Saturday, October 12, 2013

Mark Steyn on Shutting Down the Land Of The Free

Of course, we haven't had a land of the free in quite a few years, and a lot of Americans like it that way.Here.
President Obama and his enforcers have the same concept of the royal forest that King John did. The government does not own this land; the Park Service are merely the janitorial staff of “we the people” (to revive an obsolescent concept). No harm will befall the rocks and rivers by posting a sign at the entrance saying “No park ranger on duty during government shutdown. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.” And, at the urban monuments, you don’t even need that: it is disturbing that minor state officials even presume to have the right to prevent the citizenry walking past the Vietnam Wall.

I wonder what those Japanese and Australian tourists prevented from photographing bison or admiring a geyser make of U.S. claims to be “the land of the free.” When a government shutdown falls in the forest, Americans should listen very carefully. The government is telling you something profound and important about how it understands the power relationship between them and you.

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Friday, October 11, 2013

Movie: Captain Phillips

We saw the new Tom Hanks movie "Captain Phillips" this afternoon, and I for one, came away drained. The last five minutes are among the most emotionally affecting I can remember.

Based on the 2009 piracy of the cargo ship MV Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia, Hanks, at the hands of his captors led by Barkhad Abdi as Muse, turns in a great performance. Terrified by the violence dealt out by the pirates, and possible consequences for his crew and himself, Hank's Phillips nonetheless maintains his wits enough to help his crew resist and the US Navy to rescue him. Unlike so many Hollywood movies, his is no swaggering, macho hero, but a real human being doing what he can to improve an impossible position.

Highly recommended.

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For Those Of You Who Did Not Clik Through From Gaye Levy's Site...

...Gaye has been gracious enough to republish a post of mine entitled "Emergency & Disaster Preparation Basics".

I wrote it to help people who were interested in preparing for relatively routine disasters, but who did not know where to start. It was not aimed at those who are contemplating the end of the world as we know it, but for those concerned with such events as hurricanes, blizzards, earthquakes, and the like. I kept it pretty generic, as preparing for most short term disasters is pretty generic: water, food, the means to cook it, first aid supplies, and so on. Being well prepared for any one likely problem will prepare you adequately for most. For example, water stored for earthquakes also prepares you for a broken water main.

Only you can decide which problems might arise in your area, and whether and to what extent to prepare for them. What I have come to realize is that one can be remarkably well prepared for only several hundred dollars, even if you do not have any of the supplies yet. Also, most of what one needs is available with a few cliks on Amazon.com. There is very little difference between prepping for several days and several weeks or even months: the difference is largely in adding more of the same stuff.

So, if you are interested in being prepared for life's little bumps, but don't quite know where to start, check out the post, and browse Gaye's Backdoor Survival site. Among others, she has a post on getting prepared over the course of a year. You don't have to do it all at once.

And don't forget to have some fun with it: a grim, clench jawed approach can work, but a lot of this can be entertaining. Enjoy it!

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Welcome, Backdoor Survival Readers!

If you have clikked through from Gaye Levy's 'Backdoor Survival' feel free to browse this site.

I have been focussing a bit obsessively lately on the effects of the government shutdown, in part because so many of the actions are both deliberate on the part of the executive branch, and because they seem to have been very little reported. So far as I can tell, they far exceed the pettiness of previous shutdowns. Since they are largely at the discretion of the executive branch officials, I lay the responsibility on our president.

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Thursday, October 10, 2013

18th Century Programmable Automaton by Pierre Jacquet-Droz

Good Grief: Clike vous ici, SVP

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Patriotic Pushback to the Park "Service"

One restaurant owner in Yorktownrefuses to shut down.
The National Park Service owns the building he uses, so Helseth was ordered to move out within 48 hours when the government shutdown began last week.

"I was called about 9 o'clock Tuesday morning, Oct. 1," Helseth told CBN News. "I was told I had three hours to vacate my restaurant. I was shocked and called back to say I can't quite possibly do that."

He was granted a three-day stay but eventually closed the restaurant. A week later, in defiance of government orders, he reopened for business.
I wonder: Has anyone checked the terms of the various victims' leases to see if the Park "Service" has the right to shut them down?

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Criminals Take Over the US Government...Criminals, Democrats, Traitors...What's the Difference?

In a new research paper, Andreas Madestam (from Stockholm University), Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), and I set out to find out how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election....We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3-6 million additional votes in House races. That is an astonishing boost, given that all Republican House candidates combined received fewer than 45 million votes. It demonstrates conclusively how important the party's newly energized base was to its landslide victory in those elections, and how worried Democratic strategists must have been about the conservative movement's momentum....

The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 - 8.5 million votes compared to Obama's victory margin of 5 million.

President Obama's margin of victory in some of the key swing states was fairly small: a mere 75,000 votes separated the two contenders in Florida, for example. That is less than 25% of our estimate of what the Tea Party's impact in Florida was in 2010. Looking forward to 2012 in 2010 undermining the Tea Party's efforts there must have seemed quite appealing indeed.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the IRS slowed Tea Party growth before the 2012 election. In March 2010, the IRS decided to single Tea Party groups out for special treatment when applying for tax-exempt status by flagging organizations with names containing "Tea Party," "patriot," or "9/12." For the next two years, the IRS approved the applications of only four such groups, delaying all others while subjecting the applicants to highly intrusive, intimidating requests for information regarding their activities, membership, contacts, Facebook posts, and private thoughts.
Chicago Machine Politics: Why did anyone think it wouldn't go federal with a Chicago thug in the White House? And another running the Department of "Justice"?

I want well educated, thoughtful Obama voters to answer that.

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Just Another Democrat Felony and Coverup

They just don't stop coming.

There are so many I can't even keep up.

And that is exactly the way the Democrats want it.

Democrat = Traitor.

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James Madison on the Power of the Purse

The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.

So, if I understand this, Madison believed that the House shall properly determine which already existing laws and programs shall be funded.

Radical Elitist Scum.

I can see why American Constitutional History is de-emphasized in schools today.

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Emily Miller: D.C. police chief covers up giving Feinstein illegal ‘assault weapons’

More anti-Constitutional activities by the Democrats...but then that has become redundant.
Washington Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier seems to think that gun-control laws don’t apply to the liberal elite. The police chief helped Sen. Dianne Feinstein acquire “assault weapons,” which are illegal to possess in the District, for a news conference early this year to promote a ban on these firearms, then tried to cover up the police involvement.

...Chief Lanier wanted to help Mrs. Feinstein, but didn’t want the media to know.
Cmdr. Williams emailed Mr. Mentzer to put a “bug” in his ear that the police would “prefer that no mention of the fact that the weapons came from D.C. or were recovered by MPDC....”
The chief did not later extend the same cooperation to Republicans, about which:
Mrs. Feinstein’s staff gloated: “I was gratified to hear Sens. Cruz and Graham complaining that getting weapons into their hearing today was ‘unworkable,’” Mr. Mentzer emailed Cmdr. Williams and another officer with a news story about the Republicans not being able bring in even a legal rifle. “I find you guys ENTIRELY practical, for the record.”

Do tell.

For the record: There is nothing in the Constitution which allows any government to ban militia type weapons.

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Wednesday, October 09, 2013

President Stompy Foot Removes Handles From Water Fountains

What did you expect from a Chicago political machine hack when he took over the Oval Office?
...the NPS even removed handles from water spigots along the Chesapeake and Ohio canal where bikers and joggers exercise as well as along the Great Allegheny Passage, just to ensure people don't get any water from them.

Instead of saving money, the NPS is expending additional resources to go out of its way to close such locations and to make people miserable.
It's the Chicago way: My Way, or Else.

It just make me feel warm and fuzzy all over to contemplate giving these freaks with guns even more power to punish us for insufficient submissiveness.

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Monday, October 07, 2013

We Must Give President Stompy Foot More Power

Dave Carter, in 'When The Bleeding Heart Becomes The Iron Fist':
Welcome to liberal utopia, where barriers are not erected against terrorists or illegal aliens on our nation's borders, but rather against citizens, and where wheelchair-bound veterans enroute to honor their comrades face tighter security than terrorists enroute to murder a US Ambassador...

Can you believe that men who conquered Nazi Germany's barricades on the beach at Normandy 69 years ago actually faced barricades from their own damned government?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I can imagine that. We voted to "fundamentally change" America, by making a narcissistic Chicago Political Machine hack the President of the United States.

The House of Representatives, following the wishes of their constituents, submitted a spending bill fully funding the federal government, less ObamaCare.

President Stompy Foot reacted like a thwarted 2-year old.

Oh, by the way, according to the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA,:
With the government shutdown, many GS and contract priests who minister to Catholics on military bases worldwide are not permitted to work – not even to volunteer. During the shutdown, it is illegal for them to minister on base and they risk being arrested if they attempt to do so.
All Hail Emperor Stompy Foot.

Or else.

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President Stompy Foot In Action

Las Vegas, NV (KTNV) -- The government shutdown is being felt close to home for some locals. They say they're being forced out of private homes on Lake Mead because they sit on federal land.

Joyce Spencer is 77-years-old and her husband Ralph is 80....

Thursday, a park ranger said they had 24 hours to get out...

Park officials said property owners can visit only to retrieve belongings; they sent Action News a statement which reads in part, "Unfortunately overnight stays are not permitted until a budget is passed and the park can reopen."
Remember, at least one member of the National Park "Service" has been quoted as saying that they have been ordered to make the federal shut down as inconvenient as possible for the proles.

Our federal servants have demonstrated they are vindictive jerks with guns.

President Stompy Foot in Action. The proles are what he is dedicated to stomping.

Therefore we must give President Stompy Foot and his successors even more power.

Or else.

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"FIVE off-duty NYPD officers were among the bikers involved in SUV attack"

Well, then, I guess that makes it OK.

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'Fast & Furious' Gun Walking Book Banned by Our Government Because It Would "Hurt Morale"


John Solomon at the Washington Times reports:
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is blocking the main whistleblower in the Fast and Furious case from publishing a book, claiming his retelling of the Mexico “gun-walking” scandal will hurt morale inside the embattled law enforcement agency, according to documents obtained by The Washington Times.
I think that is a new excuse for censorship of reporting on government scandals: It would hurt morale.

The government could shut down a lot of newspapers, book publishers and bloggers under that justification.

The ACLU has joined with litigation.

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Sunday, October 06, 2013

Colorized Old Photos

Ici:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Colorizedhistory/430760113645337

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/10/civil-war-figures-in-color.php

This includes a great portrait of General Douglas McArthur.

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President Stompy Foot in the Spite House

Here:

http://twitchy.com/2013/10/06/spitehouse-president-stompy-foot-sparks-new-name-for-white-house-photoshops/

http://twitchy.com/2013/10/05/unbelievable-police-prevent-drivers-from-pulling-over-and-viewing-mt-rushmore/

And don't forget President Stompy Foot has closed the ocean to fishing.

Unbelievable.

Just exactly why do we want government to have even more power to abuse us when we are insufficiently submissive?

Maybe, just maybe, some adults will come along and Occupy DC.

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The Supreme Soviet Comes to Washington DC

Leonard Downey, Jr, in the Washington Post:
Sanger, who has worked for the (New York) Times in Washington for two decades, said, “This is most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”...

“Reporters are interviewing sources through intermediaries now,” (Washington Post national news editor Cameron) Barr told me, “so the sources can truthfully answer on polygraphs that they didn’t talk to reporters.”...

“People think they’re looking at reporters’ records,” Post national security reporter Dana Priest told me. “I’m writing fewer things in e-mail. I’m even afraid to tell officials what I want to talk about because it’s all going into one giant computer.”
It does start to sound a bit Soviet, but then Obama's family, childhood, and early adult connections were rather sympathetic toward the Stalinist point of view.
Will Obama recognize that all this threatens his often-stated but unfulfilled goal of making government more transparent and accountable? None of the Washington news media veterans I talked to were optimistic.
I think it is no threat at all because the "oft-stated goal" isn't a goal. It never was. The whole mindset is Control Freak. Control people's health insurance if they can't -yet- control their health care directly. Control the people's ability to resist via IRS abuses. Control the people's ability to resist by banning entire categories of firearms. Punish political speech with IRS field audits. Punish contributions to Republicans with federal swat team raids on guitar manufacturers.

I think openness was never a goal. It was only a lie.

It always was.

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