Month: October 2020

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Basic Fucking Rights Guns and Stuff

Why They Aren’t “Just Guns” To Us

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Second Amendment to the Constitution of The United States of America

It doesn’t take much time at all outside of my socio-political bubble for me to realize that the majority of Americans don’t understand why firearm ownership is so important to those of us who have them. Why the Second Amendment to the Constitution is one of my absolutely fundamental political topics. I’m basically a single-issue voter. Some people are Pro-Life. Some people are Pro-Choice.

I’m Pro-Gun.

To many people this seems like a radical stance. How can an educated and otherwise seemingly intelligent person have such an extreme view? I figure if you’re reading this, it means one of three things: 1) You already agree with me on guns and you want to reaffirm your opinions; 2) You’re waiting for me to say something radical so you can dismiss my arguments and reaffirm your opinions; 3) You’re open minded and actually interested in why a person would consider the Second Amendment to be of the utmost importance to modern Americans.

I’m going to speak to the third group. Everyone else, feel free to tag along with me, but I’m going to pretend like you don’t exist.

The most basic and fundamental reason I can give for being a “gun guy” is very simple: Freedom. Owning, carrying, and training with a firearm keeps me Free. Freedom comes in many varieties and flavors, and a gun (or many many guns and lots of ammunition)–and the right training–help safeguard every one of them: Freedom from fear of bodily harm from an ill-intentioned criminal; Freedom to secure my own food if the need arises; Freedom from oppression in an extreme case of historical redundancy.

To address the title of this Ramble: They aren’t “just guns” to me because they literally represent my ability to keep Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. If you’re anti-gun, you’re anti-my-Life.

If you need more reasons than that, I’ve got plenty of Rambling to do on this one.

You Ever Wonder Why It’s Amendment Number Two?

My first argument for the importance of the Second Amendment is fairly simple. There were ten amendments to the Constitution immediately gathered and ratified by the states of the newly-formed Union. These became known as the Bill of Rights. Now, being a group of rather wise, worldly, and organized folks, it would make sense that the founding fathers would endeavor to include the most prescient and pressing Rights first and get them front-loaded so they would be seen as priority.

Therefore, we can say that the Right to practice whatever religion you wanted to was extremely important to them. Also, the Right to speak your mind without fear of the government silencing you. The Right to assemble and request redress of grievances. These were paramount to them because they saw these as the best means by which they could guarantee the free flow of ideas that would help the People to improve their newly-established nation. They were also strong motivators for the war of independence they had just finished fighting.

So, upon figuring out how to word the First Amendment, guaranteeing the absolute most important Rights of the citizenry, what did they tackle next?

Arms.

The Inalienable Right of the People to keep and bear Arms was so crucial to maintaining the stability and freedom of the population–in fact, the security of the free State–that it was the second thing they voted on as a newly-formed government.

That seems like a big deal to me. Maybe like the second biggest deal.

But Muh Mulisha

One of the biggest talking points brought up by proponents of strict gun control laws is the mention of the Militia. It’s been said that a Militia must be an organized military force, and that in the modern world that means the US military. This is supported by the idea that any other “militia” is outlawed in each of the 50 states. They are considered private paramilitary organizations, and are banned.

This seems like a legitimate argument on the surface, but I believe in taking a deeper dive than that. Let’s put aside for a moment that the militia’s legal definition includes every able-bodied male between 17 and 45 who is a citizen or wishes to become a citizen of the United States.

I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.

George Mason, Address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 4, 1788

Let’s go back to the start. In order to understand how to best interpret a governing document from another era in modern times, I posit that we have to first understand the intent of each mandate. Reading through the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and other musings of the founding fathers, it seems somewhat obvious that the Bill of Rights was intended to leash the federal government: to limit its ability to muzzle the populace. I believe that the members of that first Congress had contingencies in mind when they crafted the specific limitations on the government that each Amendment represents. In other words: “What were they thinking when they wrote this? What were they thinking when they voted on this? What were trying to keep the government from doing?”

From what I’ve read of the events surrounding the founding of our country from the likes of Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, etc. I believe that their reasons for arming the Militia were two-fold: 1) They needed to be able to raise an army at a moment’s notice against any country wanting the test the fledgling nation; 2) They were inherently distrustful of any organized federal government, and wanted the people to be armed against tyranny. This mindset can be inferred from the series of checks and balances they built into the framework of their new government, combined with the rigid protections they placed against the new government for the populace. It would be understandable given that they’d just been under a regime that had pressed them to the point of rebellion and used exactly the tactics they were barring against to try and keep then in line.

The only way they were able to fight against the crown was because they were natively armed. They wouldn’t have been able to mount an offense against their oppressors were it not for the number of privately-held arms among the citizenry. So in their minds, the best way to keep the people prepared against a tyrannical state or invading outside force, was to make sure the People could fight from every nook and cranny. If a threat, foreign or domestic, wanted to steamroll the citizens of the United States, they would have to bleed for every inch.

But Things Are Different Now!

No, they’re really not. The only real difference between 1776 and 2020 is that we’re softer and have the internet. It only seems different to you because we’ve been a powerhouse since we dropped a couple of atomic bombs on an island nation in the Pacific, and we’ve enjoyed something akin to domestic peace ever since. Sure we’ve been in constant “police actions” but those have been somewhere else–abstract ideas of war to those not fighting in them. Things easily put out of mind. The fight has always been somewhere else, not at our front door.

Soft times.

Outside of a few acts of terror, there have been no real attacks on our soil, no armies knocking on our gates, and no serious internal threats to national security. We haven’t known a real threat to our way of life. This gives many people a sense of security; they believe they are going to be safe no matter what. They’ve forgotten the world is full of predators.

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

Don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking that just because we’ve been on top that we will always be on top. We have enemies in the world, and they would love nothing more than to see us knocked off our pedestal and onto our ass. I was a Boy Scout. I didn’t make Eagle or anything, but I took many of the lessons from my time in the troop to heart. To wit: “Be Prepared.”

You Don’t Stand A Snowball’s Chance in Hell Against the US Military

That is a pretty accurate statement. I don’t think that I, or some coalition of a significant number of Americans, stand much of a chance of defeating the American military in a war. The government has done a pretty good job of making sure of that by keeping citizens from owning the same level of weaponry that they have, not to mention the proliferation of things like drones, recon aircraft, tanks, and hellfire missiles.

I’ll mention in passing that the North Vietnamese made a pretty good showing back in the 60’s and 70’s, and the Islamists of the last 20 years have given us way more headache than anyone anticipated (the Soviets before that, too). “Hearts and minds.” The only reason any revolt of the last few millennia has had even moderate success was because the people were armed.

An armed individual is a citizen, an unarmed one is a subject.

But the Police!

There are so many ways to approach this one. I’ll see what I can do to be brief.

With everything going on in the “defund the police” world, I can’t even believe that someone would seriously still pull this one out of their pocket. The level of doublethink required is almost laughable, but, that’s where we’re at today. If you can’t trust the cops, then you can’t use them as an argument about why I don’t need them around. Not being able to trust the police is all the more reason to be able to protect yourself.

Then, even if you believe you can trust them, there’s the simple fact that the police can’t be everywhere at all times. They are overworked, overburdened, and often just too damn slow to get there in time to save anyone from anything. There’s a saying among the 2A community that goes something like:

When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.

So, when you’re staring down the barrel of some bad guy’s illegally-acquired M4 or AK-47 or even their little .380 pea shooter, and you’re wondering if you’re going to survive the next ten seconds, you go ahead and let me know how safe you feel knowing that the police are just a few blocks away with their radar guns pulled on the guy doing 5 over on the frontage road to the highway, licking their chops at the thought of meeting that traffic quota.

This next point is the real doozy that most people just aren’t aware of, so I’m going to give it its own little standalone here:

The Police Have No Duty to Protect You!

Supreme Court of the United States, Warren v District of Columbia and DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services

You can read more about that from people that know more about law than I do, but basically, there have been a number of SCOTUS cases that have upheld the established precedent that the police don’t have to do that whole “protect” part of “protect and serve.” Just jump over the wikipedia page for the Warren case, and scroll down to the “See also” section.

I carry a gun everywhere I go because I can’t rely on anyone else to protect me. The highest court in the land has said that it’s my job to protect me, and I plan on taking that job damned serious.

You Don’t Need an AR-15

I’ll address this one last because it’s basically a throw away argument. As such, I’ll give it a throw away answer: It’s not called the Bill of Needs, it’s called the Bill of Rights.

I have the Right to keep and bear Arms. As such, nobody has the power to deny me that Right. So fuck “Need.” I don’t have to prove to you that I need anything. The Bill of Rights asserts that I have an Inalienable Right by birth to keep and bear Arms as a de facto member of the disorganized Militia charged with securing the free state. That said… You’re God damn right I need an AR-15. Have you seen the riots happening lately? Have you ever tried to defend yourself against a dozen or more people trying to surround and murder you or burn down your fucking home?

I need an AR-15 and more, because there are people out there who will use their own number (not to mention illegal weapons, because don’t forget there are CRIMINALS out there who don’t give a shit about the legalities of the firearms they’re carrying) to kill me and take whatever I have.

I assert that as a citizen, as opposed to a subject, of the United States of America, we are all charged with guaranteeing our own safety, security, and Freedom. That’s what the Second Amendment is really all about. In order to ensure that we can live up to that responsibility, the founding fathers insisted that our Rights to Arms be preserved and upheld against any infringement from authoritarian power. If you don’t believe that, then I charge that you are simply in denial–denial of the basic fact of nature that at the end of the day, in the dark of night, when you are alone and confronted with a Wolf, there is no one responsible for your own safekeeping but yourself.

I accept that there are Wolves. I am prepared for them.

I am Pro-Gun.

Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.

-Hodo

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Musings Society

Rona

Most people will agree that COVID-19 and our response to it has been something of a cluster fuck. A goat rope. A monkey fucking a football. Most people will also agree that any response from a true leader (or organization dedicated to leading people) must be measured, reasoned, and based on facts.

Yeah… right.

Instead we have a bunch of thumb suckers running around like their assholes are on fire, screaming to the ceilings, pointing fingers and throwing shit at each other while they argue incessantly about whose fault it is that people are dead, while our economy spirals down the toilet, all in the name of garnering a few more votes through disinformation and oneupsmanship.

One day we’ll elect an actual leader instead of having to choose between a reality TV actor slash real estate mogul who speaking style makes your stomach roil or your great great great grandpa’s weird pervy neighbor in the retirement home who uses his unreasonable lust for his sassy black nurse as proof that he isn’t racist. But, that’s a path for a different Ramble.

It’s my position that we should have gone with the administration’s first plan; the plan where we recognized that there was a disease running around, and that people were going to get sick, but that life still has to go on. It was the plan that was going to be used before Trump et al. caved to the pressures of a populace stricken with uninformed panic and a handful of medical professionals who saw the chance for political gain and pop culture stardom.

People Are Dumb

In the words of Steve Perry, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.” We have, as a race (the human race, not the modern anti-racism racist definition of race), allowed hyperbole and fear to pull aside our reason, and governments the world over have given in to societal panic. COVID-19 presents in the vast majority of its patients as a cold, and a mild version at that. There is a percentage of people, varying by age group, that have a truly severe reaction to the disease. Something like 90% of hospitalizations from COVID are from people with aggravating conditions like hypertension (there’s a link between COVID and ACE receptors), obesity (lots of health impacts, typically including hypertension), chronic lung disease (you know… where COVID likes to attack ACE receptors), diabetes (which impacts your immune health), and heart disease (typically the result of an unhealthy lifestyle).

We see from the numbers (and we were seeing this back in March and April) that the virus strongly impacts the elderly, with something like a 5% mortality rate and a pretty staggering 20% hospitalization rate. There were places reporting numbers like 70% hospitalization rates for the elderly but those were very early on and we weren’t testing nearly as widely as we have been since then. We discovered that the number of mild and asymptomatic cases was much higher than we initially suspected, meaning that the total number of cases was higher, and therefore the proportion requiring interventional treatment was much lower. The real numbers seem to have settled somewhere around 15% average for those over 65. Keep in mind, that that’s hospitalization, not mortality and not even severity. That’s just the number who are admitted to hospital, even for observation.

We also see from the numbers that people under 20 are shrugging this virus off like a fly buzzing around a cow’s ass. The hospitalization and mortality rates for school-age children are virtually 0. That climbs steadily until around 50, where there is a jump, and then again at 65+.

So for a disease that strongly impacts a very specific demographic (65+), and has flu-like impact on the vast vast vast majority of people (99.5%), we decided to just roll with it and protect the vulnerable populations like we do every flu season, right? Oh wait… no, we decided it was best to SHUT EVERYTHING DOWN and let the economy atrophy until small businesses (you remember that whole American Dream thing, right?) all had to close and leave their owners destitute and dependent on stimulus checks.

It is my personal opinion that this was a mistake.

Unintended Consequences

Now, I’m no supergenius, but even I could look ahead from March and see that locking everyone up in their homes for long periods of time would have all kinds of negative impacts. For me, personally, it has been a net positive: it forced my employer to allow remote work (which was something we always said was a reasonable measure, but management and customers weren’t fans of the idea), let me spend way more time with my family, and helped me build better relationships with my kids and wife. I recognized early on that I was one of the lucky ones. Imagine being single with no kids; you’re alone all day, every day, and every time you leave the house you have to abstain from any kind of physical interactions. That kind of isolation is absolutely devastating to a social being, like humans. Even extremely introverted people crave interaction with people they know and love.

This doesn’t even mention the emotional strain caused by people having sick and dying relatives that they can’t visit because of draconian COVID-fearing visitation policies in hospitals and care centers. Can you imagine not being able to gather around your mother on her death bed and be there to comfort her as she passes from this world? No chance to tell her one last time how much you love her? No way to feel her hand in yours one last time?

Take this kind of isolation and trauma and combine it with the superficial and unfulfilling relationships that people develop through social media and add in the absolute societal insanity that 2020 has brought along with it, and you have an emotional wrecking ball on your hands. Not having the relief of interpersonal interaction means that people aren’t able to level out between stressors, so it should be no surprise to anyone that suicides have skyrocketed during the quarantine.

Aside from these direct consequences, there are studies being conducted right now that are focusing on the indirect deaths resulting from COVID. These would include deaths as a result of hospitals/urgent care not being willing to treat patients who show up with non-COVID symptoms because they are trying to save space for critically ill Rona victims. Alternatively, people are choosing not to seek health care until they are critically ill, because they are afraid of catching COVID if they venture from their homes. Both categories of people then worsen under their own care until they are finally admitted to the hospital but it’s too late.

So what we’re seeing is a dramatic increase in overall mortality in the United States that far exceeds the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19, and I believe that can be directly attributed to the implementation of a panic-driven strategy for containment, as opposed to a reasoned plan for cautious continuation of every-day life.

“Okay, wise guy, what’s your brilliant fucking plan then?”

My plan is to put kids back in school. There’s virtually no risk to them from Rona, but there are lots of risks (mental, emotional, and physical) to them staying isolated from one another and away from a consistent education.

Open businesses up and let people who can work do so. Those among us who want to stay in business and meet with our friends and relatives should be free to do so, at our own risk. After all, if people can gather for political protests, I can gather for a birthday celebration.

Keep the elderly protected under voluntary quarantine and don’t send COVID-positive people back into the most vulnerable populations in the country.. Spread the word that this shit will fucking wreck them if they get it, and then trust them to make their own decisions.

Most Fucking Importantly: STOP MAKING A HUGE FUCKING DEAL ABOUT NEW CASES

Nobody should care about the rising number of cases of COVID-19. It’s a God. Damn. Virus. A highly-contagious virus. People are going to get it. There’s not much we can do about that. What the media should be reporting on, and what the government should be basing their decisions on, is the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations and interventional treatments.

Who gives a rat’s ass how many people test positive without symptoms? Who fucking cares how many people get the sniffles? Tell the people in charge how many people are seriously impacted so they can know when stricter measures are actually necessary. The only context in which total number of cases matters is when we need to calculate the percentage of cases that end up badly. Even then, there are so many factors at play with the human body, that total numbers like that are nearly meaningless.

We should have done 15 days to flatten the curve. That was okay. What should have happened was 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off, on, off, etc. responding to the total number of interventional cases in the local populace, until we reached herd immunity. Instead, we fucked our economy, bankrupted thousands of small business owners and their families, and led a non-trivial number of people to suicide and you know what? People still fucking got sick. People are still dying.

The difference is we’re killing our prosperity at the same time.

Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.

-Hodo

Categories
Musings Society

Free Speech and Social Media

I’ve seen a lot of talk about social media and free speech, so I figured I’d weigh in because my opinion is better and should be considered more valid than everyone else’s.

The main thrust of the argument I’m hearing is that the government should regulate Twitter, Facebook, and Google like utilities because they are such prevalent entities that stand between the populace and access to information and communication. I’m going to be frank, well actually I’ll be Martin, but I will be blunt: I think that stance is a crock. I don’t think any individual social media platform has the responsibility to ensure any kind of free speech on their platform. I don’t think Google has that responsibility either.

I don’t think any individual social media platform has the responsibility to ensure any kind of free speech on their platform.

“But First Amendment,” you might say. “But monopoly,” you might say. “Curating information,” you might say.

“First Amendment is protection against the government, not the individual,” I would reply. “Free enterprise,” I would reply. “Use a different platform,” I would reply.

The First Amendment argument, in my view, is moot. “Congress shall make no law …abridging the freedom of speech…” So, it protects you from Congress making laws and enacting policies, but there is no guarantee under the First Amendment that a business owner has to allow you to walk into their property and say whatever the hell you want to say. The First Amendment is a guarantee that the government can’t curtail your right to the free expression of ideas. Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. are not (yet) the government. Therefore, the First Amendment does not apply.

For the monopoly argument: believe it or not, there are alternatives to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, just like there are alternatives to CNN, New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal. We don’t go out and insist that the government regulate newspapers or the 24-hour cable news cycle. What they do and what Google or any social media platform do are basically the same thing: they curate information and present it to you. The real difference is in customization and scale.

What I mean by that is that you can’t walk up to a news anchor and be like “What’s the story with Benghazi?” and expect an answer. Google will give you a whole bunch of stories about Benghazi and if you’re super lucky you’ll find an answer like “On September 11, 2012 two US government buildings in Benghazi, Libya were overrun by an insurgent force in a premeditated attack. Repeated requests from local security forces to the US State Department went unheeded, allowing the recklessly lax security to be overwhelmed, resulting in the deaths of four Americans: Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods. These men were let down by their government and left to die unnecessarily.”

Right… back on track here…There are alternatives to these platforms and if you don’t want them to have control over what you see, then–and I know this is a whacko crazy thought–STOP FUCKING USING THEM. Switch from Google search engine to Duck Duck Go (my search engine of choice), or Yahoo, or even Bing for Christ’s sake… I take it back. Don’t use Bing. Never use Bing. Use Vimeo instead of Youtube. Use any of a thousand cloud storage solutions instead of Drive. Use protonmail for email instead gmail.

Proton is doing amazing things with privacy and security, by the way. They have FREE end-to-end encrypted email and offer FREE VPN services that keep no logs.

If you want to do social media for news but don’t want Twitter or FB curating what you see, create an RSS feed from your favorite sources (and a few of the ones you hate too because a balance of ideas is critical to avoiding an echo chamber).

If you want to talk with your friends, then get them all on a different platform, like Parler. Or you can just start using a chat app. I have a bunch of friends on Keybase and Slack and Mattermost (and IRC, but we don’t talk about IRC) and we have different channels dedicated to memes of varying levels of crudeness and offensiveness. The more offensive channels are the best channels.

The point of all of this is to try and make you aware that things like Google and Facebook and Twitter and all these other things are services with viable alternatives. They aren’t forcing out any of the market, USERS are forcing out other markets. And what’s more, these aren’t services that are required for the function of the modern world. They are conveniences. Google is convenient, but the internet existed before it was the most popular search engine in the world. Twitter and Facebook are convenient ways to communicate with your friends and check up on some current events, but there are other ways to get your friend fix and check the news.

The point is that invoking something as dangerous as governmental intervention in private business, and setting more precedents about when it’s acceptable, is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. It should be the last of last resorts. We shouldn’t be considering it as a necessity in a scenario where the market still has plenty of ability to make decisions on where they “spend their money,” or in this case, spend their clicks. Clicks to Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. all mean money from ad revenue.

Choose wisely which corporations you choose to support with your traffic. Do some research and see if there are alternatives that you would rather see succeed. If there are, then try to use them more and get the word out to your friends and family to push that platform.

Use Duck Duck Go to find me on Parler.

Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.

-Hodo

Categories
Be Better Musings Review Things I Read Lately

Being A Man

Before we take this Ramble, I have a confession. This Ramble is also a bit of a book review for a few books I read recently. I’ve linked to them throughout the Ramble, and if you buy those books through those links, I get a little kickback. The site I’m linking to is called Bookshop, and they help support local bookstores that are all in danger of shutting down because of Amazon. So, if you buy from those links, you’ll be helping me, and helping keep local bookstores open, which is pretty fucking cool. I promise I’m not linking you to bullshit books that suck, I’m only recommending things that have helped to change me in some way for the better and that I think we can all learn something from. With that said, Ramble on:

“Toxic” masculinity. You hear it thrown around all the time. Makes me think of some kind of ‘roided up powerlifter glowing green after being exposed to noxious chemicals. You know, kind of like…

The Toxic Avenger (1985, USA) - Wrong Side of the Art

But what does “toxic” masculinity mean? What does is portend for the future of our boys when the adjective used to describe their biology is constantly paired with a word that literally means “deadly”? Is there a way we can raise men who embody the positive traits masculine without this so-called poison?

Fuck yeah there is.

Now, I’m not claiming to be a shining pillar of manliness. I’ve never been the picture of a testosterone-fueled Hollywood dreamboat. I’m not jacked or yoked or cut or chiseled. I spent a large percentage (probably half) of my life training brain more than brawn. I skipped athletics when I was in high school, opting instead to get my phys ed credits from marching band. Thanks to asthma, I always hated to run, and since running was the core of everything athletic that I could see, I chose to carry around a bundle of drums to beat on instead. I never joined the military–a thing many associate with masculinity. Instead, I thought the best way I could support the warfighter was to put my brain to use solving some of the hard technical problems they face way out there at the tip of the spear. I’ve made a modest career helping support the guys out there dangling their asses over the line, but not being one myself.

Doesn’t sound like a picture of masculinity, does it?

Luckily for me, being an athlete and military veteran aren’t the only measures of masculinity. Those men certainly display a number of masculine traits (and veterans have my unwavering respect for the sacrifice they made for my family and me), but those aren’t the only ways to make a man. Not by a long shot. Which brings us to the point of this post: “What does it mean to be a man in the modern world and why the hell should anyone listen to some dude on the internet?”

What does it mean to be a man in the modern world and why the hell should anyone listen to some dude on the internet?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

Let’s start with the second part. Why should anyone listen to me? Well, I’m a modestly successful man who has read a bit about masculinity through the ages, listened to some really smart people talk about manhood, and generally feels pretty good about himself as a representative of the male of the species. Give me a few more paragraphs and you can decide whether I have anything useful to say. If you close this page thinking I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, then okay, but if not, then maybe we can help a generation of lost boys become found men.

In my not-so-humble opinion, any good learning endeavor begins with books. There are 3 in particular that I think any man (or teenage boy approaching manhood) should thumb through.

The first one is King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette. This was one of those that I was skeptical to pick up at first because I wasn’t much of a philosophy or psychology guy, but once I started, I found it hard to put down. It’s a dive into the Jungian archetypes of man that have carried pretty consistently throughout history and across geography. The crazy thing about it is how approachable and fascinating they manage to make something as chewy as Jung.

Pick it up on Bookshop: here

The general premise is that masculinity presents in 4 archetypes. I bet you can guess what they are. Those archetypes are pyramidal, meaning there are an aggressive version at one bottom corner, a passive version at another bottom corner, and one balanced version at the top peak of each archetypal pyramid. From there they discuss the presentation of each one of these variations in both childhood and adulthood, how to recognize when you are too far to one side or the other, and what kind of disservice you are doing to yourself and your community by not growing to your fullness.

In the end, my main takeaway was that one must strive for balance and temperance in order to be your best and most fulfilling self.

The second book was nothing like what I expected it to be. From the title, I expected Iron John by Robert Bly to be some kind of John Henry or Big John fiction about manly men doing manly things. Turns out I was way off. Robert Bly creates a surprisingly enthralling narrative where he walks through the symbolism and metaphor in the Grimm story of Iron John, a fairy tale I had never heard before.

Pick it up on Bookshop: here

I don’t want to get too deep into it because Bly does a much better job than I ever could, but basically the story follows a boy born to power who finds Iron John and is pulled from wealth and civilization into the wild natural world. The balance he must strike between wild and civilized before returning to the world of men in triumph and power, describes the struggle all men must endure to embody a true definition of a righteous and masculine man.

Both of these first two books hit on two critical things that previous generations had that modern men lack: elder mentors and manhood rituals. The authors all posit that lacking a moment to point to where they can say “I am a boy no longer,” and not having another man–an Elder–to point to where they can say “This is how a man lives,” leave a boy wandering through adulthood, lashing out at those around him in search of some evidence that he is truly a man.

Lacking a moment to point to where they can say “I am a boy no longer,” and not having another man–an Elder–to point to where they can say “This is how a man lives,” leave a boy wandering through adulthood, lashing out at those around him in search of some evidence that he is truly a man

After those two books dedicated to defining the transition from boy to man and outlining the qualities of True Masculinity in its Strength, I’m recommending something more focused on awareness of thought and forming better mental habits.

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen is a very quick read. Basically a treatise on how thought sculpts your reality, it’s not long but it’s profound. There’s a reason that Allen’s work has been considered a classic since it was published in the early Twentieth Century. In the end, the primary thing I left with was the uplifting feeling that I was not only responsible for, but ultimately capable of, building the reality I wanted for myself.

Pick it up from Bookshop: here

That, to me, is the heart and soul of masculinity: taking responsibility for your actions, sculpting the world around you to realize your goals, protecting those people and things that are your charge, providing for the same, and leading them as an example of personal responsibility.

In the vast majority of cases, none of those tasks will require violence, anger, or aggression. But that brings me the final piece of masculinity that, in my estimation is the basis of this idea of “toxic” masculinity, and that is Violence. Capital V.

I don’t think you can mention the male of (most) any species and not also mention Violence. Birds, cats, dogs, deer, humans. All of these animals will attack one another under certain circumstances, and all of these animals will attack other creatures at other times. It is the role of the masculine to do the dirty work when necessary to protect or provide for society. Those who speak out about “toxic” masculinity are seeing this violence and aggression used in ways that are destructive and hurtful to society, and conflating it with true masculinity.

From the readings, especially King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, it seems straightforward to me. These men have yet to understand that they are acting from a place of insecurity and weakness. To embody masculinity is not to pick on those physically weaker or try to insert yourself into the world of an attractive woman through cat calls or unwanted confrontational advances. In fact, real masculinity is the opposite of those things. A masculine man will stand up for those weaker, help them along, and understand that by helping those weaker than himself he is making the entire community stronger. A masculine man can approach a woman he finds attractive confidently and respectfully and strike up a conversation in a way that doesn’t make her uncomfortable.

I said earlier that I had spent a large percentage of my life training my brain and not my body. I also spent a lot of my life insecure, depressed, and tired. Then I started going to the gym. I started lifting weights. I began to take pride in my body and recognize it for what it was: my only real physical property. I lost a ton of weight. I’m still kind of a squishy motherfucker, but I eat right, I train BJJ, and I hit the range a few times a month. Simply put, I increased my ability to do Violence and that made me a calmer and more centered man.

It is a hallmark of masculinity to train your body to the limits of its capability. That doesn’t mean that you have to be a chiseled Adonis. A man with ALS who can only move one arm who still works that arm to the best of his ability in a struggle to keep his machine functioning as well as possible; that man is masculine as fuck. That dude has as much of my respect as the powerlifter cleaning more than his bodyweight.

It’s a strange balance to have to strike, this melding of Testosterone and refinement, but I think it’s one that most men know in their hearts. I think those who display “toxic” masculinity know they are misbehaving, but don’t understand where they are compensating or how to grow into better men. Maybe someone will sit them down and be their Iron John or their modern-day shaman and put them through that ritual we all need to make the transition to manhood.

Thanks for taking this Ramble with me. Now, get out there and be some Lost Boy’s shaman.

Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.

-Hodo

Categories
Be Better Musings

No Regrets

Photo by Lukas on Pexels.com

I have this theory about life. It’s not terribly groundbreaking or revolutionary, but it is something I think about whenever I’m worried or afraid to do something I think will improve my life. It goes like:

The things you fear are the things you should be doing.

Now, this isn’t fear like “if I do that, I’m going to die,” although, some of those fears should also be faced. These fears come from without. The fear that someone else will see you doing a thing and judge it a waste of time. The fear that someone will take in the product of your labor and deem it unworthy. The fear that you will look silly.

The fear that you will fail.

That last one–that’s the big one, the reason most people don’t do things. That’s the reason why dreams lay by the side of the road, bloated in the ditch, as people drive past in their fuel-efficient vehicles acting like they don’t see them because someone else’s dead dreams might remind them of their own hope corpses. That’s why people die with regrets.

I don’t want that. I have no idea how long I’m going to be here. I can’t tell you whether I will die next week from some rare blood disease or hyper-aggressive cancer or stray bullet or Antifa brick to the head. I’m 37 years old and people younger than me die every single day.

What makes me special enough to be exempt from that? Nothing. Not one single minuscule fucking thing.

So I decided a few years back that I wasn’t going to let any of that petty bullshit hold me back. I was going to do the things that made me and the people I care about happy. I was going to chase contentment. I decided I would keep working my normal job, because it pays the bills and doesn’t stress me out too much, but in my spare time, I was going to write a book, or two, or three.

In the process of all of this writing, I’ve discovered a lot about myself. For three years, I worked on writing this story. I wrote 300,000 words without a single thought to how good or bad it was. I just puked words out onto a page. It was glorious. Then I joined up with the community and started showing other writers my work.

Judgment came down from on high.

For the most part, people were positive, which was awesome. Some people were negative, which was less than awesome, but it helped to make the work better. Then this strange thing happened: I started having difficulty writing.

I would sit down at my keyboard and stare at it. My mind would go totally blank. I knew what I needed to write, but it wouldn’t come out. I would start typing, because that’s what you do when you get blocked, you just write. Write anything. It doesn’t matter. Just get the words flowing again.

Still, it was all crap. I would write and write and write and end up deleting it all the next day because it just sucked. Eventually, I would break through the barrier and something worth a damn would spew giddily from my story hole and my fingertips would hesitantly cram it onto a computer screen. Then a few weeks later, the cycle would repeat.

I noticed something after a while: Rarely did the block come on its own. There was something that incited it. Something that made my mind say “You’re not a writer today. Today you’re a failure.” And somewhere in the corner there was this weak little nerdy kid, with his hair parted on the side wearing a bolo tie sitting at his desk, who just couldn’t tell the voice that it was wrong (I have a picture of me looking exactly like that from like 4th grade, by the way. If you don’t believe me, ask my mother, I’m sure she’d happily show it to you and gush about how adorable I was). That kid would just agree and curl up in a ball and decide it wasn’t worth the effort if he was just going to fail anyway.

Here’s my thoughts on the matter: that kid’s wrong. Even if the voice is totally right and I’m a complete failure and not one single person ever enjoys the words I write down, that kid is still wrong. The value and beauty in life is in the living.

The measure of how well you’ve lived your life is how satisfied you are with it.

I’ll leave you with an exercise I do from time to time. I do this to make sure I’m living this life the way I want to, not the way someone else thinks I should. I do it when I feel like I’ve lost perspective and I need to remember the shit that matters.

Okay, relax. Here it is:

Contemplate for a moment the idea that one day you will die. Don’t think of it as an abstract idea. Really consider what those last moments will be like. Maybe you will die in your sleep, after a long struggle with an illness. You’ll lie in bed and your chest will feel heavy. Breathing is a chore and when you do manage a gasping wheeze, it isn’t enough to satisfy your need for oxygen. You close your eyes, and listen as the world hurdles through space. You can feel that the end is near and your essence will return to be among the forces of the universe.

What will you think in those last few breaths before you close your eyes and the darkness takes you? How satisfied will you be with the decisions you’ve made and the way you’ve spent the all-too-few and precious minutes you were given? Did you look at the things that were just too scary, the things that, while in the moment, seemed too big and daunting to reach for and turned away from them? Or did you, instead, listen to your heart–to your soul–and grab life by the balls and take the things you wanted as it screamed and fell to its knees begging for mercy? What things will you wish you had the chance to go back and do? What things will you regret as you lay there, contemplating the end?

Go do those fucking things.

Live your life as though you’re watching it from your deathbed. Because one day you will be.

Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.

-Hodo

Categories
Basic Fucking Rights Be Better

VOTE

Early voting started this week in Texas! Get your ass out there and cast your ballot for whichever train wreck of a human you think will keep us all afloat the longest!

Categories
Musings Review Society

How Sir David Attenborough Might Save the World

I couldn’t sleep the other night and decided it would be cool to watch a Netflix documentary. Oops.

I’ve always been a conservative leaning guy when it comes to the Constitution and federal vs state governments. I’ve been more of a liberally-minded guy on individual rights–let people do whatever they want, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else–and I’m a nature-lover. I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, and it’s just goddamn gorgeous out there, but from a young age I recognized that there was less and less of it. The more I rode in the car with my parents, the fewer hills and trees I saw, and the more houses or businesses or quarries or industrial plants I saw.

Texas Hill Country

It always broke my heart a little.

So, I’m a bit of a green dude. I’ve tried to avoid supporting companies that use loads of pesticides, but I don’t typically insist on organic. I curse under my breath when I get packages with tons of plastic packaging. I worry about how many plastic grocery bags are piling up in my garage. I see first-hand that we’re eating up more natural resources than we can replenish, and I have always felt that there’s no way we can sustain our “advancement” as a society.

And then I watched Sir David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet and it fucked me up. Attenborough does such an amazing job of intertwining the timeline of his career and everything he’s seen with the rise of population, carbon levels, and reduction of environmentally-stabilizing wilderness. He ties industrialization with wilderness reduction, but where he really got me was his ability to tie that reduction to real and tangible harm.

When discussing the impact of fossil fuels and general non-renewable resources, he says something along the lines of “humanity has released the carbon from thousands of years worth of animals in 200 years.” If you consider that the refinement and combustion of a hydrocarbon is chemically similar to the original creature that hydrocarbon originates from going through decomposition on the surface, it’s a comparison that really hits home. We’ve released a few millennia worth of gasses in the short period of the industrial era.

His lifetime of experience, combined with existent scientific research, presented with the passionate desperation of a man who sees his mortality and believes this film to be his last opportunity to save not only ourselves, but also every wild species on the planet, is deeply impactful. By framing the problem from multiple angles, and tying each of those angles to a single causality, he makes a strong case for impending catastrophe.

His lifetime of experience, combined with existent scientific research, presented with the passionate desperation of a man who sees his mortality and believes this film to be his last opportunity to save not only ourselves, but also every wild species on the planet, is deeply impactful.

Basically, he’s made me a climate change believer in a way that nobody else has managed to do.

Now, that might not in itself seem like enough to send me into something of an existential spiral, but it sure as hell did. It wasn’t the assertion that we’ve managed to reduce the wilderness coverage of the globe from 2/3 to 1/3 in less than a hundred years, which I personally believe is likely to be accurate (maybe even an underestimate). It wasn’t that swaths of reefs in the oceans are dying because the pH of the water has shifted beyond what they can sustain, which I personally believe is true (and is probably our fault). It wasn’t that we’ve transitioned to this reality where the ability to sustain a practice for long-term success isn’t a consideration for profit-driven enterprises. It wasn’t even that we’re reaching a point where we won’t be able to grow enough food to feed humanity, which seems ever more apparent as we’re being forced to use crazy carcinogenic pesticides and engineered fertilizers to help our overworked farmers make a living.

It was that I knew there was nothing that I could do to stop it.

Who am I to do anything? I’m just a guy trying to raise a family and make ends meet. Nobody knows me. I don’t have a following of any kind. I don’t have a reputation as a scientist that will leverage folks to see the errors of our ways and make changes. But I’m trying anyway, because I feel like I must.

As a logician and scientist, I’ve analyzed this problem before. I’ve read the research and dismissed many of the conclusions as representing some poor data practices and playing into confirmation biases. What I’ve learned from the places that I found credible is that the biggest offenders, by a huge margin, are not individuals but commercial and governmental entities. It’s such a large gap that even if we managed to reduce our individual footprints to nothing, we’d barely make a scratch. For example, if you look at the data coming out about the impact to carbon emissions from the quarantine, which was a worldwide reduction of travel by a huge percentage, the numbers look promising at first saying that there was a 17% reduction during peak months, but in the end, the impact is only going to be a 4-7% reduction for the year. So, if we all stay home and our cars are only having a 17% impact (averaged out to 7% when we return to normal living) where the heck are the other 83% coming from?

Industry and infrastructure.

Infrastructure is controlled (or at least regulated) by the government. That means we have to convince our leaders that the only way to truly “Keep America Great” is to ensure that we replenish our resources as we use them so that they will be there for future generations of Americans. I would have thought that this would be a no-brainer, but with lobbyists making our politicians rich to help keep their investors rich, we’ve seen virtually nothing in the way of legitimate efforts to increase our infrastructure sustainability.

Some day (hopefully very soon) we will be able to convince the political apparatus that renewable resources and sustainable processes are the only way to ensure the long-term survival of our species and pretty much any other.

That brings us to Industry. I firmly believe that industry will not change until their consumers and/or government regulators force them to. They are making far too much money to consider the possibility of really making lasting and impactful changes. If they don’t stay competitive, they will lose money and go out of business and then their competitor will rise and wreak the same havoc they did before. They do this for profit and they won’t stop until it’s no longer profitable. How do we make it more profitable for them to work sustainably?

I don’t really know, but I do know that corporations only listen to dollars, so we have to begin showing them that the long-term implications of unsustainable operations and what that looks like to their bottom dollar. They have to see that harvesting without allowing regrowth will only serve as a self-limiting mode of operation. They will run out of supply and then they will run out of business.

What I can say with some certainty is that humans have a history of adapting and overcoming through innovation and technology. Sometimes that tech ends up failing in spectacularly unanticipated ways, but other times it succeeds and carries us forward. It is my sincere hope that this documentary turns the tide and Sir David Attenborough’s final witness has the impact he desires.

Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.

-Hodo

Categories
Basic Fucking Rights

No Deal

If you take nothing else from my Rambles, please, please, please remember these next couple of sentences. Nothing in the Constitution or Bill of Rights of the United States of America gives its citizens anything. Those documents acknowledge that humans are born with certain Inalienable Rights, and outline a series of restrictions against government to protect those Rights from being stolen away. To emphasize: the Bill of Rights protects rights already belonging to you it doesn’t give you rights through benevolence.

Winston Churchill once said that one should never let a good crisis go to waste. As a politician and leader, it was his prerogative to make the most of any given situation–to turn public outcry, outrage, or fear into a lever to pry more money, power, or influence from the populace. This is not a partisan statement. All portions of the political spectrum are guilty of this, and it has led to the downfall of pretty much every powerful government in history. Eventually the leadership takes and takes until the people refuse to give anymore.

Then war happens.

Historically, there have been many nations where the power was taken from the people by force of arms. There have been a few much more sinister governments who took advantage of confusion, fear, and anger to convince the populace that their Inalienable Rights were too dangerous, and should be forfeited for the greater good. In effect, the people voluntarily gave up their base Freedoms for a momentary sense of security–a deal with the devil.

Never give away a Freedom during times of war that you will miss during times of peace

You, me, our parents, and our grandparents have been the currency of a similar barter for nearly a century now. Since the early twentieth century (and probably before, but I consider the NFA of 1934 to be the first big offender), we have allowed the government of the United States to convince us that our guaranteed Liberties are just too dangerous. So they trimmed them here and there in the name of keeping us safe from ourselves. One of the largest and most sweeping infringements on our rights of the last 100 years has to be the Patriot Act.

The Patriot Act is the sort of draconian legislation that would have made the founding fathers start another revolution. It basically gives the government carte blanche to suspend a citizen’s Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment rights, if they decide that you might be a terrorist. That’s absolutely nuts, but we were so petrified of a bearded dude with a suicide vest that we allowed Big Brother to trample on our Inalienable Rights in exchange for a promise of safety.

And this happening in a country that revolted over some fucking tea.

This is all to say that we must be vigilant. An organized, civil, and Free society isn’t the sort of thing that just happens. It takes a lot of people making hard decisions. It takes risk. It takes sacrifice. Sometimes personal freedoms mean that you have to deal with idiots doing dumb things, dangerous things, or things that just don’t make any sense. But that’s part of the package. And it’s abso-fucking-lutely worth it.

Never give away a Freedom during times of war that you will miss during times of peace, because it’s not like the powers-that-be are going to relinquish it back to you when the threat has gone. They will hold that action as precedent and use it again and again until eventually it is the new normal. And then the only way you’re buying it back is with blood.

I’m afraid we’re already too far gone in the modern age. “Shall not be infringed” has been trampled into obsolescence. There are no more Self Evident Truths. When the government can tell you that you have to shutter your lawful business or that you can’t take your children to the park or that you don’t have the capacity to choose your acceptable level of risk, then we’ve lost what it means to be American. American used to mean Free to brave the wilds and push against the status quo. Now we must stay indoors, wear masks, and fear hugging our neighbors.

I’m not willing to cede these basic rights to anyone. You shouldn’t be either. I hope, deeply, that there will be legal precedents set with the SCOTUS that strike down executive orders from governors and mayors, if for no other reason than to say that the executive does not have the power to levy these types of mandates, even in a time of “crisis.”

Remember how I started this little piece. Are you willing to be forced to shutter yourself in when there isn’t a virus being spread around? Are you willing to be told you have to close your business, because your governor or mayor or the president said so? If your answer is yes, then I charge that you aren’t worthy of the protections afforded to you under the Amendments to the Constitution. If your answer, like mine, is a resounding “Go fuck yourself,” then I think we can be friends, and I’d be happy to fight beside you when they come to shut us down.

Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.

-Hodo

Categories
Be Better

No One Is Smart In a Bubble

Photo by mali maeder on Pexels.com

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply

Stephen R. Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

This dude, Stephen Covey, is a pretty smart motherfucker. He’s written a couple of hugely successful ‘self help’ books about how to become a more successful and ‘effective’ version of yourself. One of the most under-rated skills that smart, skilled, and generally worth-a-shit people focus on is the simple act of really listening. Listening to comprehend. Listening to learn and grow. Listening to expand.

Not listening to refute. Not listening to find loopholes. Not listening to teach.

Listening to understand can help save the world. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. I legitimately believe that the path we’re on right now, with all the unrest, the shouting each other down, the rampant victimhood, and immediate dismissal of others’ problems as somehow lesser than our own, is going to be the downfall of the United States of America, and maybe the world as we know it.

This is something we don’t see in our media much anymore. Watch any CNN/MSNBC/Fox, etc. panel and you will either see lots of people arguing with each other and talking over one another, or two people with exactly the same viewpoint nodding heads and patting each other on the back about how right they are. Very few members of the media invite someone on their show and really talk with them to learn what it is they have to say, to expand their own meager worldview by merging it with someone else’s. A counter-example of this is someone like Joe Rogan. On the Joe Rogan Experience, he invites all kinds of people on, from all walks of life, and has these extremely compelling conversations with them. He counters points here and there, but it’s with intent to press them for legitimacy, to make sure they aren’t bullshitting, and not with the intent to shoot them down and prove how right he is.

When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know; but when you listen, you may learn something new

Dalai Lama

I chose the title of this post because no matter where you look in history, you will find some really bright people, but you won’t find a single solitary asshole among them who got to be brilliant on their own. Archimedes, Socrates, da Vinci, Newton, Tesla, Einstein, Curie, Hawking. Read up on them, and you will find that none of them came by their brilliant discoveries on their own. They existed in a sea of other brilliant minds who contributed to their understanding and knowledge.

Every person sees the world through a filter of their own experiences. This works pretty well if humans don’t have to live around other humans who have lived different lives, but it really falls apart when we try to create policies and practices that will govern the lives of people from different parts of a country as large as the United States.

Consider for a moment the geographical and cultural spread of the United States as compared with other countries. Latitude has a massive impact on lifestyle and culture. Compare the approach to food and leisure of someone from the southern US to someone from the Midwest. Being in Texas, we see this within the borders of our own state. Life in Brownsville near the border with Mexico is completely different from life in Amarillo, near Oklahoma, simply due to weather. Add to these inherent differences that we also encourage people from all over the world who are fleeing oppression to come bask in the glory of Liberty and Freedom, and we get an immense spread of life experiences and expectations.

And all of these people have to live together harmoniously, or the greatest social experiment in the history of Earth falls apart in ruins.

And we’re on the brink of it. It’s up to us to save this thing called America.

It can’t be done without sharing perspectives. We all absolutely must learn to hear one another with openness and compassion, in order to build an inclusive and productive society.

Stop. Look. Listen. You might find we have a lot in common.

Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.

-Hodo

Categories
Guns and Stuff

Honey Badger Don’t Give a Fuck

In a modern day example of “What Second Amendment? I’ve never heard of the Second Amendment!” the ATF sent a Cease and Desist letter to Q, LLC regarding the manufacture of their Honey Badger pistol. Q responded to the letter and has taken up a legal battle with the ATF. Now, you can go read the letter yourself from the link above, or you can listen to me, a self-proclaimed expert and blowhard, break it down and rave ad nauseum about what a crock of shit this is, and how the ATF is such a dysfunctional and broken organization that it doesn’t even understand its own regulations.

Basically, the ATF is saying that Q is manufacturing short-barreled rifles (SBRs) and not pistols, when it’s pretty obvious (to anyone whose head lives outside of their rectums) that the Honey Badger, et al., are AR pistols. By the ATF’s own definitions, an SBR is a firearm with a rifled barrel under 16″ in length (overall length less than 26″) and that is intended to be fired from the shoulder. That last clause is the one the ATF is saying damns the Honey Badger to a life of hellfire and arbitrary NFA censorship.

Like most everything in the world of laws, legalities, and political double-cross, the devil is in the details. So what, you may ask, are those details?

Well, I’m glad you fucking asked.

Back in the old days of pistol manufacturing, folks (Sig, in particular) started replacing the stocks on shorty ARs with these awesome little forearm braces, so they could actually control the crazy little fucker in their hands instead of turning the entire countryside into a sporadically-planted field of 5.56mm Freedom Seeds. These braces had a split along the bottom and a Velcro nylon strap around them so these pioneers of shoot-em-up could have a safe and fun Saturday afternoon.

Brace in action, from guns.com

Initially, when questioned, the ATF issued a letter determining that shouldering a pistol no more turned it into an SBR than strapping a dildo to a hedgehog turned him into Ron Jeremy. Then later on in 2014, they probably decided they could make themselves more relevant if there were more people breaking their regulations, so they decided that in fact shouldering a pistol did magically turn it into an SBR, which seems nuts (reference above crude porn simile).

Fast-forward to 2017 and some goddamn freedom fighters got together and pestered the ATF enough to make them reconsider their idiocy, and the bureau issued a reversal. For those who don’t give a shit to try and parse bureaucratic bumfuckery, that whole letter basically says that a brace is a brace and not a stock, and if you don’t fuck with your brace to make it more comfortable or practical to fire from the shoulder, then you haven’t made a SBR, no matter how you shoot the damn thing. At the risk of bringing to light some shit that might further get the ATF pissing in their britches, I have to wonder out loud if something like the splitfix qualifies. I would argue that it doesn’t, since it’s primary purpose should be to aid in keeping the shape of the brace opening, thereby preventing undue wear on the brace and making it more effective when strapped to the forearm*.

But now, in what I view to be a prime example of governmental overreach and treachery, the ATF has once again decided that braces are stocks and pistols are rifles. It’s my personal belief as a red-blooded American who understand the English language and has read through such documents as the “Constitution of the United States of America,” and the appended document commonly referred to as “The Bill of Rights,” that we can solve all this hassle by just repealing the National Firearms Act and moving on with our lives. When I read a statement that says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” and then look at a law whose express purpose is to infringe on my right to keep and bear arms, I have to wonder how it even became law in the first place.

So, in summary: Fuck the ATF and their arbitrary limitations on firearms; Fuck the National Firearms Act and its arbitrary limitations on firearms; and Fuck anyone who thinks that going against God-given rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is an American agenda.

For more, you can always just throw something into your favorite search engine (I use Duck Duck Go because information security is what I do for a living and Google can suck my nuts) or you can listen to Colion Noir talk about it, because he’s a badass.

Stay ready. Stay safe. Stay free.

-Hodo