Quote of the Day

"If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: 'Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.' "

— Martin Luther King

Alex Helps Addicts

As someone who's dealing with severe addiction (You remember my blondphilia, right? No, I'm keeping it.) I feel for those poor gambling addicts who are defenseless even against one-armed bandits.

Now I'm introducing a novel, 100% effective cure for gambling addiction. It involves setting up the addict with a limitless supply of empties in front of a reverse vending machine, where every gamble is a win.

What's Good for the Gunmen Is Good for the Thugs

For some people, civilization means being defenseless to the point where you love to kiss the jackboot in your face.

The fact that protesters at President Obama's political events have begun showing up bearing arms may be disquieting, but it's perfectly legal — and the Secret Service, charged with protecting the President, insists that it is not unduly alarmed by the development. That's because while the Second Amendment guarantees Americans the right to carry guns, federal law also gives the Secret Service the right to keep gun-toting folks away from the President.

…

But former Secret Service agent Joseph Petro thinks his former employer may be trying to put the best face on a bad situation. "The Secret Service is very concerned about this," says Petro, who spent 23 years as an agent, including four guarding President Reagan and his family. "It's hard enough to protect the President, and this is not helpful." He pauses. "We are not a Third World country."

So being a disarmed victim of jackbooted thugs is a hallmark of development? I guess I don't have to tell you where you can shove that brand of "civilization."

While protesters in certain states may have the right to carry weapons to spots near presidential visits — and the Secret Service may blanket the President with protection — Petro says the guns' presence changes the atmosphere surrounding such events. "They're intimidating people like it's a western saloon," he says.

The Old West was the only truly civilized society that ever existed. But I guess it's not hard to understand why the jackbooted thugs want to be the only ones who are "intimidating."

And the weapons could turn a verbal clash between demonstrators into a shoot-out. "In a heated atmosphere," Petro argues, "it's a recipe for disaster."

So what are you packing, you jackbooted moron? Yep, thought so.

Most critical, according to Petro… is the message the guns send. "These guys aren't going to shoot the President," he says of the protesters. "But it's putting the idea in some nut's head that maybe he can get a gun and try to shoot him."

Maybe so. So what?

The President has the power to kill innocent people with cruise missiles and nukes. So why should he not live in fear, too?

Fair is fair. He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. If you don't want to be a bull's-eye, don't run for President.

A second man outside that event displayed a gun holstered to his leg. "I wanted people to remember the rights that we have and how quickly we're losing them in this country," William Kostric later told MSNBC. "It doesn't take a genius to see we're traveling down a road at breakneck speed that's towards tyranny." Kostric, who used to live in Arizona, said he voted for Ron Paul in the last presidential election. He carried a sign saying, "It Is Time to Water the Tree of Liberty," a reference to Thomas Jefferson's quote that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." …

Both Arizona and New Hampshire are "open-carry" states in which it is legal to carry visible weapons in public. But every gun-bearing protester requires the attention of the Secret Service and the local and state police who reinforce their efforts. "If the local police are drawn away to deal with these fools, then there's a vacuum somewhere," Petro says. "Perhaps one of those cops was supposed to be in a critical place where he or she could have stopped someone from doing something to the President. That's a real problem."

Yeah, somewhere some donuts would have needed to get eaten. Or some fool citizen would have needed to get ass-raped.

But Paul Helmke, who heads the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, says such an act "endangers all in attendance" and that even if their actions are legal, "common sense" should dictate that gun owners keep their weapons away from such gatherings. "Loaded weapons at political forums endanger all involved, distract law enforcement and end up stifling debate," he says. "Presidential protesters need to leave their firearms at home — no exceptions."

Maybe. But again, fair is fair. Then the pigs and jackbooted thugs need to leave their guns in their sty, too.

Like in Limeystan. Most cops there are unarmed.

And guess what? Those bobbies are friendly.

Extending the perimeter, he suggests, makes more sense than handcuffing those with guns. "If the Secret Service started arresting these people," he says, "they'd have battles on their hands."

As they should have. For that would be open tyranny. If what little gun rights still exist are trampled into the dust so that Obama can feel a little safer, it is definitely time to fertilize the tree of liberty.

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." The particularly bitter irony here is that this isn't even the usual case of depriving the minority of their liberties so that the majority can feel a little safer. This is plain and simple depriving all the people but one of their rights so that exactly one person, who gets a private 747 and much undeserved respect free of charge, can feel a little safer on top of that.

If Prince Obama can't enjoy his sinecure on account of the pea of gun rights, he should resign. I guess America will do just fine without anyone around to socialize medicine.

Ugly in, Ugly out

In the past, there's been some criticism about the black and white characters in Atlas Shrugged. The heroes are beautiful and the villains are ugly.

Well, move over, wing nut and moon bat critics. Here comes life imitating art.

Look at Injustice Sonia Sotomayor. I won't even mention her elephantine proboscis (which isn't her fault, unless you want to call failing to get a nose job a fault).

But what did she do to her face? Around the clock tanning? Chain smoking? Or maybe it's just gravity.

Suffice it to say that, putting it charitably, she's way uglier than Miss Pigskin, Pamela Anderson. And, taking a page right out of Atlas Shrugged, she has some pretty ugly things to say:

…Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., asked Sotomayor about a 2004 opinion, which she signed, that found that "the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right."

Coburn wondered how courts cannot see the explicitly stated Second Amendment "right to keep and bear arms" as fundamental, yet can hold as fundamental the unexpressed right to privacy. Sotomayor answered: "Is there a constitutional right to self-defense? And I can't think of one. I could be wrong, but I can't think of one."

Even Sarah Palin wouldn't say, nay, even think of something that stupid and evil. If Palin is Hitler in lipstick, then Sotomayor is Hitler in all his/her/its unvarnished ugliness.

And Sotomayor didn't graduate from some backwoods college, but summa cum laude from Princeton. So much for the quality of moon bat schools.

If there's no Constitutional right to self-defense, the Constitution is just a piece of worthless toilet paper. The right to self-defense is the only fundamental right there is. Without it, any other rights are meaningless. If you don't defend yourself, no one will.

From the streets of Washington, DC — where the pigs have been empowered by the courts to do nothing if you get raped and murdered because they'd rather have another donut — to the concentration camps of Germany — where the pigs will even actively assist in raping and murdering you — one thing is certain: You only have the rights you personally fight for. Or, as Henry David Thoreau had it: "Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way."

If you have to leave defending yourself to the government, you're at the mercy of any punk on the street and of any Hitler in government. The only question is, is this one ugly villain motivated by love of punks or by love of Hitlers?

Downtown Dawn?

Those years of impasses that are the World Trade Center rebuilding saga left developer Larry Silverstein, as Johnny Cash would put it, with no tenants, no loans, no chance. Yet the whole project boils down to government and private incompetence of epic proportions.

Here's the epic. (With apologies to Tanya Tucker.)

Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

It's been eight years and folks here 'round still call them ugly
All the folks around New York say you're crazy
'Cause you walk around town with tax rebates in your hand
Looking for that mysterious tenant man

In the olden days they called it Libescheme then
Ugliest buildings you ever laid eyes on
Then some men of low degree hijacked the site
And promised us they'd sure rebuild it right

Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

(FADE)
Chris O. Ward, what's that tower you work on
Could it be the faded plans from days gone by?
And did I hear you say they was a-meeting you here today
To take off your hands some floors in the sky?

The Face That Burned a Thousand Homes

Well, maybe not a thousand, more like a couple dozen, but it got some people murdered, too. So I guess it somehow adds up.

That face belonged to one Fannie Taylor, who was afraid to admit to her husband that she had a lover. So when that lover beat her up, she blamed a fictitious black trespasser. The upshot: The predominantly black hamlet of Rosewood was burned to the ground by a white mob, which murdered several black people in the process.

Today everybody's favorite joke of an encyclopedia features an article on the Rosewood massacre. Well, I have to admit that that "encyclopedia" is good reading, despite its subjective, collectivist standards of truth.

(They hold that as an encyclopedia, they are bound to exclude "original research." Yet, they apply that rule even to trivial and obvious facts, and to conclusions that logically follow therefrom. I.e., everyone can see that grass is green — or maybe yellow or brown sometimes. But if there were no books that say so, but only a book that says grass is striped pink and blue, Wikipedia would write that grass is striped pink and blue.)

Anyway, this article is definitely required reading. Obama would call it a teachable moment.

We learn that:

(A) Jealousy is indeed, as the word itself proclaims, lousy.

(B) Lying can have unintended consequences (unless you hold that Fannie was aware her lie would get local blacks into trouble, but didn't care shit).

(C) We're barely out of the Dark Ages: This happened in the US four score and seven years ago, not in medieval Europe.

(D) Man is nothing but a sub-animal if he doesn't think. If he doesn't think, his scheming mind and his ability to use tools make him even more dangerous than the worst animal monster.

'Tis dangerous to wake the lion,
Destructive is the tiger's tooth,
But far more fierce, and far more fiendish,
Deluded man bereft of ruth.
Woe to them who lend the sightless
The heavenly torch to light the way!
It guides them not, it can but kindle,
And towns and lands in ashes lay.

— Friedrich Schiller

In context…

The master, with judicious training,
Knows when 'tis best to break the mold;
But woe! when streams of ore, all glowing,
Rush unchecked from out their hold!
Blind raging, like the thunder's crashing,
It bursts its fractured bed of earth,
As if from out hell's jaws, fierce flashing,
It spewed its flaming ruin forth.

Where forces rude are madly reigning,
There can no perfect form be framing;
When nations would themselves be freeing,
The common weal will soon be fleeing.

Woe, when in the heart of cities
The smoldering embers heaped-up lie,
When the people, fetters bursting,
Help themselves with savage cry!
Rebellion, at the bell's strong cable,
Sendeth out a howling sound;
Though consecrate to peace and quiet,
The tocsin rings the signal round.

"Equal'ty and Freedom!" men are shrilling,
To arms the peaceful burghers fly,
The streets and halls with crowds are filling,
And murd'rous bands around there hie.
Then women, to hyenas turning,
'Mid horrors mock and jeer and jest,
And tear, with panther's frenzy burning,
The heart from every hostile breast.
There's naught that's sacred more, for breaking
Are all the bonds of pious fear?
The bad the good one's place is taking,
Vice knows no law in its career.
'Tis dangerous to wake the lion,
Destructive is the tiger's tooth,
But far more fierce, and far more fiendish,
Deluded man bereft of ruth.
Woe to them who lend the sightless
The heavenly torch to light the way!
It guides them not, it can but kindle,
And towns and lands in ashes lay.

…this, like the Wikipedia article's harping on the "extra-legal" nature of the crimes, would imply that "the rule of law" and submission to "legitimate authority" are any better than "extra-legal" action.

So we finally learn that:

(E) Nothing could be farther from the truth. Often, legal action is at least as bad as extra-legal action. Whether an innocent black man is lynched for "raping" a white woman or whether he is sentenced by an all-white jury to be murdered, he's just as dead.

Likewise, sometimes extra-legal action is superior to the rule of law. Look, once again, at Bernie Goetz.

The law demanded that Bernie do nothing while he got assaulted and mugged, and maybe raped and murdered, and the law did nothing to protect him, but everything to protect hoodlums. When Bernie fought back, it was the only possible moral action.

(This is, ironically, from a racial point of view, the diametrical opposite of the Rosewood massacre: an innocent white man attacked by black hoodlums. Goes to prove that neither of the races is superior.)

Likewise, if an innocent black man is on death row, about to be murdered by the government, and there is no appeal left, what other moral action can there be but to break him out of jail?