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

Nova | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

When you step back and look at the big picture, it really makes one wonder—how big of a piano needs to be dropped on people’s heads before they notice what’s happening?   Simon Black at sovereignman.com

Stars shine for billions of years, fusing one element into another, hydrogen into helium, carbon, neon, oxygen, silicon, until one day fusion into iron begins. There, quietly, at the heart of the star, it’s doom is sealed. Fusion into iron generates no net heat, in fact, it’s a heat sink. There comes those last few seconds when equilibrium is lost, the star can’t support its own weight, the outer shells collapse inward at nearly the speed of light and the star is torn apart in a spectacular cataclysm. When gravity wins, it wins all at once. So it shall be with us.

There are those among us who want what they don’t need and need what they don’t want. Tolerance for this has metamorphosized into entitlement, which for the beneficiary mimics success, and so the core of career consumers has grown large enough to make its own weather and exert its own gravity. Debt on this scale would eventually overwhelm any economy, no matter how robust. Enough is never enough, even if it were a wide-open spigot plumbed to any conceivable source of supply. Fantasies about debt can keep it going for a while, but in the real world no debt has ever gone unpaid, if not by the borrower then by the lender. In the end, historic debt has historic consequences.

The hard road ahead will likely be comparable in its scope and impacts to the harrowing times brought by America’s first three rounds of anacyclosis. To live through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, or the Great Depression was not an easy thing; those of my readers who are curious about what might be ahead could probably do worse than to read a good history of one or more of those.   John Greer at resilience.org

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.

Control | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

Control

There is only one way to shorten and ease the convulsions of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new —revolutionary terror. – Karl Marx

To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated. – Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Communist International, 1918, purged and executed in 1936

We know how socialism in Russia worked out: decades of terror, mass arrests, labor camps, intentional famines, atrocities and executions. Why did the populace not resist? It began this way, in 1918, and you’ll note it was not a suggestion:

 Citizens! Hand over your weapons

94 years later… It is truly a strange time in which we live. The Russian news outlet Pravda, formerly the mouthpiece of the Soviet regime, has published an opinion column encouraging Americans not to surrender their guns and gun rights to the government. The column warns that the disarming of the population is one of the first steps toward government repression and totalitarianism, and cites Russian history as an example, as this is exactly what happened in Russia when the Bolsheviks came to power. – Daniel S., comment at amnation.com

Dis-Investment | Ol’ Remus and the Woodpile Report

The proprietor of the well-respected Survival Blog, James Rawles, is not one for overstatement. So it was doubled-down unsettling when he wrote the most chilling advice we’ve seen recently, a spare and direct statement which appeared in his Economics and Investing section:

As of today, Wednesday, June 13, 2012, I strongly urge all SurvivalBlog readers to immediately draw down their checking accounts and liquidate their CDs, passbook savings accounts and most of the their stocks to buy tangibles.

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.