The Logical End-state of Gun Control.....and Fair Warning from Down-Under

In legal terms, Australians have a right of self-defence. While some states rely on the common law and others have it enshrined in statute, the right itself is never questioned. Moreover, juries consistently refuse to convict those charged with serious offences whenever self-defence is made out. 

What we don’t have is the practical ability to exercise that right. Possessing any object specifically for the purpose of self-defence, lethal or non-lethal, is a criminal offence. There are many women, raped and/or murdered, who would have been liable to prosecution had they been carrying anything that might have saved them. 

Those agile enough to retreat from an assailant can obviously do so if it is feasible, and it is lawful to use items at hand such as screwdrivers, kitchen knives and beer glasses. But for those unable to flee, insufficiently strong, or with no improvised weapon, there is no option for them but to rely on the police or — if they are lucky — bystanders, to protect them from ­assault or theft. 

Prohibited self-defence items include pepper sprays, mace, clubs and personal Tasers. In some States carrying a pocketknife is ­illegal and even wearing a bulletproof vest is banned. 

The Prime Minister is protected by armed guards at taxpayers’ expense, and the wealthy can hire armed security guards, but the safety of everyone else ­relies on the assumption that the police can keep us safe. And as the saying goes, when seconds count the police are minutes away. 

What this means is that self-defence is not a realistic option for most people, and especially not for the majority of women, elderly and disabled. We have become a nation of defenceless victims.

David Leyonhjelm is the Liberal Democrats’ senator for NSW

Link

Know Your Domestic Enemy: Beltway Edition

Not long ago, the District of Columbia was ordered by a Federal judge to become compliant with the 2nd Amendment: that the right extends beyond just the home. And the D.C. Council was forced to pass an emergency concealed carry law. Of course, like in many other locations where State control is worshipped, the D.C. bill is "May Issue", meaning the applicant must show "good reason" in which to be armed. And in like in those other locations, as we know all too well....the Statists don't consider self defense to be a "good reason" [though ironically safeguarding large amounts of cash and the protection of elitists is].

But the kleptocratic elitists aren't happy about protecting the natural right of a D.C. citizen to protect themselves. Not too happy ay all:

Councilmember David Grosso (I-At Large) introduced an amendment today to establish a public database of concealed carry permit holders, saying people have a right to know if their neighbor or date has a gun.

“We should at least give our neighbors and residents a chance to know who has the gun. Put it up there! Let people be proud if they want to carry a concealed weapon! But at least we’ll all know who it is, and we can treat them differently….”

Councilmember David Catania (I-At Large) supported the amendment, saying that, while there's a right to bear arms, there's "no commensurate right to privacy." Yvette Alexander (D-At Large) was also in favor of the amendment: "Who cares about the confidentiality of a gun owner? We don't want it, so expose yourself."

Link

That's the tactic we see from the gun control cabal time and again. They hate the right of self defense, because it doesn't rely upon the State, but rather, the citizen. They provably cannot argue on the merits, so they demonize and attempt to ostracize the citizen who accepts the responsibility of self and home defense. But they of course are targeting the law abiding citizen. The citizen who will go through burden of application, licensing, regulation and taxation....to exercise their natural and Constitutionally protected right. Will it be long before the Statists campaign to do likewise for our other Constitutional rights? Or will they remain hypocrites?

Great job Secret Service......*UPDATED*

your security and surveillance failed....and your solution is to further remove the citizen from seeing the 'People's House'?


UPDATED: And here we go:


Secret Service considers a larger buffer zone around the White House


After an unprecedented security breach Friday night at the White House, the U.S. Secret Service is weighing a series of measures that would move tourists and D.C. residents farther away from the complex to reduce the chances of intruders piercing its security perimeter and endangering the president.


One proposal is to keep people off the sidewalks around the White House fence and create several yards of additional barrier around the compound’s perimeter. Another is to screen visitors as far as a block away from the entrance gates.

Know your domestic enemy

New York City councilman and State Assembly shoo-in Charles Barron has reiterated his admiration of dictators and said he hopes to host one of them — Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe — in the states … again. 

“I would love for him to come to Albany. I would love for him to come anywhere in the United States, really,” Barron said in a recent interview with the New York Observer. “I think he’s a shining example of an African leader on the African continent.” 

Barron famously hosted Mugabe as city councilman in 2002. 

Mugabe took control of Zimbabwe in 1983 and instituted martial law in 1987. He rose to power after starting an ethnic cleansing in which tens of thousands of people were murdered, the Observer reports. Barron praised him because he seized land from white landowners and redistributed it to black Africans. 

“No one’s perfect,” Barron told the Observer. “I see him as a freedom fighter.”

Barron has expressed support for dictators around the world, including Libyan dictator Muammar el-Quaddafi and Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro. 

He told the Observer, “All my heroes were America’s enemies. 

Barron is expected to beat his Republican opponent for a New York Assembly seat handily. The Observer reports that he is running to replace his wife in the Assembly, who in turn is replacing him as city councilman.

Link

Can't really add to that. The asshattery is plain to see.

Ann Coulter and the Rovian elite don't much like Libertarians.....

Except when they want to use their votes like a cheap hooker.

The biggest current danger for Republicans is that idiots will vote for Libertarian candidates in do-or-die Senate elections, including Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina and Colorado. (That's in addition to the "Independent" in Kansas who's a Democrat.) Democratic candidates don't have to put up with this crap -- they're even trying to dump the official Democrat in Kansas to give the stealth Democrat a better shot. 

When we're all dying from lack of health care across the United States of Mexico, we'll be deeply impressed with your integrity, libertarians. 

Which brings me to my final assignment this week: If you are considering voting for the Libertarian candidate in any Senate election, please send me your name and address so I can track you down and drown you. 

Lair of the Harpy 

Well, Ann......"bring it on". Should I send you my address? You'll get your skinny ass capped.

The current meme from the GOP is: C'mon....vote GOP, we'll sort out all of these divisive issues later. This upcoming election is yet another notch in the "most important election of our lifetime!!!! cycle. It's amazing how each successive election is even more important than the last...yet they still don't support making Election Day a holiday, to bring out more voters.

Dear Ann and her party elite never seem to realize that Libertarians aren't merely disaffected Republicans. They are not a subset of the GOP. Some are to be sure, but not those who identify with the Libertarianism writ large. Libertarians have watched with interest, how the party elite trashed and sabotaged the tea party movement within it's ranks. And Libertarians are cognizant that the GOP wants only what the Democratic Party wants...gaining and/or maintaining party power.

The GOP doesn't want Libertarian ideals, they juts want Libertarian votes. They are a political party wedded to the increasing growth of the scope of government; as has been proven during every GOP Administration. Libertarian swag and rhetoric is the camouflage the GOP dons when they get called to the carpet for not governing in accordance with their campaign pledges.

Such is their folly, when their perfidy loses elections. They blame third parties, because they can't bring themselves to acknowledge that they cannot even mobilize their own ranks or registered voters.

Such is the folly of a Libertarian who gets conned by the snake-oil salesmen. Change will never occur if we continuously - and willfully - box ourselves into the narrow game, run by the party elites and the media.

Letting the GOP use you like a cheap hooker, will only give you shame and an STD.

After a long hiatus.....THIS is the U2 that I grew up with

Granted, the U2 I remember fondly, is this:

Scotland...Aye

Don't hate.....Celebrate....Go Ducks!

Dress a Duck

The Moral Bankruptcy of the GOP

The GOP has long opposed any and all actions of the Obama Administration...and sometimes for good reason. But the current bedwetting against the hypothetical threat ISIS poses to the homeland, exposes the party for what it is.

A morally bankrupt institution focused only on gaining and/or maintaining power.

They bitched and moaned against Obama's inaction while ISIS tore through the bleak, flat wasteland of NW Iraq. They called upon the Administration to bomb ISIS, and some [McCain, Graham, etc] denounced the Administration for not arming "moderate" Syrian forces. Now that the Administration has embarked upon an air campaign against ISIS, and is indeed looking to arm Syrian fighters [what could possibly go wrong?]....they continue to bitch and moan, as if their stated goals were not being realized.

Congress maintains the power To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water. [Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, US Constitution].

The House of Representatives could have conducted a roll call vote and called Obama's bluff, long ago. They declined. If the GOP is not going to pull up their big boy pants and act like Constitution-abiding adults, but rather whine and cry like Democrats...why should I ever lend them my vote? They play the same games regarding civil liberties as does the left. If they're going to play bullshit political games, enabled by their media allies...they are in the same camp as the left.

The party is corrupt, bankrupt....and leading the country to oblivion, arm in arm with the alleged 'other side'.

Think of the Children!

From Knuckledraggin My Life Away

Alba gu bràth

*Alba gu bràth = Scotland Forever

And the song remains the same.....

If you read enough news and watch enough cable television about the threat of the Islamic State, the radical Sunni Muslim militia group better known simply as ISIS, you will inevitably encounter a parade of retired generals demanding an increased US military presence in the region. They will say that our government should deploy, as retired General Anthony Zinni demanded, up to 10,000 American boots on the ground to battle ISIS. Or as in retired General Jack Keane’s case, they will make more vague demands, such as for “offensive” air strikes and the deployment of more military advisers to the region. 

But what you won’t learn from media coverage of ISIS is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of the largest military contractors in the world. Ramping up America’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political and sectarian conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.

HuffPo

Same as it ever was. Our media is utterly failing the nation. Party immaterial. While the average oxygen thief worries about Obama calling ISIS, ISIL.....or conjures contrived ire at their perception of media bias....they remain oblivious to the campaign by the major parties and the incestuous relationship with the American media, to keep the American public ignorant.

Bread and circuses. We deserve what befalls us.

ISIL/ISIS...real threat or overblown?

The airwaves have been filled with dire warnings of ISIL, ISIS or IS if you prefer, being a tangible threat to the security of these United States. And to be sure, they're well organized and have made what appears to be astounding gains over the last few months. But are they really the cat's meow?

The War Nerd, Gary Brecher, expalins some reality based facets of their so-called blitzkrieg through some parts of Iraq:

If you know the ethnic makeup of the turf they’ve taken, their “shocking gains” don’t seem so shocking, or impressive. After all, we’re talking about a mobile force–mounted on the beloved Toyota Hilux pickup truck, favorite vehicle of every male in the Middle East—advancing over totally flat, dry ground in pursuit of a totally demoralized opponent. In that situation, any force could take a lot of country very quickly. It’s just a matter of putting your foot on the accelerator, moving unopposed on the long stretches of flat desert, then dismounting at the next crossroads town for a small, quick firefight against a few defenders who didn’t get the memo to flee. Once they’re dead, you floor it again until the next little desert town.

So this isn’t the second coming of Erwin Rommel by any means. Everything has conspired to push the Sunni advance, from the lousy opponent they’re up against to the terrain, which is a light mechanized commander’s dream.

Flat and dry is how a mechanized force commander wants his ground—and believe me, you haven’t seen flat and dry until you get to Iraq. Once you’re south of the Kurdish mountains, you’re on a dried mudflat. Iraq is much flatter than the deserts of the US, most of which get much more rain than central Iraq. No rain means little erosion, with few wadis or ravines to slow those Toyotas down. This is, after all, Mesopotamia, a land literally built by the sediment of the Euphrates and Tigris. It’s river mud, but nice and dry because very little rain falls, especially in June (average rainfall in June is 5 mm, the size of the numbers printed on an ATM card).

On ground like that, any force with good morale and enough fuel could advance as quickly as the Sunni have. It’s the Bonneville Salt Flats of insurgency, the place you go to set new speed records.

Regardless, I do advocate raining steel from above, on every Hilux we can target...as well as assisting the Kurds in very concrete ways. I just wish our pathetic media would understand that sensationalism+ratings does not equal journalism.

"The idea that if you take religion out of the public square, if you take the Bible out of the classroom, that that’s neutral - well, no it’s not neutral! It’s a different worldview.“

I partially agree.  Schools should conduct a survey of religion(s) Nobody is taking your religion out of the public square. People are however, opposing the government endorsement of religion, writ large. And I'm really not sure how one teaches secularism in school.

“I think we should start calling secularism a religion.”

I think people should call you a dumbass. There, see how that works?

“Because if we did, then we could ban that too, because that’s what they’ve done.“

And, no. Religion cannot be banned. Religion is the faith and practice regarding supernatural [and naturally invisible] deity, by individuals.

“They’ve hidden behind the fact that the absence of a religion is not a religion of itself, which, in fact it is, because it has certain moral values and certain teachings that look like a type of moral worldview.”

Make up your mind…you just called the absence of a religion NOT a religion..and then contradicted yourself. A secular “worldview” professes a paradigm where the State [the government of ALL American citizens in this case] does not officially endorse the existence of a supernatural deity…much like our Constitution.

“So what we have to start doing as Christians is reassert ourselves and say, 'You know what? The freedom of religion is not the freedom from religion.”

Somewhere a bumper sticker has lost its catch-phrase. Freedom OF religion likewise does not mean a government endorsement thereof…it means that all citizens are free to practice a religion of their choice, or none.

“We should be in the public square. We should be taught in the schools. We should be an open marketplace of ideas instead of throttling one perspective out of the fear it being offensive to someone."

Uh-huh. The public square and marketplace of ideas occurs when like minded citizens form voluntary associations. When the State takes a stand on a controversial and utterly unprovable issue such as religion, it opens the gates for a majority oppression of certain ideas..as we’ve seen in the past.

An astute commenter at the link below noted: Secularism isn't the presence or absence of belief. It is the act of not taking a position on religion where one's personal views on religion are not at issue.
Mediate

Of course, Santorum travels in the same circles as Bryan Fischer:

Military service should rightly be reserved for those who believe in and are willing to die for what America stands for - and what America stands for is a belief in God as the source of our rights.

Keep it together man......

I couldn't.

Those who mourn our fallen warriors, aren't just the two-legged.

Voting for Fiat over Freedom

Many people want their religion imposed on the rest of us so badly that it's their only consideration. 

It's why they vote and how they vote. Everything else is secondary, and liberty gets swept aside because it would mean people making choices- voluntarily, consensually, and without coercion- which would be against the religion's rules for its followers. 

Of course, it doesn't matter at all whether the people whose liberty is being violated belong to that same religion or not. Everyone must obey "The One Way" regardless of anything else, and no matter whether "The One Way" respects liberty and rejects the initiation of force or embraces evil with the excuse that "it's what God demands".
It's Sharia Law, no matter which religion is pushing it. I find it rather vile and distasteful and think those pushing it should be ashamed and resisted in their attempts.

Kent's "Hooligan Libertarian" Blog

My only quibble would be the opening word. It's really difficult to determine how many Americans believe - and vote - this way. But not only do they exist, there are a myriad of activist and lobbying organizations, with deep pockets with which to make their case. Philosophically, I have no issue with a cities voting their conscience, even if it is comprised of the above. I just wish they'd educate themselves on the definitions of the liberty rhetoric they espouse in concert with the above.

They don't call it "World Nut Daily" for nothing.....

The "Ice Bucket Challenge"


Fuentes also addresses the matter of pouring water over ones head and how that act directly correlates with water baptism and syncs the IBC with the sacred Christian deed of cleansing and purification, albeit, in a sacrilegious manner. She also delves into deep issues of rituals stemming from dark, cultic practices that encompass the IBC and which symbolically place America and Americans in a satanic ritual – with or without their knowledge.

Satanic ritual? Yes. Rituals abound in “Christian” America. Whenever spectators watch singers like Beyonce, JayZ, Rihanna, Lady Gaga and especially Nicki Minaj, they are indoctrinated and involved with blatantly satanic rituals that stem from the deep abyss of the occult. Some of these very same artists have taken the ALS IBC. Gaga doesn’t utter a word as she baptizes herself, arrayed in a sexy black leotard, sporting black lips, perched in an ornate black chair. Gaga doesn’t use a bucket; she instead uses a large silver bowl associated with pagan worship. Do you think she would take the IBC if it didn’t meet her pagan criteria? Not a chance.

The ALS IBC is ritualistic in nature. People are chosen to undergo a form of water baptism with cultic god Oprah leading the charge “in the name of ALS.” The Bible is clear: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). Oprah is a god to millions of Americans, and those who follow her doctrine and antics have tossed Jesus off the throne of their hearts – perhaps not intentionally … or perhaps so. Yet by following her seemingly innocent IBC decree, knowingly or not, they have cast Jesus off symbolically.

WND

They keep losing...because "tradition" isn't a defense

Gay Marriage and the Limits of Tradition

None of this means Americans have no use for traditions. We have all sorts of favorites, from fireworks on the Fourth of July to football in autumn. But we feel entitled to alter and embellish them at our whim. The fireworks we see are bigger and better than the ones Americans saw a century ago. Football now starts in August and goes till February.

Marriage morphed repeatedly long before gays got it. Women acquired more rights, divorce became available to anyone who wanted it, and alimony grew less common. People of different races can now marry each other even in places where it was once cause for lynching.

Longstanding arrangements that make sense endure without controversy, and that's just the point: They make sense. Tradition and a good reason will win an argument, just as tradition and $2 will get you a ride on the bus. Americans don't keep doing things unless they serve our purposes, even if they suited our grandparents to a T.

The 20th-century Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. spoke for most of us: "It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past."

The prevailing ethos in this country is that we are the masters of tradition, not the servants. We treasure the customs and practices passed down from our ancestors. And we change them anytime we want.