Tag: Americana

There is a need for big dogs with sharp teeth to guard the sheep, especially the little lambs:

Rembrandt’s phone rang at 3:15p.m. on a Saturday. He was on his way home from his grandson’s karate tournament, about 5 miles from his Mesa home.

It was Sassy. A BACA kid was in trouble.

Her road name is Music, and she’s 10. She belonged to a BACA chapter in another state but is now living in Arizona with her grandmother. That makes her Sassy’s and Rembrandt’s kid now.

Her abuser is in jail, but his family members had tracked the girl down in Arizona and were banging on the grandmother’s front door, demanding that she turn the girl over to them, shouting up at the second-floor window where the child was huddled in her bedroom. Her grandmother called BACA and then dialed 911.

The bikers know the drill well. Rembrandt called those who live closest to him – Rock, Uno and Fat Daddy. He stopped to change out of his grandpa clothes – shorts, T-shirt and sandals – and put on his biker garb – jeans, boots, leather vest, holster and handgun.

The bikers carry weapons on stakeouts only when there is a threat against a child and they feel that as citizens they also could be threatened. Otherwise, Rembrandt says, they do not wear weapons around children. He says most of the bikers are licensed to carry concealed weapons.

Rembrandt stuffed water bottles into his saddle bags and jumped on his 2000 purple-and-orange Indian Chief.

By 3:40 p.m., the four men were on their way to Music, the rumble of their bikes announcing their arrival. Music’s grandmother rushed outside when she heard them, hugging Rembrandt and giving him a piece of notebook paper with a description of the people and their license-plate number.

Sheriff’s deputies had been there, she said, and had escorted the people out of the neighborhood. But it is a public street, and law-enforcement officers just don’t have the manpower to stay for long. She feared that once the deputies left, the people would be back.

She was right. But when they did return later that evening, they saw something different: four big bikers, all wearing shades even in the dimming light, their motorcycles backed into the mouth of the driveway.

Rock had something resembling a cannon strapped to his leg; Rembrandt wore his gun on his hip.

To someone trying to mess with a little girl, a group of large, strong bikers sends a certain message, Rembrandt says. “It just has a different feel than a cop,” he says. More unpredictable, maybe.

“Cops are actually handcuffed by specific rules and laws that we are not. A cop has to work within a framework,” Rembrandt says. “You can flip off a cop. You don’t want to flip off Rock.” Just knowing that a biker doesn’t have to follow rules or honor boundaries can intimidate a person trying to make trouble.

That night, Music’s grandmother pitched a small tent in her granddaughter’s bedroom, right under the window, so the little girl could look out the window whenever she wanted to see the bikers at the end of the driveway.

Bikers guarded the house in shifts for the next 2 1/2 days. Some rode two hours from Tucson, kept watch for eight hours and then rode home again.

They talked in low voices, and once Music was asleep, the red embers of their cigarettes glowed in the dark.

Bikers Against Child Abuse is an example of the vast superiority of the libertarian model based on good people freely contributing their time and energy to other individuals in their community to the statist model of permitting a parasite class to forcibly extracting resources from everyone and pay itself to pretend to address the problem through government regulations and bureaucracy.

I thought I’d post this since it strikes me as the sort of activity that some of the Ilk might find to be fulfilling, assuming any of you are capable of passing the required background checks.  BACA seems to go in more for road bikes and handguns than crotch rockets and fully tricked-out .50 caliber rifles with 4th Gen scopes, though.

It’s a good cause. Sometimes, all that courage requires is the certain knowledge that somewhere out there, someone is looking out for you.

I told you that Baby Boomers were, collectively, the most despicable generation in American history. But now they’re really outdoing themselves:

“My goal is when they carry me away in that box that my bank account is going to say zero,” Willison said. “I’m going to spoil myself now.”

Upending the conventional notion of parents carefully tending their financial estates to be passed down at the reading of their wills, many baby boomers say they instead plan to spend the money on themselves while they’re alive.

In a survey of millionaire boomers by investment firm U.S. Trust, only 49% said it was important to leave money to their children when they die. The low rate was a big surprise for a company that for decades has advised wealthy people how to leave money to their heirs.

Needless to say, they’re not too worried about fixing the economy either. All far too many of them care about is that Social Security and Medicare last long enough to see them to their graves. Still talking about Woodstock, of course.

I agree with Paul Krugman:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

The Giuliani as America’s Hero Mayor was particularly ludicrous. And I think it’s totally ridiculous that the NFL teams still have American flags on their helmets. A few more attacks and they’ll look like the Ohio Buckeyes.

Secular faux holidays like the media are trying to pump up today are simply ludicrous. There is nothing sacred about 9/11 and nothing good has come of it.

Joseph Lozito, husband, father, and American badass:

It turns out that Maksim Gelman wasn’t just any nutjob riding pantless on the Subway – he was a bona-fide spree killer in the middle of a 28 hour stabbing rampage that had left four people dead and five more wounded across the boroughs of New York City. Earlier in the weekend, Gelman had done a shitload of crack and murdered his stepfather and his girlfriend’s mom with a knife, stabbed his girlfriend 11 times, ran over a dude with a car, slashed another motorist, and carjacked an unsuspecting couple, stabbing both of them in the process. He was a career criminal who had completely lost his fucking shit, and now he was swinging a goddamned machete around a crowded Subway train filled with women, children, and more innocent bystanders than a superhero comic. And now he’s coming straight for Joseph Lozito, and there isn’t a hell of a lot this Pennsylvania native can do to avoid the confrontation. It’s like a bad 80s movie about gang violence on the Subway, only this was rush hour traffic, real life, and Gelman is definitely not wearing an awesome headband or listening to rad jams blasting from the tape deck on his boombox.

But Joseph Lozito isn’t just any chump on his way to work, and he sure as shit isn’t about to sit there and let some psychotic madman knife him to death without putting up a fight. This guy is a life-long MMA fan who took his love of the sport to super-fan levels – he’d been to UFC 1 in 1993, never missed a pay-per-view, and celebrated his friggin’ wedding anniversary by taking his wife to see the Ultimate Fighting Championship live.

He’s also fucking gigantic – standing 6’2″ and weighing in at 260 pounds. Gelman wasn’t going to know what the fuck hit him…. As Gelman approaches, Lozito does the last thing the knife-wielding maniac expected – he attacks.

That’s the best line in the article: “he attacks”. As my sensei always taught us, “when you go, you go!” In other words, once the moment for action arrives, commit 100 percent. Lozito appears to have had little idea what he was doing – a simple arm bar and break would have been significantly safer than a takedown – but that only emphasizes his courage and heroism.

It’s easy to be pessimistic about Americans. They tolerate one of the smartest, most predatory political classes in the history of the world. They pretty much don’t want to do anything except go to work, eat, drink beer, and watch television as their country is overrun by Mexican gangs, Somali jihadists, and people with names like Maksim.

The country is broke and heading for collapse, but there is still hope for what comes after. Because despite all its many flaws, America is still the place where MMA was invented, where paintball was invented, and men like Joseph Lozito not only fight when they’re forced to fight, but fight to win. New York City and Washington DC and Hollywood and San Francisco and Maksim Gelman aren’t America, they’re all tumors indicative of the imported cancer will eventually kill the United States. The real America is where a man isn’t trying to rule the world or live as a parasite, but merely wants to do his job, do his own thing, and kick your ass if you won’t leave him alone.

And where were the cops that Gelman confronted first? New York’s Finest where you’d expect them to be, hiding like little girls and waiting for it to be over: “Two transit cops locked themselves in the train’s front room with the conductor and didn’t immediately open the door when straphangers called for help, because they thought the madman had a gun.”

I think we can safely drop the idea that God has any particular affection for America now:

A 5.9 magnitude earthquake centered in Virginia forced evacuations of all the monuments in Washington and rattled nerves from the southern state of Georgia to Martha’s Vineyard, the Massachusetts island in the northeast where President Barack Obama is vacationing. No injuries were immediately reported.

And across the South, a single thought echoed throughout a million minds as if they were one. “Only 5.9? Come on!”

Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%.

Take the Full Civic Literacy Exam.

I scored 97%. Not bad, although I somehow managed to blow a quote that I should have known. But yes, it’s official, I am in fact more knowledgeable than those esteemed intellectuals, the college educators of the nation.

Such a surprise.

UPDATE – I had Ender take the quiz. No economics yet, hasn’t ever lived in the States, but still scored 63%. I didn’t realize how different his perspective is from mine until the WWII question, when he mused out loud “I suppose they must mean the United States”.

This is what a vibrant American community will increasingly look like. You simply cannot expect to maintain civilization by giving barbarians responsibility for upholding their share of the social fabric. As the social scientists have discovered, much to their chagrin, the more diverse a community becomes, the less contact people wish to have outside of their race and ethnicity. This is not hard to understand, given incidents like these. The problem is that European cultures tend to do nothing about obvious problems for far too long, then brutally overreact. The Western way of war is unlike the Eastern, it is total and destructive in nature rather than limited and predatory.

In other words, when the reaction finally comes, history suggests that it is going to be very ugly indeed. And the worst thing is that it will have been completely unnecessary.