Print

Wrap-up of news and opinion from your not-so-humble correspondent.

Blowing His Stack

Joe Stack, who flew his Piper Cherokee into an Austin, Texas office building housing IRS offices, is being disowned left and right. The left want us to ignore those parts of his suicide note in which he bemoans the lack of government health care and the right wants us to ignore that it wasn’t offices of the Department of Health and Human Services he was flying his plane into but the Internal Revenue Service, collection agency for the loathed income tax.

Honestly, Joe Stack wasn’t really an ideologue, of either the left or the right. He had no coherent agenda beyond being driven into a homicidal fit of depression by a bureaucracy that when it wasn’t victimizing him was foiling and mocking his modest aspiration to have a nest egg to retire on.

I just re-watched the movie Deep Impact last night, a rip-off of a much-superior novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Lucifer’s Hammer. In this less-entertaining iteration of Armageddon — another rip off of Niven and Pournelle’s novel — President Morgan Freeman institutes a national lottery for a million Americans to be sheltered from a comet strike on earth, and aside from Marines, Acorn workers, Steven Spielberg, and artists with grants from the NEA, anyone over fifty is disqualified. This is a generation of self-loathing hippies’ dream solution to overpopulation, capitalism, American imperialism, and budget-busting entitlements for Social Security and Medicare … but they may have miscalculated how many thousand or even million Joe Stacks will not go gentle into that good night.

You really don’t want to squeeze the old timers. They own more, vote more, like guns better, have more accumulated skill sets, and hate noisy kids who play in their flower gardens. It’s a formula for a lot more planes being flown into a lot more government offices.

In closing, I’d sincerely like to thank Joe Stack for using a Piper Cherokee rather than a firearm in his suicide attack on the IRS offices in Austin, Texas.

#

Ron Paul and CPAC

Congressman Ron Paul at CPAC 2009

For anyone not suffering from amnesia — that is, anyone who doesn’t have a regular talking gig on a cable news network — the Tea Party movement did not start out as a Neocon Republican effort to run either beauty-queen Sarah Palin or Scott Brown for President, but was spontaneously formed by a bunch of Ron Paul supporters looking for something to do next when Dr. Paul’s candidacy was eliminated from the 2008 presidential race. So it was both entertaining and enlightening to see Dr. Paul show up in first place in this past weekend’s presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference … and to hear the lamentations coming from the Neocon women on the floor.

During the 2008 Republican presidential debates — before the financial meltdown emerged into the light — all the mainstream Republican candidates took every opportunity to belittle Dr. Paul for his predictions that overspending on war and domestic entitlements would plunge us all into economic disaster. Now the Republican/Conservative Axis has a simple choice: become “Me, too!” Obama-ites — like Scott Brown — or admit that Ron Paul had it right and become radical minarchists in his image.

And that question depends — doesn’t it? — on whether the leadership of the conservative movement — and the Republican Party — are retards.

#

Is President Obama a Socialist?

I watched Bill O’Reilly today concern himself with the labelling of President Obama as a socialist.

Don’t worry about it, Bill. With the exception of Ron Paul, just about every politician in America today wants to maintain socialistic government programs to one extent or another.

#

Are the Soldiers at Fort Hood Still Sitting Ducks?

It is now 111 days since Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot 43 disarmed soldiers and civilians on the Fort Hood army base, killing 13, the result of a classified Clinton Administration policy — unchanged during the two terms of George W. Bush — preempting base commanders from allowing soldiers to carry firearms on base, and giving that authority — through layers of bureaucratic obstacles — to the politically-appointed Secretary of the Army.

Go watch the 1943 movie Stage Door Canteen, made during World War II. It accurately portrayed sergeants with a loaded sidearm on a train and enlisted privates carrying their rifles with them in public.

Why is it that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — even after observing the Bonus Army of World War I veterans in combat in Washington D.C. with active-duty troops led by George Patton just prior to his election — didn’t worry about armed soldiers threatening public order … but Presidents today do?

#

Frankly, My Dear, I Don’t Give A Dog

Dr. Gary Smith of The American Academy of Pediatrics considers hot dogs lethal — and wants them labeled as dangerous, or even banned — since kids who love Armour Hot Dogs might choke on them because of the sausages’ cylindrical shape.

At what moment in history do we decide whether it’s time to point and laugh at these clowns with diplomas, or bring out the tar and feathers and run them out of town on a high-speed rail along with the other snake-oil salesmen?

#

Blogging a Novel

Escape from Heaven

I have now published two out of three parts of my novel, Escape from Heaven, in this forum. I have yet to receive a single comment on the novel on these pages.

Unless I get some feedback indicating someone is reading it, I won’t see any reason to publish Part Three.

#

SEK3 — Six Years Gone

Samuel Edward Konkin III

Six years ago today, my friend and mentor, Samuel Edward Konkin III, discorporated.

I see him not all that infrequently in my dreams. This means nothing to those of you who regard dreams as mere neurological or psychological events; to me, I take this as continuing contact with the man.

My original tribute to SEK3 is here.

#


My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available for sale or rental on Amazon.com Video On Demand. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

Bookmark and Share
Print