'Protect and Serve' Response From a Reader

Dear Mr. Kerr Mudgeon:


     Your posts over the last two days [Saturday, May 26, and Sunday, May 27] have made clear the real meaning of that previously nonsensical"To Serve and Protect" phrase.


     The powers that be see to it that they are well and truly protected and that the rest of us get royally serviced.


     Thank you for making this clear, and keep in mind the maxim expressed by George Orwell's porcine forerunner of the rulers we have today -- "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

[Correspondent's Name Omitted at Her Request] 

Many Good Things About Getting Old But I Can't Remember Any of Them

I've sure gotten old!  I've had two bypass surgeries, a hip replacement, new knees, fought prostate cancer and diabetes. I'm half blind, can't hear anything quieter than a jet engine, take 40 different medications that  make me dizzy, winded, and subject to blackouts. Have bouts with dementia.  Have poor circulation; hardly feel my hands and feet anymore.  Can't remember if I'm 85 or 92. Have lost all my friends. But, thank God, I still have my driver's license.

Know how to prevent sagging? 

Just eat till the wrinkles fill out.

It's scary when you start making the same noises as your coffee maker.

These days about half the stuff in my shopping cart says, 

'For fast relief.'

I feel like my body has gotten totally out of shape, so I got my doctor's permission to join a fitness club and start exercising. 

I decided to take an aerobics class for seniors. 

I bent, twisted, gyrated, jumped up and down, and perspired for an hour. But by the time I got my leotards on, the class was over.

Just before the funeral services, the undertaker came up to the very elderly widow and asked, 'How old was your husband?' '

98,' she replied . . . .  'Two years older than me' 

'So you're 96,' the undertaker commented.

She responded, 'Hardly worth going home, is it?

Once Was Sufficient

More on Protect and Serve Priorities

Police services are not unlimited and therefore have to be prioritized.


The question raised by the facts and circumstances surrounding the murder of the Berkeley hills homeowner after the city's police department decided not to respond to his call for help with a prowler on his property is whether police services are allocated and prioritized on an appropriate basis.


It is an unfortunate fact that some individuals and their lives and safety are more important than ordinary citizens and their well being. The reality is that the Berkeley constabulary would have been dispatched to, and arrived on the scene in force in a heartbeat had the call for help come from the city's mayor or a member of its city council.


So it behooves us to understand just where private citizens stand in the list of priorities. How great is the disparity of the protection afforded them and that allocated to public officials . . . members of the political elite who make up our ruling class?


As is pointed out in an item posted on this blog just a day or two ago, the Berkeley police department was able to send an officer to the neighboring city home of a reporter in the dead of night to demand revision of a news story that supposedly had quoted the police chief incorrectly. The department also was able to deploy ten officers (including four command personnel on overtime) to endeavor to retrieve a cell phone that had been stolen from the son of the department's chief.


So there you have it.  Those who share places at the public trough have first call to be protected and served.  Private citizens rank somewhere down the line -- their protection and service has less priority than the recovery a stolen cell phone.


There's a lesson here:

Nemo Curat

That's Latin for Nobody Cares.


The reality is that your life and well being, and that of your loved ones are not as important to anyone else as it is to you. You are and always must be your own first responder. So arm, train, and prepare both mentally and physically to meet that responsibility. Nobody can predict if and when you will be challenged by the need to do so.

Bravo for Newport Beach

The Southern California town has displayed both common sense and a spine. It is billing the Obama election campaign $35,000 to reimburse the city for what the big zero's political visit to the community cost it. The full story can be seen here. 

Cribbed Gem

Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette examines the media-created myth about Obama's breathtaking intelligence . . . .

    Mr. Obama has said a lot of unsmart things: there are 57 states; Canada has a president; 'Austrian' is a language; America is '20 centuries' old; Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan. He's called the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) the Maldives, and declared it would be 'unprecedented' for the Supreme Court to invalidate a law passed by Congress.

     President Obama's stimulus bill didn't stimulate. His subsidies to 'green' firms have produced neither the jobs nor the energy he promised. Deficits are out of control.

     Noemie Emery in the Weekly Standard ... 'Journalists who wept when he won the election now grind their teeth in despair . . . .  The gap between sizzle and steak never seemed so large.'

     Could it be that Mr. Obama's 'superior intellect' is a myth created by journalists to mask what may be the thinnest resume of anyone ever elected president?

     An example of puffery is the description of Mr. Obama as a former 'professor of constitutional law.' Mr. Obama was a part-time instructor at the University of Chicago law school, without the title or status of professor. And, according to blogger Doug Ross, he wasn't very popular with the real professors. 'I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back,' Mr. Ross wrote in March 2010. 'According to my professor friend, [Obama] had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building . . .  . The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified'.

The man's a plain fool. So how dumb did his voters have to be in order to not notice?

Time to chant the mantra once again: "We live . . . in a land . . . run by morons."

. . . Cribbed from Lee Rodgers
(whose blog  is well worth 
visiting on a  daily basis)

What If . . . ?

Who Gets Protected and Served

Remember that Berkeley, California, homeowner who was beaten to death in his own front yard well after he had called the police for help with the unarmed young black man who was prowling about on his property?  The police deemed the call to have a low priority, decided not to respond to it, and even ordered off  an officer who offered to respond and could easily have done so in ample time to save the homeowner's life.


Shortly thereafter, a Berkeley police officer was deployed in the dead of night to the neighboring city home of a news reporter to demand revision of a news story that the chief of the department believed to be incorrect about something that he had said.


Now it turns out that about a month earlier ten -- yes, 10 -- Berkeley police officers were deployed to recover a cell phone that had been stolen from an unlocked locker at the city's high school. That intrepid crime fighting task force included three detectives and a sergeant, each of whom logged two hours of overtime on the assignment.


Incidentally, the stolen phone belonged to the son of Berkeley's police chief.


Question: Did the deceased homeowner die because he lacked the right relatives or because he made a poor choice in the selection of a time to be attacked?


While cogitating about just who gets protected and served, the following explanation reached me via an e-mail from a friend --

I became confused when I heard the word 'service' used with these agencies:

Internal Revenue 'Service'

Postal 'Service'

Telephone 'Service'

Cable TV 'Service'

Civil 'Service'

General 'Services' Administration

City, State & Federal 'Services'

Customer 'Service'

This is not what I thought 'Service' meant.

But today, I overheard two farmers talking, and one of them said he had hired a bull to 'service' his cows.

 BAM!!! It all came into focus.

 Now I understand what all those agencies  are doing to us.

Admire the Guy Who Opted Out

That fortunate guy who renounced his U.S. citizenship for Singapore before reaping the benefits of his Facebook investment deserves respect and applause, and I write that as a guy who for too long respected and strictly obeyed the rules.

That of course was before we had:

           *   A federal government that spent tax money without a plan . . . on autopilot with no budget . . . just continuing resolutions for more than three years.

      *    A treasury secretary who didn’t pay his taxes until he was nominated to that sinecure, a former senate leader who didn’t pay his taxes, a chairman of the tax writing committee of the House of Reprehensibles who didn’t pay his taxes. Remember Leona Helmsley, who went to jail a few decades ago for accurately, though unwisely, publicly stating that “only the little people pay taxes.”

       *   A General Services Administration that throws itself lavish taxpayer funded parties, and federal judges from the 9^th Circuit who are planning a sumptuous paid vacation for themselves in Hawaii that will cost the taxpayers some $900,000.

   *  Federal and state governments incurring gargantuan debts that cannot ever be repaid but that will burden all future generations.

The fact is that our system of government has become irretrievably corrupt, and does not deserve support.  The guy who absconded to Singapore was wise enough to recognized and act on that fact.

Senators Charles Schumer and Robert Casey are pushing legislation to make following that worthy’s example more difficult and very expensive. They are proposing a financial version of East Germany’s infamous Berlin wall to maintain their enslaved subjects under the control. Good luck with that!

A few years back Claire Wolfe wrote America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.  Her book, The Freedom Outlaw's Handbook: 179 Things To Do Until the Revolution is well worth reading. It’s fun though probably superfluous.

Despite – or perhaps because of -- the efforts of the likes of Messrs. Schumer and Casey, the system is coming apart like an overripe grapefruit. Like the Soviet Union in its final days, it’s on the brink of, and headed for extinction, collapsing of its own weight.

The State We're In

Even If Biden Is Right . . . .

The nation's number two moron, Vice President Joe Biden, claims Mitt Romney is no more qualified to serve as president than Joe the Plumber.

Questionable assertion.  But even if it's correct,  Mr. Romney as well as the plumber obviously are more qualified for the presidency than either the self-aggrandizing guy with delusions of adequacy who now (occassionally) sits in the oval office or the gaff-prone number two backup doofus who has spent a lifetime feasting at the public trough.

Thrice Blessed

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. 

. . . Mark Twain

Econ 101 -- a Simple Lesson

U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000


Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000


New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000


National debt: $14,271,000,000,000


Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget. Annual family income: $21,700


Money the family spends: $38,200


New debt on the credit card: $16,500


Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710


Total budget cuts: $385

Fly the Gadsden Flag

Bailout Bucks Bail Out of U.S., Relocate in China

Four-Legged Wisdom

Ironic, Isn't It?

The Secret Service scandal was discovered when a disagreement on how much a prostitute wanted for her services came to light.

She demanded $800 . . . the Secret Service Agent offered $30.

How ironic is it that the only person in Washington willing to cut spending gets fired?