Thursday, January 12, 2012
Foul-mouthed Canton cop fired, plans to appeal
The foul-mouthed Canton, OH police officer who threatened to shoot an armed citizen in the head over his concealed pistol last summer has been fired, but he reportedly plans to appeal.
News of the firing of Canton officer Daniel Harless has already hit some of the gun rights forums, such as GunRightsMedia.com and Gun-Politics.org. Members on both forums are elated. This column first discussed the case back in July after video from Harless’ dash camera became public. The case ignited a fury among gun owners all over the country, including the Pacific Northwest.
Perhaps the most critical remarks of all came from John Richardson, blogger at No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money:
Opinion Supreme Court delivers a knockout punch to the White House
Wednesday the United States Supreme Court delivered a knockout blow to the White House in the cause of religious liberty.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a unanimous court swatted away the government’s claim that the Lutheran Church did not have the right to fire a “minister of religion” who, after six years of Lutheran religious training had been commissioned as a minister, upon election by her congregation.
The fired minister -- who also taught secular subjects -- claimed discrimination in employment. The Obama administration, always looking for opportunities to undermine the bedrock of First Amendment religious liberty, eagerly agreed.
There was just one big problem standing in the way of the government's plan: the U.S. Constitution. For a long time American courts have recognized the existence of a "ministerial exemption" which keeps government’s hands off the employment relationship between a religious institution and its ministers or clergy.
Here, in this case, the Department of Justice had the nerve to not only challenge the exemption’s application but also its very existence.
But, Chief Justice Roberts pushed back hard, telling the government essentially to butt out:
Blowback is real ........
Via California Tree of Liberty
Verbatim Post
The invaders set up camp on the outskirts of our village a week ago. A few days later, their tanks began rolling down our streets with their turrets traversing from left to right and only stopping to point there cannons at anyone crossing the roads. A few of the villagers responded with anger. They grabbed their rifles and rocket launchers ready to use force to repel this act of aggression. The troops came to recruit police officers and soldiers to help provide "security" for the new government. Checkpoints were set up at every other street corner. What did we do to deserve this? All we want is peace and to be left alone not guns pointed in our faces with soldiers at every street corner questioning our every move. While driving to the market, to pick up some food, I was stopped at a checkpoint. There stood three soldiers and a giant armored vehicle three times the height, and twice the length of my car. While staring into my vehicle one of their translators shouted a series of questions, "Where are you going? What is this in your trunk? Do you have any weapons? You say you have nothing to hide?" They clearly thought I might have been hiding something from them.
A soldier pulled me out of my car and searched my body. He started combing through my hair with his fingers. Completely frightened, I asked what they were looking for. He barked something at me in his strange dialect and kicked my legs apart. He patted me down and across my torn and threw his knife-shaped hand into my crotch. The other soldiers whipped out their knives and ripped apart my car’s interior only leaving the seat’s metal frames. They motioned me to leave so I limped back to the car and drove off. This event happened at least multiple times a week, sometimes daily. Of course, it was a little easier for them the following times since they had already wreaked havoc on the inside of my car. I only pray that they don’t harm me or my family.
The first villagers who took up arms against the invaders fired mortar rounds into the invaders’ encampment. Some of soldiers at the checkpoint next to the market spotted the flashes evacuating the mortar tubes. The occupiers sent armored vehicles down to the house and ripped through its walls with machine gun fire. The men inside the house were killed.
The next day the multiple convoys of troops swept through our village. They were looking for mortar tubes, rockets, and other explosives. A group of soldiers kicked down my door and ran into the living room pointing their guns at my family and me. I was pulled out by my hair into the street. A translator asked if I had any explosives or weapons in the home. I didn’t. They proceeded to rip apart my home by flipping over the couches and throwing about all of my family’s personal effects. The translator informed me they found nothing but I had to be taken back to their encampment for questioning. My hands were forcefully zip-tied together behind my back and a black cloth was thrown over my face. I was then thrown in the back of truck with other people from my village. Some of the men were crying and begging for god’s help. Some were pissing all over themselves. Others pledged revenge.
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We arrived at the military base and were lined up next to each other. We were individually taken into a room for questioning. Many of the men were detained there for days while the rest of us were allowed to go back to our homes. I later discovered that almost every male for age 15-45 were taken from the village that day. Once again, others plotted to use force against the invaders.
I woke up the next morning to the sounds of rockets being fired over our village. I rushed outside and saw that they were exploding somewhere inside the military encampment. Then my sight went black. I woke up in the middle of the street. The four houses around me were demolished. I looked towards my home which had also in ruin. My wife and children were under the rubble. Grabbing each piece of rubble and throwing it wildly into the street; I searched for my family. I asked a couple of others running frantically looking for their loved ones what happened. They said the army responded to the rocket attack by sending a barrage of mortars into the village. They missed.
I found my wife and children dead. They were crushed under the rubble of our home. A patrol of soldiers came and tried to compensate my losses with money. I refused to take it. No amount of money could possibly bring back my family or my home. There were others in the village that lost family and friends to the bomb-driven slaughter. We have all lost the will to live. We’re getting guns and promising retribution.
This could have been a story written by an Afghani, or an Iraqi but it was written by me. I was part of that occupying force in Iraq. I put myself in the shoes of a person on the other side of our guns. Some of the events in this story I personally witnessed, and others are the stories of what other veterans have seen. I hope and pray one day that all Americans are capable of exercising empathy and are able come to the logical conclusion that violence only produces more violence.
Blowback is real and it is perpetual in the lives of the millions across the globe. However, there is one presidential candidate who has vowed to end it. Vote Ron Paul to help end this vicious cycle.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Killing the West With Kindness
Verbatim Post
A couple of hard-luck stories:
First story: Randy Johnson of Marion, Indiana was laid off from his job at a paper-products company in 1995 along with 200 other employees. The company had been purchased by Bain Capital six months previously. Mitt Romney was a principal of Bain Capital at the time. Mr. Johnson was laid off: That’s the hard-luck story, the whole thing. The guy was laid off. In 1995. He’s still whining. In fact he’s going professional with the whine: Obama’s people are trundling him around the country to tell his story in halls full of empathetically weeping citizens.
Second story (scroll down a bit on that link): Mr. and Mrs. Smith of Bristol, England have ten kids but only a four-bedroom house. Things are cramped. They are also hard-up: Mrs. Smith tells us that the children have only one Nintendo Wii console between them. If that’s got you reaching for your hanky, please note that neither of the Smiths has held a job since 2001, when the child count was three. They live entirely on government benefits, north of $150,000 worth per annum. The town gave them the house and also delivers breakfast to them.
The first story there is a story about capitalism, one feature of which is that employees get fired, sometimes through no fault of their own. It happens to the nicest people. It’s happened to me. I was once fired from a job as a dishwasher (for taking a day off without telling the boss). As well as being a firee, I’ve also been a firer. In charge of small programming teams, a couple of times I had to fire people. (There is quite a high level of incompetence among computer programmers.) Swings and roundabouts.
The second story is about the welfare state. The welfare state seemed like a good idea when it first came up a hundred or so years ago. There was a lot of real distress beyond private charity’s reach: the chronic sick or disabled, the unemployed, the old. Diverting some portion of state revenues for relief of that distress seemed like a good idea—like a civilizational advance, in fact. Now it’s a gravy train for the workshy, especially for those willing to put a wall of kids between themselves and responsibility.
The two stories’ common denominator is kindness. Randy Johnson’s beef with capitalism is that it’s unkind. The Smiths’ beef with the welfare state is that it’s not being kind enough to them.
Here’s a different story, one that should be an illustration of kindness in action: the story of refugee resettlement in the USA. I just got back from a lecture by Don Barnett, an expert on the topic. Don ran through points he’s made in his Center for Immigration Studies research papers.
Bottom line: Refugee resettlement is a huge money racket, with executives of the VOLAGs (Voluntary Agencies) drawing extravagant salaries that are mostly paid by the US taxpayer. Government money has well-nigh chased out private charity. The United Nations drives the process, the State Department waving refugees through to the VOLAGS, who after a few weeks dump them on the welfare systems. (Refugees are immediately eligible for all welfare benefits.) Claims of refugee status are checked perfunctorily or not at all, so that a high proportion—Barnett thinks 90 percent—are bogus.
(There was a nice illustration of that bogosity in Portland, Maine recently. City officials wanted taxi drivers with airport-access permits to show up in person when renewing permits. Portland’s large contingent of Somali cabbies protested. “The Somalis have argued that they sometimes have to go to their homeland to attend to family matters, and that those trips can be lengthy. They might not be in the country when their permit is up for renewal.” For people admitted on refugee visas because of a “well-founded fear of persecution,” it seems a bit odd to be shuttling back and forth to the persecuting country. Hat tip here to the invaluable Refugee Resettlement Watch website.)
US refugee policy has always been borderline insane. Living in Hong Kong forty years ago I met several smart, well-educated young people with decent apartments and good jobs who told me they were waiting for their US refugee visas. Their families had fled to the colony from mainland China during the great famines of 1958-62. When I met them they were well-settled and prosperous, but the US government still considered them refugees. When I mentioned this to Don, he agreed but added that things have gotten way worse since 1980.
Again, it’s a matter of kindness. That at least is how uninformed people—say, 99 percent of the population—think of refugee resettlement. It’s a money racket, a scam on the taxpaying public—Don Barnett calls it “ACORN Without Borders.”
That illusion of kindness is bolstered by the churchly names that many of the refugee VOLAGS have. Catholic Charities (the biggest one); Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service; Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; Episcopal Migration Ministries…to object to these godly outfits would surely be blasphemy. Meanwhile, I’ll leave it to the ACLU to figure out how the boxcar-loads of money the government throws at the VOLAGs squares with church-state separation. Hello, ACLU? Hello? Hello?…
In his recent book, Steven Pinker tells us how violence, cruelty, and hardship have declined across the modern period, with the decline accelerating in recent decades. Pinker refrains from following the trend line into the future. But you can’t help thinking, and thinking that Pinker thinks, that the world—at least the Western world—will go on getting kinder and kinder until all occasions for distress or discomfort have been vanquished from human life.
Perhaps so; but my three stories illustrate that there may be an undertow working in the opposite direction.
If revulsion at capitalism’s unkindness brings us down to state socialism, and welfare-state kindness encourages parasites such as the Smiths to breed incontinently, and the bogus kindness of the refugee-resettlement scams fills up our towns with high-fertility people utterly alien to us in religion and culture, then Western civilization is killing itself with kindness.
How to Climb a Rope Like a Navy Seal
Editor’s note: This post was written by Bryan Black and originally ran on ITS Tactical.
So why should you climb rope? First of all, if you’re not including rope climbing in your workout routines, you’re missing out on one of the best forearm and grip workouts around.
Climbing rope is also a core component of building functional strength. Every man should be able to physically save himself, and rope climbing trains many of the same muscles you’d need to pull or lift yourself to safety.
Sourcing a Rope to Climb
If you’ve never attempted to climb a rope before, don’t worry; I’ll address that below. The first step in progressing into rope climbing is an obvious one. Get yourself a rope! There are a couple of options I’ll recommend here.
Manila Rope
Senator Jim DeMint: Listen to Ron Paul
Verbatim Post
If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.
There was no reaction against these words of Reagan at the time. All Republicans understood that Reagan was right, and that he wasn’t inventing a new Republicanism but only following in the steps of the previous generations of true conservatives. While libertarianism has different shades and different views about specific points of policy, conservatives at the time knew that conservatism and libertarianism are the same. Five years later, Reagan won the elections and change the course of America. It is debatable whether his policies really followed his rhetoric. But still, the libertarian ideas were conservative ideas, period, and no Republican at the time could get in trouble or be spoken of negatively is they professed libertarian ideas.
It is the tradition of Ronald Reagan that Senator Jim DeMint, the man in Washington DC with the greatest political contribution to the Tea Party movement in the last elections, the most conservative member of the Senate, warned the Republican Party that saying negative things about Ron Paul hurts the Republican Party. While the Republican establishment has been eager to point to Ron Paul’s libertarianism as a “proof” that he is not a true conservative (what would they say to Reagan then?), Jim DeMint called the party back to its true ideological roots. He said that the refusal of the other candidates to listen to Ron Paul is to “our detriment.” Jim DeMint added the most interesting comment one can find these days within the Republican field, that the debate within the Republican Party he is most comfortable with is between conservatives and libertarians.
This must give food for thought to the more conservative voters in the Republican Party. So far the establishment has been dismissing Ron Paul, but every alternative candidate has a record of big-government statism and business as usual. Some like Santorum have even openly declared that one of the foundational rights given by our Creator, as written in the Declaration of Independence – the Pursuit of Happiness – is what is destroying America. Others, like Gingrich, have worked to introduce legislation to make internal passports compulsory for all Americans withing the United States. Of course, at the end, the call for more government intervention in the society is not different from the liberals’ own version of statism – or the differences are only in the details but not in principle.
DeMint may have another point too: The astounding difference in the average age of the voters for Ron Paul and the voters for the establishment candidates. The establishment likes to dismiss this with the words, “Ah, young people just want legal weed.” But such demeaning attitude won’t help the GOP. In a few years, the party’s main adversary will be the average life-span in the US, not any political opponent; the only mass influx of fresh blood is through the Ron Paul rallies. Alienating these crowds of enthusiastic young people may prove to sign the death certificate for the GOP in the next few years. And contrary to the establishment propaganda, these young people don’t “just want legal weed.” They want much more: liberty. And they see that liberty in the old conservative principles that Reagan wrote about, and Ron Paul is preaching and defending.
Jim DeMint, after all these years in the Senate, has proven to be a wise man of strong convictions. When the Republican field was still uncertain as to what they should do about the Tea Party, and even Michelle Bachmann was debating whether she should speak to the Tea Party rallies, DeMint threw his full weight of a conservative politician behind, calling the Tea Party a “spiritual revival,” and that “people are awaking to the fact that government is not and can not be god.” And now, while disagreeing with Ron Paul on specific points, DeMint is able to see that only the message of liberty can save the Republican Party from its current state of a country club gerontocracy. The Republican establishment – and the Republican voters too – better take his advice.
III Patch & III To Liberty 2012 Platform
Click the LINK above and contribute $10 or more and receive a III Patch.
You can also buy a dozen or more of
III to Liberty 2012 Platform Books
pictured below directly from Sam at a reduced rate and receive the patch free. I place them in gunshops at cost.=======
III to Liberty 2012 Platform
Available at Amazon Now! The III 2012 Political Platform, and featured pieces by Concerned American, Alvie D. Zane, Arctic Patriot, TL Davis and more.
Candidate Match Game. Answer the following questions to see which candidate is most like you.
Update: Dixie took it as part of homeschool today and she came out Paul and Perry with the least like her Obama and Romney.:) Ain't a dime's worth of difference........
91.7% Paul followed by Perry and Bachmann. Obama, Huntsman and Romney tied as least like me! Can't imagine why.......
Via Blue