Professional Skills
Education
- PhysicsChemistryMathematicsMesa, Arizona
Modern methods of widget manufature and marketing
Current City and Hometown
Mesa, ArizonaCurrent city- Mesa, ArizonaHometown
About Michael
- Cynical malcontent, morbid misanthrope, nihilist macroaggressor, sometime gadfly, erstwhile ditch-digger, desultory physics major, O negative blood donor, pro-Second Amendment activist, proud GOA life member, proud AzCDL life member and ersatz Renaissance man.
When the lord made me, he made a ramblin' man.
https://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality
Since, lamentably, Facebook doesn't have a "dislike" feature, I herein list some of my dislikes:
Pretentious people
Immature people
Humorless people
Irrational people
Self-righteous people, no matter if they derive their sanctimony from extreme religiosity or from liberal political correctness.
People who don't have their shit together and who, as a consequence, wind up wasting my time.
People who waste my time for any other reason.
Cultural diversity. Despite what the bullshit mongers who rule over us would have us believe, diversity is not strength, it is dissension and discord. It is nothing but trouble.
Liberals (or progressives, or whatever the fuck they're calling themselves these days.)
Conservatives
Centrists
People who want to grab my guns (I really, really hate those guys.)
Bloggers/vloggers/sites I follow:
Pat Condell
Paul Joseph Watson
The Libertarian Enterprise (mostly for L.Neil Smith's columns)
Pro Libertate
Fred on Everything
Vin Suprynowicz
American Renaissance
Taki's Magazine
Chateau Heartiste
Eric Peters Autos
Lew Rockwell
Jim Goad
Stuff Black People Don't Like
Vdare
Daily Kenn
Fark
Favorite Quotes
- "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. _Bartlett's_Familiar
_Quotations_ is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more."
-Sir Winston Churchill
"I don't want the government to make me safe. Free men are not safe and safe men are not free. Whenever politicians and police talk about making you safe, what they're really talking about is enslaving you."
-Yours truly
"Hey, michael [sic] - what you just did is way more annoying than what any person of color could possibly do. Please go walk your degenerate ass into the ocean until you cease to exist."
--Eric Fritz, Facebook user.
"[Michael Ryan is] a piece of shit."
--Somer Rose, Facebook user
"Please fuck off and go play with your guns Michael."
--John Fengler, Facebook user
"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."
--George Orwell
"Of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made"
--Immanuel Kant
"Hell is other people."
--Jean-Paul Sartre
"Human existence must be a kind of error."
--Arthur Schopenhauer
"Some people are alive simply because it's illegal to kill them."
--unknown
"Man can get used to anything, the scoundrel."
--Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
-H.L. Mencken
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
--Samuel Johnson
"You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute. You are avenged 1440 times a day."
--Ambrose Bierce
"[Life]...is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
--Shakespeare
"Qui s’excuse s’accuse."
--French maxim
"Never take more than two steps from your weapon."
-Norse proverb
“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”
― Émile Zola
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?
--Epicurus
"One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to
take my nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old
burned-out warehouse. 'Oh no,' I said, 'Disneyland burned down.' He cried and cried, but I think that deep down he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late..."
--Jack Handey
“If loving someone is putting them in a straitjacket and kicking them down a flight of stairs, then yes, I have loved a few people.”
--Jarod Kintz
"Violence has resolved more conflicts than anything else. The contrary opinion that violence doesn't solve anything is merely wishful thinking at its worst."
--Robert Heinlein
"those who beat their swords into plowshares will do the plowing for those who don't."
--Unknown
"Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master."
--Sallust
“Everyone has his reasons.”
--Jean Renoir
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."
-Mark Twain
"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."
--D.H. Lawrence
"One is entitled to his own opinions but one is not entitled to his own facts."
--Daniel Patrick Moynihan
"I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense."
-- H. L. Mencken
"History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die"
--Will Durant
"Today is a good day to die!"
--Crazy Horse
"The doors to heaven and hell are adjacent and identical."
--Nikos Kazantzakis
"Hell is a place where there is no reason."
--Unknown. Widely misattributed to Dante Alighieri
"If you don't follow the news, you're uninformed. If you do follow the news, you're misinformed."
--unknown
“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic”
– Dresden James
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."
--Thomas Pynchon
"The technique of infamy is to invent two lies and to get people to argue heatedly over which one is true."
--Ezra Pound
“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.”
--Tom Clancy
"The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion."
--Proverbs 28:1
"Facts are stubborn things"
--John Adams
"To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."
--Captain Ahab, _Moby_Dick_
"He who fights with monsters should see to it that in the process he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
"To attempt to silence a man is to pay him homage, for it is an acknowledgement that his arguments are both impossible to answer and impossible to ignore."
--John 'Birdman' Bryant
"Fucking is a family value."
--John 'Birdman' Bryant
"Stupidity beyond a certain point can only be a work of intelligence."
--Fred Reed
"There's a sucker born every minute."
--unknown. Widely attributed to P.T. Barnum, but it was likely said by a David Hannum, remarking on Barnum's business dealings
"It is better to keep one's mouth shut and appear to be a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
--unknown. Widely misattributed to Mark Twain
"Anyone can stand adversity. If you want to see what a man's character is really like, give him power."
--unknown. Widely misattributed to Abraham Lincoln.
"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you."
--Matthew 7:6
“The human race...has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.”
--G. K. Chesterton
"I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people."
--Travis Bickle, _Taxi_Driver_
"Any excuse will serve a tyrant."
--Aesop
"A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday."
--Alexander Pope
"The proof is in the pudding."
--unknown
"A fool's bolt is soon shot."
--Shakespeare
"Honesty is the best policy."
--Cervantes
"Living well is the best revenge."
--George Herbert
"A man can die in the right just as easily as he can in the wrong."
--unknown
“It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
--Edmund Burke
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
--Napoleon Bonaparte
"Stereotyping is just practicing sociology without a license."
--unknown
"Anyone who hates children and dogs can't be all bad."
--Leo Rosten
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
--Robert A. Heinlein
“Conservative; Noun. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”
--Ambrose Bierce, _The_Devil's_Dictionary_
"Corporation, Noun. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
--Ambrose Bierce, _The_Devil's_Dictionary_
Friendless, adj. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.
--Ambrose Bierce, _The_Devil's_Dictionary_
"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."
--Edward Abbey
"People who respect the law and like to eat sausage should never find out how either one is made."
--unknown. Widely misattributed to Otto von Bismark.
"In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available to an average citizen in America right now. I mean, there was nobody going to throw you down on the side of the road spread-eagled, and look up your butt for a fucking marijuana cigarette. God almighty, what have we done to each other?"
-Merle Haggard
"Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret."
--Horace (Latin for “You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will always return.”)
"The most improper job of any man … is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."
-J. R. R. Tolkien
"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptable. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
-Frank Herbert
"I started drinking to drown my sorrows but now the damned things have learned how to swim."
--Frida Kahlo
"A fool's wrath is presently known: but a prudent man covereth shame."
--Proverbs 12:16
"In the mouth of a fool is a rod of pride, but the lips of the wise will preserve them."
-Proverbs 14:3
"It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull."
-H.L. Mencken
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
-H.L. Mencken
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
-H.L. Mencken
"...there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."
-H.L. Mencken
"School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers."
-H.L. Mencken
"When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel."
-H.L. Mencken
"Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice."
-H.L. Mencken
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-H.L. Mencken
"Never trust a man who owns no guns."
-Unknown
"...among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised."
-Niccolò Machiavelli
"Molon labe."
-King Leonidas I
"Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty."--unknown
“America is at that awkward stage; it's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”
-Claire Wolfe
“The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”
-Oscar Wilde
"A weak mind isn't strong enough to hurt itself. Stupidity has saved many a man from going mad."
-Stairway to Heaven
"Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem."
-Thomas Jefferson (translation: Better freedom with danger than slavery with safety."
“Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.”
-Howard Aiken, designer of the Mark I relay computer
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
-John F. Kennedy
“A great ship ensconced in a harbor is safe from any injury, but that is not what great ships are built for.”
-unknown
“Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.”
-Latin for “Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.”
“If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.”
-W. Somerset Maugham
“Whenever we are attacked, people are willing to give up someone else's liberties for their own security.”
-Andrew P. Napolitano
"I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones."
-Winston Smith in Nineteen-Eighty Four
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-William Pitt the Younger
“If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”
-Anatole France
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
-C. S. Lewis
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”
-Voltaire
"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."
--Voltaire
“If you can't say 'Fuck,' you can't say, 'Fuck the government.'”
-Lenny Bruce
The laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicide, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
-Ceasare Beccaria, 18th century criminologist
“A free people ought [...] to be armed [...]”
-George Washington
“Free men have arms; slaves do not.”
-William Blackstone
“There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy.”
-George Washington
“Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power.”
-Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author, in the Los Angeles Times, 1992-Oct-15, commenting on the response of the Japanese public to government corruption
“To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized, merely the domesticated.”
-Trefor Thomas
“There is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives could have been saved if the [German] people were not brainwashed about gun ownership and had been well armed. ... Gun haters always want to forget the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which is a perfect example of how a ragtag, half-starved group of Jews took 10 handguns and made asses out of the Nazis.”
-Theodore Haas, Dachau Survivor
“Most gun-grabbers want to disarm you because they believe you must share their sickness, which they are sure would drive them to murder or suicide were they armed with a gun.”
-Daniel Pouzzner (Mutatis mutandis, people who support stripping you of any of your other freedoms want to do so because they believe that you would abuse those rights as well, and for the same reason.)
“Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.”
-P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores
“There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.”
-unknown
“Poor people have access to the courts in the same sense that Christians had access to the lions.”
-Judge Earl Johnson Jr.
“Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business.”
-Jesse Ventura
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
-Blaise Pascal
“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
-Anne Lamot
“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
-Confucius
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
-Tacitus
“The more laws that are written, the more criminals are produced.”
-Lao-Tse, Tao Te Ching
“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
-George Bernard Shaw
"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
-George Bernard Shaw
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Every man over forty is a scoundrel."
-George Bernard Shaw
“The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.”
-Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)
“Football exemplifies the worst features of American life: it's violence punctuated by committee meetings.”
-George Will
“The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners.”
-Ernst Jan Plugge, Dutch network security consultant
“And do not forget the petty scoundrels in this regime; note their names, so that none will go free! They should not find it possible, having had their part in these abominable crimes, at the last minute to rally to another flag and then act as if nothing had happened!”
-From the fourth leaflet of the White Rose Resistance in Germany, 1942.
“When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.”
-Plato
“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.”
-Plato
“One man with courage makes a majority.”
-Andrew Jackson
“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
-Plato
