Posts Tagged ‘Billy Beck’

Registration=Confiscation II: Update

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

Billy Beck posts an updated link to the Long Island gun confiscation story.

Apparently, there are some discrepancies between the original post and what is now open to public view.

Billy notes:

At this point, and with all appreciation noted above in full effect, I must say that the Forum is missing an opportunity at leadership. This issue goes far beyond the “open community of Long Island Gun owners”. I saw that discussion before it was moved, and it’s an important adjunct to the initial report.

The Forum doesn’t owe anyone anything. It would, however, be an important service to let everyone read the discussion.

It’s a pity: I don’t understand hiding something this important.
…
[In response to email suggesting the original post might be a troll, Billy writes:]

(I think we’re dealing with someone who simply doesn’t realized what he’s facing.) However, the fact is that there are some ambiguities to this thing that you won’t see in the original post. I don’t think they’re show-stoppers, but they should be available to view.

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Posted in Bill of Rights, Cops, Dammit!, Fighting Back, Guns and Ammo | Comments Off

Registration=Confiscation

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

New York City Police have been conducting inspections of firearms in private homes.

For what its worth they told me they had about 30 in total of ’site inspections’ to conduct in my neighborhood, and one of the officers had a stack of paperwork with him which looks like it listed all the gun owners in the area, their names and the weapons that were supposed to be registered in their file.

Asks Billy Beck, “Does everyone understand?”

Answer: It’s another notch down on the Great Dimmer Pot of Liberty’s Torch. Don’t worry, folks, it’s all just part of the show.

[Incidentally, Billy, your link didn't work for me:
"* Problem Verifying your Access to this Board -- If this board uses verification, you must use a valid username.
"* Board Data could not be Found or is Corrupt -- If you encounter this, contact the system administrator immediately."]
Update: The forum moved the post to an open thread, although the thread is closed to non-members, and the comments on the original thread were not moved with it, unfortunately. See Billy’s new post, here.

Meanwhile, back on the Left Coast, here’s news video showing state and local police going around Oakland neighborhoods confiscating guns from people who bought their guns legally, but have since become “Prohibited”. They can do this because, of course, they have lists of registered gun owners showing the guns they are known to have.

The most important thing about this story is what you don’t see: shoot-outs. This action is aimed at people who are supposedly dangerous criminals, and not a single one goes down shooting. They all let the cops in, let them collect the guns, let them walk back out again. They complain to the reporter, one or two of them, off camera, but they do not resist.

The only thing I can figure is, they all have instructions from their Evil Overlords not to resist, so as not to reveal the Movement.

Because it can’t be, it just can’t be, right? that all those gun owners are in fact more or less responsible people who do not go shooting at cops even with damn good cause. Can’t be, because “responsible gun owner” is an oxymoron.

I ask Billy’s Question again: Does everybody understand? Does everybody see that this is practice, a dry run, a dress rehearsal, an out-of-town tryout?

Does everybody understand that this is, god damn it, gearing up?

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Posted in Bill of Rights, Cops, Dammit!, Guns and Ammo, Law, Self-defense | 2 Comments »

two–four down

Friday, November 28th, 2008

[update]
Beck’s back, and says it was his fault:
“If I were in charge around here, I’d fire me.”

OK, then. Whew.

One of the most obnoxiously abrasive, rabidly self-righteous, principled and clear-thinking blogs in existence has apparently been hijacked: Billy Beck’s two–four.net now displays a bland, generic advertising portal.

I assume this is ordinary domain squatting and not the beginning of the obamist purge.

I’d say, keep Beck in your thoughts and prayers, but I know he’d just sneer at such magical superstition.

I will say this: whoever it is that’s taken from Billy what’s his is going to regret their mistake — unless it turns that it was, in fact, his mistake, like forgetting to re-up or something, in which case he will politely swallow his medicine, and do whatever he needs to do to get back on the air.

Because, you know, he runs his own life and accepts responsibility for it, up to and including defending himself and his with deadly force.

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Posted in Dammit!, Fighting Back, Web | Comments Off

Quote of the Day: A Nice Beverage

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Just a turn of phrase I like, from Billy Beck:

I’ll drip up some bean-sweat….

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Posted in Quote of the Day | Comments Off

Armed Militia in Action

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Billy Beck demonstrates how it’s supposed to work:

That kid was frightened when I yelled “Hello!” up the road at him.

For years now, people have been hiking and biking up and down Daisy Hollow. It’s really funny: they roll out here from Ithaca or wherever in all their gear. Hikers walking with ski-poles in the summer. You name it, etc. People who live out here think they’re cute. When I go walking, I go up on the hill with a rifle.

The very first time I laid eyes on him, he looked like he was walking out the end of a neighbor’s driveway. He’d made about seventy-five yards up the road by the time I had my boots on and was out the door.

Walking up to him, I could see that he was apprehensive. I said from about fifteen yards away, “I hope you will understand why this is necessary.” I had all his attention, now. I’d say he was in his early twenties.

“You know,” I told him, “We’ve been watching people hike up & down this valley for a long time, but that is the very first time I ever saw what looked like someone coming out of that driveway.”

Read the rest to see how it comes out.

That’s all an armed citizenry is about, folks: people looking out for each other.

[Edit: In comments, Beck clarifies he was not armed for this encounter. I believe the overall point stands.]

As always, Robert Peel’s Policing Principle Seven holds: “…the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

Beck takes a lot of heat for things like not paying taxes, not enlisting, not shouldering his share of the social responsibility.

That right there is Beck doing his share, directly, not subcontracting it to someone in a uniform. He exposed himself to risk, he accepted the potential responsibility of putting someone to death on the spot.

I can’t point to the last time I did that. Can you?

Moreover, he accepts that burden without setting himself as an Only One who can act with Officially-backed impunity. Like, oh,  Grady County Oklahoma Deputy Sean Knight [Link via Beck, here.]

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Posted in Fighting Back, First Responders, Guns and Ammo, Militia, Self-defense | 4 Comments »

Beck’s Razor

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

Anyone worth talking to knows Hanlon’s Razor:

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.

Now I find Beck’s Razor:

n. The practice, on an internet discussion thread, of making substantive comments in a confrontational and insulting manner as a means of sorting the other participants into those who can understand the substance and those who only see the tone and the form.

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Posted in Philosophy, Throwing Out the Trash | 2 Comments »

Lipstick? That’s Your Best Shot?

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Palin’s a big girl. I expect a bit of playground taunting will roll off her back.

But who cares?

Seriously, I’ve seen maybe three or four folks asking what Palin really stands for.

Billy Beck, of course, is one of them:

Nothing in the ground up there belonged — or belongs — to “Alaska” except by arbitrary claim of the sort that kings would have asserted before the rise of rational politics that eventually instituted America as the first nation consciously and deliberately attendant to principles of individualism, in which free people could thumb their noses at such a claim and then go to work at production on their own powers.

I’m warning you people: if you’re interested in freedom, Sarah Palin is not your friend. Get this through your head: no matter how awful an Obama presidency could be, you need to be looking at this Palin thing a lot more carefully than people like Bennett would like you to.

In a sane world, McCain and Palin would be laughed off the national stage as socialist radicals. We’ve gone so far off track, they look like stodgy conservatives, and otherwise intelligent, informed folk of good will are allowing themselves to be distracted by lipstick smears.

Beck calls it The Endarkenment.

Understand, I’m still not to the point where I’m going to stand outside my polling place on Election Day, holding a sign telling people not to agree to tyranny, while handing out pro-gun and pro-jury-annulment flyers. I still think that McCain-Palin, bad as they are, represent a much slower slide into the pit, with fewer razor blades along the way, and maybe even some escape hatches, than Obama does.

But damn, Beck gets harder to argue with every day.

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Posted in Dammit!, Palin | Comments Off

Gov. Palin

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

I was completely tickled by the nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as Senator John McCain’s running mate, simply because it so obviously threw both the press and the Obamessiah campaign into such a tizzy. I have not laughed so hard and so long in a long time, as I did watching CNN “cover” the announcement last Thursday.

It’s hard not to let that good humor spill over into outright approval, particularly since her acceptance speech said many things I agree with, particularly Palin’s attacks on her opponents.

Still:

I don’t want “an advocate in the White House”.

I just want you creeps to stay out of my way.

Billy Beck, helping me keep things in perspective.

And, in the midst of entirely-justified conservative and even libertarian howling about the hypocrisy of the Obama campaign, and the socialist/liberal camp generally, The Daily Show reminds us that politicians are all lying, hypocritical thugs who do not deserve the power to tell us how to live our lives:

Via The Agitator, and do read the comments there.

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Posted in Laugh Dammit!, Media, News Media | Comments Off

Quote of the Day: “Painting Big Pretty Pictures”

Monday, August 11th, 2008

No, I’m not going to be oohing and aahing over the damn Olympics this year, any more than I’ll be praising the next Arafat Peace Prize winner. Billy Beck explains why:

I can’t help it: it really does strike me that the Chinese might’ve thought much better than to hire one Albert Speer as a central planner on the Olympic Games. That would be: the son of that Albert Speer.

Bonus curiosity: the Taipei Times article is written by Nina Khrushcheva. That’s Nikita Khrushchev’s grand-daughter.

Now that, right there, is what we can reasonably call diagnostic. But it’s not the quote of the day, just a plain reciting of fact.

Beck’s trade is lighting rock shows. When he sees a show, he can tell exactly what was involved in putting it on.

All over the net, I’ve seen various ravings about the Opening Ceremony. That was the biggest cued lighting production I ever saw. The scale of automated lights control was out of hand.

…

The fly-rigging was amazing, and I’d love to see the drawings. What you saw the other night was the biggest extension of rock production technology to date, and make no mistake that that’s not what it was. None of it will ever tour, but almost everything about the hardware and a great deal of the design (color saturation, for instance) can be traced directly back to San Francisco acid shows in the 1960’s, the principles and aspirations of which rock-tour crews have been dragging around ever since.

The development of that hippie technology, by the way, is the result of applied capitalism, not applied socialism, much  less communism.

From the cold eye of technique, this show was a stupendous integration of applied technology. This is what the craft can do today: show you a real-live illusion of a man running along an unfolding scroll over a hundred and fifty feet in the air along a circumference of over fifteen hundred feet.

What it cannot do is abstract the ethical purpose to which it’s put.

It was all very pretty, but I couldn’t like the look of it. If I had the fruits of over a billion peoples’ labor at my disposal, I should hope that I could paint big pretty pictures, too.

You want to know about another venue for pretty pictures?

North Korea, whose beloved leader Kim il Poofy Hair has a thing for huge flash card displays and mass dance routines. Watch the video at that link, and understand: those thousands of faceless performers are not fulfilling their own dreams, they are acting out the commands of a ruthless dictator who could order any of them to his bedroom, his torture chamber, or the firing squad, as easily as he could order these displays.

I haven’t seen the Olympic opening show. I plan not to, and I plan to spoil the enjoyment of anyone who tries to watch it in my presence.

It’s bright paint on the face of a hideous demon.

Beck has more words on the technicalities and its implications in a follow up here.

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Posted in Communism, Quote of the Day | 1 Comment »

Just ‘Cos You Got The Blues

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

One of my two favorite Savoy Brown songs. The other one is “Jack the Toad”, which doesn’t seem to be on Youtube.

But “Just ‘Cos You Got the Blues Don’t Mean You Gotta Sing” is. The video is a slideshow of the poster’s friends, and doesn’t strike me as being relevant. But by golly, they got the song posted, and for that, I’m grateful.

Provoked by Billy Beck’s posting of “Hoochie Koochie Lady“, of which he says, rightfully, “If that ain’t rock music, then there never was any such thing.”

[Beck himself can be seen here, stage right, playing the guitar in his band, the Coots. Warning: the music's good, wish I'd been there, but the video and audio quality is, as Beck calls it, "forensic", recorded for self-evaluation by the band.]

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Music, Songs and Poems | Comments Off