16 Mar Village Praxis: Mindset/ Action vs Inaction by John Meyers

Publisher’s Note: I wanted to thank everyone for the many words of praise and congratulations for reaching post #500 in the last essay.

Per the tragic NZ massacre by the gunmen in the mosques, the apparatchiks in the NZ government managed to ban semiautomatic firearms in 24 hours; Kiwis should count themselves fortunate the malefactor didn’t use a hammer or power tool or a vehicle…

Ironically the gun laws allow any potential invader to double down on compressing the time frame needed to secure the islands for conquest.

I have reached episode #150 in my quest to complete ProfCJ’s Dangerous History Podcast. I continue to be amazed at the amount of solid historical inquiry that takes place.

Please take a listen to Boston T. Party’s rousing homage to masculinity at Libertopia in 2018.

A shout-out to Donk for his very generous donation to the works here at ZG.

Less than 675 shopping days until the next teleprompter reader slouches in to the Offal Office. Plan appropriately. -BB

“Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words.
Be careful of your words, for your words become your actions.
Be careful of your actions, for your actions become your habits.
Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character.”

– Chinese Proverb

“…Thought is a means to the end of action, and most freedom activists have forsaken the cold, tough environment of action for the warm, safe bed of thought.”

– Boston T. Party

The State of the Empire is dismal. The irreversibility of the decline of Pax Americana is already set. Orange POTUS has stated in his State of the Union address that America will never become a socialist country on his watch. Sorry Mr. President, but given modern usage and understanding of the term, it’s too late. Everything from Social Security to using Eminent Domain for a wall building boondoggle along the southern part of the country that the State claims as its own property, and everything in between proves it. Not to mention, his proposed budget is the biggest in history. The Right still cheers.

One thing I’ve noticed since the rise of Trump is the incessant defense of the man in all areas by those in the Patriot movement. Anything that the man does is seen as an edict handed down by the orange Yankee liberal even if it is at odds with their basic core principles. The ultimate act of irony to me is his appointment of William Barr to be Attorney General. Yes, the same guy who defended Lon Horiuchi, who shot Vicky Weaver in the head while holding a baby and defended blanket federal immunity for all law enforcement agents no matter their crime. Silent they remain.

This phenomenon happens with every political faction when they take power, but it seems much worse this time than years past.  Every 2 to 6 years the parties swap domination rights and the opposition acts as though they will resist the authoritarianism of the party in control. Neither dominant political party in these united States opposes dictators. They merely want to be the dictators. The fabricated Culture War is in reality just a war among factions of Power running fedgov, not any legitimate opposition to the status quo.

It has become quite clear to me that the various Patriot factions not only lack principle, but broadly speaking they lack the will to act. In the Obama years, there was talk of armed conflict over spending, infringements on rights, gun control, and socialism. The same folks now openly embrace it as Trump takes it all to new levels and they even make excuses for it or worse, openly defend it.

In recent years there has been a rise in discussions about Masculinity. This is undoubtedly due to the degradation of manliness in the general public. Large pluralities of modern men can’t put on a starter, frame a deck, or fell a tree. They work in cubicles. The growing trend of joining ‘tribes’ and looking for something more, is no surprise, because they didn’t grow up that way or weren’t exposed to it like previous generations. Frat boy type groups centering around political values even exist. But instead of spending all that time in the bar talking about manliness, why don’t they actually do legitimate ‘man things’ instead? Instead of talking about 9mm vs .45, why aren’t they on the range? Why aren’t they in the timber stand or working cattle instead of drinking in some urban center in a yuppie bar?

One of my ideological mentors, Boston T. Party, used to talk quite a bit about action vs. rhetoric. In the introduction to Claire Wolfe’s brilliant work, 101 things to do until the Revolution, he spoke of action libertarians vs. egghead libertarians. Ms. Wolfe’s proposals in the book were action oriented, with Monkey Wrench Gang zeal, rooted in bedrock principles.  The egghead libertarians are the think tank types, or the folks incessantly debating, as Boston put it, things such as the legitimacy of urban rat control funded by taxation in New York City. While I go through phases just like anyone and enjoy a good round table discussion about philosophical issues occasionally, it dwarfs daily action. For every smart-ass comment I make to a friend in passing about X political capers, I spend hours dry firing, or in the gym or working on living self reliantly.

A full discourse on the political and humdrum activism can be found here:  https://zerogov.com/against-humdrum-activism-a-critique-of-the-conventional-reaction-by-john-myers/

Let it serve as a corollary to this essay.

Having just a cursory presence in the gun/liberty blogosphere, even I can see the obvious. Articles or blog postings about the latest piece of gear for someone’s next patrol against the communist legions headed by AOC get the hits, but articles about employing ones carbine quick and efficiently or techniques for the clinch range gun fight get nothing. A gear review or a caliber debate will get a million hits, but an article about what your practice routine looks like will get none. People like to talk and live vicariously through others.

The reality is the philosophy has been written. It’s been debated and refined. It’s now time to do.

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28 Feb The Gun Owner is the New Negro by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: I just wanted to thank my readers and supporters for post #500, I opened the ZeroGov blog in July 2009 after being excommunicated from LewRockwell.com by Lew Rockwell.

I have no ill feelings toward Lew, his site, his rules. I still read LRC and appreciate the one stop shopping for the increasingly red-pilled libertarian diaspora that visits there.

So again, thanks to all the readers who have kept this tiny voice in the ‘net wilderness alive.

No ads and no begging for money and whatever landed in the tip jar, I thank you for it.

My title today is a direct challenge to any Democrat politician to deny their party’s enthusiasm for anti-black policies that colored all of their race decisions through most of their history as violence brokers at every level of “office”.

Comrade-President Woodrow Wilson led the vanguard:

“Upon taking office, Wilson himself fired 15 out of 17 black supervisors in the federal service and replaced them with white people. After the Treasury and Post Office began segregating, many black workers were let go. The head of the Internal Revenue division in Georgia fired all his black employees, saying, “There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place in the corn field.” To enable hiring discrimination going forward, in 1914 the federal government began requiring photographs on job applications.”

If you haven’t purchased one or ten of these, I suggest you buy one immediately. If these survive the year, I will be shocked. It’s not hard to get a table top mill and a jig and finish your own lower.

I am on episode #141 of ProfCJ’s Dangerous History Podcast and thoroughly digging the journey, I started at #53.

Please keep in mind that every political solution in the history of this country has made you less free and not more free. That is a feature and not a bug.

Buppert’s Law of Government: “Any government beyond self-government is naturally a delimiting affair for liberty as the population increases subject to the coercive nature of its institutional rules.”

I have been incommunicado on podcasts since 2015 and look forward to doing them again, here is one of the talks I think I enjoyed the most.-BB

“The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside.… Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them; … the weak will become a prey to the strong.”

― Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right

Private weapons ownership and self defense are the most primal and unvarnished imperatives in the human condition, absent these, every man is subject to the whims and fancies of both government and private criminals. Private weapons owners are now discriminated against on a mass basis in schools, restaurants, government buildings and many other public places; segregation works. Democrats are going back to their roots as the creators of such diverse practices and groups as the KKK, segregation on buses and lunch counters, black disarmament laws, lynching and other such social niceties. The Republicans are playing along in their traditional role of willing Mensheviks to the Democrat Bolsheviks.

“Gun control advocates today are not so foolish as to openly promote racist laws, and so the question might be asked what relevance the racist past of gun control laws has. One concern is that the motivations for disarming blacks in the past are really not so different from the motivations for disarming law-abiding citizens today. In the last century, the official rhetoric in support of such laws was that “they” were too violent, too untrustworthy, to be allowed weapons. Today, the same elitist rhetoric regards law-abiding Americans in the same way, as child-like creatures in need of guidance from the government. In the last century, while never openly admitted, one of the goals of disarming blacks was to make them more willing to accept various forms of economic oppression, including the sharecropping system, in which free blacks were reduced to an economic state not dramatically superior to the conditions of slavery.”

Modern gun owners are the new Negro. Private weapons ownership and communism do not mix.

There is no such thing as socialism. That’s just a polite way of saying fuck you. It is all just communism with a smiley face. The socialist hides the gun and the communist brandishes it.

Mike is right, if you’re an individualist and don’t realize you are in a siege, you’ve been asleep. This isn’t about the sophomoric groin tackle and pigmentation identity games played by both left and right and every collectivist malefactor in between. This diversity is superfluous and purposefully buries the individual identity in a tribal costume around the cannibal cooking pot. The actual bifurcation is dead simple: this is a clash between home sapient and homo Sovieticus.

Communists aren’t human beings.

The logic is sound and unimpeachable apparently. Someone got shot trying to break into a house? Ban houses (or at least ban locks on houses so no one is “forced” to break in). But ultimately; someone got shot trying to steal private property, so eliminate private property.

All use of government brandished weapons is exempt from the preceding lesson in logic…

Now we see that the CPUSA v2.0 has passed a Universal Background Check diktat that will criminalize all private transfers of weapons in the USSA and subject them to scrutiny by the designated law imposement apparatchiks. The leadership vermin in the House know the Senate will most likely not pass it and the Mango Mussolini has vowed to oppose it but his trust level on firearms is exactly zero.

As I have mentioned before, it is approximately 700 shopping days until the next collectivist meat puppet shambles into the Offal Office to drool and dissemble on the teleprompter with more bloviations of dezinformatsiya and civilian maskirovka.

The weapons disarmament crowd has been after this since the ink was drying on the evil 1968 GCA. A linkage between a buyer and a firearm and the permanent relationship recorded by government authorities is an awesome tool for future confiscation. They don’t have it yet despite the 4473 requirements at your local unfunded BATFE field office, the nearest gun store, to maintain their FFL records for 20 years. I surrendered my BATF FFL in the early nineties and there was a requirement to turn in all my 4473s on file when I retired the license. They never made it when I tripped and dropped them in the shredder.

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22 Feb Buyer Beware: Never Go Full Benchmade by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: Just remember that you have approximately 700 shopping days until the Mango Mussolini may lose to the other socialists in the largest voter fraud yet in 2020.

Stock up while you can.

Guns:

Ammo:

And train like your life depends on it…

Communism is a human neurological software virus. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2007 in “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”:

“When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith, but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical and dialectical materialism was not an absolute, and it did not have any supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had its martyrs and saints and doctrinaires and (after a while) its mutually excommunicating rival papacies. It also had its schisms and inquisitions and heresy hunts. I was a member of a dissident sect, which admired Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, and I can say definitely that we also had our prophets…Those of us who had a sort of rational alternative for religion had reached a terminus which was comparably dogmatic.”

As Arthur Koestler wrote in the seminal “The God That Failed”:

“Something had clicked in my brain, which shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had ‘seen the light’ is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows…The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into a pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past.”

C.K. Ryan recently penned this gem:

“These days, when I see that copy of “Das Kapital “on my shelf, my mind turns not to its author, but to Socrates. For during my years as a Marxist, I lost touch with the philosopher’s greatest insight: “I neither know nor think I know.” Socrates was the smartest man in Athens because he recognized his ignorance. It is perhaps the oldest lesson that philosophy has to teach us, yet so many of us have forgotten it.”

Political cults are caravans to mass graves and fortunately all politics has a shelf life, some folks just like to put the pedal to the metal when it comes to scrambling over the ideological cliff for their masters.

The current infantcide cavalcade is yet another unmasking of the true intentions of the communists as they press ahead with their evil agenda. Just ask them one question: …if your moral framework allows you to maim, dismember and murder the most innocent, vulnerable and defenseless among us, what exactly does your moral compass stop you from doing?

Burn this into your skulls and sear it into your brain: the quaint term “Deep State” is nothing more than a civilized synonym for communism.

Manhood is the sole brake on communism whether you like it or not. My friend Boston does a brilliant disquisition on this.

Pleasant dreams, Helots. -BB

I am enjoying the mass exodus from supporting the cretins at Benchmade.

Like the Billion Dollar PR lesson for United Airlines when they dragged a paying passenger off a plane, Benchmade out of Oregon yelled “hold my beer” and tried to practice some extreme of backwards customer service.

Of course, the airlines continue the practice. On domestic airlines , you’re an inmate, on international flights with foreign flagged airlines you are still treated like a paying customer.

Anyway, I wonder at how many more “tacticool” companies are snickering like the commies at BM at taking money from the gun and knife enthusiasts and supporting government weapons-grabbing collectivists with the proceeds.

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2019/02/josh-wayner/does-benchmade-knives-support-second-amendment-rights/

Funny how their fondling of coproach genitalia led to the discovery of their political donations. Don’t they know that fraternizing with the police never advances freedom? But then again, serendipity can be a bitch for commies in patriotic drag.

I am underwhelmed by BM quality and own very few. Benchmade has had rotten QC for the last decade or so. Off-center blades, wobbly locks, breaking springs, gaps between bolsters/scales/back-spacers, asymmetrical grinds and edge bevels. And they take the moniker of “handmade” to a new fabricated level. And you pay a high price for these.

I wish folks with time on their hands would do the public records research to see what these collectivist vermin are donating to. We know that the geniuses at Bag of Dicks and Leatherman have been worshiping at the disarmament altar for awhile. Leatherman, Gerber, CRKT, Kershaw/ZT, and Benchmade are all produced near the Portland area and Zero Tolerance knives have been my top pick for years for a quality folder. I do hope revelations don’t reveal a government supremacist contagion in the water there that turns knife businesses into communist pod combines.

I always wonder at the curious phenomenon of a tool or outdoor company thinking that socialist justice virtue signalling will garner more sales. How many of the soi-boi legions actually spend the money on the middle-tier knife offerings like Benchmade?

Sort of like the other C-Suite vermin at the aforementioned companies spitting in the faces of their own clientele like Dick’s and Field and Stream...

At least we know as crazy as Lynn Thompson is, Cold Steel will never go full Benchmade. You never go full Benchmade.

Maybe we’ll discover in a curious moment of enlightened seppuku they donated to the Labor commies in the UK to help ban knives too.

Benchmade: “Another feature people love but don’t really use is the lifetime warranty and sharpening.”

Free markets have so many attributes that make them adaptable and ultimately superior to government when it comes to quality goods and services. You choose who you support.

Can everyone just break the knives and call on the lifetime warranty? Asking for a friend…

PSA for Benchmade: BFYTW.

As Pete says at WRSA: “Stop spending your money with businesses that want you dead.”

Buyer beware…

12 Feb “Because We Knew Mordor Was Real…” by Bill Buppert

“There is a word very commonly used these days: “anti-communism.” It’s a very stupid word, badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, something basic, something fundamental. Therefore, it is taken as the point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say that this word was poorly selected, that it was put together by people who do not understand etymology: the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says “anti-communism” is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: that which is against communism is for humanity. Not to accept, to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. It isn’t being a member of a party.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Speech in Washington D.C. (30 June 1975), published in Solzhenitsyn: The Voice of Freedom (1975), p. 30

Publisher’s Note: My youngest son rotates out of his Okinawan tour with the USMC in August, I look forward to him coming home to be closer to his parents at a western posting to finish out his enlistment. The Corps is an existential train wreck in so many ways that I will explicate once he has safely concluded his four-year enlistment. Right now, he has no intention of reenlisting, thank the Gods.

He is one of the most talented shooters I know, and the Corps has done nothing with that wealth of genetic skill and knowledge.

I just started ProfCJ’s epic multi-part series on the “not so civil war” starting at episode #131 in his DHP podcast series. I mentioned before I started at episode #53 to enjoy my commutes to the day-job. I am an amateur military historian and he has really rounded out my knowledge base and expanded the power critique to areas I had not investigated.

In other news: “Why are anti-gun activists so violent?” When you turn that question around and ask it the other way (why are the government supremacists so opposed to private humans being armed?) then it pretty well answers itself.

Push back.

Don’t let the communists seize the high ground on language; if gun violence is responsible for two thirds of all suicides, is it rope violence if they hang themselves? There is no communist country in recorded history that permitted private weapons ownership. I say again, you will note that the disarmament enthusiasts NEVER advocate the disarming of government forces. It is not even in their “moral” imagination.

Ever. -BB

The title of this essay is quoted from the widow of Vaclav Benda, Kamila. Her husband was a jailed dissident in communist Czechoslovakia. The courage of Benda in defying his government is so much more profound than the faux outrage and cost-free virtue signaling of the present generations of outraged harpies and impassioned soy-bois who man the fainting couches. Keep in mind that the present RESIST! army in America is a plea to not reduce the size and scope of government but the opposite. These new communists want the largest government in the history of humankind to get even larger and deadlier.

That is their fatal conceit because they know what’s best for you.

“Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story” — the hobbits and others resisting Mordor — “was our story too.”

Kamila Benda continues:

“Kamila talked about how she once received a letter from Vaclav from prison. In it, he wrote of the possibility that they would emigrate in exchange for early release.

“I wrote back to tell him no, that he would be better off staying in prison to fight for what we believe is true,” she told me.

Think of it: this woman was raising six kids all alone because her husband was a political prisoner. Yet she told him that the cause they served was more important than the relief of their suffering.”

The kids told about how their parents vaccinated them against the disease of communist ideology by raising them to know that the things they heard at school and in the media were lies. In other words, Vaclav and Kamila were consciously counter-cultural, and understood that they had to impart the same sense to their children, to keep from losing their children to propaganda.

Any government beyond self-government is naturally a delimiting affair for liberty as the population increases subject to the coercive nature of its rules. Hence America is too big to succeed at anything but tyranny.

Dunning-Kruger Effect is a serial killer of freedom…it is one of the most vital tools of the government university system, ground zero of the kakocratic mandarins in the faculty lounges.

The present Murder Inc. political combine in DC is nothing more than a gang with colored rags, bad music and really shitty rationales for mass violence. You’ll notice that the mountains of laws on the books from the Federal to the local level come with a death sentence to any disobedient serf depending on their level of resistance to initial apprehension by the standing army of coproaches that cravenly but obediently carry out every order by their political masters.

After all, they’re only upholding the law. They’re only following orders.

The pathetic Republicans are merely the Menshevik straight men for the Bolshevik comedy troupe prancing about as Democrats. Since the Mango Mussolini has been in the Offal Office, it has been my pleasure to see the mask fall off as the collectivists on the “left’ lose their minds and say what they’re really thinking. From infanticide to private weapons confiscation to wholesale seizure of economic sectors from nominally private hands, the parade of communist caterwauling and virtue signaling has been magnificent to behold.

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31 Jan Diamonds Live Forever by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: I will be attending a two-day red dot pistol course with Modern Samurai in March. Email if you think you want to join us.

 Alex at ammo.com has penned another barn-burner on the vile income tax. Here’s a taste of his brilliant jeremiad:

“Progressivism reached its zenith during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, when progressive reformers finally got their wish as the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913. This ratification settled any constitutional questions about the legality of this controversial tax. It started out as a relatively limited tax, with individuals making below $20,000 paying a rate of one percent, and the rich – those making making more than $500,000 – paying a seven-percent tax.

Supporters of the income tax sold it as a tax that would only target the filthy rich. But as history has shown, government encroachments have a tendency of growing over time. In 1917, the lowest tax bracket paid two percent, although the highest income earners saw their taxes skyrocket to 67 percent.”

Remember that this wretched slave instrument reached a peak marginal rate of 94% under RedDR.

In other news, the local brain-damaged mandarins in DC have deployed an elite “straw inspector unit” to police the plastic straws still in circulation since the ban by Mordor on the Potomac this month. The straw tends to be a single use item in restaurants so I wonder at plastic cups, plates, takeout boxes and utensils, are those next? Aren’t Styrofoam cups also petroleum products? Of course, one good way to dispose of Styrofoam is to mix it with gasoline for a primitive napalm variant.

In the state of VA, one of their violence brokers in the political brothel quaintly called the VA House of Representatives is proposing a bill that would allow a mother in collusion with her doctor to murder and dismember her child within seconds of leaving the birth canal. So the Governor-Comrade Ralph Northam (CPUSA-VA) who is for delivery day abortions received $2 million in campaign donations from Planned Parenthood (who benefit from abortions for procedures and the human dismemberment market), but Planned Parenthood is supposed to be a non-profit organization which receives funding from the government…. which means they are essentially throwing money back in forth to benefit each other. Since 1973, the infanticide industry in the US has slaughtered over 60 million babies.

I suspect that bediseds th callous disregard for life evident in all collectivists, this is also a long play on organ harvesting and trafficking by the usual suspects with government cover.

“Virginia House Democrats propose legislation to allow abortions up until the moment of birth:

Todd Gilbert (R): Where it’s obvious a woman is about to give birth…would that be a point at which she could still request an abortion?

Kathy Tran (CPUSA-VA): “My bill would allow that, yes…”

NY has joined the homicidal madness and RI is doing the same thing. It would be interesting if someone took the time to see the text of these bills and their similarity since they are all being proposed at the same time. I suspect one would find Planned Parenthood and associated medical combines doing this to increases the number of bodies that can be harvested for profit. The state is almost to Peak Evil.

You can’t make this shit up. Infanticide has been a progressive pipe dream for over a century. Keep in mind that politicians are death fetishists first and foremost. For serial killers, psychopaths and sociopaths, political office is the ultimate cloaking device to practice your evil in public and rob the taxpayer at gunpoint to pay for your sumptuous living.

As most of my readers know I am guilty of othering and demonizing communists, I do not consider them human beings worthy of my consideration or protection. They are the enemy of all moral and free men. Surprisingly, Radio Free Europe published a great retrospective on the Romanian elimination of their communist overlords in a style I hope to see repeated in the future.

We all know communists now, you don’t just see them on TV or whatever media you consume (I recommend you never watch another news broadcast for the rest of your life. They are strangers in the supermarket, that car with the Obama or Pantsuit Negan sticker on their car; they may even be friends and family. Their creed is a gun to your head.

There are communists amongst us!

When the government comes to take away evil private guns, they will use evil government guns to do so.

I have been listening to ProfCJ’s Dangerous History Podcast starting at #53 and I am now on episode #124 and it has been a wild and informative ride. I can’t recommend it enough.

I appeared on his show here when we discussed irregular warfare together for several scintillating. episodes. I have been on radio silence podcasting since that time.

I used to support him on Patreon but I have quit that Soviet outfit for its noxious communist policies. I urge you to do the same. He is now on SubscribeStar. Enough of my money is robbed from me to support the state and I wish to take the crumbs I’m left with and invest them wisely.

Twitter addiction, yes, I had it and went cold turkey on Monday of this week. I will check the feed once a month. My editor said you’ll sell more books if you use Twitter. No more.

I remain an expat of the libertarian diaspora and have joined the small but growing collapsitarian intelligentsia.

This has been a longer than usual “bits and sods” but there it is. -BB

One of my favorite websites is The Captain’s Journal and it just so happened that I was called out unfairly and mis-characterized in my beliefs and called an atheist, I want to briefly set the record straight and I did so in an earlier screed.

Pardon me if I make this particular essay more personal than the usual analytical and rhetorical flights of fancy I publish.

“Donk” was kind enough to send a response to my essay and gave me permission to publish it:

“Bill,

I apologize if I incorrectly generalized you as an “avowed atheist,” however, the statement was based on two things. First, I recall an exchange we had several years ago in the comment section of one of your blog posts, I do not recall if it was here or at another blog. The exchange dealt with Romans 13. I agree that it does not mandate the disciple of Christ to slavishly obey the state, regardless of how benevolent or malevolent. But I also recall stating that man is fallen and sinful and that a community needs to have some method to redress violations of natural law between individuals. Your responses in this exchange is what started my assumption, apparently incorrectly, that you were an atheist. Second, I recalled reading one of your blog posts where you essentially said you were an atheist and that you encouraged your children to be likewise. Perhaps I misread the blog post and/or am mis-remembering what you meant. So, to clear the air, I admit to being wrong and assuming incorrectly and sincerely apologize.

That said, I hope you took the following comments as a compliment and not a back handed one – I truly do find wisdom and truth here on your web site and reading your posts have helped me develop a clearer picture of how I see the world as it is.

Lastly, I have gone through many of the stages of becoming “woke” to the world as it is (to borrow an idiotic, yet current term); shock and anger being the most prominent. My comment regarding LEOs is not to diminish their tyrannical role in our society. It’s just that I have grown tired of the ranting and choose to concentrate efforts on building tribe/community and looking to what will remain/build upon after the inevitable collapse of Leviathan. I find much useful information in the comment sections of liberty blogs, however, it is frustrating to have to wade through a sea of righteous keypounding to find the occasional pearl, that’s all.

In closing, love the T-shirts (have them both) and equally love the stares at the local small town events – especially from the coproaches.

Donk

PS, please feel free to publish my mea culpa anywhere you choose.”

Thanks Donk and I mean it, a gentlemanly comportment will win me over every time and you have done so in spades.

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19 Jan Men and Weapons: The Quality of Refusal by Bill Buppert

“The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost maidenlike, guest in a hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. The man who combines both characters – the knight – is not a work of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.”

― C.S. Lewis

“These are the figures of steel whose eagle eyes dart between whirling propellers to pierce the cloud; who dare the hellish crossing through fields of roaring craters, gripped in the chaos of tank engines … men relentlessly saturated with the spirit of battle, men whose urgent wanting discharges itself in a single concentrated and determined release of energy.

As I watch them noiselessly slicing alleyways into barbed wire, digging steps to storm outward, synchronizing luminous watches, finding the North by the stars, the recognition flashes: this is the new man. The pioneers of storm, the elect of central Europe. A whole new race, intelligent, strong, men of will … supple predators straining with energy. They will be architects building on the ruined foundations of the world.”

― Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis

Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.

– Robert Heinlein

Publisher’s Note: Happy Birthday, Lysander Spooner, the patron saint of this site.

 “Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) is the American individualist anarchist and legal theorist known mainly for setting up a commercial post office in competition with the government and thereby being shut down. But he was also the author of some of the most radical political and economic writings of the 19th century, and continues to have a huge influence on libertarian thinkers today. He was a dedicated opponent of slavery in all its forms — even advocating guerrilla war to stop it — but also a dedicated opponent of the federal invasion of the South and its postwar reconstruction. See Let’s Abolish Government, a collection selected personally by Murray Rothbard as Spooner’s best work.”

Had a great visit with my youngest son, on leave from his posting in Okinawa. Ironically, his first duty station is where was born when I was stationed Torii Station with 1-1 SFG(A). A little sad he is gone but rotates back to the state before the end of the year.

I am also thankful that all three of my boys are chock-full of toxic masculinity and a stirring rebuke to the APA assault on civilizational standards of manhood.

Fuck them.

 …and all my children have a healthy psychosis called Drapetomania. 

Get to the range. -BB 

Here’s what we know: outside of the southern United States which started going after disarmament notions to control black access to guns way before the Federal government stepped in it in 1934 with the infamously ill-conceived National Firearms Act, the US started conducting a low-level three-pronged war (the Executive nodding sagely at the Legislature as they pass bill after bill narrowing and restricting access to firearms by non-government humans and the Federal Courts rubber-stamping odious restriction after odious restriction) against private weapons ownership.

This jobs program for Volstead Amendment enforcers in the Treasury Department was followed by these gems of legislation and judicial brilliance in the 1938 FFA, 1939 US v. Miller, 1968 OCC & SSA and GCA, 1986 FOPA, Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, Gun-Free School Zones Act (1990), Brady Act (1993), AWB (1994), on and on and on.

Comrade Reagan made a guest appearance when he disarmed California pedestrians with the 1967 Mulford Act after the Black Panthers made him fill his pants when he was busy building a giant bureaucratic state (hiking taxes and legalizing infanticide among other things) in Sacramento and they happened to show up bearing arms at his house of ill-repute in the Governor’s office.

You will note that no such restrictions have emerged for the possession of weapons by our zookeepers in the government. If anything, these hubristic Orcs have accelerated the deployment of arms and munitions to countless agencies. Anyone that wants you disarmed wants to control and/or kill you, usually in that sequence depending on your level of resistance.

My readership know my position on firearms laws and the Second Amendment. My latest screed can be found here. I have written many other jeremiads against the violence brokers in the government. 

“Every one of these infringements is legally stamped and approved by the Federal government tentacled agencies and robed government employees. 

Every one of these infringements is an abridgement of your de jure and de facto right to defend you and yours.

Every one of these would have been a sufficient causus belli for the festivities at Lexington Green on 19 April 1775 and every one of these is a violation of the intent and spirit of the Declaration of Independence for which the Constitution was the tombstone.”

The Second Amendment is dead if it even survived the beginning of the twentieth century when state after state, especially in the south started regulating the fuck out of firearms possession by private citizens while ratcheting up the armories of government employees as exemplified by the Federal Prohibition agents and the infamous beating and bloodying of thousands of WWI pensioners during the Bonus March in 1932.

The aforementioned list of legislative and judicial nonsense in concert with the establishment of sadistic and ill-tempered agencies like the BATFE and all Federal “law enforcement” agencies cements the case that the 2A is merely an inconvenience to the zookeepers presently lording over the host of taxpayers living on the vast American plantation. In case you’ve been living in a cave, you will note the tens of thousands of incidents where the 19,000 law imposement organizations peppering the landscape maimed and killed thousands with government guns.

So here is where it leaves you: you have an Offal Office occupant whose roots are that of a crony capitalist in the Mussolini style of state corporatism melded to a hybrid Northeastern progressive steeped in the soft communist marinade of a New Yorker. Once you grok this, all of his behavior and spinelessness on weapons ownership makes sense.

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30 Dec No. Their Cold Dead Hands. Part II by Bill Buppert

THEY SAY: “Those assault rifles have no sporting purpose. You don’t need a 30-round magazine for hunting deer they’re only for killing people.”

WE SAY: “I compete in DCM High Power with my AR-15. You need a large-capacity magazine for their course of fire. My SKS is a fine deer rifle, and I’ve never done anything to give my government reason not to trust me, blah, blah, blah.” (FLAW: You have implicitly conceded that it is OK to ban any gun with no sporting use. And eventually they can replace your sporting arms with arcade-game substitutes.)

WE SHOULD SAY: “Your claim that ‘they’re only for killing people’ is imprecise. A gas chamber or electric chair is designed for killing people, and these devices obviously serve different functions than guns. To be precise, a high capacity military-type rifle or handgun is designed for CONFLICT. When I need to protect myself and my freedom, I want the most reliable, most durable, highest capacity weapon possible. The only thing hunting and target shooting have to do with freedom is that they’re good practice.”

Give It to Them Straight
by John Ross
Author of Unintended Consequences

“When law and morality contradict each other the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his sense of morality or losing his respect of the law.”

— Frederic Bastiat

Publisher’s Note: I hope everyone has had a great holiday with friends and family. I was able to get all my children under one roof this season so I am blessed.

Part I is here.

My youngest son is on leave and he and I have spent some great range time together. He is a phenomenal shooter with reload times that see the spare magazine in the Glock before the ejected magazine hits the deck. -BB

“The downside to gun control is genocide.”
― John Ross, Unintended Consequences

“Later that day [August 31, 1918] the head of the Cheka, [Felix] Dzerzhinsky, and his assistant, Jan Peters, ordered that ‘anyone caught in illegal possession of a firearm will be immediately executed.’ ”

Sean McMeekin, The Russian Revolution (pg 265)

Guns don’t kill people, physics kills people.

Yes, America is now Vichy France Version 2.0 during the War to Save Josef Stalin. Many Frenchmen resisted the socialist decrees in 1935 (ironically to disrupt communist political violence) to disarm the population but many did and when the German army rolled in, they simply confiscated government registration records and proceeded to round them up. Those that complied had their weapons seized or worse. Registration always leads to confiscation.

You may see an unprecedented assault on private weapons ownership in the near future, the communists are going hammer and sickle after non-government firearms following the path of other western countries in the past century stripping their subjects of the ability to defend themselves against both private criminal and existential government threats. The former being much more remote in probability than violence visited on you by your own government.

That red, white and blue flashing light bar in your rear view mirror when a road pirate pulls you over may be the truest representation of what those colors really mean.

You will note some of the worst excesses of government attacks on private weapons ownership occur under GOP auspices like the Republicans outstripping Democrats for gun-grabbing in the horrific 1968 Gun Control Act, the hoplophobic nonsense in the Orwellian-named Firearms Owners Protection Act in 1986 and Bushevik I banning the import of cosmetically offensive weapons in 1989. Reagan has a long history of denying American subjects the right to bear arms like the Mulford Act in 1967.

Hence the Mango Emperor signing the idiotic bump-stock ban (one can use a rubber band to achieve the very same effect with greater accuracy). And Trump’s extemporaneous fellating of the coproach state by saying seize them first and due process later. So bold, so heroic.

You cannot rely on the GOP to protect firearms ownership; they are naturally wobbly-kneed in ANY rhetorical fight and have an idiotic relationship with the urinalists in the communist press in which they think that this time (this time!), they’ll get the respect they deserve.

There is not a single component of Federal weapons legislation that has any justification beyond regulatory power to deny owning and bearing firearms. Like hate crimes, charging of a malefactor with gun possession does not specifically address the act of committing a crime. It criminalizes possession of a tool and is merely an additional charge for the “just-us” system to stack them high to scare the accused into a plea deal.

As readers of this site know, I can’t make any rational, moral or consequentialist argument for the power much less the existence of the state hence my complete dismissal of the Second Amendment as a bulwark to protect these rights that exist prior to any government approval. That amendment like so many in the fetid Constitution is poorly worded and crafted in a way that encourages ambiguity and “literal interpretation” (a nonsensical notion in which humans are expected to need an interpretive framework for a literal construct). Mind you, the most compelling and elegant argument I have seen for the wording (which should have reversed the clauses) is the following:

“A well-schooled electorate, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed.”

 But the rule of law is a myth hence the interpretive frameworks of modern courts will render whatever judgment they wish no matter how insane or illogical the ruling like Zombie Scalia’s “dangerous and unusual” chicanery in Heller and Commissar Robert’s decision on national socialist healthcare being a tax and therefore law of the land.

Exhibit A is the Second Amendment’s treatment in the “just-us” system such as the 1934 NFA, 1938 FFA, 1939 US v. Miller, 1967 Mulford Act (CA), 1968 OCC & SSA and GCA, 1986 FOPA, Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, Gun-Free School Zones Act (1990), Brady Act (1993), AWB (1994), on and on and on.

All perfectly legal and the law of the land despite the base interference with private weapons ownership. You will note in the history of the US, no government body at the Federal level has sought similar prohibitions against its legions of enforcers and coproaches.

David Kopel is a savvy observer of the 2A and wrote this interesting essay in 1999, which has since been superceded by other rulings the cranks on the Supreme Court have issued.

“In the face of this Supreme Court record, is it accurate for gun control advocates to claim that the non-individual nature of the Second Amendment is “perhaps the most well-settled” point in all of American constitutional law? The extravagant claim cannot survive a reading of what the Supreme Court has actually said about the Second Amendment. In the written opinions of the Justices of the United States Supreme Court, the Second Amendment does appear to be reasonably well-settled–as an individual right. The argument that a particular Supreme Court opinion’s language about the Second Amendment does not reflect what the author “really” thought about the Second Amendment cannot be used to ignore all these written opinions–unless we presume that Supreme Court Justices throughout the Republic’s history have written things about the Second Amendment that they did not mean.”

 To me, Kopel makes an extraordinarily compelling argument yet if the hundreds of appointees to the “bench” in the Federal judiciary are any indication, logic and morality mean nothing. Pure naked government power and the expansion thereof is the sole expository notion.

Remember that this is a system that has convicted 14 cops of murder since 1914 and the same coproach army has extinguished the lives of twenty thousand Americans since the turn of this century, four time the number of American combatants that have died in new-imperialist shit-pits planet-wide in the same time period.

Every killing by a cop justified. Every one.

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10 Dec The Guerrilla Gunfighter: A Book Review and Commentary by John Meyers

Publisher’s Note: I love the Christmas season because everyone starts to behave like ethical anarchists but it won’t last.

I was recently mentioned in the comments section of one of my favorite blogs, Herschel’s The Captains Journal. I wanted to post a corrective to the notion that I am an atheist.

Here’s the comment and my response:

Donk: That said, considering the present state of regulatory and law enforcement affairs, it seems to me we should all be going full Buppert. Bill is an avowed Atheist and that gives me considerable pause as a devoted disciple of Christ. Yet, God is the author of all truth, beauty and goodness and often times that can be revealed among the pagan. Mendelssohn, Mozart, Leonard Bernstein, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe (shout out to da Commonwealth). So…..let’s chat about the more esoteric aspects of our Western civilization than always chest beating over unruly LEOs. In fact, let us as sovereigns over our @Fred Apex tribes, make a pact today we will no longer accept tyranny in our local AO, however, it manifests itself REGARDLESS of the personal cost. As far as me and my household…..done, years ago.

Donk,

I am not an atheist, I am a Spinozan deist with a strong agnostic bent. While spiritual as a Stoic, I would most likely be accused of not having a religion. I find that most atheists even in the libertarian camp tend to be insufferable scolds and know-nothings who suffer the same critical flaw as theists: trying to critically prove a null in the supernatural sphere and expecting their reasoning on both sides to be a compelling argument for the other. No thanks, I only have so much time until I shuffle off this mortal coil to the next adventure or dust.

Per the Constitution, a worthless slaver document that has convinced believers that the government advancement of individual liberty is possible, and history proves otherwise. Just look at the “three branches” (a quaint government obedience training nostrum) reducing and gutting the right to bear arms at every turn. Exhibit A is the 1934 NFA, 1938 FFA, 1939 US v. Miller, 1967 Mulford Act (CA), 1968 OCC & SSA and GCA, 1986 FOPA, Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, Gun-Free School Zones Act (1990), Brady Act (1993), AWB (1994), on and on and on. There’s more to that but you get the picture.

The police have killed more than 20,000 human beings in America since the start of the new century; that’s four times as many soldiers have died since the beginning of this century.

And I also suspect that number is lower than the actual pile of corpses because of non-, under- and mis-reporting by the 19,000 police departments littering the landscape of America.

All policeman are armed Leninists in the end whose sole function is to be the strong-arm and bloody spearpoint of the political class and its army of bureaucratic apparatchiks in the Amerikan nomenklatura.

I am no longer a small “l” libertarian (I was a member of the LP for three months in the 1990s, that cured me of it), I am a proud collapsitarian.

Rant off.

Cordially,

Bill Buppert

Just clearing the air. on to John’s scintillating essay. -BB

“Even in the immediate, short-term context of the private citizen, unconcerned with the drain-circling spiral of post-modern American life, who is simply concerned about the safety of himself and his family, the pistol, with its ease of concealment, convenience to keep close at hand, and always ready, moves pretty quickly towards the pinnacle of the hierarchy of efficiency of practical lethality.

…And this is the reason I have written this book before writing one about fighting with the rifle. This book is designed to be a complete training program, for you to learn not only how to engage realistic targets at all ranges from contact to the limits of the weapons ability, but how to apply that skill level in the context of real world combative scenarios. It is designed to teach you how to practice those skills, once learned, so you can develop the ability to actually utilize them in such a manner.”

– John Mosby, The Guerilla Gunfighter: Clandestine Carry Pistol

I’ve been a fan of John Mosby’s Mountain Guerrilla Blog pretty much since the beginning. I’ve always enjoyed the man’s no BS approach to firearms, tactics and philosophy. His other two titles in similar veins to The Guerrilla Gunfighter are mainstays in my reading rotation as well. However I think Mosby’s latest book is a step ahead of the rest.

Upon arrival of the book, with its green cover, it immediately struck me as being similar to the IRA Green Book. Whether that was intentional or not, I do not know. I grinned.

I’ve read the book all the way through once, and referred back to several sections several times after grokking some of the material. The material and presentation is more mature than The Reluctant Partisan series and demonstrates a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

One doesn’t have to be an academic devotee of Austrian Business Cycle Theory, trudge through a David Harvey screed on the inevitability of the collapse of Late Capitalism or even watch Peter Schiff news clips to understand, as Mosby puts it, “shit just ain’t right.”

Its pretty obvious things are going south. Trumpian neo-liberalism mixed with populist nationalism and a dash of economic illiteracy will not save America. 1775 will likely never happen again.  We are obviously on the trajectory of the slow decline of Empires and not the survivalist wet dream of waking up tomorrow, hearing guns crack in the streets and it finally being “time.” While this may challenge the grand arrogance of the average American nationalist’s sacred view of God, Country, patriotic flag bunting, Grandma’s apple pie and all the rest, it needs to be said. (Nationalist sacred cows slaughtered with a traditionalist critique here)

Enthusiasts of Unconventional Warfare (UW) doctrine will take note that rather than focusing on rural greenside patrolling operations with the mythical survival team in a post-collapse scenario of Tactical Fantasy Band Camp, (which actually is relevant by the way but in my view it should just be further down the average person’s priority list, because generally most folks need work on the fast/accurate part of the equation. Dunning-Kruger and all that) it recognizes that guerrilla conflict as well as day-to-day operations in the current world, largely center around pistol fights in developed areas. Think Northern Irelands dirty war vs. jungle-ops in Vietnam.

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27 Nov Evil Is As Evil Does: The Government Education Complex by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: I do hope that everyone is tooling up for the coming Endarkenment. I don’t have a crystal-ball but my spider senses tell me we are getting closer to midnight.

 Congress-Comrade Swalwell (CPUSA-CA), the new Dr. Strangelove of the weapons disarmament lobby, has been the subject of hundreds of analyses in the blogosphere especially among the always possible samizdat in North America. I won’t repeat their sage scribblings but my only hope is that cooler heads prevail and folks start getting acquainted with the primary engines of irregular warfare: grievances (perceived and real), legitimacy and force ratios.

 If the Left’s new love affair with military hardware is any indication of their martial imagination, we should be grateful they haven’t been paying attention to the absolutely worthless calculus of bringing technology to bear as the sole expositor of victory.

 I will be going to the Small Arms Review gun show in Phoenix on Saturday, 1 DEC 2018. Biggest gun exhibition in the west. I have grown cynical of gun shows in the past but this one is a great technology exposition and a way to make contacts among fellow hoplites and peltasts. Send me an email or a ping on my forum if you are attending, I’d like to meet some of readers.

My daughter and I are putting together a photo and/or video contest for the first ZeroGov T-shirt we produced using her exquisite design, details to follow. The winner will get a ten-ounce silver bar.

The second ZeroGov T-shirt is out now.

 A hint: You should practice your modified and full clutch flag to be competitive. -BB

 “I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

― John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

“Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships — the one-day variety or longer — these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.”

― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

 I want to discuss why I think the education system in America may be one of the primary causes of the renaissance of government supremacism and communism in the minds of youth both young and old alike.

Some folks know I am a systems engineer by trade after a career dabbling in a variety of disciplines and hard roads to include my light fighter career in the Army from which I retired in 2003 [I did two contractor tours in AFG in 2013 and 2015].

In engineering, when we conduct root cause analysis, we have a variety of scientific and forensic tools we employ to get to the bottom of wicked problems (or not so complex problem sets) from Six Sigma, critical thinking modalities and the tried and true fault/event tree framework for the nuclear industry. The tool selection is enormous, and you tailor it to the problems you’re trying to resolve. The one universal is that ALL problems have multivariate root causes that vertically and horizontally cross each other to make for complexity that can be hard to unwind.

One example is the Challenger disaster where the engineers warned the launch facility leadership that the temperature in the morning of the launch had critical indicators for O-ring efficacy on the pad.

Bob Ebeling was one of five booster rocket engineers at NASA [Never Ascend to Space Again] contractor Morton Thiokol who tried to stop the 1986 Challenger launch. They worried that cold temperatures overnight — the forecast said 18 degrees — would stiffen the rubber O-ring seals that prevent burning rocket fuel from leaking out of booster joints. Engineering teachers use him as an example of good ethical practice.

Riffing off of Malcolm Gladwell’s intuition framework, Ebeling’s professional training and spider senses told him the launch should not go. Intuition is among other things an engine of the unconscious competence of being expert at a thing. NASA launched against his warnings and the rest is history. The problem wasn’t simply the O-rings but a cascading of calamities of bureaucracy increasing the scientific illiteracy of the leadership in NASA and a refusal to be flexible enough to weigh the advantage of chance and engineering intuition.

A rambling but necessary preamble to post on why all American education and especially college “education” is compromised beyond redemption. There is no way to fix it but to raze it to the ground, cashier all the administration and faculty and not let a single red cent of government money onto any campus across America ever again.

There is a reason the US government dominates K-PhD indoctrination apparatuses across the country to include the diabolical connection between student tuition inflation and the government takeover and sponsorship of all student loans.

Is there a distinction between Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) and the rest of the less technical disciplines? Yes, but that distinction is narrowing as the usual suspects in academe start attacking the very foundations and structures of verifiable, reproducible and provable fields of study. One can be confident that the interpretive frameworks of the verities of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the stone-cold constraints of bridge building and atomic reactor maintenance in civil and nuclear engineering are worlds apart in both checks and balances and arguable distinctions for practitioners. In the end, the former has no life and death implications while the latter subject to an erosion of scientific standards and methodology has grave implications.

Many say the university is in trouble but it has been in the hazard since the end of the first world war. The combination of calls for universal college, the cozy academic proclivity to be government supremacist propaganda organs and the squishy and permeable and elastic standards for evidence has doomed these institutions to be the veritable universities they are today. Not hetero-versities but universities that champion a diversity in groin tackle and pigmentation but a rigid monochromatic Orwellian group-think of the mind that has made the advocacy of the most loathsome statist slaughterhouses in history de rigeur.

Mind you, the latest transgender madness has now accelerated the fraudulent process of making everything a social construction regardless of biological evidence or obeisance to Burke’s democracy of the dead.

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14 Nov What Would Michael Collins Do? by Bill Buppert

“It doesn’t matter if one man fights or ten thousand; if the one man sees he has no option but to fight, then he will fight, whether he has others on his side or not.”

Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you.”

Gandhi

The new masters aren’t satisfied with the latest fake results.

Go ahead and vote, you’re what’s for dinner.

The American Communist Party will do anything for power, both wings of it.

You have approximately 90-180 days to get all your tools in order.

Aesop says it best, I can’t improve on his prognosis.

T3: tools, training and tradecraft.

You know what to do.

“But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope … and you will cease to fear.’ … Widely different [as fear and hope] are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope … both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic