The Enlightenment Reactionary’s Observations on Life #2

Stephanie had a big surprise for her husband on their wedding night.

1. Women will always hack off their hair and switch to frumpy clothes after you marry, then claim they just wanted to look nice for you.
2. Auto mechanics will always think that you’re an idiot.
3. Liberals will club you in the head repeatedly in you refuse to join their peace protest.
4. Radical Liberals abhor violence and are willing to commit any act of violence to prevent it.
5. Environmentalists firmly believe that by burning SUVs, multi-million dollars homes, ski resorts, industrial sites, and other places of employment constitutes helping their fellow man.
6. Liberals who successfully sue tobacco companies will celebrate by firing up a joint and holding the smoke until they faint.
7. Cashiers at fast-food restaurants can’t speak English.
8. Cashiers anywhere are not hired for their math skills.
9. Complaining about cashiers does no good because the manager can’t speak English.
10. In California you can entered into a long-term intimate relationship with a goat but adjusting the fast idle screw on your carburetor will get you the death penalty.
11. Celebrities are unimportant people who make their living pretending to be important people.
12. People who violently oppose petroleum drilling, transportation, exploration, pipelines, tankers, storage facilities, and refineries bitch the most about high fuel prices.
13. People who live in states with the most punitive anti-business laws attribute their unemployment to corporate greed and government conspiracies.
14. Nobody will ever live long enough to see an unscrewed-up order at a fast-food restaurant drive-through.
15. Liberals will always believe that the only justification for having a military is as a jobs program.
16. Drivers in New Mexico have their turn-signal levers welded in the off position.
17. Women with large breasts want small ones, those with small breast want large ones, medium-sized women can go either way, and they all want you to pay for the surgery.
18. Men will never end their quest for a virgin nymphomaniac.
19. Ex-wives will still call you and demand that you do chores around what used to be your house.
20. Cars only break down when you take a short-cut through the most dangerous part of the city.

Slamming Keith Olbermann

I’ve been wanting to do a thorough emasculation on MSNBC’s resident nutjob. Unfortunately, it’s been more difficult than you might expect. The man is beyond parody. Its seems that just about anything that would make for a good skewering has already been done by the smirking fool–and then bragged about.

Do Liberals Ever Listen to Themselves?

I’ve got to tell you I’m a little baffled. Hillary Clinton’s own party is trying to burn her to the ground for a statement concerning her campaign and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. I despise the woman, and all of Joe Kennedy’s foul creche of demon spawn, but give me break—and her for that matter. At this point, I’m pretty sure the reason they’re ripping on Hillary is that she broke with the sacred texts of liberal protocol and made a coherent, cogent, rational, and worst of all—on topic comment.

Conversely, we have Barack Obama whose every third word is guaranteed to cause the electoral equivalent of the China Syndrome. But yet it doesn’t. Obama has committed scads of verbal gaffes, any one of which should have been sufficient to send him to the card table with the little kids while the grownups continued the campaign. But yet they don’t.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ve been waiting in vain for 57-state-gate to take its toll. It’s bad enough when Lefties have inane beliefs that could negatively impact the country; not believing the Constitution means what it explicitly says comes immediately to mind. But when the presumptive nominee for the country’s largest political party doesn’t know the difference between states, territories, and possessions, or how many of them there are, then something something is wrong in the state of Denmark (rumored to be an island in Lake Superior).

Poor George Allen, one of the most promising early candidates for the Republican nomination had his campaign crumple faster than the French army after uttering a word made up on-the-spot for comedic effect. If you’ll recall, Allen humorously dubbed a spy from a rival campaign “Macaca”, presumably to let both the spy and his supporters know that knew he was there. The non-event immediately became the event of the hour, day, week, month, and year. Strangely, the story vanished overnight after this strong contender was eliminated as a threat to the Liberal Democrat Politburo. We all know the controversy would still be raging if Allen had hung in there until now.

If the opposition and its lap dogs in the media are going to have a double standard, is it too much to ask that you at least try to be sneaky about it?

Left-Wing Wasteland

Because it’s time for another song parody. I would actually record these but the only musicians I’m friends with are Left-wingers.

sung to the tune of Baba O’Reilly

Left-Wing Wasteland

Out here on the streets
After Left-wing conceits
We push our cars to keep them moving
But we’ve got no rights
Humanity’s a blight
If we’re gone, the Earth’s improving

Don’t whine
Don’t waste your time
Finally, Left-wing wasteland

Daughter, take my hand
Let’s run while we can
Don’t look behind
It’s just Atlas Shrugging
Now the Ummah is here
Children tremble in fear
The Chosen Ones are raging
Our girls’ hopes are ending

Left-wing wasteland
It’s just a Left-wing wasteland
A Left-wing wasteland

Ted Kennedy Near Miss

For a while this morning, it looked as if Ted Kennedy had stroked out. As was to be expected, laudatory news coverage was broadcast everywhere, even on Fox News, and as fawning as the coverage on Fox was I shudder to think how obsequious and drooling the Democratic Party lap dog networks were.

As it turns out, the strokes were actually seizures and it appears the Senator will recover fully. As a human being, I am pleased. As an American I’m a little disappointed. Anything that brings an end to Ted Kennedy’s political career is a good thing for America. Few people alive today have done more to destroy this country than Massachusetts’ favorite imbiber. Just about any anti-American would have been pleased to call the Senator’s 1965 Immigration Bill punch in Uncle Sam’s throat the capstone of his career. Teddy, of course, was just getting warmed up.

I’m a passionately loyal American, but even I get exasperated at the obtuseness of my fellow citizens at times. After some 50+ years of Kennedy family antics and escapades, a significant portion of my countrymen and women still consider the Kennedy clan to be the American equivalent of royalty. The sad truth is that as long as Joe Kennedy’s horde of descendants stalk the Earth, no freedom that Americans enjoy is safe.

John McCain and Global Warming

I just watched the focus group testing of John McCain’s new global warming ad. In it he assures somebody, most likely not his own team, that he believes in global warming.

I’ll take a different tact on this just for a change. Believing in climate change is like believing in sunrises and sunsets. They all happen, have happened, and will continue to happen. It’s not all that daring just because the time frame is different. As I’ve posted elsewhere, even if true, the effects of global warming will be the slowest moving catastrophe in recent history. In one of the breathlessly panicked forecasts I’ve read we’re told that sea level will soon rise by a fraction of an inch a year. This would allow more than enough time for a responsible government led by grownups (read that ‘not liberals’) to respond. The people could evacuate entirely, move to a higher elevation, or (far more likely) postpone the inevitable by a massive spending project on a system of dikes and levees.

Even if none of this works and coastal cities are destroyed, don’t cry! Celebrate! You’re environmentalists for Gaia’s sake! You hate cities anyway. This also has the additional benefit of making the land you bought out in the boondocks, to get away from the human blight, into highly desirable beach property. You can sell it on the sly, and become filthy rich, all while hypocritically condemning the capitalist system. You know! Just like all of those people you slavishly vote for.

More seriously, few people I know seriously deny climate change. The climate has always changed, and will always continue to do so. The question is whether humans caused it. The, answer of course not. It’s an ongoing process. Well then, do humans make it worse? Probably, but only to an insignificant level. About the same way that coupling one extra boxcar to a 100-car train makes the wreck worse if it jumps the tracks. In other words, it only matters if you addicted to shame.

I think maybe Obama and McCain should share a campaign slogan this cycle: We’re screwed in ‘08.

How To Impersonate a Liberal

I was out running some errands earlier today and listening to Michael Medved while I did it. Now, Michael is far from my favorite Conservative, but not my least favorite either. I didn’t hear what set them off, but I listened to a series of irate liberals call in and berate him. One went so far as to call him stupid. Ironically, in each case the caller had misunderstood Medved’s point and were railing against, not what he said, but rather what they thought he had said. Even worse, even if he had said those things, their refutations consisted mostly of ad hominem attacks and overwrought comparison of apples to oranges. To his credit, Medved answered their rants as if they were rational human beings.

Still, it all reminded me of the old joke from way back when:

Q: How do you impersonate a Liberal?

A: Spend a lot of time talking about complicated world issues that you don’t understand.

I’ve Returned

I’ll provide a brief explanation of my absence for my long-distance friends. The financial disaster to which I referred in the previous post was a good old-fashioned case of getting fired. It came as a big surprise because I was the only one following state and federal law where I was working. When I became frustrated enough to complain to the boss, I was told I was just jealous and the most egregious violator was held up to me as an example to emulate. Further complaints only got me tagged as racist in addition to “just jealous”. Finally, the day came when our new supervisor sidles up to me and tells me, with a literal wink, “You don’t have to be good, Don. You just have to look good.” I told him that, since it was a matter of public safety, I wasn’t going to cut corners or falsify documents and if things didn’t change I would report him to the authorities. In my good-natured naivety, I actually felt bad about having to get so tough with him. So, to no one’s surprise but my own, when I arrived at work the next day I was beset by management, whisked into the office, and immediately fired for “threatening to kill everyone the previous day.” I was relieved of my keys and shown the door. Truly, no good deed ever goes unpunished.

As you might expect this introduced an additional element of stress into my marriage. When we married, we were both relatively low-paid educators with similar political and social beliefs. Among those beliefs was that the necessity of a voucher system if the public education system was going to even approach functionality. As luck would have it, she took a “desperation” job with every intention of leaving the next year. It is a charter school dedicated to giving kids a “second chance”. As with every left-wing institution, the slogan is deceptive. I believe in second chances. God knows I’ve needed a few. However, to even get sent to this institution of “learning” a kid is usually on something like his 37th chance, and should have long since been in jail. My wife was of considerably higher quality than what they usually got and she skyrocketed through the ranks-and pay scale. Soon she was earning four times my income. This was when she “started growing balls” as my brother would say. The 80-100 hour workweeks were only the beginning. My lovely started gaining weight-a lot of it. By the end she tipped the scales at about 380 pounds. Even as bad as this all was, the worst part was what her constant immersion in the leftist world was doing to her. At one point she informed me that she was no longer a Republican, she was a Christian Socialist. Why, you might ask? It’s easy. She informed me that if one reads the Bible, and actually understands it, you’ll be forced to admit that Christianity IS Socialism, and that Socialism simply IS Christianity put into practice.

I decided that, since what is good for the goose is good for the gander, I would make some unilateral changes of my own. I would look for a new job, but I would be more selective and not take the first thing that came along and I would use the resultant slack time to work on my frequently neglected novel. This introduced two new forms of tension: First, my wife bitterly resented the loss of income, even though towards the end my job provided less than 20% of the family budget; Second, she feared embarrassment should my book ever be published. All the more ironic since this particular book was her idea. You see, I had been writing another book when we met. During that time, for some reason that I have long since forgotten, the works of a certain obscure author came up. I was familiar with him and my wife expressed curiosity so we obtained some of his books. She only read a few of them because she found them to be poorly written (a frequent complaint) but she did find the concepts and themes presented to be “provocative” and “stimulating”. Some time later, she requested that I temporarily abandon the book I was writing and start a new book based on similarly provocative and stimulating themes, but do a better job with the basics. Eager to please her, I agreed. Now comes the stressor. After over 3 years of writing and rewriting, researching material, extensive note-taking, a glossary, multiple appendices, and writing numerous back-stories, she announces that she wants me to abandon the project. Why? Because being associated with the story, even obliquely as the wife of the author, would be professionally embarrassing and could possibly harm her career. Naturally, I told her that after 500 pages of manuscript and nearly as many of ancillary material the answer wasn’t just “no”, It was “Hell, no!”

There is more. There always is. No doubt I could have handled things better, but then I could have done much worse. Regardless, things went along like that for awhile, then my sweetie filed for divorce. She could have handled that a little better, and she couldn’t have picked worse timing. I won’t lie, it hurt. It hurt a lot. Still, the 380-pound thing took a lot of the sting out of it.

I took the opportunity to take stock of my life, because that’s what one does at such times. For the first time in 20+ years, I had nothing to tie me to the place I was in. I decided that was as good a time as any to go back to my hometown to make a fresh start. I had left because I hated small town life, and I still do. I just have come to hate city life even more. Besides, my son and grandchildren are here and I felt an impulse to be a more involved granddad. So I moved home. It was a good decision, but I did overestimate the demand for middle-aged, overeducated white guys. I’ve been living “pillar to post” as they say for several months, but I’ve finally bagged a job. I’m looking forward to resuming blogging without having to pull punches for the sake of my ex.

Have a good one, folks.

Beware of the Unelectable

I’ve been practically rubbing my hands with malicious glee over some of the revelations about Barack Hussein Obama. Why am I so delighted? Because just the little bit that has already been revealed is enough to sink his campaign a 100 times over. Even better, such facts will not discourage the Democrats from making him their candidate. In fact, in their Bizarro World brains it might even encourage it.

Then reality sinks in. Recent history has shown that a terrifying percentage of the electorate is dumber than a Los Angeles jury. Total unelectability is no impediment to getting elected. The election of 1996 proved that. Only months before he won a second term the pundits and talking heads were debating whether Clinton was relevant after the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. His polls were in the tank and he was routinely described as unelectable. Instead, the country was blighted with 4 more years of the reprobate.

I no longer make predictions. Up till 1996 I had a perfect record. Starting in 1968 as a second-grader I successfully predicted the outcome of every election, including Clinton’s first victory. I based the latter on the sad realization that a whole generation of voters had no recollection of Jimmy Carter and “malaise”. Ah, but predicting 1996 wasn’t even a strain. It simply was outside the realm of possibility for Clinton to get a second term. Yet he did.

That is why I would encourage you not to get complacent. We still live in that Bizarro World that produces two-term Clintons.  We must be because the only two candidates that I believed had the slightest business in the White House are already gone, leaving only liberals and liberal wannabes for the most part. I fear this is going to be another “lesser of two evils” election. Yet again, instead of getting to vote for, we’ll be voting against.

Apologies to Those Who Stop By

I apologize for dropping out of sight. I had an unexpected financial disaster which greatly complicated my life. Additionally, I got wrapped up in working on a novel that I’ve been writing and couldn’t bear to stop because I was definitely on a roll. I’ve got about 500 pages done and I’m beginning to think I’m going to pull it off. I’ll try to post more often in the future. In the meantime, go read my response to the Lefty loon who commented on “The Poor Don’t Pay Squat”.

The Liberal Lexicon: “E” Words and Phrases

The Definitions

1. Education—indoctrination.
2. Elderly, The— aged saps who will vote for you consistently if sufficiently terrified.
3. Enemy—you.
4. English—Language used by capitalist imperialist aggressors to ruthlessly suppress native cultures of subjugated people. Should be used as little as possible because it just encourages conservatives.
5. Enlightenment—historically, a period of intellectual and spiritual darkness perpetuated by European white males against the rest of humanity; as a mental state, the realization that liberals were right all along.
6. Entitlement Programs— bribes for for their constituents.
7. Equal Time— giving liberal commentators 90% of air time and print in the media.
8. Evil—Used to describe people and things that are wicked, malicious, viscious, and willfully harmful to other people, just as in English; however, it is only used after the person or thing has already been defeated by conservative action.
9. Expert—liberal who doesn’t blow his lines when reading off of our script.
10. Exploitation— economic growth.

Open Letter to September 12th People

There can only be peace when they will start to love their children more than they hate us.

Golda Meir

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!

Charles Mackay

I had an unusual and revealing conversation with a friend back during the days of my horribly misspent youth. It was at the beginning of some momentous Republican shaking and moving, probably the election or Reagan in 1980 or the Gingrich Revolution in 1994, I forget which. During this conversation my friend and his spouse were complaining of the hostile rhetoric that was coming from the Conservative Republican side and the lack of a willingness to compromise. In short, the Right was kicking ass and taking names as we used to say in the military. I asked them if they had heard anything they had thought reasonable and they responded by singing the praises of George Will and William F. Buckley.

Now as fine as those two gentleman are, and I’ve read hundreds of their columns, these are a couple of guys who were “Born to be Mild”. Will and Bill are to politics what your grandfather was to your lifestyle in the 1970s. You remember him? The guy that calmly and rationally explained to you why you shouldn’t drink, smoke, carouse, and be promiscuous? Afterwards you smiled, hugged the man, chuckled at his naive innocence and went out partying. Until your non-rational, non-calm father caught you and royally kicked your ass.

So, naturally I explained to my friends that, though we would prefer civil discourse, we were tired of being a perpetual minority party and had realized that we had to get down in the mud and fight for our beliefs kicking and gouging as necessary. In short, we had to act like Democrats to do battle with Democrats. My friend gave me a horrified look and said, I kid you not, “No! Don’t stoop to our level!”

So, to all of you September 12th people, nice is for peacetime and this is not peacetime. I’ve heard the United States compared to a lifeboat that takes in as many survivors as it can. Well, as as anyone who didn’t go to an urban public school can tell you, if you overload the lifeboat it will capsize, so after a point you have to turn people away no matter how much it breaks your heart. Similarly, if you come to find that someone has an icepick and is poking holes in the lifeboat, you throw his ass overboard, and don’t get heartbroken about it. Now, the problem with liberals and/or Democrats, as you well know, is that they’re all about the guy with the icepick.

I know that these are our fellow citizens, for better or for worse, and that you would rather come to some sort of accommodation with them. Who wouldn’t? Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. Of course one should still be civil where possible, but if civility means compromised national security, then civility is a luxury we can’t afford.

Most people have had any number of epiphanies in their lifetimes. Occasionally, some of these are virtual fist-in-the-face experiences where your realize something earthshaking or life changing, something that you just can’t believe you didn’t see before. It can be any number of things: your girlfriend has been exploiting you, that troublesome spouse never had any intention of changing, your parents have been manipulating you with intentionally bad advice, or maybe just that you were in the wrong career for the wrong reasons. Someone may have warned you along the way, or maybe you even “knew” it, but with a little “k”, on an intellectual, but superficial level. I’m talking about the experience when you finally KNOW it to the very marrow in your bones.

My most recent experience with that last phenomenon had to be with one of Rush Limbaugh’s favorite phrases. That being, “These people have to be defeated.” The people in question being the Left in general and, in our context here, September 10th people in particular. I’ve heard him say it for years now and I’ve always known he was right, but I knew with a little “k”. I figured if I stayed informed, voted for the best candidates, and had the courage to confront people spreading lies, then I was doing my part. In the years after the horrifying events of that day I’ve suffered from quite a bit of cognitive dissonance from watching the Left take undeniable facts that support no-brainer conclusions and arrive at insanely wrong answers. I just couldn’t understand it. That was, of course, precisely the point.

The rhetoric of the Left isn’t meant to be understood. It only has to confuse long enough for them to accomplish their goals. Logic and reason aren’t goals to be sought and upheld. They are barriers to fulfilling their whims and fortunately, for them, can be circumvented. We have a weakness, we logic, reason, and rationality types. We think that deep down in everybody there is a logic, reason, and rationality person just dying to get out. Unfortunately, the modern Leftist is a creature of pure emotion who genuinely considers a poor sap like you to be handicapped with “rigid linear thinking”, or as you and I call it, sanity. So what’s the epiphany? What is it that you need to KNOW?

You need to know that almost all of these people are beyond reach. You need to know that minds are like concrete, once they’ve set it is almost impossible to reshape them in any fundamental way. Furthermore, the longer it has been since the mind has set the more unyielding it becomes because you’re not just fighting an incorrect idea, you’re fighting an emotional creature that is totally invested in that idea. When people even begin to suspect that the thing they’ve dedicated 30, 40, or 50 years of their lives to is a total sham, the mind slams shut. This is a defense mechanism like the ones you see where the 70-year old scientist who was barking up the wrong tree on his research dedicates all his remaining years to denouncing the 30-year old scientist who saw the mistake. So it is with the Left. Do you really expect someone on the Left to stand up and admit, “Wow! We spent trillions and trillions of taxpayer dollars on antipoverty programs and increased poverty. Man, is there ever egg on our face!”?

So, if you want to live in a world where terrorism and rape rooms are the fault of terrorists and rapists instead of Western Civilization, KNOW this, Liberal Democrats are like zombies, you can’t do anything for them, but you can keep them from eating the brains of other innocent people. To that end I’m planning on going on an indefinite hiatus from just bitching and try to find someplace to actually”do” for the cause. I suggest you do the same thing.

Sad, But True #4

Dating a liberal will make you reconsider your opinions—on dating.

The Liberal Lexicon: “D” Words and Phrases

The Definitions

1. D—the grade university humanities professors award to self-identified conservative students after they finally learn to keep their mouths shut.
2. Daughter—any female offspring that you are required to support and whose mind and reproductive organs belong to us.
3. Death Penalty:— The immoral taking of life as punishment for murder, rape, treason, and other forms of self-expression. The only known legitimate use of the death penalty was the execution of a multitude of capitalist pigs committing foul deeds in two 110-storey office buildings.
4. Democracy—having recounts until we get the results that we want.
5. Democratic Rebuttal—tantrum.
6. Dialogue—begging our enemies for mercy.
7. Diplomacy—the process of making Faustian bargains.
8. Discrimination—freedom of association.
9. Disenfranchisement—when Democracts lose election because our constituents are either too stupid to use a voting machine or put their eyes out with the punch card stylus.
10. Diversity— the condition of various races and ethnicities all having the same opinions.

Necromongers

I don’t know how many of you folks out there are science fiction or fantasy fans. If you’re not, I think it’s your loss. Despite what your bitchy old maid English teacher told you in Jr. High School, it’s just as legitimate a literature as any other and asks the big questions about the “human condition” just as well as any other, sometimes better. After all, what’s more important than the future and the genre provides an excellent opportunity for “if this goes on” kinds of stories.

Naturally, the message people draw from these stories depend a lot on what they bring to the story with them. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy is a classic example. It is excellently written with a depth and attention to detail one seldom sees. Virtually everyone who reads the books insists on seeing them as allegorical, i.e. one extended metaphor from cover to cover. I’ve met people who see an object lesson on abandoning traditional values, others who see the Second World War acted out in a commentary on fascism, still other see an environmental angle with the Ents. Lots of us have met hippy folk in the 60s and 70s quite convinced the stories foretold the peace, love, and dope generation. So much so that they insist the Hobbit’s pipeweed is marijuana. The point being that despite the author’s intention a reader may take a totally different message home than the author intended. And no, that admission doesn’t legitimize that stupid deconstructionist crap.

So it is with the movie Chronicles of Riddick starring Vin Diesel, a sorta, kinda sequel to Pitch Black. I enjoyed the movie greatly. I thought it was great story, although many might find it too dark in tone. This wasn’t a problem for me since I like my entertainment a little on the dark side. I’m one of those people that find people who are always chipper and happy intolerable. Morning people are particularly irritating. If you see me chipper and happy go-lucky, it’s probably raining. But I digress.

I’m not going to go all through the movie, so for the 3 or 4 of you who haven’t seen it, grab the DVD. I’m going to concern myself with the heavies in the movie, the Necromongers. I found these blood-thirsty closed-minded homicide machines to be a perfect metaphor for our present day Muslims. Ironically, one of the first people they waste in the film is a Muslim Imam. I know, I know. Muslims in the future? It doesn’t compute, but no movie is perfect.

The Necromonger’s religious beliefs are beyond bizarre, they are demonstrably insane. In order to achieve their paradise, the UnderVerse, they are dedicated to setting things right. Unfortunately for everybody that isn’t one of them, the Necromongers consider life itself to be a cosmic mistake, a tragic accident, a cosmic infestation if you will. They are literally a death cult. They practice what they preach by sterilizing themselves when they become Necromongers to prevent themselves from adding to the problem. Consequently, they increase only by conversion, which is easier than it sounds since the only other choice is to be murdered. Sound familiar? This is their only function. They travel from place to place, planet to planet, and destroy everything the find. Those that will convert are converted into killing machines themselves. Everyone that won’t is killed. Then the process is repeated somewhere else. They are relentless and are too far gone to be reasoned with. They know that their cause is righteous and the only way; they will brook no disagreement. That should also sound familiar.

Satanic Teddy Bears

I can’t really say too much about Gillian Gibbons and the Terrifying Teddy Bear of Death; I’m just too gobsmacked by the whole affair. The entire episode is beyond ludicrous—even for Muslims.

Citizens and Starship Troopers

Recently a memory popped into my head and I felt compelled to write about it. It’s the sort of thing that will probably earn me friends and enemies in equal measure. I was busy letting the border situation and amnesty nonsense burn a hole in my stomach lining when the memory of reading a certain book popped into my head. Perhaps it was the rose petal strewn “Path to Citizenship” proposed by the professional dullards of the Left.

The book was Robert A. Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” and I stumbled across it in the school library when I was 15. It was a pivotal moment in my life and affected a great change in my thinking and beliefs. I devoured the book and was delighted to find a chunk of common sense in a world seemingly devoid of it in 1975. Though the effect on me lingered, the memory of the book itself faded over time. I was occasionally reminded of it from time to time. But mostly it was lost in the deep caverns of my mind.

When I was 25 it popped up again in a Mainstream Media article I was reading and was referred to as, “the highly controversial Starship Troopers.” I was totally surprised that there could be any controversy so I asked fellow science fiction people about it. Many of them were hostile to it as well.

A little research and I learned it had been roundly condemned as Fascist propaganda, among other things. The society it described was very disciplined and had a common social order. The society was pro-military, pro-business, and pro- just about everything a conservative or libertarian believes in.

But the main sticking point was that citizenship was not automatic. Citizenship had to be earned through personal achievement or public service, frequently military service, and we all know how the Left feels about that. Non-citizens were guaranteed specified rights, but could not vote. To be citizens, one had to have something invested in their nation, be it time, money, blood, sweat, or tears.

Ever since I was 15 I have thought that idea had a great deal of merit, and not just because I’m a military veteran. It has been noted that in a democracy, the plebes will “vote themselves bread and circuses” till there is none left. Most of the immigrants I’ve meet, no matter how nice they were, firmly believe in the “zero-sum” theory of wealth, including even those from English speaking countries. They want their slice of the pie and will vote for whoever will slice it for them.

My point is that automatic citizenship, even for the native-born, has its downside. Though I’m not sure that policy should be changed. What I do know is that a blanket amnesty would create a huge mob of voters all clamoring for their piece of pie and with no concept of wealth creation and capital accumulation. We wound up with a semi-socialist government during the Red Decade of the 30s, and we are still trying to slough off that drag on the nation. Uncontrolled immigration, blanket amnesties, and vote for illegals would result in an even “redder” decade, or longer.

If I was calling the shots, I would end automatic citizenship under certain conditions, as well as dual citizenship. Automatic citizenship could only be conferred if both your parents are native or naturalized. If either parent was a foreign national or an illegal, citizenship could not be conferred at birth. If I could push it through I would insist on some kind of service to the country as a token of loyalty by those who didn’t qualify for automatic citizenship.

Handy Tip 11

When a Democrat utters any phrase or sentence with the word “social” in it you should put your hand over your wallet and start backing slowly toward the nearest exit.

Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco Values

“San Francisco is 49 square miles completely surrounded by reality.”
Paul Kantner of the rock band Jefferson Airplane

I had an opportunity to live in the San Francisco Bay area for about a year. I say opportunity because I really looked forward to it. I had lived most of my life in small towns filled with narrow-minded people who didn’t know what to make of me. So, while I wasn’t all that enthused about most of the Bay Area lifestyle, I was sure that if they could handle guys tonguing each other in the streets then accepting me would be a breeze.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. The exact same things and beliefs that offended my home folks as wacky left-wing radicalism offended the Bay Area folks as heartless right-wing reactionism. Far from being tolerant, the Bay Area has a sacrosanct mindset, a SF Orthodoxy if you will. Defy it, or even question it, at your peril. Any deviation causes the typical native to begin frothing at the mouth in mindless rage.

Don’t get the idea that you can avoid this problem by just not talking about politics. The social injunction against discussing religion and politics is practically unknown there. San Franciscans talk about politics and religion the way most people talk about the weather. A question like, “How about that idiot Bush and those mother”effing” Republicans?” is considered an icebreaker.

After a year of this I proclaimed them to be among the most intolerant people I had ever met. Naturally, they deny this and point to every conceivable class of human being and how they are celebrated and embraced in the city. This caused me a great deal of cognitive dissonance because it sounded true on the surface, yet deep down inside I knew there was a glaring flaw in their reasoning.

Eventually, I figured it out. The problem was that I was letting them define the terms of the discussion. I needed to go up a level of conceptual abstraction to get it. When you do that it becomes readily apparent that the typical San Franciscan tolerates one thing and one thing only: the intolerable.

Open Letter to September 10th People

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without a government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

Thomas Paine, “Common Sense”

Now that the Left, now virtually synonymous with the Democratic Party, has finally regained control of Congress, I find it amusing that they have suddenly discovered bipartisanship, civil discourse, and rational debate. The situation reminds me of my childhood when certain relatives and neighborhood hangers-on were such sticklers for rules and good sportsmanship–when they were “it”, or had the ball. Otherwise, it was a Darwinian dog-eat-dog world. Naturally, being Leftists, you think everyone but yourselves are too stupid to know whats going on. That being, of course, that now that you’re back on top you’ll be wanting to resume pretending to accept our values so that you can use them against us.

I will say only two things about your victory in the off-year elections. One, congratulations. Two, don’t make the mistake of wallowing in hubris and believing that the electorate mandated your philosophies or agendas. Our people got brutally spanked for the sin of “going native”. In other words, they started acting like you. I give you this advice only because I know you’ll never take it.

As you’ve probably noticed, you aren’t getting many takers. That’s because we have long since realized that being civil and trying to engage the Left in rational debate is the intellectual and political equivalent of bringing a dull rusty butter knife to a gunfight. Yes, grim necessity requires that we sink to your level. Sad, but necessary.

Obviously, I don’t speak for every Vast Right Wing Conspirator, but I do speak for quite a few, and we are sick of pretending that you guys aren’t idiots. Or insane, Or insane idiots. Insanity has been occasionally defined as doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome. This behavior is very nearly the Democratic Party’s perennial platform. No matter how many times your ideas fail, you are always ready to slap a fresh coat of paint on the same old disasters, give it a new name, and proclaim it to be some kind of innovation. You never seem to suspect that the only ones you’re fooling are yourselves. You remind us of the old joke about the dim-witted person who constantly beats his head against a brick wall because it feels so good when he stops.