David Codrea:

The Mexican government has begun arresting armed “vigilantes,” desperate citizens in fear for their lives who can no longer wait for their compromised government to rein in ultra-violent cartels.

I knew it wouldn’t last, and especially since [at least some of the] citizens opposing the cartels took on uniforms and declared subservience to the state.  Like all good gun controllers, they don’t care about the safety and health of the people.  They care about their control.  Once again, folks.  Gun control is about … control.

Via David Codrea, GOA:

Once again, anti-gun Senators like Kay Hagan (D-NC), Mark Begich (D-AK), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), and Mark Pryor (D-AR) are trying to trick gun owners into supporting them in their upcoming tough races for reelection in pro-gun states.

At the core of their slimy scheme is a do-nothing bill being pushed as the Sportsmen’s Act (S. 2363).  North Carolina’s Kay Hagan, who voted FOR the universal gun registry bill, is the chief sponsor.

Other chief cosponsors are Mary Landrieu (who also voted for universal gun registration) and Mark Begich and Mark Pryor (who, according to Harry Reid’s staff, would have cast the deciding votes for that universal gun registry bill, had their votes been needed).  It’s also cosponsored by anti-gun leader Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Read the rest at the link.  It gets more complicated – or not.  Here’s my take.  No more laws of any kind until the ones in place get repealed, and that means the Hughes Amendment, the Gun Control Act, The NFA.  If you want to stick national carry reciprocity in there somewhere, that’s fine with me.  Until then, block everything these communists try to do.  There.  That wasn’t too complicated.

Kurt Hofmann:

And then remember that the Obama administration has asserted (and indeed exercised) the “right” to use armed drones to assassinate suspected “terrorists,” without regard to their American citizenship. And people like Franchi accuse us of using “violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes”?

Subservience is for little people.  Power is for the philosopher-kings inside the beltway.

I’m glad that Mike Vanderboegh documented the damage to his computer this time courtesy of the TSA.  So the TSA doesn’t just feel up little girls, remove colostomy bags, look at naked pictures of people as they walk through machines, and push around the elderly.  They can also tear up computers.

The TSA is the lowest common denominator of our society.  Except maybe for SWAT teams.

The Strike One pistol is coming to America (I’m surprised that the ATF approved it).  Has anyone I know ever shot it before?

News From Texas:

BROWNSVILLE – Ranchers along the Rio Grande say immigrant smugglers threaten them constantly.

One Cameron County rancher said smugglers ordered him to look the other way or face the consequences.

The landowner said smugglers are using trails on his property to bring illegal immigrants into the country.

The rancher said he fears for his safety.

“You don’t see anything; you don’t talk to anybody,” he said.

He said smugglers stop at nothing to get the immigrants across.

“They have no problem doing whatever it takes to protect them and their organization,” he said.

Landowners said the trails are becoming increasingly valuable to smugglers because they are not patrolled as often and public lands.

More than 180,000 illegal immigrants have crossed into the Valley this year. The landowner said he and his neighbors are feeling increasing pressure by smugglers to turn a blind eye to criminal activity.

“They basically come up to you and say, ‘we are going to give so much a day and we will drop it off and you do what you want with it,” he said.

The man said he turns smugglers down.

“Once they get a hook in you, they got you,” he said.

Or the report could have read:

“Boy, I’ll let you and your people live this time.  But the next time I see you on my property, I’ll send a 5.56 your way.  I’ll shoot your ass, burn your carcass, and bury it so deep not even the dogs will be able to find you.”

Then of course the rancher would have to follow through with it.  Either way, by no choice of his own, the Southern rancher has been cast headlong into dystopia Amerika.  As I said in my long comment to this article, either way, the Southern United States rancher will likely cease to exist.  Say goodbye to the American way of life.

Vox:

America’s shooters have had around five years of trouble finding enough bullets for their guns. In the years after President Obama’s 2008 election, then again after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, with barely a lull in between, big-spending gun aficionados left manufacturers struggling to keep shelves full. Now, the shortage seems to be winding down.

Demand has remained high since 2008, in part because some gun owners, frightened that Obama would tighten gun control laws, went into panic mode. But that’s only one side of it. The problem is that supply never seemed to quite meet that demand. And that’s in part because even though they haven’t said so, skittish manufacturers don’t believe the panic will last long enough to make it worth the investment in costly new factories.

[ … ]

Whatever the numbers might be, there’s plenty of evidence that ammunition demand has been unusually high. According to one ammunition manufacturer, the shortage situation has been in effect nearly every year since September 11.

“Our company has been in a backorder situation since 9/11. There’s only been one year since 9/11 where we haven’t been working overtime,” says Kristi Hoffman, co-owner of Black Hills Ammunition in Rapid City, South Dakota.

[ … ]

he gun industry has acknowledged that politics drive gun-buying. Knowing that, manufacturers are reluctant to invest in lots of expensive new facilities when they’re afraid the political mania could vanish at any moment. But as Guns and Ammo reported last year, America’s ammunition manufacturers have been operating at or near capacity for a decade, and reluctant to boost that capacity.

many companies will only expand as far as their current workers and machinery will take them.

[ … ]

“Beyond that, you have to say, ‘How is my crystal ball here? Is this going to go on for the next 10 years so I can hire more people, I can build on to my facility? or is this going to be done in 6 months or 18 months?” says Hoffman. “Typically in our industry what people do — like us — you run as hard as you can with the people you have.”

It’s as I had suspected all along.  There has been crisis buying, but beyond that, the stocks have been depleted and are slow to recover.  Manufacturers are understandably reluctant to hire people and then have to lay them off later if demand subsides.  Good people in manufacturing don’t like affecting livelihoods.

Larry Hyatt (of Hyatt Gun Shop) and I were having a conversation recently, and he told me that his experience is that the gun control threat from the administration had caused crisis buying of guns and that peak has subsided, but that the trajectory is still upward.

Mike Vanderboegh once said, when asked what he was doing, “I’m trying to buy more time.”  Good.  We all need more time.  Prepare now for your needs in the future.  And don’t ever expect the ammunition stocks to completely recover.  Demand, like gun ownership, will be on an upward trajectory, while manufacturing will continue as is.

Canada Free Press:

In Murrieta, over the last few months, over 500 illegal aliens a week are being released into the general population, many of these people are children, without a medical screening.  Last weekend that number changed to 200 every 72 hours.  They are being shipped in from other areas around the country to our holding facility, where they do not have the room to house these people, much less give them a proper processing above checking to see if these invaders are known criminals.

Murrieta Border Patrol agents are testing positive for Tuberculosis.  Hand and Foot Disease, and Chagos, both previously eradicated from the area, are on the rise.  We are being hit by sickness, and we are told that as we are exposed to these infectious diseases, if we reject allowing these diseased people into our population, we are nothing more than a bunch of racists.

Other diseases to emerge, especially among Border Patrol agents, is H1N1 (“swine”) flu, and chicken pox. It is anticipated that also coming are diseases like dengue and Ebola virus, when one considers these incoming illegal aliens are from Central and South America, the Middle East and West Africa.

Fox News:

A government-contracted security force threatened to arrest doctors and nurses if they divulged any information about the contagion threat at a refugee camp housing illegal alien children at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, sources say.

In spite of the threat, several former camp workers broke their confidentiality agreements and shared exclusive details with me about the dangerous conditions at the camp. They said taxpayers deserve to know about the contagious diseases and the risks the children pose to Americans. I have agreed to not to disclose their identities because they fear retaliation and prosecution.

“There were several of us who wanted to talk about the camps, but the agents made it clear we would be arrested,” a psychiatric counselor told me. “We were under orders not to say anything.”

The sources said workers were guarded by a security force from the Baptist Family & Children’s Services, which the Department of Health and Human Services hired to run the Lackland Camp.

The sources say security forces called themselves the “Brown Shirts.”

“It was a very submissive atmosphere,” the counselor said. “Once you stepped onto the grounds, you abided by their laws – the Brown Shirt laws.”

She said the workers were stripped of their cellphones and other communication devices. Anyone caught with a phone was immediately fired.

A former nurse at the camp told me she was horrified by what she saw.

“We have so many kids coming in that there was no way to control all of the sickness – all this stuff coming into the country,” she said. “We were very concerned at one point about strep going around the base.”

Both the counselor and the nurse said their superiors tried to cover up the extent of the illnesses.

“When they found out the kids had scabies, the charge nurse was adamant – ‘Don’t mention that. Don’t say scabies,’” the nurse recounted. “But everybody knew they had scabies. Some of the workers were very concerned about touching things and picking things up. They asked if they should be concerned, but they were told don’t worry about it.”

The nurse said the lice issue was epidemic – but everything was kept “hush-hush.”

“You could see the bugs crawling through their hair,” she said. “After we would rinse out their hair, the sink would be loaded with black bugs.”

The nurse told me she became especially alarmed because their files indicated the children had been transported to Lackland on domestic charter buses and airplanes.

“That’s what alerted me,” she said. “Oh, my God. They’re flying these kids around. Nobody knows that these children have scabies and lice. To tell you the truth, there’s no way to control it.”

Welcome to the beginnings of dystopia Amerika.  It’s all intentional – don’t doubt it for a minute.  And it’s going to get worse.  Much worse.  And then even worse.

Miami-Herald:

A Sweewater police officer was recovering Monday after his holstered gun discharged and hit him in the leg while he was chasing shoplifting suspects at Dolphin Mall.

The officer, Joel Bosque, was responding to a shoplifting report at the mall when he was injured. He was taken to the hospital and is “doing fine,” police spokesman Jorge Fernandez de Lara said.

Bosque, who has been with the department for a year, will likely be placed on administrative leave while Miami-Dade police investigate.

The incident happened on Sunday after four suspects took off through the sprawling mall, 11401 NW 12th St., from the Burlington Coat Factory.

According to police, four men were spotted shoplifting in the store by a loss prevention officer. When the officer tried to stop them, they took off in different directions.

Bosque and another officer were able to catch one of the four. The three others are still at large.

Darius Brown, 18, was charged with felony theft, robbery and resisting without violence.

Bosque’s gun went off while it was in his holster, police said.

There should be no need to rehearse what we’ve said so many times before.  Guns don’t just “go off.”  More than likely (almost certainly) he had his finger on the trigger of his weapon and stumbled, causing his finger to squeeze due to sympathetic muscle reflexes.  See my description here for more details.

The real issue here is that the officer was reaching for his weapon and had his finger on the trigger while chasing a fleeing suspect.  Now go back and read the Supreme Court decision in Tennessee Versus Garner to see if he should really be doing that.  Fill in the comments section with your homework.

Prior:

Gun-Mounted Flashlights Linked To Accidental Shootings

Chicago SWAT Raid Gone Terribly Wrong

The Moral Case Against SWAT Raids

The Las Cruces Sun-News:

The man accused of attacking an elderly couple in their Las Cruces home, striking their heads with a hammer then stealing their pickup truck last month, pleaded not guilty Monday morning in state District Court.

Guy Jaime Young, a 42-year-old from Hobbs, N.M., had been indicted on nine felony charges recently by a Doña Ana County grand jury. He’s facing two counts each of attempted first-degree murder and armed robbery, plus aggravated burglary, three counts of evidence tampering and unlawfully taking a motor vehicle.

Las Cruces police allege that on June 11 Young randomly selected the elderly couple’s home in the 800 block of Camino Del Rex, grabbed a hammer then attacked the 82-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife. Afterward, Young demanded cash from the woman, then left in their Ford F250 pickup, court documents state.

Assault hammers are nothing but violent instruments of death, and belong on the battlefield, not the streets of America.  They must be banned.  For the children and elderly.

Prior:

The Need For Ban On Assault Hammers

Concerning Guns, Hammers And Violence

David Codrea:

The Manic Latin Disciples ranking member and prohibited person due to gun and drug convictions is joined in problematic legal issues by former CeaseFire Illinois Director Tio Hardman, who was charged with domestic violence, and “CeaseFire worker Sylvester Hudson, who was charged last year with selling heroin to a federal informant outside CeaseFire’s headquarters at UIC.

Hey, it is Chicago, where bad people do politics, and politics is always bad.  Given what you’ve seen lately come out of Chicago, do you wonder why the anti-gunners aligned themselves with such ne’er-do-wells?

Via WRSA, Daniel Greenfield:

The Consensus isn’t for America. It’s for the world. It cares as much about Americans as it does about Guatemalans or Pakistanis. Its members vacation and live around the world and see themselves as human beings first and members of a people or a nation second. They have a “higher citizenship” in humanity. They will take what is good about America and apply it elsewhere.

What do they believe in? What are their ideals? They believe in efficiency. They believe in justice. They believe that everything can be constantly improved until it is perfected in a perpetual process of social evolution. They are not religious. Their religion is that of the factory floor. Their faith is in their own godhood as experts. They believe that man came from apes and that someone has to see to it that he behaves like a good ape, rather than a bad ape.

Well said.  It’s what my former (and now deceased) professor Dr. C. Gregg Singer wrote about and called social Darwinism.  Man is a tabula rasa, and failure of his actions redounds to failure of the system, failure to train him, failure to incorporate him, failure to teach him (although there are variants of detail such as Instrumentalism, Utilitarianism, etc.).  An individual’s failure is that s/he isn’t as well educated and socialized as the philosopher-kings who rule us.  Not coincidentally, this very philosophy also undergirds counterinsurgency theory (so called COIN).  Do you wonder, now, why it has failed so miserably where it has been tried?

Finally, here is something I want (well, there are many things I want, most of which I can’t have, and this is just one wish list item).  I want Rock River Arms or LaRue Tactical to engineer a 0.270 rifle in the AR (Eugene Stoner) platform.  Various web sites to which I have been discussed the need for work but no research.  Wrong.  Research would be necessary to get the chambering right, the buffer spring constant, the rifle barrel length and thickness to ensure proper harmonics, etc.

Forbes:

Random gun violence is a terrifying fact of American life, because of both the violence and the randomness. Terror bred by violence does not really require comment; they are twinned. But terror bred by randomness does, especially when it leads people to accept as true a reasonable story that is false, when a myth functions as an explanation. And that is what is happening with the way we talk about mental illness and random gun violence. Thankfully, a just published report in the Annals of Epidemiology pulls together the facts we need to consider if we really want to adopt evidence-based policies to reduce random gun violence.

The article, “Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy,” is a comprehensive, critical survey of the available data (and it is surprisingly accessible and  well-written for an academic treatise). It concludes that “most violent behavior is due to factors other than mental illness.”

[ … ]

Jeffrey W. Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine and lead author of the article in Annals of Epidemiology was quoted in the UCLA Newsroom saying ”but even if schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression were cured, our society’s problem of violence would diminish by only about 4 percent.”

That is not very much. When people with mental illness do act violently it is typically for the same reasons that people without mental illness act violently.

In other words, advocacy for mental health checks and blame of the “mentally ill” for violence in the U.S. is not only unfair, it is a ruse intended to hide the real reasons for the advocacy, which is to intrude on civil rights and the moral duty of self defense.

It’s nice to see the recapitulation of things already said about this issue, in fact things I have cataloged.

Clinicians treating patients hear their fears, anger, sadness, fantasies and hopes, in a protected space of privacy and confidentiality, which is guaranteed by federal and state laws. Mental health professionals are legally obligated to break this confidentiality when a patient “threatens violence to self or others.” But clinicians rarely report unless the threat is immediate, clear and overt.

Mental health professionals understand that, despite our intimate knowledge of the thoughts of our patients, we are not very good at predicting what people will do. Our knowledge is always incomplete and conditional, and we do not have the methods to objectively predict future behavior. Tendencies, yes; specific actions, no. To think that we can read a person’s brain the way a scanner in airport security is used to detect weapons is a gross misunderstanding of psychological science, and very far from the nuanced but uncertain grasp clinicians have on patients’ state of mind.

What about diagnoses?

If mental health professionals were required to report severe mental illness (such as paranoid schizophrenia) to state authorities, it would have an immediate chilling effect on the willingness of people to disclose sensitive information, and would discourage many people from seeking treatment. What about depression, bipolar disorder, substance abuse or post-traumatic stress disorder, along with other types of mental illness that have some link to self-harm and impulsive action? The scope of disclosure that the government could legally compel might end up very wide, without any real gain in predictive accuracy.

Diagnosis is an inexact and constantly evolving effort, and it is contentious within the profession. To use a diagnosis as the basis of reporting the possibility of violence to the authorities would make the effort of accurate evaluation much more fraught. And what of the families and friends of the mentally ill? Should their weapons purchases be restricted as well? A little reflection shows how unworkable in practice any screening by diagnosis would be.

“We’re not likely to catch very many potentially violent people” with laws like the one in New York, says Barry Rosenfeld, a professor of psychology at Fordham University in The Bronx….

A study of experienced psychiatrists at a major urban psychiatric facility found that they were wrong about which patients would become violent about 30 percent of the time.

That’s a much higher error rate than with most medical tests, says Alan Teo, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan and an author of the study.

One reason even experienced psychiatrists are often wrong is that there are only a few clear signs that a person with a mental illness is likely to act violently, says Steven Hoge, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. These include a history of violence and a current threat to commit violence ….

Perhaps most important, although people with serious mental illness have committed a large percentage of high-profile crimes, the mentally ill represent a very small percentage of the perpetrators of violent crime overall. Researchers estimate that if mental illness could be eliminated as a factor in violent crime, the overall rate would be reduced by only 4 percent. That means 96 percent of violent crimes—defined by the FBI as murders, robberies, rapes, and aggravated assaults—are committed by people without any mental-health problems at all. Solutions that focus on reducing crimes by the mentally ill will make only a small dent in the nation’s rate of gun-related murders, ranging from mass killings to shootings that claim a single victim.  It’s not just that the mentally ill represent a minority of the country’s population; it’s also that the overlap between mental illness and violent behavior is poor.

Whether folks engage in myth-telling because they believe in myths, or just want to mislead, the result is the same.  Communicating lies is both hurtful and sinful.  We are required to tell the truth, and the truth is that there is little to no correlation between mental health, whatever that is, and violence.

The setup for this has been occurring for quite a while.  The collectivists on the right have helped the leftists gain strength, but the rate and fury of activity that has been consequential in destabilizing the United States has increased almost beyond comprehension.

The long term evolution of America to a position where such a strategy might stand a greater chance of success began long ago with the move towards urbanization.  The flight from rural America was helped along with family farms bought out by Monsanto and Archer-Daniels-Midland, with low paid migrant workers on those farms, all subsidized by tax payers and rate payers who couldn’t see that there was a very high hidden cost for the low cost of produce.

The urbanized familes – at least, many of the uneducated families – have absolutely no means to earn a living in the inner city.  They are repeatedly told, “we’ll take care of you.”  And we do, via public transportation, food stamps, welfare, socialized medicine, public education, jobs programs, and a host of other entitlements.  The cost, of course, is borne on the shoulders of the middle class.

Furthermore, the previous administration had its wolves in sheep’s clothing.  Hank Paulson, father of TARP and bailout, has joined the anthropogenic global warming fanatics, and here is the catch, is now advocating a carbon tax.  The key here isn’t AGW, it is that Hank Paulson advocates a tax, which is the whole point of AGW.  But the current administration has accelerated implementation of the Cloward-Piven Strategy with a fury.

The Fast and Furious scandal is one manifestation of Cloward-Piven, with the administration fully expecting to pass onerous gun control and perhaps even so-called immigration reform from the influx of illegals due to the increased violence in Mexico.  But when that didn’t materialize due to folks like Mike Vanderboegh, David Codrea and [later] Sharyl Attkison, the chaos at the border had to be catalyzed some other way.

Enter the rumor mill, effective enough, it would appear, to make it into newspapers in Central America.  Don’t for a second doubt that this chaos is having the intended long term effect.

A flood of illegals has massively surged at our southwestern borders. The economic impact of medical care, education and incarceration for illegals forced on taxpayers is bankrupting Arizona.

Why are such swarms entering the U.S. illegally NOW, particularly children? Newspapers in Mexico and Central and South America are actually describing U.S. “open borders,” encouraging people to come with promises of food stamps or “amnesty.” It is textbook Cloward-Piven strategy to overwhelm and collapse the economic and social systems, in order to replace them with a “new socialist order” under federal control.

Carried by this tsunami of illegals are the invisible “travelers” our politicians don’t like to mention: diseases the U.S. had controlled or virtually eradicated: tuberculosis (TB), Chagas disease, dengue fever, hepatitis, malaria, measles, plus more. I have been working on medical projects in Central and South America since 2009, so I am aware of problems these countries face from such diseases.

A public health crisis, the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime, is looming. Hardest hit by exposures to these difficult-to-treat diseases will be elderly, children, immunosuppressed cancer-patients, patients with chronic lung disease or congestive heart failure. Drug-resistant tuberculosis is the most serious risk, but even diseases like measles can cause severe complications and death in older or immunocompromised patients.

The costs are cascading down to the local level.  “Small towns and counties in states bordering Mexico are drowning in debt due to the swarm of illegals stealing and destroying property, requiring expensive medical care and needing proper burials, all of which the federal government has largely refused to pay for.”  In Brooks County, Texas, the concern is mainly public safety.

 Sex offenders, murder suspects and gang members are making their way through the vast rangelands of Brooks County.

The Vickers ranch is one of the many land spreads affected by the surge in illegal immigration. What is more concerning to the ranch owners is the type of people trekking through their land.

Linda Vickers never wanders away from her house without her trusty canine companions – Blitz, Elsa, Schotten and Tinkerbell.  The dogs provide a sense of security in a land of insecurity.

“The safety factor out here has changed,” Vickers said.

Vickers and her husband own and operate a nearly-1,000-acre ranch in Brooks County.  Vickers reports anyone who crosses her fence line to Border Patrol.

“As of yesterday, 196 illegal immigrants with 136 apprehensions by Border Patrol,” she said.  The dogs sniff out those hiding in the brush.

“There are some good, helpless people. Then, there are some really bad ones,” Vickers said.

Earlier this week, Vickers took a photo of a man on her front porch. She said the man had a Tango Blast tattoo.  Tango Blast is the largest and one of the most dangerous gangs operating in the state, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

“I sometimes have to take a step back and realize the jeopardy that could happen out here,” Vickers said.

It’s not just gang members that worry Vickers. Border Patrol agents arrested a wanted murderer near Falfurrias and sex offenders in the Rio Grande Valley last weekend.

“They’re everywhere,” Vickers said.

The goal of the administration is for the local and state governments to demand federal dollars, but with federal dollars comes federal control.  The ultimate aim of Obamacare wasn’t to work or function, it was to fail, thus driving America to a single-payer system.  Unless one understand everything this administration does within the framework of Cloward-Piven, you cannot understand them at all.

The corollary to the urbanized collective, the redistribution of wealth, and the single payer health system, is a heavy policing presence, whether regulatory thugs inside the beltway, uniformed thugs who enforce the laws, or militarized SWAT teams who kick doors down.  Or in other words, heavy policing is the corollary for the problems that modern society chooses to create for itself.  The problems themselves are not a necessary product or outcome; rather, we have chosen the problems, and an overbearing, statist police presence is the intended outcome, while the problems are the catalyst.

Via Mike Vanderboegh, DianaWest asks if the Southern border can be saved?  Mike points to Boehner’s treachery on immigration, while we will perhaps in the future point to the treachery of recently elected House majority leader.  For the House majority leader who wants border enforcement and then amnesty, they’ll fabricate phony metrics on border arrests and call the issue closed.  As for the reason both parties want immigration, both legal and illegal, the corruption runs too deep to be rooted out.

The alleged need for immigrants pertains to the desires of corporations to have low paid workers.  It doesn’t enrich you or me, it enriches the rich (heads of corporations, boards of directors, and so on).

Here’s how it works.  It helps the corporate bottom line by forcing the middle class to pick up the tab for medical care, which burden happens largely on the backs of nurses in emergency rooms (my daughter is a nurse in an ER), with medical insurance premiums escalating in order to pay for the service.  Food stamps (so called SNAP) also factor into the calculus, as well as driver’s insurance (for uninsured motorists coverage).

It isn’t that there is no cost for low paid workers.  It’s that the cost is borne by the middle class as welfare to corporations and the wealthy.  The GOP is connected at the hip to such interests in terms of money, while the Democrats are connected in terms of future voters.  With such powerful interests at stake, it should be obvious why the Southern border is a sieve and illegals are left in the country unmolested.

As to whether the GOP will ever be able to rely on votes from the Hispanics, that is a non-starter.  “Hispanics are not historically and ideologically aligned with what the GOP is supposed to be.  To point to Roman Catholicism and claim that Hispanics will vote GOP because of socially conservative viewpoints misses the bigger picture of the state of Catholicism in South and Central America.  It is a synthesis, or a hybrid mixture, of Catholicism, superstition, Marxism, and in some cases evil “patron saints” for the cartel criminals.”

The elaborate setup for the problem is far too embedded into American culture and government to eradicate.  There’s too many border crossings, too much border traffic, too many Mexican truckers driving in the U.S., too many Mexican workers, and too much corporate money at stake to reverse the course now.  It would take far more than simply “securing the border,” whatever that might mean given that the horse left the barn years ago.

I am not suggesting that we don’t try, but I am suggesting that we prepare for failure of the routine, typical political strategies.  Personal and family preparation for failure of the American system is the advisable course of action.

David Codrea:

In a peculiar combination of a “Catch-22” contradiction along with Soviet-style psychiatric controls, expect the desire to own guns to be proof of a mental disability. Especially if they’re the “non-sporting” kind and accompanied by a belief that keeping and bearing them is “necessary to the security of a free State.”

Kurt Hofmann:

[citing a gun controller] … but there must be plenty of people among the eight million Americans now holding Concealed Carry (CCW) privileges who don’t have the physical or mental dexterity that handling a lethal weapon requires.

Then advocate taking them off the road first, since automobiles are the most lethal weapon in America.  Let’s hear it.  I want to hear this weasel advocate taking cars away from people who need transportation.  Until then, he’s just a wind bag full of hot air.

 Via Mike Vanderboegh, Kevin Williamson:

Is there something magical about Albion’s seed — Protestantism? the English language itself? the combination of the two in the King James Bible? — that inoculates the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand against the European intellectual disease? That disease mutates every 20 years, but the primordial strain of the virus is always identifiable: more power, centralized power, consolidated power.

Yes, and to the degree which it wanes, totalitarianism will wax strong.  It’s called the philosophical problem of the one and the many, which totalitarian societies answer favoring the former, while anarchy answers favoring the later.  Only historical Christianity gets it right, with the balance of institutions – government, family and church – all answerable to God.

Via Uncle … oh my.  Just … oh my!