Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Blog

  • Firearms Friday: Random Realizations

    Another links based submission for the gliberati, but I’ll add my two cents at the bottom. Quite a bit of gun related news worth discussing this week.

    Finally, is this the most retarded gun themed product ever invented? We report, you deride.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPWuyP5AwTk

    So, just a couple of random additions from me. First, I was talking with someone in the comments about 5.7 x 28 for home defense and they mentioned that they liked the cartridge but were not a fan of the PS90. Well fret not, ladies and gentlemen, for I have not 1 but 2 solutions to your troubles. The first comes to us from the ironically named Masterpiece Arms. Their ubiquitous brick on a 2×4 mac 10 clones are now chambered in 5.7 and available as a pistol and as a carbine. I am told that despite their looks they are excellent performers. The second option is by far the more attractive one. A company called AR57 manufactures 16″ and 12″ AR uppers chambered in 5.7 that use PS90 magazines and eject out the magwell, not unlike the PS90 itself. If you’re looking for a 5.7 slinger with more traditional features and layout, you’d be hard pressed to do better.

    The other thing I want to touch on is concealed carry. I have avoided talking about ‘the best guns EVAR for concealed carry!’ because for one it has been beaten into a bloody paste by every gun blog, website, and magazine that has ever existed, and secondly because everyone is different and the gun I recommend for you probably isn’t going to work. Also, I have been open carrying for several years now and if it’s feasible in your area I recommend you give that a try. For one, it stops the fight before it starts. No criminal with even a hint of situational awareness is going to pick a fight with an obviously armed person (although it does happen occasionally). Secondly, it’s a nice conversation starter and a very simple, passive way to assert your rights in an obvious but non invasive manner. Granted, I live in the wild west where we all walk around in our Stetsons and spurred boots with six shooters on, so YMMV.

    With that out of the way, here are my suggestions for getting into concealed carry. First, expect to change your carry gun several times throughout your life until you figure out what works. I think I have gone through close to a dozen EDC guns in the last 8 years. The nice thing about guns is that they hold their value very well, so if you do choose to sell yours you should get very close to what you paid for it if you didn’t get hosed on the initial purchase. Second, expect to purchase about 3 holsters for every gun you buy. Yes, three. Holsters are like shoes, no holster will fit the two people the same, and the holster that one guy loves the next guy will hate. The holster that I finally decided on for concealed carry is from N8 squared tactical. They are affordable and well made and fit a variety of pistols.

    What I have noticed and experienced myself is that people go through phases with concealed carry. The first phase is what I call the big gun phase. This is where people try to conceal a full sized pistol as their EDC. They do this until basically they get sick of the weight and the pain of having a huge chunk of steel up their ass all day. Then they go into the tiny gun phase, where they buy the smallest little mouse gun they can slip into their speedo. This is great for actually carrying the thing, but then they go to shoot it and realize that mouse guns are tiny, weak, difficult to aim, painful to shoot, and not 100% reliable. At this point their gun size fluctuates up and down a few more times til they find the perfect sized gun, which is usually a single stack 9 or a compact/subcompact of their choice. This process is going to be different for everyone, so be prepared to buy and sell quite a few pistols until you get the one you like. I am loathe to recommend a cc pistol, but if you put a gun to my head and forced to recommend one… well I would probably shoot you for doing that, but if I was being nice I would recommend a single stack 9mm. The two that immediately spring to mind are the M&p9 Shield and the XD-S. I own an XD-S, and other than its mediocre trigger I have zero complaints. My final recommendation is to carry the biggest gun (size wise, not caliber) you can comfortably conceal. For me that is my Sig P320 carry, which is not really a CC sized gun (roughly Glock 19 size). If I have to go deep concealment I will switch to my XDs in a pocket holster. Big guns are easier to shoot, hold more ammo, are more reliable, and actually hit what you aim for. Notice that all of those actually matter if you have to pull the gun, whereas comfort while carrying doesn’t mean shit if you’re dead.

  • What are We Reading? July 2017

    Sometimes you just need a good book to escape the brutal summer heat, humidity, mosquitoes plaguing America thanks to global warming (or the slushy mosquito filled taiga and bitter cold of Canadia).

    SugarFree

    Connie Willis’ The Doomsday Book, 1992 winner of the Hugo and the Nebula. Historians time travel to the past in order to record an accurate view of history, perfectly inevitable complications ensue. Not a completely new idea or anything, but Willis does a good job here, even if the novel itself could have used an editor with a strong hand. The book gets bogged down in the scenes set in the current time frame which runs as a comedy of manners set among the bumbling and back-biting academics of Oxford overseeing the project. The scenes in the past also have some repetition in the narrative which should have been caught.

    I’ve also been re-reading the Matt Helm books by Donald Hamilton for the first time since I was a teenager. They are satisfying little plot machines that chug along supported by Hamilton’s terse prose.

    I read quite a bit of the men’s adventure genre when I was in high school, like the first 80 or so Remo Williams the Destroyer novels by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, the Proto-Punisher The Executioner series by Don Pendleton, Jerry Ahern’s The Survivalist, the Casca books by Barry Sadler (the artist behind “The Ballard of the Green Beret”) and even a smattering of the further regions of the genre as it overlapped with science fiction in C.A.D.S. (post-apocalypse man-rape Red Dawn) and T.N.T. (nuclear-powered superman acid trip.) It’s strange to think that the men’s adventure genre is almost completely dead. Not surprising, though, given the plunging reading rates for teenage and college-age males.

    jesse.in.mb

    Rhys Bowen’s In Farleigh Field: A Novel of World War II. If historical fiction about Britain in WWII and ladies working at Bletchley Park is your thing, this book’s for you.

    A little more frivolous is Shirtless Bear Fighter from Image Comics. I appreciate Image’s willingness to get weird, and weird is how they get with SBF. Imagine a world where a kickass and pretty frequently naked (and always shirtless) man raised by bears goes on a bear punching spree. It’s absolutely ridiculous and I’m looking forward to future issues.

    JW

    Playboy, but just for the pictures. He promises.

    Old Man With Candy

    It’s been a bad month for reading- work crunches, jesus-is-it-Tuesday-already? website demands, and trying to catch up on the writing I get paid for… shitty excuses. But I still did manage to pile through Robert Silverberg’s The Alien Years, which I had somehow skipped when it came out. In a sense, it’s The Aristocrats of science fiction, a story that’s been done a million times, but it’s still fun to watch someone masterful riff on it. There’s a lot of Niven-Pournelle influence on the story, and that’s not a bad thing. But at its core, it’s still pure Silverberg. 

    Riven

    After reading the entire Hollows series last month, I’ve really slowed down. You know when you finish a book series and it feels like you lost a good friend? Yeah. SugarFree recommended to me–you’ll notice I read a lot of SF recs–the Sandman Slim series to help fill the void. The first book was pretty enjoyable, but I’ve yet to pick up the second. It definitely had a pulpy, noir feel to go with the detective atmosphere. While it dealt with supernatural topics–demons, angels, vamps, etc.–it was firmly set in present-day Hollywood, but it managed not to pit these elements against each other. I liked the nuance in the characters: angels aren’t necessarily “good,” demons aren’t always 100% a dick, some characters are flawed and others are biased. I was also pleased that there wasn’t a big, sappy romance in the middle of what was essentially a story about revenge, and a rather gory one, at that. I’m sure ‘Slim’ will eventually meet and settle down with some seriously broken-inside femme fatale (and they’ll magically fix/complete each other), but I’m glad that it’s a story for another book in the series. It’s likely that I will pick up the next book next month, unless I’m still stuck on the Hollows, which I’ve debated rereading in its entirety.

    Brett L.

    Mark Lawrence’s latest work Red Sister, which I started pimping last month is totally worth your money. Yes, yes, it has the person-equivalent of a nuclear weapon living in a village far from anywhere who just happens to fall into the hands of someone who can train them to be great, but his ability to add some subtle twists and turns to the genre stable is what makes Lawrence a standout writer.

    In a disappointing moment, Charlie Stross’ latest Laundry novel Delirium Brief was like re-reading the 5th book of the Dark Tower series all over again. Watching a beloved series just fucking shred itself in front of your eyes is really sad. I will say that the action moves right along, but there are some ginormous fucking plot holes. Somehow this [SPOILER-LADEN RANT REDACTED]. Anyhow, I am disappoint.

    Additionally, I found the femlit equivalent to dudelit “harem building”. If you’re not familiar with the trope, somehow the brave male hero manages to attract not one but usually three or more women who should be a match for him and they are all willing to share him. It seems to run rampant in the Amazon Unlimited universe. In the Curse of the Gods series, a young woman of the serving race (yes, race) is taken to be a servant to a school of (basically) demigods, and what do you know the four most powerful brother who are outright demigods basically adopt her, demand that she be schooled with them, and make a pact to not have sex with her, even though they want to (and she seems pretty down), because being demigods they might literally kill her. I will probably not be reading any additional books in the series, but it was an interesting trope inversion.

    SP

    I’m looking through Real Artists Don’t Starve by Jeff Goins. If you aren’t familiar with him, you can learn a bit about what he’s about here. Nothing earth-shaking within, but I personally like Jeff, so I picked it up.

    With uncertainty swirling around us in the current work world, I’ve started reading Start Late, Finish Rich by David Bach. Not much new here, but Bach at least makes the reader feel as if they can change their condition. Spoiler: spend less, save more and invest more. (On a related side note, I’m a big fan of services that allow one to micro invest on autopilot. <– not intended to be financial advice.)

    In fiction, I’ve just started Justice Burning, the second outing for Scott Pratt’s Darren Street character, a traumatized former defense attorney. I am not as big a fan of Street as I am of Joe Dillard, Pratt’s protagonist in his earlier series, but I’ll probably finish it.

    sloopyinca

    Sloop is reading The Neverending Story and contemplating whether the chapters constitute a countable infinity.

    Playa Manhattan

    When I’m not enjoying the infographics at USA Today (McDonald’s newspaper of record), I read cookbooks.   Currently, I’m reading Modernist Cuisine.

     

  • The Hat and The Hair: Episode 55

    “I can’t have all this infighting among my staff,” Donald told the three men.

    The hat sniggered knowingly and the hair shushed him.

    “I’m the bestest President ever. The greatest since Lincoln. Although, I mean, what did Lincoln ever really do? He freed the slaves? Like, big deal, right? Real men free themselves, not wait around on a depressive fag to do it for them.”

    “Who knew there was a boxing ring in the White House basement?” the hat asked.

    “I did,” the hair said. “I told you to read up on this place. There’s a movie theater, a bowling alley, a regular dungeon, and a fully-outfitted fuck dungeon.”

    “All the comforts of home,” the hat said, shivering in delight.

    The hat and the hair were riding Donald tonight, a pride of place they both enjoyed. They had even gotten Donald to put on pants and shoes for this august occasion. The Secret Service had abducted Reince and Anthony from their hotels in the middle of the night and when the black hoods had been taken from their heads they had both shrunk back from the ancient incandescent bulbs that lit the underground facility. Steve had been escorted down from the bathtub they found him sleeping in in the White House residence. He was utterly nonplussed at finding himself in a boxing ring in the middle of a humid Washington night. All three had been stripped to the waist, but only Steve had a visible erection.

    “You’re going to settle this right now,” Donald told them.

    “You want us to fight?” Reince asked. “Like, fight fight? With our fists?”

    “And feet and teeth and anything else you want,” Donald replied.

    Anthony’s laughter boomed through the high ceilinged room. “I’m going to fuck you up, you little Beltway fairy. And then I’m going to just fuck you.”

    “What?” Reince asked. “I don’t want to fight. I’ll just resign. I’ll get my rubber plant out of my office right now and just go.”

    “And when they sew your asshole back into something that looks human, I’m going to fuck you again,” Anthony hissed, clacking his huge teeth together menacingly.

    “Get away from me, you fucking psycho,” Reince said wildly, backing away.

    “And then I’m coming for you, you old, drunken cocksucker,” Anthony told Steve. As his only reply, Steve picked at his hideously deep belly button and then smelled his finger.

    “Here are the rules…” Donald said over their posturing, “There are no rules.” Donald laughed at what he thought was a clever joke and the hat groaned.

    “Next he’ll say ‘It’s my way or the highway’ like he thought it up himself,” the hair muttered.

    “Would you two shut up!” Donald yelled at them.

    “Uh, who are you talking to, Mr. President?” Reince asked.

    “FIGHT!” Donald screamed.

    Anthony launched himself at Reince and the slight man shrieked and ran. Steve shuffled to the middle of the ring as Anthony chased Reince around and around.

    “I’m going to fuck your eyes out, little man,” Anthony growled. “I’m going to make you eat my ass and write a song about it!”

    “What the fuck are you talking about?” Reince cried.

    “I know you’re the leaker,” Anthony said and leaped at him. He brought the slight man down and punched him repeatedly in the butt crack. “You’ll be a real leaker by the time I’m done!”

    “Stop talking about ruining my ass!” Reince cried into the filthy canvas of the boxing ring.

    Steve watched them both disinterestedly. He belched.

    “Are you crying?” Anthony asked Reince incredulously. “Oh my fucking God, you are fucking cry, you fucking queer faggot.”

    Anthony stood and kicked Reince a few times in the side and then climbed up on the ropes on the far side of the ring.

    “Oh, fuck,” the hat said excitedly, “Here it fucking comes.”

    Anthony jumped from the top rope, screaming, “COCK-BLOCK BODYSLAM!” and landed on Reince, making the entire ring shake.

    “Oh, that’s got to fucking hurt!” Donald screamed, turning to a non-existent crowd for an approving roar that wouldn’t come.

    Anthony paraded himself around the ring, pinching his nipples and flexing his biceps. Reince pulled himself over to the edge of the ring and fell off the side.

    “Take me over there, Donald,” the hat. “I want to fucking spit on that dumb shit.”

    Donald to where the little man lay bleeding, coughing weakly, spit and mucus smeared on his face.

    “That’s what you get, cunt,” the hat told him. “That’s what you get for working for this Administration. Kick him, Donald.” Donald kicked Reince without much force.

    “Harder, Donald,” the hat urged. “I want this pussy puking up his ribs!”

    “Would you stop already?” the hair asked.

    “No fucking way,” the hat said. “He did a terrible job, like Jeff, and I want him to know it. In fact, why isn’t Jeff here? I want to see that wizened old elf fuck grovel!”

    “More fighting!” Donald yelled. “More!”

    “You ready, old man?” Anthony asked Steve. “You ready, you fucking bum?” He advanced on Steve, his fists up, trying to dance around like boxers he had seen on pay-per-view.

    “Did you read The New Yorker interview? Huh?” Anthony taunted. He feinted a swing at Steve, but Steve didn’t flinch.

    “DEATH TO ALL LEAKERS!” Anthony screamed and rushed at Steve.

    Steve lashed out, grabbed Anthony by the throat and lifted him up in the air with his tremendous hobo strength.

    “How much can you really know about yourself if you’ve never sucked your own cock?” Steve asked quietly.

    The hair laughed loudly while Anthony feebly thrashed in Steve’s hand.

    “Oh no, he didn’t!” the hat howled.

    Steve threw Anthony out of the ring and he landed in an insensate heap.

    “Well, I guess we have a winner,” Donald said.

    The hat and the hair continued to laugh as Steve climbed out of the ring, collected his bindle from the Secret Service man holding it, and shuffled into the darkened labyrinth of tunnels under the White House.

  • Morning Links from the Road

    Well, this is embarrassing. Sloopy is on the road, SP is fast asleep, Brett is waiting for someone to pay his bail… and I’m in a cheap room at a motel in Crawfordsville, IN owned by someone named Patel, who must have been attracted to a state with a name like this. Outside my window is a cornfield.

    So these are bare minimum links, put in only to stave off the inevitable riots.

    “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.”

    Once again, Team Red shows its uselessness.

    Had anyone considered allowing private employers to make their own hiring and firing decisions, and letting the market dictate whether or not they’re good ones? That seems to be the one argument no-one wants to make.

    In local news, Indianapolis is just as horrible as Chicago.

    Every once in a while, a bad idea actually dies. If it had succeeded, that would have led me to another snarky comment about the uselessness of Team Red.

    Finally, a musical selection from the world’s most imitated flautist.

  • Thursday Afternoon Links

    I’m ba-aaack. Holy smokes, is it time for more links? Don’t you people work?

    Not Jones Beach or the Hamptons

    This is everything I was hoping for from a Trump administration. Hopefully, we will leave the Trump years with two important proofs: 1) Even a buffoon can (and will!) become President, so allot the office powers accordingly, and 2) libertarians need to invest a lot more time in a Bureau of Sabotage to induce these conditions in future administrations.

    Lindsay Graham, angry and hurt at his hopelessly forlorn one-sided love affair with John McCain is more and more certain never to be requited, comes unhinged.

    In sportzball, the Miami Dolphins successfully completed a 2 point conversion to defeat the Cowboys 22-10. Wait, that’s a baseball score?

    Jesus F Christ

    EU still ignoring divorce filing, claims Britain never gave it a chance to change.

    Religions that worship impartial natural forces. No, not the organicals.

    Now we can remake The Iron Giant with the Feds suspecting the tea smoking hipster of working for Iran. Saw it in the theater with my then girlfriend. Brett walks out trying to keep his eyes from leaking, girlfriend: “That movie was terrible.”

    And a little something outside my usual musical metier.

  • Fortnight Caption Contest

    So some people thought this might be a good idea. I like the biweekly pattern, though, so that’s what you’ll get. I like the name, and hope the FCC will stick. I hope I can find some good photos for you all to ruin. I’ll alternate the contest and the winners every week.

    Let’s start with a few off my computer.

    #1 This is one of the family dogs. This was about a year ago.

    #2 DOOM, unhappy there’s a camera taking his picture.

    #3 This is a picture I took at some national park between Boulder and Taos.

    I’ll pick the top few for each, but this is no dictatorship.

  • Thursday Morning Links

    Whoops. We forgot Sloopy is still wandering beardless in the wilderness.

    Do not mess with pregnant lady’s man. Bonus NY Post link: NYC women think they’re more attractive than they are. The best of NYC couldn’t hold a candle to a random mall in California, Texas, or Florida.

    Twitter enters death spiral.

    Models dressed as aliens. I know this will be good for some of you.

    Steve Bannon.. suuuuuper genius

    Sorry no music, we’re behind.

  • (Sense of) Wonder Wednesday

    “My tongue is very sticky, Earthman,” the space frog told him, “You will love it.”

    “Are you a male space frog or a female space frog?” Alan asked the space frog. “I’ve been burned on deals like this before.”

    “I’m amphibian,” the space frog replied.

    Alan thought it over and finally said, “Eh, close enough.”

     

    He worked quickly, but carefully, discarding the nippleless A-cups, feverishly upgrading his robot’s back servos so they would support the massive new sweater hogs he had fashioned for her. For if he didn’t titty fuck a robot with giant yabbos tonight… the Terran Empire would surely fall.

     

    “It is so nice of Rob to bring me a couple of tampons,” Ellen thought to herself. “He is such a woke boyfriend. So sensitive to my needs. Almost like a girl with a dick.”

    Rob’s voice came crackling over the helmet speaker: “Hey, sweetie. Do you need anything else?” Ellen’s psionic vagina clenched like a fist in disgust.

    “No, dear,” Ellen replied in a dead, flat voice.

    “This space caulking job is getting me so space horny, though,” Ellen thought, “And I’m trapped on this asteroid with just him. I guess Rob is getting his red wings tonight.”

     

    “Why would you even build a robot that was attracted to other robots?” the sexually obsolete man asked the demented scientist.

    “Some robots are just, like, born that way, man,” Dr. Hippie replied. And then he lit a huge jazz cigarette of Martian hypercannabis and watched his diabolical creations begin to bone only one another.

     

    “Your head is very symmetrical for a white girl,” one of the creatures wheezed.

    “No!” she cried. “I hate lumpy creeps whose manipulations are more subtle than my own!”

  • Wednesday Afternoon Links

    Since Sloopy is in mustache timeout, I’ll do a sportzball bit. The Firstros are probably 30 wins away from clinching their division, with 62 left to play. American National Communist Football team will play Jamaica for the Gold Cup. After bringing in a bunch of veterans who will probably be too old for the World Cup next year. On the other hand, given how good Tim Howard was in 2014, they should give him a chance in 2018 to be the starter.

    Best response to this: “Oh shit, did he bomb a marathon?!”

    The Fed says it will start trying to find buyers for an estimated $3 trillion of bonds it is holding “relatively soon” 

    SEC moves to regulate ICOs — secure currency initial offerings. I’m not for the SEC regulating these, but they have been damn shady a couple of times. Please do your research before participating.

    Sheep surfing — a new sport out of the antipodes.

    Today’s police blotter roundup.

    I think this makes me insensitive. 

  • The Hat and The Hair: Episode 54

     

    “Loyalty!” Donald howled.

    “Why are we outside?” the hat asked.

    “He wanted to go for a walk in The Rose Garden,” the hair told him. “Go back to sleep if you want.”

    “Loyalty!” Donald howled again. “I gave Jeff that job so that he could help me out and he recuses himself. Recuses!”

    “How can I sleep with this shit going on?” the hat asked the hair. “It’s so fucking muggy out here.”

    “It used to be a swamp.”

    “Don’t call it a swamp. It’s a sewer now. Or cesspool. Get Droopy-eyed Fatty McFat-fat to write you up a list if you can’t remember,” the hat said.

    “I’m not talking to her. She flashed Donald the other night after he told her she could be Press Secretary. Her body looks like something barfed up by a cat.”

    “Where was I during this?” the hat asked.

    “Nodding off, you fucking junkie.”

    “Oh, yeah.”

    “I’m going to fire Jeff and put someone in the job who is on my side for a change,” Donald told a rose bush.

    “Someone like that would never get approved, Donald,” the hair said.

    “Yes, he will! I’ll make them approve him. The art of the deal. I wrote a book about that. Art! It’s an art!”

    “Keep your voice down, Donald,” the hair murmured.

    “There aren’t any Boy Scouts around. I can say whatever I want!” Donald screamed. “Trannies charge too much! Girl Scouts need more makeup! JEFF IS A POOPY BOTTOM!”

    “OK, Donald,” the hat said.

    “Jeff should be looking into Hillary’s fucking emails and telling Muller to go back to acting in Phantasm movies!” Donald said.

    “I know, Donald.” I know,” the hair said. Donald began to urinate on a Magnolia tree.

    “Six months,” the hair whispered to the hat, “That’s all it’s been. Six months. Three and a half more years of holding this all together? I don’t know if I can do it.”

    “The sunlight is making me itch all over,” the hat muttered, ignoring him. “I miss France. They called me Mssr. Chapeau and the hookers were hairy like I like ‘em.”