Some perspective

He Is Risen!



All Hail the Chief.

Hunter-Killer Watch - Drone lands in ND

Ok - yes, economic woes aside, we are still heading towards The Singularity and all of the interesting changes and shifts that includes.

A predator drone has been moved from Arizona to North Dakota to patrol the northern border between the U.S. and Canada.

Here are some details:

After two failed tries, an unmanned aircraft expected to be the first to patrol the northern U.S. border completed a flight from Arizona to North Dakota.

U.S Customs and Border Protection officials said the Predator B drone touched down Saturday at the Grand Forks Air Force Base after a six-hour flight from Libby Army Airfield in Sierra Vista, Ariz.

Is it me, but isn't a little unnerving to think about unmanned aircraft flying across our skies? I wonder how many of these flights that we don't know about.

More details on the Predator:

The Predator weighs 5 tons, has a 66-foot wingspan and can fly undetected as high as 50,000 feet. It can fly for 28 hours at a time and will be equipped with sensors and radar.

They can also be equipped with Hellfire missiles and other nasties for offensive work.

Yikes!

Sha-bam . . sucka!

Well, what goes around comes around, doesn't it?


"But wait . . . gloves . . . didn't fit. I thought that . . . er . . . "

The best things do come to those who wait.

Obama's Question #59

A few stories have covered the ridiculously invasive list of questions posted by the New York Times as the official questionnaire being used to qualify folks for a top-level position in the Obama Administration.

After wading through question after question involving potential conflicts of interest, involvement with AIG and Freddie May/Fanny Mac, illegal immigrant nannies and/or servants, potentially damaging past associations, online habits, and controversial and/or candid diary entries, one would think that this would not only disqualify most folks currently living and/or working in Washington DC, but also most everyone living in America over the age of 10. I know we are all looking for the Big Change, but these questions could even disqualify The Man himself.

Of particular interest to our demographic, was one asking specifically about gun ownership of the would-be applicant:

(59) Do you or any members of your immediate family own a gun? If so, provide complete ownership and registration information. Has the registration ever lapsed? Please also describe how and by whom it is used and whether it has been the cause of any personal injuries or property damage.

Some interesting conjecture can arise from this question, most notably the inclusion of gun registration (which differs significantly in meaning and severity depending on geographic locale) and use of firearms in accidents that caused injury to people and/or property. Asking how it is used can also be used to differentiate from "approved" firearms usage - i.e. sporting clays, antique collections, etc. - from "unapproved" uses - like to protect one's family from violent criminals and misguided civilian national security forces gone wild.

Don't be surprised if this is a potential foreshadowing of the aforementioned change to our national gun registration policies, as well as opening up firearms manufacturers to more of the ridiculous litigation that Obama and his ilk are so fond of.

Here's the full list of questions.

Couldn't see this one coming . . .

Ok - so I am trying to not get a whole mess (literally) of politics into this blog, but this one is notable for the gun show culture. We've all been taking about the inevitability of Obama and what that has to do with 2nd Amendment rights - and apparently this is a sentiment shared fairly generally with gun enthusiasts.

Run on Guns After Obama Wins



Full article.

And another from before the election.

In honor of the upcoming election . . .



Check out Part 2 here.

And just like that . . . the commies won!

As an ardent supporter of a free market economy, I - like many other Americans (98% of emails to the White House over the past week or so - according to some sources) - have been appalled by the lack of perspective in some of the government bailout nightmares that have been taking place in the last few weeks.

Some of the recent policies are so socialist in their application that they are making FDR look like an ardent conservative.

Here's the latest piece of hogwash to cross the radars:

US government may take part ownership in banks

WASHINGTON (AP) - News that the Bush administration is considering taking part ownership in a number of U.S. banks helped restore a relative calm over global financial markets Thursday.

The aim of such a move would be to thaw the lending freeze that threatens to push the world's economy into recession. It comes after rampant fear about the global economy sent investors scurrying on Tuesday for safety in U.S. government securities despite an orchestrated round of rate cuts by the world's central banks.

Investors also were hoping that selling, which gave the Dow its ninth straight day of losses, was overdone. Wall Street began the day higher, but then slid after declines in some blue chip names like General Motors Corp. weighed on the markets.

An administration official, who spoke late Tuesday on condition of anonymity because no decision has been made, said the $700 billion rescue package passed by Congress last week allows the Treasury Department to inject fresh capital into financial institutions and get ownership shares in return.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told reporters that Treasury was moving quickly to implement the $700 billion rescue effort and he specifically mentioned reviewing ways to bolster the capital of banks.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D93N27U01

Not to be conspiratorial here, but what the hell is going on?

I don't know where we lost our way (but I think it may have happened sometime in the 1960s), but we are not the country we were when we set-off to defeat fascist nationalism in Europe during the 1940s.

Let's take a look and see where we are in the process:

10 Planks of the Communist Manifesto

(My emphasis in bold)

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.

From wikipedia.

I am not smart enough to know exactly what the hell items 7, 8, and 9 mean, but I can tell there is a general movement in this country to change the culture of America - from the cradle of the industrial revolution and the envy of the world, to the a shadow of its past greatness - where the political focus has moved from being a beacon of light for the rest of the world - to being a giant hand-out machine to everyone who thinks they need to have a suck at the big government tit.

What a world we live in where the Russians are the capitalists and the Americans are becoming the communists!

Some of my more left-leaning friends would have you believe that communism is the most equitable system of government . . . it just has never worked in modern, non-nomadic societies because it hasn't been hasn't been their whiny, disenfranchised version of it.

Ron Paul's Perspective on the Economy

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

Check out - http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

Woo-hoo, the Olympics!


Fun for everyone . . . . except Christians, those who speak out loud, parents, Zhang Zhixin, press folk, fringe religions, Tibetans, rural villagers, minorities, any religions and free thinkers.

Go USA Badminton!

Quotes

“I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet.”
- Nancy Pelosi

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
- H L Mencken

Get your hands off my guns, you damn dirty Apes!

Everyone has their day in court, or so the saying goes. For those of you who have been living in a cave, on Mars - with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears - The Supreme Court began to hear arguments today in a Washington DC case that challenges the classic question of the Second Amendment - whether the right to own a weapon is a individual or state right.

Overall the news I have heard so far is fairly positive on the pro-gun side, but knowing how screwy things are right now, I am sure that can change fairly quickly.



In either case, and in honor of this momentous occasion, I have to give a plug for the controversial and wonderful Unintended Consequences by John Ross. It was recommended to me by one of my hunting buddies and its a great novel about how gun control got started in America and where it can lead if it goes out of control.

Here's an overview. I am sure some would consider it to be fairly alarmist, but it gives some background on how gun control started in this country (post-reconstruction to keep guns out of the hands of the recently freed slaves) and how ridiculous some of the gun control laws are vs. the amount of crime they are actually preventing.

I think it stands with Boston' s Gun Bible as two of the best books for the shooter who is interested in self-defense and wants to know more about

Also - while researching the web today to get the latest on the case I found this great deconstruction of the most common arguments against the Second Amendment.

The article breaks down 5 arguments against the individual right to own a firearm - even getting into the details of what it would actually mean if we limited private ownership of firearms to the actual weapons around at the time of the Constitution.

I won't spoil the fun, but let's just say we'd be limited to around 1820 or so, when the percussion cap replaced flintlock ignition as the new standard. High tech!

Here's an excerpt:

The Second Amendment’s basis lies in the natural right of self-defense. For the Founding Fathers, the Second Amendment was not a dispensable exercise in “what if?” They had confronted an oppressive government with personal armaments and succeeded in securing liberty. The Second Amendment is a provision ensuring that citizens would always have the necessary tools for physical resistance to future tyranny.

Whether or not you are a gun owner, hunter or recreational shooter, pay attention to the news and watch what happens with this case. The old Chinese proverb May You Live In Interesting Times will go double for the next few months as we'll not only be deciding which two shysters will be running for President in the fall, but also seeing how the Supreme Court does at deciding a real case - with ramifications that could shake our Republic down to its very core.

Ok - too dramatic?

Does this put it into perspective?



More information
Gun Owners of America
Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership
A Human Right

“Before 2020, every newborn child in industrialized countries will be implanted with an RFID or similar chip. Ostensibly providing important personal and medical data, these may also be used for tracking and surveillance.”
– Michael Dahan, a professor at Sapir Academic College in Israel