.45 ACP is a type of handgun bullet. It was designed in 1904 by John Browning for the new Colt pistol adapted by US Army in 1911. It proved itself possessing a very high stopping power during World War I and is a very popular high caliber handgun ammunition in America ever since. The reason for this is a very simple one. The stopping power is an ability of bullet to stop a big man with bayonet running towards you from driving this bayonet through your guts. A different bullet may kill the man, but would not stop him and his bayonet. .45 ACP would reliably do this stopping trick so your guts will be just fine.

Last week I encountered a situation that I did not encounter for the last 23 years ever since I immigrated to America from the Soviet Union – the widely used popular commodity product manufactured for more then a century disappeared from the shelves of the stores. This product is .45 ACP bullets. The shop assistant happily informed me that it is just a temporary inconvenience caused by dramatically increased sales of guns and ammunition so supplier cannot keep up with the demand He had no doubt that eventfully they will catch up and everything will be back to normal.

So while media of all kinds is discussing fine points of American gun culture, the regular members of this culture are buying ammunition in huge quantities despite the fact that it is not cheap even for dwellers of American suburbs with jobs and/or small businesses.

The media discussion is very often concentrating around self-defense issues with only sporadic reference to American tradition of being armed against tyrannical government. In reality the violent crime is down and in Suburbia it is practically non-existent. The government is obviously growing like cancer tumor, but we still seem to be quite a bit away from setting up concentration camps for dissidents, the situation that would call for use of guns and ammunition.

I think that the piece that is missing in this discussion is a symbolic value of a gun as tool of power. In any encounter of a person with the gun with person without gun, the person with gun is powerful, while person without gun is powerless. When I was growing up in USSR after WWII it was a usual thing in movies of, unknown to Americans genre of industrial drama, to see a powerful person like plan manager or even scientist with a gun, usually in his desk. Contrary to the rules of Russian school of dramatic art it would be never used, but it always had the same deep meaning – this guy allowed to have a gun so he must be important and powerful.

Meanwhile in real life to have unauthorized gun would be a crime punishable by long prison term. Even veterans of war who had guns given to them as award for some heroic action with their name and description of action inscribed on the gun (popular way to reward an officer without going through bureaucratic nightmare of getting him a decoration) were strongly recommended to give their guns to government for “safekeeping”. As usual it was an offer that nobody could refuse.

It short, I believe we should look at gun control battles for what they really are – a struggle of politicians and bureaucrats to deprive Americans of these symbols of power in hope that it would help them to break resistance to their political agenda.

I think politicians and bureaucrats should be very careful and remember old flags of American Revolution depicturing snake and “Don’t step on me” slogan. Recently these flags start flying again. Just keep in mind that when you are stepping on the people, nobody knows when and if they start using the stopping power of .45ACP. One thing is for sure – you cannot have a big government without stepping on the people.

“Love and Survival” is interesting because it provides a pretty good scientific support to what I consider a plain common sense – a human being needs another human being(s) to have close relationship in order to have good and healthy live.

It makes a perfect evolutionary sense because everybody has periods of temporary weakness physical or psychological or both and need support of somebody else. Besides it is quite obvious that no human being could survive the first 10-15 years of life without external help.

Actually it provides for a very good case for every individual to adhere to boring traditional family values – that is to have, love, and cherish a spouse and take care about young and old not as matter of goodness and morality, but as a matter of self-preservation. As far as I am concern it just makes for a higher quality of life.

Here are a couple samples from the book:

The Harvard Mastery of stress study – In 1952-54 126 healthy Harvard student questioned about relationships with their parents. 35 years later 91% with cold relationships had serious diseases typical for midlife while on 45% with warm relationships had such diseases.

The John Hopkins Study – 1100 medical students followed starting in 1940-s. It was defined that closeness to parents had valid predictive value for good or poor psychological and physiological condition 50 years later.

Overall it contains reference to some 15+ studies that leave no doubt about value of close relationship for human wellbeing.

I do not share Ornish’s interest in eastern philosophy, dieting, and overall science/mystery staff. For me it is just shows the simple way to good live – find somebody to love you and love them back as they are without being judgmental and trying to change them to become more to your liking. If you cannot do that with humans, just get a dog, still would be better for your health then any dieting and even many medicines.

A while ago when I was some 10 years old I learned in school about the great scourge of humanity – Tatar-Mongols. According to the history that I was taught, they where savages who came from distant and nearly inhabitable steppes in XIII century, devastated all civilized world from Pacific shores of China to Eastern part of Europe and where stopped only by heroic fight of noble Russians who despite loosing all the battles and being subjugated by Mongols for 200 years nevertheless weakened Mongols to such extent that they could not expand much farther to the West. As result as usual ungrateful Western Europe was saved to develop its civilization which eventually produced wonderful contemporary industrial world. Russia meanwhile paid for its heroism by falling behind and was still catching up at the middle of XX century some 700 years after invasion.

This book provides much more interesting and logically much more probable account of the greatest kind of empire in human history. The reason I used words “Kind of empire” is that what Mongols mainly created was not a big bureaucratic state, but rather a common space of trade and communications that established foundation of contemporary word. Obviously being not less bandits then Russian noblemen or Chinese bureaucrats or American politicians they robbed everybody in their power, but it was somewhat more orderly robbery with enough space for people being robbed to produce sufficient wealth for themselves. In short while other robbers treated people in agricultural way that is like peasants treat their crop – planting, growing, and cutting with continuing attention and control over process of growing, Mongols treated conquered people like horses, allowing free pasture with little attention and getting what they needed when enough wealth was produced.

For me the most interesting is history of conversion of pastoral culture of Mongols who were not cowboys, but rather horse-boys and lived off pastures and horses in necessarily small family size groups into the most powerful military force known to history until advance of contemporary technology. Especially interesting is Genghis Khan’s ability to accommodate independent, self-sufficient, and quite individualistic Mongolian horseman into well coordinated military unit.

The military strength of Mongols came from combination of every warrior being self sufficient with 5-6 horses and hunting ability that provided for food, shelter, and mobility with team discipline and loyalty to the unit that allowed tens of thousands of such warriors coordinate their actions. Resulting ability of Mongols to fight equally well in retreat as in advance with decisions readily made at every level without excessive fear of superiors provided for the huge advantage in any encounter with big armies of agricultural people with their well armed knights, huge masses of poorly armed conscripts, top down decision making, and inability to move fast either spatially or intellectually because of bureaucratic hierarchy.

I do not know how much details of this book regarding Mongols religious tolerance, support of science, technology, and trade are correct, but the undeniable fact of Mongol’s movement over the huge Euro-Asian space and mingling and mixing multiple people living in this space could not possibly occur without giant exchange of information and knowledge causing upgrade of everybody’s level to the top level achieved elsewhere. In short it looked like the beginning of one world in which we are living today.

I am starting this blog because I need a place to express my ideas and hopefully to find people who would be interested in them. These ideas are about philosophy, economics, politics, work of society, and similar things that I was interested in since I was a small child a very long time ago. As far as I know these ideas not trivial so I would appreciate any meaningful feedback.

My views are not right and not left, but in main libertarian. The main disagreement that I have with libertarian point of view is in relation to private property. The great libertarian thinkers properly see it as the foundation of free society, but accept its existing allocation as given, unchangeable, and sacred. I am, on other hand, see it as just a temporary arrangement easily changeable by force applied legally or illegally. Their aim was to prove that it would be the best for society if property remains sacred and all transaction are conducted voluntary without government interference. In their views it would provide the best outcome for everybody because people with resources will always need labor of people without resources and therefore lively exchange beneficial for everybody will take place. I believe that with expanding level of automation people with resources will need less and less labor from people without resources, all the way to the point when there is no demand for labor whatsoever. My solution is to provide unalienable and marketable private property rights for natural resources to everybody and only after that allow Laissez–faire free market economy to sort things out.

Other two mainstream-political movements tend to support and promote Welfare State either in form of private charity (conservatives) or state controlled wealth redistribution (liberals), which in my view is deeply destructive for human individuals depriving them of ability to search, strive for better life, fail and/or succeed-the only staff of life that actually provide for happiness.