More Book Covers!!

  Rather than add anything particularly useful to the internet, I have instead opted for the crowd-pleasing fodder of more book covers, including a magazine cover.
  First up, yet another offering from our dear friend "Dr" Jeremy Nascimento, who  lends his voice to the self-help genre.  I honestly don't know where he finds the time to  write all these books.

 

  "Dr" Nascimento (who holds an esteemed laureate chair at Wassamata University in Moosylvania) continued his servitude to the general public with his  next tome, in which he compiles and distills  all of his  homesteading wisdom into an easy-to-read guide for anyone who 's not afraid to take the very real risk they will starve to death.

 

Soon afterwards,  yours truly found himself the subject of much scorn following a real 'hit job' expose in a once prestigious magazine that arose over what was really a very innocent misunderstanding. The bottom-feeding paparazzi will never rest until they get the incriminating , out-of-context photo that  is a  key feature in their livelihood. It is included here not to give any free press to my critics, but rather to give you, my loyal readers, some idea of the muckraking that passes for serious journalism these days.

 

   As they say though, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and I'm sure my  opponents were astonished  when all the  brouhaha  catapulted my latest work  to the bestseller list.

 

  Just a few days  later though, I found myself being misquoted in a popular  entertainment  magazine. These chuckleheads can't even properly spell cannibalism!!

 

  Fortunately, being the unflappable work-aholic that I am, I  pressed on with some ghost-writing, dipping into the biography realm with a man that is  practically a household name.

Let this be a lesson to you young writers out there. work is always the solution.

Glenn Beck and the Fatal Flaw

Someone gave me a copy of Glen Beck’s new book on gun control, entitled, appropriately enough, Control.  Now I do have some issues with Mr. Beck, which I won’t go into here. I don’t think it’s profitable for the people in the liberty movement to devour each other over perceived ideological impurities. Beck, love him or hate him, is a very visible voice that is, at least when his  handlers don’t pull his chain too hard, encouraging people to think about liberty and  he’s probably a fine fellow to read if you are slowly detoxing from the ‘government is good’ mindset.

  Having said that, the book is, over all, a very good collection of studies done by the gun control crowd which are then debunked, and quotes from the gun control crowd which are then examined in light of the  facts.  My issue with the book and it’s approach may seem like a minor point to some, but to me the very subtlety of it makes it a dangerous point.

  In it, over and over again, Mr. Beck makes the case that all we gun folks want is a reasonable exercise of our rights.  Nobody is asking for RPG’s to be legal, nobody wants a machine gun; all we want is what’s reasonable.  This sent up a big red flag for me. Who decides what’s reasonable?

  For Beck to say it’s unreasonable for me to  own a  grenade launcher is the ideological twin  of Feinstein  saying it’s unreasonable for me to own a  30 round magazine. In both cases, someone else has appealed to some external standard to decide for me what I should and should not have.

  Now I may well decide on my own, if I were allowed the choice, that a grenade launcher is impractical for me. I’ve made that decision with a variety of legal weapons, over issues of cost or practicality.  Ultimately I should be the one that decides what’s reasonable for me, not Glenn Beck and certainly not Feinstein.  In my estimation, anytime you surrender that decision to somebody else, whether you keep the articles you wanted to keep or not, you’ve lost the issue on a philosophical level.

  That philosophical surrender leads to your next loss as somebody else redefines what’s ‘reasonable’. Before long you’re disputing about what we’re asking to be legal. Since when do we ‘ask’ for freedom? As a friend of mine once said “a freedom that you have to ask for is a privilege’.

  If I was a  more conspiracy-minded sort of guy ( wait a minute here) I would entertain the notion that the Glenn Becks of the world are there to keep liberty folks from wandering too far off the reservation, and from thinking too deeply or from looking at things a certain way.  As long as we stay busy reacting to the other side’s definition of reasonable, and as long as we keep asking for permission to exercise  our rights, we can still be controlled. Or am I overthinking it?