I have finished my newest lightweight 20″ AR build.

If you don’t recognize the text, it is an ironic tribute to Woody Guthrie, and the way this sentiment has been adopted in the popular culture.

Woody Guthrie was known for being anti-Fascist.  He wrote songs titled “All you Fascists Bound to Lose” and “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave.”  The thing of it is, I’m not sure Woody Guthrie had any idea what a Fascist really was.

In a letter to his daughter, Guthrie wrote “Maybe I could talk to you about fascism…  It is nothing in the world but greed for profit.”

A biographer of Woody Guthrie stated “Guthrie envisions the fascist threat as an economic threat in the first place, which endangers American society through the illegitimate enrichment of an elite through the exploitation of the working poor.”

Woody Guthrie’s opinions on fascism sound a lot like Bernie Sanders’ opinions on Wall Street.  There is nothing in it about totalitarianism, government oppression, or any of the other political hallmarks of actual, factual fascism.  Guthrie’s antidote to fascism was labor unions and a collectivized work force.

“There ain’t but two sides, the working people’s side and the big bosses’ side.”

Keep in mind that the original draft of “This land is your land” by Guthrie was critical of the concept of private property.

“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.”

Guthrie’s long time friend and touring partner Pete Seeger said “You know, Woody was a Communist.”  A number of current pro-Communist and pro-Socialist writers have taken to touting Guthrie as a hero because of his folk status.  But don’t take their words for it, let Guthrie tell you himself what he believed.

“Every single human being is looking for a better way…when there shall be no want among you, because you’ll own everything in Common. When the Rich will give their goods unto the poor. I believe in this Way…This is the Christian Way and it is already on a big part of the earth and it will come. To own everything in Common, That’s what the Bible says. Common means all of us. This is pure old Commonism.”

Guthrie’s brand of fascism is of the “fascism is anything I don’t like” kind.

That’s how owners of private businesses became fascists, even though a state controlled economy was central to Italian Fascism and Nazism.

You see this today with SJW’s, BLM, Sanders supporters, and other leftists.  This is how conservatives who support limited government, gun rights, and economic freedoms are all fascists.  At least with these special snowflakes, they can claim the ignorance of being two generations removed from a time when fascists ruled countries.  Guthrie was in his prime during WWII, he should have known better.

So why would folksy socialist believe that a guitar kills fascists, for the same reason hippies believe that drum circles can fight the man.

It can’t.

History has shown us that political and economic freedom are intertwined.  It is impossible to control the economy wile allowing people to have other freedoms.

If Orwell’s vision of the future was a boot stamping on a human face – forever.  Than Guthrie’s was a Birkenstock stamping on a human face – forever.

This is also the difference between the BLM/SJW’s and Bernie supporters.  You’re gonna get stomped on, it’s just a mater of how folksy the stomping will be.

So what really killed fascism.  M1 Garands, about 5.5 million of them.  Also M1919s, 1911s, Thompsons,  P-40 Warhawks, P-51 Mustangs, B-17 Flying Fortresses, B-25 Mitchells, M4 Shermans, and several million more tons of other ordinance.

In the spirit of honoring real history, I put Guthrie’s statement on the one thing that really did stop fascism.  A gun.

Travelers lining up at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport to check in for El Al flights and at nearby TWA and Pan American counters hit the floor when four or five terrorists rushed in at 9:10 a.m. and set off hand grenades. The terrorists then unleashed a barrage of submachine-gun fire. Thirteen people were killed and at least 70 wounded in the Rome attack, which lasted two to three minutes. Three of the dead were terrorists who were slain in a gun battle with security officers. Three people died in the Vienna attack, which started five minutes after the terrorists stormed the Rome airport. Among the dead in Vienna was one terrorist. At least 47 people were wounded.

Source: 16 Die in Terrorist Attacks at Rome, Vienna Airports : 117 Hurt in Raid Aimed at Israelis – latimes

The real question is how the attacks did not happen before? The news item and picture are from the Abu Nidal attack at the airport in Rome on December 27, 1985. Apparently not only we have not learned a damned thing after all the past attacks but we strove it to make it easier with all the TSA Theater Security Checkpoints.

It does not take a genius to imagine the casualty count of a couple of suicide bombers in the middle of this or any crowd at any airport in the US.  But the stupidity will not change until we have a pile of bodies and assorted body parts decorating an airport terminal.

But we must make sure that potentially dangerous people do not gain access to airport terminals like the ones that attacked Brussels, right?
No, that would be racial profiling and CAIR would go on TV to cry racism. Instead, we must watch stupid shit like this being done in the name of “security”:

Dear President Obama,

I grew up in Miami, Florida.  As you could probably imagine, many of my friends were of Cuban descent.  Most of them were second generation Americans, the grandsons and granddaughters of first wave Cuban exiles.  First wave, describes the Cubans who fled (or were driven out of) Cuba during and shortly after the Revolution in 1959 because of political reasons.  They are recognized as political refugees.

I remember quite clearly being told about the Cuban Revolution by my friend’s grandparents.  It struck a chord with my, a young Jewish boy in Miami, because what they described in Cuba sounded so much like what the Holocaust survivors who my grandparents knew up in Fort Lauderdale would describe.  The torture, mass killings, not knowing who you could trust, the horrors they they had witnessed first hand.  The fear and the sadness poured out of them decades later.

There is one story that sticks in my mind from the paternal grandfather of a friend, classmate, and next door neighbor.  He (the grandfather) was a young man, a teenager during the Revolution.  Politically curious, he attended an anti-Castro meeting in a warehouse in Havana with a friend.  It was raided by Castro’s soldiers.  They split up and ran, the plan was to hide for a while then return home.  After a little bit, my friend’s grandfather started to walk home when he came across the scene of a massacre where a number of anti-Castro meeting attendees had been stood up against a wall and shot.  He recognized the shirt on one of the bodies.  It belonged to his friend.  Fearing that he had been followed and not wanting to put his family in danger – it was well known that Castro’s soldiers would will the families of anti-Castro supporters – my friend’s grandfather went to the Havana docks and found a boat headed for Miami.  He left Cuba with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, having never said “good bye” to his family.

This is the regime that you are going to baseball games with.  This is the regime that you are nodding along with when they criticize America.  This is the regime you “agree to disagree” with on human rights.

Is that the strongest condemnation you have for a regime that stood people against a wall and shot them because a family member dared to listen to a speaker disagree with Fidel?

You are willfully ignoring the greatest act of oppression and mass murder in the Western Hemisphere in the 20th Century for a photo-op.

Mr. President, you are being shown a Potemkin Village and you are asking if you can buy a time-share in it.

This is an affront, not just to the American ideal of liberty, but to basic human decency.

This is unbecoming of the President of the United States.

-J.Kb.

It wasn’t even close or far: unanimous court decision. 8-0 vote.

While stun guns were not in existence at the end of the 18th century, the same is true for the weapons most commonly used today for self-defense, namely, revolvers and semiautomatic pistols. Revolvers were virtually unknown until well into the 19th century, and semiautomatic pistols were not invented until near the end of that century. Electronic stun guns are no more exempt from the Second Amendment’s protections, simply because they were unknown to the First Congress, than electronic communications are exempt from the First Amendment, or electronic imaging devices are exempt from the Fourth Amendment.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES JAIME CAETANO v. MASSACHUSETTS ON PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT OF MASSACHUSETTS No. 14–10078. Decided March 21, 2016

You can read (and I urge you to do so) starting in page 15. It is a careful dissection of the stupidity of the lame meme used by Gun Control, Gun Sense and “Gun Safety” fanatics. The closing alone is worth the price of admission.

A State’s most basic responsibility is to keep its people safe. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was either unable or unwilling to do what was necessary to protect Jaime Caetano, so she was forced to protect herself. To make matters worse, the Commonwealth chose to deploy its prosecutorial resources to prosecute and convict her of a criminal offense for arming herself with a nonlethal weapon that may well have saved her life. The Supreme Judicial Court then affirmed her conviction on the flimsiest of grounds. This Court’s grudging per curiam now sends the case back to that same court. And the consequences for Caetano may prove more tragic still, as her conviction likely bars her from ever bearing arms for selfdefense. See Pet. for Cert. 14. If the fundamental right of self-defense does not protect Caetano, then the safety of all Americans is left to the mercy of state authorities who may be more concerned about disarming the people than about keeping them safe.

There you go.

I wish I had good news. I wish I could tell you that all these nutjobs-racist-socialist scum will cease to exist come November 9th and we go prepare ourselves for Thanksgivings with the family and then a peaceful Christmas.

It is not gonna happen. It will actually get worse. 

This past weekend we saw how the political ultra-left had no problems violating the Civil Rights of people who wanted nothing more than the simple right to exercise their Freedom of Assembly at a Trump Rally in Arizona.

I do not care if you like Trump, hate him or could not care one way or the other: You cannot “protect” Civil Rights by violating Civil Rights.”

The lack of Law Enforcement (Ferguson Effect) and Judicial response (DOJ political blindness to left-wing misdeeds) to this, past and future events will embolden the Socialist Mutawwi to go further up and including violence against those who they deem politically impure. They are betting (and rightly so) on the common decency of people and the existing law system that gives them equal footing with the rest of us, but will use it to subvert what they consider an evil and unequal society.

What we are seeing now is simply the results of many years of preparations. It is the culmination of the 60s movement who went on to take positions within the government and Academia, the last one possibly the most influential as they now created another set of young Useful Idiots who believing themselves immortal, will be the cannon fodder in days ahead.

J. Kb. wrote about Orwell recently and it is scary un-funny how much IngSoc is now commonplace. Definitions change to accommodate a political story rather than serve as guide of thought. History itself has to be changed or suppressed (“We‘ve always been at war with Eastasia“) and the record changed or better yet, memory-holed. We have seen this being applied by the Gun Control Community with a small amount of success when they move the goalposts and change definitions and even how they change how call themselves and what they do like Handgun Control Inc to Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and from Gun Control to “Gun Safety.”

And don’t think short game. The Ultra Left thinks and plans for the very long game as they have been doing till now. Will they achieve their goals by November? Nope, doubtfully. Even if Hillary gets elected and re-elected and this batch of useful idiots has worn out, a new batch will be coming out of colleges ready to take their place and continue the Mutwwai. Think about it, Would Bernie Sanders be even considered as Primary candidate 20 years ago? Obama? There is your answer.

So, what will we see? More in the form of uncivil disturbances. They will create episodes in which their own will be hurt or killed to claim status victim and demand “justice” from an oppressive and militarized Law Enforcement. They will also demand a softer/kinder/gentler Law Enforcement (…wait, they already are doing so… never mind) which will result in less actual safety and leaving the population at the mercy of the Socialist Mutawwi. Expect riots and arson to go unchecked like it happened in Baltimore. And when the Socialist Mutawwi go home after a nice day of Social Justice imparted on the oppressive corner Bodega owner because he decided to support for the none-approved candidate or cause, the standard criminal scum will show up to reap on the lack of cops on the streets. Yes, it is not a bug, it is a feature. People do not complain much about political change when they are victims of unchecked crime.

“Damn it, Miguel! You are just making paranoid shit up.” Actually this has happened before in many countries and I lived the process in Venezuela with a few different adjustments to fit the local culture. I guess I do not have to explain how well the country is doing under the Latino version of Bernie Sanders and his Bots.

Do I expect the US to end up like Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc? No, a much different culture to begin with and a very different economy. That does not mean there will be no strife, no clashes with bodies decorating the streets: There will be plenty but probably it will not rise to a former Yugoslavia-type of event. If I have learned one thing about being American is that we are polite to an extreme, but once that extreme is reached, you better bring out the checkbook and write HELL where it says PAY TO THE ORDER OF.

You think I am kidding and that there is not a lot of silent anger barely being held in check? Then explain the Trump phenomenon.

From the folks at Bennington Trading Post

I am going to argue for a shift in social policy.  I know the immediate reaction to it from many (if not most or all) of my readers will be “J.Kb, are you crazy?  Did you hit your head and become a socialist?”  No I haven’t gone crazy, or become a socialist.  But I want you to bear with me for a moment, and let me argue my point.

I have become in favor of publicly funded daycare, as part of the public school system.

This came about as the result of some conversations I had recently with my tax guy and my son’s daycare.

Let me explain why:

In principle, I am not against the government spending money.  It needs to.  What concerns me is how much money the government spends and on what it spends the money.  One of the things I believe in is that the government should not be in the business of direct wealth transfers.  The government shouldn’t take money from Citizen A and give it to Citizen B, because A has more then B.

I am in favor of spending (in reasonable, sustainable amounts) on institutions that benefit the country and citizenry as a whole.

The military to defend us.

Law Enforcement to protect us.

An impartial judicial system (courts, prosecutors, public defenders) to maintain justice and order.  This is critical for a strong economy, where legal protection is vital in maintaining business contracts.  Without courts to enforce civil law, our economy would crumble.

Infrastructure that is used for the transportation of goods and services that support a thriving economy.  The Federal Interstate Highway System is perhaps the greatest economic endeavor of any government since the fall of the Roman Empire.

I will add to this list, public education.  It is a benefit to the nation that its citizenry is educated.  It benefits all of us when our population is literate and can finish school with the skills necessary to work and contribute to the economy (We can debate the effectiveness of this later, I’m talking about principles).  This is one of the things that separates 1st world from 3rd world countries, mass education.

Given this, I think that public daycare would be a public benefit.  The children of the poor and working classes are at a disadvantage to the children of the middle class.  We can talk about many reasons why, but one of the biggest is that middle class kids are better prepared for school.  Middle class parents read to their kids.  Poor parents don’t.  Part of that is just a matter of time (hours put in at work), and part of that is cultural.  This is also seen over summer vacation, where poor kids don’t get intellectually stimulated and fall behind while middle class kids go to camp.

Publicly funded daycare would provide an education floor for poor kids before they started school and during the summer, giving them the benefits of a more middle class upbringing.

Yes, I am absolutely advocating educating the generationally poor out of their generational poverty.

I’m already paying for publicly funded daycare, so are you.  Both at the state and federal level.  This is the exact type of direct wealth transfer that I am against.  Going to a publicly funded system would come with ending the daycare subsidy.  This transitions the money the government spends on daycare from a direct wealth transfer to a public benefit available to anybody who wants to use us.

Yes, I know, public daycare will cost more than the subsidy, so how is this better?  Well, this is where conservative pragmatism comes in.  By providing public daycare, we can reduce other direct wealth transfers a well.  Daycare is expensive, even with the subsidies.  There is the common argument that for many parents, daycare isn’t worth the cost.  They just don’t make enough money to justify daycare.  I can tell you from personal experience, this one is true.  We moved for my job.  My wife didn’t work for a while because if she went out and got a retail job, she would’t make enough to cover the cost of daycare.  It wasn’t until professional job came along that it became financially worth it.

By removing the cost of daycare entirely from someone’s budget, now a minimum wage (or better) job is a money making venture.  For poor families and single mothers, this means more income.  More income means less other benefits.

Let me be brutally honest: “Now that your daycare is publicly funded, like public school, you have no reason not to get a job, so go find work because we’re gonna reduce your welfare.”

Given the rate of welfare abuse (including daycare subsidies*) and the inefficiency of government wealth transfer programs, the additional cost to the public for daycare should be offset by the reduction in other benefit programs.

*Growing up in Florida, with my family owning a small business that employed a lot of part time workers, I witnessed first hand how grandma could get approved as a daycare and collect the daycare subsidy for watching her own grand kids.

More people working is also a benefit to the public as more people are involved in the production side of the economy and become tax payers.

Now I know one of the arguments against this is just how bad the public school system is.  Yes, I am aware of that.  But part of this program is that I support a voucher system – which I also believe in for public school reform.  Pick your daycare (licensed ones only, no more grandma), and the credit follows you.

So there you have it.  I want to make daycare a public benefit.  The two reasons are:

1. Educate the bad habits out of poor kids.
2. Gives me an excuse to cut welfare/direct wealth transfers.

Let me put it to you like this: I have Netflix.  Some people can’t afford Netflix.  I’d rather pay a little more to add to the DVD collection at my local public library (which I can borrow from as well) than to pay for other people’s Netflix.  Public benefit vs. direct wealth transfer.

Hopefully my justifications are enough to allow me to keep my conservative credentials (especially No. 2).