And In Case You Thought...

...That Hitler's youth camps were long gone...

The kids sat in Frances Willard Elementary School's library Thursday morning, waiting for their teacher.

She arrived about 9:10 a.m., dressed in all black, including a black face mask.

"Sorry
I'm late," Rock Island Police Officer Dytanya Robinson told the Junior
Police Academy class. "I've already been working two raids ... I've
been sweating in this hot suit since 6 a.m."

The students were wide-eyed and curious. They wanted to know more about her job with the tactical unit -- and her uniform.

More here...

"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison, speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788

Anchorage Proves...

…That Nazi-fascism is alive and well in the Last Frontier…

As Saturday gave way to Sunday, smokers

enjoyed their last gasp inside bars and bingo parlors across the city.

A ban approved overwhelmingly by voters earlier this year will send

them outdoors the next time they get a nicotine fit while knocking back

a Budweiser.

Midway through the evening at the Bradley

House, a bugler played taps while Bradley walked solemnly to the door,

an American flag cradled in one arm.

She tore down the sign that had been posted

ever since the city’s restaurants went smoke-free in 2001, the sign

saying the Bradley House is a smoking establishment — something it

could do because it’s designated as a bar, not a restaurant, even

though it’s actually both.

Now a souvenir, the sign made the rounds at

the bar as customers signed it. “June 30, 2007,” one of them wrote. “In

memory of our lost rights.”

Later, people gathered outside near a new

cedar building decorated with a big red ribbon. They applauded as

Bradley cut the ribbon and opened the door, revealing a room where

smokers can take shelter when it’s cold and wet.

“After today you’re gonna have to go out to a shack?” a nonsmoker asked Cassidy.

“Yep,” she said.

“I’ll come visit you there,” he said.

Back inside the bar, Cheryl Contreras, caught up in the spirit of things, borrowed a Marlboro Light from a friend.

“This is my first cigarette in, like, 30 years,” she said. “They put this ban in and made me smoke again. How healthy is that?”

Contreras voted against the ban even though

she quit smoking when she was 24. Her friend Joelle Donovan would have

voted against it too, except she’s Canadian.

“That’s why I’m becoming an American,” Donovan said. “I want a voice. Laws like this scare me.”

“Laws like this scare me.”   That pretty much covers it…  It would scare any rational person.

More here…

“One of the striking differences between Fascism and Communism
is this: Fascism has inspired no great work of art…. No doubt, Fascism
is too vile and scurrilous an ideology to produce those charities of
the imagination which are essential to literate art. Communism, even
when it has gone venomous, is a mythology of the human future, a vision
of human possibility rich in moral demand. Fascism is the ultimate code
of the hoodlum; Communism fails because it would seek to impose upon
the fragile plurality of human nature and conduct an artificial ideal
of self-denial and human purpose. Fascism tyrannizes through contempt
of man; Communism tyrannizes by exalting man above that sphere of
private error, private ambition, and private love which we call
freedom.”  — George Steiner

Long time...

...No post...

;)

I am trying to decide whether to simply post the same content to both blogs or to use this one for something else...

We will see...

"Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; .... The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. "
-- Frederick Douglass

Due to Circumstances...

...that come from free market choices, I have opened a new blog here...

Please update your bookmarks and blogrolls accordingly.

Viva La Sez Faire!!!

Bye, bye Google/Blogspot???

To my dismay, I have found that certain of my readers are unable to get to my blog because of filtering by Google (they own Blogger). This is an unacceptable situation for me and I am looking into alternative blog sites right now.

If/when I am forced to relocate, I will post updates and revise settings in the forums and to as many co-bloggers as I can contact. Thank you for your continued support and patience.

Cashiers and a sign of the times...

...Morrigan has fun shopping at WalMart!!!

Just one of the many strange goings ons, by a people becoming more and more desperate...

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
-- Thomas Sowell

Doug Kenline...

...the King of Bloggers, has revamped his updated site and is making money doing his favorite thing. We should all have it as good as Doug. Go and visit and see what he is up to...

What Have Conservatives Wrought???

Only the final destruction of the republic. Supposedly conservative republicans have controlled the House of Representatives since 1994, the Senate since 1996 and the White house since 2001. It took over 200 years for American government to amass a one million, million (a Trillion) dollar debt. Our current president and congress add one million, million (again, a Trillion) dollars to the debt every 18 months. They fight phantom wars against plant extracts and social methods. They can create a criminal out of thin air. They kill more civilians than they do soldiers, and call it an acceptable ratio.

How anyone can morally support such a system is beyond me. I think mostly they do it from fear. Fear makes them irrational. They won't think it through, because to do so puts them face to face with their own fear of being responsible for themselves.

Pericles once said, "Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." I think that was around 430 B.C. (BCE for all you nimrods who think that changing the name of a measurement term gives you some moral superiority over everybody who wants to keep things simple) Even that statement provokes the people to try to participate out of fear.

I tend to go with the Riddick philosophy. In "Pitch Black" the Imam counsels Riddick, "Can we pray together? I have already prayed with the others. It is painless." Riddick replies that, "It's pointless" The Imam responds, "Because you do not believe in God, does not mean God does not—" at which point Riddick interupts him and firmly states... "You think someone can spend half their life in the slam, with a horse bit in their mouth, and not believe? Think he could start out in some liquor store trash bin with an umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, and not believe? You’ve got it all wrong, holy man. I absolutely believe in God. And I absolutely hate the fucker." (For those of you who don't like that word, feel free to join the nimrods against simplicity.)

Substitute state for God in the above (or maybe in addition) and you get my sentiments on the matter of conservatives and liberals and politcal parties, in general.

Lew Rockwell puts it quite succinctly...

"The problem with American conservatism is that it hates the left more than the state, loves the past more than liberty, feels a greater attachment to nationalism than to the idea of self-determination, believes brute force is the answer to all social problems, and thinks it is better to impose truth rather than risk losing one’s soul to heresy. It has never understood the idea of freedom as a self-ordering principle of society. It has never seen the state as the enemy of what conservatives purport to favor. It has always looked to presidential power as the saving grace of what is right and true about America.

"I'm speaking now of the variety of conservatism created by William Buckley, not the Old Right of Albert Jay Nock, John T. Flynn, Garett Garrett, H.L. Mencken, and company, though these people would have all rejected the name conservative as ridiculous. After Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR, what's to conserve of the government? The revolutionaries who tossed off a milder British rule would never have put up with it.

"For my part, I'm hoping that the whole conservative movement will go down in flames with the decline and fall of the Bush administration. The red-state fascists have had their day and instead of liberty, they gave us the most raw and stupid form of imperial big government one can imagine. They have given America a bad name around the world. They have bamboozled millions. They have looted and bankrupted the country."

More here...

The Bene Gesserit Littainy against Fear.
From "Dune", by Frank Herbert

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

To Gulch...or not to Gulch...

Robert Klassen looks at the salient points...

I’d like to thank those readers who wrote to me asking for more information about small-scale restoration farming. My advice is usually the same: Look for level land in a poverty stricken county that has been trashed and overgrazed, has utilities in place, has ground water, rainfall, and moderate weather. Such property can be cleaned up and the fertility restored with little expense or labor, although that will take time. For a high-tech urban dweller, that means the place is only useful as a private vacation spot.

I saw a perfect place on the western slope of the Olympic Mountains recently. Ten acres in a flat spot on a valley floor beside a year-round creek, covered in weeds from overgrazing, a trashed doublewide, junk and garbage scattered around, the kind of place a spouse might condemn on sight. What I saw was restorable land with utilities in place in an excellent spot for a vineyard. I would pick up the trash, give the mobile home away, remove the cross fencing, hire a guy or rent a tractor to disc it down, sow in clover, and forget it for a season. With nothing to steal showing, I'd use it as my personal campground (I live in an old motor home) once or twice a year, bring up the fertility, and get up to speed on viniculture.

More here...

"...the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch."
-- Thomas Jefferson