Libertarian

Scattershooting 230128

January 28, 2023 by tornado Leave a Comment

Happy new year! Several topics have cropped up of late, not demanding a full-form entry, so I’ll resurrect an old category for a 2023 kickoff encore. As usual, topics are highlighted, so you can skip what doesn’t interest you.

Scattershooting while wondering why so many otherwise intelligent ignoranti fall for obvious, textbook conformist cult tactics employed by purveyors of the secular “social justice” ideology…

AMAZING DALLAS FIREWORKS SHOW on NEW YEAR’S NIGHT: Several times, when not setting them off myself, I’d go up Reunion Tower to watch Trinity River fireworks shows and assorted pyros doing their thing around town on July 4 & New Year’s. Now they’re launched from the tower, with lighted drones in formation as accompaniment. Spectacular! I ought to go see and shoot this sometime.

‘TWITTER FILES” REPERCUSSIONS and SO-CALLED PANDEMIC “MISINFORMATION”: Over the past couple months, several independent journalists, with the full cooperation of current Twitter owner Elon Musk, have exposed a hardline left-wing censorship agenda of Twitter users and linked content, by the corporation, in collusion with high-level government bureaucracy (mainly but not entirely FBI). This includes labeling pandemic content, by licensed medical doctors and scientists, as “misinformation”. This also includes information from peer-reviewed studies that was flagged or relegated to sight unseen. Yesterday’s ”conspiracy theories” sometimes do become today’s news. They affirm comments I made to some folks many months ago about non-expert bots and poorly educated basement dwellers—censoring posts from real-life scientists and physicians in fields such as immunology, epidemiology, virology, and general medical practice. Some low-wage tech contractor in the Philippines, nor high-level company executives without medical degrees, have no business censoring degreed, licensed physicians on medical topics! Yet these were the tactics social media employed to limit what you were being told about a crisis situation to Big Brother’s official Party line—even when the line clearly was flawed then or turned very wrong later. Thank God for watchdogs, gadflies and leakers — even if it’s the new owner dishing it out on prior management at great cost to himself.

MATURITY, SELF-RESTRAINT AND DISCIPLINE ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Speaking of Twitter, a libertarian I follow there, Curtis Scoon, posted these wise words: “I don’t want to be the person on social media who has something controversial to say about every headline just for attention. It’s definitely close to being an ambulance chasing personal injury attorney.” (My words now) …or virtue signaling to either spectral extreme. I have huge respect for such self-discipline & maturity. I aim the same. Not every topic needs instant opinion from every person. I’ve expressed my extended thoughts on this before, in this space, with, “Silence is Not Complicity nor Agreement.” I’ll comment on the issues of my choosing, at the time and place of my choice (and nobody else’s). The context was “hot takes” on the Tyre Nichols incident in Memphis. There’s more to it, but next is what I’ll say for now, in this medium of my choice:

DISTILLING the TYRE NICHOLS KILLING to the SIMPLE PLAIN TRUTH: Often, videos like the Tyre Nichols police-brutality footage from Memphis (which I won’t post here) miss crucial “before” context. In this specific case, I don’t think such context matters. I’m having a hard time imagining what “context” would justify treating any handcuffed man with such relentless, 5-on-1 savagery — basically 5 strong dudes tossing the guy back and forth between each other like a medicine ball and taking turns slugging him full force. No excuse for that, whatsoever. Even if he had violently resisted before being restrained (and that info wasn’t available from the video I saw)…once handcuffed, that’s that. His wrists are locked together with steel, behind his back, and he can’t use his arms. That was basically a gang-beating of a helpless man, in this case the gang being cops. These now ex-cops have been charged with murder and official abuse. The justice system is working as it should here. Unfortunately, this incident is being spun every which way and twisted like taffy by people with bigger social agendas. What it is, plain and simple, is homicide, and any and all who commit homicide (including cops on duty, regardless of how they look) must be held responsible.

COMMON GOTCHA AGAINST ECONOMIC LIBERTARIANISM ISN’T a GOTCHA AFTER ALL: I had to laugh recently at a stupid meme some airheaded male celebrity sent out, thinking it was a “gotcha”. The meme implied libertarians are hypocrites because Ayn Rand accepted her Social Security checks. Clearly this wasn’t the product of a critical thinker, or much of a thinker at all. You see, those checks were her money anyway, extorted from her for years before in taxes. So she had no reason (and neither do you) to feel at all guilty about getting some of it back. Too bad she, and you, couldn’t have just kept it in the first place, instead of being forced to process it through a massive, inefficient, distant, detached bureaucracy that skims so much off. And I’m still waiting in futility for anyone, anywhere, to show me where personal entitlement spending of any sort is an enumerated Federal power in the literal, black-and-white words of our Constitution.

DO YOU HAVE STUDENT LOANS? PAY THEM. This entry is brought to you by tough love from a fellow (former) debt holder. And not just any ex-student, but one from poverty: first-generation college graduate here, raised inner-city poor in Dallas with no air conditioning, who remembers with razor-sharp clarity the sounds of wailing sirens and the feel of roaches crawling up sweaty legs many summer nights. There’s not a college student anywhere in this land who has a thing new to say to me about being “economically disadvantaged”. I arrived at university with assets valued in two digits, not counting a beater car that was worth maybe $200, no parental aid whatsoever, and scholarships for which I had busted my tail, but were still woefully insufficient. I left grad school with even less: $16 to my name, and five figures in student loans. Inflation-adjusted, they match magnitudes from many sob stories I hear today. I paid off every last one in under 10 years by working rotating shifts, in a real career, for which my major of choice was chosen specifically to prepare me, using something called foresight and something else called sacrifice. Hint: my major wasn’t “gender studies” or similar useless bullshit. Unless one was targeted by illegally predatory lending, which I do oppose, I have a very hard time feeling sorry for anyone who demands that government (in other words, all of us but not him or her self) pay off debts he/she voluntarily chose to accrue. There’s a word for that, and it’s “freeloading”. My message, therefore, is clear: Yes, it is a loan. Pay it back. I’ve been there. I did, and I’m nothing special. So can you. Make better choices.

THE FED, BRETTON WOODS, GOLD STANDARD, and the RISE of CHINA: Finally, here’s a provocative, yet deeply historically informed, long-form essay by the aforementioned Curtis Scoon on how the Federal Reserve came to be, and its relationship with both American decline and the rise of Red Commie China as an economic and military power. I don’t necessarily buy into every detail he posits, but there’s a lot of basic truth here. This is well worth 15 minutes of time to read carefully and consider critically.

My Brutally Honest Position on Climate

December 19, 2018 by tornado Leave a Comment

I want to make a brief and categorical statement on climate in response to bullshit rumors about me that trickle back.

I have no substantive dispute with peer-reviewed research on the thermal trends observed so far. As such: In no way, shape or form am I a “climate denier”. The overall global climate has warmed in recent decades and probably will continue to do so in the next several decades. Period. There you go. Rumors debunked.

That said, I quite deliberately take no specific positions on future scenarios (due to uncertainties inherent to atmospheric numerical modeling), nor advocacies as to what specific to do about it, if anything. I stand mostly in the sidelines of that screaming match, on purpose. Yes, I sometimes read papers and articles by an array of scientists, out of scientific curiosity, and laugh or snooze at some of the absurdities thrown out from time to time by both non-scientist pundits, and a small cadre of scientists who engage in sociopolitical extremism and conflicts of interest related to their own research.

Otherwise I’m not wasting time with it anymore here, after this post. I have better things to do, namely live my life the best I know, and forecast and research what I deal with: localized weather (specifically tornadoes and other severe storms). As such, I say little about climate on social media because I have little meaningful to say.

I only will speak to one generality, as a sociopolitical conservative and libertarian: Overall, for all the societal troubles we do have morally and ethically (more later), poverty is lower, crime is lower, and base mean income levels higher worldwide than ever. Why is this?

Look no further than free-market solutions, science and technology (and the medical and logistical advancements that have arisen therewith). Without burdensome governmental regulation, the free market, scientific ingenuity and technological advances, as with every other major societal challenge, will allow us to adapt to whatever happens with the climate. This is an optimistic view based on the benefits already reaped from technology. Any failure to adapt will be related to the extent that tech is handcuffed by regulation in its ability to respond to whatever climate may do. [We are, after all, a tropical species.]

In an earthly, material way, I am confident free-market technology and innovation will “save us” to the extent we need saving. Outside earthly material concerns, the ethical, spiritual and moral decline (including the cancer of socialism and the mass abdication of Judeo-Christian Biblical morals) is far more likely to be our downfall as a civilization! Not the climate, to which humanity can adapt quite well if we let focused sci-tech (especially but not exclusively private sector) on it, and not just fling taxpayer money about willy-nilly. Throwing money at problems doesn’t solve them. Nor does forcible wealth redistribution at governmental gunpoint. Instead, focused ingenuity and innovation do.

As for energy, I favor a gradated, economically neutral to gainful, “all of the above” approach toward less-polluting sources. Those who are advocating total cessation of fossil-fuel use are welcomed to do so: put their money where their mouth is and stop using them right now, today, otherwise it’s pure sanctimony and hypocrisy. I give those who advocate an end to fossil fuels, yet still use gasoline or jet fuel in any form for their own personal transport, no credibility in the argument whatsoever. Not to mention those who use petroleum-based plastics or lubricants in any form in their lives!

And that is my position, as someone who is absolutely, positively, unquestionably, and indisputably not a “climate denier”. Warming is underway. Let tech have at it. Otherwise…

I simply have more important things to concern myself with in life, and don’t see good reason to prioritize nor get radical about it, aside from my trust in science and technology to offer economically viable adaptive strategies. Most of the arguments I see flying back and forth on this issue, from all sides, are banal, repetitive, unoriginal, and uninteresting. Let’s get real: this issue bores me. After this post and a previous (more detailed) offering of advice to all concerned, I’m done with it.

See, I am a fiercely independent thinker and follow nobody’s herd mentality. My positions are right here, in your face. If you don’t like my brutally honest ambivalence about how to specifically respond to climate, as I often say: your problem, not mine. Deal with it.

One final quip: isn’t it curious that the only home in my neighborhood with either solar PV panels and solar water belongs to a socially conservative, fiscally conservative, governmentally libertarian Christian couple: my wife and I. Looks like I put my money where others’ mouths are, even if they don’t. Damnedest thing, huh? Go stick the “denier” garbage where the sun don’t shine.

Example of Leftist Anti-Freedom Tactics

September 7, 2018 by tornado Leave a Comment

The First Amendment does not say “except” or “unless”. In fact it exists specifically to protect peaceful assembly and controversial and offensive speech from governmental intrusion.

After school, on a public (key word there, public) sidewalk next to the Downington STEM Academy in PA, Christian teen siblings Lauren and Connor Haines held signs protesting abortion, including one with a picture of a dead aborted baby, while peacefully discussing the issue with passersby. Their assistant principal Dr. Zach Ruff came out harassing, threatening and cussing them, while using his large girth to stand in front and impede viewing of their message.

The school authority’s message: “You can go to hell where they are, too. They’re not children. They’re cells. … I’m as gay as the day is long and twice as sunny. I don’t give a f*** what Jesus tells me about what I should and should not be doing. … You do not have my permission to speak and engage. You are harassing public school students, and I will call the police if you don’t shut up.”

Full 18-minute video:

During his assault on the First Amendment, the self-described “twice as sunny” principal (under PA law) assaulted Connor too, by getting within inches of his face and trying to rip a sign from him. That’s not all. Following the assistant principal’s pathetic example of bullying and threats, other students and parents (!) engaged in mob-scale harassment by sending Connor, Lauren and their families hundreds of messages, some profane.

These are the tactics of oppressors and anti-freedom mobs, folks: herd-mentality threats, intimidation, and authoritarian bullying.

Fortunately, this time, by eliciting legal aid from legal-defense nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom (one I am proud to support tangibly), the good guys courageously prevailed over hateful authoritarian bullies. Ultimately the school had to apologize and acknowledge the violated First Amendment freedoms of Lauren and Connor, the vice principal was suspended, then resigned, and Lauren and Connor are free as they should be to exercise their free-expressive rights on public property.

Unfortunately it doesn’t end there. This is but a microcosm of public-school and college incidents of First Amendment violation all across the nation, hundreds of them and adding up yearly. With his PhD and “educational” background, Ruff very well could get a job elsewhere around students, where the same bigoted anti-Christian bullying can begin anew. And he’s far, far, far from the only one with that mentality. Protectors of freedom must be vigilant and call out the destroyers of freedom at every turn in this era of hate and intolerance of peaceful dissent.

You see, freedom is our greatest earthly gift and is God-ordained. Support and protect it, even when people freely express things that bother or offend you. No question, I wholly endorse and approve of Connor and Lauren’s message, and defend their right to say it. Even as an open and unapologetic social and fiscal conservative, I also am a governmental libertarian to the core, and defend the right of those peacefully expressing messages I don’t approve, to do so in the public arena…yes, even left-wing messages! Freedom is for all, not just liberals, conservatives or “moderates” (whatever that is…seems everybody from far left to far right thinks he/she is a moderate). This includes artistic freedom from the vicious viceroys of political correctness.

I fully am using my freedom of expression to post this…and folks, it has been happening for decades and is not going to stop. I have my ideals, opinions, and biases as well. I absolutely do preferentially post instances of left-wing violations of freedom, in large part to counter the intense bias of most mass media against the right, and against Christians. So be it. As long as I breathe, and as long as the left violates others’ rights (anymore, a given) there’s plenty more where this came from. Deal with it.

Don’t like my expressions of free speech, or others’? Ignore it, or argue non-violently. Don’t weaponize authority to squash others’ God-given and Constitutionally codified right to free expression! If you do, expect a well-earned backlash in support of freedom, and expect to lose — ideologically for starters, and in court if necessary.

Want to fight ideas you disapprove? Use facts, reason, logic, and levelheaded, rational counter-argument. Never threats, intimidation, bullying, or violence! And yes, that applies from the President (hardly a role model here) right on down to some spiteful vice principal, and ultimately, you and me.