A Friday Rant

It’s been a heck of a week, my back hurts and my attitude just stinks.

Let’s see, we have the passage of the Real ID act, hidden inside a military spending bill, our President is pushing a proposal to grant legal status to something like 10,000,000 illegal aliens and the US Border Patrol ordering agents in Arizona to deliberately hold down their arrest numbers to make the Minutemen look bad.

I’m not sure how much more bad news on the freedom front I can take without going bat-shit screaming insane. Who needs Islamist terrorists when you have the US Congress and government?

How about bad economic news instead? The stock market is down–Walmart didn’t make it’s numbers. United Airline won court approval to dump their pension problems on the taxpayers (via the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation), and Delta may not be far behind. The Feds are slowly reregulating the airline industry. Consumer sentiment dips.

Well, that isn’t going to help out my attitude any.

Here’s a good question for you–where do you go? Leaving the country isn’t the answer, since as bad as it looks, we’re still head-and-shoulders freer than any other country. There are places with (currently) better economies, but I don’t want to live there. Damnit, this is my home! I want to stay here, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where you can really live a Horatio Alger story if you’re willing to work hard enough.

Or at least you could, once upon a time. Face it, Alger has been dead 105 years, and we aren’t as free as we once were. Bravery? Well, it seems we still have that, and that’s a good thing–we may soon need it in wholesale lots.

Vote the so-and-sos out? Who can you vote for besides the Democans and the Republicrats? Libertarians? Constitutionalists? This country desperately needs a viable third party who is willing not only to abide by the Constitution, but who will make sure all the nonsense currently on the books (even if some lifetime tenured jokers in black say it’s Constitutional) gets tossed into the trash where it belongs.

Claire Wolfe has some thoughts on this, and they’re good as far as they go, but I don’t think “staying angry” is going to do it. Humans can only stay actively angry a short time. Even at that, I’m not sure you can get enough people to be angry for that short time to make a difference. As long as they have cable and an illusion of security, they will bleat happily and do whatever the TV newsdrone says they should do.

I’m going to Camp Freehold this weekend, and since I have managed to once again anger the gods that reside in my back, I’m going to have to take it easy. I’m going to pack up the ol’ laptop and see if I can work some of my thoughts out.

I can’t help but think that our country is approaching a tipping point. The ramifications of these various actions are going to be too complex–The Law of Unintended Consequences is going to be working overtime. No one can know what the outcome of all this will be, but I just can’t find it in me to believe that it will be good for our freedom or our standard of living.