Uniting the Republican Party

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

So I got a little taste of some of the internal conflict within the Texas Republican party this past week while I participated in the Texas GOP Convention, which was the largest political convention in the world to date.  It is a pretty clear trend: the energy and young people are solidly behind the message of liberty and adherence to the US Constitution as defined by Ron Paul.  There are a few main groups where opposition to the message of liberty seems to come from:  1) The so called social conservatives, who advocate deviating from the conservative philosophy in areas where using the force of government supports the specifics of their value system.  2) The entrenched establishment who wish to remain in power at all costs.  3) Those convinced that support of the outrageous interventionist military practices are a good idea or are necessary for our safety.

While I do understand that many mainstream Republicans are turned off by the Ron Paul supporters who are rude, outspoken, aggressive, hard to deal with, or otherwise just look like they don’t fit in, the message that Ron Paul delivers is what I want to talk about.  His message on Thursday covered the topic of how to unite the Republican party.  Here is what he said:

Uniting the party is important, but you have to ask the question, what are you going to unite around?  If you unite around no child left behind… if you unite around expanding the department of education and expanding medicare benefits… if you unite behind the things that cost money…. what good is it?  Sure we want to be united, but we have to unite on the right principal.  And if you get confused on what the right principal is and what the position should be, why shouldn’t we all just unite behind the Constitution?

Original audio here, around the 8:40 mark.

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All My Peaches are Gone

Posted on June 10, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

Something (birds suspected) ate every bit of every peach that was on my tree.  All they left was the pits, hanging there as if my tree only grows peach pits.  Dang birds.

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We’re all packin’

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

One of the best speeches from today at the Texas GOP convention was from Jerry Patterson, land commissioner and 2014 lieutenant governor hopeful.  Here was one of his jokes:

Patterson, the author 17 years ago of the state’s concealed weapon law, said he noticed how courteous everyone was at the convention hall. If someone accidentally bumped someone else, it’s been, “Excuse me,” with the other fellow responding, “no, excuse me.” He said the politeness was overwhelming until he figured it out: “We’re all packin’,” he said.

He went on to explain that 17 years ago, all the papers and liberty-haters were exclaiming how there would be blood running down the streets from all the violence caused by citizens legally carrying guns.  This is a pretty typical liberal reaction, but the truth is that violent crime has gone WAY down in the past 17 years.

Now, I said all that so I could say this:

On the way out of the arena this afternoon, I bumped into another man.  I said ‘excuse me’, then jokingly repeated the ‘no, excuse me’ part of Patterson’s joke a few times.  The guy smiled at me and said, “hey, don’t mess with me, I’m packin’ “.  I responded with “well, so am I”.  He gave me another smile and said, “no, I’m serious”, and so I said, “so am I!”

True Story!  It made me wonder just how many of the 11,000 or whatever it was people there were taking the responsibility of self protection as serious as the two of us did.

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Can Police “Terminate” Your First Amendment Rights?

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

“What should be concerning to many Americans is that while police and government officials are taking unprecedented steps in surveillance and monitoring of Americans’s activities, which may not be constitutional, they are at the same time cracking down on the media and the public’s right to record and report on what is happening right in the open.” -Ben Swann

Watch the full story and see the ignorant and abusive Chicago police in the news clip here:

Reality Check: Can Police “Terminate” Your First Amendment Rights?

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Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

When it seems like everything around me is SNAFU, it helps to remember where we are in the pyramid of needs.  I can’t remember a time in my life when I woke up and questioned if I would have food, shelter, or water that day.  This is why I can think and worry about how screwed up our system is and how evil / misguided statists are.

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Using the Victorio VKP250 to Make Plum Jam

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

Just a few days ago, Amber and I spent hours cutting up fresh plums from our fruit tree to make the most awesome batch of plum jam I’ve ever tasted.  After waterlogged fingers and tired feet we both thought there must be a better way.  Turns out there is.  It is a bad-ass gadget called the Victorio VK250 Food Strainer.  Oh, you also need the 4 piece accessory kit to go with it, and unless you are very good at cutting in the right place the first time, you will need a couple of extra spirals also.  What this genius mechanical wonder does is move the plum (or whatever fruit you are working with) down an ever-decreasing sized spiral path against a mesh to push out the stuff you want into one stack and the stuff you don’t want into a different stack.  You can change the size of the mesh with the choice of 4 different screens, but they only give you the choice of two different spirals.  If you have any brians and a saw of some sort, you can easily figure out how to make the spiral ‘shorter’ so that it passes a larger pit and makes less ‘mush’.  Without going into the details, I got a little ambitious with my saw and cut away too much, but it still worked about 500% faster than doing it by hand, even though I wound up wasting some good plum meat.

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