Oh, that's COOL!Very similar to the first time I flew with a firearm.
The following events are not fictional, but they may have happened at different times, with different patients, at different places. Each one of the authors has had patients just like these, in situations just like those described. If you want to know what it’s like to live a day in the life of an ambulance driver, or a small town cop, or a small town ER nurse, join us for the story.The first story, "Bobby," begins here. Part 2 is here and Part 3 here.
It’s the same story. On the same night. With the same people.
This is what we do, and working with paramedics and cops like these is part of the reason we do it.
If there were any justice in the world, that would leave a scar.You'd think that Obama would be relieved to see that there are still some forces on the planet more effective than the Democrat party at destroying businesses and leaving people homeless.
-- Wave After Wave of My Own Men
TOMMY by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)We don't treat our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines as second-class citizens anymore, unless you're an academic Leftist convinced they only sign up for the military because they're too stupid to do anything else:
I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.
I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide,
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.
You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!
You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq. -- John KerryTommy ain't a bloomin' fool, Mr. Kerry.
It is not a fact that all men are created equal, it is not a fact that they are able to choose their rulers wisely, and it is not a fact that their judgments on public matters, taking them in the mass, are prudent and valid, or even worth hearing. But it is a fact that they are better off, the stupid with the intelligent, when the scope of government is rigidly limited, and its agents have no prerogative outside the narrow and clearly marked bounds. -- Henry Louis MenckenFound via Van der Leun at The Clairemont Institute.
The powers of the legislature are defined, and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written. To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction, between a government with limited and unlimited powers, is abolished, if those limits do not confine the persons on whom they are imposed?Barnett continues in his introduction:
Since the adoption of the Constitution, courts have eliminated clause after clause that interfered with the exercise of government power. This started early with the Necessary and Proper Clause, continued through Reconstruction with the destruction of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, and culminated in the post-New Deal Court that gutted the Commerce Clause and the scheme of enumerated powers affirmed in the Tenth Amendment, while greatly expanding the unwritten "police power" of the states. All along, with sporadic exceptions, judges have ignored the Ninth Amendment. As a result of judicial decisions, these provisions of the Constitution are now largely gone and, in their absence, the enacted Constitution has been lost and even forgotten.And I would add, with the assistance of a public education system designed, as Henry Louis Mencken described it in the 1930's,
...not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originalityand:
Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.So while the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government have been slowly, inexorably erasing the boundaries on the defined, limited scope of government as written in the Constitution, our schools have been busy cranking out generation after generation ignorant of what it is that is being taken.
Without these missing clauses, the general scheme of the Constitution has been radically altered, which is precisely why they had to go. The Constitution that was actually enacted and formally amended creates islands of government powers in a sea of liberty. The judicially redacted constitution creates islands of liberty rights in a sea of governmental powers.My twenty-four-year study of the right to arms has shown me that radical alteration. I didn't learn about it in primary school. I didn't learn about it in high school. I didn't learn about it in college. I learned it on my own, starting at about age 31.
Scalia: Mr. Gura, do you think it is at all easier to bring the Second Amendment under the Privileges and Immunities Clause than it is to bring it under our established law of substantive due? Is it easier to do it under privileges and immunities than it is under substantive due process?This from a Justice who has made his dislike for "substantive due process" known ever since he's been on the bench:
Gura: It is easier in terms, perhaps, of -- of the text and history of the original public understanding of --
Scalia: No, no. I'm not talking about whether -- whether the Slaughter-House Cases were right or wrong. I'm saying, assuming we give, you know, the Privileges and Immunities Clause your definition, does that make it any easier to get the Second Amendment adopted with respect to the States?
Gura: Justice Scalia, I suppose the answer to that would be no, because --
Scalia: Then if the answer is no, why are you asking us to overrule 150, 140 years of prior law, when -- when you can reach your result under substantive due -- I mean, you know, unless you are bucking for a -- a place on some law school faculty -- What you argue is the darling of the professoriate, for sure, but it's also contrary to 140 years of our jurisprudence.
I have grammar school students come into the Court now and then, and they recite very proudly what they have been taught: "The Constitution is a living document." You know, it morphs.What difference does it make whether there's 140, 150 years of prior law if the precedent is WRONG, if the court used bad decisions to reduce the enumerated limits on government power in contravention of the written Constitution? Scalia also said elsewhere:
Well, let me first tell you how we got to the "Living Constitution." You don't have to be a lawyer to understand it. The road is not that complicated. Initially, the Court began giving terms in the text of the Constitution a meaning they didn't have when they were adopted. For example, the First Amendment, which forbids Congress to abridge the freedom of speech. What does the freedom of speech mean? Well, it clearly did not mean that Congress or government could not impose any restrictions upon speech. Libel laws, for example, were clearly constitutional. Nobody thought the First Amendment was carte blanche to libel someone. But in the famous case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court said, "But the First Amendment does prevent you from suing for libel if you are a public figure and if the libel was not malicious" — that is, the person, a member of the press or otherwise, thought that what the person said was true. Well, that had never been the law. I mean, it might be a good law. And some states could amend their libel law.
It's one thing for a state to amend it's libel law and say, "We think that public figures shouldn’t be able to sue." That's fine. But the courts have said that the First Amendment, which never meant this before, now means that if you are a public figure, that you can't sue for libel unless it’s intentional, malicious. So that's one way to do it.
Another example is the Constitution guarantees the right to be represented by counsel. That never meant the state had to pay for your counsel. But you can reinterpret it to mean that.
That was step one. Step two, I mean, that will only get you so far. There is no text in the Constitution that you could reinterpret to create a right to abortion, for example. So you need something else. The something else is called the doctrine of "Substantive Due Process." Only lawyers can walk around talking about substantive process, in as much as it’s a contradiction in terms. If you referred to substantive process or procedural substance at a cocktail party, people would look at you funny. But, lawyers talk this way all the time.
What substantive due process is is quite simple - the Constitution has a Due Process Clause, which says that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Now, what does this guarantee? Does it guarantee life, liberty or property? No, indeed! All three can be taken away. You can be fined, you can be incarcerated, you can even be executed, but not without due process of law. It's a procedural guarantee. But the Court said, and this goes way back, in the 1920s at least, in fact the first case to do it was Dred Scott. But it became more popular in the 1920s. The Court said there are some liberties that are so important, that no process will suffice to take them away. Hence, substantive due process.
I think it is up to the judge to say what the Constitution provided, even if what it provided is not the best answer, even if you think it should be amended. If that's what it says, that's what it says.Apparently, he's not so handcuffed about other things, though.
--
[N]o government official is "tempted" to place restraints on his own freedom of action, which is why Lord Acton did not say "Power tends to purify." The Court's temptation is in the quite opposite and more natural direction –- towards systematically eliminating checks upon its own power; and it succumbs. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 981 (1992)
--
If you don’t believe in originalism, then you need some other principle of interpretation. Being a non-originalist is not enough. You see, I have my rules that confine me. I know what I'm looking for. When I find it - the original meaning of the Constitution - I am handcuffed. If I believe that the First Amendment meant when it was adopted that you are entitled to burn the American flag, I have to come out that way even though I don't like to come out that way. When I find that the original meaning of the jury trial guarantee is that any additional time you spend in prison which depends upon a fact must depend upon a fact found by a jury - once I find that's what the jury trial guarantee means, I am handcuffed. Though I'm a law-and-order type, I cannot do all the mean conservative things I would like to do to this society.
In summary, the Fourth Amendment is the keystone that holds up the arch of our Bill of Rights which in turn is the unique contribution of our founding fathers to our system of government which has now survived longer than any other representative government in the world. In his famous dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice Brandeis called privacy - which he defined as: "the right to be let alone" - "the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men." Justice Brandeis argued that the framers knew that Americans wanted protection from governmental intrusion not only for their property, but also for their thoughts, ideas and emotions. Take away the Fourth Amendment and the right of privacy disappears.We were told, immediately afterward, that this new power "would be used judiciously."
The deputy sheriffs here in Gould made no attempt to develop a sworn affidavit in writing from the purported informant, Forehand, and they therefore made no attempt to get either a search warrant or an arrest warrant from an independent third party magistrate on the basis of probable cause. I have no doubt that the deputy sheriffs believed that they were acting reasonably and with good intentions. But the old adage warns us that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." In my judgment, that is precisely where the majority opinion wants to put us - by unhooking the "protective sweep" from its connection with the execution of an arrest warrant in a home, which is where the Supreme Court framed the concept. In my view the gambit of getting permission to enter a citizen's home in order to talk to someone and then conducting a protective sweep search under the guise of sensing danger to the investigating officer will effectively eliminate the need for complying with the Fourth Amendment and at that point we will all be, literally and figuratively, on the road to hell.
According to Newton County Sheriff, Don Hartman Sr., random house to house searches are now possible and could be helpful following the Barnes v. STATE of INDIANA Supreme Court ruling issued on May 12th, 2011. When asked three separate times due to the astounding callousness as it relates to trampling the inherent natural rights of Americans, he emphatically indicated that he would use random house to house checks, adding he felt people will welcome random searches if it means capturing a criminal.Judicious, eh?
Word.We don't need to send the country into bankruptcy, in the name of the poor, by spending trillions of dollars on people who are not poor, and who could take care of themselves. The poor have been used as human shields behind which the expanding welfare state can advance.
The goal is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency, because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus.
Thomas Sowell, Dependency and Votes
...though it is now clear that in the popular view of their case, as well as in the political view, the line between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor was not distinctly drawn. Popular feeling ran high at the time, and the prevailing wretchedness was regarded with undiscriminating emotion, as evidence of some general wrong done upon its victims by society at large, rather than as the natural penalty of greed, folly or actual misdoings; which in large part it was. The State, always instinctively "turning every contingency into a resource" for accelerating the conversion of social power into State power, was quick to take advantage of this state of mind. All that was needed to organize these unfortunates into an invaluable political property was to declare the doctrine that the State owes all its citizens a living; and this was accordingly done. It immediately precipitated an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, an enormous resource for strengthening the State at the expense of society.It was explained to us over 75 years ago (and before), but nobody paid attention. Except the ones pushing "progressivism." They understood all along.
-- Our Enemy, The State by Albert J. Nock, 1935
In every generation, there are those who want to rule well--but they mean to rule. They promise to be good masters--but they mean to be masters.That sumbitch ain't been born.
Mamet employs his trademark intellectual force and vigor to take on all the key political issues of our times, from religion to political correctness to global warming. The legendary playwright, author, director, and filmmaker pulls no punches in his art or in his politics. And as a former liberal who woke up, Mamet will win over an entirely new audience of others who have grown irate over America's current direction.That's not the QotD, this, from that book, is:
We were self-taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group–irrespective of our group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special. We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty; that all people are alike, and to judge their behavior was "judgmental"; that property is theft. As we did not investigate these assertions or their implications, we could not act upon them and felt no need to do so. For we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say all humanity.And they and their disciples still believe it.
Our schools rate just below Mississippi in math and science. Tell me why, given our high taxes and highest paid teachers in the nation? Can the governor or legislature explain? Is the culprit the notoriously therapeutic California curriculum? The inability to fire incompetent teachers? The vast number of non-English speaking students? Derelict parents? How odd that not a single state official can offer any explanation other than "We need more money." What is the possible cure for the near worst math and science students in the nation? Yes, I see it now: the California Senate just passed a bill mandating the teaching of homosexual, lesbian, bi-, and transgendered history, just the sort of strategy to raise those English composition and vocabulary scores among the linguistic and arithmetic illiterate.He has much more to say on a much broader subject, but that paragraph is QotD.
Karl Marx would be giddy with pride seeing what our public schools are teaching my kids today. - Lyle over at The View from North Central Idaho - Critical Pedagogy Hits HomeRTWT.
The Court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement in drug cases.I'd expect this of Clarence Thomas, not Ginsburg.
The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.A comment in response to it seen elsewhere, however, puts it in perspective:
I'm not worried about the 1/5 of America that voted for him, I'm worried about the 3/5ths of America that didn't care enough to vote at all.
Higher ed, (Mamet) said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—"Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever"—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.This is the whole strategy of "critical theory" - the Frankfurt school's methodology for using the education system to de-moralize (hypen used intentionally) the population. Thomas Jefferson? He can't be a great man, he was a slave owner and adulterer! Pull the lever! Writing an essay on economics? The grader will be a Keynesian, so it had better slant that way! Pull the lever!
"If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we're training ourselves not to see cause and effect," he said. Wasn't there, he went on, a "much more interesting . . . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?"
"The question occurs to me quite a lot: What do liberals do when their plans have failed? What did the writers do when their plans led to unemployment, their own and other people's? One thing they can't do is admit they failed. Why? To admit failure would endanger their position in the herd."To admit failure would require them to question their ideology, and that loses them their position in the herd.
One of the first was A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. In it Sowell expands on the difference between the "constrained vision" of human nature—close to the tragic view that infuses Mamet's greatest plays—and the "unconstrained vision" of man's endless improvement that suffused Mamet's politics and the politics of his profession and social class.I didn't have to be converted by Sowell's magnum opus, but Conflict of Vision's effect on me was similar.
"He came back to me stunned. He said, 'This is incredible!' He said, 'Who thinks like this? Who are these people?' I said, 'Republicans think like this.' He said, 'Amazing.' "
After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.Read the whole piece.
Testing, testing, testing....And much more has followed. According to Blogger I've published over 5,000 posts, an average of 1.7 per day. (Haven't kept that pace recently.) According to Sitemeter, the site has drawn over 2.2 million hits, an average well over 700 per day (and trust me, it didn't start out anywhere near that high).
Is this thing on?
Apparently so. Too bad I managed to lose the opening essay it took me an HOUR to compose. Oh well. I'll reconstruct it and put it back up later.
Welcome to The Smallest Minority, so named because most of the really good names, Eject! Eject! Eject!, USS Clueless, Instapundit, Acidman, and so on were already taken. And while not a Randian, I accept a lot of Ayn Rand's observations as accurate, and it was she who wrote: "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
This blog is about the rights of individuals, that smallest of minorities, so it seemed apt.
More (hopefully MUCH more) to follow.
...that there is no right to reasonably resist unlawful entry by police officers.What part of "unlawful" don't they get? OK, I'll unreasonably resist.
The English common-law right to resist unlawful police action existed for over three hundred years, and some scholars trace its origin to the Magna Carta in 1215. The United States Supreme Court recognized this right in Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529, 535 (1900): "If the officer had no right to arrest, the other party might resist the illegal attempt to arrest him, using no more force than was absolutely necessary to repel the assault constituting the attempt to arrest." The Supreme Court has affirmed this right as recently as 1948. United States v. Di Re, 332 U.S. 581, 594 (1948) ("One has an undoubted right to resist an unlawful arrest, and courts will uphold the right of resistance in proper cases.")So it's established Supreme Court caselaw, right? And inferior courts may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch, right?
In the 1920s, legal scholarship began criticizing the right as valuing individual liberty over physical security of the officers. One scholar noted that the common-law right came from a time where "resistance to an arrest by a peace officer did not involve the serious dangers it does today." The Model Penal Code eliminated the right on two grounds: ―(1) the development of alternate remedies for an aggrieved arrestee, and (2) the use of force by the arrestee was likely to result in greater injury to the person without preventing the arrest. In response to this criticism, a majority of states have abolished the right via statutes in the 1940s and judicial opinions in the 1960s.Really? They did? Under color of what authority? I'm unaware of any Supreme Court decisions post 1948 that established this new interpretation. I'm unaware of any amendments to the Constitution prior to or after 1920 that did so.
States may have grown accustomed to violating the rights of American citizens, but that does not bootstrap those violations into something that is constitutional.As 9th Circuit chief judge Alex Kozinski wrote in his August 2010 dissent to that court's U.S. v Pidena-Moreno decision, another case involving Fourth Amendment protections:
Having previously decimated the protections the Fourth Amendment accords to the home itself, our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home's curtilage and in public. The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory. 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.And I am reminded once again of our complete disconnect from the difference between the citizenry and the police as expressed by Sir Robert Peel's Nine Principles of Modern Policing, most especially Principle #7:
Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.That stopped when the public became "them" to the police.
The police protect the People. The military defends the State. When the military becomes the police, the People become the Enemy of the State.Our police forces are becoming more and more militarized defenders of the State every day, and rulings like this one are helping that happen.
Glad to see that you're registered for our upcoming Blogger Shoot! I'm looking forward to seeing you again since the last time we saw one another face-to-face at the GBR in Reno. In conjunction with the Shoot, we're putting together an awards ceremony called The Gunnies for Saturday night at the Shoot and The Smallest Minority has been nominated for a Gunnie Award in the following category:Consider it done, though I think you'd have a hard time arguing that TSM is an entertainment site.
* Best Gun Blog - Entertainment
Voting is now open for the next 14 days to determine the winners in each of the 9 categories. It'd be pretty cool if you could announce your nomination for The Gunnies on your site.
Scene 1, History AP: My son asked me how WWII ended the Depression. I said that the draft soaked up a lot of excess workers, which reduced unemployment, and British buying for the war helped our economy but that the war generally destroyed rather than created wealth. He said, "Dad, you can't tell it to me that way. The guy grading the AP is going to be a Keynesian." So we talked multipliers and aggregate demand.These two short paragraphs are chock-full of everything I've been saying since I started this blog about the American education system and more.
Scene 2, Spanish AP: My son hands me a list of Spanish words he is trying to learn. They are the Spanish words for things like "social justice," "poverty", "exploitation", etc. I told him it was an odd selection of words. He said that nearly every Spanish essay in every Spanish textbook he had ever had were about revolution and stopping the rich from exploiting the poor and fighting global warming. So he wanted to be prepared for a similar topic on the AP. After the test, I remembered this conversation and asked him what the essay was. He said the topic was "show why the government of poor countries should give free bicycles to the poor to fight global warming."
He said that nearly every Spanish essay in every Spanish textbook he had ever had were about revolution and stopping the rich from exploiting the poor and fighting global warming.That's what they throw at the general population. Here in Tucson the Tucson Unified School District has what is called "Raza Studies" - a program directed exclusively at Hispanic students, which I wrote about in Balkanization. By some accounts this class doesn't stop at talking about "stopping the rich from exploiting the poor and fighting global warming." Oh no!
The basic theme of the curriculum was that Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites.The former Arizona Superintendent of Public instruction (now Attorney General) has been trying to kill the Raza Studies program for years now. The last two public meetings with the TUSD board have been canceled because of organized student protests, which tells you about all you have to know concerning what the Raza Studies program is actually teaching.
In this narrative, whites are able to maintain their influence only if minorities are held down. Thus, social, political and economic events in America must be understood through this lens.
This biased and sole paradigm justified teaching that our community police officers are an extension of the white power structure and that they are the strongmen used "to keep minorities in their ghettos."
It justified telling the class that there are fewer Mexican-Americans in Tucson Magnet High School's advanced placement courses because their "white teachers" do not believe they are capable and do not want them to get ahead.
Mailing a check to the government to help the poor because you're feeling compassionate is like handing the local crackhead a twenty to fetch you a pizza because you're feeling hungry.From The Basic Problem, a response to the question "What's this libertarian stuff about?"
(W)elcome to “free market communism”.Yup, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. Thanks to The Silicon Graybeard for the pointer.
This is “redistribution through gaming the system”. Flashing through all Western civilization, in every European, Canadian, Australian, and US marketplace. If it had a video version it would be called “Grand Theft NATO”.
50% of the people play by the “old” rules. They pay taxes, pay their mortgages, pay their own food bills, enter the country legally, and basically support the “other half”.
The “other half”…play the “victim” of the paying “majority”…and try to guilt them into paying for MORE stuff….while amassing goods and services at the discount window of the “government”, which slanders the paying majority as “greedy”. (and any other slander that imposes immediate guilt and shame…pick a weapon as you walk through the terrain…racism, sexism, homophobia, jingoism, etc)
In Grand Theft NATO, the “have nots”…are GIVEN more and more and more. They are “protected” by their benefactors…but, in order to recharge their “batteries” to press on…they MUST vote when they see their “energy” being depleted. Vote for a leftist…get more “energy”, be given more stuff…and more powerful “weapons”.
As you reach higher and more sophisticated levels…you get assistance in weapons of mass deception. Global warming is used as a hoax weapon to “redistribute” money, power, influence…from the “haves” who are ripped off on a worldwide basis…to the “have nots” in leftist enclaves.
You also get “mass media” protections…a force field shield that covers you for every misdeed, puts out false information and distortions for your benefit.
Grand Theft NATO is available everywhere you can find leftists in power. Thanks for playing…now hand over some more of OUR money…you have made enough already.
"cfbleachers"
History's revolutions and upheavals — whether the Nika rioting in Constantinople, the periodic uprising of the turba in Rome, the French upheavals, or the Bolshevik Revolution — are rarely fueled by the starving and despised, but by the subsidized and frustrated, who either see their umbilical cord threatened, or their comfort and subsidies static rather than expansive — or their own condition surpassed by that of an envied kulak class. Perceived relative inequality rather than absolute poverty is the engine of revolution.
These are strange and dangerous times. An insolvent federal government, an exporting China and India, and an almost complete indifference to federal immigration, tax, and regulatory laws have all combined to create a well-entitled but increasingly angry population, one "empowered" and made more, not less, bitter by the last two years of governance in Washington.
Victor Davis Hanson, Works and Days, Thoughts on a Surreal Depression
Our mighty Navy SEALs not only put a bullet through Osama's head, but carried off his computers, disks and hard drives. So far, all they've revealed is that Osama had multiple Netflix rentals of "Rendition," "In the Valley of Elah," "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Love Actually."
Can you imagine what's on Osama's hard drives? I mean besides the goat pornography. Pants are wetting throughout Pakistan's military establishment.
Ann Coulter, Next Time, Use FedEx
So much for airport security: Man 'smuggled 80 guns into Britain' by hiding them in suitcasesSo... did Project Fast and Furious expand to include Jolly Olde England? Is Greenoe a BATF employee, on or off the books?
An American man is suspected of smuggling 80 weapons into the UK by hiding them in his suitcases.
Former U.S. marine Steven Greenoe, who holds British citizenship, apparently strolled through airport security in both Britain and America with dozens of handguns stashed in his suitcases on ten flights last year.
He is believed to have delivered them to criminal contacts in the North West of England.
On one occasion, Greenoe was stopped after officials at Atlanta airport spotted the firearms.
But incredibly he was allowed to board the flight after telling officials he worked as an international security consultant.
The revelations are an embarrassment for transatlantic security and for the UK Border Agency. (Ya THINK?)
It makes a mockery of security regulations which mean innocent passengers have to carry cosmetics in clear plastic bags when in fact Greenoe apparently had no problems carrying weapons in a suitcase. (Those regulations were already a mockery. Now they're a belly-laugh.)
A number of 9mm semi-automatic pistols believed to have been bought by Mr Greenoe for $500 each in a North Carolina gunshop were offered for sale at up to £5,000 a piece in Britain a week later, according to the Times.Wow! At current exchange rates, that's an $8200 return on a $500 investment (minus, of course, the plane fare.) Still, you're looking at close to a 16:1 ROI if you can move five at a time, and he's moved at least 60 guns that they know about. At a guess, we're talking $400k worth of profit.
More than 60 weapons, including more than 20 Glock pistols and more than a dozen Ruger handguns, are understood to be still unaccounted for.
A Navy SEAL walks into a bar and says, "Give me a bin Laden!"
The bartender says, "Sorry, sir, but I don't know that cocktail."
"It's easy," replies the SEAL. "Two shots and a splash of water!"
The GOP is having a debate tomorrow in South Carolina.Go read the whole thing. And give 'em hell!
Your challenge is to listen to the questions and answers and decide what the best answer YOU would come up with.
In the past, TV tells us who wins, and they've rigged the set-up. IOW, they NAIL our minds with this set up time and again. I have myself come up with better answers, some of which were quite funny while being practical.
It is my thinking that the American public is far smarter than any currently serving politician or well-known spokesmouth. Here is your chance to prove that is true and get some publicity too.
I am going to do my part to drum up interest in unofficial answers.
To that end, I am prepared to divide up $200 for the answers submitted to my email box that I find better than the answers given by the GOP stiffs to the conservative unfriendly questions served up by the establishmentarian water carriers. And turning the tables on the water carriers by mocking their question before tailoring your answer can be a winner!
Deadline for submission is 11:59 PM Saturday, 5/07/11.
Report: Nearly Half Of Detroiters Can’t ReadFrom that report (PDF):
The National Institute for Literacy estimates that 47% of adults (more than 200,000 individuals) in the City of Detroit are functionally illiterate, referring to the inability of an individual to use reading, speaking, writing, and computational skills in everyday life situations.It gets better:
We also know that of the 200,000 adults who are functionally illiterate, approximately half have a high school diploma or GED, so this issue cannot be solely addressed by a focus on adult high-school completion.Further, from the (short) CBS story, it would appear that certain areas in the D.C. metropolis and around Cleveland are even worse. Truly, if our education system had been foisted on us by a foreign power, it would have been an act of war.
While these numbers are less severe for the region as a whole, the region at-large is far from immune to this issue. Within the tri-county region, there are a number of municipalities with illiteracy rates rivaling Detroit: Southfield at 24%, Warren at 17%, Inkster at 34%, Pontiac at 34%.
Imagine Harry out in the woods, wearing his invisibility cloak, carrying a .50bmg Barrett, turning Deatheaters into pink mist, scratching a lightning bolt into his rifle stock for each kill. I don’t think Madam Pomfrey has any spells that can scrape your brains off of the trees and put you back together after something like that. Voldmort’s wand may be 13.5 inches with a phoenix-feather core, but Harry’s would be 0.50 inches with a tungsten core. Let’s see Voldy wave his at 3,000 feet per second. Better hope you have some Essence of Dittany for that sucking chest wound.RTWT
William the Coroner, Harry Potter Needs a 1911
It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment. – Christopher HitchensSee What We Got Here Is ... Failure to Communicate for more on this concept. See also this previous QotD and this one.
The universe is probably littered with one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones that made the irrational decision.
The Mississippi River, its tributaries swollen by snowmelt and stormwater, is rising toward a flood level that could equal or exceed anything in its recorded history. The threat to Cairo, Illinois — just below the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers — is so grave that the US Army Corps of Engineers is about to blow up a levee just downstream at Bird’s Point, Missouri, to relieve the flooding in Cairo by deliberately inundating 140,000 acres of farms and towns. The emotional controversy that has arisen over this move obscures a real and rising threat to the economy of the United States.RTWT.
But the real threat posed by this historic, gathering flood may well lie several hundred miles to the south, where the Mississippi crosses the Louisiana border. There, as the Corps well knows but dare not discuss, this historic flood threatens to overwhelm one of the frailest defenses industrial humanity has offered to preserve its profits from the immutable processes of nature. This flood has the potential to be a mortal blow to the economy of the United States, and outside the Corp of Engineers virtually no one knows why.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? -- Alexandr Solzhenitzyn, The Gulag ArchipelagoI intend to repeat this post each May 1 that I continue to run this blog. This is the second time I have put it up.
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The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. -- Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting, Silveira v. Lockyer, denial to re-hear en banc, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 2003.
