Found this at a newish blog ...

It has become evident we as a nation are at a watershed moment in our society, culture and governance. Our society is depraved, our culture benighted and our governance is out of control, tending more to tyranny than as a representative republic. I remind our citizens of an excerpt from our Declaration of Independence:

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

I continue with my edited "causes" (edits appear as italics and parenthesis in red):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such (Government), and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these (States) and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

The history of the present (President, Administration and Congress) is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

(They have) refused (their) Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

(They have) forbidden (their) (legislators) to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till (their) Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, (they) has utterly neglected to attend to them.

(They have) refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

(They have) called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

(They have) obstruct(ed) the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refus(ed) to pass others to (dis)courage their (illegal) migrations hither.

(They have) obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing (their) Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

(They have) made Judges dependent on (their) Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

(They have) erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

(They have) kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

(They have) combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving (their) Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For (restricting and regulating) our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond (local jurisdictions) to be tried for pretended offences:

For altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For (superceding) our own (State) Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

(They have) abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of (their) Protection and waging War against us.

(They have) destroyed the lives of our people.

(They are) at this time (arming and supporting) large Armies of foreign (nations) to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the (elected representatives) of a civilized nation.

(They have allowed) our fellow Citizens to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

(They have) excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of (foreign nations) whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A (President, administration and Congress), whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, (are) unfit to be the (government) of a free people.

We, therefore, the (citizens) of the United States of America, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these (United States) solemnly publish and declare, That these united (States) are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the (current tyrannical government) and that all political connection between them and the (free citizens of the Unied States of America), is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

#OUTLAWS! May God Bless America!
Follow @NACBU_bloggers
 

Under the Fedora: Meanwhile

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Ted Cruz Obamacare debate but while that has been the headline there are a lot of things going on that deserve more attention. Such as Babalu Blog post on the murder of Lara Jones:

It makes the dictatorship look good, and more importantly, it helps drive tourism to the island. Tourists like Lara Jones, a British teacher who thought she was vacationing on the Castro regime's highly touted low-crime island. Instead, this young lady ended up murdered in her Cuban hotel room, and it took the press more than a year to finally report this heinous crime.

Normally the murder of a young lady in an exotic country like Cuba would be something the MSM would swarm over but anything that paints such a country in a bad light isn’t apparently news fit to print.

However there is a movie out about Cuba Una Noche Jay Nordlinger had this to say about it.

In Una Noche, life in Cuba is depicted as nasty, grim, and hopeless. Is it even worse than depicted? Oh, sure, for a great many. I am reminded of The Lives of Others, that masterpiece of a movie, which appeared in 2006. It is about East Germany and the Stasi. When I wrote about the movie, I heard from former East Germans who said, “Life in our country was worse — a lot worse — than what that movie portrays.” I mentioned this to the maker of the film, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. He said essentially this: “They’re right. But good luck finding a movie that’s closer to the reality.”

And asks this question:

After the Castros fall, will the media and our cultural elites at large speak honestly about Communist Cuba? Will they speak about Cuba the way our ESPN writer spoke about East Germany? I doubt it. They have too much invested in the myths about Cuba: the glories of its health care, literacy, and racial enlightenment.

I think within a few years after the Castro government falls the media will be like France in 1948 where everyone claimed to be part of the resistance.

Robert Stacy McCain brings to our attention a piece on what is and what is not acceptable to say these days:

Vanessa James is a British lawyer who wrote a column for the Guardian newspaper with the headline, “Formal complaints over sexism should be last resort for women,” which included this:

The point is that everyone has boundaries and communicating these to colleagues through behaviour is key to avoiding unnecessary offence.
It is also important to ensure that when a women is subject to treatment that falls outside her boundaries she can identify that and decide how to address it and move on.
If you do not define your own boundaries then you cannot expect others to be able to either.

There was a time when such advice would have been considered simple common sense, but in our more “enlightened” age it’s a cause for conflict and feminist blogger Katie Halper objected strongly..

Vanessa James is a successful lawyer — and that’s a bad thing, says Katie Halper, who writes for a feminist blog.

This is the difference between pragmatism and ideology: Do you want to solve your problem, or do you want to construe every problem to fit political categories and intellectual abstractions?

As Stacy has said over and over

Feminism is a totalitarian ideology that acknowledges no limits to its ambitions. Men who seek to negotiate a compromise with feminism are like Neville Chamberlain, supposing he could have peace by handing over the Sudetenland to Hitler.

You can’t negotiate with feminism, you can either fight it or concede to it.

One of the more significant stories of the week has been the slaughter in Kenya by Al Qaeda related groups that specifically targeted non-Muslims. There has been plenty written about that violence, but not as much about the American angle to the story that the tavern Keepers blog has noted:

The Abubakar as-Saddique mosque in Minneapolis has recently been taking actions to combat al-Shabab recruiting of their members. However, this is only coming after they distanced themselves from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Abdirizak Bihi, a Somali-American community leader in Minneapolis, states that while the mosque was affiliated with CAIR it was a center for recruitment by Islamist terrorists.

“All of our kids were going there for years. That’s where indoctrination happened.”

“[The al-Shabaab recruiters] become the father they never had. They engage them. And the way they engage them, is — these angry young men who are left on the street, it’s like, ‘[Americans] don’t like you. They hate you. So we’ll love you.’ In the end, they end up being brainwashed.”

When Mr. Bihi brought the terror recruiting activities to the public, CAIR responded by calling him an Islamophobe, the standard title attached to anyone who dares tell the truth about the actions of Muslim Brotherhood groups and other Islamist factions. There are a lot of Somali refugees that were resettled by the State Department in Minneapolis as the government of Somalia fell to Islamist warlords. While this humanitarian move is to be lauded, problems arose when the community did not assimilate and spread out as new Americans. Instead, they stayed insulated and a perfect target for radicalization and brainwashing by terrorists. According to a Washington Post 2011 profile of Bihi, at least 25 young men disappeared from Minneapolis to fight for Al-Shabab and dozens of others were being investigated for recruiting or fundraising for the terror group.

Atlas Shrugs has been all over stuff like this, but the rest of the media has continued to ignore those facts. Meanwhile PJ media has noted another fact concerning Kenya that has not been convenient to this media.

Reports from Kenya indicate that security wasn’t allowed to carry firearms in the upscale mall where the massacre occurred. At the end of the day, this was another mass shooting in a “gun-free zone.” It would seem that someone forgot to tell the terrorists that weapons were not allowed. Knowing terrorists, I’m sure if they had known about the restriction they would have dutifully complied. Still, there is that chance that some terrorists are not the most upstanding, law-abiding folks in any given neighborhood. Perhaps the better part of valor is making sure that “the gun free” zone goes the way of the dinosaur. We all may be a lot safer.

When I see this kind of talk from our friends on the left on gun free zones making people safe. My mind goes to a quote from Sheldon Cooper and the big Bang Theory:

And I'm sure some fool in the Donner party said the snow would stop any day now. I like to think they ate him first.

I can’t wait for the show to come back new this week.

Lee Stranahan is in Beirut reporting on Christians plight from the Syrian civil war and is breaking news:

In an exclusive interview with independent American journalist Lee Stranahan, Syrian refugees say the attack on the predominantly Christian village of Maaloula was aided by Muslims living in the town. The revelation that their neighbors were joining with the Syrian rebel jihadists to terrorize Christians in the small village about 45 minutes north of Damacscus came as a shock to them.

Anyone who hits bloggers as not real reporters should take a good look at the work Lee is doing right now.



I recently saw the movie The Family staring Robert Di Nero , Michelle Pfeiffer and Tommy Lee Jones. It’s a comedy but a dark one with a fair amount of violence and no cleaning up of what organized crime is.

I’ve always found it interesting that the diversity police don’t have a problem with the portrait of Sicilians as a bunch of gangsters. Of course they (or I should say we) are White Europeans so there is no objection to any such thing. Of course I and most Italian Americans could care less.



The Patriots are 3-0 and we’ve heard every week about how poorly they have been playing, Tom Brady has been particularly hard on himself. Yet the team has yet to lose a game.

That’s how good the Patriots have been in the Brady Era, so great that when they are playing bad they start 3-0.



The Boston Red Sox are finishing strong, they’ve clinched the AL east and are fighting with Oakland for the best record in baseball. At the same time with five games to go there are 3 teams (5 mathematically) fighting for those two wild card spots. The Houston Astros are not one of them. With 4 games left they have lost 107 games. They have lost 11 games in a row and can realistically expect to finish with 110 losses.

And if they do so they will still finish a full 10 games ahead of the 1962 New York Mets.

Finally this weekend the 9^th Doctor Special is coming up on BBC America, we have finally reached the modern era of the series. Christopher Eccleston only played the Doctor for one year and while David Tennant followed him admirably I’ve always if given another couple of years he might have proved to be one of the best Doctor’s who ever piloted the TARDIS

If you haven’t seen any of his stories, I’d suggest doing so.

Later.

Follow @NACBU_bloggers

Under the Fedora: Credibility

Hi did you miss me?

A lot happened while I was gone but current events in Syria trump everything else.

In terms of the realities on the ground, not much has changed.  The various rebel groups continue to fight Assad.  Hezbollah Syria & Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon has been enlisted to help defend the regime while Hamas and Al Qaeda are fighting with the rebels and attracting swarms of Islamists all over the world to help in the fight.

Meanwhile we are informed that there are some rebels on the side of the angels who are not Islamists and simply want to remove Assad (a very reasonable desire) and some in the government particularly John McCain and Lindsey Graham have been pushing to arm these folks (there may also be reason to believe that attempts to do so might have had something to do with the Benghazi attacks.

Reports of a chemical weapons attack broke in late August.

On Aug 21^st the White House was “deeply concerned”  within a week they went from deeply concerned to “about to attack” and just as quickly to seeking a vote in congress.

Right now the smart money is on the president losing the vote but Michael graham Disagrees:

it won’t be “fence-sitters” who give Obama the “yes” vote he needs. It will be hard-core, partisan liberals. They need Obama to help fight their fights, protect Obamacare, push amnesty, etc.  An Obama who’s humiliated internationally by a Congress that then pays not cost for it (remember, Americans oppose bombing Syria) will have achieved his “fork moment” (as in “stick one in him, he’s done”) three years before the end of his term.

Loyal Democrats won’t let that happen.  

Given that we’ve already seen him try to pretend that he didn’t set a red line concerning Chemical Weapons in Syria it will take more than a congressional vote to make him look strong.

There are legitimate reasons to attack Syria, I’ve listed them but that doesn’t change one thing.

Barack Obama is a weak man in charge of a strong country.  No amount of missiles fired at Syria or boots on the ground when that fails, is going to change this fact nor convince our enemies  who figured this out long ago, otherwise.

If we decide to go to war just so this president can assert his manhood then we deserve the consequences but if the whip counts don’t change there is a chance that they won’t even bring this up for a vote.

One of the oddest things about the entire Syria debate is the sudden decision by part of the left particularly the MSM that war IS the answer.

The other day, I saw Andrea Mitchell interview Bill Kristol on MSNBC and, if you have any memory at all, you know that Kristol was the Evil Neo-Con Liberals Hated Even More Than Karl Rove during the Bush era. This morning, I woke up early and caught the 4 a.m. replay of Rachel Maddow, and she was so rabidly pro-war you half-expected her to break out into the “Patton” monologue:

I watch MSNBC a lot and I constantly hear that if we don’t strike it will send the wrong message to Iran about our resolve of our country and president to stop their nuclear program.

Of course that whole “resolve” argument would have more teeth if the president didn’t veto Israel planned strike on Iranian nukes last year:

Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser to the Israeli government and a retired Major General in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), told the Israeli press that Obama “vetoed” the strike, which was planned to take place at the height of the 2012 election cycle.

“Israel has the capability to destroy the Iranian nuclear program” and was prepared to do so, Eiland was quoted as saying in a private meeting earlier this month, according to the Israeli paper Mida.

However, top White House officials “pressured” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cancel the attack on Iranian nuclear sites, according to Eiland.

“There are many areas where Israel is free to act independently: building in Jerusalem, striking in Gaza, and other areas in our region, where we do not need an approval from the U.S.—even when they do not like it,” Eiland told the Israeli paper, confirming that Netanyahu “was about to give a go-ahead” before being told by the United States to stand down.

“But when it comes to issues that affect the broader American interests, we cannot act contrary to their considerations,” Eiland was quoted as saying.

The record is rather amazing.  The President was against the revolt in Iran against the Mulahs, pro Muslim brotherhood in Egypt, wouldn’t give the order to relieve Benghazi and support hitting Syria now that Islamists are fighting to remove Assad.

I guess when Glenn Reynolds put it “They not anti-war, they’re just on the other side” back during the Iraq war days he wasn’t kidding.







It’s a given with the number of elected officials in the United states that you are bound to hear one of the say something stupid on a regular basis but that woman from Colorado takes the cake

Another Colorado Democrat has stoked the state’s raging gun-control debate by challenging the argument that guns are needed for self-defense.

Colorado House Majority Leader Dickey Lee Hullinghorst said in an interview on YouTube last week that firearms ownership is redundant because the state Legislature keeps citizens safe from harm.

Does that mean if you are an unarmed person in Colorado and are robbed or injured by an attacker you can sue the state?





We found out that the Fix was in during the Bobby Riggs vs Billy Jean King match from my youth.  This had huge cultural significance at the time.  I wonder how many of the people who celebrated that win at time would have spoken up if they knew then what we know now.

Speaking of the Fix Anthony Wiener apparently used a company to create phony supporters.  This actually isn’t as big a deal as it sounds as our friends on the left have been doing this forever.

I still can’t believe the Red Sox are in first place.

I also think it was a mistake for the Pats to release Tim Tebow, now there is no way to distract the media from the Hernandez murder trial.

The 8^th doctor special ran last weekend and it was strictly about the Doctor Who movie.  What a waste of time.  No Paul McGann no Charlie Pollard no Big Finish.

I wonder since Big finish isn’t allowed to mention the 9^th Doctor on if the BBC is restricted from mentioning Big Finish in reverse.

I got to the movies this month and saw “The World’s End”.   I thought it was really funny my wife thought it was hilarious.  If that’s not the sign of a good date movie I’d like to know what is?

I’ve been watching the Drama Broadchurch on BBC America.  I’ve seen up to episode 5 so far and it’s one of the best things on television.

In theory I could look online to find out who did it as this was broadcast last year but so far I’ve managed to hold off.

One oddity, my son was watching it and noticed how many actors from Doctor Who including 10^th doctor David Tennant and Arthur (Rory Williams) Darvill where there.  There are  quite a few but given the amount of time the show’s been on it would almost be harder to find someone who hasn’t appeared on Doctor Who at some time or other.

Finally my youngest who has had trouble finding work for a while picked up two jobs in a week and is working both while back in college.  On the way back from the bank he was commenting on how much money is deducted from his checks.

The surest way to spot a future conservative voter is to find a teen who notices the amount of money he earns that the government takes from him.

Next week all.



Follow @NACBU_bloggers