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Showing posts from May, 2018

From Survivalists to Subscribers: Leafing through the Pages of Life

The fresh zeitgeist in the Western world appears to have descended from the skies, not from the heavenly halls of divine wisdom but from the delusional doldrums of distant demagogues, the dusty halls of civic centers and the stripped-down storylines thought up by masterful mockingbirds and fairytale authors atop the ivory tower. Whereas this planet's inhabitant's once carved out their lives, the terrain and the frontiers of those lands, their modern counterparts have been left with the remains of history's civilizations, prohibited from building upon, altering or in many cases even touching the artifacts and regions which depict the inspired endeavors of a time gone by. Today, the adventurer encounters barbed-wire fences, "no fishing" signs, posted curfews, ubiquitous warning placards, and routine penalties, citations and fines, even possible arrest, for traveling or sleeping across so-called public property. This property, in addition to its many laws, has

The Incredulity of the Insufferable Left

The general Leftist theory cannot possibly or consistently account for a variety of ordinary life dynamics and phenomena. The following list affords a mere snapshot into what would otherwise require an endless anthology to become comprehensive. As such, this list serves merely as a primer into some of the poetic, oftentimes comical, shortcomings of the Leftist worldview, not as any remotely exhaustive examination thereof. The general Leftist is one who advocates for the advancement of specified groups or interests by means of social enslavement through the apparatus of institutional force or coercion, a body otherwise known as government. Through the mind’s promulgation of certain basic axioms and expectations, the specimen attaches to notions which purport to rebalance the scales toward parity or otherwise achieve reparations for past wrongdoings, assigning blame to those who bore positively no responsibility for the events under review, and systematically deprivi

Yosemite in the War Against Freedom

Upon my arrival in Yosemite this weekend, I was nearly crippled by the prospect of inevitably breaking the law.  I hadn’t intended to steal, to drive recklessly or in excess speed, nor had I any intentions to commit assault, battery or any other variety of heinous acts.  No, I had only envisioned an impromptu adventure into the wilderness of Yosemite, hopeful that I might find a tiny plot of land where I could park my car and pitch a tent.  If only such a simple concept were met with a reality as accommodating.  Instead, this trip took me on a wild goose chase in search of a parking lot where I might freely leave my vehicle without being cited for a manufactured violation, whose consequences measure in the hundreds of dollars and untold quantities of stress, whose enforcement takes the form of men with guns who stand prepared to place me in handcuffs should I ultimately fail to satisfy the fabricated debt ostensibly owed to a body of people who have yet to really justify th

Government Kills: Opportunity Costs Measured in Deaths, Not Dollars

You know what is one of the largely-ignored ramifications of downzoning and vertical restrictions on construction in the San Francisco Bay Area?  The numbers of people who will die, and the value of property which will be lost, during the next earthquake.  Whereas some corners of the Bay Area are better equipped to survive such an imminently catastrophic event, most people cannot live there because of those restrictions and because of the consequent pricing-out effect.  Instead, a great many Bay Area residents have desperately capitalized on relatively cheaper real estate on dangerous fault lines across the region, and the silver-tongued bureaucrats, who purport to represent the interests of their constituents, simply do not care. Indeed, those chatterboxes care only about the observable and tangible qualities of life and the initiatives they can undertake today to bolster their perception in the polls. They care only about those ideas which are marketable at the podium or

Another Racist Construction of Government: From Concentration Camps to Heritage Months

In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, enabling the forcible incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans solely on the basis of their race, effectively circumventing due process and suspending their Fifth Amendment Constitutional rights to favor political expediency.  In the wake of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, public envy of the economic success of Asian immigrants collided with popular contempt for everything resembling the Empire of Japan.  For four years, the lives of many were unalterably ruined and thousands perished across at least ten camps from Camp Upton in New York to Manzanar and Tulelake in California.  During this time, an estimated value of $10 billion (in 2018 dollars) of lost property and income was accrued and tens of thousands of Americans were deprived of their Constitutional right to due process and their right to appeal, while political righteousness was palatably pursued by men and women adorned in the l