From the Late Night Comics

A company is developing drones that can be used to pick up and deliver items for customers. So if you see a drone, someone in the neighborhood either joined al-Qaida or Netflix.

. . . Conan

Today was the first day that cardinals started voting for the new Pope. Everyone has already voted except the cardinal from Florida, who's still trying to figure out how the ballots work.

. . . Jimmy Fallon

Truth Now Is Racist

Judging from the responses to the second post preceding this one, it now is racist to tell the truth about what happens to a city and the quality of its leadership when blacks become the dominant political force.

Why Liberty and Freedom Lose

Freedom loving individuals are just that -- individuals.  They have lives. They pursue their individual goals.  For the most part they loath organizations and resist being herded into any kind of collective.  That makes defending liberty and freedom problematic and difficult.

Statists on the other hand have only their ideology. They escape personal emptiness only by organizing to further collectivism.  With no other purpose in their lives they constantly are plotting and working full time to force everyone into the universal collective that is their  goal.

How Progressives Undermined Our Culture and Designed the Downward Spiral in Detroit (and Elsewhere)

The sordid story is told in book that is reviewed here.

. . . and now the story is being repeated in another major city that, like Detroit, has become a corrupt black-dominated Demorat-run plantation, as is detailed in this report.

Who Is It That's Hallucinating?

Anyone who believes that the U.S. government might target, attack, and kill any of the nation’s citizens on American soil must, according to ersatz Republican Senator John McCain, be fantasizing or suffering from paranoiac hallucinations.

That was the gist of the semi comatose antique Arizona senator’s response to eloquent questions raised last week by his far more vigorous and alert colleague, Senator Rand Paul.  Senator Paul insisted on being advised whether the current administration was claiming that it was free under the Constitution to do just that.

Perhaps Senator McCain is close enough to the after life to have been advised on the matter by the members of the Weaver family who the rest of us thought had been gunned down by federal agents at the family’s Ruby Ridge, Idaho, home, and/or the 80 men, women, and children who we believed had been gassed and incinerated by an American paramilitary force at their Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.

If McCain wants to maintain that those atrocities were not the result of official government policy he should tell us who was held responsible for them and how the responsible individuals were punished.

More Evidence of Pain for Political Gain Strategy

See this Report.

Rand Paul: A Refreshing Voice of Reason

23 Adult Truths

1. Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.

2. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.

3. I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.

4. There is great need for a sarcasm font.

5. How the heck are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?

6. Was learning cursive really necessary?

7. Map Quest really needs to start their directions on #

I'm pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.

8. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.

9. I can't remember the last time I wasn't at least kind-of tired.

10. Bad decisions make good stories.

11. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment when you know that you just aren't going to do anything productive for the rest of the day.

12. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after Blue Ray? I don't want to have to restart my collection...again.

13. I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten-page technical report that I swear I did not make any changes to.

14. I keep some people's phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.

15. I think the freezer deserves a light as well.

16. I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Light than Kay.

17. I wish Google Maps had an "Avoid Ghetto" routing option.

18. I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.

19. How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear or understand a word they said?

20. I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars team up to prevent a jerk from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers and sisters!

21. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.

22. Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, finding their cell phone, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey - but I'd bet everyone can find and push the snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time, every time.

23. The first testicular guard, the "Cup," was used in Hockey in 1874 and the first helmet was used in 1974. That means it only took 100 years for men to realize that their brain is also important.

Ladies.....Quit Laughing. 

Inflicting Pain for Political Gain

The execrable sequestration strategy of Obama and his gang is spelled out by the estimable and unfailingly erudite Thomas Sowell in this perceptive essay.

Precedents

[Firearms licenses] will not be granted [to] Jews [or persons] suspected of acting against the state. Those who do not require permission to purchase or carry weapons [include] the whole SS and SA, including the Deaths Head group and officers of the Hitler Youth."

. . . German Firearms Act of 1937 

All weapons of every kind in the possession of Jews are forfeit to the Reich without compensation and are to be handed in. This embraces all firearms including starting pistols and all edged weapons.

. . . Gestapo circular

December 12, 1938

The following, from eminent civil liberties attorney Don Kates, is for the edification of those who have forgotten about, or are ignorant about or oblivious to the murders committed by the  U.S. Government at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas:

   Though genocide has come to mean mass murder, that is not its intended meaning. Its intended meaning is the attempt to exterminate a group defined by race or ethnicity. The Holocaust was a highly successful attempt to murder all Jews. The WWI Armenian genocide was the Ottoman empire's Armenian minority which succeeded in killing over a million of them; no one knows exactly how many. But the successful 1960s Indonesian attempt to kill hundreds of thousands of liberals was a politicide (though it was, as is often the case) mixed w/ a successful attempt to exterminate the Chinese in Indonesia. They are literally "the Jews of the Orient" - hated because they work hard and are very successful.

   Could this happen here? The following is an excerpt from another old column of mine on mass murder:

   Insofar as opponents of gun ownership ever discuss genocide, they simply dismiss the problem with the assertion that it is fantastic to think that genocide could ever occur in the U.S.

   As a "reality check" for people who reflexively dismiss the relevance of geno-politicide, consider a "thought experiment" for which I am indebted to Rutgers University Law  Professor Robert Cottrol, a historian who is now professor of legal history at George Washington University: Let us suppose we could go back to the year 1900 and tell a select group of the most eminent savants then available that within 50 years a great nation will exterminate millions of members of a minority group. Having so informed them, we ask them to predict which nation would engage in that genocide, and which victim group that nation would murder.

   The peril of myopically ignoring the possibility of geno- politicide is illustrated by the fact that in 1900 not even the most perspicacious and knowledgeable observers would have been able to predict the Holocaust. Yes, they might have listed the Jews as a likely victim group. But other victim groups would have been ranked as even likelier targets. Moreover, Germany would not even have figured at all as a likely perpetrator of genocide -- unlike the U.S. which would have been ranked very high as likely to murder millions of blacks and-or Indians.

   So much for the idea that anyone today can be confident that genocide will never happen in the U.S. -- not even 40 or 50 years from now when conditions may be as different from today's situation as Germany's was in 1940 compared to 1900.

   Had Professor Cottrol and I been asked to guess (based on the world view of a year-1900 savant) our choices would have been, in descending order of probability:

1) Perpetrator: Ottoman Empire; Victim Group: Armenians (which actually happened during WWI)

2) Perpetrator: U.S. Victim Group: Blacks

3) Perpetrator: U.S. Victim Group: Indians

4) Perpetrator: Russia Victim Group: Jews

5) Perpetrator: France Victim Group: Jews

   These guesses were concurred in by a leading analyst of

geno-politicide, Professor Ted Robert Gurr (Political Science, University of Maryland). As to Germany, however, he pointed out that in1900 it was engaged in tremendously brutal, homicidal suppression of Africans in its African colonies.]

Once Upon a Time in America

. . . while property is considered as the basis of the freedom of the American yeomanry, there are other auxiliary supports; among which is the information of the people. In no country, is education so general -- in no country, have the body of the people such a knowledge of the rights of men and the principles of government. This knowledge, joined with a keen sense of liberty and a watchful jealousy, will guard our constitutions and awaken the people to an instantaneous resistance of encroachments. 

. . . Noah Webster, On Education of Youth in America, 1790

Australian School Answering Machine

Firearms Facts (Without False P.C. Assumptions and Emotions)

Support for tighter gun laws is often based on mistaken assumptions.  A common one has to do with the alleged impulsiveness of otherwise law-abiding people—in particular, the notion that most shootings are acts of passion that involve guns purchased by non-criminals for home protection.  However, a look at empirical studies -- evidence, not assumptions -- yields a vastly different conclusion. A 2004 study by the National Academy of Sciences, for example, couldn’t identify a single gun law that had lowered violent crime, suicide, or gun accidents. This wasn’t a minor report, but a massive review of 253 journal articles, 99 books, and dozens of government studies.

Other research has found that handguns have been used more often for defensive purposes than for committing crimes. “Annually, three to six times as many victims successfully defend themselves with guns as criminals misuse handguns,” writes attorney, criminologist, and Independent Institute Research Fellow Don B. Kates Jr.  A study published in the BYU Journal of Public Law found that firearms were used approximately half a million times per year to stop home invasion burglaries, and in most of those cases no shots were fired: merely brandishing a gun sent the burglars scurrying to safety.  These findings are especially comforting because the police rarely arrive in time to stop a crime in progress and are indemnified if they fail to protect law-abiding citizens.

The evidence on crime and firearm ownership has had a powerful effect in some academic circles: it has convinced several researchers to abandon their former advocacy of tighter restrictions on guns.  Economist David Mustard explains what shaped his former support for tighter gun laws: “My views on the subject were formed primarily by media accounts of firearms, which unknowingly to me systematically emphasized the costs of firearms while virtually ignoring their benefits,” he wrote in a 2003 article for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.  “It is now over six years since I became convinced otherwise and concluded that shall issue laws—laws that require [gun carry permits] to be granted unless the applicant has a criminal record or a history of significant mental illness—reduce violent crime and have no impact on accidental deaths.”

. . . The Criminology of Firearms 

By Don B. Kates Jr. 

(The Jurist, 2/27/13)

Diversionary Kerfuffle

Media attention to the spat between Obamamites and Bob Woodward about whether the administration threatens journalists who don't whore for the ruling gang is the serious import of the substantive report by Mr. Woodward that led to the communications on which the lame stream media's journalice focused.

The honest report by the liberal but ethical Mr. Woodward pointed out and documented that Mr. Obama (i) played a key role in originating and enacting the sequester, (ii) has been less than forthright and scrupulously honest about that, and (iii) has been irresponsible in, and disingenuous about his administration of the law in ways contrary to the interests of the nation and its people.

All of the foregoing is set forth in detail in this City Journal essay.

Hail Armageddon!

Why the Obama gang and its progressive minions want the sequester to inflict the maximum amount of pain possible on ordinary citizens and how big government apparatchiks target any and all spending cut to achieve that result is spelled out by the always erudite and on-target Charles Krauthammer in this essay.

Sven & Ole

Two Minnesota engineers were standing at the base of a flagpole, looking up.

A woman walks by asks what they were doing.

"Ve're supposed to find da height of dis flagpole, "said Sven, "but ve don't haff a ladder."

The woman took a wrench from her purse, loosened a couple of bolts, and laid the pole down on the ground.

Then she took a tape measure from her purse, took a measurement, announced, "Twenty-one feet, six inches," and walked away.

Ole shook his head and laughed. "Ain't dat just like a voman! Ve ask fer da height and she gives us da length!"

Sven and Ole have since quit their engineering jobs and are currently serving in the United States Senate.

 Now they are trying to determine the height of the Fiscal Cliff!

Parable of the Sandwich

Sneaky Regulatory Strategy

Governmental overreach is taking place surreptitiously with Obama administration's Chicago-style government by thuggery making politics ever more shameful and sordid than normal. The latest progressive/bureaucratic scam to stealthily expand government and diminish individual freedom is just beginning to emerge into public view and be challenged, as is spelled out in this report.

Obama Shredding His Target

More on the Pipsqueak Sequestration