Tag: Reset Button

Hopenchangen Hopenhagen Carbonhagen

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Hopenchangen Hopenhagen Carbonhagen

So Obamateur is flying to Carbonhagen on his way to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize to inspire other World Leaders™ to Do the Right Thing© and cut per capita CO2 emissions back to 19th Century levels in order to Save the Planet!©™® In the mean time, the Imperial Senate Democrats are preparing to throw their female constituency under the bus® by prohibiting Federal funds from being used to pay for abortions just so they can get Health Care Reform©™® passed and fvck the rest of us, too.

Just when do the actions of our Congressweasels fall to the level of “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object…a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism”?

Just askin’.

UPDATE: Who needs Carbonhagen? The EPA can just make sh!t up as they go!

First “Law Abiding Citizen” now “Harry Brown”

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First “Law Abiding Citizen” now “Harry Brown“

Watch the trailer:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVOSfHFNlcI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&w=640&h=385]
It was supposed to release in the US on 11/6/09, but I can’t find it showing anywhere. It’s also supposed to have opened in the UK on 11/11. Someone’s seen it, because there are currently 40 User Comments at IMDB. This is typical:

This film accurately depicts life in modern Britain today.

Not the image of a flowing rolling countryside of middle class England which is often depicted in typical international films but one of an inner city “sink” estate – Elephant & Castle in London – with all of its associated problems.

I saw the film last night and it brought back all the memories I have of having lived in similar circumstances.

Michael Caine is excellent, this is probably one of his best films and I expect film nominations for his role.

The film gives a gritty but realistic view of the life most people live on the sink estates of Britain, all are there through no choice of their own, but some are aware of the conditions they are forced to live in.

I don’t think we’ll see the British government promoting this film as it portraits the country in a very bad light, though, if you are not from Britain and would like a taste of what some of us have to put up with I recommend you see this film.

I’d like to see it.

Interesting Question

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Interesting Question

This is a serious question to all readers of The Market Ticker.

Where is your personal breaking point?
No, I’m not asking how far you have to be pushed before you “go postal” and commit random acts of violence. That’s not a question to ask in polite company, even though for virtually everyone, there is such a point.

No, I’m asking how much abuse you have to have personally served upon you by the banksters and other scam artists in this country before you have had enough, and start doing unto the other guy – because he has done you.

— The Market Ticker, Where’s the Breaking Point?

RTWT, and the links.

The natives are getting restless. Billy Beck gives us the Quote of the Day:

I am beginning to consider this year since January as a fairly close comparison to events elsewhere in 1917, with the temporal slipped-disk of George Bush as Alexander Kerensky for eight years. If we take Obama as the first post-American president, then Bush was the president of a provisional government. In any case, the slow-motion revolution of Amsoc is no longer slow-motion. We’re living a moment in history that will reverberate through history as the turn of a great wheel, into precisely what cannot be completely foretold right now, but it must surely be enormous in its consequences.

We are more and more in it, every day, and none it is anything good for anyone. As the struggle intensifies, every person’s principles will be more clearly illuminated, right down to the street-level where you live. Pay close attention, and keep both hands on the wheel.

Quote of the Day – Tough History Coming Edition

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Our currency is tanking. Our debts are climbing. Our energy needs are breaking us. Our borrowing is out of control. The country is divided in a 1859/1968 mode. And the world is smiling as Obama, now hesitant and without the old messianic confidence, presides over our accepted inevitable decline. The country needs to buck up and meet these challenges head on, since the world smells blood, whether in Iran, Russia, the Mideast, North Korea, or South America, and in a mere 9 months of the reset button.

– Victor Davis Hanson, Works and Days, Change and Hope

This sh!t is really starting to worry me.

Entropy Happens

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Monday’s scoop of free ice cream has drawn some traffic, some links, and some comments, and last night’s gun blogger roundtable at Gun Nuts Radio has provided another spark of inspiration. Unfortunately, twelve-hour days and 2:30AM cat fights in the kitchen are conspiring to smother that spark, so I’m afraid this piece isn’t going to be quite the quality I’d prefer, but I want to keep up with Rule of Blogging #1 as best I can.

One of the comments left at Restoring the Lost Constitution was this one:

“Thus perish all compromise with tyranny!”

(William Lloyd Garrison, setting fire to the constitution on Framingham Green, Massachusetts, July 4, 1854)

Word.
Billy Beck

Immediately followed by this one:

The Necronstitution.

Why try to restore a thing so instrumental in the death of America?

“The American Revolution in fact died with the ratification of the US Constitution.”

http://tinyurl.com/n6xyo5

It was only a matter of time to arrive at this point. That was clear before the ink was even dry on that thing.
Matt

Obviously neither Beck nor Matt are particular fans of the Constitution, but the fact of the matter remains that there are a significant number of us who want what we believe that document promised us restored. We far outnumber those of the Anarchist bent, but (as I have been cataloging here at TSM for the last six years) we’re both overrun by people who have been fed Rousseau (the overwhelming majority unknowingly) for their entire lives.

And that feeding has been deliberate. I strongly recommend you watch Bill Whittle’s 13 minute piece on “The Great Liberal Narrative”. As commenter “jb” put it in his linking post,

Gramsci saw it correctly, although he was a minor marxist of his time. Jailbirds rarely get recognition.

“Gramsci rejected the state-worship that results from identifying political society with civil society, as was done by the Jacobins and Fascists. He believes the proletariat’s historical task is to create a ‘regulated society’ and defines the ‘withering away of the state’ as the full development of civil society’s ability to regulate itself.” (Wikipedia)

He was a communist’s communist–he kept the end goal in sight at all times. Lenin and Stalin were more deadly, but Gramsci was more consistent. Give the proletariat the essentials of life, or even a bit better and they (the proletariat) will let the marxist masters do what they wish.

So what about that inspiration from the Roundtable discussion last night? Hold on just a bit longer.

Back in October of 2006 I wrote an überpost, hoping to conclude my series on “What is a Right?” entitled The United Federation of Planets. If you’ve got an hour or two, you might want to go peruse that piece, but the key relating to this post is that what people believe drives the cultures they live in. At one time, the vast majority of this society believed that the Constitution protected our rights and our property. Many of us want that protection back. Apparently most people think they do, but honestly don’t understand that what they’re agitating for is its exact opposite. Those who do understand it are (IMHO) evil.

Last night, one of the questions we bloggers were asked was “what was our favorite or most popular post?” LabRat said one of hers was Parasite memes and monkeyspheres. It’s one of my favorites as well, and it starts out with this:

It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: “Kings. What a good idea.” Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. — Terry Pratchett, from Feet of Clay

She goes on to argue a convincing case that human evolution prewires us to hate rich people, and embrace “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Read it.

So if LabRat is even half right, it’s not really surprising that socialism is so seductive to so much of the population, and that the ideology laid down in the Declaration of Independence very well may have had the seeds of its destruction sown with the ratification of the Constitution of the United States.

Entropy happens, and it generally only goes one way without a huge influx of carefully directed power from outside the observed system: downhill. Our Constitutionally-oriented belief system has survived, mostly intact, for over 200 years – which is a pretty damned good run, historically. What the people of this nation have accomplished in that period is more than exceptional, it’s quite literally so extraordinary as to seem almost impossible.

But it’s not enough, apparently, to overcome the siren song of “we’ll take care of you!”

That major design flaw, it seems, is catching up to us.

Good night. I hope you sleep better than I probably will.

Restoring the Lost Constitution

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Can we?

Don’t doubt that it’s been lost. A while back I struggled through Randy Barnett’s Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, a college-level text on that subject. Barnett thinks we can, but first he spends some time detailing how we went from, in his words, “islands of government power in a sea of liberty” to the exact opposite – sinking islands of liberty in an ever-expanding sea of government power. For Barnett, a law professor, the changes are viewed through a narrow lens – that of legislation and court decisions. He views the path back largely as a reversal of that course, but I don’t think the courts can save us.

If you’re a hardcore Three-Percenter, you may believe that the Constitution might be restored by men fighting a 300 meter Second Revolutionary War with small-arms. I’m not so sanguine about that one, but I appreciate the sentiment. If I thought it could actually work, I’d be on the front lines pulling triggers.

Current pundits think the path back might be through a “throw the bums out” sweeping change of our legislative bodies. I’m not so sanguine about that, either, as I’ll explain.

But don’t for a moment doubt that whatever the government is operating under presently, it isn’t the Constitution of the United States that each and every elected and appointed public official still swears an oath to uphold and defend, and it hasn’t been for quite some time.

Back in October of last year, I posted a short video of a portion of an interview of Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov discussing the socialist strategy of “ideological subversion” of an enemy country. That interview was taped in 1985. As Bezmenov explained, the process of “ideological subversion” was:

To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of their balance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow, and it is divided in four basic stages. The first one being demoralization. It takes from 15-20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years it takes to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy.

—

In other words, Marxism-Leninism is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counterbalanced with the basic values of Americanism, America patriotism.

Recently I’ve been reading John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education. Gatto states in no uncertain terms that from his perspective something changed radically in the American public education system in 1965. It did so in all the metropolitan school systems nationwide, and later spread to the suburban and rural school systems. Bezmenov states that “at least three generations of American students” had socialism “pumped into their heads” as of 1985 – that is, a minimum of 45 years of “ideological subversion,” dating back between 1925 and 1940, and putting the first generation subject to that subversion into positions in the educational system that enabled enaction of that widespread systemic alteration by 1965, and accelerate the process further.

Here we are in 2009, a further twenty-four years on, and we have elected as President a man whose supporters see Ché Guevara as a hero, who was surrounded by active supporters of socialism, who appointed at least one advisor who is an open communist, and his history strongly suggests that the President was heavily influenced by socialists throughout his life.

Many of his generation (which is mine) were.

I’m not saying that the entire population of the country has been brainwashed by an organized, orchestrated conspiracy of the Tuesday Night Socialist Club, far from it. But the evidence strongly suggests that the undeniably attractive “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” ideology has set deep roots in the American culture since Marx first cast the seeds of his philosophy to the four winds. In fact, a 2002 Columbia Law School survey found

. . . that sixty-nine percent of respondents either thought that the United States Constitution contained Marx’s maxim, or did not know whether or not it did.

The survey result cannot be dismissed as anomalous, for it parallels the outcome of a survey conducted by the Hearst Corporation fifteen years ago.

And law professor Michael C. Dorf, who I quote from above, next asks the real question of this essay:

These results, taken together, are troubling for a constitutional democracy in which popular consent underwrites the government’s legitimacy. How can Americans be said to tacitly ratify the Constitution over time when so many of them have a deeply erroneous idea of what it contains?

What Constitution would we restore? Sixty-nine percent of the survey respondents couldn’t even tell you that it didn’t contain Marx’s maxim!

I haven’t read the book, but Orson Scott Card, in a piece he wrote five years ago, reviewed a book by Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead. In that review, he quotes this:

Jacobs sees us as being well down the road to a self-inflicted Dark Age, in which we will have thrown away many of the very things that made our civilization so dominant, so prosperous, so successful. We are not immune to the natural laws that govern the formation and dissolution of human communities: When the civilization no longer provides the benefits that lead to success, then, unsurprisingly, the civilization is likely to fail.
As she says in her introduction, “People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?”
Dark Age Ahead gives us a series of concrete examples of exactly that process.
“Every culture,” she says, “takes pains to educate its young so that they, in their turn, can practice and transmit it completely.” Our civilization, however, is failing to do that. On the contrary, we are systematically training our young not to embrace the culture that brought us greatness.
A civilization is truly dead, she says, when “even the memory of what has been lost is lost.”

A civilization is truly dead when even the memory of what has been lost is lost.

That quote has stuck with me ever since. (And I recommend you read the rest of Card’s post as well.)

For whatever reason, we have not passed on our culture. We have systematically discarded it, forgotten it, refuted it, and in some cases reviled it. Card himself, in one of his more recent novels, described America thus:

(America) was a nation created out of nothing – nothing but a set of ideals that they never measured up to. Now and then they had great leaders, but usually nothing but political hacks, and I mean right from the start. Washington was great, but Adams was paranoid and lazy, and Jefferson was as vile a scheming politician as a nation has ever been cursed with.

…

America shaped itself with institutions so strong that it could survive corruption, stupidity, vanity, ambition, recklessness, and even insanity in its chief executive.

But can it survive enmity?

The Constitution is the fundamental legal document of our nation. It is the philosophy of John Locke laid down as the basic law of the land: Life, liberty, property. Protect all three against attacks from both private individuals and governments – including our own.

But socialism is based on the philosophy of Rousseau, and the two are totally incompatible. As Jonah Goldberg put it during an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt back in February of last year:

Rousseau says the government is there, that our rights come from the government, that (they) come from the collective. Locke says our rights come from God, and that we only create a government to protect our interests. The Rousseauian says you can make a religion out of society and politics, and the Lockean says no, religion is a separate sphere from politics. And that is the defining distinction between the two, and I think that distinction also runs through the human heart, that we all have a Rousseauian temptation in us. And it’s the job of conservatives to remind people that the Lockean in us needs to win.

And I’m afraid we’ve already lost that fight. There aren’t enough Lockeans left, and we awoke too late. Rousseau’s beautiful but flawed philosophy has, like the pied-piper, led our children to the pier, and the Endarkenment cometh.

And there’s your free ice cream for the day.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Anyone who is being honest recognizes the country is on a path towards a major calamity. We have been living beyond our means for decades and the fiscal mismanagement of the country will come to a dramatic climax in the next decade. What many deny is that this crisis was pre-ordained based upon a predictable timeline of generational forces repeating over and over again throughout history. The elites are continuously stunned that every 20 to 25 years a fresh mood engulfs the country and new generations act differently than the generations who proceeded them. The privileged are astounded because they don’t want to accept the fact that progress is not linear and that society will undergo highs and lows over the course of a century.

— Financial Sense Editorials, Boomers – Winter is Coming

Found at Bloodletting

Happy Independence Day

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Happy Independence Day

The Unanimous Declaration
of the Thirteen United States of America
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

Snopes details the fates of many of the signers.

I’m going to the range.