Blogging Break

Back online in a couple days.  Until then, please go visit those cool bloggers in our Blogroll at the left.

Some more NSA pics for ya:

Hat Contest!

All The Right Snark is holding a contest until (thru?) Thursday.  Winner gets a hat!

It is a caption contest.  This is the photo above.  The person on the left is the infamous Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator who filibustered the first attempt to limit abortion in the state.  You may recall the measure passed the following week.  To learn more about here, go to this Townhall article by Guy Benson.

Click Here to enter the contest post.

Related... We found this killer-coupon at Knuckledraggin.

Elysium - Next Hollywood Flop?

If our friends on FB have any say in it!  Here is what we've seen so far this opening day:

Matt Damon's desperate attempt to drive up ticket sales: He criticizes Obama!  "Obama broke up with me." (Politico)

We doubt he'll come close to nailing this Elysium role like he did his role in Team America.  He might be a bed-wetting Hollywood liberal, but he rocked in that movie!

A hearty Ushanka Tip to everyone who sees this movie as the Commie Propaganda that it is.

Quote of the Day

Robb at Sharp As A Marble:

Think about this – there is nothing that the anti gunners can sell. Nothing. There is no anti-gun range where you can take your anti-gun targets and not shoot them. You can’t buy accessories for your anti-gun. There is no market for setting out a day with the family to go to a plot of land and ban guns.

The only item in their shopping cart is misery and their currency is lies.

Maybe anti-gunners prefer an economic system where there are no transactions...

Marxism and Islam

Diana West - 62 minutes of discussing the threats to our liberty.



14:15 mark:

As I read, and read, I began to discover, much to my amazement, that during WWII the US embarked on a campaign to whitewash communism that is uncannily similar to what we have seen in the wake of 9-11 in terms of whitewashing Islam.

U/T: Hat Owner Doc and The Heritage Foundation

Quote of the Day

Nice to see there are still some optimists.

Velociworld:

This guy? This guy we have now? He's nothing. He's vaporware. As Theodore Roosevelt once said, I could carve a better man out of a banana.

The Left is old and tired. Like me. They can be rolled back. Put your kid in trade school. Refuse federal school loans. Create plumbers and engineers and HVAC masters. Starve this beast.

Law school is a sure path to unemployment and $250,000 in debt. Don't play that game. The lesson we must teach these Marxists disguised as liberal Democrats is: We will roll you back. 

Via WesternRifleShooters

Lone Survivor - The Movie

Limited opening, December 27. 




We'll be there.

You have time to read the book.  It is one of the greatest stories of our current war.

U/T: to our nation's fighters, including author and Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell

Quote of the Day

Adam Corrola in his recent podcast:

I did HuffPo yesterday… They wanted to get into why I called them ‘assholes’, basically, for taking my Gavin Newsome thing. They did what a lot of folks on the left do, which is they take a problem… Then they take the person who would like to find the root of the problem, label him a racist, offer no solutions for the problem, other than me and my racism and then move on. As conquering heroes, by the way. They make proclamations of a problem, and if you offer a serious solution to the problem…that becomes hate speak. I don’t know if you know this, but suggesting that families stay together and focus on education has become hate speak. Does that seem like hate speak to you? … So I get into it with [Lieutenant Governor of California] Gavin Newsom, the headline on the Huffington Post is, ‘Carolla wants to know what’s wrong with blacks and Hispanics.’ Is that what happened?… It’s not.

---

“Me asking somebody…to engage in a behavior that I know would lead to a path to success is not racist… Look, listen, there’s a club in this town… The cool guy comedy club is super left-wing, throws around a lot of terms like ‘the pipeline from schools to prisons’ and ‘voter suppression’ and things like that,” Carolla continued. “The little things that you and I wouldn’t think of as a big issue, such as getting valid ID in the state that you live in, or focusing on schoolwork and education and homework and things like that. These are the things that they don’t think that certain cultures are up to. And so they use that and they sit up on top of Mount Pious, and they look down, and they throw around these terms, and then they all go to their parties that don’t involve any of these nationalities, and they smoke weed and they talk about what a racist I am.”

---

“You have to understand, every time somebody says, ‘you’re racist’, ‘you’re sexist’, ‘you’re homophobic’, really what they’re saying is, ‘I’m not’, ‘I’m better.’ It’s not really about me, it’s about them,” Carolla said. “It’s much more to do with them than does with me… It’s mainly a narcism. ‘You are fat. Thus, I am skinny.’ ‘You are racist. Thus, I’m evolved.’ ‘You’re homophobic. Thus, I am not.’ You see what I’m saying? All the finger pointing is really about self-congratulation.”

Bravo!

Friday Afternoon Cigar

We're about half way through Ion Mihai Pacepa's new book, Disinformation.  He shares the honor with Ayn Rand as the only other author to have two books in our Library book list at the left.  Pacepa ran Communist Romania's Intelligence organization before defecting to the US in 1978.  You can't get better insight into the priorities and attitudes of the former Soviet leaders than what you get from Pacepa.

Disinformation centers on the KGB smear campaign against pope Pious XXII.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Soviets wanted to discredit the Vatican (and all religion) by connecting them to Hitler and the Nazis.  Pacepa explains how this was done using media, the arts, etc.  While explaining this, he exposes other Soviet practices, priorities and attitudes.  Here is a timeless lesson on P98:

Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy.  The Jews, who for centuries had not been protected by the power of a state, proved a convenient enemy for both Nazism and Communism.  Nowadays the general perception is that Nazi Germany was the cradle of anti-Semitism - and it is not easy to change that perception.  Nevertheless, before the words Nazi Holocaust were on everyone's tongue, we had the Russian word pogrom, meaning massacre.  

We smoked a Rocky Patel Edge on a beautiful Ohio Friday.

Is That Pin Photoshopped?

A hat-wearing comrade shared this image with us. And then we had to prove that a picture really is worth a thousand words!

Nice group, comrade!

The KGB spent billions during the Cold War to make the US look impotent.  They failed.  Maybe a subject for a future Ushanka post:  Was their failure a result of their tactics, or our leaders?

But what goes around comes around.  Agent Putin's patience has been rewarded with the Snowden NSA whistle blower asylum deal. 

We are disheartened that Snowden wasn't invited back to face his criminal charges and a promised reduced sentence.  He is not a hero, nor a traitor (like Manning).  He is a whistle blower.

The crime wasn't Snowden's.  The real crime was the absolute lack of outrage among our elected elites.  It turns out every member of congress was both aware of the NSA total-surveillance program and supportive of it. How's that for representation?

Just Wednesday a family in New York was visited by the Obama version of the NKVD after their family had made Google searches of "pressure cooker" and "backpack."  (The media did not mention if their searches also included words like fertilizer, crop-duster, RPG, bomb, Larry Sinclair, or jihad.)  This story reminds us of another picture:

So if they can respond to a combination of Internet searches, why aren't we seeing the mass arrest of criminals?  Cell technology tells us who was in an area at the time of a crime.  Face recognition can take a partial image from a surveillance tape and return an identity.  The same technology that 'nabbed' that family in New York can be used to find people planning a crime over email or social media.  And with email and Facebook archives at the NSA, we can find criminals who have bragged of their crimes.

Yet we haven't.

Which begs the question: "Does this total surveillance exist to reduce crime and protect the citizens?"

If not, why does it exist?

Our theory: government employees are tired of looking impotent, incompetent and pathetic after the foreign-directed terrorist actions: the shoe-bomber, underware-bomber, and Boston Marathon, etc.  Attention is now focused on their massive vacation-day and sick-day benefits, their higher-than private sector pay, their protection from dismissal over incompetence, misbehavior or Obama economy, the layers of bureaucracy that protect their layers of fat, or the glaring indictment of the failures of Affirmative Action that their existence amplifies each day.

Criminals don't cooperate.  They are dirty, troublesome, crafty, and elusive.  Why not define, then pursue, a new class of criminal?

Why not kick in the doors of people who don't plan on defending themselves against force?  People who would never think of arguing with a person with a badge.  People who would not let the lack of a warrant stop strangers from entering their home.  People who would celebrate the arrival of these government employees in their armored personnel carriers and with their automatic weapons because a wounded unarmed college dropout might be in the neighborhood.

All of a sudden the government employee transitions from the slug who can't do 10 minutes of work a week to the slug who can't do 10 minutes of work a week but is surpassing their arrest and investigation quotas.  The lucky ones might even get to shoot a dog or two in self defense.