Roy Roger's Prayer

I became a Roy Rogers fan later in life.  To me he is what Hollywood stars ought to be:  a good role model to folks who pay to see his movies.

Anyway, I just came across this, Roy Roger's prayer, which he asked to be said at the beginning of each Roy Rogers Riders' club meeting :

Lord, I reckon I'm not much just by myself,
I fail to do a lot of things I ought to do.
But Lord, when trails are steep and passes high,
Help me ride it straight the whole way through.

And when in the falling dusk I get that final call,
I do not care how many flowers they send,
Above all else, the happiest trail would be,
For You to say to me, "Let's ride, My Friend."

Amen

The Roy Rogers Riders Club Rules

1. Be neat and clean.
2. Be courteous and polite.
3. Always obey your parents.
4. Protect the weak and help them.
5. Be brave but never take chances.
6. Study hard and learn all you can.
7. Be kind to animals and take care of them.
8. Eat all your food and never waste any.
9. Love God and go to Sunday school regularly.
10. Always respect our flag and our country.

Good stuff.  Roy Rogers site here, at RoyRogersWorld.

I had a conversation with some anti-gun folks the other day.  They were wildly misstating and misinterpreting the 2nd amendment, and then saying "you're interpreting that using 20th century understanding of those words... I'VE looked into it and know really what they meant back then."  I explained that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were argued at length in what are now known as the federalist papers, by folks who actually lived in the 18th century and who actually wrote the Constitution, and so probably had a better understanding of what they meant than this individual who was trying to twist their words into pretzels 200+ years later (e.g. "by 'right of the people', they meant 'right of the states to form militias'").

Anyway, I saw this on Patriot Post (patriotpost.us), and it reminded me of that conversation.  Incidentally, the founding fathers were a pretty amazing bunch of guys.

"If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positives forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state."

--Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 28, 1787

Which was 18th century language for "gird your loins".

National Socialism redux

Very interesting - Abortion Icons change their perspective

Well this is cool.  Roe v. Wade is the iconic abortion case where the US Supreme Court held that abortion pre-viability was a right.  There was another case released the same day, Doe v. Bolton, that said abortion anytime during the term was legal.

So, the 40th anniversary of those cases is coming up.

 In the midst of this flurry of media coverage a woman named Sandro Cano has quietly issued a media release on a Christian newswire service calling for the two Supreme Court cases to be overturned. This in itself might seem unremarkable, until you learn Cano’s other name: Mary Doe.

Yes, that Mary Doe.

Good for her.

Meanwhile, another women, Norma McCorvey, briefly captured headlines during last year’s election cycle when she released a pro-life ad featuring graphic pictures of aborted children and accusing President Obama of “killing babies” by his support for abortion.
Most won’t recognize McCorvey’s real name, but will instantly recognize her pseudonym: Jane Roe. Yes, that Jane Roe.

 Read the whole thing here.

Bad taste is the new measure of discernment

Here's a thought on the appeal of asceticism and bizarre aesthetics as a "keeping up with the Joneses" kind of excercise:

Capitalism made luxury hard work by making everything cheap. Suddenly it wasn't enough to just lie in bed and order the butler to bring you exotic pomegranates from the Orient and champagne from the vineyards of France. Those things could be found in any supermarket courtesy of the jet plane. Status stopped being a lazy man or woman's game and became a frenzied rat race. Fat was out and hyperactive workouts were in. Anyone could afford good art, so those with discerning taste chose bad art. Anyone could vacation abroad, so they bought old farm houses, restored them and painted bad art while trying to grow their own food.

 Things that make you go Hmmm.  Whole thing is here.

A nation of adolescents

I have been thinking of the prevailing zeitgeist as the rise of the un-serious, but I think Laura Hollis got it more right:

America has become a nation of adolescents The real loser in this election was adulthood: Maturity. Responsibility. The understanding that liberty must be accompanied by self-restraint. Obama is a spoiled child, and the behavior and language of his followers and their advertisements throughout the campaign makes it clear how many of them are, as well. Romney is a grown-up. Romney should have won. Those of us who expected him to win assumed that voters would act like grownups. Because if we were a nation of grownups, he would have won.

Yep.  I have no idea what to do about it, except gird your loins, but there is another look at the same phenomenon.

Read it all here.

The decline and fall...

Yeah, me too.   Read it here.

Some of my libertarian friends think that a financial or societal collapse will lead to a better understanding of the importance of freedom, and that a new flowering of liberty will bloom in the aftermath.

That’s a foolish and stupid idea.

What will actually happen is what happened when Rome fell: a period of barbarism and tyranny and darkness will sweep over us at worst, or at best, people will demand that a man on a white horse punish the appropriate scapegoats and make the trains run on time again. Sure, I hope I’m wrong, but history is on the side of pessimism. As nearly as I can tell, all we can do is hold on tight, because we’re getting ready to ride this puppy down in flames.

...

But, maybe, in 500 years or so, a confident, adventurous people will once again step onto the surface of the moon. No doubt they will be amazed to learn that the mythical figures of Buzz Aldrin, Alan Shepard, and their companions actually did exist, and set foot there once upon a time, and left behind six beautiful, red-striped banners, spangled with white stars on a field of blue.

I have no words...

... but Mark Stein found some appropriate on this, the morning after the Unites States gleefully embraced marxism:

I appreciate the sterling if pitiful efforts of my comrades to clutch at straws these last few hours, but, on this grim morning after, I fear the most salient analysis comes from Sir Richard Mottram, Her Britannic Majesty’s former Permanent Secretary for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, albeit speaking in another context:

“We’re all f***ed. I’m f***ed. You’re f***ed. The whole department’s f***ed. It’s been the biggest c**k-up ever and we’re all completely f***ed.”

Words to ponder.

I like Sir Mottram's words so much, I'll appropriate them and say it myself:  We’re all f***ed. I’m f***ed. You’re f***ed. The whole department country's f***ed. It’s been the biggest c**k-up ever and we’re all completely f***ed. 

A disgrace

There are simply no other words for it.   I never liked Obama; I thought he was a hyper-partisan socialist/communist whose policies were misguided.  I thought he was hyper-political, running focus groups on what shoes to put on in the morning.  But it never occurred to me that he would deliberately paralyze the national security apparatus for what has to be political reasons.  

While American diplomats and personnel fought the terrorists for seven hours, Obama's crack national-security team and the U.S. military simply watched and listened. U.S. fighters could have been on the scene in an hour offering support, and U.S. commandos within 3 hours, but no orders were given. A military-loathing, anti-American commander in chief sat on his hands while U.S. territory was attacked, a U.S. ambassador assassinated, and three other Americans murdered, and team Obama then devised a phony story to cover up for the disaster.

I say deliberately, because I have to believe that in the absence of orders to the contrary, there is someone in the US military chain of command in Africa or Europe that has the authority to make the call to go in and secure the facility and save the embattled US personnel. 

Then, a BS story or excuse is not only thought up, but sent around to the State Dept. et al and told that this is the official word, even though individuals in State and elsewhere knew perfectly well it wasn't.  All for polling reasons.  Disgraceful. That alone is worth throwing the bum out, and once he's out, pressing charges.

Original is here, but you have to dig down a bit.

Thoreau the libertarian

I've never read much (like any) Thoreau.  I understand Walden Pond was like 1.5 miles from his house, so On Walden Pond as a definitive treatise on back-to-nature is a bit, well, overblown. That said, this quote is supposed to come from him, which raises him up in my estimation:

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

 --American author and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Mixed feelings

I saw a guy on a street corner socializing his "dog" on my way into work this morning.  The pup was wanting to run and hide as each car came by, and the guy would bring it back (it was leashed) and reassure it.  As I drove by I saw that it was a wolf pup, probably 6 months old.

My first thought was "you dickwad, wait until that twitchy animal is 120 lbs, still twitchy, and you can't control it".  My vision was of someone's 5 year old kid running by that wolf, surprising it, and the wolf removing the kids face with one bite.

That said, I'm generally opposed to people putting their noses in where they aren't involved.  So now I'm conflicted.  Is it OK for that f'n genius to raise a wolf in town or not?  My gut very much says no, its not OK, but I'm trying to reconcile that rationally.

Quote of the day

Quote of the day, from Richard Fernandez :

Nils Pratley at the Guardian is impressed. “Bailouts in the eurozone used to generate relief rallies that lasted at least a week. The Spanish version couldn’t even manage a full morning.”

The yield on 10-year Spanish government debt, which had fallen to 6% soon after the start of trading, ended the day at 6.5% – an astonishing turnaround. Worse, Italian bonds followed the same pattern, closing a whisker above 6%, the highest since January. Far from calming nerves, the grant of €100bn (£81bn) or so of cheap loans for Spanish banks seems only to have hardened investors’ analysis that the eurozone debt crisis is getting worse.

 ...

The bitter truth is that the European collapse is simply the consequence of Leftist fantasy politics.  It is what happens when people realize that the ‘paradise’ they’ve been building is nothing but a deconstructed, demographically collapsing, hollowed-out and bankrupt shell of lies.

Pax Americana is not the way the world normally operates

Richard Fernandez gets it right again:

The idea that the office on the corner will always be able to dispense Government Cheese does not reflect the normal historical experience. Rather it reflects that peculiar period of stability and prosperity which followed the end of the Second World War: the Pax Americana, which the Left hates. Our civilizational attitudes have been formed on the basis of the exception, not the rule.

We in the first world have been on a global vacation from history since the 1960's.  I fear its time to get back to work.

Whole article here.

An excellent point

"Who killed the 20-30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago -- big government or big business? ... Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death -- big government or big business? ... Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state? Whatever bad big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes ... committed by big governments." --radio talk-show host Dennis Prager

You'd better run...

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity, by legislating the
wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to
work because the other half is going to take care of them;
and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work,
because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

Democratic Dialog

The following poem was entered into the Congressional Record in 1949 by Representative Clarence J. Brown (R - Ohio). He described the author only as "a prominent Democrat of the State of Georgia"

Democratic Dialog

Father, must I got to work?
No, my lucky son.
We're living now on Easy Street
On dough from Washington

We've left it up to Uncle Sam
So don't get exercised
Nobody has to give a damn -
We've all been subsidized

But if Sam treats us all so well
and feeds us milk and honey,
Please, daddy, tell me what the hell
He's going to use for money.

Don't worry bub, there's not a hitch
In this here noble plan -
He simply soaks the filthy rich
And helps the common man.

But, father, won't there come a time
When they run out of cash
And we have left them not a dime
When things will go to smash?

My faith in you is shrinking, son,
You nosy little brat;
You do too much thinking, son,
To be a Democrat.

Colonel Jeff Cooper's Rules for Life

Understand the problem. Pull your weight.
Appreciate!
Be completely honest and trustworthy in all things.

Cracks in China's economy?

Saw this:

One of the world’s few remaining real estate bubbles finally seems to be losing air. Real estate transactions have slowed so quickly that in the last two weeks, brokerages across China have laid off thousands of brokers and closed hundreds of offices.

So Europe is basically broke and fighting over who will pay for what. America is broke, with the Fed having to buy up treasury bonds because nobody else will. China is an export-based economy selling basically to America and Europe, but has also been artificially tinkering with their monetary value. I think China has a lot of room to grow, but that their command economy has let them to seriously misallocate resources. Is the faltering of their real estate market the first sign of worse to come?

VDH does it again

Victor David Hanson is becoming my go-to guy for coherent historical perspective on things. Here he discusses the various "Occupy" protests, and ropes in the Tea Party for good measure:

For the last six decades, constant technological breakthroughs and growing government subsidies have given a billion and a half Westerners lifestyles undreamed of over the last 2,500 years.

{snip}

None of these protesters discuss the effects of 2 billion Chinese, Indian, Korean, and Japanese workers’ entering and mastering the globalized capitalist system, and making things more cheaply and sometimes better than their Western counterparts.

{snip}

Since 1970 there has been a historic, multitrillion-dollar transfer of capital from the West to the Middle East, South America, Africa, and Russia through the importation of high-cost oil and gas.

None seem to grasp the significance of the fact that, meanwhile, hundreds of millions of Westerners were living longer and better, retiring earlier, and demanding ever more expensive government pensions and health care.

Something had to give.

And now it has. Federal and state budgets are near bankrupt. Countries like Greece and Italy face insolvency. The U.S. government resorts to printing money to service or expand entitlements. Near-zero interest rates, declining home prices, and huge losses in mutual funds and retirement accounts have crippled the middle classes.

Interesting times, folks, interesting times.