Vote for Larry Correia

It's a fearful confession to make on this Blogovia street corner, but I rarely read science fiction. Even Heinlein. (If you catch me quoting him, it just means I clicked over to BrainyQuotes to cherry pick a piquancy in support of a point I made lamely.)

I have nothing against the art form, and I may be the poorer for not liking it.  But to me it's like goat milk; however lovely it may be, I am sufficiently pleased to know others enjoy it.

Nevertheless, I'm more than than okay with Larry simply from reading about him and sometimes visiting his blog. He's one of us and quite capable of penning any one's quote of the day, e.g:

Every day, over a thousand writers of explody, action-adventure, gun-nut, monster-killin’, novels are maligned on the internet by stuffy literati critics for not being “real” novelists who write ham-fisted, navel gazing, message-fic about starving polar bears or some crap.  

You can click that for guidance on how you, too, may  "tell stuffy literati types to go screw themselves."


H/T Tam

Gas is cheap

You just put $75 worth of unleaded in your little car. You cussed the Arabs and the Africans and the Venezuelans and the Texans. When we get the pipeline from Athabasca you'll cuss the Canadians, too, eh?

Wrong targets, Bunkie. Your enemy isn't wearing a turban, a sombrero,  or a Stetson. He's wearing an Armani with real button holes in the sleeves. He's  carrying an alumni card from a great university and impressive  government identification documents.

He and his forebears arranged this fiasco more than 40 years ago when our masters thought it would fun to divorce currency from any objective standard. It happened to be gold, mostly for reasons traditional and sentimental. It could just as easily have been copper, lead, bauxite, or any other useful physical substance which is more or less scarce.

It isn't like we absolutely need another reminder of this, but it can't hurt.

Forbes writer Louis Woodhill offers some mathematical evidence. It's worth a look even if your eyes glaze over at a sequence of funny little symbols and more zeros right of the decimal point than you care to deal with.  Because? Because he arrives at a conclusion which has been pretty plain to libertarian types since we all decided that the difference between  Republicans and Democrats was about the same as that separating Gotti and Castellero.

"At this point, we can be certain that, unless gold prices come down, gasoline prices are going to go up—by a lot. And, because the dollar (and virtually all other currencies. J.) is currently a floating, undefined, fiat currency, there is no inherent limit to how far the price of gold in dollars can rise, and therefore no ultimate ceiling on gasoline prices..."


And gold prices aren't going to come down, are they? At least as long as our presidents and our congress are so gleefully in love with fiat money, the world's most overwhelming SuperPac.  Bridge to no where? Great idea, Senator. How much do you need?  

Right now, the threat posed by rising gasoline prices is not just to family budgets. An even greater danger is that the government will use escalating oil prices as an excuse to do something stupid.

That constitutes my major quibble with you, Mr. Woodhill.  The correct phrase would be, "as an excuse to keep doing something stupid."

Don't mess with old people

Somehow I doubt Jay Leone of Marin County, California, is about to get a nice congratulatory card from his Senator Boxer.

Mr. Leone is 90, seems fit , and is without doubt feisty. A burglar got in and shot him in the head.

Now, there are a lot of  possible reactions to that sort of affront, including trying to call 911 before you die. But Mr. Leone's was, "F---- you, you son of a bitch. Now it's my turn." Whereupon he got his SW .38 snubby and emptied it, hitting one Samuel Joseph Cutrufelli thrice in the stomach.


Burglar Sam is one of those rare Californians without a highly developed social conscience. If he had one he would have  reclined and quietly bled to death, dreaming his last dreams of aromatherapy and unleaded condors.


He survived to become an expensive public charge, accused of attempted murder and other sins.


So far no one has proposed indicting Mr. Leone for anything.  


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I recommend reading the story for its funny scatalogical deails and the grace with which reporter Gary Klien tells the tale of Mr. Leone's testimony.


H/T Nephew Mike

Learning Politics with Travis McGee

Our friend John D. MacDonald pauses in his narrative of the search for Bix Bowie's fate in the Oaxacan highlands. Travis and Meyer are interested in the scene, a high mesa marked with anthropological remnants of a tough and ancient people.  John D. permits Enelio, their bright new Mexican friend, to explain. (N.B. The term "priest" needs to be read in its meaning in Meso-American culture before the Spanish invasion. The priests were also the temporal masters -- the polticians, the Obamas, Santorums, Gingriches, and Romneys, among many other latter-day names.):

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"Here is how it was.  Five, six, seven hundred years ago, these mountain people who had been led into this place by the priests and the soldiers, they cimbed to that place that you see, and they made offerings of food, and they worshipped. They bult the temples and they dug the wells, carried the stones, made the pottery, cut the thatch. But the priests got too far away from the people. They thought they owned the people forever. They lost common understanding. So one day the people went up to the high places and killed the priests and killed the guards and pulled down the temples and never went back. ... They just got tired of slave life, of catering to the demands of priests for food and women and children to train, and tired of work that became more meaningless to them. They went up and killed them and put and end to it...".


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This little offering is not meant as an immediate call to hone the swords and hoist Mencken's Black Flag. It is a suggestion that authoritarianism has its ultimate punishments.

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From Dress Her in Indigo, the 1987 Fawcett printing, p. 95.