DEAR SANTA

American Atheists

The above billboard will appear in Memphis, Nashville, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Fort Smith, Arkansas — right in the middle of a handful of red states. The campaign, according to an American Atheists news release, is “aimed at in-the-closet atheists who are pressured to observe religious traditions during the holidays” and who might want to attend the group’s Memphis conference next year.      MSN

The Oxford English Dictionary defines an Atheist as a "Person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods" and defines an Antitheist as "One opposed to belief in the existence of a god".  I'll leave it up to you to categorize this organization into what you believe to be the appropriate category.

American Atheists said it is bringing the campaign to the South not because of the quantity of atheists there, but because “discrimination and mistrust of atheists is especially pronounced” in the region.

Perhaps that question about atheists and antitheists is one atheists ought to ask about themselves when they question why people feel the way they do about them. In a PEW Survey that asked how Americans feel about different groups on a scale of 0 (Coldest) to 100 (Warmest), Jews, Catholics, and Evangelical Christians ranked 63,62,61 respectively.  Buddhists, Hindus, and Mormons ranked in the middle (53,50,48) while Atheists (41) barely squeaked out ahead of Muslims (40).

I have absolutely no problem with atheists, yet the public face of atheism isn't atheistic, it's antitheist.  I can't shake the feeling that the most vocal antitheists base their actions more on personal animosity than rational thought.  The notion that religion is and has been the root of all evil is misguided and runs contrary to the historical record, one need look no further than to the history of secular states to observe that their track record is no better and often worse than that of religion.  There is no doubt that man has committed great evils and atrocities, often in the name of religion but just as often in the name of the king, state, or party.  More often than not religion is an excuse and not the cause.  As The Shadow used to ask "What evil lurks in the hearts of men?"

Prolegomena to any Further Taxonomy of Leftwing Progressivism

Is anyone else fed up with the rope-a-dope the lefties give us when we press them in comment threads to explain themselves?  I have yet to hear one of them provide a cogent explanation of just what liberalism is.  Is there no manifesto akin to Russell Kirk's most excellent 10 Conservative Principles?

When confronted with the irrefutable logical outcome of their horrible dogma, lefties perform one or a combination of several evasive maneuvers. This led me to identify and name some of the more common tactics employed by leftwing weasels and slippery socialists when a right thinking person confronts them in a blog thread and call BS on their BS. 

Here is my humble list of neologisms describing liberal debating tactics.  What do you think?
 
1) Liberal Lafftosh: Go all goofy and laugh it off

2) Wriggling the Game: Feign ignorance or purposely misunderstand the question

3) Self-Flatulation: Explode in righteous anger and malodorous indignation

4) Il Canardo: Ignore you or steer the conversation into the ditch by introducing irrelevancies (Ducky's favorite)

5) The Jersey Special: Slide off the Jersey Turnpike of truth and spin your intellectual wheels trying to justify the unjustifiable, explain the inexplicable, defend the indefensible... all accompanied by smelly, billowing clouds of dust and smoke as the marxist malefactor burns rubber, screeches, and mires the car deeper into the intellectual ruts he creates.

Can you think up some more?  Post them in the comments section for the amusement of all.

How to Stop the Immigration Madness

Our immigration system is not broken, and President Obama's imperial decree will not "fix" it. With a wave of his magic scepter, he has just invited millions more in.

Two actions would slow the tide and turn it into a trickle:

1. An ironclad worker verification system...
...(unlike the puny, nebulous system we have now) and draconian punishments for employers who hire undocumented workers.

We can do this folks. We're in an age of global banking networks and almost instant background checks for gun purchases. We have the technology, but government doesn't have the will, thanks to their masters, the Silicon Valley Robber Barons and the US Chamber of Communists.

Instead of armed INS raids at job sites, with news footage of poor men and women being cuffed and stuffed, accompanied by interviews with scared wives and children whose breadwinner has just been locked up, it should be government bureaucrats auditing the company's employment records, and frogmarching the management off to jail.

2. No government assistance...
...of any kind to anyone who cannot prove she is here legally. That includes publicly-funded services like schools and hospitals. We should provide medical care to anyone who needs it, but for the undocumented, the next step after receiving care is a plane ticket home, with the US government billing the undocumented immigrant's government.

No government contracts to churches to provide assistance to illegal immigrants. If Churches believe providing succor to people here illegally is the work of Christ, then they can do it on their own dime.

Conclusion
Take away the chance to work and remove access to the social safety net, and you remove the motivation to come here illegally or to overstay your visa. Sounds harsh, but government's first debt is to its citizens who pay to fund it. 

A pleasant side-effect is that the absence of undocumented people would remove the stigma of being from somewhere else and erase the cloud of suspicion that maybe you are mooching off the government because you talk funny.  There will always be bigots and haters, but reasonable people of goodwill have a right to question what goes on in their own country.
 
In the near future, I will blog about what our nation would look like if we took these steps.

The First Sunday of Advent: Christingle

 

Today is the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of the Western Liturgical Year and the traditional start of the Christmas Season.

The Christingle has its origins in the Moravian Church in the 18th century with  Bishop Johannes de Watteville of Marienborn.

The orange represents the world, the red ribbon the blood of Christ, the dried fruit represents the fruits of the earth and the four seasons, and the candle Jesus, light of the world.

The story of the Christingle is that there were three children, who were very poor, but wanted to give a gift to Jesus, like the other families at church were doing. The only nice thing they had was an orange, so they decided to give him that. The top was going slightly green, so the eldest cut it out and put a candle in the hole. They thought it looked dull, so the youngest girl took her best red ribbon from her hair and attached it round the middle with toothpicks. The middle child had the idea to put a few pieces of dried fruit on the ends of the sticks. They took it to the church for the Christmas mass, and whereas the other children sneered at their meagre gift, the priest took their gift and showed it as an example of true understanding of the meaning of Christmas.

Saturday Sessions: Just to get you in the mood - Christmas Music!

Black Friday

 

I don't know about you, but I would never go shopping today.  The second to last thing I want to do is shop and the last thing I want to do is shop in crowds.  Do you think the sales worth it? I don't, and apparently neither does the Wall Street Journal:

The Myth of the Black Friday deal.

OCCUPY CHRISTMAS

Also known as Buy Nothing Day was started in Canada in 1992 as a protest against consumerism and over-consumption.  It was moved to the day after Thanksgiving in 1998.  Perhaps they're right, last year 141 million of us went shopping on this day and spent $57.4 Billion dollars. What are you going to do today, shop? Or something else.  Me? I'm going to kick back and enjoy the day off.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

So much for a nice pre-Thanksgiving post.

I've left the video here to illustrate the stark contrast between cultural and social desires and reality, Enjoy.

LET'S NOW TALK ABOUT FERGUSON

Had I the time and the appropriate editing software I'd have treated you with scenes of the Ferguson riots set to the music featured above.

1.  The standard for obtaining an indictment from a Grand Jury is probable cause.  Here's a pleasant or unpleasant fact for you dependent upon your point of view;  If you can't obtain an indictment there is no way in hell you are going to obtain a conviction to the standard of "beyond reasonable doubt".  Let's not mince words though, we all know what the rioters of Ferguson want is a lynching, anything less than hanging Darren Wilson from the old oak tree is just not going to satisfy the crowd.

2.  I have an hour commute each morning and have been spending it cycling through the following talk stations: POTUS, Patriot, Urban View, and Progressive on Sirius.  I'd like to address a comment I heard many times on three of the four stations.  "Mike Brown didn't deserve to die for stealing a handful of cigars".

HELLO! Back the cart up Hoss... Mike Brown didn't die for stealing a handful of cigars, he was stopped for walking in the street and possibly, stealing a handful of cigars.  Mike Brown died for assaulting a police officer.  Now whether or not you consider that justifiable given the evidence released is up to you.

3.  Mike Brown is a symptom of a bigger problem and a catalyst for what is going on right now.   It's a multifaceted problem with everything from the Gangsta subculture to the Police subculture at fault.  It's also a "racial problem", but perhaps not in the way you think.  I've known a lot of cops over the years and there are pretty much only two races: Cops and Civilians. I'm not convinced that if Mike Brown was an 18 year old six foot five 290 pound white kid that came through the window of a patrol vehicle and wrestled for the officers gun things would have turned out any differently.

One of the problems is the way the majority of police interact with the community, most cops interact with three kinds of people: Cops, Victims, and Perps.  They live in different neighborhoods, hang out with other cops, and spend life fairly isolated in patrol cars from the community that they serve.  Until we change the way our police do business, and the federal government isn't helping by militarizing them, nothing is going to change, if anything it is going to get worse. We need to get the police out of their cars, at least in urban areas, and onto the streets and interacting with the community in general on a regular basis.  Cops need a regular assigned neighborhood, need to get to know the people in their neighborhoods and the people need to get to know them.

4. There is a trust issue between the police and the black community.  I got news for you, I'm an upper-middle class middle-aged white guy and there is a trust issue between the police and the white community also.  Understandably, the issues between the police and the two communities are not currently the same, but give it time, I'm sure we'll eventually get there. 

5.  The law enforcement response in Ferguson was incompetent.  While I can sort of understand the rational for initially maintaining a low police presence as to not inflame the situation, we can all see, and hindsight is 20/20, how that worked out.  Maintaining the police in a mass military formation like a phalanx of Hoplites was also stupid (although I do understand that it maximizes police safety).  The police should have been stationed at the store Mike Brown robbed, at the business that had been previously been looted, and stationed in pairs along the street at regular intervals, close enough to support one another but far enough apart to provide general coverage.  Having 200 cops in tight formation controls no more territory than a smaller group could.

What do you think?

Vendepatria en la Casa Blanca

President Obama is a liar:  In his Facebook speech announcing his big speech that would come a day later, he claimed that our immigration system is broken. 

No it's Not:  
It is negligently administered and barely enforced.  People cross our borders with impunity, social services and taxpayer-funded services like schools are ladled out to all with no questions asked, and employment enforcement is nonexistent.  When is the last time you heard about a workplace raid?  More importantly, has any employer ever been punished for hiring undocumented workers? 

El Vendepatria
There's a Spanish word for President Obama that our neighbors south of the Rio Grande know quite well:  Vendepatria; one who sells out his country.  Any citizen in any country of Latin American would hurl that insult at her president if he took an action like Obama's.

Barack Hussein Obama is anti-American, and he leads an anti-American criminal enterprise known as the federal government, which is separate and distinct from We The People, and is dedicated to our enslavement.

We have a job shortage in this country resulting in millions of chronically-unemployed.  What does Obama's Enterprise do?  Import more workers who have a demonstrated track record of accepting below-market wages.  The simple law of supply and demand guarantees that wages will not rise.

Common sense also predicts that this will attract even larger waves of humanity to our southern border, which means more death, rapes and robberies along the way, and more exploitable people here that will constitute an even larger problem than President Obama's latest diktat claimed to address.  And by the way, if his unilateral proclamation was so humane, why did he only hand out 5 million golden tickets, and exclude over 15 million more undocumented unfortunates living here?  How inhumane is that?

Divide and Conquer
This creates another noisy Democrat constituency too poor and ignorant to help themselves.  The more uneducated and unemployable the new arrivals are, the better.  It grows the nanny-state, employs a burgeoning cohort of poverty-pushers and gives racist bigots and grievance hustlers like La Raza and MEChA a bigger bullhorn and a bigger slice of taxpayer-funded largess doled out by progressives in government.

It's Their Nation, We The People just Live in It
Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley want cheap labor, hi-tech and low-tech, because there is no such thing as being too rich, and our progressive government (infested with progressives of all parties) enables them, as it does the Wall Street gangsters.  These nefarious swindlers, along with the US Chamber of Communists, are selling the country right out from under us.  They are stealing our birthright, and purposely changing the face of this nation.  Hollywood drug addicts and cultural pornographers are the the propaganda arm of this Cultural Long March.

They don't care that this nation is becoming a third-world toilet.  They live and travel in their own guarded enclaves.  Their children do not attend government schools.  They are rich enough to shield themselves from the societal destruction they perpetrate.

Free people in Tocqueville's America forming free societies and determining their own lives is messy and inefficient.  Today's progressive elites of all parties need us to be needy, addicted to government nickles and dimes, moving which ever way they nudge us.

Does This Conference Make Me Look Like a Pervert?

Seaside, Ore. (CBS SEATTLE) – Controversy is surrounding a sex education conference in Oregon as the event has hosted students as young as 11 years old. The conference gives tips on masturbation, using internet porn and quirky alternatives to sex.

Lesson plans taught at the Oregon Adolescent Sexuality Conference include tutorials on porn websites, pamphlets on sexting and information about “teledildonics,” or the remote use of sex toys over the Internet, KOIN-TV reports. (CBS Local - Seattle)

This isn't a conference; it's a criminal enterprise.  The pedophiles in teachers' clothing who planned and perpetrated the crimes committed at that conference should be arrested for sexual pandering to children.

This was a conference paid for by the State of Oregon, and school districts are required to send people to it in order to be eligible for certain types of funding. As the article states, school children also attend.  Based on interviews featured in the articles, the criminal activities were probably a very tiny part of the conference, and those who stumbled into them unawares were shocked at the content.

Go read both links and then explain to me why the state of Oregon should not immediately arrest perverts Cory Silverberg and Brad Victor and charge them with sexual pandering to minors and other pedophilia-related charges.

What The Hell is Going On?

This is not an isolated incident.  A little Yahoogling reveals that sex education is getting kinkier and more graphic, taught by degenerate pederasts whose true goal is to get their own rocks off and turn America's youth into like-minded twisted freaks.

What are the origins of this?  How and why did such a fetid nest of satyrs, nymphomaniacs, sodomites and filthy sexual deviants hijack our popular culture and take over our nation's pedagogy? 

I am not a conspiracy theorist, but there must be people with a purpose behind this.

Could someone educate me?  (Please, in the old-fashioned way).

Illegal Immigration: A Simple Historical Perspective

This is Æthelstan,  first King of the English.  

The traditional view of the process has assumed the migration of several Germanic peoples, later collectively referred to as Anglo-Saxons, from the western coasts of continental Europe, followed by the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms across most of what is now England and parts of lowland Scotland. 

The assumption that the Anglo-Saxon settlement developed from the migration of people from the Germanic coastlands, largely displacing the native people, has been challenged by those suggesting that the changes in material culture and language were caused primarily by a process of acculturation that followed the movement of a relatively small number of people. 

Britain used to be a Celtic Nation

Population pressures and migration 

can move mountains 

Just ask this guy.

Saturday Sessions

Music to contemplate Obama's

Speech by.

Sorry to you old school fans out there, 

I decided to toss in a few covers.

An Appeal to Emotion

Meet Astrid Silva

Harry Reid & Obama's Gal Pal

US Senate

She didn't get to go to her grandmother's funeral, but she did get a $100,000+ K-12 education courtesy of American taxpayers.

Ed100

Don't believe the chart... here's Nevada's 228 page breakdown

One morning in 2011, Silva's mother watched from a window as immigration officials detained her husband on a deportation order. The family called everyone they knew for help, including Reid's office. After several weeks, her father's deportation was deferred until 2014. Silva thanked the senator in a letter decorated with a sketch of mountains and cactus over which she wrote the title of the state song, "Home Means Nevada." L.A Times

I found the President's speech to be short on substance and long on appeals to emotion and hollow promises.

First, we’ll build on our progress at the border with additional resources for our law enforcement personnel so that they can stem the flow of illegal crossings and speed the return of those who do cross over. 

As my father used to say, "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me".

I know some of the critics of the action call it amnesty. Well, it’s the not.

 Merriam-Webster: the act of an authority (as a government) by which pardon is granted to a large group of individuals.

Actually Mr. President, yes it is.

White House Face Sheet on Immigration Plan


Don't worry though folks... it's a win-win situation.  If this gets struck down either in the congress or the courts, we win.  If this doesn't get struck down in either the congress or the courts, well take the words of David Gergen, Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government to heart:

If a Democratic president can cancel existing laws on immigration, what is to prevent the next Republican from unilaterally canceling laws on health care?

 

The Wonderful World of Infotainment

What's more important?
The Biggest Loser

Reality TV

 

Or the Biggest Loser

of a midterm election since Harry Truman

Seriously though,
What's more important than 
what the President has to say?
 

Grey's Anatomy,

The Big Bang Theory,

The Biggest Loser,

and

Bones

Who is planning to show the Presidents Address on Immigration tonight?  Univision and Telemundo.

“In 2006, Bush gave a 17 minute speech that was televised by all three networks that was about deploying 6000 national guard troops to the border. Obama is making a 10 minute speech that will have a vastly greater impact on the issue. And none of the networks are doing it. We can’t believe they were aggrieved that we announced this on Facebook,” a senior administration official told POLITICO. 

Western Hero would like to point out to the Big 4 broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC) that in accordance with the Radio Act of 1927 the spectrum belongs to the public and licensees have no property rights to use it.  The issuance of broadcast licenses is via comparative hearings held by the FCC, the intended outcome of which is that "the most qualified user will be granted use of the spectrum to best serve the public interest".  Seriously, do the Big 4 really think that The Biggest Loser better serves the public interest than coverage of a presidential address on immigration that polls consistently rank as one of the top 5 problems facing the nation today.

 

Meanwhile in an entirely unrelated coincidence: French lawmakers get a new procedure to remove their president for "breach of their duties that is clearly incompatible with the exercise of their mandate".  The Local

 Vive la République!

Is Pride Racist?

PRIDE by JACOB MATHAM, 1592

The other day after responding to a comment I was reading an article on collective narcissism.  That led me to another article on hubris and group pride.  In that article I found the following:

Black pride is a slogan used primarily in the United States to raise awareness for a black racial identity. The slogan has been used by African Americans of sub-Saharan African origin to denote a feeling of self-confidence, self-respect, celebrating one's heritage, and being proud of one's personal worth.

White pride is a slogan used primarily in the United States for a white race identity. This is traditionally closely aligned with white supremacy, white separatism, and other extreme manifestations of white racism.

So let me see if I get this... Black Pride is a good thing, White Pride is a bad thing.

He said what?

 

Executive action on immigration would amount to violating our laws and would be “very difficult to defend legally.

“If we start broadening that (DREAM), then essentially, I’ll be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally, So that’s not an option.”

“The problem is, is that I’m the president of the United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States. My job is to execute laws that are passed.”

“The easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws,”

New York Times

Bias?

 

Earlier this year the Oregon Senate passed Bill 833, a measure to give driver's licenses to illegal aliens.  Opponents gathered enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot and they had a vote.

Do a Google News search on Oregon Ballot Measure 88 and you'll find little reporting outside of Oregon itself.  Would you not think that with all of the talk of executive action to effectively grant amnesty to some six million persons residing illegally in the United States that the national media might pick up on the results of this referendum?

But Oregon's a liberal state you might say, the results wouldn't reflect national opinion... you might think that, but in liberal Oregon, the measure to give illegals driver's licenses was defeated by...

66.4%

In fact the measure was defeated in every county in Oregon except for Multnomah, which is part of the Portland metropolitan area.  And you wonder why conservatives think that the mainstream media is biased against them.

The Sound of Music

Photo: Michael Schmid

The Sound of Music opened on Broadway on this day in 1959.  Many people don't realize that the musical is based on a true story and is based on the memoir of  Marie von Trapp.  Below is the song Edelweiss performed by August, Amanda, Melanie, and Sofia von Trapp, the great grandchildren of Captain and Maria von Trapp.

Saturday Sessions: Clara Ann Fowler

The Singin' Rage,

Miss Patti Page

 

Traditional Pop singer Clara Ann Fowler who went by the stage name Patti Page was the best selling female artist of the 1950's.

Starting with the 1948 hit "Confess", Patti Page was one of the first pop artists to overdub her own voice due to a strike that made background singers unavailable.

Her signature song, "The Tennessee Waltz", first recorded in 1950 was one of the best selling singles of the 20th century.

Patti Smith continued to top Pop charts through the mid-sixties and remained a chart topping performer in adult contemporary and country music into the early 1980's.  Patti continued to perform, recording her first live album in 1998; Live at Carnegie Hall, and performed up until 2012.  She passed away on January 1st, 2013.

Brooklyn the New Paris?

Photo: Jim Henderson

My sister used to live in Brooklyn, across the street from Sunset Park.  I remember visiting once and waking up to find all the cars on the park side of the street with slashed tires, fortunately I was on the house side of the street.  That was before she moved to the Upper East Side, just down and across the street from the Permanent Mission of St Kitts and Nevis.  I thought the Upper East Side was way cool.  Imagine my surprise to read that Brooklyn is the new Paris.

Now the wannabe city is Brooklyn...  Ballard is the Brooklyn of Seattle. Glasgow and Melbourne both claim Brooklyn cool. And Oakland, California, has been called the Brooklyn of San Francisco...  There's even a Brooklyn of Paris: the once-gritty suburb of Pantin. Its derelict, graffiti-covered warehouses have been taken over by galleries and artists, turning it into the hippest place in the City of Light. MSN

I haven't been to New York in four years, haven't been to Brooklyn for even longer.  Last time I was there we climbed up on the roof to spectacular views of the Harbor and World Trade Center.

Photo: GK Tramrunner229

 So... is Brooklyn "the new epicenter of cool" ?