The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the Determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are constitutional rights secure.
Albert Einstein
Category Archives: Politics
Reality is knocking at their door
I just ran across this headline as I was scanning the news: Leading doctor says free NHS is unsustainable.
LONDON (Reuters) – The National Health Service is unsustainable and needs to be reformed, one of the country’s most senior doctors said on Saturday.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Bernie Ribeiro, the new president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said healthcare should be paid for through a social insurance system.
“If we’re going to have a health care system suited to the future, we’ve got to be prepared to invest in it,” he said. “I don’t personally believe that can be done out of pure taxation.”
Ribeiro suggested a means-tested system where the poorest would pay nothing at all and other patients would take out insurance to cover a proportion of their costs.
“We’re not a poor country, the working population is reasonably well paid, we could afford our workers to make an identifiable contribution towards health care — not one hidden in national insurance and taxation.
“We seriously need to look at this again.”
The Labour party vowed during the May election to continue free care for all through the NHS, which it created in 1948.
Britons tend to be very protective and proud of the health service which employs 1.3 million workers and spends over 76 billion pounds a year.
But an independent report in June 2005 said the service faced serious financial problems through poor management and doctors and patients have repeatedly complained of long waiting lists and over crowding on many hospital wards.
Socialism–The Road to Serfdom (which was written in 1944 and intended for the British audience). And socialized medicine is just one of the steps down that path. At least a few people are getting a clue after nearly 50 years. The question is, is it too late to reverse the slide into the abyss?
Muslim jokes
Neal Boortz (the link www.vicioussob.com works too) has some Muslim jokes on his web site. They are here and here. Some are pretty good. My favorites are:
From the Muslim standup comic Goffaq Yussef:
- How many Palestinians does it take to change a light bulb. None! They sit in the dark forever and blame the Jews for it!
- A Palestinian suspect was being grilled by Israeli police. “Honest, I’m not a suicide bomber,” he said. “I didn’t say I wanted to blow myself up so I could sleep with 72 virgins. All I said was I’m dying to get laid!”
- A Palestinian girl says to her mommy, “After Abdul blows up, can I have his room?”
Bumper stickers:
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If you don’t like the way I drive, stay out of the World Trade Center
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Driver carries only $20 worth of C4
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My kid and YOUR money go to Gitomo Bay.
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My 12-year-old can blow up your honor student
Don Kates on bigotry
First off, does anyone have an email address or website for him? I can’t seem to find one.
Second, while searching for an email address I found this speech by him. It was from this speech I pulled todays quote. I have often commented about anti-gun owner bigots and have praised others that use that term against the anti-freedom crowd. Kates, in his speech, spells it out for us better than anyone else I have come across. A sample:
… the gun control debate is not really about criminology but rather about bigotry and the effort of an influence group to force its morality on everyone by having it adopted as state and federal law. To see this it is necessary only to review some unfamiliar facts: the average gun owner is better educated and has a better job than non-owners; attitude surveys find gun owners neither racist nor sexist; liberals are only somewhat less likely than others to own firearms; liberals who do are no less willing to use them to defend their families; the only violence gun owners endorse is willingness to come to the aid of crime victims. Gun owners do not approve of police brutality, violence against dissenters, etc. Also, good Samaritans who actually come to the aid of crime victims are twice as likely to be gun owners as the general populace.
Though these facts have been uniformly established by numerous sociological studies, they will doubtless surprise you almost as much as they would the anti-gun movement and the media. After all the former (which is actually a gun BAN movement), with the enthusiastic aid of the media, have succeeded in stereotyping gun owners as violence-oriented yahoos — educationally, intellectually and morally retarded.
There is a word for people who inaccurately, unjustly ascribe negative characteristics to a whole group of others they dislike: that word is BIGOT.
You may not realize it but the language we use in our fight for freedom has a huge impact. As Kevin at The Smallest Minority posted a couple days ago the mindset and world view are dependent upon the language we use. If we let our opponents define the terms (think “assault weapons”, “sniper rifles”, “gun safety regulations”, etc.) we will lose. We must define ourselves and our opponents. Our opponents are bigots. It’s demonstrably true. Don’t let them or anyone else forget it.
Quote of the day–Don Kates
The gun control debate is not really about criminology but rather about bigotry.
Don Kates
Constitutional lawyer and criminologist
July 2, 1994
http://www.hoboes.com/pub/Firearms/Essays/Don%20Kates/Don%20Kates%20at%20Sacramento%20Rally
The latest example
As near as I can determine people who desire restrictions on firearms have zero connectivity with reality. They haven’t looked at the history of gun control to determine what happens in the real world. This determination is the basis for my Just One Question–which no one has ever attempted to answer. In addition to the safety and security issues which are my main concerns there are the enforceability, corruption, and abuse of power issues. The current situation in South Africa is just the latest example of what happens when you allow the government to attempt implementing “common sense” restrictions:
The Black Gun Owners’ Association says it is preparing to sue the Minister of Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula, on behalf of thousands of prospective gun owners who have paid fees in advance to comply with new firearm licence legislation, only to have their applications and requests for refunds refused by the South African Police Service.
…
To comply with legislation, applicants paid up to R1 500 for training courses, safes and competency certificates, only to have their applications denied.
“Everything has been planned for people not to obtain licences. The government has made a big blunder. The minister (Nqakula) said he does not want illegal firearms, so why is he refusing people legal firearms?
“The new law is encouraging people to support illegal firearms. In South Africa, firearms are readily available and some of the people selling illegal firearms are police (disposing of) amnesty firearms,” he said.
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Durban Guns and Ammo owner Justin Willmers said more than 1 000 applications submitted via his shop, after waiting two years to be processed, had been refused on appeal.
He said applicants had received identical response letters saying they had not given a “substantial reason” as to why they could not use alternative means of protection.
“Since July 1 last year, I have not sold one gun,” Willmers said. He said when customers realised the lengthy processes involved in obtaining a firearm legally, they simply turned to the black market.
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Suter claimed the police had neither the capacity nor the expertise to administer licence renewals from the country’s roughly 2,5-million gun owners. And with three and a half years left to renew 4,5-million firearm licences, at the current pace of work, it would take 26 875 years, he said.
Responding to claims the NRA is a “special interest”
“This is a day in America when the little guy lost out to powerful special interests.”
– Michael Barnes, President, Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence
That is the lead to this article by Howard Nemerov. You know Barnes is full of crap just from his association with the Brady bunch. But I didn’t know the other details outlined in that great article. Nemeroy also says this about Barnes:
He is a Washington insider, having been a congressman from 1979-1987. He is a lawyer who has an association with the law firm of Hogan & Hartson.
He thens goes on to tell how much money lawyers have been donating to our politicians and how those politicians are a “Who’s Who” of those that voted against the bill to outlaw frivolous lawsuits against firearms manufactures.
If you like well documented, hard facts kind of reading go read the rest of it.
A bit of a side note–I haven’t crowed about this bill passing the Senate for various reasons. Stephanie sent me this link which articulates some of the reasons not to be overjoyed about passage of this law. I agree with everything in the article but if I were to vote on the bill I probably “hold my nose” and vote “Yes”. The reality is the Federal government exercises way more power than it was granted by the Constitution. But failure to exercise that power for good does not lessen the evils that excess of power brings. That excess of power must be reduced in a manner which reduces evil as much or more than the good that can be done with that power. Failure to accept this good does not accomplish that.
Quote of the day–Harry Thomas
And Miss (Attorney General Janet) Reno, I say to you: If you send your jackbooted, baby-burning bushwackers to confiscate my guns, pack them a lunch. It will be a damned long day. The Branch Davidians were amateurs.
I’m a professional.
Harry Thomas
NRA Board Member
Quote of the day–William F. Buckley Jr.
[T]he government of the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, proposes to concern itself over the quality of American life. And this is something very new in the political theory of free nations. The quality of life has heretofore depended on the quality of the human beings who gave tone to that life, and they were its priests and its poets, not its bureaucrats.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Periodical
National Review, August 7, 1965
Quote of the day–The Talmud
Who can protest an injustice but does not is an accomplice in the act.
The Talmud
Quote of the day–DER NATIONALSOZIALISMUS DOKUMENTE
We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: . . . and end to the power of the financial interests. We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand . . . the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our entire system of public education . . . . We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents . . .
The government must undertake the improvement of public health – by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor . . by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth. We combat the . . . materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of the common good before the individual good.
Excerpts from the political program of the Nazi Party, adopted in Munich, on Feb 24, 1920 – source- DER NATIONALSOZIALISMUS DOKUMENTE 1933-1945 , edited by Walther Hofer, Frankfurt am Mein: Fischer Bucherei, 1957 pp 29-31
Quote of the day–Alphan Oumar Konare
The political, economic and social consequences of the anarchic proliferation of light weapons are well known. They are the millions of victims, most of them civilians, the displaced populations with their tears and suffering, the phenomena of child soldiers, terrorism and wide-scale banditry in urban areas. This belief in disarmament does not proceed from idealism, or from naivete. The best strategy for prevention of armed conflict is to eliminate the means of violence.
Alphan Oumar Konare
President of Mali
Oslo, April 1998
From http://www.prepcom.org/low/index.html
Quote of the day–National Crime Prevention Council
Don’t carry a weapon. You lose, whether you use it or it’s used on you.
National Crime Prevention Council
10 things you can do. Tip number 8.
From: http://www.weprevent.org/your10.htm (as of March 10, 1999)
Quote of the day–SA OBERFUHRER OF BAD TOLZ, GERMANY
The associations of the nation revival, SA [Storm Troopers], SS [para-military adjunct of the Gestapo], and Stahlhelm [a non-Nazi lunatic fringe para-military organization], give every responsible citizen the opportunity of campaigning with them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above-named organization and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon . . . must be regarded as an enemy of the national government and will be brought to account without compunction and with the utmost severity.
SA OBERFUHRER OF BAD TOLZ, GERMANY
Quoted in Richard Munday
“The Monopoly of Power”
(paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, 1991)
Quote of the day–Milton Friedman
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Milton Friedman
Quote of the day–Eric Engstrom
Computers and the internet are a far bigger problem for the government than they are for the individual.
Eric Engstrom
October 2003
Quote of the day–Jeff Cooper
The media insist that crime is the major concern of the American public today. In this connection they generally push the point that a disarmed society would be a crime-free society. They will not accept the truth that if you take all the guns off the street you still will have a crime problem, whereas if you take the criminals off the street you cannot have a gun problem.
In the larger sense, however, the personal ownership of firearms is only secondarily a matter of defense against the criminal. Note the following from Thomas Jefferson:
The strongest reason for the people to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against the tyranny of government.
That is why our masters in Washington are so anxious to disarm us. They are not afraid of criminals. They are afraid of a populace which cannot be subdued by tyrants.
Jeff Cooper
From Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries
Vol. 2, No. 5
May 1994
Institutionalized bigotry
According to these guys I imagine I exhibited all the symptoms of someone about to go postal, except for one. The one missing was supplied by PNNL–by firing me. How many other civil rights activists exhibit the same “symptoms”?
Some type of obsession, e.g., weapons, other acts of violence, romantic/sexual, zealot (political, religious, racial), the job itself, neatness and order
Performance Problems, including problems with attendance or tardiness [I am a night person and I, and others, would arrive late and leave late]
Access to and familiarity with weapons
Being fired, laid off or suspended; passed over for promotion
As I read this web page I and others who advocate for the rights of gun owners, should never be hired in the first place. There is a word for this–bigotry.
Quote of the day–Jim Grieshaber-Otto
“Free trade” is actually a misnomer, Grieshaber-Otto contends; the new global rules are actually aimed primarily at restricting government regulations, which is bad news for advocates.
Jim Grieshaber-Otto, Ph.D.
An international trade expert with the government of British Columbia.
From: http://www.jointogether.org/gv/default.jtml?O=264057
August 12, 2000
Quote of the day–H.L. Mencken
Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.
H.L. Mencken
MicroNews
[This doesn’t mean that all aberration is a form of human progress. Just as in DNA mutations–most of the mutants are not viable. -Joe-]