By Nathan Barton

Good morning.  Today is officially “Martin Luther King Jr. Day” in most of the United States, a holiday intended to “balance” official holidays so that “African Americans” (except those who are not dark in skin color, of course) or “Black Americans” (except those who don’t trace their ancestry to Africa, of course) have a holiday to counter the influence of President’s Day, Columbus Day, and Christmas Day, all of which “celebrate” white people (even if of Semitic or Mediterranean origin).  In our civic religion, the dead Baptist preacher and Communist leader has been recreated as a demigod of peace and justice and brotherly love, because he was “martyred.”  And as a result, the taxpayers are saddled with paying for yet another three day weekend for government employees.  Such a deal!

I (like most private sector businesses and workers) don’t get this day off.  You probably do not, either.  So here is to a good day.  And here are some stories to share, together with my comments.

So, the “messiah” made a speech, intended to “solve” the problem of a “rogue” National Security Agency.  Right.  The BBC has a blog summarizing the media responses which is fill with the garbage that the media puts out now, but much of the media is upset; one even compared the “messiah” to the much hated Bush II.   I didn’t listen to this self-serving, pandering, zero-calorie speech: I have better things to do, like work to make a living, sleep, and enjoy the beauty of the Black Hills.  Anyone who did, unless they are getting paid to do so, wasted precious minutes of their lives hearing what they already knew.  And John Q. Public does seem, as the BBC said, to be about half apathetic.  It isn’t that so many people are afraid of another Bloody Tuesday (9-11), as they are afraid that they will be the next to have the NSA copy down their credit card numbers and expiration dates and three-digit “secret numbers” and their text messages to their bosom buddies!  I admit I got a kick out of Freedom Outpost’s thoughts on this piece of conmanship:  they translated his speech as “If you like your freedom, you can keep it.  If you like your personal liberties, you can keep those too.  Trust me!”

A Michigan police officer’s response to a man walking down the sidewalk legally openly wearing his handgun, following a single phone call from a Mrs. Grundy, is yet another example of how it is clear that a good many states (and local jurisdictions) left the Union before it was ever really dissolved, because they didn’t agree with the few fundamental liberties specifically protected in the Constitution.  This has apparently triggered a federal lawsuit (hopefully under RICO and conspiracy to violate the rights of Americans; the article doesn’t say) but don’t expect anything to come out of it.  Perhaps a hundred or two hundred people – not in groups, but individually, going about their business in this town openly carrying a pistol might make people wake up.  But I doubt it.

A gunman threatened to kill everyone in an Alabama Dollar General store but a man carrying concealed shot and killed him before he could take the employees to a back room (traditionally the place in American stores where madmen kill their victims with or without robbery in mind).  So now the man who saved other people’s lives is being investigated to make sure he didn’t commit a felony by carrying concealed without a permission slip from the state or the local sheriff.  Or violated some other law since the DG store had a sign “forbidding” open carry.  (Guess the dead nutcase missed that, or was carrying concealed until he whipped it out on the manager and the store clerk.)  I guess the attitude is that SOMEone has to be investigated and prosecuted: why not the man that not only saved lives but saved the taxpayers a big bill for incarceration, trial, and probably life imprisonment? (Thanks to JPFO for this story.)

American politicians are so fond of fighting “wars” on this and that.  The latest is the “messiah’s” and the Dems in Congress’s “war against income inequality.”  This will join all the other failures in the past.  We have had the war against poverty for fifty years now, and it seems, indeed, that poverty won – we have more of it than ever before.  We’ve had the “war on terrorism” for fifteen or so years now, and we have more terrorism than ever before, even if we have to keep redefining it.  (Terrorism today includes six-year-old boys kissing six-year-old girls in school, and old folks standing on street corners waving Gadsden Flats.)  We had “WIN” – Whip Inflation Now, from Gerald Ford, a war on inflation:  sheesh: back then gas was a shocking $1.25 a gallon and milk was 50 cents a gallon and a 12-ounce Pepsi and a McD’s hamburger both 10 or 15 cents!  The one thing you can be sure of today, and for the past half-century, is that when the FedGov declares war on something, you know who is going to win – and it ain’t the people.  Of course, the FedGov DOES win because they have an excuse for more and more power and influence and campaign contributions and theft from the taxpayers.

Quote of the day:  Charles J Chaput (Roman Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, formerly Bishop of Rapid City and Archbishop of Denver; AmerInd):  “Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant and then it seeks to silence good.”  Certainly not a new concept, but one echoed from the Bible (which is pretty good for an RC Archbishop, even today!).  And true in both spiritual and temporal matters.  The quote is in an opinion piece about Cuomo’s recent statement that “extreme conservatives… have no place in the State of New York.” Of course, the “extreme conservatives” include many libertarians and free-market anarchists, like me.  Then, I’ve known I didn’t belong in NY the first time I visited that dump, way back in 1964.  And again when I had to be there in 1974, and in 1981.  The place is sick, and most of the people have the personalities of caged rats, because that is what they are.  But they figure 1 in 20 New Yorkers (state as a whole NOT NYC) are “extreme conservatives” and I have met a few libertarian and christian New Yorkers who at least are able to simulate sanity.  But as far as I’m concerned, the US would be better off WITHOUT New York, or at least NYC and probably Long Island and vicinity.  The majority gave up being free people a long time ago.

David Eckert of New Mexico has settled out of court with two police departments, including one in Deming, New Mexico, for $1.6 million for his anal probing to search for drugs in his body: the hospital that DID this (which billed him $5,000 for the pleasure) has not settled yet. Along with the guy at Last Resistance, I agree that I’d have much rather this gone to court, to expose this evil even more.  But I hope that we and others can do this.  This is important to me because (a) I often live and work just a few miles from New Mexico, that most Iberian of American states (Deming is only 300 or so miles away) and sometimes even work and drive and shop IN New Mexico.  It is too much of a nice place to be infested with the kind of tyranny that it has – a relic of both Spanish AND AmerInd AND Anglo perversions.  And because this sort of evil is happening over and over and over.  The cops and hospital personnel who did this awful thing will pay NOTHING except perhaps a tiny cut in their department expenses and maybe a slightly smaller pay raise:  it is taxpayers and insurance companies that will be hurt.