More Random Reflections

• Heartfelt congratulations to the Boston Red Sox for proving that “the Curse” did indeed end three years ago. While some might argue that they owed their victory as much to the Colorado Rockies’ offensive impotence as to their own skills as a team, it was obvious from Game 1 of the American League Division Championship series that this team was headed for the top. However, I must admit that my congratulatory tone here is largely self-serving. As a life-long New York Yankees hater, it always warms the cockles of my heart to see the Red Sox come out on top. Furthermore, having seen our Diamondbacks defeated by the Rockies, who definitely proved themselves not to be the powerhouse they or the media wanted us to believe they are, I was not about to “go with the herd” and cheer the Rockies on as “our National League brethren.” This attitude seems to have seized local Diamondback fans like a plague and it truly mystifies me. Why on earth would one want one’s division rival to win a World Series? It boggles the mind. This is why, during the late 1990s when the Yankees were winning yearly American League Championships as if it were pre-ordained, I always and without exception cheered for their National League rivals in the World Series, even though the rest of my fellow Baltimore Orioles fans were remaining “loyal to the league.” Nonsense! To paraphrase the old Arab folksaying, my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

• Speaking of baseball, let’s quickly revisit the free-market economics behind it. The news yesterday that Alex Rodriguez has opted out of his optional contract final year with the Yankees and is shopping for a new home has prompted not a little whining from self-styled “pundits” about “greed.” Apparently the opportunity for A-Rod to earn a couple of hundred million dollars over a five-year period has sparked the usual flames of socialist-statist envy, with the usual hue and cry about how “outrageous” baseball salaries are “destroying the game.” *SIGH* I grow weary of having to do this, but for the benefit of the many slow learners and economic ignorami out there, here it is, once again: No one will earn any amount of money that isn’t commanded by the market. The fact that A-Rod is being offered this “obscene” amount of money to play baseball is due to the fact that millions of fans out there are willing to pay lots of money to see him exercise his talents in a venue where they can be put to best effect. I personally think that A-Rod is grossly overrated and worth nowhere near this kind of money, as his post-season performance seemed to prove beyond a doubt. But apparently many other baseball fans and club owners think otherwise. We’ll soon see whose opinion prevails, since it is ultimately the owner of one team who will decide whether the cost of A-Rod’s salary and bonuses is more than offset by his on-field performance and with it the increase in profit his presence brings to their team. Either way, we’ll once again see that the market has an amazing knack for consistently bringing about results that are satisfactory to all stakeholders involved.
  
  
• Once again, is anyone else as sick as I am of “God Bless Amerika” replacing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch? ENOUGH! BASTA! STOMATA! KHALLAS!
  
  
• I’m afraid I can’t put the issue of home defense off any longer. By this I mean the investment in guns and security cameras and/or a burglar alarm. While I certainly regret having sold my handguns before leaving Virginia, it was easier than transporting them across country, the risks of doing so simply greater than I cared to undertake. So what prompts the urgency of purchase now? Well, last Friday had me doing what I usually do first thing in the morning, which is taking our two dogs for an early morning stroll around the yard, returning them to the house to feed them, then transferring them to the dog run on the east side of the yard for the day. I keep two padlocks secured to the chain link gates, just to allow the dogs to be locked up if I go away from the house for any appreciable length of time. Up until Friday, however, I seldom used them. It wasn’t until about 9:30 AM that I heard barking coming from an unusual angle of the house, making me think that someone’s dogs had gotten loose. Indeed, “someone’s dog-s" (plural) had gotten loose – mine. Imagine my surprise at both of them showing up at my side door! I immediately grabbed both by their collars and walked them back to the run, where I found both gates wide open. Now I know for a fact that I had secured both, as I’ve done every morning in the six months since we had the run built. Neither dog can jump high enough to push open the wishbone gate latches, so I’m convinced that someone had to have opened them. The scariest aspect of this is that if this had happened, I should have noticed it since I’ve made a habit of sitting at my kitchen table to work, with my kitchen dining window facing the east side of the yard, allowing me to see most of the comings and goings on the dirt road outside the property line. The fact that I couldn’t see who might have approached the run and let the dogs out really unnerves me. Why, in the fifteen months that we’ve lived here, has this not happened before? I’m not aware of any new neighbors or anyone with a grudge against us, so I can’t even make a short list of suspects. Still, the fact that someone could sneak up on us like that has me worried. It’s time to definitely reinvest in some firepower and, preferably, a surveillance system. If any readers can suggest something for external home surveillance that is both inconspicuous and affordable, I’m open to suggestions.

• I finally got my daughter to open up about the speeding ticket that she received on here way to work in Oro Valley the other week and for which she has a court date on the 14^th of next month. From her description of events, it sounds like the uniformed extortionist, er, cop had the wrong car in his sites, but I still have to get her to take me out with her to retrace her commute path and explain sequentially what happened. Only then can I give her definitive advice. For my readers’ benefit, if you ever visit the Tucson area, beware the northwestern suburb of Oro Valley! This despicable little burg, inhabited by retirees and yuppies, is a notorious speed trap and the town government, apparently bereft of legitimate means of collecting sufficient revenue, has resorted to theft from motorists as its primary source of income. Tucsonans know what I’m talking about. More on this to follow.

• Digging the debt ditch a little deeper. Not only did I trade my vintage Ford Escort wagon in for a more terrain-appropriate vehicle (a 2004 Nissan Frontier XE pickup) last week, but my dear wife also picked up a similar vehicle (a 2004 XE V6 crew cab) from the same dealer, with my full consent and blessing. Driving the eight-cylinder Yukon Denali SUV the forty round trip miles to and from work each day was becoming quite painful on the wallet. Also, since we ultimately want to use the Denali as a “family road trip” vehicle, the wife didn’t want to keep putting miles (and the attendant wear and tear) on it. I think it was a sensible decision, though one that will extend our accelerated debt payoff period for a bit longer than either of us would like. Still, it’s nothing insurmountable. On the current schedule I’ll have my truck paid off in seven months, hers in not much longer, so I think things will get back to normal shortly. Nothing onerous, especially with two income streams.

• Speaking of debt and its elimination, I strongly recommend purchasing the book or audio CD equivalent of John Cummuta’s Transforming Debt Into Wealth. While John’s critics have pointed out that his methods are not original, I maintain that John puts a more human and approachable spin on the process than perhaps any other consultant out there. His methods truly do work and an investment of twenty to forty dollars for his book or audio CDs will more than pay for itself in the end. John, consider this a free plug from a sincere devotee!

Down (In Flames) Go the Diamondbacks

Was anyone surprised? Did any of us fans who observed their performance on the field during the tail end of the regular season anticipate any other outcome? Did the revelation in the press that the D’backs clubhouse resembled a slumber party of high school boys come as a shock? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, congratulations on having spent the last year successfully living as a troglodyte. For those of us paying even the least bit of attention, let alone devoting much our free time to following the home team through every game during the end of the regular season and the post-season, this was the only end we could foresee.

This is a young team, one that obviously has tremendous potential. But with youth comes also a lack of maturity and a need for boundaries, guidance, and motivation. Bob Melvin, for all the praise heaped upon him and for all the calls to name him “manager of the year”, for the National League if not all of Major League Baseball, does not appear to be the man best suited to do this. I do not know what Melvin’s agenda for the team was after the end of the Division Championship games against the Cubs. It appears obvious from the quality of team play, however, that lengthy strategy sessions with the players to focus their strategy against the Colorado Rockies, a team with which they should have been by now intimately familiar, did not take place. Indeed, it would seem that the D’backs had Melvin’s blessing to sleep in, booze it up, and generally lay about during the five-day rest period. The Rockies seem to have put that same interval to much better preparatory use. Though I have no way of knowing what either manager did during the hiatus between the NL Division Playoffs and the NLCS, the Rockies' performance on the field certainly seems to indicate that they prepared themselves mentally, strategically, and physically for facing the D’backs, perhaps taking extra time to carefully study the offensive and defensive weaknesses of our lineup. The D'backs apparently didn't think such a thing to be necessary, to their evident detriment.

What disappoints me most of all is the attitude permeating the D’backs clubhouse that says “We don’t care if we win or lose, we just want to have fun.” Well, young sluggers, your fans expect you to both have fun AND play to win. While it’s true that you’re not commanding, among other things, the high salaries of some of your peers on other teams, your fan base expects nothing less than one thousand percent performance effort from you, including the dedication to winning as many games as possible, most certainly once you make it to the post-season. Anything less is unworthy of a professional baseball player.

So what to do? Well, for starters, Josh Byrnes, Jeff Moorad, and company need to kick BoMel in the ass and in the midsection and let him know that this “whatever” attitude permeating the club will not be tolerated and that if it takes “bedchecking” of his team to get them to play baseball like adults, then amen, so be it. (For my money they could also give him some pointers on managing his pitching staff. Leaving starters in the game after the fifth inning just ensure that they “get the win” has, in several key situations, led exactly to the opposite. The situations with Livan Hernandez and Micah Owings during the last two games of the NLCS are prime examples of what happens when starters show fatigue and start missing the strike zone and giving up runs. Having starters tough it out through six-plus innings during the regular season is one thing, but if you’re looking to win a championship or a World Series, you do what you have to do and go to the next available arm appropriate for the situation before runs are allowed and leads lost. Under such circumstances “get’em outta there!” needs to be any manager’s post-season motto where starters are concerned during the middle of the game, especially in the National League. Bullpens are there for a reason. That said, keeping closer Jose Valverde on the mound for extra innings and having him pitch thirty-five-plus balls is a common-sense no-no. What on earth were you thinking, BoMel?)

Second, send a few of the younger guys back down to Tucson and let them mature for a season. Justin Upton, for all of his star power as a hitter and right fielder when first brought up from AA Mobile, quickly lost steam as far as I’m concerned and really needs to get that final year of growth in the top of the minors before joining the mother team full time. Eric Byrnes, for all of the accolades heaped upon him by management and fans, is perhaps the most overrated player on the team. His post-season performance was pathetic, to put it charitably, and his top-of-the-ninth strikeout with two on last night in game four was the icing on the cake that sent the Rockies to the World Series. Get off your pedestal, Byrnsie, until you’ve done something to earn it. On the other hand, I hope that Mark Reynolds is given equal playing time at third next season. He has more than lived up to expectations, despite committing defensive errors that have proved costly at times. He has shown himself to be a quick study and will overcome these bad habits. Augie Ojeda has also more than earned a spot on the permanent roster and needs to be allowed equal playing time with Orlando Hudson at second base. My only gripe about Augie is that he displays at tendency to be overzealous defensively, moving into first base or right field territory to catch fly balls or grounders when they are clearly within the sights of the right fielder or first baseman. This has caused cross-ups and conflicts on a couple of occasions, with Augie “bumping out” Conor Jackson or Justin Upton, causing balls to drop in for base hits that should have been caught. Not quality play for major leaguers. Indeed, most players should be over this by the team they move up out of Advanced “A” league ball.

In closing, I expect better from the D’backs in 2008. Discipline and focus are what’s needed. Let’s hope that BoMel and coaching staff will step up to the plate and see it happen.

A Sad Side Note in Closing: Next season is scheduled to be the last for the Tucson Sidewinders, the D’backs AAA farm team. After thirty-eight seasons here in Tucson, first as the Tucson Toros, then as the Sidewinders beginning in 1998 with the establishment of the D’backs as an NL expansion team, they have been sold to a New York concern that is planning to move them to Reno. Apparently they have had the second lowest attendance figures for the Pacific Coast League for at least four seasons running, with only the Colorado Rockies’ AAA team, the Colorado Springs SkySox, having lower figures. The Sidewinders have always provided this city with quality baseball at bargain-basement admission prices, with regular appearances by current Diamondback stars. They were the 2006 Pacific Coast League champions and almost repeated their playoff success this year. Sadly, Tucsonans just don’t seem interested in baseball in significant numbers. The Sidewinders’ 11,000-seat stadium, Tucson Electric Park (affectionately known as TEP to us fans), rarely ever fills more than 5,000 of those seats, even on weekends. With baseline box seats going for just $9.00 each and general admission seats at $6.00, it’s hard to imagine cost being a factor in keeping the fans away. Personally, I suspect that it has more to do with the park management and the (abysmal) quality and exhorbitant prices of concessions (higher even than those at Chase Field in Phoenix, home of the D’backs) than anything else. Current owner Jay Zucker doesn’t seem to show any interest in reaching out to the fans, so I suppose that his team’s fate is largely his own fault. Anyway, the Sidewinders will be sorely missed, at least by this fan. Maybe we’ll be lucky and get an independent league team to set up shop in town. Till then, there’s always Cactus League (pre-season Spring training) baseball.

Pathetic (But a Sign of Times to Come)

I had always thought that such claims were overstated, though given what I see around me every day I don’t know why. It is impossible, I always believed, for anyone who has sat through twelve years of formal classroom instruction to have learned so transparently little. The basics, the bare rudiments, simply have to have been picked up at some point, if only through osmosis.

I was wrong. Some, perhaps many more than I expected, learn absolutely nothing in twelve years of public school education that will ensure their survival in the real world. I met one such tragic young victim yesterday afternoon.

It happened when I stopped by a local gas station/convenience store down the road that is also home to an A&W fast food outlet. It was late in the afternoon, I had just picked up my grandson from school, and didn’t feel in the mood to cook anything for dinner. So, I decided to pick up some bacon double cheeseburgers for the wife, the kidlet, and me to nosh on while we watched the NLCS playoff game. I was greeted at the counter by a young lady of no more than eighteen, your stereotypical white suburban high school student. She took my order, which came to a total of $16.18. Needing to simplify the holdings of my wallet and unload some burdensome change, I promptly gave her $21.18 consisting of a twenty, a one, and change of a dime, a nickel, and three pennies. Expecting a five in return, I was instead greeted by a blank, confused stare.

"I can never figure out how this works when you guys do this,” came the plaintive reply.

“HUHHHH?” I wanted to exclaim. “COME AGAIN? What is it about this exercise in elementary arithmetic that you should have mastered, cold, in the third grade that you don’t understand?”

Quickly gathering my composure and realizing that this poor creature needed help and encouragement, not ridicule, I explained that the point was to receive change of an even, easily measurable amount, preferably in paper money. Using a simpler example, I said that if the total of my order had come to, say, $2.38 I might have given her three one dollar bills, in which case I would have received sixty-two cents back in change (or so I would hoped, assuming this wretched girl could count it out properly). However, because I did not want to be burdened with additional change, I might have instead decided to give her $5.38, consisting of a fiver, three dimes, a nickel, and three pennies. Simply subtracting the amount owed from the amount given would yield $3.00, meaning that I would be given three one-dollar bills in change and at the same time would have relieved myself of bulky coinage while providing the cashier’s till with desperately needed change. Simple, right?

Apparently not. The young lady returned the same confused look, clearly not understanding why anyone would undergo what in her underdeveloped intellect was an exercise in quantum abstraction. At this point I gave up, although I did convince her that I was not sticking my hands illegally into the till by having her give me a fiver in change from the original transaction. I wondered how many other customers she had interacted with who were both less honest and less patient and courteous with her as she fumbled her way through a simple transaction.

Dear readers, are your children like this poor, unfortunate young lady? Is this what you want to subject your children to by sending them to the State’s regimented enstupidation factories paid for by your stolen tax dollars? Can you look yourself in the mirror in the morning and say that you love your children and have their best interests and their future at heart when you allow them to become dumbed down by an institution wholly unconcerned with their education, but fixated totally on turning them into mindless, compliant State-worshipping robots? Worse still, are you not guilty of NEGLECT by allowing this to happen? Have you completely abdicated your responsibility for your children’s education by dumping the burden for their intellectual development into the lap of the State? If so, I feel no compunction in telling you that your children’s failure to develop intellectually is your fault, and your fault alone. What must be done to further prove to you that a public school education will destroy your children’s desire to learn, will wring from them the ability to think critically, will alienate them from the essential nurturing that comes from the family, and will poison their minds against the very values you instill in them at home? Have the last four decades of proven failure of America’s public schools not registered with you at all? What more must be done to drive the point home?

I genuinely suspect that for most parents the answer, though they will never admit it even to themselves, is that they simply do not consider their children’s education to be their number one priority. Oh, sure, they’ll pay lip service to the idea that their children’s education is the most important family goal and will attempt to convince themselves that nothing is too good for their little precious darlings. However, when the heat hits the pavement they simply are not prepared to sacrifice what must be sacrificed in order to ensure that their children are given the best opportunity possible to learn. I do not mean to imply that these parents must sacrifice big money in order to provide little Johnny with a premiere private school education, although this is often the most desirable option. What I mean by “sacrifice” is parents giving of their time and energy to ensure that, no matter where their children go to school, they are receiving an education in what they will need to survive in the real world, be this a combination of “the three ‘R’s” and certain core values practiced at home, or advanced subjects in which they are interested and for which they aspire to study in greater detail. How many of you parents spend quality time helping your children with homework, or answering their questions about subjects they’re studying that you might have at least a rudimentary knowledge of, or, most important of all, seriously probing your children about what they learned that day, what their teachers talked about in class, and how they interact with their classmates?

For all too many parents, their childrens’ education is a “fire and forget” process. It is one that involves nothing more than shoving the kids off to school in the morning and, assuming that Mom and/or Dad aren’t working 15-hour-plus days in order to enjoy the lives of yuppie suburbanites, picking them up at school in the afternoon and then leaving them free to do whatever they please. More often than not Mom and Dad don’t even drop off or pick up Johnny and his siblings, instead letting state-controlled yellow convict transports deliver them to and from school. They also provide the kids with a key to let themselves into and out of the house in the afternoon, since nobody is likely to be at home. Mom and Dad then just hope and pray that Johnny and siblings pick up at least a few tidbits of what passes for knowledge (again, mostly through osmosis) during the course of the day. After all, if the schools can’t force knowledge down the kids’ throats, then the schools aren’t doing their jobs and, damn it, that’s what tax dollars are supposed to pay for.

That’s probably what the young A&W worker’s parents thought too. Let’s hope she learns a lesson from her experiences with change making and looks for answers that will help her avoid future embarrassment. I sincerely hope and pray that she won’t look to the source of her failure for the fix.

Bye-Bye, Joe (*Smirk*)

I hope millions of you out there are, like I am, savoring last night’s defeat of the New York Yankees at the hands of the Cleveland Indians in the American League Division Championship. As an old Baltimore Orioles fan (and thus an avowed Yankee hater), the site of Joe Torre’s long, brooding, oh-my-god-I’m-so-screwed face both during and after the game as Cleveland “bitchslapped” the Bronx Bombers in their own backyard was especially gratifying. While some might quibble with George Steinbrenner’s dropping a dime on ol’ Joe before Game 3 in announcing to the press and the universe that Joe had better have his resume ready for circulation if he lost the series, I really think Joe had to have seen it coming. You see, when you lead a team that, along with its fans, believes that it has a birthright to a World Series slot and when you, your team, and the fan base act accordingly (i.e., Guinness record-setting smack talk), you set a high bar for yourself. You lay mines for yourself to stumble on. You let loose a giant petard to hoist yourself up with. You piss in the well that you know you’ll probably have to drink from. In short, the sympathy lamp cannot possibly be lit for you among any reasonable gathering of human beings.

New Yorkers in general are, for lack of a more polite term and as anyone who has ever lived or traveled in the Big Apple well knows, seven-star assholes. Seven-star assholes who believe that the universe revolves around them and their city. Seven-star assholes who believe that “the chip” that makes them who they are (and surgical removal of which would probably kill them) also serves as a magic magnet to give them what they want, when they want it. Seven-star assholes who, for all of their façade as the most cosmopolitan of people, are remarkably out of tune with the rest of the country. The goodwill extended toward New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11 was as ephemeral as soft-serve ice cream in July, with New Yorkers, just by being themselves, doing as much to erase that precious goodwill as quickly as possible. This is now reflected in the rest of the nation’s attitude toward the Wormy Apple’s baseball prima donnas. Like the city they represent, they are still milking the residue of that vanished 9/11 goodwill as hard as their crooked former mayor, whose smarmy, arrogant face graced both of the Yankee home games like an infected pimple on a zit-ridden teenager’s face. And by the way, for God’s sake, will Major League Baseball please put a stop to the insipid practice of performing “God Bless Amerika” during the seventh-inning stretch? While this was a very touching and understandable reaction to the events of 9/11 in the days and weeks following that tragedy, it's well past the point of having played itself out. This faux patriotism wrapped up in the most obnoxious strains of jingoism has grown extremely tiresome. Isn’t the playing of the national anthem before first pitch homage enough to the almight leviathan State? Bring back “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”, PLEASE! (And by the way, why in God’s name has Dr. Ronan Tynan of the Irish Tenors been named the de facto voice of GBA during the stretch? Is Dr. Tynan an American citizen? If not, why is he being asked to front for American jingoism at a baseball game? )

Anyway, now that the Bronx Bums have been put in their place and a “dynasty” (oh, please!) ended, those of us professional Yankee haters can rest in the smug satisfaction that King George’s firing of Joe Torre will have even wider repercussions than creating a management vacancy. Several players destined for free agency next year have already made it clear that if Joe goes, they go too (A-Rod apparently among them, hopefully to the Red Sox, the Indians, or the Tigers). The loss of these half-dozen players are unlikely to lead to replacements with other free-agent superstars in time to make a difference for next season, so it’s very likely that for the first time in a decade and a half we’ll see a Yankees team that rests at or near the AL East bottom for a season and that will not even by a factor in post-season contention in 2008. How sweet the music! Let it play loud and long!

Random Reflections

It’s been nearly a year since my last post and much has happened since then. I’ve settled down into my routine of work (telecommuting for my company back East, with some local work to supplement it), getting the house and property into inhabitable shape (no small feat given its condition when we moved in), obtaining an important professional certification (Certified Information System Security Professional [CISSP]), losing a father-in-law to cardiac arrest, helping my wife transition into her new job, providing moral support and encouragement to my daughter as she trains and prepares for a new career in the medical field, mentoring and parenting my grandson during his mother’s trying schedule and his own settlement into a new pre-school, and just coping with the vagaries of life in general.

Some of you who’ve corresponded with me probably are aware that I’ve been a frequent contributor to the Copwatch forums. In fact, you may have also noticed that this has been just about my only web presence for most of the last year. I did not intend to neglect this blog as I have; it’s just that I see the mission of Copwatch as being one of the most important facing our nation today as “law enforcement” (I use this term sacrilegiously here) continues to spiral farther out of control and the police continue to ever more rapidly abandon any pretense of protecting and serving and continue to more brutally than ever assert themselves as what they always have been above all: the enforcement arm of the ruling elite. As the death of Carol Gotbaum at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport last week shows (and all credible evidence currently points to her death as negligent homicide at best and murder at worst), the Heimatsicherheitsdienst, an organism rapidly devouring and subsuming every local police force in the nation, has anything but our best interests and safety at heart. While I certainly do not expect Mrs. Gotbaum’s death to provoke a public outcry against police brutality from among the somnolent Amoricon masses, most of whom are of the “he/she-deserved-it-and-besides-it’ll-NEVER-happen-to-ME” mindset, I do hope that it will serve as a wake up call to those straddling the fence.

Those who have paid any attention to my rantings of late have probably also noticed a marked absence of references to God, faith, church, or worship. Since relocating out of the D.C. area, I have been unable to find a church to call home, or indeed any “Christian Church” worthy of the name that I would even consider joining. One of the most insidious signs of the success of the current Bush Regime in subverting, perverting, and destroying traditional American institutions in its quest to impose its unique brand of imperialist fascism has been the co-opting of formerly faith-based institutions. While this rot is currently pervasive throughout the nation’s churches in general, nowhere is it more glaringly obvious than in America’s evangelical Protestant congregations. Dear readers, I have yet to set foot inside an evangelical church here in the heart of Southwestern Red State Central that has not resembled a Republican Party convention. While politicizing churches under ANY secular ideology is absolutely odious and perverse beyond words, Amerikan “conservative” fundamentalism, “the Religious Right” in common MSM vernacular, is the most revolting of all. I cannot imagine Christ returning to our world and even recognizing his teachings in any of these so-called congregations. I can only imagine his utter revulsion at the perversion of his message and can also easily imagine a repeat of his driving the moneychangers from the temple act, manifold. Indeed, I’m quite hard pressed to think of the last such church I attended that delivered a message out of any of the Four Gospels (you know, those pesky missives that contain, like, the actual words spoken by Jesus that are the foundations of the Christian faith. Yeah, THOSE. I know it’s not very appetizing). The most popular cherry pickings appear to come from the Old Testament and Revelations, just the books to justify the current evangelical fascination with and addition to gratuitous statist violence. Revelations in particular seems to have acquired new popularity as the current candidate for anti-christ (no, not the Bushtard, but the movement he represents) gains an ever stronger stranglehold on Christian institutions, their congregations having sold out to the State in return for watery spiritual-political pottage. Anyway, all of this is simply an aggevating factor in one of the most severe crises of faith I've suffered in decades, one which I'll consider discussing at greater length later.

On the political front some might point to the ascendancy of the Ron Paul presidential campaign as a sign of brighter times ahead, a fresh hope for the future. Would that this were the case. My own view is that it is extremely naïve of libertarians to believe that Ron has any serious chance of getting past the primaries, let alone becoming the Republican (or third party) presidential nominee or of getting elected to the presidency. Any libertarian worth the name knows damned well that the entire election process in this country is corrupt and rotten beyond salvation and that the moneyed interests dominating the process and enabling the two major parties are not about to let an outsider gain the upper hand. It doesn’t matter if ninety percent of the unwashed masses support him. The gatekeepers of “democracy” are NOT going to let an independent upstart like Ron Paul anywhere near the Oval Office. Even in the unlikely event that the stars align in exactly the right order and Ron not only wins the Republican primary and the nomination, but gets elected to the presidency, he will not remain there long enough to have any impact whatsoever. As I’ve said in other venues, the powers that be undoubtedly already have “wet boys” on retainer to deal with the contingency of a Ron Paul presidency (taking care to make Ron’s demise look like “an accident”, of course, something that the organs of the MSM will regurgitate without question). More likely, however, there will be nothing so crude as the outright murder that PTB usually reserve for lowly, unconnected serfs like me and my readers. Much more likely is that they’ll orchestrate a scandal that will receive the full backing of the MSM and will prompt an absolutely hostile Congress to impeach Ron and remove him from office. Ergo, nothing gained except a renewal and reinforcement of the current sociopolitical rot and the power of those who continue to spread it. This is why I find myself both amused and enraged by libertarian (of both “L” sizes) calls to “get out the vote” for Ron. Silly people, hasn’t it been proved again and again that one cannot change a rotten system from within and that anyone who tries will just be co-opted by it?

Finally there is my utter disgust with society in general, unabated since my last series of epistles and indeed strengthened by my new surroundings. I won’t bore anyone with details except to ask rhetorically what one can say about a state full of acephalic creatures who have sent John McCain and John Kyl back to the Senate for an unforgivable number of terms and whose voters embraced, with enthusiasm, their California socialist neighbors' (whom they claim to despise) ban on smoking in privately-owned public establishments. You get the idea.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I realize that my old gathering of followers, all half dozen or fewer of them, has long since dispersed and lost what little interest they ever may have had in anything I have to say. This is entirely understandable. A moss-covered rock loses its appeal after all of the moss has grown over it and nothing else takes root. Maybe new moths will gravitate toward the fresh light. We shall see.

The Solution is Very Simple: Arm EVERYONE

(LIBERRANTER’S NOTE: Yes, I’m back - sort of. To what few, if any, regular readers I have, I apologize for my nearly 12-week silence. Things have been extraordinarily busy here since September, with grueling work schedules and the process of FINALLY selling our house in Virginia, as well as my spending many hours studying for a professional certification exam for which I’m sitting in December. I’ll try to write as frequently as possible, but can’t guarantee that I’ll be a frequent contributor again until after the first of the year. Thanks in advance for bearing with me.)

This breaking news item caught my attention this morning, mostly because of what I know will be the inevitable fallout from it. Two teenagers got into a scrap at Annapolis, Maryland’s Westfield Mall, resulting in one opening fire with a gun, drawing an off-duty U.S. Secret Service agent into the battle, resulting in both his and teenage shooter’s injury. Fortunately, no deaths or other serious injuries were reported.

The inevitable response to this event will be vociferous demands from elements of the Left, who seem pathologically incapable of even noticing, let alone learning from, the unintended negative consequences of the policies they endorse, for a complete ban on guns.

This author has a better idea: rather than ban guns altogether, encourage EVERYONE to carry a loaded weapon in public, concealed or otherwise. Common sense tells us that there is no better way to test Thomas Jefferson’s maxim that “an armed society is a polite society” than by ensuring that a sufficient percentage of the population is armed for defensive purposes. Even the densest “gangbanger” will think twice or thrice before drawing on a crowd of people in which there odds are that 90 percent of them are armed and trained in the use of their weapons. The little teenage thug at the mall would no doubt have been far less eager to draw and fire had he been surrounded by men, women, and adolescents with side arms.

Leaving aside the benefits of deterring government employees from abusing their positions of authority, an armed citizenry would prevent the deaths of many innocents and alleviate the need of “law enforcement” (such as it is) to constantly have to defend itself against accusations (usually valid) of unacceptable response time or inaction. Police agencies would become mostly investigative organizations, as an armed citizenry would remove the need for armed police officers to respond to every violent crime; the armed citizen would have removed the threat well before the investigating officer(s) arrived at the scene.

Of course the State isn’t about to sanction armed citizens on a national scale, a concept that was simple common sense to our forebears in this nation’s first century and a half of existence. While the State will cloak its objections in patronizing, self-serving rhetoric claiming that free access to arms will lead to more incidents such as that in the above-referenced article (despite multiple independent studies over the last two decades indicating that exactly the opposite is true), the State’s real fear, and a well-justified one at that, is that an armed citizenry will zealously defend its rights and property against encroachment by the cornucopia of extra-legal law [sic] enforcement agencies that are the State’s arm of oppression. Better to have the plebian masses suffer violence at the hands of rogue elements of society than to sanction a threat to the Establishment’s power.

But there is hope. As violence, spawned by the State’s destructive meddling in the socioeconomic affairs of the citizenry, continues to escalate, more and more Americans are going wake up, re-read the 2^nd Amendment to the Constitution, and come to realize that a right guaranteed protection by the State requires no “permit” or “training.” Guns will proliferate among law abiding citizens, that majority element that the State hates with more of a passion than it does any violent street criminal. If nothing else, last year’s SCOTUS decision in the case Castle Rock vs. Gonzales, in which the high court affirmed precedent declaring law enforcement absolved of any responsibility to defend citizens against violent crime, has sent us a loud message that we are responsible for our own self-defense and that if the State will not assist us in this regard, they need to stand aside. Let us hope that Americans are smart enough to realize this.

Meanwhile, beware teenage gangbangers in public, as well as off-duty fedcops with itchy trigger fingers and poor aim.

Follow-Up to My August 27th Post: Lew Rockwell Agrees With Me

My post on the 27th of last month takes the Arizona LP to task for being a superficial shell of libertarianism, ultimately indistinguishable from the Demopublican party. Lew Rockwell echoes this sentiment in an article published in today's LRC, although he focuses primarily on the Libertarian National Committee and its recent gutting of the traditional libertarian platform that served as the party's moral pillars. It is hardly necessary for Lew to have done so for the benefit of "small 'l'" libertarians, but he has probably done an invaluable service to fence straddlers who are debating the merits of abandoning their support of the Demopublicans.

Alas, the "service" Lew is performing is the sad task of informing would-be freedom lovers that the Libertarian (Big "L") party at the national level is no longer the answer to America's political degeneracy, said party having been infiltrated by what many of us can only consider a deliberate infection of Demopublican viruses in a not-so-subtle attempt to destroy the party's moral underpinnings. As I mentioned in last week's rant, the LP, once a "non-party party", is now obsessed with performing a fool's errand; to wit, playing the establishment's game in order to win votes and gain power in office, even at the expense of its moral compass. Small wonder it's continuing its voyage to nowhere, and fast.

It goes without saying that if America wanted more "mainstream" political parties, at least two dozen others would be fiercely competing with the Demopublicans for a hold on the Amoricon masses' loyalty and elections would be narrowly won, perhaps even bordering on violent and with participation being at nearly one hundred percent of the eligible voting base. As it now stands there is every indication that the Demopublicans are going to be lucky to draw even thirty-five percent of eligible voters to the mid-term elections, a heartening sign that perhaps the "moron" component of the term "Amoricon" is smaller than we all thought and that Joe and Jane Sixpack are finally letting the establishment know that they've had enough of the games. For the LP to play along with the Demopublicans' desperate and failed strategies, based on a transparent absence of principle or morals, hardly serves the cause of freedom. Better, as any dedicated libertarian knows, to stay home and watch the whole sickening fraud than to play a willing part in it. Too bad that the "freedom-loving libertarians" in charge of the LP, who should know better than to place faith in politicians or political office, don't realize that. The saddest part is that they'll mislead a great many people into misplacing hope and trust in an institution that has repeatedly failed them and will continue to do so again and again. That is the most unforgiveable part of the whole moral abdication aspect of the LP compromise.

So to Lew I extend a heartfelt "thank you" for seconding my bleak assessment of the status quo. To the "leadership" of the current LP, I say "shame on you. You should all know better."