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Category: Poly-Ticks

Those blood-sucking vermin in state and national capitals and city halls everywhere

How “Just Waiting,” “Comrade X,” and Small-Town Power Saved the Day, Part II

See Part I here. The Action, continued Comrade X began emailing Just Waiting’s publicly available, but largely hidden, information to contacts around the county. Immediately, he got pushback from the local Republican Party, which told him they thought the homeless housing could benefit the community. “Then I realized where the problem was,” CX admits wryly. He decided that if established powers weren’t going to act, he’d have to do it on his own. Or rather, not on his own but with the help of other grassroots actors. JW was integral, keeping CX up-to-date on the calls coming in and the…

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How “Just Waiting,” “Comrade X,” and Small-Town Power Saved the Day, Part I

I don’t usually write about within-the-system political actions. Most are a waste of time. This was such a successful exception, performed at the local level, and with such Freedom Outlaw panache, that I thought the action and its perpetrators deserve a tip o’ the hat. —– Longtime blog Commentariat members and freedomistas Just Waiting (JW) and Comrade X (CX) both moved to a small town in a quiet, obscure county in the State of Jefferson. They arrived separately, from different sinkholes of statism. Both were seeking freedom. Each had his own intensely political past — one as a tough, scruffy…

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What to do when you’re screwed

If you’re going through hell, keep going. –Winston Churchill —– We hardly need Arnold Schwartzenegger to tell us our freedom is screwed. As determined as we freedomistas may be to uphold our mental and philosophical freedoms, our political freedoms and economic freedoms are gone-gone-gone. They’ve been going for decades of course. But we now live under a regime that in eight months has ruled via a combination of ever-shifting whim, diktat, incompetence, and a complete disregard for reason, principle, or constitutional law. When you’re ruled by capricious madmen, your external freedoms are moot. Here today, gone tomorrow, partially restored for…

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I’m suffering an attack of optimism

I’m suffering the sudden onset of optimism. Don’t worry, the condition probably won’t be fatal or chronic. I’ll be back to my normal, healthy, pessimistic self in a week or two. But meanwhile I can’t get rid of this feeling that everything may turn out okay out there in the world. Well, not everything. But outcomes of the current madness may be better than we expect. I feel this way precisely because everything’s falling apart. And all kinds of people are recognizing that everything’s falling apart or has already fallen and can’t be raised back up. That’s the part that…

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Friday Freedom Question:
Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?

There is no such thing as a recovering political junkie. At least not in my house. Here at Mo Saoirse Hermitage, the entire household (with the exception of Ava-dog and the cat) have had their eyes glued to news screens even through days of post-election existential emptiness (“Biden has gained 34 new v*tes over Trump in Pencaronevia, while Trump’s lead in North Georgvania has slipped from 1.6662 percentage points to 1.6661!”). Why a free-market anarchist and small-town Outlaw should be so engaged with Stupid National Politics, I can’t explain. But so it is. And you know, the news isn’t all…

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Fear and loathing in the hinterlands

I’m sorry for going so long without posting. I didn’t intend to, but for weeks every time I’ve thought of blogging, I’ve been overwhelmed with disgust. If my disgust were only about politics and the current woeful state of the world, I’d blog my way through that. That’s mere business as usual. Politics and its attendant idiocies, however, are only a minor component of the bile that rises in my soul. The much larger component of my disgust continues to be triggered by the depleted and degraded state of freedom in the minds of so many who ought to be…

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Friday links

Okay, after months of madness and rants, time for some (mostly) upbeat news. So here we have positive political developments, scathingly rational commentary, and even a couple of charming monkeywrenches. Enjoy. “The Rebellion of America’s New Underclass” by Joel Kotkin. Sooooo very typically politically sneaky and snaky, if true: Money donated to Black Lives Matter, specifically earmarked to defund police, is going straight to the Joe Biden campaign. (I haven’t verified this.) Glenn Greenwald (who, along with Matt Taibbi is one of the few rational, liberty-respecting voices remaining on the left) excoriates the politicians and so-called medical experts who performed…

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Anger and madness

I dreamed last night that I was in Portland with a dozen or so blog friends when The Big One hit. We had gone to the city searching for Covid-19 supplies, which was tough enough. But now we were trapped by Mother Nature — in a world where people had been ordered to fear and avoid each other. In a world where natural instincts to help had been crushed. For some reason, I had a large collection of books with me, which two of my friends quickly “borrowed” without permission. I knew they immagined my collection would be loaded with…

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Freedom in the time of panic
or
10 small ways to turn crisis lemons into freedom lemonade

I began writing this post after California ‘crats shut down the Bay Area and Governor Jay Inslee of Washington state demanded that all restaurants in his state close their doors except for take-out and delivery. I also began the original version of this post with a fulmination about the insanity of specific measures (“You oldsters stay in your homes and don’t go out even to buy food.” In other words, “We don’t care if you starve for want of helpers to run errands for you; just don’t clutter up our hospitals or disrupt our attempts to make ourselves look like…

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Hysteria Hits the Hinterlands (and a small Friday ramble)

I hit the library yesterday to do some ‘Net surfing and emailing, only to find it “canceled” like so much else. It was open and minimally staffed, but had the air of a haunted house. Patrons could check out and return books, but the banks of library computers were shut down (“until at least March 31,” said the signs), chairs were removed from all the carrels and upturned on the long reading tables, and the ever-present din of children was absent. I never thought I’d miss the shrieks of rugrats, but I did. The place was a freakin’ tomb. They…

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