Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Beverage Order of Battle

We're staying in tonight, so the bar is open. The Order of Battle to bury this worthless Year will be: 1. Whisky, Scots, McCarthy's Clear Creek Distillery, Oregon 2. Beer, Henry Weinhart's Blue Boar Ale (with supper) 3. Sparkling Wine, California, Temecula Valley, Almond-flavored (midnight toast) Amounts of the above weapons in my battle to supress the mostly-ugly memories of 2012 will be as required to achieve the objective. That is all.

"Fiscal Cliff" meat prices

Unbelieveable! Sirloin Petite Steak normally sells for $3-4/per pound. I just paid $7.49/pound for it. Regular gas is steady @ $3.14/gallon, though. A $1,200.00 cheapie stripped AR seems right in step with that meat price....

Disarming Military Veterans - Part Two

In Part One of this post, we noted why military veterans are feared by "liberal" politicians: fear that their positions of comfort and leadership would evaporate if those pols were to over-reach in the further strengthening of an overly-ambitious Federal Government, and the Veterans were to tell them, "No, that's far enough, you can't go any farther towards erasing the individual rights of liberty our forefathers gave us." Some of us have said that, individually, and in small organizations, but we are ignored or shouted down by the momentum of the movement which exists to make all citizens wards of the Government instead of stewards of their own Liberty. That momentum is mighty, and approaches or may have already exceeded 50% of the citizens of this great Nation. The progenitors of the wardship movement, sometimes known as Socialists, after the model of Government which says that the society has more rights collectively than the individual has, have become well-organized at their task, and ending individual Liberty is within their grasp if they act together in a final push.

That final push may be coming, and it will certainly be preceded by as much citizen disarmament as the Socialists can manage, for the obvious reason.

We aren't afraid to state the obvious here.

The reason the Socialists want us disarmed is that they are somewhat afraid that a revolt against Socialism might develop during the final push to implement the destruction of individual liberties, and they are VERY afraid that if those carrying the revolt have credible arms, their revolt might succeed in restoring all the individual liberties our forefathers intended us to have, and that would mean the end of their trying to convert the very-NOT-Socialist USA into a de-facto Socialist nation.

The disarmament of Veterans has already begun.

For some, it began with the end of their enlistments during this current war against terror in South West Asia (Iraq & Afghanistan). When those Veterans mustered out, or in some cases are still enlisted or serving with Commissions, the military began to make an assumption that they had likely been affected by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Don't get me wrong, PTSD is a real affliction, and it's definitely job-related to the military (and other stressful occupations), and in one respect, it's good that the military has finally recognized that. Generations of soldiers, sailors and airmen have served, some have been afflicted with PTSD, and had their afflictions ignored by the military. PTSD is not ignored now, and that much is good.

There's a dark side to the initiative within the DOD to handle PTSD though, and that dark side is expressed by the DOD assuming that all veterans who have been in enemy contact (and a few who haven't been) are afflicted until they have demonstrated that they haven't been afflicted. Is the Department of Defense merely trying to leave no PTSD-afflicted veteran behind, or is another purpose at work here?

I maintain it's the latter. The dark side here is that the assumption of PTSD affliction as a normal or usual outcome of having been in contact with the enemy allows the DOD to attach a label to the combat veteran.

That label is "Crazy". No, they don't come out and say the word, "crazy", but they imply it. PTSD in it's moderate-or-worse form is considered a personality disorder, and those with recognized personality disorders may not possess arms in this Nation. Thus does the wannabe-Socialist government try to disarm it's greatest and most-likely potential foe, by calling them "crazy", and requiring them to prove that they're not. Of course, that's a perversion of our legal system, which REQUIRES the assumption of innocence until complete proof of guilt is obtained, but ever since the Virginia Tech University massacre, perpetrated by a deranged person who obtained arms by lying about his mental disease, and the mistaken acquiescence of the NRA in the "solution" to that "problem", persons in treatment for any sort of personality disorders are supposed to have their Second Amendment rights removed until they are certified as sane and responsible and have gone through (a yet-undeveloped) process to certify that. Coupled with the fact that the Forefathers didn't recognize the then-nascent industry of Psychology, under the auspices of which everyone must be labeled as to their deviancy from a norm, Military veterans with PTSD were swept into that net. The forefathers had "insane asylums" in their day, but they could never have imagined the extent of labeling people "crazy" that we do today. The DOD's assumptive diagnosis of PTSD in separating/separated Veterans (their "screening system" for Veterans amounts to that) sweeps far too many Veterans into the "crazy" net.

Lest you forget, the idea of labeling people "crazy" so as to minimize their opposition to Government is not new, and both of the major Communist dictatorships of the past century, namely the former USSR and the People's Republic of China, make or made strong use of the "crazy" label, except they don't do it to disarm the populace (those people are already disarmed), it is used to deny basic liberty. I refer you to the acclaimed docu-novel "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

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Summary: So far, in Part One, we have identified FEAR as being the motivator for the current attempt to at least weaken and probably remove, the Second Amendment and it's Civil Right of self-defense with firearms, and we looked at the application of FEAR as the primary tool to do so.

In this Part Two, we have identified the target of that "fear-and-smear" campaign. That target is we Veterans, who pose the greatest threat to the implementation of Socialism and the further reduction of individual liberties in this Nation. We have examined just how this fear-and-smear tactic is going to go, and it's likely strategic objective, the disarmament of Veterans by claiming that we are all too crazy to possess firearms.

How do we fight this structured campaign of fear, which appears to be working at it's inception? What steps must we take to solidify the Second Amendment and anchor it properly against the tide of disarmament hysteria which is sweeping the Nation after Newtown? Who could best lead this fight? What tactics will work and what tactics won't work? All these questions will be tied up in Part Three, the final Part of this series.

Rivrdog blog Banned in China!

I just got word via a close friend, that a friend of my friend, traveling on business in Asia, noted that this blog is blocked in China but gets through in Hong Kong. Very interesting....

Gun-ban network found

...a new one.

Note the headline for the op-ed I just refuted here. (Open the attached .PDF)

Now do a Google search on that exactly-worded headline.

Ah-Ha! I doubt if Mizz Nesbit wrote that headline, in fact, it seems to be well outside of the entire Pamplin Media Group, doesn't it? Note that the first listing coming up is from Illegal Mayors Against Guns, so Bloomie's filthy lucre is being spread around here. Look at the third listing under that search. Now look at that home page. It's damn near identical in design to Bloomie's page. I'd bet serious $$$ that the same Web designer did both of the pages. Now look at the highest-linked BlogSnot blog. Looks the same, eh?

Draw your own conclusions, but I'm beginning to believe that Bloomie's money has replaced Soros' gelt as the main funding source for all the recent howls for gun-banning.

Now that we know the enemy's location....

A local 2A kerfluffle

I was going to write and publish the Part Two of my piece on Disarming Veterans, but then I read my local blatt, and it seems that their "sweet little old lady" historian has joined the ranks of the screaming gun-banners, so I took the time to write an Op-Ed for the paper she publishes in instead of the Part Two. I'll get to that Part Two shortly.

Here is her Op-Ed (sorry about it being sideways, print it out and read it like a newspaper). No, you can't link it, my local blatt is a low-budget publication, and they haven't put Friday's Editorial stuff online yet.

Download SCAN0037

Here is my reply, as emailed to the blatt:

Editors:

This letter is in reply to Sharon Nesbit's op-ed piece of 12/28/2012 in the Outlook. Please consider publishing this letter it in it's entirety as an Op-Ed.

Most of us don't write very well in the "tirade" format. I've tried, but all editors who have ever worked with my screeds say they would be better in some other format. I guess the Outlook Editors all gave Ms. Nesbit a pass because she has published a book of "tirades", so you probably consider her an expert in the genre.

I was going to ask to join her "conversation on Gun Control", but then, upon my second reading, I noted that she never invited any replies or "conversation", so I will have to be content with trying to dig out her points and suggesting improvements.

Her first point is that the National Rifle Association is an accessory to numerous murders. She has used a legal term there, and she needs to watch using legal terms. The NRA now owns Ms. Nesbit if it wants to sue her, but I'll satisfy myself by pointing out that she has never accused the National Automobile Dealers Assn of being "accessory" to any of the thousands of deaths using the cars they rep, the drivers of which which were later ruled culpable (drunk driving). Nor has she so accused the National Marine Manufacturer's Assn, an umbrella org for boat manufacturers, of any similar crime, although products they push are responsible for many culpable deaths every year.

Her next point: "Clackamas Town Center was barely over when we did it again." (My emphasis added). I'm not sure just what your reference to "we" was, Ms. Nesbit, but I am offended that you paint us all of us as deranged killers. I have had no part in any of the killings you mentioned, and I doubt that you have had either. I won't sue you like the NRA might, but I think an apology for your intemperate accusation is certainly in order here.

Her third main point seems to be that those who bought semi-auto military-style rifles recently are somehow on the same level as the mass-killers. I didn't buy one, but I'm offended anyway, because the recent purchasing of those rifles by folks who have desired one is a perfectly-normal reaction to the hysterical screaming of the gun-ban zealots who are now in full cry to ban those rifles. My reply to Ms. Nesbit is, why would any rational person believe that a killer with unlimited time to plan a horrible crime such as this would not do the crime if semi-auto rifles or pistols weren't available? He could have attacked a full school bus by pushing it off a cliff with a large truck, but do we hear calls for banning large trucks (or fortifying school buses)?

I completely agree with Ms. Nesbit's final point: write your political representatives to express your outrage. My outrage is that the deaths of all these people are being used as a political tool to try to destroy an enumerated Civil Right, the right to keep and bear arms. The "security of a free State" (ours) is indeed threatened here, but it is NOT threatened by those who lawfully own arms, arms of any type. It is threatened by those who feel it appropriate to tear down the only Civil Right that stands by and for itself, and the only Civil Right upon which all the other Civil Rights depend for survival. Without the Second Amendment, our Constitution and it's Bill of Rights are mere scraps of paper which any politician could ignore without peril. With the Second Amendment, permitting military-style weapons as it does, those who consider themselves our political masters and betters HAVE that peril, they KNOW that peril, and that is why we are still free. Look carefully at those who want to remove or restrict the Second Amendment. If you look closely enough, you will probably find that there are other Amendments which those people would destroy as soon as they have destroyed the Second.

During the "Conversation", you will be asked...

"Why do you carry arms" or "why do you WANT to carry arms"

Instead of blowing off the questioner with a simple answer such as "because the Seond Amendment says I can", which, while true enough, still lacks that "savoir-faire" that will convince a liberal, try some or all of these:

• "Because there's danger out there, and not enough cops, so YOU need some protection and I'm willing to create it for you. Aren't I a nice guy?" This could be called the "sheepdog" gambit, but as with all chess gambits, it might not work, so be prepared for that.
• "Because the level of danger we all face from criminal activity every day varies, and is also unpredictable, and isn't going to be changed with any gun bans (see England, Australia, etc). I don't know about YOU, but I have better things to do on a constant basis than continually having to evaluate my danger level and react by avoidance, like YOU have to do." This is called the "Risk Management" solution. You should be able to sell this if you keep the snark level down.
• "Because I've grown up carrying guns, have gotten used to doing that properly so that it won't impact YOU at all, and it is the simplest way for me to handle the variety of dangers I face every day. Bearing arms give me options for handling danger that I can't get in any other way except by hiring professional bodyguards, and I'm not rich enough to do that." This one could be called the "trained and ready" explanation, and it might have the best chance, depending on how skeptical of the first two the liberal person might be.

All three of these explanations may be appropriate for you to inform your liberal friends/relatives with. If so, do so.

Why I use the term "Dancing in the Blood"

I didn't invent this term. Some other protectors of the 2A did, but I use it, and here's why:

The use of "Dancing in the Blood" to describe the immediate, almost instantaneous, use of the horror-effect (blood) of any gun tragedy to bash guns and not perpetrators is a cold, calculated plan for the gun-bashers. In the three latest mass killings, the first public statements calling for strict gun control happened well before any police investigations had finished, well before the motives of any perpetrator were known and even before it was known how the perpetrators had acquired their firearms.

What was obvious about the gun-ban proponents in each of these tragedies was that they sought to make their initial push to use the events to further their cause at the height of public revulsion at the first news of the crimes. Had they been able to actually go to the crime scenes and come before the cameras carrying out dead, bloody children, I have no doubt that they would have done THAT, as well.

Now, the other side of the coin. It is a complete, stark lie to claim that defenders of the Second Amendment also "Dance in the Blood" after these tragedies. The defenders of the Second Amendment run purely defensive campaigns when these events occur. Yes, immediately upon hearing of the tragedies, I go on watch for what has become the inevitable "Dancing in the Blood" of the gun-banners. Yes, immediately upon hearing the first "Dancing in the Blood" statement, I fire right back. When the pirate ship sails into view, is it wrong to roll out YOUR guns before they've fired their opening broadside? Not really, you're just preparing for what appears to be an inevitable battle. We defend the Second Amendment and the Civil Right it enumerates, that's all. What kind of a warped mind can say that a purely defensive stance is somehow the same as the offensive (in both senses of the word) tactics of the gun-banners?

I'll stop calling a spade a spade when it looks like a diamond, heart or club, not before.

Disarming Military Veterans - Part 1

In the past few weeks since the recent mass shootings, and the "dancing in the blood" which inevitably followed those tragic but unstoppable events, this blog has consistently transmitted a singular message, that the Bill of Rights, in all it's ten Amendments, is inviolate. 

"Inviolate" means it is a set of standards, rules to govern the behavior of citizens and governments, and, in the case of the Second Amendment (2A) the rule SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED (changed). It is so written as the Law of the Land, and we are, after all, a Nation of Laws. So we have been told, at various times, by all of our Government leaders, including President Barack Hussein Obama.

Why then, since the Right to Keep and Bear arms is so obviously a foundational part of our Law, do so many of our governors attempt to evade it?

There is one human trait which explains this deviancy from our basic Rule of Law. That trait is the emotion of FEAR.

Fear. That emotion which we as humans find most difficult to overcome with logic, reason and sanity.

Fear. That emotion that leaders of evil intent most utilize to gain our compliance to their wills, even if that compliance violates all law and/or logic.

Fear. The one thing that can be relied on to force control of the citizenry even as that control is inadvisable, inappropriate, illogical or illegal.

To defeat the application of fear, we must understand how it starts.

Fear most often begins when accustomed human comforts are threatened. Food aplenty is a comfort, as is shelter from the elements, and above all, some way of securing the money to make these comforts possible within our system of commerce. So, we work for our "living", another way of saying we offer our talents in exchange for a wage to enable our comforts.

Some of that talent is in the form of leadership, and some of that leadership is in the form of governance, so it happens that some become givers of laws and makers of rules. These govenors are people like us, though, so they strive for comforts like we do. If their access to their accustomed level of comfort is threatened, they become fearful. These governors have been granted or have assumed the power to use fear to govern, so, when their comforts are threatened, they use fear projection against us, so as to end their own personal fears.

Are you still with me? I know this background information in human psychology is difficult, but understanding it is vital to gaining insight into the "gun control issue".

Okay, let's move on then.

Ever since human society has existed, it's members have fought for control of those societies, the fighting mostly being against other, exterior societies. To better fight, professional soldiers are used. These are men (mostly) who have learned the harsh disciplines of war and have learned to personally control how fear affects them. This advanced level of fear-control makes these soldiers relatively immune to the fear-projection antics of the governors who exert control in the non-soldierly, or civilian, part of their societies. This immunity to fear of persons trained and experienced in warfare is a major problem for those governors, because their primary method of control in the making and giving of laws, projection of fear, is apt to be rejected by those trained as soldiers.

The Founders recognized this potential rejection of control by the soldiers, and insisted that the citizens control the military profession in this society. The Founders' wisdom was appropriate and has been followed, so we have not had any excursion of the military outside their civilian-generated orders of performance of duty, in the entire history of this Republic.

Now it all changes.

The present set of governors of this society appears to have decided to change the entire societal model, the model that worked so long and got this society to the place of planetary ascendancy it has achieved, and the model that the Founders put into place with our Constitution. This blog-post will not attempt to discribe that catalog of change that our present governors seek, it will simply say that it exists, and is being put into place as we speak. It appears that these changes are such radical departures from the original intent of the Founders that some resistance to their imposition on the society might be expected.

In the vernacular, the fecal matter is hitting the rotating blades of the wind-machine. We abbreviate this to "SHTF" in this blog.

The condition of SHTF is as perfectly normal to the professional soldier as it is horrifying to the civilian. It is part of the situation that soldiers have been trained to NOT fear. Soldiers function well at their tasks of war in SHTF conditions, unlike the general citizenry, or, for that matter, the governors who started flinging the poo to begin with (the Force of Irony is strong with them).

Were the trained soldiers (we call them "Veterans") to decide, either within the military structure or outside of it, that the governors had gone too far with their departures from the normal modes of society, the soldiers could easily change out the set of governors to one more to their desires. That change is generally known as a "revolution", because it involves inviting the present governors to rotate their sorry asses out of leadership and perhaps out of existance as well.

There are no present signs that the society of military professionals intends to perform such a rotation on the governance, but the governors worry about it anyway, as well they might. Were rotation to begin, there is NOTHING that they could do to stop it. The governors seem to have begun to REALLY worry about rotation, though, because they have just come up with a plan to disable that function of the military veterans within the greater society of civilians: they want to disarm the veterans.

Soldiers fight with weapons, and the most common weapon used to fight with is the individual soldier's rifle. For the past 38 years, that rifle has been the M-16 and variants, now the M-4. There is a civilian counterpart available, known as the AR-15 (a Colt Patent Firearms designation, but universally accepted for copies of the Colt rifle). Many veterans acquire AR-15s either while they're in the military or upon separation from the military. These veterans keep their soldierly skill sharp with rifle practice.

The governors now want to end possession of AR-15s by veterans, and anyone else who might possess them and thereby enable veterans to be armed with them, or perhaps even form "Well-Regulated Militias" as the Second Amendment allows AND directs, under the leadership of some of these professional soldiers. The Well-Regulated Militias, of course, would be immiediately able to replace the fear projection of the present governors and thereby end their changes to the societal order.

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To summarize Part One of this discussion, the current problem that our governors have with citizens' possession of soldierly firearms is all about fear, with most of that fear being on the part of the governors, and most of the governors' fears being caused by fear of their loss of control of forcing their objectives. Such loss of control leads to loss of comforts by the governors, and when they are uncomfortable, they want us to be uncomfortable as well, sort of a "spread the wealth" thing.

In Part Two, we'll discuss how our governors have lied to us, have generated fear in the population to aid in their departures from the normal model of society, and how they can be defeated easily without resort to the discomfort of being rotated out of office, even though they may richly deserve such rotation. 

If we (spit!) wind up with an AWB...UPDATED!

....The best choices left in the semi-auto rifle category will be the Garand in a battle rifle, and (maybe) the SKS in a carbine. Advantage - SKS, since there's not much 30-06 ammo around anymore, and it's VERY $pendy to have a Garand properly converted to 7.62 NATO.

In pistols, it will be any single-stacker of your choice, mine would be a 1911, probably a Coonan in .357 Magnum. MAYBE your Glocks and other double-stackers would qualify with ten-round magazines, but my reading of the proposed language of the Feinstein AWB-X suggests not.

Now, if Feinstein's bill were to make it through unmodded, there needs to be a companion bill forcing the Feds to pay MARKET, COLLECTOR PRICE for any firearm restricted from present use. The AWB-X will stop short of confiscation, but it's actually confiscation (IN PLACE) to say that you can have a gun but never pull it out of your safe. In fact, didn't Heller say that already? The House should see that all that money for compensation of gun owners comes from reducing "Gimme" funds. I'd start with the SSI stipends that go to addicts, but that's just my personal choice.

As for forcing gun owners to go get NFA paper on guns they already own, THAT expense should be compensated, too. I don't know about you, but I would charge $150 per hour for completing complex Federal forms where hyper-accuracy is the only acceptable standard. If I have rifles and pistols in my safe that will have to be filed & registered as NFA, the only current way to meet that standard is to pay a Class III dealer to store them while I go through the processes involved with Class III registration. That dealer is NOT going to store my guns for free.

The economic impacts of Sen. Feinstein's gun-grab are immense, and should not have to be borne by gun owners, who, up until the moment of application of her rule, will have done nothing wrong and will have incurred no additional expense.