Apr 15, 2012

Tam strikes again

Pocketa, Pocketa, Pocketa, Mr. Mitty.

It's just you and a couple of girls heroically engaging the 82nd Airborne and at least one MEU, the ladies with their right-way Smiths and wrong-way Colts, you with whatever banger that most tickles your tactical gonads.

After many adventures you are victorious. America is restored to liberty and prosperity, and the Fred Waring Singers warble Over the Rainbow as the females vie for your heroic affections.

The reality might vary a smidgen from that.

What disturbs me is how many of the "I bought a Century Arms AK and a case of ammo; let's get iton!" crowd talk like they're looking forward to this because, I don't know, it means no more mortgage payments, or they won't have to go in to work on 
Monday.


It is one thing to expect an Obama or Romney or successor to fiddle away America's last burning days. It is something else to hope for it, even with oodles of charged magazines, a basement full of canned tuna,  and 50 MREs in the bugout bag.

The odds do not favor our run-of-the-mill Armageddon Arnie as the alpha warlord in a real world of total collapse, his daydreams to the contrary notwithstanding. I suspect about the best he could hope for is being the sergeant in charge of burning the civilian corpses.  (Put the little kids in this pile, Corporal. Stack the rest over along the creek. Send a detail for kerosene. And detail a private bring me my gas mask.) 


It could come to that, and to ignore the possibility is foolish.  Preparation -- the equipment and supplies and attitudes to preserve the people you love -- is not foolish. But that is plan B or C or Z.

Plan A is to keep scrabbling, even if it means continuing to vote. To keep talking, even if it means discourse with statist idiots. We might even win. Meanwhile we can always side with that old poseur Winston Churchill. During the leadup to the Suez crisis he was chided for not being sufficiently belligerent and replied:

"To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war."









A little Sunday side trip into radio

You don't have to be a Hoosier to like Indiana Radio Watch. You just have to be an unreconstructed radio freak. Blaine Thompson probably knows as much as anyone about Indiana radio as it is now and as it was back in the 8-pot-Gates days.

The periodic email report always includes at least one thing I find interesting. This morning it notes that the little station  WBZQ in Huntington, about 20 miles southwest of Fort Wayne, has been sold. So what? Little stations change hands like used Chevys.

Because the price was 75,000 Bernanke-inflated dollars.

So what if it was just one step up from a coffee-pot operation, putting out 500 watts until sunset, then 13 after dark -- yes, only about twice what your old Cobra CB exhaled before you wired in the illegal linear amplifier?

Only a generation ago a station like that would have grossed maybe $100,000 a year.  (For perspective, that amount of 1970 money would have bought you about 20 new Corvettes, loaded. )

The rule of thumb held that an AM radio station was worth about two times its gross revenue. Real estate was extra.

So comes the end of my denial. AM radio IS dead.  Bury it beside the Yankee dollar.

---

(Blaine would be glad to put you on his mailing list, but I don't care to publish his email address. He's on Facebook.)

Apr 14, 2012

Et voila!

Oh, it's Brother Jimmy's turn to throw the bomb...



And while we're at it, why not flag the assault craft?

Flagging

Once upon a time an anal SCUBA diver criticized my diving flag because it was out of proportion. "To be official it has to be five by four by one."  Five  units wide, four high, one as the white-stripe dimension. I thanked him profusely, of course,  though I somehow forgot to ask my wife (RIP) to resew it. Despite the omission I used it for many more years and somehow escaped being hamburgerized by an Evinrude. Just lucky, I guess.

I suppose this ancient memory comes because of a morning mood which demands that I do something frivolous. So I think  I'll paint an anarcho-capitalist flag on the west end of the big propane tank. I know I have plenty of black rattle-can paint, and if there happens to be a can of yellow, it'll be a done deal shortly after the dew dries.



Unfortunately I don't know the official proportionals of the AnCap banner, so I'll welcome advice from anyone who does. In fact I solicit it. How could any friend of real liberty live with the notion that his flag fails to meet the legal standard?