He’s not targeting the White House’s actual activities. He’s not calling them out for suppressing Fast and Furious and targeting whistleblowers for retaliation. Bernstein’s only mad because reporters who need to be monitored for party loyalty are now targets.
Bernstein said “the president should long ago have put a stop to this in his administration”. Apparently he doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that the president is a Chicago street organizer who was raised by Alinskyite communist thugs and terrorists. This president does not favor freedom, he does not favor free speech. His political agenda is one that would criminalize unpopular speech, and would actively targets opposition speech. This is not a surprise to Country Class Americans.
Bernstein:
“There is no reason that a presidency that is interested in a truly free press and its functioning should permit this to happen.”
Y’know what that means, Carl? Y’know what you should be able to get from that without having Mark Felt spoon-feed it to you? It means this presidency DOESN’T favor a free press.
Bernstein is a dinosaur. He’s in the tank for the Democrats, but he still thinks they’re the same silly Democrats of yesteryear. He’s still got some smidgen of journalistic integrity left, too, and he’s wondering why the Democrats are trying to crush and control journalists now. He doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with, and he doesn’t understand that the ruling Democrats are tyrants.
He sounds mad because he can’t figure out why Obama’s doing these horrible things. He’s like a battered wife who still thinks her abusive husband who just molested their children is a good guy, and she doesn’t understand all these horrible things that surely can’t be the truth. The facts stare him in the face, but he refuses to understand.
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As just one more example, Sharyl Attkisson has been yelled at for being a journalist and actually reporting on a big story – gunrunning by the US DOJ/ATF, and the subsequent coverup by the Obama administration. The media has already hushed up a few hundred murders in Fast and Furious, and hushed up Benghazi as much as they can, and they’re going to spin the IRS story as either justified because conservative=evil or as an accident. They’ve been accomplices to tyranny for so long, are they just so blind that they’re now surprised when they’re the targets?
Somewhere, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov are sharing a joke at the US media’s expense.
Hagel: Troops’ workplaces will be checked for ‘degrading’ images of women
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a close-up and comprehensive inspection of all military offices and workplaces worldwide to root out any “materials that create a degrading or offensive work environment.”
The extraordinary searches will be similar to those the Air Force conducted last year and prompted officers to scour troops’ desks and cubicles in search of photos, calendars, magazines, screen-savers, computer files and other items that might be considered degrading toward women.
The inspections will now target soldiers, sailors and Marines.
The workplace searches will be conducted by “component heads” before July 1, and Hagel expects each service to submit a report summarizing the findings.
The inspections were controversial and many airman complained that it felt like a “raid” and arbitrarily targeted materials such as fitness magazines and beer posters.
Air Force officials said the prevalence of those items may be correlated to sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace.
Hagel outlined several other measures aimed at cracking down on sexual assaults.
Part 1 here, mostly about food and people who want the government to dictate to them how they should eat.
And today, part 2, as we look at a Time Magazine piece titled “Tread on Me“.
America was born from resistance to tyranny, and our skepticism of authority is a healthy tradition. But we’re pretty free.
That’s good enough, right? We’re “pretty free”. It’s about time we move on in the Tytler Cycle and get back to bondage! Woo-hoo! Bondage! The state will make us free from responsibility and dangers of the world! They know what’s best for me!
the Don’t Tread on Me slippery-slopers on both ends of the political spectrum tend to forget that Big Government helps protect other important rights
Doesn’t work that way. This is a question of whether people believe in more or less government control. Americans believe in less government control, have traditionally always believed in less government control, and only ever believe in having government control them when they’ve been brainwashed and programmed.
But standby for incoming collectivist BS…
Like the right of a child to watch a marathon or attend first grade without getting massacred—or, for that matter, the right to live near a fertilizer factory without it blowing up your house.
There are no such rights. To be free from danger is not only impossible, but even reduction of danger is not a right – it something paid for by someone’s work – whether it be the soldier, policeman, or factory manager and safety staff.
I guess you could call me a statist.
How about one who will lick the hand that feeds with his chains resting upon him, and someone who I would wish posterity would forget was my countryman?
Go ahead, quote the Ben Franklin line about those who would sacrifice some liberty for security deserving neither.
You forgot the last part – they deserve neither – and will lose both.
But what about the rights of 8-year-old Martin Richard, blown away after watching his dad finish the marathon? Who safeguarded the liberty of 6-year-old Charlotte Bacon, gunned down in her classroom in her new pink dress? What about Perry Calvin and Morris Bridges and the other victims of the West Texas explosion? Nobody read them their rights.
There are no such rights as to be free from danger – and there can be none.
This kind of high-minded utopian fantasy was cranked out back in the 1930s and 1940s by the FDR administration. There were even oaths made to defend the freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Photo by ShortTimer
It is, by itself, nonsense.
Life? What ‘right’ to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What ‘right’ to life has a man who must die to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of ‘right’? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is ‘unalienable’? And is it ‘right’? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
- Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
You cannot legislate industrial accidents out of existence (unless you obliterate industry entirely – which is a goal of the left as a tool to fight Manbearpig).
You cannot legislate madmen out of existence. You can forcibly disarm the populace, and leave them at the mercy of governmental ruler madmen like maniac cop Chris Dorner. You can leave them at the mercy of government to make them “safe”.
You do all of those by destroying liberty, something that high-minded collectivist utopians have done in the past to construct human nature into what they want it to be – to “mold the world closer to their hearts’ desire”.
And it almost always looks the same in the end.
In contrast to those statist desires, you can safeguard the liberty of 6 year-old Charlotte Bacon. You need a rough man ready to do violence on her behalf to safeguard that liberty – that liberty needs to be bought, but the left is terrified of the tools of violence to the point where they irrationally declare that to make the gazelle safe from the lion, you must strip the gazelle’s horns.
By the left’s logic, to make the child safe, you must leave her unguarded; and target those who would do her no harm but instead do seek to protect her. There are people who are actively willing to put their own lives in harm’s way, but they are called monsters for demanding real security. They are demonized for understanding the tools and nature of violence as defense and deterrent.
You can begin to defend the life of 8 year-old Martin Richard more by identifying the threat and dealing with the threat when it rears its head. What killed him was islamic terrorism. We know this. We all know this, but our government denies it on the basis that their ideology rejects making that judgement. By the response of the authorities in the Boston bombing case, there will be no more fatalities from those particular two terrorists. The hundreds of lives saved, like the baker’s new suit in the Broken Window Fallacy, are easily forgotten because they never materialized. There were no more terrorist attacks from those two because the terrorists were pursued (at a cost of life and harm) and stopped.
Yet there are still high-minded utopians who believe that if they just apologize enough, that if they are sensitive enough, they can stop people who chant for their deaths in the street through just well wishes.
And here’s where the Time writer gets worse:
Our rights are not inviolate. Just as the First Amendment doesn’t let us shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, the Second Amendment shouldn’t let us have assault weapons designed for mass slaughter.
This is, as Jonah Goldberg would say, bonesnappingly stupid.
The First Amendment totally and completely does let us shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
If the government could mandate a white-noise generator that would specifically tune into the sound of a human voice shouting the word “Fire!” so that it could never again be said in a theater and the First Amendment were restricted, what would happen when there is a fire and no one can shout the word? What happens when no one can give the alarm? What happens when that lifesaving tool is denied? It would result in people burned to death.
The Second Amendment totally and completely does let us have modern firearms. I have yet to take or instruct a firearms class wherein I have taught or been taught to use an “assault weapon” for “mass slaughter”. Sorry, just doesn’t work that way.
The Second Amendment protects the natural right of self defense. It codifies it in the Constitution and ensures that the tools of self defense will not be denied. It does the same in that sense as the First Amendment protecting the word “Fire!”. It exists as the last full response against oppression, large and small, whether it be a lone criminal or the force of a dictatorial government.
If used improperly or abused, it’s a crime, just like yelling fire when there’s no fire. If used properly, it’s a wholly necessary lifesaving right; and it protects tools that allow for lives to be saved. And just like the loss of yelling “Fire!”, if it is taken away, it ends up the same – the result is people burned to death.
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To revisit this quote from the “Tread on Me” masochist:
Those of us who support aggressive government action to protect the public ought to acknowledge that it does, at the margins, limit individual rights—the rights of gun owners, the rights of business owners, the rights of the accused. Go ahead, quote the Ben Franklin line about those who would sacrifice some liberty for security deserving neither. But what about the rights of 8-year-old Martin Richard, blown away after watching his dad finish the marathon? Who safeguarded the liberty of 6-year-old Charlotte Bacon, gunned down in her classroom in her new pink dress? What about Perry Calvin and Morris Bridges and the other victims of the West Texas explosion? Nobody read them their rights.
The Bill of Rights is there to limit government. Governments create oppression. In a state of nature, there may be terror, but there is no all-encompassing institution that can deny you your natural rights. The Constitution is there as a contract of free men that created a limited government with the intention of protecting all of our natural rights possible while providing us tools to ensure greater protection for all as well.
I’ve been told that invoking the death of innocents is an emotional appeal rather than a logical argument. And I do admit these tragedies make me angry. But I think it would be logical for our government to try to limit these tragedies in the future.
You want to protect people, do it yourself. You want to prevent tragedies, do it yourself. You want to tread on me because you’re a coward? Then you become an oppressor, Mr. Grunwald, and you are trading bought-and-paid-for liberty for security that is not only fleeting, but wholly nonexistent.
We already sacrifice liberty all the time—our right to automatic weapons, our right to walk through airport security with our shoes on, our right to run our businesses however we please.
The writer is an amoebic poltroon who kneels before the might of the state. We shouldn’t sacrafice our right to automatic weapons, our right to walk through airport security with shoes on, or our right to run our businesses however we please. Excluding abuse of our rights, which infringes on someone else’s natural rights, it’s not the place of the government to do anything. Just because the government has abused rights in the past, doesn’t mean we should tolerate it any further.
The rights of the next Martin Richard and the next Charlotte Bacon matter, too.
Yes, and the next Martin and the next Charlotte may be killed by leftists with utopian wishes who demand schools be gun-free zones, ensuring that only criminals and madmen intent on mayhem will be armed. The next Martin and Charlotte, if they survived being left in a defenseless free-fire zone for 12 years of mandated government schooling, may not like being x-rayed by government lackeys who see them nude any time they get on a plane. They may not like that when they go to start a business, that their government demands so much from them that it’s easier just to not start the business, that their freedom has been curtailed so much that they don’t have options for a business.
But they may grow up thinking they’re “pretty free”, because there’s always something worse.
The next Martin and the next Charlotte are not one or two children, they are millions of children who will grow into adults in a nation where they are less free. The next boy may be bashed for being gay because he’s left disarmed against a mob, the next girl may be another Amanda Collins, who was raped because she was disarmed by government. The next boy may have developed the motor that runs on static electricity, but will never make it because the government has regulated him into oblivion. The next girl may not want to have her privacy violated by government every time she enters a private contract with an aircraft company to fly her somewhere.
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There are no shortages of people demanding destruction of liberty. From Cass “We Must Dominate You For Your Own Good” Sunstein, to any of the intellectuals Thomas Sowell criticizes as dominating sheperds who demand you be their sheep, there is never a shortage of men who wish to dominate and control their fellow man.
There is always a question of how many people believe that becoming sheep is noble, and how many reject that destructive notion of bondage.
NJ Governor Chris Christie, who’s a Republican when it’s convenient, has decided that the state needs expansion of power at the expense of the citizen.
New Jersey has the second toughest gun laws in the country. The first facet of Christie’s plan seeks to make them even stricter. This includes banning future purchases of the Barrett .50 Caliber; strengthening the state’s existing background check requirement by mandating that mental health records are included in the instant background check process at the time of a firearm purchase; and requiring firearms purchasers to present a valid government photo ID, along with the already mandatory Firearms Purchaser Identification Card.
Banning the Barrett .50 is stupid. Criminals don’t use them (except when they’re exported by the ATF to Mexican drug cartels). They weigh 25 pounds and cost $10K. They’re a boogeyman of the anti-gun left, who don’t like guns that are big. Or small. Or any at all.
Mandating mental health records being included in the background check is a step towards the gun confiscation New York has already seen – it will mean seizing guns for seeking help, it will mean denying Constitutional rights and the natural right of self-defense to those who’ve asked for help. The point isn’t to keep guns from crazies, it’s to keep guns from everyone.
Firearms purchasers already have to present a valid government photo ID.
For those unaware of it, New Jersey requires you to ask the government permission before buying a gun. You have to have a purchaser ID card – the state has to give you permission if you want to exercise a right. The application form can be viewed here.
The purpose is so that authorities can decide who gets to exercise rights and who doesn’t. These laws were passed predominately on the notion that the white ruling class needed to keep the black people (and poor whites) down. Now the Ruling Class simply chooses to keep the Country Class down.
At the announcement of Christie’s NJ SAFE Taskforce in January in the aftermath of Newtown, he talked about targeting and treating the root causes of violence.
There are three proposals listed, all of which are vague, but all of which actually seem to do something not entirely useless, while not actually infringing on Second Amendment rights. Actually looking at mental health isn’t a bad idea.
And then Chris Christie, who is a Republican when it suits him capable of tackling corruption when it suits him, but apparently very good at being a nanny-stater, comes up with this:
According to the Governor, too often lost in the debate about controlling gun violence in our society is the almost constant exposure young children and adults have to graphic violence. Part-three of his plan includes;
Requiring that retailers post at the point of sale the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ERSB) ratings. Additionally, requiring retailers to develop, maintain and conspicuously display their policy on selling video games with an M or AO rating.
Requiring Consent of a Legal Guardian. This is not different than the kind of parental supervision expected when a child under the age of 18 goes to see an R rated movie, Christie is requiring that a legal guardian provide consent when a minor purchases or rents a video game that has a rating of “Mature” or “Adult Only.”
If it’s a problem, it’s a problem for parents. They need to be the ones dealing with it. If parents groups are mad, they need to pressure retailers into meeting their demands (and many will happily do so, showing how caring they are, and thus generating a feeling of well-being among their customers).
And if you can’t buy it at a store, it doesn’t matter. This may come as a shock, but you can buy video games online.
The main sponsor on the U.S. legislation that banned many assault weapons in the 1990s is now talking about regulating violent video games in the future.
Speaking to an audience of 500 people in her hometown of San Francisco, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that game publishers need to make voluntary actions to avoid glorifying guns and violence following the Newtown elementary school massacre in December.
“If Sandy Hook doesn’t [make game publishers change] … then maybe we have to proceed, but that is in the future,” said Feinstein.
She went on to claim that video games play “a very negative role for young people, and the industry ought to take note of that.”
Never mind that SCOTUS already said no.
In 2011, the Supreme Court of the United States struck a California law that would ban the sale of violent games to minors. The court voted 7-2 to block the law based on the protection afford to expression under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
And of course there are Republican busybodies as well. What they miss is that it’s a cultural argument to have without resorting to laws. While they are made to understand it by their constituents when it comes to the Second Amendment, they also need to be made to understand it when it comes to the First.
In January, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said that he believes “video games [are] a bigger problem than guns because video games affect people.” Last month, Rep. Diane Black (R.-Tenn.) claimed that the perpetrator in the Sandy Hook shooting was fueled by “unprecedented levels of violent games, music, and so on.”
Even if individually those statements have some grain of truth, there’s no excuse for the government, which was established to protect rights, to use force it was granted to destroy rights. They don’t seem to push for restrictions, but they certainly don’t sound like defenders of liberty.
In a series of bills Christie seeks to impose or strengthen criminal penalties when it comes to selling firearms to convicted criminals, possessing a firearm with the intent to unlawfully transfer, hiring a “straw purchaser,” unlawfully possessing ammunition and engaging in firearms trafficking, among other areas.
This crap gets really shady really fast. He’s not going to arrest Eric Holder the next time he comes to Jersey, so I’m not impressed.
Beyond that, these are sketchy laws, most of which are already illegal at the federal level, and probably at the NJ state level as well. Obama doesn’t enforce them at the federal level, so maybe Chris Christie could apply some pressure there and demand the feds to their job. That might be a better start, rather than going after people still barely able to exercise their rights in NJ. Of course, that’s assuming he’s not completely anti-Second Amendment.
The gentleman on the left recklessly pointing a gun at his head is vulgar rapper 2 Chainz. The gentleman on the right is rapper Ice T, a.k.a. Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola from the TV drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
But even if his style of rap isn’t to my taste, let’s give credit where it’s due – I think this is a pretty good spontaneous potrayal of an ATF agent. Not bad, 2 Chainz.
Not bad at all, 2 Chainz. But you have to do it with less actual thought as to what you’re doing. It’s evident your finger’s off the trigger, and a real ATF agent would keep his finger on the trigger.
If you’re scratching your head with the muzzle all Plan 9 From Outer Space style and the trigger just is a bit out of reach, that’s cool. Remember, it’s got to be casual stupidity and carelessness, not intentional. Acting is sometimes hard, 2 Chainz.
Sure, maybe a serious chastisement punctuated in such a manner as to drive the point home a bit wasn’t something that Ice-T was expecting and that might have put him on the defensive because… well, it’s really stupid and indefensible jackassery. But it seems “F off B” is all he could come up with. Manning up to the criticism and saying “yeah, we were being reckless jackasses” is probably a little bit tougher to do than saying “F off”. Looks like the point was made and it stung a little bit.
However, Twitter really isn’t a venue that’s conducive to explaining how the image of flaunting the danger a firearm by placing it to one’s temple is sometimes seen as a display of courage, albeit a profoundly stupid one. That might be best left to anthropologists to examine why other masculine avenues to prove courage have faded in the last few decades – not only in the rap subculture, but in broader culture as well. To turn this completely on its ear, it’s worth asking why is this considered a good idea or a cool pose? What led to that cultural conclusion? (And again I note that it does exist in broader culture as well.)
To 2 Chainz credit, his finger is off the trigger – good for safety, bad for playing an ATF agent -… though pretty much every other firearms safety rule is ignored.
While we’re on gun safety and bad examples, it’s worth considering that he may be the only one professional enough in that room to carry that gun.
Or maybe 2 Chainz has been learning firearms handling from good ol’ Tex Grebner.
A Sikh man is suing the state of California over its gun laws, arguing they violate his First Amendment rights to practice his religion by barring him from carrying the kind of weapons he says he needs for self-defense.
Gursant Singh Khalsa, a practicing Sikh for 35 years, charges in the lawsuit filed this month that California’s laws banning military-style, semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines violate mainstream Sikh doctinre requiring Sikhs “be at all time fully prepared to defend themselves and others against injustice.”
Standard capacity magazines.
“We’re required to wear what’s called a kirpan” or dagger, he said Thursday. “I feel, as far as my religion goes, it dictates that we should have all weapons of all kinds to defend ourselves. By not being able to carry an assault rifle or weapon that has a high-capacity magazine, I don’t feel that I can defend myself or my family.”
Mr. Khalsa, who lives in Yuba City about 40 miles north of Sacramento, said he believes such a right should be available to all Americans with the proper training but that it’s also specific to the Sikh religion, which has roots deeply tied to self-defense.
“Some splinter groups attempt this by wearing symbolic miniature daggers in their turbans, to comply with this requirement,” he argues in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in California. “But mainstream Sikhs believe this requirement is a literal and true moral duty. As Guru Gobind Singh instructed his Sikhs; ‘Without uncut hair and weapons do not come before me’.”
The Kirpan is traditional, but it’s also a symbol. Sikhs some places are forbidden to wear the swords as local laws oppress them, and are left with daggers, or even pocketknives or pins in the shape of a kirpan.
Guru Gobind Singh clearly chose these words very deliberately – He did not state that the Khalsa was the army of the Khalsa or an army of the Sikhs or the army of Punjab – but an Army of God whose function was the protection and safeguarding of all the peoples of God regardless of religion, race or creed.
Mr. Khalsa makes an especially relevant point in that Sikhs themselves, who by their religion must protect the oppressed, have also become targets of madmen.
Mr. Khalsa, in his lawsuit, argues that the “sword” goes beyond the literal object.
“Decrees from the Tenth Sikh Guru state in the most vigorous and clear words that a Sikh’s conception of God is the sword of dharma,” he argues. “Not only the sword but every weapon became an attributive symbol of God for the Sikhs.”
Sikhism teaches that all of humanity was created by the Onkar, which is addressed by many names and understood differently. Sikhism teaches to respect all other religions (tolerance) and that one should defend the rights of not just one’s own religion but the religion and faith of others as a human right. At the end of every Sikh prayer is a supplication for the welfare of all of humanity. ( Tere Bhanne Sarbat Da Bhala )
Denying them modern arms is religious oppression:
The lawsuit also says that California’s laws infringe on the Second and 14th Amendment rights of Mr. Khalsa and others.
Mr. Khalsa, the suit reads, “fears arrest, criminal prosecution, incarceration, and fine if he were to possess loaded weapons with 11 or more round magazines within his home, within his vehicle on the streets, or within his temple. But his religious beliefs require no less.”
One of their religion’s core tenets, again, is defense of the rights one one’s own and of others’ faith, and defense from oppression for all. Mr. Khalsa gets it.
There are web sites posting my personal information, my moms address, my dads address, and other family members. Other than to be malicious and put people close to me in danger why would someone do this? These are supposed to be the peaceful people. I crack jokes but never attack people on a personal level. Ironically, now I really feel the need to arm my family and friends. #IsItBecauseImBlack?
“It’s just another fun day at work doing the peoples’ business and working in public service to make this state a better state,” the governor said, smiling. “Oh, what a joy it is. Let’s go have another substantive conversation on an important issue.”
The bill passed quickly last month through a “message of necessity” that waived the legally required three-day waiting period. The Senate, led by a Republican-dominated coalition, passed the measure by a 43-18 vote less than two hours after the bill’s text became public. The Democrat-dominated Assembly passed the bill the next day, and Cuomo signed it.
