Via Survival
"What is the meaning of a gold standard and a redeemable currency? It
represents integrity. It insures the people’s control over the
government’s use of the public purse. It is the best guarantee against
the socialization of a nation. It enables a people to keep the
government and banks in check. It prevents currency expansion from
getting ever farther out of bounds until it becomes worthless. It tends
to force standards of honesty on government and bank officials. It is
the symbol of a free society and an honorable government. It is a
necessary prerequisite to economic health. It is the first economic
bulwark of free men."
-- Walter E. Spahr, Professor of Economics at New
York University
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Paul supporters create delegate mischief
Mitt Romney may be the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, but Rep. Ron Paul of Texas is quietly racking up some organizational victories that could complicate Mr. Romney’s anticipated coronation at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., this summer.
Exploiting party rules, loyalists for the libertarian congressman from Texas in recent days have engineered post-primary organizing coups in states such as Louisiana and Alaska, confirming what party regulars say would be an effort to grab an outsized role in the convention and the party’s platform deliberations.
In Massachusetts, the state where Mr. Romney served as governor, Paul loyalists over the weekend helped block more than half of Mr. Romney’s preferred nominees from being named delegates at state party caucuses — even though Mr. Romney won his home state’s primary with 72 percent of the vote. Many state GOP establishment figures, including longtime state Republican National Committee member Ron Kaufman, won’t be going to Tampa in August as official delegates.
Mr. Paul, who is Mr. Romney’s only active challenger with the expected withdrawal Wednesday of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, “is doing more with less than any modern presidential campaign in recent memory,” said Doug Wead, a Paul campaign adviser who served as an aide to President George H.W. Bush.
“More surprises coming,” Mr. Wead, an evangelical Christian, blogged this week. “It means that Ron Paul will be a factor in Tampa.”
Exploiting party rules, loyalists for the libertarian congressman from Texas in recent days have engineered post-primary organizing coups in states such as Louisiana and Alaska, confirming what party regulars say would be an effort to grab an outsized role in the convention and the party’s platform deliberations.
In Massachusetts, the state where Mr. Romney served as governor, Paul loyalists over the weekend helped block more than half of Mr. Romney’s preferred nominees from being named delegates at state party caucuses — even though Mr. Romney won his home state’s primary with 72 percent of the vote. Many state GOP establishment figures, including longtime state Republican National Committee member Ron Kaufman, won’t be going to Tampa in August as official delegates.
Mr. Paul, who is Mr. Romney’s only active challenger with the expected withdrawal Wednesday of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, “is doing more with less than any modern presidential campaign in recent memory,” said Doug Wead, a Paul campaign adviser who served as an aide to President George H.W. Bush.
“More surprises coming,” Mr. Wead, an evangelical Christian, blogged this week. “It means that Ron Paul will be a factor in Tampa.”
More @ The Washington Times
Self-defense might be illegal in Florida
Outrageous, it is.
Particularly galling was the fact that just two weeks after Wollard was sentenced, the U.S. Supreme Court in Hellerv. DistrictofColumbia affirmed the right of Americans to have a firearm “and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” The ruling was cold comfort for the Wollard family.
Just when it seemed that Florida’s inflexible gun sentencing laws couldn’t produce a worse result, I learned last week of an upcoming sentencing in Florida that exceeds Wollard’s for sheer stupidity and rank injustice.
More @ The Washington Times
How Did You Die?
Via LT @ NC Renegade
All Poetry
Did you tackle that trouble that came your way
With a resolute heart and cheerful?
Or hide your face from the light of day
With a craven soul and fearful?
Oh, a trouble's a ton, or a trouble's an ounce,
Or a trouble is what you make it,
And it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts,
But only how did you take it?
You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what's that?
Come up with a smiling face.
It's nothing against you to fall down flat,
But to lie there -- that's disgrace.
The harder you're thrown, why the higher you bounce;
Be proud of your blackened eye!
It isn't the fact that you're licked that counts,
It's how did you fight -- and why?
And though you be done to the death, what then?
If you battled the best you could,
If you played your part in the world of men,
Why, the Critic will call it good.
Death comes with a crawl, or comes with a pounce,
And whether he's slow or spry,
It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts,
But only how did you die?
Edmund Vance Cooke
All Poetry
Did you tackle that trouble that came your way
With a resolute heart and cheerful?
Or hide your face from the light of day
With a craven soul and fearful?
Oh, a trouble's a ton, or a trouble's an ounce,
Or a trouble is what you make it,
And it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts,
But only how did you take it?
You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what's that?
Come up with a smiling face.
It's nothing against you to fall down flat,
But to lie there -- that's disgrace.
The harder you're thrown, why the higher you bounce;
Be proud of your blackened eye!
It isn't the fact that you're licked that counts,
It's how did you fight -- and why?
And though you be done to the death, what then?
If you battled the best you could,
If you played your part in the world of men,
Why, the Critic will call it good.
Death comes with a crawl, or comes with a pounce,
And whether he's slow or spry,
It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts,
But only how did you die?
Edmund Vance Cooke
Golden Dawn arises
********
VERBATIM POST
Greece's borders........must be sealed with land mines
How can the Greeks be blamed for turning to hard-core anti-immigrant parties? They have not been given any other choice besides national suicide:
Reeling from a vicious financial crisis that has cost them pensions and jobs, Greeks have been turning away in droves from the mainstream politicians they feel have let them down. Another political force is trying to tap the void, with blunt promises to "clean up" the country....Given that the mainstream parties have sold them out to foreign banks on the one hand and African immigrants on the other, then installed an non-democratic government, Golden Dawn is now the only option left for the Greek electorate. And if the ruling mainstream parties respond by attempting to violate Greek self-determination, they'll be responsible for the violence that will inevitably ensue. What we're seeing here is that democracy has always been a means to the mainstream rather than an end in itself. Make no mistake, that applies to the USA every bit as much as it does to the Greeks, the only difference is that since there is no American nation, Americans have tolerated a much larger immigrant invasion, in proportional terms, than the Greeks are willing to accept.
Black-clad Golden Dawn members have been storming across the campaign trail across Greece, stopping to chat at cafes and shops, handing out fliers promising security in crime-ridden neighborhoods - and vowing to kick out immigrants. Greece's borders, they say, must be sealed with land mines to stop illegal crossing into a country that became the entry point for 90 percent of the European Union's illegal migrants. Authorities estimate there are about 1 million migrants living in this country of 11 million. Appealing to populist sentiment, Golden Dawn has been gathering donations of food and clothing to deliver to the needy while pledging to make politicians accountable for the crisis. Ordinary Greeks are struggling under tough conditions demanded for rescue loan deals that have pushed the country into a fifth year of recession.
Florida's Gov. Scott: No gun ban for downtown Tampa during GOP convention
Via American Apocalypse
Florida Gov. Rick Scott has shot down a request by Tampa's mayor to allow local authorities to ban guns from the city's downtown during the Republican National Convention in August.
Citing
Second Amendment protections in the U.S. Constitution, Scott told
Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn that conventions and guns have co-existed
since the nation's birth and would continue to do so during the
four-day event beginning Aug. 27.
"It is unclear how disarming law abiding citizens would better protect them from the dangers and threats posed by those who would flout the law," the Republican governor said in a letter on Tuesday.
Local officials need Scott's permission to enact the temporary restrictions after state lawmakers last year passed a measure that prohibits local governments from adopting gun ordinances that are stricter than state law.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott has shot down a request by Tampa's mayor to allow local authorities to ban guns from the city's downtown during the Republican National Convention in August.
"It is unclear how disarming law abiding citizens would better protect them from the dangers and threats posed by those who would flout the law," the Republican governor said in a letter on Tuesday.
Local officials need Scott's permission to enact the temporary restrictions after state lawmakers last year passed a measure that prohibits local governments from adopting gun ordinances that are stricter than state law.
More @ U.S. News
Lightning Washington and prisoners: Good God Almighty (1933)
In 1933, with the support of Macmillan Publishers and the Music Division of the Library of Congress, John A. Lomax made the first of his field-recording trips through the American South. Joined by his seventeen-year-old son Alan, Lomax visited some of the most notorious Southern penitentiaries — among them Sugar Land in Texas; Angola in Louisiana; Parchman Farm in Mississippi — where he knew anachronistic strains of African American folk-song would be preserved away from the influence of the radio, the phonograph, and cross-pollination with whites. The Lomaxes recorded the songs of timber and ground-clearing gangs, chants of the road and railroad crews, solo field hollers with their roots running deep into the antebellum south; they also recorded comic songs, blues, and spirituals. By late 1934, they had recorded dozens of singers and hundreds of songs — "poetic expressions," as Lomax described them, "of pungent wit, simple beauty, startling imagery, extraordinary vividness and power."
"Jail House Bound," a production of West Virginia University Press, collects the earliest of the Lomaxes' prison recordings — made between July and December 1933 in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee — drawing on new remasters from the fragile original acetate discs. The album is introduced by noted American music scholar Mark Allen Jackson (author of "Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie"). Released digitally (May 15, 2012) by Global Jukebox in collaboration with the West Virginia University Press.
Building Tribe: Understanding Tribal Politics
LANGUAGE
Via Western Rifle Shooters Association
Politics – shit everyone hates that word. Like it or not any time you interact or associate with a group of people tied together by something common you’re going to delve into politics of some nature. Now I’m not talking the politics at a macro level (i.e. cake vs. pie, Dem vs. Republican) but the real down in the dirt dealing with people and their interests. Because after all people rarely act or accept anything unless it caters to them in some way, shape, or form. And rural folks are no different. If you are going to build a defensible and sustainable tribe you’re going to have to know how to politic. And the first reality you have to deal with is your expectations.
Get this into your head right now: You are not dealing with trained infantrymen. Hell you’re not even dealing with trained cooks. If you’re lucky enough to have a few vets amongst the crowd then count your blessings and hug ‘em up. But what you need to expect (and managing expectations is a critical aspect of leadership) is a group of folks that know little to nothing about basic soldier skills or tactics and are more worried about the own issues than developing a way to counter a couple of truckloads of dirtbags raiding into their AO. I’ve trained some of the worst soldiers on the planet with the expectation of making them decent troops. You want a challenge? Try teaching Angolan NCOs land nav – I’ll buy ya a candy bar if you can get the dumb sons of bitches to shoot a decent azimuth or differentiate between the Norths. Is it realistic to expect to be able to sit Bill who has worked fields all of his life down and give him a three day block of land nav with practical exams? Hell he probably doesn’t have three days to take off to learn it in most instances – do you? Manage your expectations and keep shit simple.
More @ The Lizard Farmer
UDC SERVICES THAT DESERVE A SECOND LOOK
Via SHNV
Well, to start this off, recall that Ga Gov Roy Barnes removed the 1956
Ga State Flag, and that the Ga Div UDC awarded him their Jefferson Davis
Medal, PLUS invited Barnes to be guest speaker at a Confederate Memorial
Day service in Marietta a few years ago.
The Confederate cemetery in Richmond Virginia known as Hollywood has
thousands of US flags placed on Confederate Graves by a Richmond Chapter
of UDC.
The North Carolina Division UDC is being sued over their collusion with
the government to remove a Confederate Statue illegally by citizens who
desire to see it replaced in it's original location.
The National UDC has stated they refuse to assist in any efforts to
restore 2 Confederate Battleflags on a Confederate Memorial Chapel in
Virginia, and went so far as to refuse to allow the Va Flaggers to stand
on, or walk across their property. When a group of Flaggers (including
children, UDC members, and a uniformed SCV Color Guard) stepped up on
the edge of their property to take a photo, UDC officials actually
called the police!
So as I was reading 2 stories today about Confederate Memorial Services
hosted by the UDC here in Georgia, I see the same mentality mentioned
above
HERE
It is not the fact that the AoT Battleflag is upside down, but that the
flags marking the graves are being removed after the service, which
leads to the obvious question, WHY?
That is small compared to this
HERE
As with Gov Barnes, they had a very special guest speaker at their
service, Former Augusta Mayor Bob Young, again the question is
WHY?!
For those not familiar with Young, read:
THIS & THIS
Billy Bearden
Well, to start this off, recall that Ga Gov Roy Barnes removed the 1956
Ga State Flag, and that the Ga Div UDC awarded him their Jefferson Davis
Medal, PLUS invited Barnes to be guest speaker at a Confederate Memorial
Day service in Marietta a few years ago.
The Confederate cemetery in Richmond Virginia known as Hollywood has
thousands of US flags placed on Confederate Graves by a Richmond Chapter
of UDC.
The North Carolina Division UDC is being sued over their collusion with
the government to remove a Confederate Statue illegally by citizens who
desire to see it replaced in it's original location.
The National UDC has stated they refuse to assist in any efforts to
restore 2 Confederate Battleflags on a Confederate Memorial Chapel in
Virginia, and went so far as to refuse to allow the Va Flaggers to stand
on, or walk across their property. When a group of Flaggers (including
children, UDC members, and a uniformed SCV Color Guard) stepped up on
the edge of their property to take a photo, UDC officials actually
called the police!
So as I was reading 2 stories today about Confederate Memorial Services
hosted by the UDC here in Georgia, I see the same mentality mentioned
above
HERE
It is not the fact that the AoT Battleflag is upside down, but that the
flags marking the graves are being removed after the service, which
leads to the obvious question, WHY?
That is small compared to this
HERE
As with Gov Barnes, they had a very special guest speaker at their
service, Former Augusta Mayor Bob Young, again the question is
WHY?!
For those not familiar with Young, read:
THIS & THIS
Billy Bearden
