Paul M. Jones

The Second Amendment is Obsolete, some say.  The idea that the United States could ever turn tyrannical is pure paranoia, some say.

Well, let's look at that.

Rounding up people and sending them to concentration camps (whether called "reservations" or "relocation centers"). Check. (Treatment of Native Americans.  Japanese-American "Relocation Centers" during World War II).

Illegal medical experiments involving infecting people with diseases, not treating them, and observing the effects done on people without their knowledge or consent. Check. (Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment--and particularly interesting how that was "explained" to the victims as they were getting free health care from the US Government.)

Arbitrary searches of American citizens' households aimed at the seizure of property without either probable cause or any kind of warrant. Check. (post-Katrina gun Confiscation)

Laws passed allowing the indefinite detention of American Citizens without due process of law. Check. (NDAA 2012)

American citizens going about their daily business being stopped and searched again without probable cause or any kind of warrant (or even the "reasonably articulable suspicion" for a "Terry Stop"). Check. (TSA, not just at Airports, but at bus terminals, rail and subway terminals, highways, even High School Proms.)

"Can't happen here?" It has and is happening here.

via coldservings - "It can't happen here.".

Gun Free Zones are supposed to protect our children, and some politicians wish to strip us of our right to keep and bear arms. Those same politicians and their families are currently under the protection of armed Secret Service agents. If Gun Free Zones are sufficient protection for our children, then Gun Free Zones should be good enough for politicians.

via Eliminate armed guards for the President, Vice-President, and their families, and establish Gun Free Zones around them | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government.

For those of us fighting for our traditional rights, the US 2nd Amendment is a rare light in an ever darkening room. Governments will use the excuse of trying to protect the people from maniacs and crime, but are in reality, it is the bureaucrats protecting their power and position. In all cases where guns are banned, gun crime continues and often increases. As for maniacs, be it nuts with cars (NYC, Chapel Hill NC), swords (Japan), knives (China) or home made bombs (everywhere), insane people strike. They throw acid (Pakistan, UK), they throw fire bombs (France), they attack. What is worse, is, that the best way to stop a maniac is not psychology or jail or "talking to them", it is a bullet in the head, that is why they are a maniac, because they are incapable of living in reality or stopping themselves.

The excuse that people will start shooting each other is also plain and silly. So it is our politicians saying that our society is full of incapable adolescents who can never be trusted? Then, please explain how we can trust them or the police, who themselves grew up and came from the same culture?

No it is about power and a total power over the people. There is a lot of desire to bad mouth the Tsar, particularly by the Communists, who claim he was a tyrant, and yet under him we were armed and under the progressives disarmed. Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in those whom they have slated for a barrel to the back of the ear.

So, do not fall for the false promises and do not extinguish the light that is left to allow humanity a measure of self respect.

via Americans never give up your guns - English pravda.ru.

... I learned a lesson that has no doubt been absorbed by many political leaders in recent years. If you're going to lie about the fact that there is an elephant in the room, do it while you're standing right next to the thing. If you try to hide the critter or distract people's gaze from it, they will immediately know that you are lying. But if you come right up to it and give it a pat on the shoulder, they'll start to think maybe the elephant is lying.

-- Matthew Stewart, "The Management Myth"

Most analysts had thought that American's frequent flier program became moot as soon as Delta and the other airlines copied it. But in fact, the authors argue, the effect of such programs is that customers are less likely to switch from their preferred airline to another in response to a price cut. Thus, thanks to American's AAdvantage program, Delta has less incentive to lower its fares; thanks to Delta's SkyMilers, American is less likely to lower its fares. And, still more joy, both airlines can even start to raise fares, knowing that customers are less likely to leave in the event of a price increase. In essence, by atomizing individual consumers, loyalty programs create soft, micromonopolies on the market to individuals. The result for the airlines is "greater price stability," the authors say, by which they mean higher faires. They happily chalk it up as a "win-win" for American and Delta -- never mind the fact that, according to their own analysis, consumers collectively end up paying more in exchange for having expressed their individual loyalties.

Of course, as every business traveler knows, the airpline programs work in no small measure because businesses pay the fares while travelers collect the miles. "So are bosses the losers?" the game theorists ask. "Not necessarily. Frequent-flyer miles are a tax-free way for companies to comepensate employees who undertake a lot of business travel." Thus, according to experts, in the profoundly unlikely event that an extra tens of thousands of dollars in business class fares is your company's way of gifting you a once-a-year trip to Hawaii, then it is the taxpayer who foots the bill! So it's a win-win all around -- except for those who pay taxes.

-- Matthew Stewart, "The Management Myth," p 232-233

Gold standard as a restraint on inflation, anyone? Guest Post: Inflation Since The American Revolution | Zero Hedge.

Taylor confused the logical proposition that planning and doing are distinct functions with the empirical claim that these two functions are always best performed by two distinct classes of people endowed with distinct educational pedigrees, clothing styles, and patterns of speech. The one is nonfalsifiable; the other is simply false. Cutting up your food and eating it are distinct functions too, but it is not the case that they are always best performed by two different people. In manufacturing businesses, separateing planner from doers sometimes makes sense; but, as Japanese carmakers proved to the dismay of their American rivals, getting the doers involved in the planning can result in higher-quality products and lower costs.

— Matthew Stewart, “The Management Myth”, p 55-56

I see a lesson here for software product managers: if you get the developers involved in the product planning process, you may end up with higher-quality products. The developers are not mere tools that serve the ends of your planning process; they can be very useful in helping you devise and define that product, espeically since they are the ones that have to actually build the thing.

Implicit in Taylor’s approach is the idea that management always aims at the single goal of effciency (understood as labor productivity). But efficiency is just one of several possible competing goals that management might pursue. Profitability, customer satisfaction, or maintaining good community relations can always conceivably outweigh the goal of efficiency. Later management theorists have argued that Taylor’s obsession with efficiency came at the expense of the goal of quality.

— Matthew Stewart, “The Management Myth,” p 54

I cannot help but read that paragraph and think of software development practices. We want efficiency of algorithms, but the quality of the code (understood as its comprehensibility and maintainability by other programmers) is an equally important goal.

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is dying of cancer in Havana, in a live demonstration of Cuba's vaunted socialized medical care. He went there instead of Brazil because he wanted to make a political statement. What irony.

As party cronies hover at his bedside, Cuban officials bark orders to the government in Caracas, and red-shirted Chavistas hold vigils, all signs are pointing to an imminent exit for the Venezuelan leader who controls a huge part of the world's oil.

He's going out exactly as he wouldn't have liked -- helpless and at the mercy of doctors, a far cry from the blaze of heroic socialist glory he might have preferred.

Most galling for him: It didn't have to happen this way.

His expected demise will be entirely due to his gullibility to leftist propaganda and bad choices that came of it.

via Venezuela's Hugo Chavez Sinks On Credulity In Cuban Health Care - Investors.com.

One's initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialists diminshes when one realises that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilisation offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate any remaining undesired featuers by still more intelligent reflection, and still more apporpriate design and "rational coordination" of our understaking. This leads one to be favourably disposed to the central economic planning and control that lie at the heart of socialism.

Of course intellectuals will demand explanations for everything they are expected to do, and will be reluctant to accept practices just because they happen to govern the communities into which they they happen to have been born; and this will lead them infor conflict with, or at least to a low opinion of, those who quietly accept the prevailing rules of conduct.

Moreover, they also understandably will want to align themselves with science and reason, and with the extraordinary progress made by the physical science during th past several centuries, and since they have been taught that constructivism and scientism are what science and the use of reason are all about, they find it hard to believe that tere can exist any useful knowledge that did not originate in deliberate experimentation, or to accept the validitiy of any tradition apart from their own tradition of reason.

...

These reactions are all understandable, but they have consequences. The consequences are particularly dangerous -- to reason as well as to morality -- when preference not so much for the real products of reason as for this conventional tradition of reason leads intellectuials to ignore the theoretical limits of reason, to disregard a world of historical and scientific information ...

-- F. A. Hayek, "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism", p 53-54.

I am reminded, again, that liberal/left/progressive/socialist persons accept the idea of biological evolution without a central planner or designer, and yet seem predisposed to believe that there must be a planner or designer for a complex economy of 310 million (or 6 billion, or more).