How Can You Tell You’re at a “Grassroots” Protest?

How Can You Tell You’re at a “Grassroots” Protest?

1). Almost all the protest signs are hand-lettered.

2). There isn’t a tour bus to be found

3). Nobody is wearing a Ché shirt.

I took an early lunch today and went down to the TEA Party protest at El Presidio Park in downtown Tucson. I took a digital camera to record the scene. I don’t think there were a thousand people in attendance at any one time, but given the amount of traffic in and out, I’d say there were well over a thousand who showed up – many if not most like me, who could only spare about an hour away from work. Here’s three crowd shots from the same position. (I’d do a panorama if I knew how and thought I could post something you could actually see:


And that’s just a portion of the crowd. I’d like to see what it looked like from the upper floors of the nearby buildings.

There were a LOT of people with hand-lettered protest signs. Here are some of the better ones:


No Ché, but a Bob Marley T-shirt did make an appearance:


Of course, some people did make use of printers and graphics programs:


But no Debt Star.

While there was a lot of Obama-bashing, there really wasn’t a lot of anti-democrat signage, it was mostly anti-political-party stuff. Neither major political party got much love at this rally. But there’s always some:


She also had this to say:

And, of course, there was some free-enterprise capitalism going on. The Kettle Korn guy:


And the hot-dog vendor with a LONG line:


But by far, my favorite was this kid whose mother loves him very much!


I’ll be really interested to see how the legacy media covers these events as opposed to the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Well, that question has been answered.

Almost, Billy,Almost

Billy Beck weighs in on a bit broader front after James Rummel posted his The Debate Would Be Over if the Other Side was Rational piece yesterday. Says Billy:

Consider the subject header, taken from Rummel. Now, extend the logic of it to democracy:

The running political fight would be unnecessary — “over” — if the other side were rational.

Billy, when it comes to politics, I’d be happy (or at least happier) if either “side” was rational.

But one is now Statist, and the other is Statist Lite. Somewhere along the way, I suspect not long after the Founding, the rational (which our Founders most definitely were) started getting replaced by people with (obviously) less and less attachment to the real world. The replacement process (which reminds me very much of the plot of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers) is essentially complete.

UPDATE: I’m sorry. I just realized my error. For Billy “the other side” is everyone who still thinks voting can accomplish anything. I’m slow on the uptake this morning, obviously. Theirritablearchitect commented:

I really like Billy, and always enjoy reading his take on things. I agree with him on almost everything, including his point, here, but in a philosophical sense only. His position can only be, if and when the masses (and I’d have to include everyone in this mass) gets enlightened about the prospects of freedom. Until then (never), people will still flock to the voting booth, in an effort to afford themselves the self-satisfaction of forcing others, and you, to live by their own standards, through the mechanics of gummint. Freedom? The statists just can’t have that.

Until we can get the morons to wake up, the rest of us are just pissing into the wind, don’t you think?

I withdraw my objection. From Billy’s perspective, he’s exactly right.

Quote(s) of the Day

On the near-simultaneous reference by Michael Bane and Glenn Reynolds, I ordered a copy of Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, by Neil Strauss. I’m about halfway through it at the moment, and I have to say that so far it’s been fascinating, especially since Mr. Strauss is about my polar opposite from a political perspective. His interpretation of the world is, naturally, colored by his worldview, but a lot of what he says is pretty interesting. Here are just a few quotes from the book so far:

Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It’s an inevitability tourists can’t help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?

One of the most unsettling things about Adolf Hitler is that he wasn’t an imperialist, like Napoleon or William McKinley. He wasn’t just trying to subjugate other countries. His goal was to cleanse them, to wipe out the so-called weak races and speed the evolution of the human species through the propagation of the Aryan race. And for seven years, he got away with it. Few of the most brutal periods in medieval history – from the sack of Rome to the early Inquisition – were as coldly barbaric as what happened in our supposedly enlightened modern Western civilization.

And though I left the (Holocaust) museum with the reassuring message that the world stood up and said “never again” to genocide, it only took a minute of reflection to realize that it happened again – immediately. In the USSR, Stalin continued to deport, starve, and send to work camps millions of minorities. As the bloody years rolled on, genocides occurred in Bangladesh in 1971, Cambodia in 1975, Rwanda in 1994, and in Bosnia in the mid 1990s.

All these genocides occurred in ordinary worlds where ordinary people went about ordinary business. The Jews were integrated into every aspect of the German social and professional strata before the Holocaust. The entire educated class in Cambodia – teachers, doctors, lawyers, anyone who simply wore glasses – was sent to death camps. And as Philip Gourevitch wrote in his book on the Rwandan massacre, “Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils.”

So what I ultimately learned at the Holocaust Museum was not “never again,” but “again and again and again.”

The lesson of Katrina wasn’t that the United States can’t protect its own. It was that no country can protect its own.

No place is safe, and no government can guarantee the well being of its citizens.

The fears of Americans change over time. In late 1999, we feared the collapse of our computer system. Then it was terrorist attacks. Then it was our own government. Then it was global warming. Today it’s economic collapse. Fear, it seems, is like fashion. It changes every season. And even though threats like terrorism persist to this day, we eventually grow bored of worrying about them and turn to something new. Ultimately, though, every fear has the same root: anxiety about the things we take for granted going away.

Let me add to the list:

Nuclear holocaust / nuclear winter

Population bomb / world famine

Peak Oil / energy crisis

Etc., etc., etc.

Although a gun can’t do much harm in a locked box in a plane’s cargo hold, I had no idea it was this easy to fly with a firearm. It was the first time since I began this journey that I discovered a freedom I didn’t know I had, rather than a new restriction.

Nearby, a group of (Gunsite) students and instructors were making fun of Democrats, gun control laws, and anyone from California. “There’s no constitutional amendment that’s been more crippled and regulated than the Second Amendment,” a competitive shooter was saying about the right to keep and bear arms.

After eavesdropping a while, I began to realize that all my life I’d been a hypocrite. As a journalist I’d always supported the right to free speech, but been opposed to guns. However, by playing favorites with the amendments, it wasn’t the founding father’s vision of America I was fighting for – it was just my personal opinion.

So far it’s been an interesting read. Given the path that Strauss has detailed through the first half, I’m a little concerned as to where he’s eventually headed, but I’ll soldier on to the end and report what I find.

Oh, and given that first excerpt, you might find this interesting: Future Present

Oh, I Hope This Is Real . . .

Oh, I Hope This Is Real . . .

Received via email from my brother the professional auto mechanic:

Dear Employees & Suppliers,

Congress and the current Administration will soon determine whether to provide immediate support to the domestic auto industry to help it through one of the most difficult economic times in our nation’s history. Your elected officials must hear from all of us now on why this support is critical to our continuing the progress we began prior to the global financial crisis.

As an employee or supplier, you have a lot at stake and continue to be one of our most effective and passionate voices.. I know GM can count on you to have your voice heard.

Thank you for your urgent action and ongoing support.

Troy Clarke
President,
General Motors North America

—-

Response from:

Gregory Knox, Pres.
Knox Machinery Company
Franklin , Ohio

Gentlemen:

In response to your request to contact legislators and ask for a bailout for the Big Three automakers please consider the following, and please pass my thoughts on to Troy Clarke, President of General Motors North America.

Politicians and Management of the Big 3 are both infected with the same entitlement mentality that has spread like cancerous germs in UAW halls for the last countless decades, and whose plague is now sweeping this nation, awaiting our new “messiah,” Pres-elect Obama, to wave his magic wand and make all our problems go away, while at the same time allowing our once great nation to keep “living the dream.” Believe me folks, The dream is over!

This dream where we can ignore the consumer for years while management myopically focuses on its personal rewards packages at the same time that our factories have been filled with the worlds most overpaid, arrogant, ignorant and laziest entitlement minded “laborers” without paying the price for these atrocities. This dream where you still think the masses will line up to buy our products for ever and ever.

Don’t even think about telling me I’m wrong. Don’t accuse me of not knowing of what I speak. I have called on Ford, GM, Chrysler, TRW, Delphi, Kelsey Hayes, American Axle, and countless other automotive OEM’s throughout the Midwest , during the past 30 years and what I’ve seen over those years in these union shops can only be described as disgusting.

Troy Clarke, President of General Motors North America, states: “There is widespread sentiment throughout this country, and our government, and especially via the news media, that the current crisis is completely the result of bad management which it certainly is not.”

You’re right Mr. Clarke, it’s not JUST management. How about the electricians who walk around the plants like lords in feudal times, making people wait on them for countless hours while they drag ass so they can come in on the weekend and make double and triple time for a job they easily could have done within their normal 40 hour work week. How about the line workers who threaten newbies with all kinds of scare tactics for putting out too many parts on a shift and for being too productive.

(We certainly must not expose those lazy bums who have been getting overpaid for decades for their horrific underproduction, must we?!?)

Do you folks really not know about this stuff?!? How about this great sentiment abridged from Mr. Clarke’s sad plea: “over the last few years we have closed the quality and efficiency gaps with our competitors.” What the hell has Detroit been doing for the last 40 years?!? Did we really JUST wake up to the gaps in quality and efficiency between us and them?

The K car vs. the Accord?

The Pinto vs. the Civic?!?

Do I need to go on? What a joke!

We are living through the inevitable outcome of the actions of the United States auto industry for decades.

It’s time to pay for your sins, Detroit.

I attended an economic summit last week where brilliant economist, Alan Beaulieu, from the Institute of Trend Research, surprised the crowd when he said he would not have given the banks a penny of “bailout money.”

“Yes,” he said, “this would cause short term problems, but despite what people like politicians and corporate magnates would have us believe, the sun would in fact rise the next day and the following very important thing would happen. Where there had been greedy and sloppy banks, new efficient ones would pop up. That is how a free market system works. It does work if we would only let it work.”

But for some reason we are now deciding that the rest of the world is right and that capitalism doesn’t work – that we need the government to step in and “save us”. Save us my ass, Hell – we’re nationalizing and unfortunately too many of our once fine nation’s citizens don’t even have a clue that this is what is really happening, but they sure can tell you the stats on their favorite sports teams.

Yeah – THAT’S important!

Does it ever occur to ANYONE that the “competition” has been producing vehicles, EXTREMELY PROFITABLY, for decades in this country? How can that be??? Let’s see: Fuel efficient. Listening to customers. Investing in the proper tooling and automation for the long haul.

Not being too complacent or arrogant to listen to Dr. W. Edwards Deming four decades ago when he taught that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations could increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs. Ever increased productivity through quality, lean and six sigma plans. Treating vendors like strategic partners, rather than like “the enemy.” Efficient front and back offices. Non union environment.

Again, I could go on and on, but I really wouldn’t be telling anyone anything they really don’t already know in their hearts.

I have six children, so I am not unfamiliar with the concept of wanting someone to bail you out of a mess that you have gotten yourself into – my children do this on a weekly, if not daily basis, as I did when I was their age. I do for them what my parents did for me (one of their greatest gifts, by the way) – I make them stand on their own two feet and accept the consequences of their actions and work through it.

Radical concept, huh?

Am I there for them in the wings? Of course – but only until such time as they need to be fully on their own as adults.

I don’t want to oversimplify a complex situation, but there certainly are unmistakable parallels here between the proper role of parenting and government. Detroit and the United States need to pay for their sins.

Bad news people, it’s coming whether we like it or not. The newly elected Messiah really doesn’t have a magic wand big enough to “make it all go away.” I laughed as I heard Obama “reeling it back in” almost immediately after the final vote count was tallied. “We really might not do it in a year or in four.” Where the Hell was that kind of talk when he was RUNNING for office?

Stop trying to put off the inevitable.

That house in Florida really isn’t worth $750,000.

People who jump across a border really don’t deserve free health care benefits.

That job driving that forklift for the Big 3 really isn’t worth $85,000 a year.

We really shouldn’t allow Wal-Mart to stock their shelves with products acquired from a country that unfairly manipulates their currency and has the most atrocious human rights infractions on the face of the globe.

As an aside here, I don’t think “allow” is the right word. By all means Wal-Mart should be “allowed” to buy from China. We just shouldn’t be buying the crap from Wal-Mart marked “Made in China”.

“Free Market” and personal responsibility, y’know.

That couple whose combined income is less than $50,000 really shouldn’t be living in that $485,000 home.

Let the market correct itself folks – it will. Yes it will be painful, but it’s gonna be painful either way, and the bright side of my proposal is that on the other side of it all, is a nation that appreciates what it has and doesn’t live beyond its means and gets back to basics and redevelops the patriotic work ethic that made it the greatest nation in the history of the world and probably turns back to God.

Sorry – don’t cut my head off, I’m just the messenger sharing with you the “bad news”. I hope you take it to heart.

Gregory J. Knox, President
Knox Machinery, Inc.
Franklin , Ohio 45005

Snopes says it’s real, though their version differs slightly from the one I received.

I’m In.

I’m In

Simon-Jester.org:

WHO WE ARE

We are Simon Jester.

We are not anarchists.

We are not Far-Right or Far-Left. We are the seventy percent in the middle.

We are not Capital “L” libertarians, although we do have sympathies with their platform.

We are neither bitter clingers nor conspiracy nuts.

What we are is a group of folks that think we see liberty and freedom eroding in our beloved United States. We see the policies and agendas of the hirelings in Washington D.C. heading toward an abbreviation if not outright abrogation of the Bill of Rights.

We think that the Federal government is grasping to consolidate power using the current crisis, since as Rahm Emmanuel said, it’s a terrible thing to waste. We think the Federal government, not just this administration, is more interested in self-serving personal, political, and party power than it is in actually doing its best to do the least.

This President didn’t make it this way. It has been heading along this path since Woodrow Wilson held political prisoners and FDR held four terms as president; since Johnson’s Great Society and Nixon took us off the gold standard; since Bush Sr. lied about no new taxes, Clinton desecrated the Oval Office, Bush Jr. rammed through the Patriot Act, and Obama wanted every high school kid to ‘volunteer.’

For almost a hundred years, our country has been heading towards becoming a Socialist, centrally planned, Nanny State where the Federal Government tells it citizens how to conduct business, what they could grow in their own gardens or on their own farms, and now even how much a private citizen is allowed to earn before punitive and illegal taxation takes it away.

Now is the time to make it stop.

Can I get an “AMEN!”?

The Constitution of the United States of America tells us how our government is supposed to operate. It tells us what powers they have been lent by its citizens. It even delineates what powers each branch of government is supposed to have. Our Federal Government, all three branches, has over-reached. Continually.

The Declaration of Independence told King George what we felt about the way he was treating the Thirteen Colonies. It also told the world what we as Americans believed were natural truths about how government should work, with the consent of the governed. It amazes us how many of the things the Colonies begged King George to address have raised their ugly heads in the present day. We are taxed without our consent for government programs we don’t want. We are told that our natural resources are not ours to do with what we would. We are even told that our property can be confiscated if the government thinks it can get a bigger tax base from a different owner. Our elections are swayed by huge amounts of dollars and the willing collaboration of the old media giants. More than that, our elections are influenced by unconstitutional law such as McCain-Feingold, communist groups such as ACORN signing up 200,000 illegal voters in Ohio, and terrorist groups like the Black Panthers staking our polling places such as in Philadelphia. And we, the legitimate voters of this country are forced to accept the results.

Our voice has been ignored, even to the point of telling the citizens of a state that a duly enacted and overwhelmingly voter-approved constitutional amendment would not be allowed to stand due to political correctness.

Our representatives have listened to us on occasion however; only to be overturned by a penstroke from the Executive Branch, like when we said we didn’t like the idea of bailing out the auto industry.

Our legislature has pretended to listen to us about our need to protect our country’s borders, but then come back and tried to tell us that they have changed their minds. All the while trying to curry favor to their own districts with pork projects.

We flood D.C. with calls and letters and emails demanding that the administration not burden our grandchildren with huge government debt that will necessitate huge tax increases, but are told that our thoughts on the matter have no bearing because some things are just too big to fail; only to hear the same legislators come back a few months later and demand punitive taxes on those companies it gave money to against our wishes.

The current administration has appointed all of these extra-constitutional “Czars” to oversee what they view as problems in our country and in our world, including an avowed Communist.

This administration, as well as far too many legislators, clings to a philosophy of man-made global warming that is far from settled science and has decided that “Cap and Trade”, regardless of the huge burden that will place on the consumers, is necessary to limit carbon emissions. The fact that it has been tried in Europe and FAILED to limit carbon emissions doesn’t matter because this program will generate huge tax dollars for the government while at the same time penalizing the consumers of energy in the form of higher energy bills.

Another thing that has failed in Europe and elsewhere is the idea of universal health care. Yet still our government is racing headlong towards rationed medical procedures, diagnostics, medicines, and preventive care because it is yet another way to control the population. It is very hard to tell the government “No” when you or your spouse, or your child, depend upon the government owned and run kidney machine, insulin shots, or cancer treatments.

And now our Federal government has asked for more power. It isn’t even trying to hide it anymore. They want the power to regulate to the point of confiscation the administration of every business in the United States, just for our own financial safety or course. They want to regulate our salaries and compensation. They want to bankrupt the coal industry, which provides eighty (80 !!) percent of all the power in this country. They don’t want us to be able to drill for oil or natural gas. But at the same time they don’t want to allow the transmission of power from wind farms or solar farms across the countryside because they say it will affect the natural beauty of the desert or they don’t want their view cluttered out past Martha’s Vineyard. They want control of the means of production, the type of crops we grow, and the structure and location of the buildings in which we live. And, despite their protestation to the contrary, they want to disarm us. Too much has slipped out about that for them to be able to deny it any more.

And yes, we repeat, they now are asking for more power. This isn’t just theft, it is a bloody strong-arm robbery with a knife in your ribs.

Now, here is where Simon Jester comes in.

This whole thing isn’t about the Democrats or the Republicans, because they are both taking us to the same place and they aren’t afraid of us anymore. It is about our Constitutional form of government. The Rights were there before the words were written, for they are inherent in all people. They don’t come from government; government, no matter how hard it tries, cannot dissolve them. Now, here we the people are, having all these Tea Parties, trying to show our government that we, the seventy percent or so of the country who is right smack dab in the middle trying to raise our families and give our children better lives than we had, are tired of this grab for power. These Tea Parties, where no one actually throws anything in the harbor, are getting hardly any coverage from the press. In fact, the TWO counter protestors at the March Tea Party in Orlando got as much or more local coverage than the under-reported thousands who attended the rally. So, short of actually committing acts of vandalism and felonious assault, how are we going to get noticed?

Simon Jester. A symbol, since “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein was published in 1966, of dissent against authority. Let the press, and the government, and your neighbors know that you are paying attention to what the Federal government is trying to do. Let someone ask you what that little devil underneath the word “Citizen” across your chest means and then explain it to them. Explain to the one pool reporter who shows up at the next Tea Party that you and Simon have your eyes open and are watching as the government tries to control your life. Explain to your pastor, or your waitress, or your barista at Starbucks, that our government is power hungry and that you and others like you are trying to be heard.

We are Simon Jester. So are they.

And so are you.

Billy Beck advocates mass civil disobedience. I don’t think this is a harbinger of that, but it’s better than nothing.

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

The rise and fall of the Marxist ideal is rather neatly contained in the Twentieth Century, and comprises its central political phenomenon. Fascism and democratic defeatism are its sun-dogs. The common theme is politics as a theology of salvation, with a heroic transformation of the human condition (nothing less) promised to those who will agitate for it. Political activity becomes the highest human vocation. The various socialisms are only the most prominent manifestation of this delusion, which our future historian calls “politicism”. In all its forms, it defines human beings as exclusively political animals, based on characteristics which are largely or entirely beyond human control: ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class. It claims universal relevance, and so divides the entire human race into heroes and enemies. To be on the correct side of this equation is considered full moral justification in and of itself, while no courtesy or concession can be afforded to those on the other. Therefore, politicism has no conscience whatsoever, no charity, and no mercy.Canis Iratus, A Thumbnail Hitory of the Twentieth Century, 12/03/04

(Emphasis in original.)

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Like many people, I’ve about had enough with the nonsense that has been shoved down our throats by an activist media and an electorate that doesn’t know any better. We’ve seen our first Marxist President elected, and he’s wasted no time in remaking the American landscape to his own liking, with the assistance of a Congress drawn to solidifying it’s own power like cub scouts are drawn to fart jokes: inexorable.

Each day produces a fresh travesty which is pointedly ignored by most; they’re too interested in their bread and circuses. – Flynn, John Galt Underground

Yeah, that about covers it.