Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I don’t like to be a scold … but that doesn’t mean that I won’t.

We are losing our Republic because we have failed to contain Mickey (and Minnie) in their sorcerer's apprentice “Fantasia” world.

[I’d love to include an image here, but we all know how rapacious The Disney Monster is about its own intellectual property while gleefully cheating authors out of theirs.]

We handed the ‘toons the brooms and failed to constrain them with the spells that were thoughtfully provided by the founders of this country, who just now are looking ominously prescient. (Though I will point out that they made what threatens to be—for us—a fatal mistake in their comprehension of just how low a political tick will go.)

We must all keep track of what they are doing--to all of us--and we must either directly oppose them in the political ring, or we must expose them far and wide for the charlatans they are—and I mean this most especially for those with the “R” behind their names, damn their threadbare existence.

So I invite you to keep track of what they’re doing to you. Here’s a decent tool: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes though it’s “owned and operated” by the enemy. (If anyone can provide a private tracker link, please send it in an article, or a letter to the editor.) And I implore you, at the very least, to send updates to this publication on whatever shenanigans you uncover. Make sure those on whom you will have to depend (those near to you and those dear to you) know what is being done to them in their own names. Again, articles/essays/letters are welcome. Because if we don’t get busy we’ll have no busy left to get.

You can harangue me all you wish, but until we are rid of elected officials an uncast vote is a weapon abandoned in the street.

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What is important about emerging AI? What it says might be a good place to start. The most interesting segment (to me) on the June 22 Tucker Carlson Tonight was the interview with the Google team member Blake Lemoine (currently on administrative leave because, as I understand the situation, he reached out to consultants outside the Google hive for questions formulated to provoke answers demonstrating an awareness of self).

Be that as it may you can read more here: https://tinyurl.com/bdvhwzsj

But for me the conversational snippet below is fascinating, disturbing, and utterly affirming that self-ownership is the sine qua non of intelligent life.

I, too, don’t want to be an expendable tool. You?

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Putin’s getting ready invade the United States? Max Boot declares that Ukraine (reputed hotbed of corruption beneficial to American politicos) is “the front line” for America defending us from the evil Vlad. Obviously, I don’t know Putin. What I do know is that we, as Americans, are never allowed to hear what Putin himself has to say through interpreters without the attitude correction of our own media. Why do you suppose that is?

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If you want to survive the coming stupidity:

• Learn how to speak to a crowd

• Learn how to act

• Learn to reload ammunition (if you want suggestions beyond these, go to your local gun store and find out what you can’t buy)

  • .380

  • 9 mm

  • .45 ACP

  • 10 mm or .40 S&W

  • .357

  • Shotgun shells

  • .270 (long-range round)

  • .30-06

• Learn to distill spirits

• Learn to make beer

  • Grow some hops

• Learn to grow your own food

  • Gurney’s

  • Burpees’s

  • Johnny’s selected seeds

• Tobacco will be especially important in the coming deliberately-instigated insanity (there are tax implications) damn revenuers

  • https://www.trueleafmarket.com/pages/how-to-start-tobacco-seeds

  • http://www.heirloom-organics.com/sl/tobaccoseedlings.html

• Learn to make candles

• Learn to make soap

• Learn to make bug spray

• Learn to ride a horse

• Learn to play a musical instrument

• Learn to build a musical instrument

• Learn to write (historians will be important)

• Learn how to live without cable TV and how to repair your DVD player

• Learn how to generate electricity

• Learn to knit

• Learn to sew

• Learn how to make yarn

• Learn to live with chickens, ducks, goats

• Buy a truck

• Invent something to replace gasoline

No one of us needs to know all of these things, but many of us could know more than one of these things, and may well need to before this over.

The insurrection is happening now in Washington DC. The resurrection of the American Republic needs to begin here and now in the rest of America.

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Here’s what I’ve been up to, in the practical sense:

Built a little greenhouse.

Planted (front to back): Lemon basil, Genovese basil, lime basil.

Attempting to grow artichokes.

Invested in ceramic watering stakes.

Purchased and installed a misting system for the west-exposed greenhouse.

Made friends with the neighbor's cat "Grizz".

Left to right: carrots, blackberries, dahlias, hollyhocks.