The following link was sent to me with this comment:
I got this one by way of Weasel Zippers. You know the saying, "If someone says, "Sure, I can get you all the guns and explosives you want, no problem!", you're talking to a Fed . . . And he's talking to an idiot."? A man who claimed to be a member of the KKK is standing trial for an alleged plot to assassinate President Obama, using a 'Death ray machine'. He was supplied the parts to build the 'death ray' by a federal snitch. . . I'm reminded of this classic cartoon.
"KKK member built death-ray machine to kill Muslims and Obama, prosecutors say."
White liberals never look more foolish than when they pander to angry black radicals. But it’s taken the one-two punch of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me and the hit NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton to lift the white Left into heights of ecstasy not seen since they sipped cocktails with the Black Panthers in Tom Wolfe’s immortal essay, “Radical Chic.”
But this is the era of #BlackLivesMatter and the “Rebirth of Black Rage.” Woe to the white liberal (I’m talking to you, Bernie Sanders) who doesn’t pay homage. Never mind that the actual numbers show that — when one controls for violent crime rates — encounters with the police may be more dangerous for whites than blacks. One still can’t say “all lives matter,” or he’ll be read out of the progressive movement as a (to quote white liberal Lena Dunham) “meatball” and a “dingus.”
"Got any chicken jerky?"
"What is that in your hands, and can I eat it?"
"Yeah, I know my ass is on the carpet, but I'm convalescing, you know?"
"I maintain the upper hand while carrying concealed."
Not always true. Some situations escalate, and I've been in one myself, simply because the threat doesn't believe you are armed, you look like easy prey to them and yet if you draw from concealment on an "unarmed" man (even if he's twice your size and a third of your years, even if you warn him you are armed beforehand as he approaches uttering threats to kill you) it represents an escalation that you will later have to explain, especially if you shoot him. In such a case, a .45 openly displayed on the hip would have prevented that threat more effectively than the .380 in my pocket that he didn't believe that I had (out of stupidity or brain addling by drugs -- in my case it was both of those combined with the fact that he was from inner city Chicago down in Alabama for Christmas and he didn't understand that the rules down here about firearms are far different than in that socialist paradise -- and the difference almost got him killed). My crime, by the way, was that I had "disrespected his ride" by passing his parked car too close as I pulled into the gas station. It wasn't until I concluded that .380 XTPs might not stop such a drug-soaked bruiser and I went around the side of the car to fetch my .45 out of my man bag to tuck in my belt that his girlfriend began to scream, "He's got a gun! He's got a gun!" No shit, lady, I had two of them the whole time. But one was in my pocket ready to go and the other in the car. Had he advanced just one more inch (as it was I let him get too close for he was within five feet although there was a gas hose between us) before I held up my left hand in warning with my right in my pocket ready to draw, he would have received 7 rounds of .380 Zombie loads center chest. Again, he was too close when I told him to stop or I would shoot. He didn't believe I was armed, but he stopped advancing just on the uncertainty. Once the .45 came out, he backed away, still screaming threats and imprecations about my mother, but finally concluding with "That's why I hate comin' down here, all you cracker mutherf-ckers got guns." So, I was able, finally, to educate him without killing him.
Immigration: Issue of the century.
The issue is joined, the battle lines are drawn, and the GOP will debate and may decide which way America shall go. And the basic issues – how to secure our borders, whether to repatriate the millions here illegally, whether to declare a moratorium on immigration into the USA – are part of a greater question. Will the West endure or disappear by the century’s end as another lost civilization? Mass immigration, if it continues, will be more decisive in deciding the fate of the West than Islamist terrorism. For the world is invading the West.
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
My reaction? No Sun Tzu? No Peninsular War in Spain (to include the Spanish guerrilla struggle)? No fiction? (Often you get closer to the truth of things in fiction.) Not even some classics of American military history such as This Kind of War by T.R. Fehrenbach, or The Minutemen by General John Galvin? And, as the reader who forwarded this link to me wrote in the accompanying email:
One caveat, I think it is important to understand freedom first, so that if you are skilled at war you won't use that skill to enable tyranny.
Exactly! This is where such fiction classics as Once An Eagle, Shaara's The Killer Angels, heck, even Rifleman Dodd by C.S. Forrester come in.
AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale
The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.
While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”
AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.
"Because of our dishonesty on matters of race and the elite’s use of it for their own privilege, we will see not only little progress, but also much retrogression. Look at the world abroad: anytime a man or woman identifies by race, violence mounts and chaos follows. The times they are a changing — for the worse."
What has happened to racial relations?
Crime. A small cohort of urban African-American males under fifty — no more than 3-4% of the general population — is responsible for about 50% of many of the violent crimes committed. Blacks are 5-8 times more likely to commit rather suffer an interracial crime, which makes up less than 10% of most violent crime. Both the analysis and solution have become taboo subjects. Writing the above is a near thought crime. . .
Jobs. A second problem is the static pyramidal Obama economy that has made labor participation historically low. Overregulating and overtaxing are fine for elites, who have enough money to either pay or find ways to avoid higher taxes. . . If 1 million illegal aliens a year were not pouring across the border, would not employers vie for labor rather than seek to import it cheaply? Instead, the Democratic Party is mostly about an elite on top that, as penance for its privilege, supports subsidies for the mass below that remains distant and out of sight and mind. . .
The Implicit Bargain. African-American elites envision the urban underclass the same way that some La Raza third-generation Latinos view impoverished illegal immigrants from Oaxaca. Social disparities among the poor become arguments for affirmative-action leverage for elites, as if Barack Obama getting into Harvard Law or Lisa Jackson serving as EPA administrator will lower the crime rate in Baltimore or help change attitudes about illegitimacy in Oakland. Until we confess class is a greater barometer of privilege than race, I see no solution to the escalating tensions. How odd that upscale, one-percent African-Americans at NPR, the New York Times, and MSNBC monotonously blast white privilege, as if their own lives are always far more hurtful than those in Appalachia or rural Oklahoma. . .
Progress is Impossible? Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that he has no affinity with the firemen and police who were incinerated on 911, given his grievances over endemic racism and the inability of blacks to gain parity with the majority due to systematic exclusion, formerly overt, today insidious. Currently, blacks make up about 12% of the population. The president of the United States, the present (and former) attorney general of the United States, the secretary of Transportation, the secretary of Homeland Security, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the head of NASA are African American. Twenty-one percent of the Postal Service employees are African-American; seventeen percent of the entire federal work force is black. Seventy-eight percent of the NBA are African-American. Sixty-seven percent of NFL players are black. Sixteen percent of the teams have African-American head coaches; twenty-four percent of the teams have black general managers. Has the definition of diversity become that overrepresentation in some areas (the Left’s word, not mine) of African-Americans, based on percentages in the general population, is still diversity, while underrepresentation of blacks in the physics department at Caltech is proof of endemic racism?
I'm sorry to be getting going so late. About two weeks ago, Rosey brought home a red labrador (maybe with a little pit bull mixed in, I don't know dog breeds much) from her work where it was obviously a drop-off along the road. I don't know how old it might be, except it still has puppy qualities and seems to me to have quite a bit of growth left in him before he tops out. When we got him, he was emaciated, scarred a bit from other dogs, and mostly frightened of people. He has a deathly fear of long pieces of wood like brooms (he freaked out when I went to sweep the back deck), so he was probably beaten with a stick by his former "masters."
After this morning I can make a guess as to what his former master looked like. We were waiting in the car outside the animal clinic where he is to get neutered today (he's been attempting the rape -- fairly successfully -- of the other male mutt dog we have). People were coming and going from the clinic door, dogs were coming and going with them, none of which excited his reaction. Then, a big old white guy of about thirty years, a Bubba with a huge beer belly and a beard came out of the door and INSTANTLY the dog (who I have not very originally dubbed "Red") began to growl and as the guy got closer he began to bark an attack warning. He's NEVER done that to anyone or anything since we've had him. It was all I could do to keep him from throwing himself against the window glass. He REALLY doesn't like bearded, beer-bellied bubbas, not one bit.
He has responded well to firm kindness since we've had him and he has bonded with me. He also, more recently, now misses Rosey whenever she leaves the room, whining sometimes until she returns. The only thing that's interrupting his successful training is his hormones. Time, discipline and love should take care of the rest. He shows every evidence of being highly intelligent, much more so than our other obese mutt, who responds to nothing and no one (he was dumped on us without warning as an adult rescue dog by my oldest daughter -- don't get me started). The females in my house also interfered with his remedial training and he is now useless except as an eating machine that sleeps most of the time. I call him variously "Sluggo," "Butthead," and sometimes "Nert," which is short for Inertia.
Anyway, Red had to be NPO before the procedure and the only way to guarantee that (since it has been raining and there are pools of water in the yard AND like all lab pups he's been chewing the wood off the back of our house) was to keep him inside overnight, which meant a lease with my hand attached to the other end. This pinned me in place in the upper level (he also seems to have an irrational fear of doors and refuses to go through them willingly). Consequently, I did no posting early this morning and didn't enable the comments until Rosey got up to take my place this AM. The dog had to be at the spay and neuter clinic by 0730 and so, on about one hour's sleep in my case, we got him there and the place was crowded. They sure do a land office business in deballing male dogs. At a hundred bucks a pop (counting shots and what not) we couldn't afford it but Zoe fronted us the money. Certainly the dog couldn't go on without being altered, not in our house.
So that's my excuse -- the dog "ate" my posting time. I'll go back and pick him up at 4:30 this afternoon. When I get a chance, I'll have Zoe take a picture of him and I'll post it in these pages. He's a pretty dog, I'll tell you that, with a sweet disposition.
