When Old Tech Rules: Learning to Use a Scythe

The Marugg Company, Tracy City, TN

This article is about buying and using a scythe.

Yes, a scythe.

I am an IT guy, a radio amateur, and a fan of technology in general, but I do not limit myself to the technology of modern day — leading edge, bleeding edge, or otherwise. In fact, some “paleotechnology” beats the modern stuff, in the right context. A brace and bit beats a rechargeable drill with a dead battery ten times out of ten, and a crystal radio will get you the local radio stations when an ice storm has the power off and the double-A in your Walkman breathes its last.

Don’t mistake me for a victim of romantic nostalgia.  I have no desire to go back to the time before the Salk Vaccine, or when getting the horse manure off the streets was a major issue, or before indoor plumbing and air conditioning. A Luddite, I am not. Where old tech works, however, it’s just plain stupid not to know how to use it.

Nor am I an environmental zealot. I think man-caused global warming is a fraud, and a pretext for taking away individual rights that have not already been taken in the name of saving the children lucky enough to avoid an appointment with the abortionist. And those rights not stolen in the process of giving welfare to illegal aliens, protecting the public against violent attacks by roving gangs of Christians and Constitutionalists, and preserving the habitats of spotted owls and snail darters, are not in danger from me.

It’s simpler than that. I need to cut some grass and weeds on a slope that is too steep and creepy to cut with the mower deck on my little diesel tractor, and I don’t want to use a gas-powered string trimmer. I hate the damn things. A gas string trimmer is a back-breaking, expensive stick, with a debris-spewing, hissing, whirling dervish on one end, a hot, stinking, noisy, temperamental motor and a tank of highly-flammable liquid at the other; and an exhausted, nearly-deaf, weed-juice-spattered dummy in the middle. Politics and environmentalist feelgood-ism played no part in this decision.

I have not been the weed-juice-spattered dummy since the end of May, 2009, when I brought home my “European-style” scythe, bought in-person at the Marugg Company [www.themaruggcompany.com], in Tracy City, Tennessee. My gas string trimmer is in the long-term custody of my nephew, who will probably continue to store it in his garage.

I have been on my tractor, the classy little Kubota BX1500, cutting a wide, smooth swath through grass and weeds on open areas that, from a transplanted Middle Tennessean’s perspective, are close enough to level to avoid the feeling that one is risking life and limb. I don’t regret a single molecule of Carbon Dioxide the tractor or I exhaled in that process. That is guilt-free CO2, and Al Gore can get over it.

I researched the subject of the scythe extensively – well, as extensively as one can without leaving one’s chair in front of one’s Internet-connected computer – before I settled on the Marugg scythe. Indeed, I was surprised to discover considerable scythe-related content can be dug up with some judicious use of Ixquick, my Google replacement, privacy-protecting meta-search engine.

Not only is there a lot of content, there is even a bit of controversy among the scythe-using community. Yes, controversy! Not about the difference between American-style scythes and their European counterparts, but among those who agree that the lighter, sportier European models are better than the clunky, heavy American models.

Some Canadians, such as the members of the Vido family, as represented by Scythe Works [scytheworks.ca] and Scythe Connection [www.scytheconnection.com] approach the subject of scythes with more than a little of the ardor of the evangelist. In fact, their ardor puts me off a bit, as they give the impression that people with questions or concerns about scythes should be treated with some disdain and impatience, and maybe even some arrogance.

I coined a term for this rather zealous branch of the scythe fraternity: Scythentologists. They are impatient with the stubborn, unenlightened masses who prefer to see the scythe as a tool for which there may be quite appropriate uses, but don’t find themselves able to treat it as an object of worship, a tool for artistic expression, or as a focus for an entire school of metaphysical contemplation.

To get a taste of the fervor, self-righteousness and near-contempt with which the unenlightened are treated by Scythentologists, I offer you some email correspondence between your humble blogger and Peter Vido, from the early stages of my research into scythes.

First, my note to Scythe Connection, (which apparently was the wrong place to address my questions anyway, as Mr. Vido takes pains to point out)… Well, see for yourself.

On 18-May-09, at 9:45 PM, Tom Cox wrote:

First, my sizing info: Height: 70 in.; Ground to shoulder: 60 in.; Ground to core of hip joint: 34 in.; “Cubit”: 19 in.

Second, my contact info:

Tom Cox

[contact info]

Background:

I am 60 years old, in relatively good physical condition (able to do most of my own odd jobs and grounds keeping chores), and dealing with a hilly, rural acre that is so steep in places that it makes me nervous to try to mow on my Kubota BX1500 tractor. There are also places where the ground stays wet all spring, and, even though it has turf tires, the tractor will strip or rut the turf, even on near-level ground.

I would like to be able to get some mowing work done early on summer days, without stalling until the dew is off. I understand that dew-wet grass is easier to cut with a scythe, which is good for me. By the time the dew is gone, the temp and humidity are into the range where just being outdoors is work, let alone doing anything strenuous.

I have some areas on the slopes where the grass has gotten long (2 – 3 feet), because of heavy rain and my reluctance to tackle it on the tractor. The gas weed eater is slow, noisy, messy and really hard on my lower back due to the asymmetry of the stress of using it, especially while walking the slopes. I get tired of coming in from trimming with a green paste of “yard salad” all over me, with my ears ringing from the noise, and overheated from wearing the chain saw helmet or goggles.

Another area of concern is a steep slope that has become overgrown with blackberries and sapling trees. I can attack it in small doses, downhill-only, with the tractor, but it is a little nerve-wracking and may be somewhat risky due to the hazards of rollover and hitting hidden rocks and stumps with the mower deck that I don’t see from the seat. I don’t want to belt a rock through the window or wall of my mobile home like a line-drive homer.

I doubt that [it is] realistic to expect one blade to do a good job on both the grassy slopes and the berries, so I am focusing on the grass, which I may be able to give to my nephew to feed his goats. In any case, the grass will be gone before it can become a fire hazard, and leaves a less friendly habitat for ticks, which are plentiful here. Goat fodder or garden mulch — at least it’s put to use and out of my way.

If I can mow the tender grass and weeds between patches of berries, I may be able to conquer the latter with the tractor, or, as a last resort, the Woodman’s Pal. With the surrounding grass and weeds out of the way, either method will be easier and safer.

I want a peening set, because the idea of working the metal appeals to my aesthetic sense, as well as to my frugality. I might graduate to a hammer and anvil at some point. I also want to get a suitable stone and holster.

I assume I would be best off with the shortest snath, given my height and the prevalence of sloped terrain. The #0 blade looks like a good one to start with, since I am a learner, and it is inexpensive compared to the average. I can come back for another blade when I know more. Am I on the right track with these choices?

Am I missing anything major? Assuming I get the items listed, what would the price be in US dollars (such as they are, these days), and the shipping to Tennessee (37036)?

Thanks for your time and the benefit of your expertise.

Best Regards,

Tom Cox

I thought that was a fairly uncontroversial approach — conversational, not confrontational, asking questions that would lead me to choose the right combination of products for my application, with (at the time) the intention of spending money with them upon getting my questions answered. Well, silly me. Mr. Vido replies:

Tom,
I tried to call you last night to respond more comprehensively to your scythe inquiry than I have time for in writing — but reached only your answering machine. (Our phone is far from the house, I’m there once or twice a day at irregular hours and thus there is little point of you trying to call back.)

So instead I suggest you contact Alexander at http://scytheworks.ca/ (which, if you read our catalogue introduction carefully, is where you would have sent your e-mail.) Just two quick pointers: Firstly, I think that given your terrain (and experience) an 80cm blade may be too long. Secondly: Totally regardless of  my involvement in scythe retail (but knowing what I do about the scythe’s potential) if I were you I’d give away (or sell cheaply) both of your machines and obtain suitable scythes to replace them. Your machines have no future to speak of; the scythe does! To help you understand what I’m saying here read (carefully) more information on our website — none of which was inspired by business considerations.

Sincerely,

Peter Vido

After scolding me for addressing my questions to the “wrong” party (he is a marketing genius, obviously), Mr. Vido offers me the unsolicited and un-useful advice to “give away (or sell cheaply)” my equipment, including my cherished Kubota tractor, and “obtain suitable scythes to replace them.” Uh-huh.

Gosh, Mr. Vido, which scythe model will carry 400 pounds of dirt or firewood in the loader bucket, grade my gravel driveway with the rear blade, or re-position a 26-foot camper trailer with a 2-inch receiver adapter on the three-point hitch, all the while sipping diesel as if it were expensive champagne?

I am so glad I held off on spending my allotted scythe money until I had taken another look at the Marugg folks’ site and product line. Their small, friendly shop and store are in Tracy City, Tennessee, a cool little town at the end of a pleasant, two-hour drive from our home in the northeast corner of Dickson County, about twenty miles west of downtown Nashville.

Although I had already communicated with Amy Wilson, owner of Marugg with her husband, Allen, by email and phone, we had not met until our arrival in Tracy City around midday on May 26^th. Amy made my wife, her sister and me feel welcome immediately, and proceeded to give us a tour of their facility – an unassuming, single-story building with a plaque on the front door that says that “The Marugg Company has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior – 1873.”

I am a fan of the history of technology, including that of manufacturing. As a former resident of Muncie, Indiana, I have become somewhat familiar with the late, lamented era of American history in which our country was the manufacturing heart of the world.

Remember when we made stuff? Muncie was home to General Motors plants (well before it became Federal Motors) in the middle and latter parts of the last century, but its involvement with manufacturing predates that period, thanks to the plentiful fields of natural gas that permeated that part of the country. Muncie also was the manufacturing site for giant, stationary internal combustion engines that powered manufacturing plants all over the world between the times when steam and water powered factories, and the advent of plentiful electricity. Muncie Oil Engine was a premier manufacturer of huge, slow-turning but very high-torque engines that powered a whole generation of factories for decades before cheap electricity made them obsolete.

Factory buildings of that era had a long, skinny form factor, because the power to operate the heavy machinery that made the goods the world bought was distributed through the plants not by wires, but on implausibly long, rotating spindles, driven at one end by the enormous, slow-moving but powerful engines of the type manufactured in Muncie. Every drill press, trip hammer and bending brake derived its power through belts and pulleys connected to this central spindle.

A model for a manufacturing plant, dating at least from the earliest days of the 19^th century, was the Springfield Amory. The armory, which pioneered many of the principles of modern manufacturing, made rifles for the US military. The wooden stocks for those rifles were turned on the Blanchard lathe, which received its power from just such a central spindle. Early photos and drawings of plants like the Armory show the unmistakable signature of the central spindle, connected to surrounding machines by long, serpentine belts and pulleys, whether the power on the business end was from a water wheel, a steam engine, or a Muncie Oil Engine or its kin.

All of the above is meant to explain why I was pleased to recognize the remnants of such a power distribution system in the Marugg plant. Amy didn’t know how the original plant’s power was produced before the electric era (probably brought to Tracy City by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the years after World War I), but I would bet that, in 1873, when the plant was owned by the Swiss family for which it is named, it was powered by coal-fired or even wood-fired steam, and maybe later by a diesel stationary engine.

From bygone days: Knob-and-tube wiring (top), and pulleys from the old spindle power distribution system, both replaced with modern electric power

In any case, some pulleys and spindles were still in evidence in several places around the building. That power system had long been replaced with “knob and tube” electrical wiring, which was modernized by subsequent owners up through the acquisition by Allen and Amy Wilson. Such a tangible connection to history is a pleasure to discover in the midst of modern life.

As Amy gave us a tour and lecture, she was picking up the parts of the scythe that would be going home with me. She measured my height, my “cubit” (yes, cubit – length from the elbow to the tip of the longest finger) and the height from my shoulder to the ground, so I would leave with the right length “snath” (sounds like a made-up name for a Muppet character, but it’s the term for a scythe handle, dating at least from the English of Shakespeare).

As mentioned, there are two main styles of scythes, including both blades and snaths. The American style snaths are heavy; some of them even made from aluminum or steel, and the blades are heavier, too. American blades are made from stamped steel, and seem to rely more on brute strength and momentum to cut, while European blades are hammered from more malleable steels, and can take a very sharp edge, if that is desired.

A European blade whistles through grass or wheat stalks like a breeze, cutting like a sharp knife (not an imitation hacksaw blade, like some cheap steak knife, but a real, smooth-bladed knife), striking the grass at a shallow tangent to the axis of motion, and slicing through a narrow band of vegetation with each swing, but with little more effort than that required just to move the blade through the arc.

An American blade is apparently intended to cut more like an ax or a cleaver, striking the grass nearly perpendicular to the axis of motion, and requiring considerably more effort with each stroke to carry it through the cut material. To appreciate the difference, try cutting a ripe tomato with a very sharp knife, and then try cutting it with a meat cleaver.

If these snath dimensions had been wrong, or if I had bought just any snath from eBay, I’d be hacking and swishing my way through the weeds like a demented golfer, wasting time and energy, and thinking dark thoughts of going across the road to liberate my gas string trimmer from my nephew’s clutches.

Marugg imports scythe blades from European manufacturers, but it makes its own snaths. Amy chose a curved snath for my use, and although I don’t really understand the functional difference between a curved snath and a straight one, mine works well.

Amy Wilson, owner with husband Allen of the Marugg Company, does some drill press work on my scythe snath.

Amy takes a phone order from a customer in Texas, while I roam and shoot.

The Marugg people hand-pick their snath material from Tennessee hickory.  Candidates for that role are stacked all over the plant. To get that sporty Euro curve, they steam a batch of snaths in a tub to soften them, and strap them down to one of the original  pieces of equipment unique to the Marugg shop: a snath bending rig. It looks a bit like a medieval torture device, but I heard no complaints from the couple dozen steamed hickory sticks that were getting their bend fixed in place. They looked comfortable. Maybe they thought it was more like a spa treatment; getting a massage after a soak in the hot tub.

Snath bending rack, overseen by Marugg quality control inspector/mouser

Snath bath -- the hot tub where snaths get steamed before bending

The next crucial choice was that of the right blade for my usual mowing jobs. Of course, it had to be a light, sporty, Euro-style blade, but there are hundreds of different styles of scythe blade just in that category.

A scything virtuoso – perhaps an accomplished Scythentologist – who would be cutting wheat or grass in a cultivated field, would want a long, light grass blade that can be made sharp, to cut a wide swath (another Middle English word first associated with scything, apparently). Such a user will not subject this blade to the indignity and abuse of trying to cut coarse weeds, sapling trees, or (shudder) hitting rocks.

Scythe blade inventory, imported from (mostly) Austria -- to match the tool to the job

I, on the other hand, being of the unwashed and uninitiated, scythe-wise, could be expected to abuse the blade somewhat, in the process of learning the swing, and to satisfy my curiosity as to exactly how thick a sapling or berry cane I could cut with it. Also, as I said in my email to (Professor? Father? Bishop?) Vido, above, my mowing will not be in a level, cultivated field, but in land that has never seen a plow, is constantly prey to encroaching brush, and includes the need to trim close to fences and buildings.

Amy recommended a “brush blade,” which is shorter than a “grass blade,” and with a deeper and slightly thicker back, putting a little more metal between me and whatever I attack with my scythe. I went with her recommendation, and I was not disappointed. I have subjected this scythe to considerable abuse, both accidentally and in the process of learning its limits, and it is holding up well, with some maintenance.

Maintenance is another way the European blades differ from their American counterparts. To sharpen an American blade, the preferred method is either filing or grinding. Filing is slower, but doesn’t heat the blade the way grinding does, changing the character of the metal in ways that affect its hardness and wear resistance, and using up metal at a high rate. One does not approach a European blade with a file, and — Heaven forbid — with a grinding wheel. These methods are simply too rough and unrefined. A bit of filing may be called for to repair a damaged blade, but grinding — never.

Sharpening European blades take a kinder, gentler approach. The metallurgy of European style blades calls for frequent sharpening, even in the field, but with much less metal removed at a time, and a sharper edge attained with less effort. The doctrinaire method of field sharpening is with a whetstone that the user carries in a container that holds the stone(s) in water. The stone soaks up water and stays cleaner, that way, keeping its pores from clogging with metal particles that would reduce its effectiveness.

Sporty, Euro stone holsters, complete with belt clip -- holds two stones in water.

After the removal of metal near the edge with several sharpenings with the stone, however, the cutting edge recedes to the thicker region of the blade, requiring more metal to be removed to arrive at a sharp edge. To thin or draw out the edge, the European blade is peened gently with a hammer and anvil designed for that purpose, or with a combination of tools called variously a peening jig, or a peening apparatus. The latter device, used correctly, allows the novice to thin the blade with calibrated hammer blows that compact the metal, making it stronger, while thinning the edge to allow it to be honed with the whetstone to a thin, sharp cutting edge.  The apparatus comes in two pieces – a fixture, and two cylindrical pieces that are struck against the fixture with a hammer, with the edge of the blade between them.

The fixture is a machined cylinder of tough steel with a central body about two inches thick and six inches long, turned down on a lathe at one end to a spike, and at the other, to a column about the diameter of a finger. The fixture’s spike is driven into a piloted hole in a section of tree trunk or a stout workbench, to keep it steady and to absorb the impact of the peening hammer. The other pieces are cylinders with their centers bored out to fit smoothly over the column in the fixture, but with a face at the opening that is beveled to the angle desired for the blade edge.

The blade fits between the pieces, with the cutting edge resting lightly against the smaller column, just to insure that it is compressed the proper distance toward the back with each stroke of the hammer. One cylinder is beveled for preliminary shaping – usually marked with a single groove around the outside diameter, and the other for the final contour, is marked with two grooves.

The first cylinder puts the initial contour on the edge, or repairs a major dent or crack. The second one puts on the final contour, and is most often used for maintaining the working edge at the proper thickness after a few sharpenings.

Foreground: hammer and anvil combo; far side of front stump: Peening apparatus.

My scythe budget only allowed for the hammer and anvil combo, which is about half as much as the peening apparatus from Marugg. I have peened the blade a couple of times to what I imagine to be a “good” thickness, but I will be getting an apparatus as soon as I can afford it, to take the guesswork out of that part of the maintenance routine.

I want to go back to Tracy City again as soon as we can afford it, and take more pictures of the Marugg facility. I enjoy being in the company of people who understand that the virtues of technology extend to whatever works, whether it is today’s, or yesterday’s. I also like to be around people who can be enthusiastic about a subject they know well, without being self-righteous about it. There is no hint of Scythentological fervor at Marugg — just friendly enthusiasm.

My next “wish list” will include the peening apparatus, and possibly another scythe blade, or maybe a “scythe sickle” – a short-handled sickle with a scaled-down scythe blade, for close-in trimming around landscape plants and garden beds, and an old-style weeding hoe that looks a lot more effective than the modern ones.

I also want to go back to a superb little restaurant in Tracy City, The Dutch Maid Bakery, It’s only a short walk from the Marugg shop to the restaurant, and you’d be foolish to plan a trip to Marugg that didn’t include lunch there, and some baked goods to go, and maybe a souvenir or two from their gift shop.

So goes my experiment with the centuries-old technology of the scythe. Unless circumstances force other, older ways of doing things on me, I’ll probably stick with factory-made clothes, indoor plumbing, networked computers and the Kubota tractor.

But the scythe is here to stay.

Gratuitous, artsy shot of old machinery in the Marugg plant.

My new scythe, sized for me and wrapped to travel.

So, This Is the Future, Boomers?

I have seen the future, and I don’t like it.

On one night recently,  my hard-working spouse and I decided to pick up supper from Panera Bread, a recent favorite place to eat. We knew something was wrong when we got inside. Several employees had a distinct, deer-in-the-headlights look, as they stared at the computer screens they use as cash registers. The screens were dark and lifeless. A couple of 20-something men stared too, one occasionally talking in low, urgent tones on a telephone. The one who seemed to be in charge — as much as anybody did — muttered a vague apology at the customer in front of us, to the effect that their computer system was down, and should be coming up in a moment.

About ten minutes, later, the readouts in the customer windows on the terminals came to life, as did their display screens, and I was optimistic that we would actually be able to buy supper. During this painful interval, the manager mumbled something to the employees about getting calculators for the cashier positions, and having the clerks tally purchases by hand. The employees’ eyes got even wider, and one of them (Sherry said there were two Courtneys and two Ashleys, and I think I noticed a Britney), said, “You mean, we gotta turn around, look at the sign, read the price, and write it down on a piece of paper?” She was aghast.

Meanwhile, one of the Ashleys fingered the pocket calculator tentatively, and asked no one in particular, “Do we have to figure sales tax? How do we do that?” The apparent manager, who seemed to want to grab his coat and flee the building, watched glumly as all terminals displayed an error message that looked like something out of an old version of Windows, and not good news. He muttered and reached for the phone, again. Seconds later, he slammed the phone back on the hook and muttered some more. The Courtneys and Ashleys, meanwhile, fluttered and chirped like a flock of tropical birds in the presence of a big snake. Total elapsed time: twenty minutes. Usual time elapsed between ordering food and eating: five to ten minutes.

Finally, we reached the front of the line, which had been, after all, only two customers deep. My wife asked, somewhat optimistically, as it turned out, if she could pay with her debit card. Either a Courtney or an Ashley, I’m not sure which, turned and asked the manager. He shook his head, and Courtney/Ashley smiled at Sherry, and we learned that the lack of a competent adult who was not reliant on a computer system would keep us from eating supper at Panera Bread.

We left, with my significant other steaming, and me, amazed, and thinking we had witnessed an important event. One of the Courtneys (or Britney, I’m not sure) had to unlock the door so we could leave. They had closed the store without letting us know, because their computers didn’t work.

The future, fellow boomers, is grim. We may be the last generation in which a majority of us could complete a simple purchase without the help of a computer. We are threatened with death or slavery by a portion of the world’s population that thinks we are useless, amoral sub-humans because we don’t profess their religion. They are willing to die in the process of killing us, and think they will be rewarded for doing so in their version of an afterlife.

Standing between us and these murderous fanatics are people who become paralyzed puppets when their technological props malfunction. No, they aren’t all young, and not all young people are helplessly dependent on devices to do their thinking for them. Unfortunately, the automatons in need of a reboot seem to be in the majority.

We boomers will not be allowed to retire. Our militant neighbors will kill as many of us as they can. Of those who are left, the ones who get too sick to take care of themselves will get “put to sleep” by their health insurance companies, and the ones who can still function at all will be waiting for a panicked phone call: “The computer’s down! What do we do?”

“Well, calm down,” says some gray-haired boomer sitting in a back room, spurned and ignored until this moment. “Now, get some paper and pencils, and pocket calculators. Write down peoples’ orders, and look the prices up on the menu. Add up the prices — punch in the first number, press the “+” key; punch in the second number, press the “+” key, et cetera, and when you get — What? Oh, it means, ‘and so on.’ Anyway, when you get them all in there, hit the “=” key. That’s your subtotal. Then, to figure sales tax — what? Stop crying! You can do sales tax. Now, press “+” and then “5,” and then the percent key. STOP CRYING!”….

Cities will burn in fires ignited with stolen nuclear weapons. Innocents will be turned to hamburger by fanatics wearing explosive vests studded with a kitchen drawer-full of miscellaneous hardware and cutlery. Health care will be provided by Courtneys and Ashleys, ordered around by a computerized health care “expert system” — when it’s working. We will sit in the packed ER waiting room next to a smallpox-infected terrorist, who smiles wanly, and coughs in our direction. In a back room, a grey-haired man or woman asks a panicked nurse’s aide: “Have you tried rebooting?”

Maybe the health insurance companies will be doing us a favor.

President for Life Barack Obama’s Post-Constitutional World

I’ll miss the Constitution.

Ron Paul and the rest of the feathers out at the tip of the right wing have been telling us for years it was going to happen, and we who paid attention knew something bad was happening, but we had jobs, and lives, and TV series to worry about, and it went on around us while we expressed concern, but not alarm.

I should now be alarmed, but it may be too late.  Darn.

The left runs Washington, and state and local governments hardly matter, as long as they are in substantial compliance with the federal standards that apply to just about everything.  Our fearless leaders in Washington dug the open-pit trap the economy fell into, and now they step up to the microphone with “solutions” that involve handing the economy a shovel.  Of course, the underlying purpose is power.

The consolidation of power has always been the agenda of “leaders” of both parties, and of most of their agents in government.

“Global Warming” (on this January night when the temperature will probably drop past zero, F, here in sunny Tennessee), is now also known as “Global Climate Change,” because that covers about everything the climate is likely to do, and anything it may do is cause for consolidating power in government.  By any name, it is nothing but a pretext for grabbing power.  Not just electric power, or nuclear power; political power.

If the government can say who will be able to generate the “pollutant” Carbon Dioxide, the government can say who will use electricity, or natural gas, or oil, or coal — who will generate or use energy.  When you get down to it, that gives the government the power do decide who breathes, but that will come later.

If you remember your elementary school science — that is, if you studied it before it consisted of learning how to recycle aluminum cans and put on a condom — everything is made of energy.  Matter is energy, if you divide it up small enough.  Everything we are, and everything we do, involves the conversion of energy from one form to another.

A drop of gasoline (chemical energy) explodes in an engine cylinder (heat energy) and moves the family car along (mechanical energy).  Crowd some Uranium atoms a little close for comfort, and they give off energy, which can be used as heat to turn a turbine, and run a generator.  Of course, that only happens on a large scale in France, Iran, and other countries in which the Left thinks it is OK to allow nuclear energy to be used for “peaceful” purposes.  Not in America.

Once you have a stranglehold on the generation and use of energy, you have a stranglehold on people.  Let’s just suppose that, on this sub-zero night over a large swath of the United States, the feds decide to provide a little object lesson about how the Constitution is no longer a limit on government power.  It would be a little brazen for President for Life Obama to instruct everyone to hold his or her breath for a few minutes, just to get an idea of what it would be like to be prohibited from emitting the bad pollutant CO2.  Might be a little hard to enforce, too,  at this early stage in the Administration.

No, let’s just “accidentally” turn off the power to some states that didn’t go “blue” in the last election, but they’re going “blue” now, from sub-zero temperatures.  Not for long; just for a few hours — say,  overnight.  The first time, anyway.  Maybe, they will offer some half-hearted explanation about a squirrel getting into the transformer, and the dang computers shut everything down, dumb computers, or Christian fundamentalist  terrorists, or something.  But don’t try too hard to be convincing, because the point is to make a subtle threat.

See?  If you don’t play by the new rules, will the Constitution keep you warm?  (Maybe you could burn your copy of the Bill of Rights on the kitchen table.  That’ll last a minute or two.)  Yes, your wood stove may tide you over for a few days without power, but a passing car carrying a government official might just see smoke coming from the chimney.  A DEA helicopter might be scanning in the infrared for indoor hydroponic pot farms, and see the heat coming from your fire.  Whoa, we can’t have that, can we? Spewing CO2 out into the publicly-owned air, melting glaciers and drowning polar bears? Tsk.

You’ll have to put that fire out, and schedule an appointment for the environmental impact study on your wood stove. What? Didn’t know you needed one? Well, it’s a new rule, and the standards are pretty stringent. In fact, Obama plans to apply the same environmental impact standards to your wood stove that he promised he would use to drive the coal-fired generating plants into bankruptcy. He just signed an executive order, putting the new standards into effect as soon as he takes the oath of office, where he tries not to roll his eyes when he swears to “uphold the Constitution.”

And, don’t expect to make a big, dramatic stand, holding off the EPA SWAT team with your firearms. That won’t last long, either. The UN wants us to get rid of them, for world peace. The EPA SWAT team will be armed to the teeth, but civilians need to be disarmed, because they just can’t be trusted with such dangerous instruments. First thing you know, people will be trying to band together and prevent the government from doing something that is for our own good. We are too dumb to understand that, sometimes, unpleasant things must be done to individuals for the good of the majority. People will just hurt themselves, if they have guns.  And, after all, the darn things do emit CO2 when firing.

Suppose not enough of us get the point the first few times the power goes off?  The weather might decide to give us a break (at least during Barack’s first term), and quit trying to kill us for a while.  Think we’re home free?  Well, how much food do you have stored away? Sure, you can boil stream water on the wood stove, until they come for that, but how long can you go without food? Do you have any idea how much energy is consumed to plant, grow, process and distribute food? How long will you last if that energy is cut off? Tractors and trucks burn petroleum products; canneries and processing plants use energy, stores have to have refrigeration and lights…

Forget Hoodia and Oprah’s latest diet scheme.  Try the Stalin Diet!  Tens of millions reduced their energy needs to next to nothing in Russia, that way. Yes, there was energy consumed in decomposition, but that can be dealt with. That’s what mass graves are for!  The survivors and their neighbors in the politically favored areas of the late Soviet Union were quite impressed, and strongly persuaded that the government was right.

People who grow their own food use energy, too.  Remember that roto-tiller? Are you keeping a cupboard full of winter squash, carrots, canned goods and dried foods that will last for months? That might be considered hoarding, you know. People in “public housing” (and eventually, if the “emergency” goes on long enough, “refugee camps”) might eat pretty well on the food you are selfishly keeping for your own family. Remember, a few may have to suffer for the good of the many. Once they leave with your firearms, expect the truck to come back for your “hoarded” food.

What the hell, you’ll probably be moving into big “public housing” complexes anyway.  Concentrated housing is more energy-efficient, you see, and makes better use of land, according to UN standards.  Yes, the complexes may  be surrounded by tall, chain-link fences with razor wire and bright lights, and guard towers, but that’s just for your safety.  Can’t have people smuggling in guns or fattening foods, can we?  Goodness, no.  Outside of the concentration ca– I mean, the public housing complexes, will be plenty of government-mandated green spaces, of course.  The UN is big on green spaces, and so are the planning commissions in California, and the rest of the country.  You’ll be able to glance out at the green spaces through the chain-link fence, on your way from your apartment block to your government-mandated job.

All employment, see, will be government-controlled, because, when you control energy, you control industry and business, and well, who knows better where you should be spending your time than your government?  Heck, you live in public housing, you eat public food, and drink public water, why shouldn’t you be happy to work in the public sector?  Who better to determine where your skills will do the most public good, than the public employment service?

When you control the energy, of course, you control the health care.  Yes, that means “public” health care. Be ready for the same level of service in “public” health care that you are used to in “public” restrooms.  Maybe your public service job will be in the Kevorkian Pavilion of the Tom Daschel Health Care Resource Reallocation Center, where babies and baby boomers go to die.

Yes, as there always is in government health care, there will be temporary shortages of medicines, medical devices and health care professional services.  After all, why would anyone become a health care professional, to make the same money as a sniper in a guard tower, or a low-emissions crematorium attendant, according to the government pay schedule?  Some of us will be required to step up, and make sacrifices, for the good of the many.  Is that diabetes medication costing more, lately? Is that cardiac bypass going to put the clinic over budget for January? Euthanasia is so much cheaper, and unborn children are just “lumps of tissue,” right? Nip that cost item in the bud. Save energy!

Wow, I can’t wait to live in President for Life Barack Obama’s Brave, New, Post-Constitutional  World.  Of course, I probably won’t be around long. I already feel guilty about being white, a natural-born citizen (unlike Obama) , middle-aged, and a CO2 emitter. It’s only a matter of time before I have to step up, get in the game, do my part.

Hey, did the lights just flicker? I hope the power stays on long enough to see tonight’s crucial episode of my favorite TV show.

“If the kid next door jumped off a bridge, would you?”

Somebody named Stephen Collins, a lobbyist for the auto industry (his title is actually, “President, Automotive Trade Policy Council,” but I feel comfortable in calling him a lobbyist), wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, this week. He was responding to a WSJ editorial of December 6, which was critical of the then-proposed auto industry bailout.

His argument is that several states’ legislatures  have given preferential treatment to foreign automakers to relocate in their states. These big favors are often in the form of tax breaks that add up to hundreds of thousands of tax dollars per job created, according to Collins, and that’s why we shouldn’t wince too much at giving GM, Chrysler and Ford a “bridge loan” that they probably, or maybe, will pay back.

Ah, yes, the “two wrongs make a right” argument. AKA, the “But Mom, all the other kids in second grade are going to the nude drug sex party at Barack’s house!” argument. If that argument works here, where does it end? Just because government did one, or a hundred unconstitutional and stupid things, does that make it OK for them to do a hundred more?

Let’s get real.

If our tax structure weren’t rigged to punish success, choke business, feed government-addicted voters and get career political hacks re-elected again and again, we wouldn’t need to offer tax incentives, or any other kind of corporate welfare, to get people to build factories and make things. Foreign manufacturers would be elbowing each other in the ribs to be first in line to build factories here. Groups of American investors would get together and build manufacturing plants, and cars would advance in quality and decline in cost the way personal computers have over the past twenty years.

There would be hundreds of car brands, in thousands of different models and configurations. A company that made junk would be out of the market in months, or reincarnated (hah) quickly with new management and new ideas to get new market share. Innovators would take advantage of the advances in carbon composites for light, strong bodies, and high-tech alloys for fuel-sipping engines. Emerging battery technology and increasingly efficient electric motors would give internal combustion engines a run for their money, and entirely new powerplants would challenge both.

Have a look at the early history of the US auto industry, before the Big Three, when dozens of car manufacturers were springing up around the country.  Factories that had made stage coaches and carriages began to build the first horseless carriages. They ranged in cost and complexity from spindly, one-lungers with no suspension and wooden seats, to magnificent, motorized living rooms and land yachts like the Auburn, Cord and Deusenberg.

Economic downturns and and an increasingly grasping and power-hungry federal government, spawning the federal income tax and an exploding cancer of regulation, and not the market failure of individual products, brought about the consolidation of this raucus, cutthroat competition into three lumbering, and eventually, clumsy and inefficient behemoths.

Add to the mix the rise of the United Auto Workers Union, which became a parallel management structure in all three businesses, with its own greedy bureaucracy and sacred cows to feed, and you have the recipe for the current disaster.

What will “bridge loans,” or bailouts, or whatever you want to call them — huge sacks of money, confiscated by threat of force by government, from people foolish enough to work for a living, do to change this situation?

Nothing. Nothing short of a revolution will restore the American entrepreneurial spirit and economic freedom that gave birth to the automotive boom of the beginning of the last century.  May it happen soon.

Numbering the Bullets — and Backdoor Gun Control

In the Spring of 2008, some Tennessee lawmakers were pushing a bill (HB 3245/SB 3395) that would require all bullets sold in the state to be laser-engraved with a unique serial number. Tennessee is one of several states in which this scheme was  floated. Such initiatives will probably resurface, like a recurring infection, after the first of the year.

I’m sure that the legislative sponsors sincerely believe that the technology to do this exists, that it is “relatively” reliable and inexpensive, that it won’t impose an undue burden on legal gun owners, and that it will result in solving more firearm crimes.

Most are also sincere (one hopes) in the belief that this bullet ID database will not be used as a back-door method of identifying legal handgun owners, in order to make the confiscation of their handguns at a later date more convenient. For a government that no longer trusts its citizens with the right of self defense by handgun, this is a logical way to go.  Most legislators, that is. Unfortunately, there may be some who eagerly await such a confiscation move, and who hope that an ammunition database will make it easier.

As to the technology, please allow an Information Technology administrator and firearms enthusiast to express some skepticism. Yes, it is certainly possible to laser-engrave a very large amount of information onto a very small surface area. One only has to look at a photo taken through an electron microscope of an integrated circuit “chip,” showing the circuit paths etched by a laser. The individual conductive paths make a human hair look like a giant redwood, by comparison.

However, integrated circuits are not fired under tremendous heat and pressure from the breech of a firearm, forced down the barrel of that firearm at 500 to 1000 miles per hour, and distorted or even shattered on impact. Have the bill’s sponsors seen objective studies that show how much of that etched code is still readable after the short, stressful life of a fired bullet? Or, are they taking the word of the measure’s proponents?

Then there’s the challenge of storing and recovering those codes from a government database. By some estimates, 10 billion rounds (that’s ten times one thousand times one million) of the more common handgun ammunition types are manufactured in the United States alone, every year. Even if, as some of the “ammo coding” proponents suggest, the code would “only” narrow the field to one box of twenty to fifty rounds of ammunition, we are still talking about generating, etching, and keeping accurate track of something like half a billion (that’s five hundred times one million) unique codes — each year. And each year, add another half a billion.

Ammunition has a shelf life measured in years, or even decades, if properly stored. So, a bullet coded one day may not be fired until ten, or twenty years later. Am I supposed to believe that a government that can’t even keep track of ten or twenty million illegal aliens (We don’t know how many, do we?), or the illegal use of a 9-digit Social Security number, will be able to track one, unique “ammo code” code out of five billion, back ten years, to the manufacturer, seller and, ultimately, to the buyer? Sorry. I don’t. Even if the information is entered accurately (and it often isn’t, judging from other forms of government record-keeping), it can be lost, altered or destroyed.

Does anyone know what it will cost to maintain the database — personnel, hardware, software — that houses this information? Do the legislative sponsors have any realistic estimates? Or, are they listening to the moist whispers in their ears from the manufacturers of laser engravers, database administration programs and computer servers, who will be scrambling for the contracts to accumulate and maintain this enormous, and always-growing mountain of data?

Does anyone dispute that the burden of this process on the ammunition manufacturers will drive up the price of their products? One ‘Ammo Code” proponent’s Website (www.ammocoding.com) estimates that a laser engraver will cost “only” $300,000 to $500,000. Of course, an engraver would be needed at the end of each production line. If a manufacturer runs batches of the five or six most popular handgun ammunition types at one time, that’s “only” a few millions of dollars in up-front costs, plus the cost of labor to operate and maintain what must be a fairly complex piece of equipment, plus the extra time and space added to the manufacturing process, and their attendant costs.

This could only look attractive to the manufacturer of the engraving machines, it seems to me. How many of them are lobbying for these bills in state legislatures around the country, and counting the added revenues as they drift off to sleep?

Of course, the gun control lobby has to be enthusiastic about anything the drives up the cost of personal protection via handgun, even a little. If the price of ammunition can be pushed high enough to put  it out of reach for a single mother in the projects, with a minimum wage job, an abusive “ex” who likes to drop by and beat her, and a neighborhood full of crack dealers and pimps who don’t seem to have any problems getting handguns and ammunition, so much the better.

And then, there’s the problem of privacy. Does anyone not know about information theft? A former director of the US Central Intelligence Agency “misplaces” a laptop with top secret documents on it. Tens of thousands of credit card numbers go missing because somebody was patient and skillful enough to penetrate a corporate network and steal them.

Even if you choose to ignore the deliberate misuse of “private” information within government (the browsing of passport data files at the State Department, or the illegal possession of private FBI files by White House staff come to mind), incompetence, laziness and corruption make the theft of such information as ammunition ownership not just likely, but nearly inevitable. Do we really want that sort of information lying around?

Criminals typically obtain handguns on the street, or by stealing them. In the jurisdictions with the strictest gun control laws on the books, a criminal can still get a handgun (or even a machine gun, if the price is right) in hours or even minutes. A criminal is someone predisposed to have no more regard for firearms laws than for any other laws, or he would not be a criminal. Would the criminal not also find ways to circumvent the “ammo codes” by getting his ammo on the street, from sources that are less than scrupulous about their record-keeping? As the history of gun laws repeatedly shows, an ammunition code law would only burden those who buy their ammunition legally. The criminals would skate.

Millions of pounds of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, opiates and other drugs are smuggled into the US annually by entrepreneurs who know a market when they see it. Will they not see a market for uncoded, or unregistered ammunition? Does anyone with a toehold in reality doubt it?

This “ammo coding” initiative looks like a scam advanced by an unholy alliance of opportunists who see a chance to profit from it, and power-hungry people who don’t trust John Q. Public with the means to defend himself with a handgun.

The legislative sponsors of these bills need to take five steps back and look at them from another point of view — and then, back away from them, completely.

Olbermann’s Flatulent Rap on Those “$70 an Hour Autoworkers”

Keith Olbermann is an ignorant blowhard and an Obama sycophant, so nobody should really waste any time on what he has to say (and the great majority  of us don’t), but he set me off with this rant, which has been memorialized, not surprisingly, on uaw.org. Understand, I never watch PMSNBSNPR, or wherever he hangs out, but this article was pointed out to me by my brother, a retired GM electrician, who is following the whole bailout scene with understandable interest.

In what I understand is typical Olbermanic fashion, Herr Olbermann sets up a straw dog, and bravely, forthrightly,  righteously, knocks it down. He claims some awful, mean people said UAW autoworkers make “$70 an hour,”  thanks to the idiotic and self-destructive contracts between the Big Three auto companies and the United Auto Workers over the years.

I never heard anyone claim the $70 (or $72, I heard that, too) was any autoworker’s hourly wage.  The way I heard it was that $70/hr. was their COST to their employer in wages, plus all the bennies, plus what GM was paying the job bank employees to braid their nose hairs, get Masters Degrees in Underwater Basketweaving, etc., plus, plus, plus — averaged among the workers who are actually, or allegedly,  involved in building cars. (Parenthetically, I wonder how much it is if you add in all the union execs make, and will retire on, plus the union lawyers, lobbyists, thugs, arm-twisters and car scratchers, plus their political contributions and bribes to every Democrat since Carter that’s run for president…)

Thing is, thanks to the lowlifes at the top at GM, and the lowlifes at the top at the UAW, working together to screw everybody else in the world blind for decades, and set themselves up to retire like Saudi royalty in the process  — plus a great deal of help from the regulators and taxwriters at the federal government — it costs too damn much to make cars at UAW plants.  Since they can’t get people to pay what a car costs, plus some profit, they are on the ropes.

It’s not exactly baffling that it turned out that way.

I want Olbermann (or anybody at the UAW Website, for that matter) to explain how a taxpayer-funded “bridge loan” (oh, sure, they’ll pay it back, wink-wink) is going to make things any different.

If a lot of people take cuts in pay and benefits, and some people get laid off, and some people start paying more of their own health care costs, and the unions stop collecting dues so line workers get to keep more of what they make to pay for their own health care (har, har, snort), they can reduce the cost of building a car. Can they design and build cars that people want to buy, at a cost they are willing to pay? Will billions in tax money make that happen?

Will workers with the “GM attitude” (we who grew up in the Midwest’s GM culture know what that means) stop being dead weights, ghost employees, drunks and saboteurs, and start working as if their jobs depended, to some tiny degree, on their productivity? Oooh. That’s a big one. That might take a few more billions.

Would any of the above be more likely to happen after a tax-funded bailout? Or is it more likely after a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization that throws everything back on the table and everybody understands they either make it work, or take a walk?

Chrysler got a big bailout, back in the Carter era. Did it cause them to get lean and mean, and start kicking Japanese and European carmaker ass? Apparently not. They’re in line to climb in Uncle Santa Claus’s lap again, and whisper their wish lists in his ear, this time joined by Ford and GM.

Courtesy of TIME Magazine, August 24, 1979, here’s a little refresher on the last time a bailout was tried on a Big Three automaker:

“The Carter Administration decided last week that now was the time to come to the aid of the nation’s most beleaguered major company. After weeks of rising pressure for a federal fix for the multiplying problems of Chrysler Corp., Treasury Secretary G. William Miller produced—and Jimmy Carter approved —a Government bailout. It was designed to prevent the nation’s No. 3 automaker (1978 sales: $13.6 billion) from sliding into a bankruptcy that could have put many thousands out of work and sent a shudder through U.S. financial markets.

“Beamed Chrysler Chairman John Riccardo ‘We are extremely encouraged. This fits the bill.’

[...]

“Treasury aides were understood to be thinking of $500 million to $750 million over a limited period.”

[...]

That’s $500 to $700 mil in 1979 dollars. Wonder what that would buy today, thirty years later? What did it buy, back then? It didn’t buy a solvent, successful, competitive Chrysler.

It’s thirty years later. Somebody, please tell me, why is this time different?

So, how much IS a trillion dollars, anyway?

“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon, you’re talking about real money.”

The current mania for bailouts started with an up-front price tag of $700 billion.  That was just the beginning, of course.

US Senator Everett Dirsken is supposed to have uttered the quote above, but scholars at the Dirksen Congressional Center have been unable to confirm that. Since Dirksen was a Republican, and a fiscal conservative, in an era when much classier Senators represented Illinois in Washington, I rather doubt that he did.

You can sure hear a current senator from either party, or an economy wonk in either the incoming or outgoing administration saying that, though, can’t you?

The parade of needy parasites in search of a bailout gets longer every day. It was $700 billion at first, but we knew that was just a taste. The total liability the Bush administration has so far  (as of last night, November 26th, that is) squatted and dumped on us taxpayers has been estimated at $7 TRILLION, and that’s preliminary.

So, how much is $7 trillion, really, besides being “real money?” Is there a way to understand such a huge number, or are we stuck with trying to grasp a meaningless abstraction? Let’s try, anyway.

Don’t most of us working adults have a feel for how much money a thousand dollars is? What can you buy for $1000? I found a Sony, 50-inch plasma TV listed at Wal-Mart for $976.54. Close enough. Round up to $1000, and let’s get going. How much is a million dollars? A thousand, Sony, 50-inch plasma TVs.

I imagine you could get all of those in one, big railroad boxcar, if you packed ‘em in real tight, wall to wall, and floor to ceiling.

How much is $100 million? It’s the payload in a hundred railroad boxcars, each of them loaded with 50-inch, plasma TVs. How long would a train of 100 boxcars, loaded with plasma TVs, take to pass you at a railroad crossing? If it’s moving right along, maybe, what –  five, ten minutes? And each car that rumbles past your windshield is carrying $1 million in plasma TVs, bought by taxpayers.

How much is a billion? It’s a thousand million. How about ten trains of a hundred boxcars each — a thousand boxcars, total — of $1000 plasma TVs? Can you picture sitting in front of those flashers and cross arms, watching ten, hundred-car trains — one billion dollars — going by?

How about a hundred billion? That’s a hundred, one-hundred-car trains of $1000 plasma TVs. If you’re stuck at this railroad crossing while these go by, you’d better be in an RV, with a full refrigerator and an empty toilet tank.

How much is a trillion? It’s a thousand billion. That’s a thousand, one-hundred-car trains, carrying what has to be most of the  world’s production of 50-inch plasma TVs.

$7 trillion in plasma TVs would have to be hauled in SEVEN THOUSAND, one-hundred-car trains. A 100-ton boxcar is about 70 feet long. A hundred-car train, without locomotives, would be about a mile and a half long. A fantasy train carrying $7 trillion worth of plasma TVs would be over 7500 miles long — long enough to tie up every crossing from Vancouver, BC, Canada, to the middle of Brazil, if the fantasy train track went that far in a straight line.

Remember, now — these plasma TVs were all bought with money confiscated by threat of violence from US taxpayers, present and future. They will be distributed by government employees who don’t care what those taxpayers think about their methods.

If the distribution is as efficient as a government venture usually is, over half of the TVs will be lost, stolen, broken or given to people in Third World countries who live in mud huts without electricity, who think TV is unholy, and who hate the United States because it is The Great Satan. The latter recipients will trade their TVs at the local bazaar for AK-47s and explosives with which to kill Western aid workers and blow up US embassies.

Now, do you have a better idea of what “real money” is?

All aboard the bailout express! Have your tickets ready.

Deliver Me from Dinosaur Bailouts

Pat Buchanan recently wrote that he would like to see the Big Three “American” auto companies get the bailout of taxpayers’ money that is being discussed.   He says the Republicans will suffer if they don’t support it.

Pat, the Big Three Dinosaurs are no more “American” companies than Toyota — maybe even less so. Check the parts content and manufacturing locations on your “American” car, before you make such an unfounded assertion.

Get back to me when Big Three execs start acting as if the location of their corporate offices really mattered to them. Would they care if they went to sleep in Dearborn and woke up to Taiwan or Brussels? Not if they got to take their perks with them. Let their stockholders dump them in favor of people who care about America, and have them get back to me.

The Big Three execs are entitled to their grotesque (from my perspective) bonuses and golden parachutes, if their stockholders are dumb enough to put up with their incredibly bad decisions, and enough customers are dumb enough to pay for them as part of the price of a car. They are NOT entitled to taxpayers’ money, unless they start selling something taxpayers want to buy. If not, screw ‘em.

Also, Pat, please tell me: Why should taxpayers help the UAW recover its hundreds of millions of dollars spent to elect BHO, by subsidizing their members’ union dues? They got their guy. Screw them, too.

An American company CAN come back from the dead. If its employees and retirees want to badly enough, let them pull out their own wallets.  Let them break up and buy their companies out of bankruptcy, make sacrifices, and begin making products Americans (and the world) want. Look at Harley Davidson, if you want to know how that is done.

Let us taxpayers keep the bailout money, and invest in automotive start-ups that use automated manufacturing, advanced materials, non-union labor, superior technology and real market knowledge to build cars Americans and others will buy.

The Big Three Dinosaurs? The tar pits are this way.

“Compassionate Conservatism,” and Other Reasons Why the Republicans Lost

Compassionate Conservatism

“I call my philosophy and approach compassionate conservatism. It is compassionate to actively help our fellow citizens in need. It is conservative to insist on responsibility and results. And with this hopeful approach, we will make a real difference in people’s lives.”

President George W. Bush

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/20020430.html

Let’s get this out of the way up front. The Republicans got their heads handed to them in the 2008 presidential election because they deserved to. And it had nothing to do with the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice presidential candidate. In fact, that was the lone, good decision anyone in the Republican brain trust has managed to make in years, notwithstanding the snide remarks and lies told by the scuttling rats inside the McCain organization and their sycophantic hangers-on in the pundit class.

No, the Republicans put a lot of effort into defeating themselves, and it started long before Sarah Palin killed her first moose. They walked away from the conservative ideals that got Ronald Reagan elected twice in landslides, and won them a congressional majority in 1994. Why? Because the Republican “leadership” never really believed in those ideals. You see, at its core, the Republican Party is a bunch of spineless whores.

Yes, I said whores, and I meant it — exactly in the sense P. J. O’Rourke used the term, in the best American political science textbook ever written, his PARLIAMENT OF WHORES – a Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire US Government.

The spineless Republican retreads who guide the party’s destiny will sell their allegiance to any interest that promises to get them reelected – and this is the sad part — whether or not a rational person would see the slightest chance that it would work.

Like a beaten, bleeding hooker who refuses to file an assault complaint against her abusive pimp, because he “really loves her,” even after he has beaten her to a pulp for the umpteenth time, this core of Republicans returns to courting “moderates” and “undecideds,” and “reaching across the aisle,” even after two runaway victories with Reagan, and after winning back a majority in the House and Senate in the abortive “Republican Revolution” of 1994.

They chose their most recent standard bearer, John McCain, because he is a faithful follower of this self-destructive tradition. He was perfect for the job.

But he was only the most recent keeper of the flame. Go back to 1992, to the modern roots of this pathetic legacy. George Herbert Walker Bush, who was elected in 1988 on Reagan’s conservative coattails, turned his back on his own, “no new taxes” promise. In the endless search for the Bigger Tent the Republican whores thought would win them a second term, GHWB bequeathed to us eight years of Clinton, Clinton, Gore & Co.

In an effort to keep the conservatives from drifting away, or worse, from fomenting an outright revolt, Republican campaign bosses told us throughout this dark period to give them our money and efforts, threatening us with the nightmare scenario of socialist utopias and Stalinist gulags if the Democrats got their way. Of course, those same brave, Republican soldiers were practicing “bipartisanship” the whole time, “reaching across the aisle” to the Democrat minority and Republican turncoats on un-constitutional legislation and incompetent or evil judicial appointments.

Thanks to eight years of high-profile sleaze and transparent power-grabbing by the Clintons and their lawyer-thugs in expensive suits, the voters recoiled sufficiently at the prospect of Kerry and Gore to give us eight years of George W. Bush. Again, conservatives were told to give money, get out the vote, and — after each election — to sit down and shut up. Our reward was eight years of bloated spending and rampant federal bureaucratic expansion, under the brand name of “Compassionate Conservatism.”

Let me chase this cockroach of an idea out from under the refrigerator and stomp on it, once and for all.

George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” is to “conservatism” what “charity” is to “armed robbery.” Compassionate Conservatism is neither compassionate, nor conservative. Like calling the unrestricted right to kill unborn children “pro-choice,” Compassionate Conservatism is a marketing fraud. Why should the American people have been alarmed by Republican warnings that, if elected, Obama was going to “redistribute the wealth?” The Bush administration has been doing that for two terms.

Bush signed McCain-Feingold (AKA: The Incumbent Hacks Protection Act), ramrodded through No Child Left Behind, and championed a colossal prescription drug welfare program. All the while, he actively promoting a storm surge of illegal immigration that overwhelmed the health care and criminal justice systems, swamped government schools, and turned entire American communities into suburbs of the Third World.

The compassion actually shown by Compassionate Conservatism was restricted largely to Democrat ideologues, illegal aliens, government bureaucracies, Saudi petrocrats, pharmaceutical companies and teachers’ unions.

Conservatives who voiced disapproval of unfettered illegal immigration were accused of lacking compassion; of being un-Christian; of wanting to deprive international trespassers of “jobs Americans won’t do.” And, in a breathtaking display of ignorance and/or arrogance, our president called American citizens who stood on our national borders as witnesses to the violation of our laws and sovereignty, “vigilantes.” To add insult to insult to injury, John McCain looked down his nose at “quote, conservatives,” as he referred to us often, and reminded us, as if from the moral high ground, that illegal aliens are “God’s children, too.” Thanks for the reminder, Reverend John.

The one issue on which all conservatives are supposed to agree about Bush is that he prevented another 9/11. Really? Am I supposed to be grateful that, between administration-mandated sensitivity classes for FBI agents on “Islam, the Religion of Peace,” those agents had time to uncover several plots to blow things up and kill people in the United States? It is certainly no thanks to the Bush administration’s slavish obeisance to political correctness that some such plots have been discovered and thwarted. Thank God for individual initiative and integrity, some plotters’ incompetence, and some good fortune.

However, like the aforementioned cockroach under the refrigerator, for every plot discovered, how many plots remain undiscovered? How many Islamist sleeper cells have slipped across our negligently unprotected borders, or been allowed to enter on “student” visas by our negligent immigration bureaucracy, carrying the components of weapons of mass destruction past negligent Homeland Security bureaucrats, while those sensitivity training sessions were going on? How many plots have not been discovered because the perpetrators have simply not been called to become active — yet?

Are we “safe” from Islamist aggression thanks to lectures from our State Department on not using terms like “Islamist aggression” — or in spite of them? If “Palestinians” are not lobbing missiles into Israeli schools and blowing themselves up in Israeli pizza parlors for a few days, is it because Condy Rice has lectured Israel on which of its appendages it should chop off next, and offer it to the bombers and missile crews as a gesture of good will? Or is it because the “Palestinians” have temporarily run out of missiles and suicide bombers?

Can we really credit George W. Bush with preventing another 9/11, when his administration cannot even properly identify our enemies? Calling the struggle in which we find ourselves a “war on terror” is like calling World War II a “war on blitzkrieg,” or a “war on kamikaze.” Terror is a means to an end, not our enemy. Our self-declared enemy is the socio-political ideology of Islam, a fascist system whose adherents believe themselves to be superior to all who do not share their belief. They offer us three options: (1) Convert to Islam; (2) Live at the mercy of a dictator as a powerless underclass; or (3) Die in the war of conquest long ago declared against us. Unless we are Jews, of course, in which case our options are mostly narrowed to (3).

The Republicans’ political malpractice over the last few presidential terms has left us in debt up to our scalps, in danger of being overrun by illegal aliens, and in a fight for our lives with an enemy that our government cannot even identify, much less understand. It has left us in the hands of a devout socialist who is a “made man” product of Chicago machine politics, and a senate hack with not much going on underneath his hair plugs, other than the incubation of his next verbal gaffe.

If any of the Republican “leaders” who brought us this debacle are still in their positions of power and influence in Congress in a couple of weeks, we get the point. It will be an unambiguous indicator that the Republican Party is destined for obscurity, and deserving of nothing but contempt from the conservatives at the grassroots who have labored for decades to keep it alive.

The Stupid Party, that party of abused political hookers and back-stabbing weasels, will have made it clear to even the most loyal conservatives that we need to go elsewhere to find principled leadership.

Tom Cox

November 7, 2008

Life and Death in a Gun-Free Zone – Observations on the Virginia Tech Massacre

(4/30/2007) The Virginia Tech atrocity has awakened the anti-Second Amendment propaganda machine. The recent editorial in my local paper followed the Gannett papers’ party line perfectly, with a good sample of the usual lies and canards in support of gun control. WND carried a link to a disturbing column on how to confiscate legally-owned firearms from American citizens.

I won’t even address those abuses of the truth. My reaction is personal, not political.

I work in a job that takes me inside school buildings. My job takes me all over the district, to large and small buildings, filled with toddlers to teenagers. I have a state-issued carry permit, which means my background and criminal history have been checked, and the state and county have decided there is no compelling reason for me to be denied my right to carry a concealed handgun — except, of course, in or around a school building. School buildings are “gun-free zones.”

Virginia Tech’s administrators gave themselves a pat on the back last year, when they helped defeat a bill in the state House of Delegates that would have allowed  those students and others who had a valid carry permit to carry their firearms on campus. They congratulated themselves on making the campus safer. In a fantasy world where everyone obeys the rules, they would have been right. A brutal lesson in reality, in the form of a mass murder, showed them how stupidly, criminally wrong they were. People who had done no wrong paid for this hideous lesson with their lives.

For years, I have asked myself, “What would you do?” What would I do, if a killer came into the school building I happened to be working in, and started making his way to posthumous celebrity by harvesting the lives of innocents. The killer might be a loner with a grievance against the world, a zealot with a political point to make (Remember Beslan? The Russians do.), or he might just be a monster fueled by the worship of evil and himself, as the VT killer appeared to be. No matter.

He would be confident, because he is a well-armed killer in a gun-free zone. He has time, as the VT killer had, to stroll the halls, and pick out targets, reloading when the clip runs dry, relishing the fear and pain he causes, basking in the screams, seeing the blood as impromptu art. Reconciled to his own death as the dramatic climax of the action thriller of which he is the star,  producer and director, he picks his targets, punches holes in them, and moves on.

What would I do? I walk out of a room to the sounds of gunfire and screaming. I turn a corner, and see a man take careful aim with a firearm, and pull the trigger. A teacher, stepping between the killer and a student, winces and falls, a bullet in the stomach. Bodies are all around her; the students she couldn’t save. The shooter’s back is to me. He wants to put another bullet into the teacher crying and writhing on the floor, but the hammer falls on an empty chamber. I know he is nearly deaf at the moment, because the shot I just witnessed was incredibly loud in this concrete-floored, high-ceilinged hallway, and it is not his first. I have a few seconds to — what?

Run out the nearest exit, leave the dead and dying, the killer, and his future victims to their fate? Can I live with myself if I survive that way? The screams will haunt my sleep; the regrets and self-recriminations will poison my every waking moment from now on.

Do I run quietly up behind this rabid animal, uttering a quick prayer, and hope to pick up a weapon on the way to bludgeon him with? Finding none, do I try to strike him with my bare hands? He is a young man, fueled on adrenaline and hate, at least, reconciled to his own death, the star of the show. I am an aging, unarmed, nonathletic civilian, and I did not make up my mind this morning that this was my day to die.

Do I strike him? Where? Do I tackle him? Kick him? What if his hearing recovers just enough to detect me coming up behind him, just as the new magazine slides home, and the first round goes into the breach? Have I just made my wife a widow? Have I added her to the killer’s list of battered lives? Will I have time to regret choosing my livelihood over my right — my obligation — to defend myself and innocent others against harm, by carrying my legal handgun into a “gun-free zone”?

All of you who have supported the idea of “gun-free zones”: these are the choices your deluded idea of “safety” have left me with. Me, and anyone saddled with a conscience and the quaint concept that the innocent deserve to be protected against evil, even at the cost of our own lives.

Thanks. I feel safer already.