Posts Tagged → civil
Appeasement is evil, because it allows evil to triumph, and other reflections of the past week
This has been both a rewarding and tough week for me.
Like many, I believe more in ideas than party allegiance. America stands for something, and the ideas at its foundation are a form of religious belief for me and many others; no surprise there, as America’s Judeo-Christian Biblical roots are well established. So, my loyalties lie with people who stand for something good, and I am opposed to people in public office who either stand for money alone, or for fluff. An elected official who will not roll up his sleeves and fight like a demon for my beliefs, for traditional American values, is not someone who is going to get my support.
The Eric Cantor self-destruction story in Virginia is all about this same thinking. It is what permeates the “Tea Party” movement. It is a basic gut-check of what is simply right, and what is obviously wrong. Politicians like Cantor do not have that same gut-check ability, or they long ago lost it. They then lost me and a lot of others, too. As painful as Cantor’s loss is, it is also very rewarding: The American People are not asleep, and David Brat’s win is hopefully the beginning of a grass-roots effort to establish control over American borders.
Obama has clearly abandoned border protection, and he is using fake, officially invited refugees to make the case for open borders, the dilution and end of American democracy, and the end of American capitalism. No elected Republicans seem capable of standing up to him.
On the foreign front, Appeasing evil people is aiding and abetting evil people. Thus, appeasement is evil.
Failing to confront evil, especially an evil that has its eye on you, is either due to mental disability, or to a self-hypnosis masquerading as superiority. Self-sacrifice trumps survival to appeasers, who casually disregard that many other people are then taken over the cliff, too.
Contemplating what drives Obama and his supporters has been dishearteneing, because I cannot fathom it, despite growing up surrounded by far-left liberals. His supporters are not asleep, and they also cannot explain to me what about him and his actions they like, on balance with those they dislike. When we discuss issues, liberals immediately fly into a rage, have fits, and if it is a Facebook debate, they “unfriend” someone they’ve known for thirty five years, a phenomenon I hear repeated by others. This is not a good sign.
For example, ObamaCare is overwhelmingly unpopular to Americans and it is failing across the board, but that hasn’t stopped his supporters from promoting it.
The Veterans Affairs scandal is an incredible indictment of the administration, but his supporters cannot concede on it.
The Benghazi cover-up is just a “political charade.” But Americans were abandoned to violently die there, while their cell phones and radio pleas for help were listened to by indifferent administration officials. In any nation this is either criminal or incompetent, and yet…no concessions.
The world is on fire, with Syria, Iraq, Russia, Ukraine, and large parts of Africa falling apart after huge, decades-long Western and American investments of money and dead. Or, in the alternative, these places are now re-assembling into sources of evil that we will eventually have to confront once again, under circumstances that at that time are disadvantageous and more costly to us.
Obama’s foreign policy, his “re-set,” is so obviously a catastrophe, that it makes one wonder if he really secretly wants this destruction. After all, the boundaries of the modern Middle Eastern and African nations were established by European powers, and we know how much hate Obama has for those Western democracies aka “colonial powers.”
Obama seems to be at war with America and Western civilization, and his supporters are either under some odd messianic spell, or they are in cognitive agreement with him.
Is America headed for a civil war over these differences? The current state of debate is not encouraging, where liberals espousing an all-controlling, all-knowing, all-seeing Big Brother Orwellian society seem to relish IRS and NSA abuses against fellow citizens. They do not realize or accept that to most Americans, this is a form of slavery, and no, they will not live under slavery.
I think I am going to go have a nice cold beer and work in the garden. In the rain. The David Brat win / Cantor loss is going to have to buoy my spirits for the coming days. Have a great weekend!
Thank You to PA Leadership Conference
A big Thank You to the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference organizers, its speakers and moderators, and the hundreds of attendees who are taking time out of their days, livelihoods, and family commitments to gather together and work on rebuilding American and Pennsylvanian liberties.
I got a lot out of it today. Big Thank You to PA state senator Mike Folmer, whose passionate advocacy for individual liberties inspires so many other citizens to work twice as hard. Even those who disagree with the traditionalist movement respect the commitment we have to protecting EVERYONE’S rights, the opposite of the Left, which is constantly undermining civil liberties.
Government shutdown? Not really. Country shutdown? Not a chance.
Both political parties are standing by their own interests and or philosophies. This is what American checks-and-balances government is about. It is not the first time people have disagreed strongly enough to achieve gridlock, and it will not be the last.
Government does not equal America. America is much bigger and much more important than its national government.
Is the government shut down? Not at all. Sad to hear from US park rangers who say they have been directed to make park visitors as unhappy as possible, to punish citizens, more or less. The White House has spent tremendous resources over the past few days to actually shut down an open-air World War II memorial on the Washington Mall, using far more resources now than have ever been used to maintain it in the past. The reason is that a bunch of Veterans are trying to visit it on their annual pilgrimage, and again, this administration is trying to punish Americans as evidence that the “shutdown” really is bad.
Obama, meanwhile, is sitting for his portrait while this is happening. Kind of like a European monarch in the 19-teens, as the old ways and power structure disintegrate under the nobility’s feet.
Is the country “shut down”? Not at all. Businesses go on making their business. Some businesses that are dependent on government contracts may have challenges, but government business is not the definition of American business. My gutters got cleaned, I paid a sawmill to cut my lumber, and we bought groceries to feed our weekend company gracing us with their presence. Life is actually going on.
Compromise is the magic word, used often in these moments.
But who shall compromise, and on what terms? In my opinion, one party has “compromised” far too many times over the past 70 years. Always being brow beaten into accepting one bad government policy after another, that party has developed a reflexive need to “compromise.” Fear of being blamed by a partisan media structure that hates that political party, the party leaders have developed a culture of constantly giving in.
I am one of those Americans who says No, do not give in. Government has grown too large, too overbearing, too much our master and not our servant. It is time to stop ObamaCare and other policies and programs that turn free citizens into serfs suffering the whims of their overlords. Government “leaders” have become nobility, due all kinds of expensive vacations on the taxpayer’s dime, voting themselves waivers and subsidies for programs that everyone else must abide by and pay for. This is not government, it is a ruling class feeding off the citizenry, pushing it around, demanding that it kowtow, or be punished.
IRS mis-deeds against political enemies of this administration continue, despite public disbelief. America is at a point like it was in 1859, when abolitionists and slave-holders could not reconcile their views. Neither side would compromise, because it meant giving up everything they stood for. Thank God the Abolitionists did not compromise, right?
Big government is enslavement. It is not the American way. Too many Americans died at home and abroad fighting for a free America. This is a good time to stand firm and say No, because all of our freedoms are just a compromise away from being gone.
Taxpayer funded holiday
Obama’s pet dog was airlifted into Martha’s Vineyard to join the family on their multimillion dollar taxpayer funded holiday there. Obama ate the hell out of tons of fried food, including oysters and clams. The Middle East is in melt down and Obama had time for a ten minute press event before returning to play more golf. Everything about this guy is BS. At my expense. At your expense. And yet, his followers maintain a messianic love for him that requires rodeo clowns to lose their jobs because Obama is so untouchable.
I can’t think of another time the nation was so badly divided, except in the lead-up to the civil war. Abolitionists and slave owners really hated each other, and each maintained mutually exclusive views that ultimately could only be resolved through force.
Go ahead and play golf, you dolt. Go to sleep, go to sleep.
Militia
Militia
By Josh First
January 3, 2013
[PHOTOS ARE COMING]
Along with other beautiful stained glass windows dedicated to free speech and religion, “Militia” is just another large, elaborate stained glass window in the Pennsylvania State Capitol building (photo above).
This window’s prominent place in the Capitol is no accident, as the free citizen militia were fundamental to being an American citizen, and formative in founding the nation. After all, it was a free citizen militia (photos below) that was so determined to hold on to their liberties (now yours) that they literally faced down the world’s greatest super power, shooting only when they saw the whites of their hardened enemy’s eyes.
Like the other rights in the Bill of Rights, belonging to the militia is an individual right. No central or national army can supplant it. It is the exact purpose of the citizen militia to act as a counterweight to a centralized army or National Guard. As the Second Amendment so clearly states, you can’t belong to a militia unless you are armed with a military-quality arm, that you own and keep in your possession, as the original militia did.
Militia is not the heavily regulated, structured, centralized Army or National Guard of today; well-regulated meant muster rolls were kept. Militia was always a grass roots, citizen-led counterbalance to national governments, whether of Britain or the new United States. Unless the National Guard reports only to the local citizens or state governors, then it is not the heir to or the modern representation of the founding militia. The militia were and must remain separate from the central (national) government and its standing army.
The Bill of Rights does not describe governmental rights. All ten of its amendments describe and reserve citizens’ individual rights and liberties, and set limits on government power. Who creates a “Bill of Rights” that grants the central government the “right” to make an army and disarm the citizens? The fact that Americans have owned firearms since the beginning demonstrates the clear intent of the Bill of Rights. Whether or not some of today’s Americans are aware of, or comfortable with some Constitutional rights and obligations, they exist nonetheless. This is who we are. It’ll take a Constitutional amendment to change the Second Amendment, if you don’t like it. And changing it could lead to a second civil war, because the Second Amendment guarantees all the other amendments, and, like the Revolutionary War militia, free citizens are still willing to fight for their liberties.
Let’s talk more about that supposed potential change to the Constitution.
Gun prohibitionists are now pursuing an orgy of unconstitutional laws that exponentially grow government intrusion and end citizenship as defined since the birth of America. Do gun prohibitionists and anti-gun politicians really believe that freedom-loving Americans will just roll over and “turn them all in,” as US Senator Dianne Feinstein so casually says? I guarantee you a massive, defiant, and probably violent dissenting reaction across the nation in response to such an effort, if not an outright armed rebellion. Political elites like Feinstein and their fellow urbanites have little contact with “fly-over country,” so they do not know, care, understand, or respect the views of their fellow citizens there.
Statists, like Feinstein, whose greatest goal is a big government involved in citizens’ lives from cradle to grave, are deaf and blind to the kind of vehement resistance now brewing among tens of millions of citizens. Many, many Americans feel and see the America they knew and loved being transformed into an unrecognizable juggernaut aimed at controlling citizens’ lives and erasing their liberties. Seething beneath the surface of daily life is an increasing, simmering frustration and mistrust. It’s one thing to beat them at the ballot box. It’s another thing altogether to aim to disarm them.
These citizens know that the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. The more the government does, the less the citizen can do. To them, government is a direct threat, not a solution.
Gun control already exists in overbearing quantity; new laws that would take away guns from law-abiding Americans are exactly the kinds of unconstitutional assaults on individual liberty that the Second Amendment was designed to repel and that the citizen militia was created to address. Using democracy to achieve undemocratic results has been the method of extremists from both Left and Right; with the latest wave of proposals, gun prohibitionists reveal their own extremism.
Draft resistors, anti-government dissenters, and assorted protests have been historic hallmarks of one part of the electorate. Will Second Amendment-rights activists have to carry their God-given guns on a Million Man March to Washington, DC, carrying today’s equivalent of the 1776-era military-grade musket, the AR-15, to get their point across?
Pro-abortion activists have long stated matter-of-factly that legally prohibiting abortion won’t end abortion, and that those who want one will seek it out, legal or not, safe or not. Well, folks, tens of millions of Americans are about to have that equivalent experience with their guns, taking them into the back alleys, yards, and woods, where they will have them, despite whatever the government may say. Such defiance is what created America. Let’s hope it doesn’t end up re-creating it.
Adam Lanza’s insane massacre of school children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, is so painful, so emotionally scarring that I will never be the same person I was the day before it occurred. My three children are as gentle, innocent, defenseless, and precious to me as those children were to their parents, and the thought of losing mine or theirs in such a cruelly violent way is too much to contemplate. My heart aches for the Sandy Hook parents. My fury rises at the incompetent parole board that unleashed murderer William Spengler to murder again, this time the brave firefighters who rushed to douse his arsonist blaze in Webster, NY. Blame enough to go around, but the actual problem-solving is hard.
Let me try: Does Hollywood really have an unfettered, unaccountable right to use its power of suggestion to continually encourage cruel, unchecked violence across America? During the recent Benghazi debacle, weren’t we told that the First Amendment doesn’t necessarily confer a right to make a movie that might incite violence? Thus, if Hollywood wants to continue marketing sadistically happy murder carnage from Django Unchained and the equally moronic Gangster Squad, why don’t all movies and video games with a modern gun in them have to pay a 50% ‘violence mitigation fee’ on each ticket sold? Use that money to put armed guards in schools, gratis Quentin Tarantino and Sean Penn.
In sum, disarming innocent citizens will not succeed, at least not without forcing millions into long-neglected, perhaps forgotten, well-regulated militias to defend their rights. Using emotional crises to immediately demand sweeping new laws is irresponsible. Can cooler heads prevail? Let us hope and pray so.
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The Militia:
You, the citizen, are still the militia. America is yours.