Frankly My Dear: A Guest Post From Ol’ Remus | Liberty’s Torch

[The following is a Guest Post from Ol’ Remus of the late and greatly missed Woodpile Report. I keep inviting Remus to become a regular Co-Conspirator here, and he keeps declining. I shall persist! — FWP]

With all the recent troubles we’re again being invited to an honest and open conversation about race, or said differently, the browbeatings will be resumed. Try this for honest and open: many of us, probably most of us, are tired of your whining, your so-called grievances, your violence and crime, your insults and threats, your witless blather and pornographic demeanor—all of it. You’re not quite 13% of the population yet everything has to be about you, all day, every day. With you, facts aren’t facts, everything’s a kozmik krisis, and abusive confrontations are your go-to.

Here’s the thing: some of us despise you, although fewer than you believe, but most of us plain don’t care about you or your doings. There was a time when we did care, but you betrayed our good will and played us for fools. We laugh about it now, but we actually believed you wanted equal opportunity and mutual respect and to live in harmony—all that stuff. Ain’t it a hoot? Imagine our embarrassment.

Voting: It just encourages the bastards | Ol’ Remus

Cuomo D’Etat: New York’s Taliban Monent | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

New York’s Taliban moment

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo made some notable comments about opponents of his showpiece gun control law, known as the SAFE Act.

“The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act—it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are. ”  NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to Susan Arbetter via blog.timesunion.com

A clarification posted at the Governor’s web site, not further attributed, claims he meant only to insult and expel representatives of conservatives, not conservatives themselves. A later posting, attributed to Mylan Denerstein, the Governor’s Executive Deputy Attorney General for Social Justice (sic), takes the form of an open letter to Frederic Dicker, a columnist at the New York Post and local talk show host. She characterizes Mr. Dicker as an extreme conservative—two words never far apart in official missives—who maliciously misrepresented Cuomo’s words with the intent of causing mischief in an election year.

Invisible: With justice & liberty for all | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

In doomer fiction the western states get the big sort-of-army irregulars, usually coordinating their military derring-do with loyal units of the regular armed forces, who together defeat the evil invaders on page 360. It’s a rule. See the 1984 movie Red Dawn, or David Aikman’s 1993 novel When The Almond Tree Blossoms for instance, or more currently, Max Velocity’s Patriot Dawn, all of which assume a Resistance defending large areas and counterattacking in set piece battles. But they posit another place, an active partisan region well east, behind enemy lines on all sides, namely, Appalachia.  There’s a reason.

Legitimacy | ol’ remus and the woodpile report

The federal government was not intended to be a charity, nor an insurance or retirement agency, nor doctor, pharmacist or health advisor, champion of the poor or rich, changer of foreign regimes, protector of the planet, educator, space explorer, diet and nutrition czar, arbiter of interest rates or prices or wages, nor trafficker in currency unsecured by gold or silver. As legally constituted it may neither promote nor restrict transfats, sugar, tobacco, alcohol, coal, gasoline, drugs, salt or food of any kind; nor may it enact legislation favoring or victimizing or exempting any gender, race or ethnicity. In short, those things DC is doing outside of its enumerated powers are unlawful...

via ol remus and the woodpile report

Mandatory Reading for 3/5/13 – The Woodpile Report

Go here, right now, and read it all. That’s an order.

Separation | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report for 2/26/13

DC has always been distant from the people. Apart from the IRS and the draft, they were “the other” we read about in the papers, running gangsters and spies to ground, getting the interstate built, fighting wars and generally looking out for the Little Guy. We believed they were the Big Picture People doing things on the largest scale on behalf of all who worked hard, lived responsibly and stayed right with the law. DC was the captain and crew of our mighty ship, alert and sure, cutting cleanly through heavy seas and turgid morass alike, while their grateful passengers shuddered at the hardship and horrors beyond the delights of the endless buffet on the promenade deck.

Gotcha | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

A supposed “gotcha” often heard from anti-gun extremists is the notion that the right to keep and bear arms was contingent on membership in a militia and, there no longer being militias, the right was transferred to their successor, the armed forces. It’s nonsense of course, privileges are contingent, rights are not, and the Supreme Court agrees, if only in the same sense they agree with gravity, less than readily and with a dollop of adolescent petulance from the dissenters.

Supreme Court, 2008- We look to this because it has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it “shall not be infringed.” As we said in United States v. Cruikshank , 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876), “[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed…
US Supreme Court, Heller Decision at scotusblog.com

Duty | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

We lost the republic long ago. Within Remus’s lifetime, loyal constitutionalist patriots have gone from the majority to a tolerated minority to a designated hate group and now, presumed terrorists. Meanwhile, the collectivists—the Democrat Republican Progressive establishment—are openly consolidating their power, strutting on the national stage like Mussolini in front of a mirror, their witless minions shouting down deviations from DC’s two party one-party line.

DC has taken on the classic structure of totalitarianism: feuding official fiefdoms with fuzzy and overlapping authorities, all burrowing into the formerly private lives of the populace, legal cover provided by a Byzantine tangle of laws and impenetrable codes, a form of lawlessness in itself, as it’s meant to be. In this pervasive fog and fear they needn’t be lawful other than by their own calculations.

Insolvency | Ol’ remus and the Woodpile Report

A business enterprise is solvent when its operations are supported by its after-tax cash flow. Should cash flow be temporarily insufficient, borrowing against accounts receivable is the classic remedy. With serial borrowing however, operations-plus-debt-service eventually becomes unsupportable by cash flow, real or anticipated. Creditors withdraw when they see this, it’s insolvency or near enough. The business closes, its assets are liquidated and the proceeds distributed among its creditors. This is what’s happening to the US, aside from the liquidation part. Debt repudiation by inflation—watering down the currency—holds such comeuppance at bay, at least for a while.

Crowds to Avoid – Pt. 2: Looters | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

The previous Woodpile Report looked at the “Official Crowd” because it’s proactive and well positioned to dominate at the outset of the final collapse. Remus said Federal and state officialdom will work against you, especially the DHS, a stumblebum Frankenstein stitched from 40 existing agencies that’s been shambling from pratfall to pratfall since 2003. DHS is a creepy outfit that sees intimidating the populace and violating the innocent as a duty.

Progress | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

Many reasons have been given for the fall of the Roman Empire—greed and decadence, Christianity or the want of it, a decline in industriousness, lack of new territory to plunder, internal wars and over-reliance on the military and so forth. These are “civic virtue” arguments. More objectively, Tainter says the total cost of maintaining the empire exceeded the total return from the empire. The notion appears to confuse cause and effect if you squint and look at it just so. An automobile will eventually cost more in maintenance than the worth of its service justifies, but the deterioration itself isn’t due to the cost of maintenance. An asset has a trajectory apart from our mitigations of its effects.

Thoughts on Fast & Furious, Ann Coulter | Ol remus and the woodpile report

... Most Americans don’t care about whether Attorney General Eric Holder is hiding Fast and Furious documents because they don’t understand the story.  It put guns in their hands to strengthen liberals’ argument for gun control… This is such a jaw-dropping accusation, Republicans refuse to make it, says Ann Coulter in this article at her blog, anncoulter.com…

via ol remus and the woodpile report.

Justice | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report – 24 Apr 2012

Justice.  Be careful what you wish for.  Mansfield Frazier at the Daily Beast—a Newsweek outfit—says this in his columnabout the Travnor-Zimmerman brouhaha:

“So what would a fair outcome look like? To my mind, the government offers Zimmerman a plea deal that has him back on the street within this decade, and he accepts it quietly. That seems like a conclusion most reasonable Americans could live with… A protracted murder trial of George Zimmerman is the last thing this country needs right now. America can only dodge so many racial bullets, and a not-guilty verdict in this case could very easily turn the racial cold war into a very hot one.”

Fair outcome?! Fair to who? Did he also advise Rodney King or OJ Simpson to go quietly off to prison? This is insulting. It stinks of contempt for white people and justice alike. Even Eric Holder hasn’t sunk this low. Hot racial war?! To begin with, Mr. Frazier, a former Cleveland newspaper editor wouldn’tcha know, assumes nobody’s noticed the ongoing attacks on whites, any one of which, were the races reversed, would be nonstop news coast-to-coast with blacks taking to the streets in waves—recent examples:

Collapse | Ol’ Remus and the Woodpile Report

Collapse is an overused word, a telescoping of events better described as a decline. The buggy industry didn’t “collapse” when the first automobile dealership appeared—Studebaker made both, nor did the vacuum tube disappear the day the first transistor was manufactured. The Roman and Byzantine empires didn’t collapse, they were transformed in a surprisingly orderly, if not voluntary, manner over a long period of time. No, they weren’t mere reorganizations or downsizing, and yes there were catastrophic events within those episodes, but a critical observer of the time would would rightly understand them to be something other than collapse.

DC | ol remus and the woodpile report

For a very long time now our representatives neither write nor read the legislation they pass into law, nor need they. Proposals of import arrive in their hands fully formed by the real government. Those owed exceptions are excepted and those owed favors are favored, and they call it consensus.

Re-post, must read | Ol remus and the woodpile report

“… Don’t expect anything of value to you from authorities and don’t expect timely information of value to you from the media. Expect government to oppose your escape with threats or force, after all, you’re a paying customer attempting to leave the mall. Others may follow. Their interest is in maintaining order, their order, not in passing out valuable resources for free. You’ll recall “maintaining order” meant instructing people in the twin towers to stay put and await a professionally supervised evacuation. We know this from people who acted on their own judgment and fled.

Also recall during Katrina how police, those who hadn’t joined the looters or decamped to more pleasant venues, forcibly disarmed honest citizens in their own homes with assistance from the National Guard, then cherry-picked the loot for themselves. Assume at the outset your local statists will use a disaster to betray their oath and you…

We’ve come to rely on the media to misrepresent facts they don’t merely withhold. Surely you’ve noticed crime stories suppress full and reliable descriptions when their favored felons are the miscreants of record. It would be comforting to think the press won’t cover up decisive, actionable facts during a major calamity as well, but the truth lies elsewhere. You can expect the mainstream press to lie early and often in such a case. Big news media is pretty much a holding pen for the irretrievably unprincipled, journalists being the deployable euphemism, some even “award-winning”. Say the word ethics to a “journalist” and they’ll assume it’s the name of someone’s yacht, someone they’d really like to know.

Perilous events are Darwinian by nature. Hindsight suggests the casualties often selected themselves, perfect knowledge would probably prove it. The survivors informed themselves of what was actually happening, then extrapolated what may happen, then refined it to what was likely to happen. Survival begins and ends with applied good judgment. Think back in your own life to those little things you did or didn’t do, those seemingly trivial stitches in time that kept you from a bad end. It wasn’t all luck or happenstance. Now that the storm is upon us, now that ever-larger catastrophes are entraining and we’re being pelted with debris, a bug-out bag is evidence of good judgement in itself. Good judgement well applied is the one indispensible survival tool and likely the oldest. Be sure to take yours with you.

via ol remus and the woodpile report.

Evasion and Survival | ol remus and the woodpile report

“… Cold appraisal of the corruption, deep capture, incompetence and general treachery of our ruling class and their swarms of apparatchiks says it’s prudent to take any conceivable civil calamity onto our accounts. Among the costs to us are evasion and survival skills. Be clear about this, no peaceful person of good will living in a sane society needs such expertise. It’s a personal disfigurement, the dark side of natural law, a rebuke to civilization itself. Those who see these things as an adventure warrant our deep suspicion. Yet no sooner are we subjected to one outrage than another follows, each betrayal more astonishing than the last.

The realist must acknowledge the one-sided, top-down trashing of the social contract and prepare for ever more calamitous turns of events, and so it is we reluctantly and regretfully consider such tactics here. ‘

via ol remus and the woodpile report.