A meme worth thinking about

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“The sheep spend their whole lives fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd.”

That is the whole of how we are manipulated to trust our greatest threat.

Published by Don Tabor

I am a former Chairman of the Tidewater Libertarian Party and was the 2007 LP candidate for the 14th district VA Senate. Previously, I was the Volunteer State Director for the FairTax. I am married 50 years with two grown children and 5 grandchildren.

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94 thoughts on “A meme worth thinking about”

      1. Hey, your ad hominem comments are bad enough, you don’t have to repeat them.

        If you insist on trolling, can’t you bother to learn the posting procedures?

        Liked by 1 person

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          1. How about you tell others the same thing you tell me and Paul?

            Besides, Mr. Roberts isn’t even in this part of the thread. UNLESS you are confirming what I have been saying for about 2 months: RE and Mr. Roberts are one in the same.

            Liked by 1 person

  2. RE: “That is the whole of how we are manipulated to trust our greatest threat.”

    Fear Putin; don’t notice Biden.

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  3. You might miss the irony here, but a few years ago I described or posted the political cartoon that fills the bill for your meme.

    It showed a house with a nervous man looking out the front window, armed to the teeth. Out the back door runs an apparently bigwig with a bag of money in each hand.

    The caption says: “Now you keep watching for those liberals that are coming for your guns.”

    Your meme is cute, and it describes my cartoon better, IMO.

    Liked by 3 people

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          3. Use another bank?

            That sort of dodges the point. There are PLENTY of people ripping us off on a daily basis who are not the government. Your inability to see ANY is a symptom of selective blindness,

            Liked by 1 person

          4. Of course people will try to rip you off, and government more often helps them than stops them.

            The best defense is a truly free market.

            Nearly all the independent gas stations in the area get their gas from the single remaining refinery in the area. Competition is limited by transportation costs.

            But if it were easier to open new refineries and pipelines to open the market to other suppliers, there would be more competition.

            But government suppresses that competition

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          5. “The best defense is a truly free market.”

            You are arguing with tautologies. It is pointless. ANY time someone points out a market failure your comeback is ALWAYS that it wasn’t a “truly free market.” Again I refer you to the chaos, abuse and rampant corruption that characterized the “truly free markets” of our country in the second half of the 19th century when the idea of government regulation was in the future.

            Liked by 1 person

          6. Think so?

            What have I consistently said were the legitimate functions of government?

            To exclude force and fraud.

            The excesses of the Gilded Age were the result of suppression of competition, both by government charters and by the failure to suppress private force. Private police forces, like the Pinkerton’s suppressed both competition and labor activism.

            The ICC was created to prevent “wasteful” competition between rail lines and later truck routes.

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          7. “Think so?”

            So, now you are arguing that there was not enough government regulation in the 19th century. More should have done more to exclude private force. So again not a “truly free market.” There is no end to this but here is something you never seem to understand – “private force” is not just thugs beating up the competition. It is unconstrained economic abuse as well.

            Liked by 1 person

          8. I have repeaedly said that government has that duty to exclude force and fraud, and otherwise stay out of the way.

            If it does that, all will be well.

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          6. They aren’t $1/gallon different. $84 and change yesterday’s close on oil futures. Yet gas is still at $3.49/gal. 2 years ago, it was around $2.500. Your beloved market is ripping you off as much as me, yet you refuse to see it.

            Liked by 1 person

        1. You can only stretch the analogy so far but keep in mind that while the shepherd can be useful for day-to-day protection, he eventually eats all the sheep.

          In the last century, in supposedly civilized countries, more people were killed by their own legal governments than in all wars, crime and other interpersonal violence combined.

          George Washingtom viewed government much as I do, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,—it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”

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          1. In George Washington’s time, there was land and resources enough that a person could live alone, with no help from anyone. For the vast majority of people, that is no longer true. If there is not a centralized force/government that keeps the electricity on and the water running and the roads open, people will die. The trick is, who controls that force? Do you elect people who think government is bad? Because if you do, you will surely have bad government. As much as you dislike them, you’d better elect libtards who think government should help people… all people. Otherwise, one day, you’ll be the sheep the shepherd eats.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. I would much prefer the government give up its monopolies and let me get my electricity and other needs on a free market. SO long as there is a Target across the street, I would much rather trust Walmart to provide what I need.

            I disagree on electing people who like government, I much prefer people who see government as a necessary evil that must be carefully limited and restrained.

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          3. Yeah well, that “free market energy” thing hasn’t worked out so well in Texas. The owners of the statewide energy company didn’t do the necessary maintenance to keep the power on in the middle of a prolonged freeze and people died. Of course, those owners lived out of state and their elected Republican official hightailed it to Cancun and there was no one around to turn the lights back on. Texans can’t throw the owners of the power company out of office because they aren’t elected by the people and their “shepherd” beds down with the wolves so he is of no use. They are now at the mercy of the “free market.”

            It isn’t necessary to elect people who like government. It is necessary to elect people who like people. Government is indeed necessary, but it only becomes evil when you elect people who hate it, who don’t want it limiting their power or their greed.

            Liked by 2 people

          5. The Texas power situation is a private monopoly, not a government monopoly. And that is exactly what happens when private companies get to run “free” with no government controls. It’s not like the old days when prices at store “A” got held in check by competition from store “B.” Now days, store “A” is owned by one of a handful of billionaires and store “B” gets put out of business because it can’t hold on, taking losses as long as store “A.”

            I have a friend whose father ran a hardware store in Iowa. One day, an old friend of his showed up unexpectedly at the store. Turned out the friend was there as a spy for Walmart. They were planning on opening a new store in his town. He said he never told his targets who he was, but since her dad was an old friend, he gave him this warning. He said he had been sent there to find out what products his hardware store depended on selling in order to stay profitable. (In his case, I think it was paint.) He said Walmart would come in selling paint at a price that was below what it cost a dealer to buy it. They would bled off customers for the product his store counted on to stay in business. Then, when his store closed, they’d raise their prices back up to profitable levels that would make up for any loses. That’s how the “free market” works now. Nothing illegal. Just nothing ethical. Or, as Trump would say, “smart business.”

            Government is the ONLY thing that can protect the average person from the wolves. And the wolves know it. They have been going out of their way to sow distrust in government for years, but lately, their efforts are frightening. “Elections can’t be trusted unless we win!” “We won and if you don’t take our word for it, we’ll start a war and overthrow the crooked government!” And the sheep will open the doors and let the wolves in.

            Liked by 1 person

          6. There are no “private monopolies”

            There are some markets dominated by one company, like Microsoft’s Windows, but that’ because no one else is providing better value.

            But Texas was more like a regulated utility that had the option of buying from more than one supplier. Still a government regulated monopoly.

            i have a different Walmart story. My sister’s 2nd husband’s father Charlie owned a paint store. Because the LA economy was always boom and bust, in slow times he came close to bankruptcy, and he was a very stressed man. When WalMart came to Thibodaux, their “spy” came to see him too. The spy offered him the job of manager of WalMart’s paint dept, and bought his on-hand inventory. He wound up with a steady income almost equal to his boom year income, boom or bust, and health Insurnace as well. He probably lived 10 years longer than he would have sweating things out in his store, You will never meet a more WalMart positive guy.

            And the customers got paint for about 20% less than he was able to sell it in his store. Competition with Lowe’s made sure of that.

            The market works.

            Government has one job, exclude force and fraud from the marketplace. Any more than that is sand in the gears.

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          7. I’m glad your sister’s second husband had a positive experience with Walmart. Most people don’t. Before Walmart came to my town, there were three mom and pop hardware stores where I shopped regularly. Now, there is only Walmart. Their salespeople (if you can find one) can’t answer questions like mom and pop could. Forget about getting special orders. And you take your life in your hands if you have to shop there at night.

            If the government was “regulating” the Texas utilities, they were doing a poor job. Just like the government “regulations” of the banks in the crash of 2008. The shepherds had gone to bed with the wolves and the sheep got eaten. Nobody was ever held accountable for the disasters and precious few safeguards have been put in place to keep either from happening again.

            Face it, the wolves are the greedy, self-serving, billionaire oligarchs and the only protection the sheep have is the government. And if the wolves con the sheep into fearing the shepherd and replacing him with (to continue the allegory) a wolf-in-shepherd’s-clothing, the sheep are going to get eaten.

            Liked by 2 people

          8. Government always screws up regulation. The regulators always wind up captured by those they regulate.

            The best defense against greed is competition. You can’t corrupt a free market.

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          9. “You can’t corrupt a free market.”

            That was not the experience in our country in the decades leading up to the Progressive Movement at the turn of 20th century. But, obviously, evidence has no bearing on dogma.

            Liked by 1 person

          12. OK, so Peter and Paul agree to comspire to raise the price of paint.

            Harry learns of the high price they are getting for paint, and opens a location between them.

            As long as you can’t exclude new competitors the market will prevail.

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          13. Peter and Paul can conspire to do way more than raise the price of paint. They can contract with the paint supplier to stop selling paint to their competitors. They’d be the only paint dealers in town. If they are big enough, they can conspire to sell paint below cost until the competition is bankrupt. In the days when the playing field was level, competition worked. But in the days of billionaire oligarchs, they can crush the competition before it gets off the ground.

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          15. Microsoft comes to mind. Bill Gates made sure ONLY Microsoft operating systems were used on every IBM PC. Then he made sure Microsoft operating systems wouldn’t run any other software products but his own. He had the only operating system in town. Microsoft became big enough it could demand everyone to design to their standards. (Which includes several backdoors that MS intended to use for spying on people to be sure nobody was running pirated software, but those backdoors are what hackers use to break into systems.) Unix didn’t have backdoors but Unix got choked out of the PC market because Microsoft’s contract with IBM wouldn’t allow any other operating systems.

            Liked by 1 person

          17. Microsoft has way more users than Unix and, IMHO, Unix is a better operating system. But 90% of the universe doesn’t even know it exists.

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          18. A lot of people run Unix on servers but most home users go with Windows because it’s easier and easier to get help with.

            WIndows and Unix each have their niche.

            But Windows dominates its market, it doesn’t monopolize it. If someone comes up with a better OS for that market, Microsoft can’t stop them.

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          19. All the geeks I know run Unix on everything. A million years ago, I worked on a DEC running VAX. There were no backdoors on a VAX system. If your network manager got hit by a bus and he hadn’t shared his password with anyone, you were going to have to buy a new system. It was totally secure… even from people who owned it. In those days, major library systems ran on VAX and, to my knowledge, no library was ever hacked.

            I once went to a Microsoft seminar in Seattle and they told us up front, don’t even think about running pirated software because we have backdoors that will tell us you’re doing it and we will prosecute. Also, if your network manager gets hit by a bus and hasn’t shared his password, call us. We’ll get in and open the system for you.

            The distinction between “dominates” and “monopolizes” is quite small. Early on, Bill Gates got exclusive contracts with all the major PC manufacturers. Software vendors had to write to Microsoft standards or they had no market for their products. Apple is the only company that has come close to competing and they had to build their own PCs to do it. Even then, Apple wasn’t really in the same market at Microsoft. Apple was/is for graphics. Microsoft was/is for number crunching.

            Liked by 1 person

          20. Back in the 80s, there were no Dental Office programs, so bought a TRS-80 Model I and taught myself to program so I could write my own. It was pretty effective for its time, a BASIC skeleton with machine language subroutines.

            With only 3 5 1/4 inch floppies for data, the records were heavily coded, using every bit of every byte.

            Anyway, there was a problem with the PRINT USING statement. It would work fine for a while, then crash. So, I called Radio Shack for help. They told me their BASIC language was written by some ‘Billy Byte Head ‘ kid and gave me his phone number, So, I called and he was aware of the bug, The stack wasn’t properly reset after each PRINT USING call and eventually the stack filled up and crashed the system. He gave me a workaround, to POP the Stack after every PRINT USING statement and that fixed it. Nice guy, was way above me in programing but wasn’t at all condescending and was encouraging toward my project.

            So, somewhere in a thrift store in Louisiana, there’s a Radio Shack BASIC manual with Bill Gates home phone number written on the inside front cover.

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          21. Awesome! You should have kept the number.

            I still have my old TRS-80. It was a good little machine for its day. The only computer I ever had that I didn’t keep was the Commodore VIC-20. I’m thinking of opening a computer museum some day.

            Liked by 1 person

          23. One thing the TRS 80 made you learn was to write tight code.

            My data blocks written to disk stored family member, date, tooth number, 5 surfaces and procedure code in 8 bytes.

            I used the US Census sorting method so that names that sounded alike but were spelled differently sorted and searched correctly. Smith=Smythe

            That program was my hobby for years and it led me to Virginia when the Louisiana economy crashed.

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          24. It has been so long since I used my TRS-80 I doubt I could even turn it on now. I still have a box full of floppies that are probably dead by now. I seem to remember you had to put the operating system floppy in first… but after that, memory fails. I still miss Radio Shack! Ah, the good old days.

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          25. Yes. Lithonia lighting was given a choice by local lighting companies and electrical suppliers. Stop selling to the lighting company on Cleveland St. or they will stop buying Lithonia. The family-owned lighting company on Cleveland St. was shut out of Lithonia because they couldn’t buy the quantitates the other larger, more corporate businesses could.

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          29. But, like you. my boss is not a fan of goverenment agencies.

            Of course, it was a story he related to me when I started here and asked him about it. And he, like you, has been known to tell a few “fish tales” every now and then.

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          32. And what if there’s no Lowes in town? Or what if the mom and pop store depended on local family traffic and the Lowes was in a town 30 miles away but Walmart was right across the street from mom and pop? You can bet ALL competition is taken into consideration before a super store goes up.

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          35. “Nope. Lowes knows how to play hardball, and such actions are a signal there is a market there worth fighting over.”

            Laughable. Just can’t admit an error. Who do you think you are fooling?

            You offered Lowe’s as a constraint on Walmart’s ability to drive Mom & Pop out of business with low ball prices. Now you say they would join the feeding frenzy. So how does that work for Mom & Pop with two corporate giants outdoing each other with lowball prices?

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          41. Uh, which of those “legal governments” that killed so many of their people came about through non-violent democratic processes? Not Nazi Germany. Not Peoples Republic of China. Not USSR. None of those governments were “legal” by our standards.

            Liked by 2 people

          43. https://checkyourfact.com/2019/06/20/fact-check-george-washington-government-reason-eloquence-force-dangerous-servant-fearful-master/

            https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/04/17/fake-olds-government-is-not-reason-it-is-not-eloquence-it-is-force-is-probably-not-a-real-george-washington-quote/

            Evidently, Washington never said that. Not to say the quote doesn’t have a point. But it is based on the trite view of fire, which may go back centuries more. There are slew of supposed quotes from our founders that were made up to fill a right wing agenda. Jefferson is attributed to many phony quotes.

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          44. I know that the Washington quote is based on earlier statements about both fire and water. A lot of ideas are very old and frequently recycled.

            The quote is often attributed to Washington but whether he said it in those words or not, it certainly reflects his view of government based on other statements.

            Just remember that more people have been killed by their own legal governments than in all wars and crimes combined and you will have to be wary of it.

            The most foolish mistake is to assume that government loses its danger when your guy gets elected.

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          45. And since 1968 we have lost more Americans to gun violence than in all our wars combined.

            So please thank all those dead Americans so you can keep your guns.

            Liked by 3 people

          47. Yes, suicide bloody well is “gun violence!” If no guns had been in the house, I’d have a nephew alive today! He sat on the sofa and blew his brains out all over the living room wall. That’s as violent as it gets.

            You have never seen a non-violent gun. Guns are built with the purpose of killing things. And they are very efficient at their purpose.

            Liked by 2 people

          48. My guns are not made to kill other people, they are there so discourage other people from using force on me.

            If your nephew was determined to kill himself, do you think not having a gun would have stopped him?

            Japan has a much higher suicide rate than we do and almost no guns.

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          49. “ My guns are not made to kill other people, they are there so discourage other people from using force on me.”

            And how is that “discouragement” take place?

            Because you have a gun that kills people.

            Unless you have airsofts.

            Liked by 2 people

          50. Well, there you go, it is the intent of the owner, and not the gun, that matters.

            My guns will never harm anyone unless I am attacked, They are for deterrence. If deterrence fails, it will only because someone evil doubted that I was able to defend myself.

            So, my guns reduce the likelihood of violence.

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          51. “My guns are not made to kill other people”

            That is a nonsense statement if there ever was one. That is exactly what they are designed and manufactured to do.

            “Nephew . . . do you think not having a gun would have stopped him?”
            It might have. Someone is far more likely to die of suicide if a gun is available.

            “Japan has a much higher suicide rate than we do”
            Another fact pulled from you ass turns out to be bullshit. The rate of suicide in Japan in 2022 is 15.3 versus 16.1 in the United States. Our rate is HIGHER even though we do not have Japan’s cultural bias towards suicide.

            https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country

            Liked by 1 person

          52. That’s just it. Nobody thinks my nephew was bent on killing himself. To this day, nobody knows why he did it. His boss said nothing was wrong at work. He hadn’t mentioned any problems to friends or family. He just came home for lunch one afternoon and called his girlfriend, asking her to come over. When she asked why, he wouldn’t tell her. She told him she couldn’t take off from work to come over unless he gave her a good reason. He didn’t, so she hung up. A little while later, he called to his sister in the kitchen to “call an ambulance.” Then she heard the gun blast and ran into the living room. People think maybe he didn’t intend to kill himself. Maybe he only intended to wound himself. Otherwise, why call an ambulance. But nobody will ever know because that “non-violent” gun ended the discussion. If it hadn’t been in the house that day, maybe he would have lived long enough to tell somebody what was wrong. But now, we’ll never know.

            And your guns were made to kill people. Otherwise, why not wave a banana for protection.

            But, unless you have actually killed someone before, be very careful how you pull a gun in defense. An MP once told me that muggers have no fear of a person with a gun. They know you will hesitate to pull the trigger. And all they need is 3 seconds to take that gun away from you and kill you with it. I always believed, if somebody was threatening me or mine, I would not hesitate. But one night, when I lived on 13th Division Prairie, a pack of wild dogs broke into my barn. I took my gun and went out to run them off. The pack charged me. I aimed the gun… and I hesitated. I hesitated to pull the trigger on a dog. I did, but if it had been a human, I honestly can’t say whether or not I would have done it.

            Guns are more of a liability to your safety than they are an asset to your defense.

            Japan has an ancient tradition of hari kari or seppuku. And it must be done with a knife, not a gun. When one has dishonored ones’ self or ones’ family, suicide is the only honorable thing to do. If Americans committed suicide when they did something dishonorable, we’d have a much higher suicide rate than Japan. And it would be done by gun.

            Liked by 2 people

          53. Sorry about your nephew, but if he did intend to kill himself there were other choices.

            That hestitation problem is overcome by practice, YOu don’t brandish a handgun, you keep it hlstered until you have made the diecision to shoot, and you train to draw and fire in one motion.

            I agree that someone who won’t make the effort to train is less likely to be successful but there are ways to train that make it fun, like IDPA competitions.

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          54. Oh stop with the semantics, you know what I mean. If you are injured or die from a gun shot, that is gun violence. What do you prefer?

            Of course suicide by a gunshot is gun violence.

            The point is pretty clear.

            Liked by 2 people

          56. “You’re counting suicides as “gun violence?” ”

            Of course. And why not? You are about 5x times more likely to die in a suicide if there is a gun in your home versus those who live in a home with no guns. So, let’s be fair and count 80% of gun suicides as “gun violence.”

            Liked by 1 person

          57. “And the US started out with only white male property owners voting. So are we more legal than they are?”

            That is a very lame attempt to dodge the obvious point – you keep referring to these fascist dictatorships as “legal governments.” They are not “legal” governments by our standards today – not 250 years ago.

            Liked by 1 person

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