Politics (and Society) Today Could Do With a Return to the Culture of Dueling

I have often thought that not only is dueling an unfairly maligned tradition but one whose application today could stiffen the spine of an estrogen-laden society and put more of a "point" to affairs of honor.  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 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.  Check the FBI statistics. 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.  Honor would be a necessary preamble to even champion dueling.  Guns or swords?  Let's make both available as a choice for consenting combatants.  I would again commend your attention to the excellent...

90% of America Dead After One Year

I read OSA in December of last year and it left quite an impression on me.  I considered myself well-versed in the potential of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) but had not thought though the implications for the new America.  An America in which the work ethic has perished and people have no idea where their food comes from.  I would suggest you pick this book up and read it.  It is a rather fast read and entertaining. Again, get your preps in order because there is nothing in the future of America that portends a land of milk and honey. -BB Letter Re: "One Second After" -- A Book Review with Some Advice I have been reading the novel One Second After by William R. Forstchen. I just finished it. Whew, what a heavy book. I decided to write it up as a "lessons learned" book review. A couple of you may be wondering why I sent this to you. Well, I just thought of you and know you to be like-minded ...

The Rifle in War: A Firsthand Look at Firefights in Marja, AF-PAK

This happens to be that rare event at the New York Times – pungent and accurate reporting that brings the issues alive.  This is one of a series.  Be sure to watch the accompanying video in this article.  It is a sign of the times when an Infantry organization has to use smoke to mark the marksman’s house for air support instead of the elegance of maneuver and fire to neutralize the threat.  I am looking FM 3-21.8, Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad at almost an inch thick on my library shelf.  The Bible for light infantry in the American armed forces.  It replaced FM 7-8 which I used to be able to put in thigh pocket on my uniform.  No longer, I could use this latest edition to augment my body armor.  While comprehensive, it could be distilled down to one page which reads “Call for Fire”. I grew up in the Army with John English’s book “On Infantry” and poring over the accounts of close combat in WWI and WWII, particularly the German lessons in Russia. This fight will get worse if the Afghan resisters start to see that a 500m war is to their advantage and start employing the real cartridges like .308 and .303 instead of the 7.62x39 weapons they favor.  What is worse for the occupation forces is if the Afghans manage to get their hands on both the weapons and training in Western sniper technology like the .338 Lapua Magnum. We should, of course, leave immediately...

Hidden History of Evil: The Soviet Communist Autopsy

CLAIRE BERLINSKI writes a fascinating essay asking the epochal question:  why is not the entire world population interested in finding out why the intellectual pathogen known as communism is not dead and buried?  What made it tick and what are the details of how it sustained itself in spite of the enormous death toll and deadening and zombification of hundreds of millions of the living?  Those of us on the individualist antiwar right loathe the National Socialists who are always fashionable villains but speak ill of the Commies and plenty of folks in the American intelligentsia will get misty or even hostile at the notion that Communism is one of the worst plagues in humanity's history.  I never thought I would have to say this but they are back and communism is gaining steam again in the near future in America and we have a President who has been reared, mentored and influenced by Communism and its offshoots.  His ambitions to be a Red Czar are only tempered by his apparent appreciation that the platform will succeed in a program of gradualism versus the instant boil of a sharp-edged coup and institution of Marxist-Leninist principles immediately.  The slow boil continues. -BB In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on...

The Constitution as a Counter-Revolutionary Act

I am starting to see an awakening among my colleagues and neighbors who pay attention and think through their suppositions that the Constitution may not be the ultimate panacea that the idolaters and hagiographers make it out to be.  I used to be a Constitutionalist and mouth the platitudes of getting back to the original intent and returning to our roots.  No more.  Thanks to my own research and the work of others such as Royce, Spooner and DiLorenzo, the curtain has been drawn back and we find the usual suspects – an enabling document not only for big government but the tools of repression granted.  The Constitution is a centralizing document.  This is why we almost had another war on American soil after 1783. The Anti-Federalists were sounding the alarm against the imposition of a “gun in the hands of the national state” and the abilities of moneyed interest to purchase the barriers to competition they needed to legislative fiat.  READ the Anti-Federalist Papers soonest! The Constitution is a Hamiltonian monstrosity which was designed from the beginning as a mechanism to destroy the sovereignty of political subdivisions and subsume them to central planning whims of the Federal government.  Lincoln simply codified in blood and coda what Hamilton could not quite see through in his time.  From that point forward, the rest is the wretched history of the tentacle and grasping Leviathan that is these united States laboring under the Sovietized creature in DC. Face it, if you are a...

The Man Behind the Image: Winston Churchill as Tyrant, War Lover and Friend of Stalin

I love a good turn of phrase and the proper elocution of the English language.  I find Winston Churchill to be one of the most eloquent and well versed humans in rhetoric and literature.  I found myself in thrall of his ideas for awhile enchanted by his articulation and my then-perceived notion that a well-spoken man was logical and possibly virtuous.  Speeches that rivaled the eloquence and power of the ancients in Greece and Rome (yes, I am an avid admirer of Cicero, et al). Then I discover his blood-lust for war and sheer statist proclivities through the good offices of Professor Raico.  As an avid consumer of military history, I had always been tangentially interested in Churchill in the war years and discovered over time he was a menace to humanity from his enthusiastic military disasters in WWI (Wilson's War) to his shameful advocacy of mass murder from the air in strategic bombing to his group hugs with Stalin at Yalta and the final disgraces of madness like Operation Keelhaul to appease his fellow-travelers in the USSR.  A record of active complicity in evil that was only rivaled by our execrable and viscous  FDR (RedDR in more accurate parlance). I  stumbled on Raico's analysis in the audio collection of the book mentioned below and my opinion changed forever. Take the time to read the entire essay and the footnotes.  What you discover is that the tissue of lies and power aggrandizement that has been celebrated by the court historians has created this Sovietized nation we live in today. I pursued other lines of inquiry concerning the frenzied and plentiful deception and propaganda operations performed by the British prior to the War to Save Joseph Stalin (others call it WWII). The massive fabrications and exaggerations in Churchill's six volume treatment of the aforementioned conflict: This may have been the embryonic moment when I started to question every notion I had of American and European history.  I have always been something of a skeptic but the essays of James J. Martin and Harry Elmer Barnes started to remove the scales from my eyes.  I started devouring more of the "other" historians whom the court historians sniff at in disdain.  The libertarian view of history makes the lens and filter even more clear.  We tend not to get caught up in party affiliations or preemptive judgments because we know the history of the growth of the state is all about power and control and the wrestling of one faction or another through force of arms or chicanery to get the farmed animals (the people) to yield to the farmers (the state).  The history of the US as of the rest of the world is basically one long sordid story of statist farmers and ranchers purchasing or bickering over the cattle or chattel rights, to use a more quaint but appropriate term.  Whether the economically illiterate Marxoid variants of yokedom or the more sophisticated farming operations of so-called "free market" states, the modus operandi is to either force or convince the producers to subsidize the looters and parasites (taxing authorities and their clients).  It is so simple it almost seems elegant. -BB

The Triumph of the Welfare State

In 1945, general elections were held in Britain, and the Labour Party won a landslide victory. Clement Attlee, and his colleagues took power and created the socialist welfare state. But the socializing of Britain was probably inevitable, given the war. It was a natural outgrowth of the wartime sense of solidarity and collectivist emotion, of the feeling that the experience of war had somehow rendered class structure and hierarchy — normal features of any advanced society — obsolete and indecent. And there was a second factor — British society had already been to a large extent socialized in the war years, under Churchill himself. As Ludwig von Mises wrote:

Marching ever further on the way of interventionism, first Germany, then Great Britain and many other European countries have adopted central planning, the Hindenburg pattern of socialism. It is noteworthy that in Germany the deciding measures were not resorted to by the Nazis, but some time before Hitler seized power by Bruning … and in Great Britain not by the Labour Party but by the Tory Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill.[160]

While Churchill waged war, he allowed Attlee to head various Cabinet committees on domestic policy and devise proposals on health, unemployment, education, etc.[161] Churchill himself had already accepted the master-blueprint for the welfare state, the Beveridge Report. As he put it in a radio speech:

You must rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.[162]

That Mises was correct in his judgment on Churchill's role is indicated by the conclusion of W. H. Greenleaf, in his monumental study of individualism and collectivism in modern Britain. Greenleaf states that it was Churchill who

during the war years, instructed R. A. Butler to improve the education of the people and who accepted and sponsored the idea of a four-year plan for national development and the commitment to sustain full employment in the post-war period. As well he approved proposals to establish a national insurance scheme, services for housing and health, and was prepared to accept a broadening field of state enterprises. It was because of this coalition policy that Enoch Powell referred to the veritable social revolution which occurred in the years 1942–44. Aims of this kind were embodied in the Conservative declaration of policy issued by the Premier before the 1945 election.[163]

When the Tories returned to power in 1951, "Churchill chose a Government which was the least recognizably Conservative in history."[164] There was no attempt to roll back the welfare state, and the only industry that was really reprivatized was road haulage.[165] Churchill "left the core of its [the Labour government's] work inviolate."[166] The "Conservative" victory functioned like Republican victories in the United States, from Eisenhower on — to consolidate socialism. Churchill even undertook to make up for "deficiencies" in the welfare programs of the previous Labour government, in housing and public works.[167] Most insidiously of all, he directed his leftist Labour Minister, Walter Monckton, to appease the unions at all costs. Churchill's surrender to the unions, "dictated by sheer political expediency," set the stage for the quagmire in labor relations that prevailed in Britain for the next two decades.[168]

Village Praxis: Required Capabilities Assessment Part III/ Gaps and Mitigation Strategy

It's been a while, so please refresh on Part 1 and Part 2 of this series if you must. So in the previous posts in this series we have learned how to analyze our environment and risks, inventory our skills, mental and physical readiness and our equipment. Now we come to the hard part- identifying gaps and shortfalls and determining how to address them. We'll begin by laying out our risk assessment (what scenarios are the most likely and what impact they will have if they occur), with our environmental conditions (how does the natural and man-made environment contribute to our our risks and scenarios) then cross reference our skills and equipment capabilities against those scenarios and conditions. This process is comparing what you can do right now with the conditions and scenarios created by a certain risk occurring. Ideally you would lay this out as a matrix- scenarios down the left hand column, skills and kit across the top, and 1's or 0's at the intersection wherein a 1 means that the particular capability meets the needs of the scenario and a 0 means it does not, or you have zero capabilities to address this particular condition or hazard. Now we'll move on to the second part of this exercise- determining gaps in your capabilities. Examine your matrix and find where you have a preponderance of 0's- is it in food stocks, water supply or purification, self defense, first aid training, map reading, etc? These places where you have a 0 are where...

Interview with Robert Higgs

I wanted to share this interview because if you have not read Higgs, you are the lesser for it.  He is almost in the same orbit as Rothbard when it comes to the intellectual foundations for pressing for liberty and freedom.  I especially appreciate the way he capitalizes on the singular advantage that libertarians tend to have when viewing history:  we know that power is the primary function regardless of alleged party affiliation which animates all lust for power.  Politicians, with rare exceptions, are sociopaths and psychopaths who are in the rarefied legal vocation of achieving wealth and prestige with no merit whatsoever.  The Republicans provide a great demonstration project for the alleged "small government" perspective in our electoral system: a clear explication for why the Grand Old Politburo behaved in such a Soviet fashion from 2000-2006 when they had all the power.  History is so much clearer when you realize it is the continuous and briefly punctuated march to total control of the populations the bureaucrats farm and the variations thereof.  The collectivists are murderously efficient when it comes to grabbing the levers of power and bulldozing all notions of decency and liberty in their path.  You will note that, excepting Ron Paul, not one GOP member stood up and asked that the Government got out of health care altogether much like our desires to get the government out of the classroom.  Period.  The powers that be are more concerned with the aggregation of the powers of arrest and...

The Battles of Lexington and Concord

I just spent the entire weekend with a few dozen of my fellow Americans shooting an Appleseed event in southern Arizona soaking up the history of April 19/1775 and sending lots of rounds downrange in a deliberate fashion to hone skills and allow men to "see what they are about".  I know, I know, this the same date the media and usual suspects will obsess over the events at Waco and the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma.  It is not that I don't mourn for the dead in both those events but this particular time and date 235 years has a much more direct correlation to our current pathos and misery.  We are here and suffering under this monstrous Federal leviathan because we forgot who we are.  The men and women who stood up to the mightiest military machine on planet Earth on that fated day in 1775 knew that liberty and freedom had a price.  They knew that their neighbors and friends and family did not exist off of each other in the Remora Nation we created here and now.  They were Porcupine Nation and proud of it.  Never once would they lift a finger against the mighty British empire unless they had been provoked and worse.  Theirs was a society of hard work and volunteerism and to quote Natty Bumpo when accused of being a loyal British subject in "Last of the Mohicans": "Frankly, I ain't subject to much at all" or Captain Reynolds in "Firefly": "I ain't runnin' no more, I aim to misbehave." Take the time today to search the 'net if you have History Deficit Disorder and educate yourself.  Lord knows you can even unplug the infernal device and pick up a book like "Paul Revere's Ride" by David Hackett Fischer.  If you want to live free, stop just thinking about it.  Educate yourself, turn off the TV, turn a trade into a hobby or vice versa. And BY GOD, learn to shoot straight. You can own the finest weapons produced but if you can't deliver consistent shots out to 500 meters, what good are they?  They are Liberty's Teeth and need to be cared for as well as you may.  We have resisters in Afghanistan defending their homeland from foreign invaders (again) with rifles nearing a hundred years old and they are winning.  Those men know what they are about.  Do you? -BB Date Wednesday, April 19, 1775 Weather ~55-65`F, winds calm Location Lexington and Concord Massachusetts Great Britain versus The US Colonies Belligerents Great Britain Casualties Force: 1500 Killed: 73 Wounded: 174 Captured: 53 ...these united States Force: 3800 Killed: 49 Wounded: 39 Captured: 0 Overview The Battles of Lexington and Concord were actually the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. They were fought on April 19, 1775, in Middlesex County, Province of Massachusetts Bay, within the towns of Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Menotomy (present-day Arlington), and Cambridge, near Boston. The battles marked the outbreak of open armed conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain and its thirteen colonies in the mainland of British North America. About 700 British Army regulars, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, were ordered to capture and destroy military supplies that were reportedly stored by the Massachusetts militia at Concord. Dr. Joseph Warren alerted the colonists of this. The Patriot colonists had received intelligence weeks before the expedition which warned of an impending British search, and had moved much, but not all, of the supplies to safety. They had also received details about British plans on the night before the battle, and information was rapidly supplied to the militia. The first shots were fired just as the sun was rising at Lexington. The militia were outnumbered and fell back. Other British colonists, hours later at the North Bridge in Concord, fought and defeated three companies of the king's troops. The outnumbered soldiers of the British Army fell back from the Minutemen after a pitched battle in open territory. More Minutemen arrived soon thereafter and inflicted heavy damage on the British regulars as they marched back towards Boston. Upon returning to Lexington, Smith's expedition was rescued by reinforcements under Hugh, Earl Percy. A combined force of fewer than 1,700 men marched back to Boston under heavy fire in a tactical withdrawal and eventually reached the safety of Charlestown. The British failed to maintain the secrecy and speed required to conduct a successful strike into hostile territory, yet they did destroy some weapons and supplies. Most British regulars returned to Boston. The occupation of surrounding areas by the Massachusetts Militia that evening marked the beginning of the Siege of Boston. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his Concord Hymn described the first shot fired by the Patriots at the North Bridge as the "shot heard 'round the world".

Rascal Rebel Rancheros by Bill Buppert

Linda Traynham managed to get a a spot for me on W&G and I am honored.  She is a delightful and erudite Texan who corresponds with me regularly.  Take a gander at her scribblings on W&G for they are worth your attention.  I penned this a catharsis after most unpleasant general homeowners meeting for our Homeowners Association which is populated by the usual timid and statist souls who seem to people most of these organization.  Timid in the respect that they fear being left to their own devices and worst of all, don't trust their neighbors with private property. -BB Apr 15th, 2010 | By Bill Buppert | Category: Economics, Featured, Morning Whiskey Most people want security in this world, not liberty. ~H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956 Saturday night ended my tenure on the local Home Owners Association (HOA) Board as I was vigorously voted out of office. Not only did I lose but the President (I was the VP of the Board) took a few moments before the meeting’s official commencement to indecorously launch a personal ad hominem attack against me for sowing so much discontent including the barbs and arrows of instigation, burrowing in the organization and egads, even quoting from my blog; in fact, quoting from the text of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals which I have permanently posted as a warning to others. I am now stigmatized as an “agitator.” My riposte to this completely unexpected broadside was that I would not engage in personal attacks or handbag fights. I also reminded the audience that my original platform on which I was elected was rather clear at the outset: private property rights and secession. I had a reputation as the sole “Nay” vote for many of the initiatives of the HOA, for which I was held in low regard. What, you may ask, is my offense? I wished to secede from the HOA and questioned its very existence. In yet another quixotic enterprise of the sort I am known for, I thought I would work within the system to make it better. Two years earlier I had stood for the vacancy with a simple two tier platform. I would approve any architectural review where the adjoining neighbors agreed because private property had primacy over the HOA and I would press for secession of the Rascal Rancheros as we had come to be called. We are a band of nine lots with our own road connected to the northwestern perimeter of the HOA. The entire HOA is comprised of nine-acre minimum parcels in the country. We Rancheros are unanimous in thinking that the dues paid year after year for essentially being ignored and seeing them used on the other side where a greater number of homeowners live was an inglorious arrangement. We even had to pay for our own cattle-guard to replace the rickety gate at the entrance to the road where it met the main arterial. We were rather alarmed for our safety because there were incidents where large groups of illegals from our Southern neighbor would gather for pickup which meant that to get to our homes, we had to exit the vehicle and open the gate and then close it behind us, a potentially hazardous undertaking. Arizona is an open range state and we could not leave the road unattended by a barrier, as we were responsible for ensuring our cattle did not use our road to go for a stroll on the highway where a collision would have a bad ending for all parties involved. The cattle guard enterprise provided a great demonstration project to me where through no coercion or from a directive on high, free Arizonans got together and pooled expenses and labor to benefit a group sharing the road. Now, mind you, this was done for a bridge project on the other side where most of the HOA lives and many volunteer hours were used but the lion’s share of the cost was borne from the collective (there is that word) coffers of the HOA for that project. This was not the case on our side; all the monies and labor were from the Rascal Rancheros above and beyond the tribute paid already. It was decided at the beginning of my tenure that we would not accept offers of help and money from the Association in spite of the squeaky wheel (me) being on the board. The thinking was that if they had ignored us for five years, if we accepted a scintilla of Caesar’s coin, they would haughtily proclaim that we were benefiting from the HOA membership. We were on our own and used the board membership to press for our rights. (Ed. I have two cattle guards myself, and here in Texas the welded pipe alone runs $4500. Bill says he managed for $3000 plus their considerable labor digging a trench, installing the cattle guard, and rebuilding the fence.) On the Board, I have always offered a gentlemanly comportment even when we disagreed and I refused to participate in personal attacks. In the months preceding the General Meeting in April, the whisper campaigns began and the usual suspects would fill hours of leisure time damning or speculating on the nefarious intention of myself and any other Rancheros who would dare to ask The Question: We wish to secede as friends and neighbors with no acrimony and simply pursue a neighborhood arrangement where private property is respected and no taxes/dues are levied and no liens are threatened for non-compliance with a quasi-government regime known as an HOA. Can we go now? A hushed voice would mutter: “Why, that would be anarchy?” To which I would respond with a delighted “Yes, Indeed!” The malice and ill temper we experienced was amazing to those unacquainted with these disagreements. There is nothing personal in this request and it is a question that has confronted mankind since time immemorial. It is the authorship of tribes and nation-states at the macro-level and the germination of divorces in Western culture. It is the genesis of self-determination and the individualistic notion of being left the hell alone. There was even one impassioned question at the annual meeting Saturday asking who would maintain the roads if the HOA were not there. As if, in the absence of a stick or fetter, everyone would simply helplessly watch their roads fall into disrepair as they gorged themselves on cheap carbohydrates and regretfully took their eyes off the television screen momentarily to gaze wistfully at the pothole-ridden wreck in front of their homes. Walter Block addresses this with alacrity in his pioneering work on roads. Over 60% of all unimproved roads in Kansas, for instance, are in private hands and maintained by the owners. Before we emigrated to Arizona from Idaho we had a quarter miles driveway we maintained to our home in the country. And, gasp, we had a part of it we shared with a neighbor which we maintained voluntarily. (Our quarter mile white gravel road requires very little maintenance, and I could buy a great deal of gravel for the $5,000 the local fellow wants to pave it. I had him make me a 75? long parking area instead. It cost half as much–ouch–but it is far more useful. This is a beautiful example of the difference between what governments and associations think the peasants should have and what we’re willing to pay for ourselves. Ed.)