Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Focus: BLM

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Damn, such a good picture I'll post it twice in one day. :)

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In the new reality of freedom fighters and domestic terrorists it is important for militias and freedom fighters not to spend their credibility cheaply. What made the Bundy Ranch a success for the patriot forces was Cliven Bundy himself. I am aware of numerous individuals who would have sold out the efforts of their supporters for a reduced grazing fee, or a better payoff.

This is one reason to take it further, to go outside the individual. We can not always rely on the backbone of those we seek to aid when the feds come calling with stock trailers and military garb. The nation is awake. A great example of this was the interchange between Harry Reid and Dean Heller, the Republican senator from Nevada.

H.L. Mencken on the Tyrant

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Mencken held that it is hopeless to look for the real man in his biographies as they tend toward distortion and sentimentalism.  Regarding the authors he added: “Nearly all our professional historians are poor men holding college posts, and they are ten times more cruelly beset by the ruling politico-plutocratic-social oligarchy than ever the Prussian professors were by the Hohenzollerns. Let them diverge in the slightest form from what is the current official doctrine, and they are turned out of their chairs with a ceremony suitable for the expulsion of a drunken valet.”   Bernhard Thuersam

Lincoln With a Few Gourds of Corn Aboard

“Even Lincoln is yet to be got vividly between the covers of a book. The Nicolay-Hay work is quite impossible; it is not a biography, but simply a huge storehouse of biographical raw materials; whoever can read it can also read the official Records of the Rebellion.

So far as I can make out, no genuinely scientific study of the man has ever been attempted. The amazing conflict of testimony about him remains a conflict; the most elemental facts are yet to be established; he grows vaguer and more fabulous as year follows year.

One would think that, by this time, the question of his religious views (to take one example) ought to be settled, but apparently it is not, for no longer than a year ago there came a reverend author, Dr. William E. Barton, with a whole volume on the subject, and I was as much in the dark after reading it as I had been before I opened it.  All previous biographers, it appeared by this author’s evidence, had either dodged the problem or lied. 

The official doctrine, in this as in other departments, is obviously quite as unsound. One hears in the Sunday-schools that Abe was an austere and pious fellow, constantly taking the name of God in whispers . . . [and] that he was a shining idealist, holding all his vast powers by the magic of an inner and ineffable virtue. 

Imagine a man getting on in American politics, interesting and enchanting the boobery, sawing off the horns of other politicians, elbowing his way through the primaries and conventions, by the magic of virtue!

Abe, in fact, must have been a fellow highly skilled at the great democratic art of gum-shoeing.  I like to think of him as one who defeated such politicians as Stanton, Douglas and Sumner with their own weapons – deftly leading them into ambuscades, boldly pulling their noses, magnificently ham-stringing and hornswoggling them – in brief, as a politician of extraordinary talents, who loved the game for its own sake, and had the measure of the crowd.

His official portraits, both in prose and daguerreotype, show him wearing the mien of a man about to be hanged; one never sees him smiling.  Nevertheless, one hears that, until he emerged from Illinois, they always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany [Hall] Nietzsche.  

(Roosevelt: An Autopsy, Prejudices, A Selection, H.L. Mencken, Johns Hopkins Press, 1996, pp. 48-49)

Nevada rancher and former Shoshone chief's range war with BLM predates Bundy standoff

Via LH


Long before Cliven Bundy faced down federal agents in his dispute with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights, fellow Nevada rancher Raymond Yowell, an 84-year-old former Shoshone chief, watched as the BLM seized his herd.

Adding to that, since 2008 they've taken his money as well -- in the form of a piece of his Social Security checks.

Yowell's 132 head of cattle had grazed for decades on the South Fork Western Shoshone Indian Reservation in northeastern Nevada until 2002, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) -- the same agency at odds with Bundy -- seized them. The federal agency sold the cattle at auction and used the proceeds to pay off the portion of back grazing fees it claimed Yowell owed. Once the cattle was sold, the agency sent Yowell a bill for the outstanding balance, some $180,000. They've been garnishing his monthly Social Security checks since 2008 to satisfy the debt Yowell says he does not owe.

More @ Fox

1968 Chevrolet Yenko Camaro SS 1,304 Miles

 R439 1968 Chevrolet Yenko Camaro SS  1,304 Miles, Same Owner Since 1991 Photo 11
It looks rather unassuming at first glance, but this 1968 Camaro has a fascinating history that begins with the fact that it is one of just 33 modified by Don Yenko in 1968. Sold new through Tom Bell Chevrolet in Memphis, Tennessee, it was originally purchased by one Miles Pleasant, who was soon overwhelmed by its power and eventually returned it to the dealer. Local drag racer and Memphis Rodders club member A.J. Lancaster then snapped it up and prepared it for competition in the new Pro Stock class. A period photo of the car shows that it deceptively displayed “396 Cu. In.” lettering on the front fenders, causing more than one competitor to wonder why they could never catch it.

What they did not know was that Lancaster had removed and stored the Yenko engine and replaced it with a specially built dual tunnel-ram 427 CI unit for competition.

More @ MECUM

Texas AG Abbott to BLM: 'Come and Take It'

Via avordvet

 

After Breitbart Texas reported on the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) intent to seize 90,000 acres belonging to Texas landholders along the Texas/Oklahoma line, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott questioned the BLM’s authority to take such action. 

“I am about ready,” General Abbott told Breitbart Texas, “to go to go to the Red River and raise a ‘Come and Take It’ flag to tell the feds to stay out of Texas.”

Gen. Abbott sent a strongly-worded letter to BLM Director Neil Kornze, asking for answers to a series of questions related to the potential land grab. 

“I am deeply concerned about the notion that the Bureau of Land Management believes the federal government has the authority to swoop in and take land that has been owned and cultivated by Texas landowners for generations,” General Abbott wrote. “The BLM’s newly asserted claims to land along the Red River threaten to upset long-settled private property rights and undermine fundamental principles—including the rule of law—that form the foundation of our democracy. Yet, the BLM has failed to disclose either its full intentions or the legal justification for its proposed actions. Decisions of this magnitude must not be made inside a bureaucratic black box.”

More @ Breitbart

Buchanan on Bundy Ranch: 'You Don’t Send the Seventh Cavalry to Collect a Bill'

Via Billy

http://media.washtimes.com/media/image/2014/04/19/ed7f621659c1c10f510f6a706700f0a8.jpg

 On Sean Hannity’s radio show on Monday, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan weighed in on the ongoing dispute between the federal government and Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy. Although things have deescalated, Buchanan insisted the federal government had overreacted.

More with video @ Breitbart

Supreme Court Upholds Affirmative Action Ban

Via Billy

 

On Apr. 22 in Schuette v. BAMN, the Supreme Court of the United States held 6-to-2 that a Michigan constitutional amendment ending racial preferences in many aspects of state government does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868 after the Civil War. One of its clauses forbids any state from denying any person “equal protection of the laws.” The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the central purpose of that clause is to end racially discriminatory state laws.

More @ Breitbart

“Tears flooded my eyes. For the first time in my 37 years I was ashamed of my country.”

 What really happened at the Bay of Pigs
 Two from my military school were killed.

“They fought like tigers,” writes the CIA officer who helped train the Cubans who splashed ashore at the Bay of Pigs 53 years ago this week. “But their fight was doomed before the first man hit the beach.”

That CIA man, Grayston Lynch, knew something about fighting – and about long odds. He carried scars from Omaha Beach, the Battle of the Bulge, and Korea’s Heartbreak Ridge. But in those battles Lynch and his band of brothers counted on the support of their commander in chief. At the Bay of Pigs, Lynch (an American) and his band of brothers (Cubans) learned — first in speechless shock and finally in burning rage — that their most powerful enemies were not Castro’s Soviet-armed soldiers massing in nearby Santa Clara, but the Ivy League’s best and brightest dithering in Washington.

More @ Human Events

IRS revokes conservative group’s tax-exempt status over anti-Clinton statements

Via avordvet

 

The Internal Revenue Servicehas revoked the tax-exempt status of a conservative charity for making statements critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, according to a USA Today report.

The Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, based in Manassas, Va., “has shown a pattern of deliberate and consistent intervention in political campaigns” and made “repeated statements supporting or opposing various candidates by expressing its opinion of the respective candidate’s character and qualifications,” according to a written determination released Friday by the IRS.

From Greatness to Whiteness

 

When Americans over the age of, let us say, 45, look at any of the iconic paintings of America's Founders -- the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the signing of the Constitution, George Washington crossing the Delaware, any of the individual portraits the Founders -- what do they see?
They see great men founding a great country.

If you ask recent graduates of almost any American university what they see when they look at these paintings, chances are that they see something entirely different.

They are apt to see rich, white males who are not great and who did not found a great country. And for many, it is worse than that. These men are not only not great; they are morally quite flawed in that they were slaveholders and/or founded a country that allowed slavery. Moreover, they were not only all racists; they were all sexists, who restricted the vote to males. And they were rich men who were primarily concerned with protecting their wealth, which is why they restricted the vote to landowners.

More @ Townhall

Awwwwwwwwww: UAW throws in the towel in Tennessee

United Auto Workers throws in the towel in Tennessee

More than just a tactical defeat, this might be a watershed moment in the history of organized labor, as Reuters reports the United Auto Workers has dropped its challenge against a pivotal February election in Tennessee:

The United Auto Workers union on Monday said it was withdrawing its objection claiming undue outside political interference in the result of a February election it lost among workers at the Volkswagen AG plant in Tennessee.

More @ Human Events

Why Does the Federal Government own Nevada?

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The most important question with respect to the Bundy Ranch Standoff remains unanswered. Why does the federal government own Nevada? It does not own New York or Virginia or Massachusetts.

Cliven Bundy says that the state of Nevada owns the contested land. The Bureau of Land Management clearly considers the property the federal governments; hence the 200 snipers posted on the property and the tasing of the Bundys for resisting when the feds confiscated their cattle. Who is right?

But the problem isn’t Nevada’s alone where government owns 87.7 % of the land leaving private ownership of the state at but 12.3 %. The percentage of land owned by government exceeds fifty percent in Alaska (98.5), Idaho (63.8), Oregon (52.6), and Utah (63.6). Indeed, the federal government claims to own a third of all the landmass in the United States (Inventory Report on Real Property Owned by the United States Throughout the World, published by the General Services Administration, page 10). Government owns almost half of California (47.5). Basically the federal government did not give western states all their land when they qualified for statehood. States were so excited to get coveted statehood that they went along with the conditions despite the confiscation of, for most in the West, at least a third of their land.

I Will Not 'Go Gentle into That Good Night'

Via comment by Sioux  on Furious Chinese Rioters Beat Corrupt Policemen To ...

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Dylan Thomas, in his famous poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night,” was referring to  how each individual will deal with death's onrushing approach.  Each person deals with the realization that he is mortal in his own way.

With all the recent revelations, and many not so recent, about the reality of Barack Obama’s dream to fundamentally transform America, using the death of a man and the death of a country as analogous seems apt. 

Furious Chinese Rioters Beat Corrupt Policemen To Death

Via Jonathan


It appears, based on these extremely graphic images, that the Chinese people has a different way of dealing with corrupt officials. As Shanghaiist reports, a riot involving around 1,000 people broke out last Saturday in Cangnan county of Wenzhou city, Zhejiang province, resulting in the hospitalization of five chengguan, China's notoriously abusive and under-regulated urban enforcement officials. The alleged cause for the riots was the five's brutally killing a civilian.

 According to reports, the chengguan "hit the man with a hammer until he started to vomit blood, because he was trying to take pictures of their violence towards a woman, a street vendor." This man later died while being rushed to the hospital. Given the following images of civilian retribution; is it any wonder, the powers that be in China fear social unrest?

More @ Zero Hedge

‘Our Youngest Hostage’

Via Cousin John


According to Sham Times and other Arabic websites, jihadi social media networks posted the above picture of a child sitting on the ground while surrounded by armed men pointing their rifles at him. 

The caption appearing with the picture, purportedly posted by a supporter of the Free Syrian Army, is “Our youngest hostage from among the hostile sects of Kessab.”

Kessab is a predominantly Christian Armenian village in Syria near the Turkish border.  Earlier it was invaded by jihadis, who terrorized, pillaged churches, and prompted some 2000 residents to flee.  Initial reports had stated that about a dozen families remained as hostages.