18 Aug Abbey’s Road: The Desert Anarchist and the Joys of Non-Compliance by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: Just discovered a curious cat named Richard Louis “Dick” Proenneke who lived alone in the Alaskan wilderness for 35 years. I’d requested a data cache from friends sent to me of documentaries while I am OCONUS and happened on these. Several documentaries by Bob Swerer were made based on Proenneke’s diaries and homemade film records of his exploits. The journals are a wonderful testament to his skills as a a writer and naturalist if not world-class builder and expedient materials fabricator. Many brag on their wilderness skills but Dick shows how it’s done. Take a look for yourself. -BB

“They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, but not my obedience.”

– Gandhi

“Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.”

-Edward Abbey

I am opposed to the government death penalty; I am also pro-life which makes me blessedly consistent.  I don’t trust the government to be able to have the responsibility to mete out the severest penalty and to do it either professionally or with no ill intent.  In the smaller sense, the evidence is massive of the queue of innocents who have been shot, hanged and poisoned for crimes they did not commit.  In the larger sense, government puts us all on death row and it is just a matter of time before the statist cops kill you in your home or vehicle or we suffer a massive die-off in America from an EMP burst that takes us from now to 1850 in one second.

I use this preamble to frame my severe skepticism of the state doing the right thing…ever.

I am not opposed to the death penalty in my house if an intruder comes in to do harm to me or mine.  I am a Flinter in temperament and predisposition.  Most of the laws on the books are noxious, useless and liberty-draining in their essence.  Malum prohibitum is the state saying don’t do that because I told you not to.  A monstrous fallacy whose logic only serves to reduce subject populations to assessed rentals on their freedom that can be wrested away at the drop of the constabulary’s hat.  I daresay that one could throw every statute book into the bonfires across the nation when Americans finally wake up and throw off their shackles of serfdom from the local to the national level and folks would not find themselves in danger but would stumble into prosperity. As a matter of fact: “If US federal regulation–and all the money it receives, generates and spends–were evaluated as a standalone economy, it would be the 10th largest in the world, behind Russia and before India. That’s right, our federal regulations outrank, in terms of overall output, the economy of the second-most populous country on Earth.”

This is simply astonishing. The brakes on civilizational advance imposed by government are incalculable.

Will commerce and everyday living really come to a screeching halt because the cops don’t show up to work or the sloth-like city landscaping crews refuse to shamble from their abodes to dawdle at make-work throughout the burgs of America?  All of a sudden, the economic illiterates peopling the municipalities across the nation go on strike for higher wages and more vacation time for weeks, nay months; will the country stagnate and fold onto itself?

Things would be difficult for about 24 hours and then voluntarism, persuasion and cooperation would emerge as the factors that make life worth living.  No utopia this and there would be scores settled and inevitable failures but only the individuals would be responsible and not the nameless strangers who lord over every facet of our lives like pawns on a macabre chessboard.  The heavy hand of the state and its shambling yoke-tenders would be out of work and the country would revitalize itself.  Tens of thousands of Americans would wake up the next morning and look to the east and exclaim:  “You can go away now; we have awakened from our prison slumber.” Ed Abbey made me say this.

I found Edward Abbey’s 1959 thesis on “Anarchy and the Morality of Violence” over the weekend while reading a small tome entitled “Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist” by James Bishop, Jr.  I have been an Abbey reader most of my adult life and found his books amusing and penetrating.  He held a lifelong distrust of all authority, especially the state and the thesis provides an insight into the flame that burned in him at a rather tender age. In reading the thesis, I am astonished that nearly sixty years ago in an America long gone, he faced the same fears of overweening government and the creeping police state emerging into monstrous being.

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09 Aug Village Praxis: The Every Day Carry (EDC) Bag by Skip Lyttle

“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.”

– Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Publisher’s Note: Skip, the Village Armorer and Praxis Editor just put together a major project on the EDC bag. He and I are both Maxpedition fanboys and love the slingbag concept. Can’t be beat. We have an entire discussion board devoted to both EDC and Village Praxis at the forum if you want to pursue detailed discussion. After a number of attempts to import his huge project, I decided to put it at the link below.

Please be sure to provide comments for addition, deletion or expansion. All these bags have one thing in common: don’t even start until you’ve clarified your mission profile and statement of purpose. -BB

EDC Bag PDF

04 Aug The Thin Black and Blue Line: Murder as Official Policy by Bill Buppert

Death by cop is at a high tide this year. It even takes a British newspaper instead of the American central government to track the numbers. We all know the Federal government simply couldn’t afford to track such numbers with their police satraps. Remember the meme several years ago where the claim was made that more Americans die at the hands of badged thugs than terrorists to the tune of about 400 per annum? All the savvy observers knew these numbers were wrong. The police are the pointy end of all politics planet-wide and it just so happens that some of the worst abuse on the globe occurs in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Let’s examine the number of cops that die year after year to demonstrate the interesting imbalance and how the police pad their own figures of line of duty deaths to exaggerate actual deaths on the job.

How many cops died during this same year, compared to 680 mundane corpses stacked like cord-wood in police engagements so far? 22 to include 3 by “vehicular assault.” 22 as opposed to 680. (Thanks, Pete) The clever lads at the site consider K9s to be the equivalent of humans. I’m OK with that if the cops afforded the same courtesy to the thousands of dogs they murder every year. These are their own figures. Incidentally, gunfire deaths are down a third this year for the esteemed police officers.

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30 Jul Spooner Lives! Monkeywrenching the State by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: 29 July was the death day for one of the inspirations for this site, William Wilberforce, who graces the masthead of this blog for many reasons. A tireless abolitionist and moral man of the highest water, he is the kind of spiritual apex I seek to emulate; absolutely relentless in his pursuit of freedom for the chattel slave and the termination of that horrific institution. Unfortunately, whether lack of moral imagination or the temporal constraint of the time he lived in, he suffered the same limitations of all 19^th century abolitionists save one. He asked the right questions but failed to address the self-ownership issue to the man behind the curtain in the first place, the state.

Wilberforce and I propitiously share the same birthday, which happily coincides with the British burning of the Offal Office in 1814.

That single abolitionist who asked the questions to my satisfaction mining the very legitimacy of the state in a moral universe was Lysander Spooner.

I also suggest you listen to Prof CJ’s Dangerous History podcast on Spooner. Outstanding explication on the man.

You can find all his works in PDF here. I happen to be a lucky soul who owns the entire corpus of his works in a six-volume hardback collection. -BB

“The “National” system so called, is in reality no national system at all; except in the mere fact that it is called the national system and was established by the national government. It is, in truth, only a private system; a mere privilege conferred upon a few, to enable them to control prices, property, and labor, and thus swindle, plunder and oppress all the rest of the people.”

-Lysander Spooner

Lysander Spooner is the patron saint of this site. Months ago, I was amused to be with friends and at one point one of the fellows was haranguing us about “getting back to the Constitution”.  As if we ever left that wretched compact with leviathan government.  At one point, another worthy said that maybe we should pay more attention to Lysander Spooner.  Indeed.  For plenty of freedom advocates, it begins with Rand or von Mises or Rothbard and a host of other luminaries who saw through the collectivist sham. For me, Spooner was a primary gateway to abolitionism.

He proves your mind is the primary weapon against the state.

For others, Lysander Spooner is the strike of the match.  I was introduced to Spooner through a great book by the magnificent James J. Martin in Men Against the State. Among the several forgotten heroes from the 19^th century, Spooner stands as a titan.  He made a rather interesting point concerning the Constitution in that he claimed that no document could bind a man if he is not an active signatory.  You can see where this would be rather problematic for a government and why the concept is roundly condemned in a court system staffed by robed government employees for whom honor and fidelity for justice will be observed as long as their masters approve.

Spooner is the gateway drug for maximum liberty and freedom.  If you pay close enough attention to his arguments and patterns of thinking, you come away thinking that the entire rotten collectivist project is not only desperately lacking in intellectual rigor but is founded first and foremost in an evil premise.  The premise of all collectivist and statist projects is initiated violence against ALL humans.  For the system would collapse if the fear of the monopoly of force were not the schwerpunkt of all actions from the enforcement of tax collection and aggression to the most banal of offenses, if one citizen not a member of the nomenklatura got away with it, revolution would follow shortly.

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26 Jul Individual Liberty and Freedom is Simple by Bill Buppert

If you initiate aggression, you’re wrong.

Don’t hit and don’t steal. Any questions?

24 Jul Return to Tradition: The Advantages of Dueling by Bill Buppert

“Amateurs train until they get it right. Pros train until they can’t get it wrong.”

– variously attributed to Pelé, Stephen Hillier, and others

“The amateur seeks excellence. The professional seeks adequacy.”

– Jeff Cooper

Bring back dueling. Yesterday.

As most know who visit this blog, I am not asking for a law or permission but the decriminalization of the affaire d’honneur; the gaining of satisfaction by challenging dishonorable scalawags to put their money where their myths are.

“While dueling may seem barbaric to modern men, it was a ritual that made sense in a society in which the preservation of male honor was absolutely paramount. A man’s honor was the most central aspect of his identity, and thus its reputation had to be kept untarnished by any means necessary. Duels, which were sometimes attended by hundreds of people, were a way for men to publicly prove their courage and manliness. In such a society, the courts could offer a gentleman no real justice; the matter had to be resolved with the shedding of blood.”

So as then and now, single combat was a primal answer to wringing justice from bad situations.

“The first rule of dueling was that a challenge to duel between two gentleman could not generally be refused without the loss of face and honor. If a gentleman invited a man to duel and he refused, he might place a notice in the paper denouncing the man as a poltroon for refusing to give satisfaction in the dispute.

But one could honorably refuse a duel if challenged by a man he did not consider a true gentleman. This rejection was the ultimate insult to the challenger.”

The modern twist would be more accurate weapons but the dishonored party could have the ability to choose more intimate  and close-quarters weapons if he chose. The defendant in the challenge could always shirk his honor and insist he will not rise to the challenge. That in itself would address some satisfaction to the aggrieved and dishonored party. The market will provide some unique solutions from training salons to escrowed and refereed single combat to weapons specifically tailored to the duel.

I have often thought that not only is dueling an unfairly maligned tradition but one whose application today could stiffen the spine of estrogen nation and put more of a “point” to affairs of honor.  The increasing feminization of society and the rampant overpopulation of metrosexual males blanch at the prospect but it puts the edge to the question.

The Germans even practiced a form that rarely led to death or serious injury in Academic fencing.

I can think of several instances in my own life where this would have resolved a difficulty.  Manners are the lubricant of civilization and alas, they are quickly perishing in America with the resultant coarseness, rudeness and cultural illiteracy that pervades the country today.  Part of this is a result of the loss of classical education, a complete lack of historical knowledge and the increasing prevalence of women of both sexes held high as the enviable male paradigm.  We are a nation with a surfeit of males but fewer men.  Men should know what they are about and have an idea of their measure under arduous or dangerous circumstances.

Some have served in the military; some participate in adventure sports and some in dangerous professions (like firefighters not cops).  Being a cop is one of the safest occupations in America outside of the self-induced pathologies of over-eating, alcoholism and suicide.

Imagine, if one would, that the tens of thousands assaulted and hundreds murdered by the state-sponsored police hordes infesting America were subject to be “called out” by surviving friends and family members. Since the state refuses to sunder the evil trifecta of officer safety, qualified immunity and police unions that make them Murder Inc. across the country, think of the braking mechanism on poor police behavior a potential meeting to seek satisfaction would render over time. I’ve always wondered where are the husbands and male relatives of all these women raped, assaulted, maimed and killed by the statist police in America?

The concept of honor is a dying creed so I expect very few adherents will step forward to advocate for the renewal of dueling as a dispute resolution mechanism. One may even see the emergence of “catch and release” duels in which the object is less than lethal but painful nonetheless.  The Southron will surprise everyone, as they are the first to step in the breech.

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21 Jul Village Praxis: The Minimalist (Airline-Approved) by Skip Lyttle

I created the minimalist to meet my frequent traveling on airlines, both CONUS and OCONUS as a backup to the main components inside my bag. If, for whatever reason, I had to modularize my essentials into a larger bag, this would serve as a minimalist version of that. Since there are stringent airline restrictions nowadays, I’ve researched and tested what items can fly and assembled them into a small kit (left) that fits inside my Every Day Carry (EDC) Bag.

The three main components making up The Minimalist, is the main compartment, an imitation Maxpedition Mini Pocket Organizer I picked up overseas, a spray-painted black Altoids tin, and a black Witz ID holder waterproof case.

Closed, the Minimalist is packed tight as a drum, but stows nicely within my EDC.

Opened, the Mini Pocket Organizer has tons of space to retain easily accessible items, as well as pockets for stowing items deep within.

The layout (below) shows the basic components within the Minimalist.
The David sling is a non-descript way of getting a small-game capability aboard an airline carry-on. I’ve used this since I was a boy and it requires skill to hit a rabbit or squirrel at 20 paces away. Along with snare line, these two methods will still be challenging, but supplemental to the mini-fishing kit inside the Altoids tin.

I use the ID holder for small incidentals that can make living easier, instead of just surviving. Some meals require salt, pepper, herbs, or spices.

There are Band-Aids, 2X2 Gauze pads, Alcohol prep pads, wet naps, as well as a packet of instant coffee.

The Altoids tin (below) lay-out includes a list of the contents.
There are still a few more items I’d like to add to the Altoids tin, which include the ESEE Izula Gear Navigation and Survival Card Sets, a micro glow stick, and the micro Sparkwheel Fire Starter (below):

Other additions could include a star chart, train and shipping routes, and water navigation aids.

The number of helpful items in one small, convenient package are limited only by your imagination.

15 Jul American ISIS: The Government War on the Confederacy by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: Please keep in mind that in the broader sense that every war in history is about slavery; about who will own you and your resources. I have no dog in the fight in the War of Northern Aggression, both sides were government supremacists.

My friend Joe Jarvis recently published a book I just read called Anarchy in New England. I posted a review at Amazon here. I highly recommend it. –BB

“A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases. The result — and a natural one — has been that we have had governments, State and national, devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth. And these crimes have been committed, and this war waged, by men, and the descendants of men, who, less than a hundred years ago, said that all men were equal, and could owe neither service to individuals, nor allegiance to governments, except with their own consent”

– Lysander Spooner

Dylann Roof murders nine black folks in cold blood in their house of worship in South Carolina; an awful event that deserves the fiercest condemnation. If one of the congregants had been armed, fewer people would have been harmed. It just so happens that the pastor is a former government “representative” who opposed concealed carry.

An enormously tragic event but the availability of guns didn’t cause the killings; an individual mindset intent on evil deeds did so.

Inevitably, the usual political suspects dance on the graves of the barely cold corpses to call on the restrictions of weapons and in this case, Confederate regalia.

Roof is seen in several photos wearing a jacket with both a Rhodesian flag and the flag of apartheid South Africa. By extension, he is a supporter of the Confederacy.

In a span of weeks, this single private psychopath’s murderous rampage somehow led the governor and political apparatchiks in South Carolina to lower the Confederate flag that was flying over the capitol and retire it. There are many interesting trends to tease out of this reaction.

We even hear rumors of large chains like Amazon and Wal-Mart being asked to remove the sale of any Confederate items from their shelves both virtual and brick and mortar.

Roof’s actions are reprehensible and the government’s reaction is expected as they tend to fill their pants when non-badged gunmen mow down innocents like the state is wont to do against the MOVE headquarters in Philly, Ruby Ridge, Waco or the recent incident where the cops ran over several children during a high-speed chase. After every one of these incidents, no one clamored to remove the flag all of these miscreants flew under, Old Glory Like the currency in the US, the Federal government hates competition and turns an angry visage toward any killing that is not government approved and authorized.

So suspend your history and logic and take a gander at the reaction of the politicos after the massacre at the church. The shooter is somehow connected to Confederate sympathies because he flies the flag that is flown by millions in the US and planet-wide. I have seen rebel flags of every variety flying in the Middle East. While in the Army when I commanded, I had a 3×5 Bonnie Blue proudly adorning the wall behind my desk despite the Army ban on Confederate regalia because I could depend on the historical ignorance of my colleagues that they would fail to recognize it. I am married to a woman who is a blood relative of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. I have done a fair amount of reading and while I am not a fan of what the Confederacy became over time during the Second American Revolution, I have every confidence they did the right thing in forcing a separation from Lincoln’s leviathan.

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09 Jul The Torture State: American Inquisition by Bill Buppert

“You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

“No conditions justify torture.”

– Norman Finkelstein

Publisher’s Note: Most of the monsters involved in the torture regime at the beginning of this new century have skirted justice and remain at large prospering and grasping at the levers of power as we speak. -BB

America has formally endorsed torture since August 2002 and has practiced it as an extension of warfare at home and abroad for most of its history. Waterboarding originated in the Spanish=American War in the Philippines at the close of the 19^th century when America was stretching its legs in its brutal colonization pogroms planet-wide after 1983.

What is torture? Per the universally accepted definition of torture:

“For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”

This “tortured” definition is typical of what a bureaucrat would come up with to describe the impossible philosophical calculus of the state that immoral means will yield moral ends. One will notice that the last sentence gives the official torture regime pardon planet-wide much like the state excuses its actions for terrorism. Terrorism is the employment of politically motivated violence against innocents and non-combatants. A reflective person would instantly apprehend that this is the cornerstone of the state’s power and that torture is merely a subset in the toolset that is the government maintenance effort for power and expansion thereof.

The existence of private torture is certainly a reality. I in no way suggest that private malcontents and twisted psychopaths don’t ply their trade globally. There are ample lurid testimonials to this in the literature and the news splashed across the screens humans habitually stare at in the absence of reflection and cognition. But they hold no candle to the government’s ability to break human beings and stack up corpses like cordwood.

Like the advocacy of abolitionism, the moral and consequential efficacy of torture is undisputed among those who have a virtuous compass. It doesn’t work but it does always transform the torturer and tortured into one twisted artifact of inhumanity. Per the efficacy of torture in divining accurate intelligence, Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose makes a succinct and powerful case:

“Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him … These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame.”

Like so many things the state does, it cannot help but be the warp and woof of everything it does everywhere. Everything the empire does abroad, it will do at home. The emerging evidence of a police state in all its ugliness in America is no accident. It’s simply a natural outgrowth of a barbarous and formerly sub rosa bundle of characteristics that have grown in the orchid hothouse of government expansion that is most American history.

Politicians are merely violence brokers; nothing more and nothing less. The coin of the realm for the state is the threat and actual employment of violence. Either the lingering forms that would include torture or the sudden extinguishing of lives through minor and major pogroms outside of warfare. The US has a long and sordid history of employing official torture in the pursuit of its interests especially when on military expeditions as hundreds of thousands of corpses can attest to if they could speak of the unspeakable things done to them in the name of US dominion.

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05 Jul Abolition is the Default State of Being Human by Doug Cook

Publisher’s Note:  Doug has graced the interwebs and my site with his poetic license and waxing eloquence as Mountain Top Patriot; I have urged him to start his own blog. He refuses. He did scribble this and I’m posting it here. Enjoy. -BB

Liberty is about one thing: Self Determination, or to put it another way, people are the sovereign and it is we who decide what is good or not good for us. That is all there is to it. That is the nature of our sovereign power, It is what makes us sentient beings, and by default makes each of us the master of our individual destiny. If the state uses its force to deny any fraction of this sovereignty we are each born with, than why would you have elections and referendums, submit to extortion rackets like taxes and obeying any “law’, but Gods primal fundamental laws of rightful Liberty you are bestowed with? What is the point really, unless you allow, permit, remember this is about choice, the state or any power but your sovereign power to determine what is good or not good for you?

It is the most profound question of what came first, the chicken or the egg.

What where you conceived with, liberty or slavery?

What came first?

Look at it from another logic. Abolition is the default state of being human. That I was created as a living Sovereign Entity. This state of life is Default by conception. Why is the creation of life so sacred if it where not the truth of us?

Sound far fetched? Wait a second, give it a good think now. The implications are the greatest paradigm of our time.

Here is my argument: Abolition is the absence of any power over my life that is not benign.

Any application or imposition or intrusion in my affairs, use of force, coercion, extortion, threat, covert or overt, which limits my own choices, bars me from self determination in any fashion whatsoever, is artificial to my natural state of abolition. I was conceived and was born purely as pure can be in a natural state of abolition. This is primal. Any construct of control over me and my self determination comes after the fact. It is therefore by default also, artificial and inhibiting. An insipid construct of evil minds without moral compass.

By this very definition, any power but my power which is employed to deny me my primal self determination is not legitimate. It is not even a right. It simply is the truth.

That Truth is a beautiful thing indeed.

So…is it so hard to believe, that abolition is not just possible, but it already exists?

That it is the default state of existence?

Think outside the box.

Billions of people acquiesce to the power of the state, billions submit to the artifice of power over their self determination, every day, and they are enslaved by this power, ruled by this power, ruined by this power, inhibited in every facet of the spheres of their lives by this power, and they are maimed, suffer cruel unspeakable humiliations, indignity’s, a universe of injustices, they are incarcerated, threatened with bodily harm if they refuse to comply, they are denied, they die, they are murdered by the millions exactly because they submitted in one way or another to this power.

Is that a truth you can accept?

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