Shadows & Light

A B/W of a photo I took yesterday morning near Portage Lake.

The photo fits my mood as the writing on the financial wall becomes ever so much clearer.
Rather than a repudiation of failed policies and a return to sound fiscal management, our so-called leaders, those who think they know more than us, have decided to throw gasoline on the fire.
A couple of weeks ago, the media was shocked, shocked to learn that in Cyprus, part of the solution would be to seize a portion the savings held in its banks. Needless to say this didn't go down so well with some people, you know the type, those who work hard, save money, plan for a modest retirement, that kind of non-sense. Let's call them Kulaks.
After the 'unexpected' outrage, the government backed off a bit and decided to only take the savings of those who had accumulated 'more'. Damned Kulaks. That way it would be somehow made more palatable to the rest, or more morally justified because they had more than others, so they must have gotten it illegally, or through some dodgy scheme, right?

But this is just the beginning, Portugal came out with the brilliant idea of paying its workers in treasury bills. Not to be outdone Austrailia quietly doubled its tax on retirement savings. So instead of letting the market take care of the bad loans foolishly made, the government and the central banks will now step in with our tax dollars to protect the well connected few from the effects of their selfishness & greed.

I received "The Great Deformation" by David Stockman this past week. Though not finished with it yet, I recommend this book to everyone. In it Stockman spares no one. So he has already attracted the wrath of conservatives and liberals alike. I think he makes many uncomfortable by speaking truths they would rather not hear.

From the first chapter,

"In the second decade of the twenty-first century, America is faltering under the weight of a dual crisis. Its public sector teeters on the ragged edge of political dysfunction and fiscal collapse. At the same time, its private enterprise foundation has morphed into a speculative casino which swindles the masses and enriches the few. These lamentable conditions are the Janus-faces of crony capitalism - a mutant regime which now threatens to cripple the nation's bed-rock institutions of political democracy and the free market economy."

 I recommend this book to anyone.
Finally, some quotes. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the sources, but I have to agree with the sentiments expressed;

1.In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm and three or more is a congress.
-- John Adams

2. If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.
-- Mark Twain

3. Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself.
-- Mark Twain

4. I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
-- Winston Churchill

5. A government which robs Pete r to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
-- George Bernard Shaw

6. A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
-- G. Gordon Liddy

7. Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
-- James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)

8. Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
-- Douglas Casey, Classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University

9. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-- P.J. O'Rourke, Civil Libertarian

10. Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
-- Fred eric Bastiat, French economist(1801-1850)

11. Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
-- Ronald Reagan (1986)

12. I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
-- Will Rogers

13. If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free!
-- P.J. O'Rourke

14. In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.
-- Voltaire (1764)

15. Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!
-- Pericles (430 B.C.)

16. No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.
-- Mark Twain (1866)

17. Talk is cheap...except when Congress does it.
-- Anonymous

18. The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.
-- Ronald Reagan

19. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
-- Winston Churchill

20. The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
-- Mark Twain

21. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
-- Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

22. There is no distinctly Native American criminal class...save Congress.
-- Mark Twain

23. What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
-- Edward Langley, Artist (1928-1995)

24. A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.
-- Thomas Jefferson

25. We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
-- Aesop

Industry, Gone & All But Forgotten

An all too typical scene these days back in the mid-west.  Dead or dying industry in once vibrant communities. Buildings that once hummed with the activity of production now lie idle and unused. Slowly decaying.

Where's the Global Warming When You Need It?

I took this Saturday evening. It had snowed hard all day. But it was close to freezing. I figured it was winter's last hurrah and would melt away in a day or two. Boy was I wrong.


Sunday was cold & cloudy but with some sun, now today, it's been snowing most of the day and as I write this, it's coming down very hard. This morning when I went out for a 4 mile jog, our thermometer was reading around 10F.

To wit...

Winter Weather Advisory

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ANCHORAGE AK

410 PM AKDT MON APR 8 2013

AKZ101-091330-

/X.CON.PAFC.WW.Y.0033.000000T0000Z-130409T2000Z/

ANCHORAGE-

INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...ANCHORAGE...EAGLE RIVER...INDIAN...

EKLUTNA

410 PM AKDT MON APR 8 2013

...WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL NOON AKDT TUESDAY...

* LOCATION...ANCHORAGE BOWL AND HILLSIDE.

* SNOW...TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATION 3 TO 8 INCHES THROUGH NOON ON TUESDAY. HIGHEST AMOUNTS WILL BE ALONG THE HILLSIDE AND ACROSS EAST ANCHORAGE.

* TIMING...SNOW WILL INCREASE THIS EVENING INTO THE EARLY OVERNIGHT. SIGNIFICANT SNOW ACCUMULATIONS WILL PERSIST THROUGH TUESDAY MORNING. MINOR ADDITIONAL ACCUMULATIONS OF SNOW ARE POSSIBLE THROUGH TUESDAY NIGHT.

* IMPACTS...TRAVEL MAY BE DIFFICULT. VISIBILITIES MAY BE LIMITED IN HEAVY SNOWFALL.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW WILL CAUSE PRIMARILY TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. BE PREPARED FOR SNOW COVERED ROADS AND LIMITED VISIBILITIES...AND USE CAUTION WHILE DRIVING.

                          ..............

It's April, the days are getting pretty long again. We're little more than two months from the summer solstice and shortening days again. A week ago, I had the bike out and was doing 10 mile rides after work. I figured I might get lucky and get some substantial mileage in during April. No such luck.

You always have to assume that there's 'one more' coming. Until about mid-May anyway.
Oh well enough whining, I guess I better head to Wal-Mart, buy my self some straws & suck it the f**k up. 

(Taken Monday evening around 8PM)

 

03312013 View From The Porch

Foreboding news over the weekend here.

Happy Easter

Despite all we have to be depressed about, Easter heralds God's triumph over the trivialities of this existence.  I truly wish that come tomorrow at least for a day, I can forget about the impending train wreck we are heading for.

However, I'm doubtful, I am becoming increasingly pessimistic about our future. As he usually does, the Diplomad eloquently sums up pretty much how I feel about unfolding events.

The western world continues on a totally unnecessary suicidal path. What was once common sense is no more. Everywhere one looks, the insanity is evident: The refusal to deal with real issues and the insistence on taking up marginal or even totally extraneous issues instead is stunning. Here in the USA, our economy remains stagnated for no logical reason. Instead, for example, of freeing up the exploitation of our vast fossil fuel resources, we continue to push money at phony green industries, throw road blocks in the way of our private sector's ability to get those fuels, block importation of fuel from our friends in Canada, and blather on and on about discredited, voodoo science global warming. Our leaders rulers take lavish vacations on our dime, push ruinous tax and spend policies, including the criminally destructive Obamacare, and avoid cutting even a bit of our bloated spending. A hypothetical "threat" to reduce ever so slightly the rate of growth in spending is declared disastrous and the equivalent of a nuclear attack. We get wrapped up debating gay "marriage," and "control" of mythical "assault" weapons when neither of those topics has any bearing on real issues facing the vast majority of real Americans, as opposed to Hollywood's fake Americans.

The entire post is worth reading. 

And if you think for a minute that it can't happen here, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you, for gold only, of course.

Finally, I'll leave you with this.

And this, to not end on a down note....

 

London Calling...

Possibly the westernmost phone booths in the United States, possibly North America.
Dutch Harbor, Alaska.
Anybody got a dime?

Owning A Home

= Never Ending Chores

A photo from a past project.  Presently, I've just finished remodeling our daughter's bedroom. Between work and work related travel.  On the plus side, it's off to Dutch Harbor today. I tried to get out last month but the weather wasn't cooperating. We should have better luck today. Though I'll be very busy, with luck, I can maybe get some good photos to post.

Concourse C

Anchorage airport

Breezy

Last week's trip to Dutch harbor didn't happen, unfortunately. After spending several hours at the airport waiting, the flight was cancelled due to weather. So, Friday morning, I find myself up at Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay) instead.

Temperatures ranged from -30 to -25 and the wind was steady at around 25mph with frequent gusts well beyond that. I was to go up early, overnight and come home on the following evening's flight.

Again, due to weather, we were almost two hours late departing from Anchorage and I didn't get home until Sunday afternoon.

Sometimes, in our modern world we forget just how fearsome nature can be and that for all of our technology, we're not really in charge. This image doesn't really convey the intensity of the cold, but I'm posting it because the flag shows how windy it was.

Out to Dutch Harbor for a couple of days. If I have time and the weather cooperates, perhaps I'll get some good pictures.

Downtown Fairbault, Minn.

 

What Difference Does It Make?

Please take a moment to see what difference it does make....

Also from The Other McCain

The Chicago Way

Posted on | January 31, 2013 | 8 Comments and 10 Reactions

Her name was Hadiya Pendleton and she was only 15 years old:

The city’s 42nd slaying is part of Chicago’s bloodiest January in more than a decade, following on the heels of 2012, which ended with more than 500 homicides for the first time since 2008. . . .
About three blocks from Hadiya’s school, she and a group of 10-12 young people, including members of her volleyball team, had taken refuge under a canopy at a park to avoid the rain Tuesday afternoon. A man climbed a fence behind the park, ran at the group and started shooting, and then jumped back over the fence and into a white Nissan. The group scattered, but Hadiya was shot once in the back and a teenage boy was shot in the leg.
Police said Hadiya had no arrest record and there was no indication she was a member of a gang or was the gunman’s target. In fact, McCarthy said there are no indications that anyone in the group was gang-affiliated. He said the police suspect that the gunman may be a member of a gang that considers the park its turf and that he mistook somebody in the group as someone from an encroaching rival gang.

Chicago has very stringent gun laws. What Chicago doesn’t have is economic opportunity, honest government or enough law-abiding citizens to keep the peace, so that neighborhoods are effectively ruled by gangs like the Satan’s Disciples and the Latin Kings, who terrorize and intimidate residents. Witnesses will not testify against the gangsters, and the police — to the extent that Chicago police are not entirely corrupt — are unable to apprehend or effectively prosecute these criminals.
Hadiya Pendleton was murdered about a mile from the $1.6 million-dollar home that Obama purchased in a corrupt deal with Tony Rezko.
This is the future of corruption and criminality — “The Chicago Way” — that Obama is bringing to America as a matter of policy.

Finally, please check out this link of a 'legal' alien who became a naturalized citizen and his views on gun violence. 

WWII Veterans Memorial

A photo of the WWII Veterans Memorial in Mohican State Park in Ohio. I took this while visiting this past November. It was built and is maintained by the Ohio Federation of Women's Clubs and serves as a memorial to those who gave their lives in defense of their country in WWII. A beautiful little building, situated on a small ridge.

I saw this link over at Improved Clinch, during Bush's administration the fever-swamp left accused the Bush administration of all sorts of illegality. However, since Obama got elected, not so much.
Yet extra judicial killings of American citizens is more of a reality than it has ever been. See below.

James Taylor is Puke

James Taylor makes ok music. It's always been a little too self-absorbed, whiny, and self-pitying for my taste, but so it goes.  However, he has lately shown why nobody, and I mean nobody with an IQ larger than their shoe size should ever listen to what any singer/musician or actor has to say about anything serious. At the so-called inauguration, this genius was quoted saying, "...  we need to make some sacrifice[s] to our freedoms, if that’s the way to put it. We need to make some sacrifices to what we might want to have, in order to safeguard our children."

Here's one article about it. 

You go right ahead and give up your freedoms first bud. I plan to keep mine thank you very much.

Listen to the dummy...



One final word, please do listen...

As I have said here before, if you want to do something about the illegal federal attempt at curtailing American's second amendment rights, please go to this link by Ruger. It makes contacting your state and federal elected representatives easy. Via Instapundit.

Via Protein Wisdom...





And lastly, this. It's worth a few minutes of your time to read. Again, via Protein Wisdom

Out on the Mudflats

My wife and daughter went on a walk out on the mudflats. My daughter took this image with the new point & shoot she got for Christmas. I did minimal post-production on it.

Here  is something you should look at, via Instapundit. It's worth a few minutes of your time.

Where the Bus Finally Stopped

And you thought it stopped at the president's desk? Or the Secretary of State? Or Congress?
Ha!! Accountability is for the little people.

From the link;
" delay and deflection — will now work to make Americans forget one of the biggest scandals of our time: the housing collapse that triggered the 2008 financial meltdown we are still suffering from. We shouldn’t just gaze over the fiscal cliff everyone else is scrutinizing; we should also examine the droids who helped set in motion our current economic mess."

" Last week, over the holidays, the House Ethics Committee quietly joined its Senate counterpart in finding that no members or staffers — or at least any it claimed jurisdiction over — broke congressional rules while obtaining “VIP” mortgages from Countrywide. This failed lender at one time provided a huge share of the questionable subprime mortgages issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage lenders that were some of the first players to fall in the 2008 financial collapse."

"Countrywide’s most famous client was Democratic senator Chris Dodd, chair of the Financial Services Committee from 2006 to 2010. Although he and Conrad were cleared of ethics violations by the Senate Ethics Committee in 2009, Dodd retired the next year after it became clear that revelations about his involvement with Countrywide had destroyed his political standing in his home state of Connecticut. He was nonetheless able to shepherd the now-infamous Dodd-Frank bill into law before he stepped down. Dodd-Frank is a rat’s nest of new regulations on financial firms, but it goes notably light on regulating the housing industry and its cozy relationship with the federal government.
Despite its explosive findings, Representative Issa’s committee lacked any jurisdiction to suggest punishment for any individuals. The matter was handed off to the secretive House Ethics Committee, which quietly issued a report just two days after Christmas. This report concluded:

While these allegations concern serious matters, almost all of the allegations concerned actions taken outside, or well outside, the jurisdiction of this Committee . . . because they occurred before the third Congress prior to the current Congress. In addition, several of the Members and employees mentioned in the allegations are no longer serving in or employed by the House, and therefore are outside the Committee’s jurisdiction. 

In other words, some of the suspect droids have moved on, so it’s time the rest of us did, too."

So you hear that peasants? Forget about it. Don't worry your pretty little heads. This is what you voted for and you're about to get it, and get it good and hard. Obamacare, illegal gutting of your second amendment right, more taxes, fees, and penalties, an altogether too late discovery that your pensions won't be worth the paper they are written on, inflation, a slow economy with high unemployment, the erosion of more of your rights, increased corruption at all levels of government, emboldened radicals who will increasingly become more shrill and strident in the dehumanization of those who aren't down with the confiscatory socialist program.

If you're one of the liberal democrats who drank the kool-aide and voted for that empty suit sack of shit in the White House, love it, embrace it, own it because you deserve it. If you're still a republican, please go back up and read the provided link and realize that the country club republican establishment and the democrats differ only in name.

John Lennon was right after all , "keep you doped with religion and sex and TV, and you think you're  so clever and classless and free, but you're still fuckin peasants as far as I can see."

Oh, here's your tax hike  (thanks, via SDA)

Happy New Years!

Russian Mission

A scan of a Kodachrome slide taken in 1982. This is the old church in Russian Mission , Alaska.
It has long since been torn down.

The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions - Part II

Found: One hand written message from some faceless, but fearless worker in a Chinese slave labor camp, written and inserted into some cheap plastic toys destined for a K-mart. An anonymous note from a modern Gulag Archipelago.

Jeff Immelt and Thomas Friedman were unavailable for comment...

Please remember on this Christmas eve, that freedom has not been the normal human condition throughout history.  Please take a moment and say a silent prayer for those who are stuck in the nightmare of socialism. Please take a minute and contrast our society, with all its problems, with the living hell of the socialist utopia.

Finally, please take a moment to reflect on the well heeled, corpulent, smug democrat elitists who would gladly sell us into such bondage, provided of course that they, like the pigs in Animal Farm, get to be "more equal" than others.

In that same authoritarian vein, ask the gun grabbers about this.

Finally, if the Bush, or any republican administration were to engage in and try to cover up the killing of innocent civilians by drones, the mainstream media would be screaming to high heaven. But the Obama administration gets the good old US-MSM PRAVDA  pass. Go figure.

Merry Christmas.

The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

 My grandmother told me that when I was young.
In that vein I am copying from Jeff Goldstein, at Protein Wisdom, the following.
Because it needs to be said, and said, and said...
When you've finished, go here and read the rest of what Jeff has to so eloquently lay down.

After that, please go read this very well written Jew Without A Gun . Thanks to John, over at Improved Clinch for posting it. Do take the time to read it.

Without further ado...
Because our own national media likes to excerpt and edit and pick and choose what to show you. Otherwise, you may not take way the correct lesson — or have the proper context for the planned “outrage” in response.
It’s who they are. It’s what they do.
So, from the Guardian UK:

The National Rifle Association’s 4 million mothers, fathers, sons and daughters join the nation in horror, outrage, grief and earnest prayer for the families of Newtown, Connecticut … who suffered such incomprehensible loss as a result of this unspeakable crime.
Out of respect for those grieving families, and until the facts are known, the NRA has refrained from comment. While some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain, we have remained respectfully silent.
Now, we must speak … for the safety of our nation’s children. Because for all the noise and anger directed at us over the past week, no one — nobody — has addressed the most important, pressing and immediate question we face: How do we protect our children right now, starting today, in a way that we know works?
The only way to answer that question is to face up to the truth. Politicians pass laws for Gun-Free School Zones. They issue press releases bragging about them. They post signs advertising them.
And in so doing, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.
How have our nation’s priorities gotten so far out of order? Think about it. We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards. American airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses — even sports stadiums — are all protected by armed security.
We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers.
Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family — our children — we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!
The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?
How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame — from a national media machine that rewards them with the wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave — while provoking others to try to make their mark?
A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?
And the fact is, that wouldn’t even begin to address the much larger and more lethal criminal class: Killers, robbers, rapists and drug gang members who have spread like cancer in every community in this country. Meanwhile, federal gun prosecutions have decreased by 40% — to the lowest levels in a decade.
So now, due to a declining willingness to prosecute dangerous criminals, violent crime is increasing again for the first time in 19 years! Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you’ve got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.
And here’s another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.
Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come
my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?
Then there’s the blood-soaked slasher films like “American Psycho” and “Natural Born Killers” that are aired like propaganda loops on “Splatterdays” and every day, and a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life. And then they have the nerve to call it “entertainment.”
But is that what it really is? Isn’t fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?
In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year.
A child growing up in America witnesses 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18.
And throughout it all, too many in our national media … their corporate owners … and their stockholders … act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators. Rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonize lawful gun owners, amplify their cries for more laws and fill the national debate with misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action and all but guarantee that the next atrocity is only a news cycle away.
The media call semi-automatic firearms “machine guns” — they claim these civilian semi-automatic firearms are used by the military, and they tell us that the .223 round is one of the most powerful rifle calibers … when all of these claims are factually untrue. They don’t know what they’re talking about!
Worse, they perpetuate the dangerous notion that one more gun ban — or one more law imposed on peaceful, lawful people — will protect us where 20,000 others have failed!
As brave, heroic and self-sacrificing as those teachers were in those classrooms, and as prompt, professional and well-trained as those police were when they responded, they were unable — through no fault of their own — to stop it.
As parents, we do everything we can to keep our children safe. It is now time for us to assume responsibility for their safety at school. The only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away … or a minute away?
Now, I can imagine the shocking headlines you’ll print tomorrow morning: “More guns,” you’ll claim, “are the NRA’s answer to everything!” Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the word “gun” automatically become a bad word?
A gun in the hands of a Secret Service agent protecting the President isn’t a bad word. A gun in the hands of a soldier protecting the United States isn’t a bad word. And when you hear the glass breaking in your living room at 3 a.m. and call 911, you won’t be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the hands of a good guy to get there fast enough to protect you.
So why is the idea of a gun good when it’s used to protect our President or our country or our police, but bad when it’s used to protect our children in their schools?
They’re our kids. They’re our responsibility. And it’s not just our duty to protect them — it’s our right to protect them.
You know, five years ago, after the Virginia Tech tragedy, when I said we should put armed security in every school, the media called me crazy. But what if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he had been confronted by qualified, armed security?
Will you at least admit it’s possible that 26 innocent lives might have been spared? Is that so abhorrent to you that you would rather continue to risk the alternative?
Is the press and political class here in Washington so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and America’s gun owners that you’re willing to accept a world where real resistance to evil monsters is a lone, unarmed school principal left to surrender her life to shield the children in her care? No one — regardless of personal political prejudice — has the right to impose that sacrifice.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is no national, one-size-fits-all solution to protecting our children. But do know this President zeroed out school emergency planning grants in last year’s budget, and scrapped “Secure Our Schools” policing grants in next year’s budget.
With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school? Even if they did that, politicians have no business — and no authority — denying us the right, the ability, or the moral imperative to protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm.
Now, the National Rifle Association knows that there are millions of qualified active and retired police; active, reserve and retired military; security professionals; certified firefighters and rescue personnel; and an extraordinary corps of patriotic, trained qualified citizens to join with local school officials and police in devising a protection plan for every school. We can deploy them to protect our kids now. We can immediately make America’s schools safer — relying on the brave men and women of America’s police force.
The budget of our local police departments are strained and resources are limited, but their dedication and courage are second to none and they can be deployed right now.
I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.
Before Congress reconvenes, before we engage in any lengthy debate over legislation, regulation or anything else, as soon as our kids return to school after the holiday break, we need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work — and by that I mean armed security.
Right now, today, every school in the United States should plan meetings with parents, school administrators, teachers and local authorities — and draw upon every resource available — to erect a cordon of protection around our kids right now. Every school will have a different solution based on its own unique situation.
Every school in America needs to immediately identify, dedicate and deploy the resources necessary to put these security forces in place right now. And the National Rifle Association, as America’s preeminent trainer of law enforcement and security personnel for the past 50 years, is ready, willing and uniquely qualified to help.
Our training programs are the most advanced in the world. That expertise must be brought to bear to protect our schools and our children now. We did it for the nation’s defense industries and military installations during World War II, and we’ll do it for our schools today.
The NRA is going to bring all of its knowledge, dedication and resources to develop a model National School Shield Emergency Response Program for every school that wants it. From armed security to building design and access control to information technology to student and teacher training, this multi-faceted program will be developed by the very best experts in their fields.
Former Congressman Asa Hutchinson will lead this effort as National Director of the National School Shield Program, with a budget provided by the NRA of whatever scope the task requires. His experience as a U.S. Attorney, Director of the Drug Enforcement Agency and Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security will give him the knowledge and expertise to hire the most knowledgeable and credentialed experts available anywhere, to get this program up and running from the first day forward.
If we truly cherish our kids more than our money or our celebrities, we must give them the greatest level of protection possible and the security that is only available with a properly trained — armed — good guy.
Under Asa’s leadership, our team of security experts will make this the best program in the world for protecting our children at school, and we will make that program available to every school in America free of charge.
That’s a plan of action that can, and will, make a real, positive and indisputable difference in the safety of our children — starting right now.
There’ll be time for talk and debate later. This is the time, this is the day for decisive action.
We can’t wait for the next unspeakable crime to happen before we act. We can’t lose precious time debating legislation that won’t work. We mustn’t allow politics or personal prejudice to divide us. We must act now.
For the sake of the safety of every child in America, I call on every parent, every teacher, every school administrator and every law enforcement officer in this country to join us in the National School Shield Program and protect our children with the only line of positive defense that’s tested and proven to work.

UFO's Over Anchorage??

    Photos of the Mayan apocalypse?
    More like the reflections of the lights from inside the room where I took this photo.
    Along the apocalyptic line here's a link to a thought provoking article from Ace, (via Instapundit).
   

Remember this saying? Living well is the best revenge.
Well, it’s got nothing to do with accumulating a bunch of wealth so you can show it off to your enemies and make them jealous.
Quite the opposite. Living well means living a happy, contented life filled with love, laughter and meaning.
Look at these clowns on the other side. They won. Conservatives are demoralized. The GOP is splintering. Socialized health care is now the law of the land.
They’re getting almost everything they’ve ever wanted, yet they’re as angry, dishonest and hateful as ever.
Did they really beat us?
No.
Not where it counts.
They’re empty inside.
They’re not winners. Winners learn, love and grow. Winners have strong work ethics, faithful marriages and unshakeable values. Winners don’t blame others for their failings, they work to overcome them. Winners believe in something greater than a man in the Oval Office.
Remember this: No matter what happens in D.C., no one can make you stop loving your kids. No one can prevent you from being a great mom, a wonderful spouse, or a loyal friend. These things are yours. You own your life. They do not. No matter what lies they tell about you, they can’t diminish who you are.


   I have to agree with most of what he says, with one glaring exception. Ace goes on to say, "We   may not be able to beat the left at the polls, but we can beat ‘em all day long at life."
While I agree with the part about life. I honestly think that though times are bleak now, there will be a resurgence. Otherwise, this is a great post and I urge you to read the whole thing.

 AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

  OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

My response to all of the crocodile teared gun-grabbers who cynically exploit a tragedy for political purposes.

What Goes Up, Must Come Down

Below is something I copied in its entirety from The Telegraph, because it's something that our so-called free media will not discuss...

The West is signing its own death sentence

Capitalism is, by its nature, dynamic. George Osborne's attempt to engineer the 'perfect society’ undermines the logic of the free market

When the Edward Gibbon of the 22nd century comes to write his History of the Decline and Fall of the West, who will feature in his monumental study of the collapse of the most successful economic experiment in human history? In this saga of the mass suicide of the richest nations on earth, there may be particular reference to those national leaders who chose to deny the reality that was, from the vantage point of our future chronicler, so obviously looming. Or maybe the leadership of our day in Washington, London and Brussels will appear to have been swept helplessly along by irresistible forces that originated before their time.

But for us, right here, right now, it matters that Barack Obama and George Osborne are playing small-time strategic games with their toy-town enemies while the unutterable economic truth stares them in the face. (The political leadership of the EU seems to have passed through the looking glass into a world where the rules of economics do not apply, so their statements and actions are beyond analysis.) Mr Obama is locked in an eye-balling contest with a Republican Congress to see who can end up with more ignominy when the United States goes over the fiscal cliff. It is clear now that the president will be quite happy to bring about this apocalypse – which would pull most of the developed world into interminable recession – if he could be sure that it would result in long-term electoral damage to his opponents.

Meanwhile, Mr Osborne takes teeny-tiny steps in the direction which is the only plausible one: little bitty reductions in the welfare programme to “make work pay” which are barely enough to push those who are actually working in the black economy off the unemployment rolls, and fiddly adjustments (almost too small to notice in day-to-day life) to lessen the burden of tax that bears down on people who are scarcely self-sustaining, let alone prosperous. Supposedly from opposite sides of the political divide, the US president and the British Chancellor come to a surprisingly similar conclusion: it is not feasible to speak the truth, let alone act on it. The truth being, as this column has often said, that present levels of public spending and government intervention in the US, Britain and Europe are unsustainable. The proportion of GDP which is now being spent by the governments of what used to be called the “free world” vastly exceeds what it is possible to raise through taxation without destroying any possibility of creating wealth, and therefore requires either an intolerable degree of national debt or the endless printing of progressively more meaningless money – or both.

How on earth did we get here? As every sane political leader knows by now, this is not just a temporary emergency created by a bizarre fit of reckless lending: the crash of 2008 simply blew the lid off the real scandal of western economic governance. Having won the Cold War and succeeded in settling the great ideological argument of the 20th century in favour of free-market economics, the nations of the West managed to bankrupt themselves by insisting that they could fund a lukewarm form of socialism with the proceeds of capitalism.

What the West took from its defeat of the East was that it must accept the model of the state as social engineer in order to avert any future threat to freedom. Capitalism would only be tolerated if government distributed its wealth evenly across society. The original concept of social security and welfare provision – that no one should be allowed to sink into destitution or real want – had to be revisited. The new ideal was that there should not be inequalities of wealth. The roaring success of the free market created such unprecedented levels of mass prosperity that absolute poverty became virtually extinct in western democracies, so it had to be replaced as a social evil by “relative poverty”. It was not enough that no one should be genuinely poor (hungry and without basic necessities): what was demanded now was that no one should be much worse (or better) off than anyone else. The job of government was to create a society in which there were no significant disparities in earnings or standards of living. So it was not just the unemployed who were given assistance: the low paid had their wages supplemented by working tax credits and in-work benefits so that their earnings could be brought up to the arbitrary level which the state had decided constituted not-poverty.

The paradoxical effect of this is that the only politically acceptable condition is to be earning just enough to maintain independent life – and not a penny more. Everybody is steered by the penalties of the tax system or the gradual withdrawal of benefits into that small space in the middle between being “rich” (earning over about £40,000 a year) and being (relatively) poor. As detailed analysis has made clear, the only group spared by Mr Osborne’s tinkering last week were standard rate tax payers. Neither rich nor unemployed, these paragons are perfect exemplars of “fairness”: surviving on an income which makes life just about bearable but remaining careful always not to allow their aspirations to propel them beyond their station and its acceptable earnings level.
This picture of the perfect society – in which disparities of wealth are eradicated and economic equality is maintained through a vastly complex and expensive system of state intervention – has been the explicit goal of the EU virtually since its inception. It had an on-again, off-again history in Britain until it was locked firmly into the political infrastructure by Gordon Brown. More unexpectedly, it has now taken root in the American political culture, where Mr Obama seems determined to exploit it in his blood-curdling contest with the Republicans. Once ensconced, this concept undermines the logic of the free-market economy which funds it.
Capitalism is, by its nature, dynamic: it creates transitory disparities of wealth constantly as it reinvents itself. Fortunes are made and lost and, as old industries are replaced by new, the earnings that they create rise and fall. Punishing those who exceed some momentary average income and artificially subsidising those who fall below it – as well as providing for a universal standard of living which bears no relation to merit or even to need – has now reached the unavoidable, unaffordable end of the line.
So who will tell the truth – and then act on it? Who will say not just that welfare must be cut, but that in future the NHS will need to rely on a system of co-payments? That people will have to provide for their own retirement because the state pension will be frozen? That without a radical reduction in government intervention, the free and prosperous West will have been a brief historical aberration?

Via Instapundit, this is too funny.

anchortown

On the anniversary of John Lennon's death, I've linked to a very nice post I saw over at the Instapundit site.

Lockheed L-10