On Chick-Fil-A and chickens

It seems like the internet, the Tweetosphere, Facebook, and the pitiful remnants of the print media are all a-clucking about Chick-Fil-A. 
Dan Cathy, Chick-Fil-A's CEO, in addition to supporting some anti-gay and lesbian organizations, made the following comments to the Baptist Press: 

Some have opposed the company's support of the traditional family. "Well, guilty as charged," said Cathy when asked about the company's position.


"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.

"We operate as a family business ... our restaurants are typically led by families; some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that," Cathy emphasized.

Blah, Blah, Blah, blah, and blah.  If Dan Cathy wants to give money to a group called Gods And Ghosts and Goblins Against Gays, that's his business. If customers want to avoid his business because of it, more power to them.  That's their business, right? 

Here's what I don't understand.....How is it that the Leftosphere is going totally batshit against a Chicken Restaurant for their anti-gay stance WHEN THAT IS THE EXACT SAME POLICY HELD BY BARACK FREAKIN' OBAMA TWO MONTHS AGO ?????

Where was the outrage?  Why didn't lefties, liberals and the rest of the Great Herd Of Independent Minds decide to boycott the Democrat Party?  Why were the Libertarians the only ones standing up for Gay/Lesbian equality??? 

Hell's Bells, I'm a freakin' Shipping Manager and Freight Broker.  But I had balls enough to publish this in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram back when Barack Obama was still "evolving". 
Was it easy? No. 
Did I take a lot of crap because of it?  Yes. 
So why couldn't The Teleprompter Jesus do the same thing until the day after North Carolina voted on their anti-gay/lesbian marriage referendum? 

It's because he's a physical and moral coward.  (Hit that link.  He flip-flops around like a catfish on the lake bank.) 

Barack Obama is a chicken. 

Here's the LP candidate for President, Gary Johnson:

"I think I do better than Obama on civil liberties, I think I crush him when it comes to dollars and cents," Johnson said. "I think I do a lot bettrer than Romney on dollars and cents but I think I crush him on civil liberties."


Asked if he was the best candidate on gay marriage, Johnson said "There's no question unabashedly let's have marriage equality now, gay rights are constitutionally guaranteed."

A Johnson presidency would ensure a "libertarian president who's going to challenge Democrats to fix things when it comes to civil liberties and then get a libertarian president who's going to challenge the Republicans on dollars and cents, something they're horrible on."

End of rant. 
The picture of our president in a chicken suit came from here. 

Alex, I'll take "Jerusalem" for $500

The Horror. The Horror.

"I find your lack of gratitutde....disturbing".
Give me more of your money. 
You don't deserve all of it. 
We gave you help, whether you asked for it or not. 
Undeclared wars, trillions in debt, massive drug war casualties, an illiterate populace, wretched schools, millions on the government tit, and a nation of cynics.
And he still wants more.
To demand that he give us less is considered "outside the mainstream".
Unbelievable.
Here's the complete context that they keep harping about. 

"In The Dust" - Mike Blakely

I went to hear Mike Blakely and Jeff Posey play at Zio Carlo's Brewpub on Magnolia last night.  It's probably the 12th? 13th? time I've heard Mike. 
Great, great stuff. 
The Jihadist Safety Consultant was supposed to meet me there but he's becoming less and less reliable as he ages.  (If you haven't read about the Jihadist Safety Consultant, just Google him.  Jihadist Safety Consultant. Or hit the label down below that says "Rickle Abue-Noir) 

This is my favorite Blakely tune.  Enjoy !!



There were eighteen dirt road miles and more
Between my place and her front door
When the weather got dry
That dust would cover my beat up Ford


I remember so well that first sweet night
She said please stay and I said all right
When I woke up in the morning
She was driving away to work

When I looked for a note I was out of luck
Till I walked outside to my beat up truck

She wrote:

"I" on the left front fender
"Love you" on my door
"Forever" all the way to the tailgate of my beat up Ford
She made hearts on all three hub caps
O what a sweet reward
"I love, you forever" written in the dust of my beat up Ford

Well I never could dream some words in dust
Would make my heart just dang near bust
Maybe you can understand now
Why I never do wash that truck

And a lot has changed ever since those days
We got three kids that road's been paved

O only yesterday in blew a wind storm full of dust
So early this morning she woke up
Found my note on her brand new truck

It said:

"I" on the left front fender
"Love you" on her door
"Forever" all the way to the tailgate of her brand new Ford
I made hearts on all four hubcaps
O what a sweet reward
"I love you, forever" written in the dust of her brand new Ford

So early this morning she woke up
Found my note on her brand new truck

It said:

"I" on the left front fender
"Love you" on her door
"Forever" all the way to the tailgate of her brand new Ford
I made hearts on all four hubcaps
O what a sweet reward
"I love you, forever" written in the dust of her brand new Ford

On the left front fender
"Love you" on her door
"Forever" all the way to the tailgate, she goes all the way
Made hearts on all four hubcaps
O what a sweet reward
"I love you, forever" written in the dust of her brand new Ford

In the dust
Left in the dust
Found it in the dust
She wrote "I love you, forever"
In the dust of my beat up Ford

The Best Libertarian(-ish) movies

Go here for a good discussion. 

And the correct answer is "Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix". 
Dolores Umbridge IS the Nanny State. 

The top 12 things that Libertarians wish that everyone knew

Here are the top 12 things that Libertarians (IMHO) wish that everyone knew:

1)  The only Fair Trade is Free Trade.  All other arrangements are designed to protect political supporters.  And no, slavery isn't "Free Trade".  Slaves aren't free to make a choice. 

2)  You can't legislate morality.  There will always be a market for alcohol, tobacco, drugs, whores, gambling, and other things that the state doesn't like.  Prohibitions create a black market, and make the activity more dangerous.  This creates jobs for bureaucrats, which is probably the only rationale for the prohibition. 

3)  War is a racket.  Check out this rant from Medal Of Honor winner General Smedley Butler. 

4)  If you want to discourage something, tax it.  Or even threaten to tax it.  Now, take a look at our economy. 

5)  If it weren't for our arbitrary political boundaries, we wouldn't have the words "exports", "imports", "globalization", or "offshoring". 

6)  You can oppose government healthcare, education and safety standards and still support healthcare, education and safety standards.  I'm almost violently opposed to the public school system, but I like the idea of education.  Amazing, isn't it? 

7)  The "Invisible Hand", the way that markets work in a spontaneous unplanned way because of people trying to make a profit, is far more effective than any "planned economy".  See: Cuba. 

8)  There really isn't that much difference in Barack Obama and George Bush. 

9)  Gary Johnson, who spent twice as much time as governor as Mitt Romney, left his state with a budget surplus.  He vetoed more bills than all other governors combined.  He once told me that if he had been dictator of New Mexico, he could've cut government jobs and spending by 40%, and nobody would've noticed.  This would've left the taxpayers with more money to spend in the manner of their own choosing.  Gary Johnson is considered radical, and "outside the mainstream". 

10)  One day Cash For Clunkers will be linked with Mao's Cultural Revolution in lists of the most insanely destructive policies ever pursued by a government.  I might have to write the list myself, but it's gonna happen. 

11)  ObamaCare adds no doctors, only IRS agents and bureaucrats.  Therefore, it is going to be a disaster. 

12)  No private industry is as scary as any government agency.  Unless, of course, the private industry has the support of a government agency. 

Tarrant County Libertarian Meetup - BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse !!

The Tarrant County Libertarian Meetup has rolled around again !!

Come hang out with us at BJ's Restaurant and Brewhouse, sample their homebrews, eat some good pizza, and help us solve the world's problems. BJ's is at 952 Northeast Loop 820, just outside Northeast Mall in Hurst/Northeast Fort Worth.


We'll be getting together on Tuesday night, July 24th from 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. (or later). And we have a lot to talk about.....

We have a Gary Johnson event coming up in August, plus a "2nd Amendment/Gun Rights" Speakers Series with the NRA and the Texas State Rifle Association coming up on August 2nd. Plus, there's an election coming up in November, right?

The Libertarian Party - Fiscally conservative, Socially liberal, Pizza tolerant, and Brewpub extremist. Show up and make your voice heard!!

Government didn't invent the internet

I always thought that our government invented the internet, and usually conceded that point in barroom arguments. 
I was wrong, and I apologize for the error. 
From the Wall Street Journal.  I'm scraping the whole thing before it disappears behind a paywall:

A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet."


It's an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.

For many technologists, the idea of the Internet traces to Vannevar Bush, the presidential science adviser during World War II who oversaw the development of radar and the Manhattan Project. In a 1946 article in The Atlantic titled "As We May Think," Bush defined an ambitious peacetime goal for technologists: Build what he called a "memex" through which "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."

That fired imaginations, and by the 1960s technologists were trying to connect separate physical communications networks into one global network—a "world-wide web." The federal government was involved, modestly, via the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Its goal was not maintaining communications during a nuclear attack, and it didn't build the Internet. Robert Taylor, who ran the ARPA program in the 1960s, sent an email to fellow technologists in 2004 setting the record straight: "The creation of the Arpanet was not motivated by considerations of war. The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks."

If the government didn't invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet's backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.

.But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.

According to a book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in 1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university contracts. They had contract administrators . . . and all that slow, lugubrious behavior to contend with."

So having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest company in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a government-led view of business and how innovation actually happens.

Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only so that people in an office could link computers to share a copier. Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC innovations. "They just had no idea what they had," Jobs later said, after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts developed by Xerox.

Xerox's copier business was lucrative for decades, but the company eventually had years of losses during the digital revolution. Xerox managers can console themselves that it's rare for a company to make the transition from one technology era to another.

As for the government's role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995, when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science Foundation was closed—just as the commercial Web began to boom. Economist Tyler Cowen wrote in 2005: "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia."

It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for making it happen.

Iowahawk: You didn't build that

Iowahawk has sat down at his laptop and created a masterpiece. 
Of course he had help from his high school teachers, the people who paid private companies to build the roads and bridges and then gave those companies taxpayer money, he had help from the Department Of Motor Vehicles, some V.A. Hospitals, the General Accounting Office, the Department Of Health and Human Services, the people who wrote the latest Farm Bill, Cash For Clunkers, TARP, The Porkulus Package, the people making a fortune off of the Drug War, and the ATF people who send teenagers who look like adults into my favorite bar and try to trick the bartenders into selling them a drink so they can bust the bartender and fine the bar owner. 
Iowahawk had help from all of those people, but hit this link anyway.  Good stuff.