Invisible: With justice & liberty for all | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

In doomer fiction the western states get the big sort-of-army irregulars, usually coordinating their military derring-do with loyal units of the regular armed forces, who together defeat the evil invaders on page 360. It’s a rule. See the 1984 movie Red Dawn, or David Aikman’s 1993 novel When The Almond Tree Blossoms for instance, or more currently, Max Velocity’s Patriot Dawn, all of which assume a Resistance defending large areas and counterattacking in set piece battles. But they posit another place, an active partisan region well east, behind enemy lines on all sides, namely, Appalachia.  There’s a reason.

Mandatory Reading for 3/5/13 – The Woodpile Report

Go here, right now, and read it all. That’s an order.

Control | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

Control

There is only one way to shorten and ease the convulsions of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new —revolutionary terror. – Karl Marx

To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated. – Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Communist International, 1918, purged and executed in 1936

We know how socialism in Russia worked out: decades of terror, mass arrests, labor camps, intentional famines, atrocities and executions. Why did the populace not resist? It began this way, in 1918, and you’ll note it was not a suggestion:

 Citizens! Hand over your weapons

94 years later… It is truly a strange time in which we live. The Russian news outlet Pravda, formerly the mouthpiece of the Soviet regime, has published an opinion column encouraging Americans not to surrender their guns and gun rights to the government. The column warns that the disarming of the population is one of the first steps toward government repression and totalitarianism, and cites Russian history as an example, as this is exactly what happened in Russia when the Bolsheviks came to power. – Daniel S., comment at amnation.com

Progress | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

Many reasons have been given for the fall of the Roman Empire—greed and decadence, Christianity or the want of it, a decline in industriousness, lack of new territory to plunder, internal wars and over-reliance on the military and so forth. These are “civic virtue” arguments. More objectively, Tainter says the total cost of maintaining the empire exceeded the total return from the empire. The notion appears to confuse cause and effect if you squint and look at it just so. An automobile will eventually cost more in maintenance than the worth of its service justifies, but the deterioration itself isn’t due to the cost of maintenance. An asset has a trajectory apart from our mitigations of its effects.