Sunday, December 27, 2009

Fashion Kills

There was a time when a proper hit man was a properly dressed man.
Back in the day the hit man was usually Irish, Italian or Jewish, and said hit man wore either a single breasted or double breasted suit and a proper hat, whether fedora or pork-pie.
Nowadays it seems that any damn slob wearing saggy pants and a baseball cap worm backwards or sideways can be a hit man. It just shows how standards have fallen.
Consider the following:
Killer Hector Quinones Plunges to His Death After His Pants Fall Down - Sphere News
The Latinization of crime has done none of us any damn good. The next thing you know hit men will be attacking their victims with serapes and and machetes.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Remember This


The next time the government tells you how to handle your health concerns, remember this:

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Men in Hats -- Trilby Edition


To the right we have a small photograph of Frank Sinatra wearing a trilby hat. The trilby was a hat identified with Sinatra, as well as Rex Harrison, as well as the stereotypical New York executive in the 1950s and 1960s.
The hat was named after a character in the novel Trilby by Georges DuMaurier, from which also came the character and concept of Svengali. Trilby, in the novel, was a woman and she was known for wearing the style of hat that was basically a modified Peter Pan hat with a creased and dimpled brim.
Nowadays, among hipsters and the hat ignorant the style is known as the skinny brim or skimpy brim hat, which is an insult to the history of the hat.
This writer has never been a big fan of the trilby since is a bastard child between a cap and a proper hat. But it's better than nothing.

Deterioration and Resistance

This writer, being by nature a pessimist, usually sees the glass as neither half-empty nor half-full, but as polluted by the dictates of the political elite of the nation.. These self-perceived Solons see themselves as the wise men and women, almost Platonic philosopher-kings, dealing with, and governing, a populace, that is, at once, easily led and unruly, as well as being rather stupid and irresponsible. The stupid part of the equation has been a proven by the last few election cycles by the very fact that the voters have deigned to install these creatures into elective office.
To the majority of these elected aristocrats the citizens of this great nation are not so much a collection of individuals and free men and women as much as they are numbers, a collective beast that must be whipped into submission or children in need of "education" and "direction"; whenever the reader hears or reads a politician or "opinion-maker" appeal to the need for the government to "educate" or "direct" the people be sure that what is really meant is that they are attempting to take another chip away from your freedom. If we are lucky we'll have freedoms the size of a toothpick when once our freedoms were of the size of a might oak.
Consider just three matters that are being argued in Congress:
1.) The national health care scheme. What this amounts to is that you will be forced to, through governmental mandate, through your taxes, pay for abortions whether you are morally opposed to it or not. And that you will be forced to buy some sort of health insurance. If you do not do so, you will either be fined or jailed. In other words, you, as a purportedly free individual, will be taxed or charged for the very act of breathing. Unless of course, you have no money. In which case you will get a free ride on everyone else's back.
This racket is based on one thing and one thing only. Our elected leaders see the populace as children instead of adults. Their actions, like many other legislative actions by Congress over the past fifty years, have attempted to negate one of the traditional definitions of adulthood: personal responsibility and the the willingness, often complainingly, to suffer the consequences of not being responsible for one's actions. More and more the government has decided that it is responsible for the citizen and the citizen's welfare by acting as the parent.
We were once a nation of independent men and women in a nation that celebrated the rugged individual. Now, it seems, we are supposed to let Big Gov make our decisions for us and wait for our government issued Big Wheel to go to work with.
2.) Certain members of the United States Senate have been investigating the possibility of regulating the Internet and bloggers by holding bloggers to the same standards of libel as traditional print publications. This writer is the first to maintain that libel and the spreading of falsehoods is a bad thing. These things are sins. But your faithful correspondent also realizes that the blogosphere, as well as the Internet, is the new Wild West and he prefers it that way. The difference between the blogosphere and traditional media is that traditional media are 1.) money-making entities and if they could get away with it they would tell lies all the time 2.) The blogosphere is more of a conversation than it is a fact factory. 3.) The blogosphere is much more self-policing than are the traditional media ,i.e any statement is open to sniping by those who disagree.
If Internet conversations are restricted by libel laws it will not be long before private, oral conversations will be so regulated. In other words, if you say, during lunch, that your boss is an idiot, you may find yourself being sued by said boss assuming that he can prove that he is not an idiot, which is pretty unlikely.
3.) The discussion of the expansion of "hate speech" laws means that Big Gov will come down on one like a ton of bricks for saying yet another "naughty" word.
Here's the question: does one have the right to hate? Does one have the right to hate a group, an individual or a concept? Is one guaranteed by the Constitution to say what one feels or thinks? If not, what is the use of the Constitution? Where will it end?
The Grand Republic has been for all too long infested by termites that eat away and eat away and eat away from the inside while we have been led to believe that they are building. It will all collapse, not with a big bang, but a sigh, all too soon.
Consider this article from the English newspaper The Daily Mail. The English Greatest Generation finds itself what the Second World War was worth the blood, sweat and tears:
'This isn't the Britain we fought for,' say the 'unknown warriors' of WWII | Mail Online
There are three documents that made the United States: The Bible, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. All three deal, each in their own way, with the freedom of the individual and the responsibility of the individual, and the limits of government. Our beneficent masters seem to have jettisoned all three documents in fact, if not in word, and have replaced them with a combination of Bismarkian/Marxist amalgamation on the European model. In other words, the people we have elected to represent us seem to want the United States to become Scandinavian Europe without the sexy blond women.
So what is to be done? One word: Resist. Resist with your vote. Resist with your voice, Resist with your actions. If your elected representative is an enemy of your freedom hold them in contempt and let them know that you do. THEY are the servants. YOU are the master. You asked for a whiskey soda and they brought you a New Coke. They serve at your pleasure and they know what is good for you instead of following your directions. If you had a gardener who ignored your order to dig up a patch of tulips because he thought that to do so would ruin the look of your garden you would not hesitate to fire that gardener in a minute. Elected officials are supposed to be maintainers of our liberties, not creators of Niceville. Washington warned that governmental power was like fire; a useful servant and a dangerous master. Our leaders have been playing with fire and the citizens are the ones who have been burned
Get angry. Learn to hate those who would deny you the freedoms that so many generations of American have shed blood for. Learn to hate with the hot burning hate that Samuel Adams hated those who hated thoise who wanted to limit his freedom and plunder his purse. Don't say, when someone has been elected to represent you who you disagree with, "I disagree with him politically, but I wish him well." Instead say, "I hope he's a miserable failure. I wish the worst for for his political career and I hope that he is soon back working as an insurance agent."
Support candidates that support liberty as this man does:
YouTube - Congressional Candidate Lieutenant Colonel Allen West
This writer has been re-reading The Gulag Archipelago. It is a chilling and troubling book. Not only for the experiences of the Russian populace, but for the possibility, slowly, slowly, like water eroding granite, that the same thing may happen here. One day, while walking down the street, you may find someone yell out to you (someone you've never met), "Hey! Mike!" and when you stop and turn around to see who has called out, find yourself being bracketed by a couple of large men who grab your arms and escort you to a future form of Lubyanka. You'll ask, "What did I do?" And you'll be given no answer.

Saturday, December 05, 2009

DUMB!

This is just plain stupid. The British government has always treated its soldiers badly unless said soldiers were officers. This story just goes to prove that they still treat their Tommies crappy. Why would any self respecting Limey join the British Army?

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