi-automatic with high-capacity magazine, but he wouldn't spring for one because of the cost, which would have been a lot more than the $15 for the bolt-action rifle he did buy me.

One of my friends and I used to walk across the field near my house, carrying the rifle, a box of ammo, and a bunch of empty milk jugs. We'd fill the jugs with scummy green water from a pond, then sight in on them from 100 feet away, and blow them with up with .22 hollow-point slugs.

We didn't shoot each other, or anyone else. We just blew up a lot of water-filled jugs that probably had some innocent bugs in them. There were no accidents with the rifle, or anything close to an accident. We didn't shoot ourselves in the feet or hands. That rifle was a lot safer than the power saws and nail guns I came to despise a few years later.

My friend and I were very careful. We respected that rifle. And we never thought a thing about carrying it in public. The police never bothered us, either.

I've known exactly one person wounded by a firearm, unlike the half a dozen I've known hurt by flying nails that bounced off hammers. I saw one guy get a flying nail stuck in his chest. When he pulled it out, a thin stream of blood jetted out about a foot every time his heart beat. My father stuck the tip of his index finger on the hole for a minute, until it clotted.

Another time I found the tip of some guy's finger, when he fell off of a ladder and grabbed some metal flashing. I buried it in the back yard of house we were working on.

I've never personally known anyone killed by a firearm. That one guy I know who was wounded was what I will politely refer to as a "career security guard." He had a drunk in a headlock and was beating him over the head with the butt of his .38 pistol when it fired, sending the bullet into his forearm (the fight instantly stopped). He has a heck of a scar, about six inches long, on the inside of his left forearm. I'm sure he learned that pistols are not billy clubs. He was a dumb guy, one who is now a little smarter.

I have known two people killed when they fell off of tractors, one who drowned when he waded into a lake wearing heavy boots which filled with water and pulled him under, and one who got hit by a car while changing a tire on an interstate. Each one of them died because they did something dumb, just like the security guard did something dumb. Fortunately, he lived. The others weren't so lucky.

Those uninitiated into human nature think the way to stop accidents with guns is to remove guns from people's possession. Since guns will never be gotten rid of (everything you need to make a machine-gun can be stored on a closet shelf), it'd be better to teach people, as children, to use firearms properly. Just the way I was taught. It's a lot easier to minimize stupidity (possible) than ban firearms (impossible).

I've known several adults who were not raised with firearms as children. When they became adults and bought guns, some of them didn't understand how dangerous they were. Their ignorance caused problems that were scary at the time, but can be laughed at in retrospect. At least most of the time.

I remember one of my friends showed me a 9mm pistol that was given to him to clear a debt that he was owed. He was in his 40s, and it was the first pistol he had ever owned. He informed me that he was told it was worth $600. I was skeptical that anyone would give him a $600 pistol for a $100 debt. I wondered what it was. A high-quality pistol like a Glock or a Sig Sauer?

What he showed me was one of the most cheaply-made, beat-up pistols I've ever seen. Even from across the room I could see that it had been banged around a lot.

I asked him to do what I always ask people to do when I'm around firearms: take the magazine out and rack the slide back so I would know the pistol was empty It was, but I wasn't going to trust his word. I never trust anyone's word about a gun being empty until I see it with my eyes. People have been killed by guns the shooters were convinced were empty.

I had a woman tell me one of his son's friends was killed when a grown man bought a pistol, took the magazine out, pointed it at a teenager's head, and pulled the trigger. He later told police he didn't know there was a round in the chamber. I'm sure this was no consolation whatsoever to the boy's brother, who was in the room when the shooting occurred. This man had never handled a gun before in his life.

When my friend handed the pistol to me, I looked at the manufacturer's name stamped on the side. It was the worst gun manufactured in the U.S., and possibly the worst in the world – a Lorcin. I've read cases where they blew up in people's hands. Brand-new, they cost $125. Used, they're worthless.

Once I saw a brand-new one at a gun shop. When I asked the owner why he was selling such a piece of junk, he answered that he knew only 100 rounds would go through the barrel before the pistol was worthless, but "poor people need self-defense."

I've seen Glocks that had 100,000 rounds put through them, and this guy was selling a shiny chrome-plated piece of garbage that you probably couldn't put a magazine through it without it jamming.

If anyone tried to give me one, I wouldn't take it. Even brand-new.

When I told my naïve friend that his $600 pistol was worth exactly nothing, that he couldn't pawn it even for $5, and that worst of all it was a very dangerous gun, he got mad at me. He didn't believe me.

When I saw him a few weeks later, he sheepishly told me he had gotten rid of it. He said when he put the magazine in, the pistol fired. In his apartment. He didn't pull the trigger; the pistol fired when he gently inserted the magazine. It blasted a neat little hole in his wall, which we spackled. The round is still in the wall. He told me he had no idea there was a bullet in the chamber.

Dumb? Dumb. Very, very dumb.

Later, I met another man, in his 30s, who knew exactly nothing about firearms. I saw him raise a .44 Magnum over his head, cock it, and when he was lowering it the weight of the pistol moved it slightly forward in his hand, causing the trigger to pull against his finger. The pistol fired upward at a 45-degree angle. Since we were in the woods, the bullet landed harmlessly, unless it plonked down on some poor unsuspecting rabbit or squirrel.

The look of shock on his guy's face was priceless. Too bad I didn't have a camera. He swore he didn't pull the trigger. I knew he didn't. But in his ignorance he made one of the cardinal mistakes: he cocked the pistol when it was over his head, then lowered it.

At least none of the guys out there were a whoopin' and a hollerin' and guzzling beer. I would have been gone in a second.

None of these people were raised with firearms. They didn't encounter them until they were adults. As a result, they made mistakes that could have been tragic.

I will, guaranteed, trust a 13-year-old raised with firearms over a 40-year-old who wasn't.

Open Borders Means Big Government

I am more than anything else, a classical liberal. Today, I’d be classified as a libertarian -- paleo, small “l,” something like that. One way in which I disagree with “libertarians” is about their support for open borders. I am absolutely against them. Why?

Because the only way a country can have open borders is if it has a huge federal government. Right now, we have a huge federal government, so we have open borders. It overrules the states, counties, cities, neighborhoods, and individuals.

One of the main reasons the federal government supports open borders is for cheap labor for wealthy people, who have captured the government and use it to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Many libertarians appear to be clueless about this exploitation, oftentimes not seeing it as exploitation, and instead see it as the “free market” (which it in no way is), just as they delude themselves that Wal-Mart, a State-supported corporation (as all corporations are creations of the State) is free market, instead of an exploitative corporation (I refer to these behemoths as Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations, the kind that finance both sides of a war).

Under a purely libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, society (which will never exist), all property would be private. Contrary to the belief the borders would be open, the truth is the exact opposite. There would not be mass immigration, because the property owners would not stand for it.

I was raised in an area with a bunch of farmers who owned very large tracts of land. I learned at a very young age I was to never trespass on their property without permission.

All those old boys had shotguns. When the government doesn't interfere, people will energetically defend their property.

One guy I knew decided to steal watermelons from a farmer. I know that sounds like something out of a country-and-western song, but he actually tried it one night. He got a charge of rock salt in his butt. He told me later that for a year he thought he would never have kids, because some of that rock salt landed in a very sensitive area, and that area wouldn't work for that year.

Then there was the farmer who owned the land on which my subdivision was built. One night many decades ago he caught a burglar breaking into his home. Years later he mentioned the incident to the police. The cops shrugged. Why dig the guy up? He's still under the intersection near my grade school.

When I was a teenager I used to hike and camp a lot. I met other hikers, who did a lot more hiking than I did. I stayed off of private property. They didn't, but in every case they asked permission to cross the property.

One hiker told me once the owner met him in his truck with a shotgun across his lap. Once he explained why he was hiking up the guy's driveway, he got his permission.
It may sound like these country people are crazy, but they're not. I still occasionally eat dinner with these people. They're friendly in a way most people never see. Neighbors walk in and out without knocking. I've seen them fall asleep on the floor in front of the TV after eating. No one said a word. But they will defend their property from strangers.

Occasionally libertarians tell me, "Well, immigrants would pay to cross the property." Say what? Where are millions of poor immigrants going to get the money to pay for such a thing? It also assumes the owners place money above all, that all people are what incompetent economists call "economic man." The only people I've seen do that are people who don't have any money. People who have money have other priorities than standing outside all night with a flashlight to catch immigrants and make them pay to cross their land.

I've had defenders of open borders tell me they want to destroy neighborhoods and other voluntary associations. This is libertarian? It sounds more like leftism to me, because the essence of leftism is the desire to destroy existing institutions in the naive belief all the "goodness" in human nature will just pop up.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn made the comment -- and I agree completely -- that leftists don't merely misunderstand human nature, they don't understand it at all.That's why I get comments about millions of immigrants paying to cross private property. Such a belief is literally in orbit because of its ludicrousness.
I also get the comment, "I should be able to hire whom I want." True. But how are those people they want to hire going to get there, when they have to cross other's property, and the property owners won't let them? My experience has also been people who make such comments don't have the money to hire anyone.

Some of the comments to me have been astoundingly dense. One nitwit told me immigrants would use the federal interstate system,, not understanding the interstate system is federal, was originally built to transport the military, and without the federal government there would have been no interstate system. Amazing! A “libertarian” supporting the federal government and not knowing why the interstate system was built!

My stupid pug has enough sense to defend what he thinks is his property. It's mine, but if he thinks it's his, that's fine with me. Even a Pomeranian will defend its territory. Yet the defenders of open borders think thousands if not millions of people will allow mass migration across their private property? What planet do these people live on, to believe such a thing?

Pat Buchanan said it best: "The peril of ideology is that it rarely comports with reality and is contradicted by history, thus leading inevitably to disillusionment and tragedy."

What am I supposed to think, when libertarians who claim to despise the federal government above all, support policies that can only exist because of that same despicable government? They live in a fantasyland.

Friday, October 8, 2010

The Eternal Lure of Mommy

Many women have a tendency to be natural socialists. I would not go so far as to say all women, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 90% of them.

To be accurate, there are men who are natural socialists. The late drunken fat slob Teddy Kennedy was one of them, as are whackos like Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer. Yes, I know...but Hillary is not a woman.

I'm sure that people in the past noticed this tendency in women. Hence, it is possibly the main reason that women have traditionally been denied the vote. When feminine socialism moves into the political (the political being defined as the attempt to rule others by force), it can do little more than destroy any society in which it becomes dominant -- and it especially destroys men through its attempt to turn them into little boys or babies. We need do no more than look any further than the Mommy State as it exists in America today.

Notice that I wrote, "moves into the political." I've come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as a good Leftism (and the feminine socialism of the Mommy State is pure Leftism). This Leftism belongs in one place only: the home. And even then it should be balanced by the father.

Friedrich Hayek, among others, has written that socialism is an attempt to take familial/tribal values and impose them on society. It's an attempt to make society "one big family." One of the biggest problems with this is that citizens remain children instead of growing up.

And what is one of the things that children do? They blame their problems on everyone else. Blaming everyone else for all your problems is one of the main characteristics not only of children, but of immature adults.

These days, this "blame everyone else" attitude has infected society in general: "It's the gun manufacturers' fault I shot someone...it's fast-food restaurants' fault I'm fat...it's tobacco companies' fault I have lung cancer...it's McDonald's fault I spilled hot coffee in my lap."

This is what happens when "family" values are imposed by force on society: many "adults" still have a great deal of child in them, always pointing their fingers at someone else and crying, "You made me do it!"

I understand the desire to impose family values on society. Ideally, it would be a society without envy, without violence, and without anxiety. It's why Leftists always want everyone to "share," even though this kind of sharing in any society can be imposed only by force. It's also why they are for gun control -- little kids (and certainly babies!) cannot be allowed to play with dangerous things. This desire for force, for power over others, is why Leftists are so enamored of the idol of the State.

Leftists believe if everyone is totally equal through sharing, then there would be no envy. Unfortunately, it is not possible for everyone to be totally equal. As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn pointed out in “Leftism Revisited,” the only way people can be totally equal is if they are totally identical. Two quarters are totally equal because they are identical. The same does not apply to people, and never will.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn has also written about Leftism as "the attempt to overthrow the Father," and uses as an example the "patriarchal" monarchies of Europe, which were overthrown by Leftists, thereby ushering in the genocide of the 20th century. He pointed out that not one monarchy went down fighting.

If people are supposed to be children under Leftism, who are supposed to be the parents? Those who plan and run societies, of course. This are the kind of people that Thomas Sowell mocked as "the Anointed." They are the people who believe that they are so intellectually and morally superior to everyone else it gives them the right to impose their vision on the unwashed masses.

A world without envy, without violence, without anxiety. Sure does sound good, doesn' t it? It actually does exist in one place: the womb. It is a place to which we cannot return.

I suspect this eternal lure of the Mommy State is, more than anything else, an attempt to return to the womb. It's an attempt to avoid not only envy, violence, and anxiety, but self-consciousness. After all, babies in the womb are unconscious. And in that unconsciousness, there is no envy, no violence, no anxiety. Just the safe, blissful oceanic feeling of being one with Mommy.

Most political scientists appear to be clueless about this desire to return to the womb, but good artists certainly aren't. In 1953 the writer Philip Jose' Farmer wrote a truly creepy story called -- yes, you guessed it--"Mother."

In it, an explorer on an alien planet ends up being trapped inside one of the planet's female inhabitants. She is little more than a gigantic immovable womb, in which everything he needs is given to him. At first he tries desperately to escape, but as time goes by, he gives up. And finally, when the Mother opens her "door" to allow him to leave...he won't go. He has returned to the bliss of the womb, escaping all the problems of the world. Of course, he gives up his self-consciousness.

This story not only describes the baby in the womb, but the way children relate to adults: what they want is just supposed to, somehow, "be there." Unfortunately, it's the way a lot of "adults" relate to the Mommy State. What they want is also just supposed to "be there." High-paying jobs should just "be there." Cheap, plentiful gasoline should just "be there."

The most scary of the Leftist mother/wombs is "Star Trek's” the Borg. The Borg cube is essentially a gigantic womb flying through space. The members of the Borg are equal and identical. They feel no pain, no envy, no anxiety. They are unconscious in the womb of the Borg cube.

In a stroke of genius, the creators of the Borg have as the ruler not a King, but a Queen. A mother. In the movie, it's played by Alice Krige, who portrays the Queen with equal combinations of regality, sensuousness and motherliness. It's truly frightening combination, because she is both repulsive and desirable. As is the Borg womb.

For men, this return to the womb means to cease to be men. This, unfortunately, is one of the functions of (leftist) feminism -- to literally make them children, even babies.

At the risk of coming across as a crackpot Freudian, feminism is the desire to castrate men, to return them to being little mama's boys or babies always dependent on the Mommy State. Leftism is ultimately an attempt to return everyone to being that original, unconscious fetus -- a return to the womb-like Garden of Eden, a place in which Adam and Eve were, like babies, utterly safe and unconscious of evil.

In literature the Borg Queen fits the archetype known as the Temptress. In the book, “Myths and Motifs in Literature,” the Temptress is described as follows: "Women seen as destroyer created many taboos as to where and when females might appear within the tribal territory, what foods they might touch, what relations they might have with men. But male fantasies about women were equally matched by her erotic attractiveness...women who were seductive and beautiful, but who would bring about the destruction of those they ensnared." This is a nearly perfect description of the Borg Queen.

We certainly shouldn't return to silly tribal taboos about who can go where and who can eat what, but it should be kept in mind that that myth about the "feminine as destroyer" is an accurate description of what happens when feminine-socialist Leftism moves into the political: it superficially appears to be attractive, but in the end it only destroys. Socialism is always the eternal Temptress: an unattainable womb that is eternally seductive, eternally destructive.

Bad Fantasies to Worse Realities

My last year in college a lieutenant colonel from the Army spoke to one of my larger classes. He wanted us to join. We'd be made officers, he said. We'd be "taken care of," he told us. As for the others (he meant the front-line grunts who did the fighting), he smiled as he commented, "we don't care what they want."

In a flash -- pow, just like that -- I understood what was going on. There had been riots over Vietnam. People had fled the country. The military had learned its lesson: you don't draft the smarter and the well-to-do and turn them into cannon fodder. Instead, you turn them into officers who don't have to fight, and put those of average, or less than average, intelligence in the front lines.

As I heard an Army sergeant once say, "Sorry people in front, good people in back." The less-intelligent, the military has decided, are expendable. They're thow-aways. The military does not care about them.

I don't know how many people joined from that class. I didn't. It didn't seem conscionable under the circumstances.

I wondered then, and still wonder now, how easily those destined to be cannon-fodder fall for such empty words as "patriotism," "honor," "defending your country," and "liberating the oppressed." I think using those words is how recruiters get them to join.

I know they fall for them a lot easier than those who could be officers.

Those words are just fantasies in people's heads. They don't mean much of anything. In 30 years the war in Iraq will be as forgotten as the "war" in Vietnam. A new generation won't understand it at all, just like the current one doesn't understand Vietnam. It might as well be the War of 1812 to them.

But what happens when those fantasies in their heads runs up against reality? I mean those who come back permanently maimed. What do words like "patriotism" and "honor" and "liberating the oppressed" mean then? What do they mean to those blind and missing limbs?

I suppose at first those wounded will try to convince themselves it was for a good cause. I understand that. No one wants to believe you ended up in a wheelchair for nothing. You want to think it was for a noble cause.

Some years ago I saw a TV interview with an Army Ranger who had been in the invasion of Panama. He ended up shot through the spine and permanently in a wheelchair. The interviewer asked him if it was worth it. He said, "Yes."

One of the reasons for the invasion was to stop the flow of drugs to the U.S. Yet now, more drugs come out of Panama than before the attack.

What comes after the permanently wounded can no longer say, "Yes"? Unending hate and bitterness because of what has been permanently lost? How many kids is a quadriplegic going to have? How many are even going to have a marriage?

There was a man in a small town I once worked in who had been clipped across the back of the neck in Vietnam. What clipped him was a bullet. He was 19 years old. Had he fallen forward in the rice paddy he was crossing, he would have drowned. He fell backward.

He spent the next 30 years lying in a bed before he died of pneumonia. I'm sure he was never visited by Robert McNamara or Lyndon Johnson or any of the other men who started the undeclared Vietnam non-war.

Of those coming back now who are permanently wounded, how many have been visited by those who are the most rabid for war, but did everything they could to avoid serving? Chickenhawk cowards like the Rush Limbaughs, the Max Boots, the David Frums and Dick Cheneys of the world?

You'll never see any of them visit the wounded. Ever. They don't want to see them. It intrudes on their fantasy world of believing the war was worth it. Seeing the maimed would pop the bubbles the live in. Instead, they'll mouth phrases like "heroes making the ultimate sacrifice" and asking God to bless them, and for people to pray for them. They'll do it from a distance, though. They'll try to avoid thinking about the fact those words won't make limbs grow back, or the blind see, or the crippled walk.

The bad fantasies for those in the front lines is a just war, patriotism, liberating the oppressed. The far worse realities for those who come back from those front lines permanently maimed is different. It is to be forgotten.

A War on Everything

If the saying, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called Children of God" is true, then what is the opposite saying? "Damned are the warmakers, for they shall be called Children of Lucifer"? It makes sense to me, if you want to consider the sayings the difference between the Creator and the Destroyer.

The word "war" is almost always used. And all these "wars" involve the coercion of the State, rather than the liberty and creativity of the free market. Isn't that what "war" means – the destructive involvement of the State? I never hear General Motors talk about "the war on Ford," as if two armies of workers would actually battle it out on a field somewhere, with mortars and machine-guns, over whether a Crown Victoria or a Caprice is the better car.

Let's assume, for the sake of illustration, that both sayings in the first paragraph are true, that they are Natural Law. This means any kind of "war" that involves the coercion of the State will never work and instead always destroy, whereas on the other hand anything that involves liberty and the free market will work because it creates. It's the difference between the Political Means of the State – theft, coercion and destruction – and the Economic Means of Society – liberty, creation and the free market.

Does the free market work perfectly? No, it doesn't. I know that. But the worst it works is a quantum leap so far above the best the State can do that the State can only be considered a danger to everything in which it gets involved.

Take the "war" on drugs as an example. The costs exceed the benefits, and always will. It's an attempt to change people from the outside in, through threats, violence, prison, destruction and death, in the manner of A Clockwork Orange. People only truly change from the inside out, when they change their hearts and minds. You can't permanently change anyone's mind for the better by beating them. If you can change it at all, it's always for the worse.

Making drugs illegal led to organized crime and a multi-billion-dollar black market that is funding terrorism against us. It has caused drugs to become smaller, more concentrated and more powerful, so they'll be easier to smuggle. It has put hundreds of thousands of people in prison for non-violent drug offenses. It has caused crime to go up, as users attempt to obtain the money for a fix. Those are some, but not all, of the results of the State's "war" on drugs.

Now imagine if we made "peace" on drugs, if they were legal. Organized crime involved with drug smuggling would disappear overnight, as would the smuggling itself. The concentrated drugs would still be around, thanks to the State. Once users have had a taste of crack, most aren't going to go back to chewing coca leaves. But at least they wouldn't be mugging people and burglarizing their houses to get the money for a fix. Crime would go down. The prisons would be half-empty. Those are some of the results of a "peace" on drugs.

Legalizing drugs wouldn't be perfect, because of imperfect human nature, but if they were legal, in just a few weeks the public would wonder why it hadn't been done decades before.

How about the "war on poverty"? It involves giving money to "poor" people. It hasn't done much good, because most of the poor have lousy characters. That's why they're poor. You could give them a million dollars, and most of them would again be poor a year later.

What the "war on poverty" has done is help break up families – or else prevent them from forming. Young unmarried women on welfare start having babies in their teens and are grandmothers by the time they are in their 30s. Boys in their teens, raised without fathers, form gangs and murder not only each other, but innocent bystanders. Those are some of the results of the "war" on poverty – generation after generation of the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons.

And if the State ceased its "war" on poverty? Without people choosing to live on welfare – because it wouldn't be there – illegitimacy would go down, as would the amount of predatory gangs and the murder rate. It's what happened in the recent past. It'll happen in the future, if we make "peace" on poverty and get the State out of the attempt to eradicate it.

For all practical purposes, every time the State touches something, it makes war on it, even if it means to make things better. The "war" on discrimination through affirmative action? It has instead set black against white, women against men, gay against straight, as each tries to use the political process to obtain power over the others. The road to Hell, obviously, is paved with good intentions.

When the personal becomes the political, you can be sure war is to follow. Making something political that should have never been political will always set people against each other. It sure won't make them get along. Instead, it makes war. Thus it always will be. It's liberty and the free market that allows people to get along, not the misguided interference of the State.