A few months ago, I opined that America, home of the best educated and most dynamic people on earth, have become so abused by the toxic mix of politics, special interest greed, and media idiocy, that virtually every policy decision would be the most stupid decision imaginable.

Once again, I think I will be proven right. The article below outlines just how idiotic the “next big thing” is going to be. Like the mortgage bubble, it will end badly.

Fueling Up the Next Bubble

The market normally dispatches the grim reaper to punish foolish entrepreneurs and credulous investors on a slay-as-you-go basis, returning talent and salvageable assets to the fertilizer heap. When played right, only the participants in the game lose their shirts. The cautious crowd gets to watch and say “Tsk-tsk, they should have known better.”

Sometimes, just sometimes, a crazy idea works. When it does, the lucky, smart and bold earn rich rewards. This rare dispensation of disproportionate wealth, along with the knowledge that failure is rarely fatal, is what motivates the thoughtful risk taking that propels genuine progress. Welcome to capitalism in its purest form.

When the grim reaper’s hand is staid by the twin forces of mass delusion and public policy, the game of capitalism mutates. It can become rational to bet on the irrational if you believe your timing is good enough to leave the greater fool holding the bag. Crazy ideas that have a chance of working get lost in a flood of crazier ideas chasing rewards whether the ideas work or not.

Every idiot fad in public education comes to mind…

Quick buck artists crowd out fundamentals players as slick positioning trumps due diligence. Early stage investors who cash out not by resolving risk, but by hiring fat-fee investment bankers to package and sell off their risk attract ever more capital when they trumpet their “returns.” Political entrepreneurs outnumber market entrepreneurs as landing government subsidies proves more lucrative than landing customers. With the exception of loathed shorts that are punished mercilessly if their timing is bad, and investigated by authorities if their timing is good, everyone is motivated to keep the delusion alive.

Sooner or later reality rears its ugly head and the grim reaper breaks loose. Except now he doesn’t come for just the foolish and imprudent. With pent up fury he spreads devastation far and wide, breathing down the necks of even the cautious crowd as they flee for safety. Thanks to the unlimited powers of a democracy stripped of constitutional limits run by populist princes on the payroll of this perverted version of capitalism, the hapless taxpayer is usually called on to clean up the mess.

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A Nobel Prize winning PowerPoint presenter wants to end our reliance on fossil fuels in ten years. More power to him if he chooses to bet his own money to make it happen – may he become the wealthiest man on earth if his crazy ideas prove right. But are we really going to gamble 20% of the GDP of the entire human race?

Great banks came tumbling down because they believed computer models could predict housing prices five years out. Are we really going to bet our collective industrial infrastructure on computer models that predict the weather fifty years from now?

A car company that has proven it can only make a profit selling pickup trucks to Joe Six-pack is going to get a public rescue. Do we really think they can be made successful by forcing them to switch over to making compact cars for a handful of affluent environmental zealots with short commutes?

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Experienced real estate appraisers proved incapable of honestly assessing the value of a house. But an army of green jobs is going to be created for freshly minted specialists to estimate carbon footprints?

Trillions are going to be spent on bridges and highways by the same people who are browbeating us to drive less?

The world’s most powerful energy source generates no greenhouse gasses. Yet it can’t get a foot in the door because it’s held shut by gale force winds emanating from an army of bloviating lawyers?

You have to admire the way this guy writes. Though the article is more rant than analysis, you simply must know that he’s right. One only need look at “Cap and Trade” proposals to see that the opportunities for waste, corruption, and financial chicanery abound with such schemes.

Look, providing some tax incentives for saving energy is a good idea, as is raising the gas tax to a point that spurs innovation and changes in behavior. We all want a better environment and less waste. However, the idea that a pack of morons like Chuck Schumer, Ted Stevens, Larry Craig, and Barbara Boxer are going to be able to manage the “energy economy” is a bet so stupid that you have to be an intellectual to make it.

No matter how you slice it, making any person in the world pay more than the market price for any good or service on the planet is just bad policy.

Obama to see light on trade

KEVIN Rudd and his Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation and G20 colleagues have twice pledged loyalty to free trade. But the leader whose support matters most, US president-elect Barack Obama, was not there. What is worse, his protectionist rhetoric on the campaign trail has free traders worried.

As the credit crisis becomes a sharp US recession, Obama will have powerful political incentive to appease a middle America that believes free trade has done more harm than good.

But history in the form of the previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, gives reason for hope that Obama will undergo a quick conversion from trade sceptic to free-trade champion.

The 1990s are looked back on as the halcyon days of free trade in America. What is often forgotten is that Clinton was quite protectionist on the electoral stump in 1992. But, once in office, he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, ratified the Uruguay round of global trade liberalisation, helped create the World Trade Organisation and then pushed for China’s entry into it.

The likely depth of America’s economic downturn makes it unlikely that Obama will be a Clintonesque advocate of free trade. But concerns about rising American protectionism are overdrawn.

Three big issues on the American trade docket will give the world early answers on how far Obama will go towards free trade: whether to revive the Doha round of talks, whether to punish China for America’s massive trade deficit with it, and whether to sign the US-South Korea free trade deal.

If Obama is as smart as the media has been telling us he is, he will find a way to ratify trade agreements. He will likely punt on Columbia, however, in the hopes that the economic damage to that country will push it into the hands of a Chavez-style thug.

I will be updating this post and bringing it back to the top over the Christmas season. If it helps trigger ideas for Christmas gift, it will have served its purpose. Also, if you have anything you’d like to add, feel free to leave it in a comment.
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Scott Peck’s first book. It’s hard to describe the number of important insights this book has to offer. One simple example is that “Life is hard,” and that the moment “you understand that bit of wisdom, it starts to get easier.” And that’s only in the first few pages.

This book is the anathema of all of that “self-help” garbage filling our landfills.
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“They Made America” is one of the best books on the entrepreneurs who innovated and invented this nation into its current position. It is a showcase of just how hard the innovator has to fight the “groupthink” in nearly every domain.

You will really enjoy the stories of the trials and tribulations of the creators and innovators of the age.

If you ever wanted to teach a class in Business History, or Entrepreneurship, this could be your text book.
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Galaxy Quest is good clean fun, and a remarkably entertaining movie. If you liked Star Trek, and don’t mind seeing it spoofed, you should buy this movie.
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Make no mistake about it, this comendy has a “conservative” message. Sure, it’s wrapped in some silliness and vulgarity. But you can’t miss it’s basic point.

View the trailer HERE!
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This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It is offers a good description of exactly what evil is, what it is based upon and how it operates. Best of all, after you read this book, you will be able to quickly identify “evil” people. (thus allowing you to stay out of their way) We aren’t talking about the Hitlers and Stalins here. We are talking about quickly identifying those toxic people who always seem to sow chaos, confusion, and destruction in their wake.
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Boyd not only changed the “art of war”, he probably saved countless lives of our troops. If you are a strategy buff, and want to know the basic algorithm of strategy to apply to political campaigns, war, or business, buy this book. It is great story about an American who was basically too good at what he did to get recognized for his brilliance.
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Forget Daniel Dennett. This book will blow your socks off once you get your head around the fact that language had to come BEFORE consciousness.

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Everyone needs a cordless drill. Seriously. Everyone.
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I discovered “Collective Soul” back in 2000. I knew a few of their hits, but not the overall quality of the band. If you like rock with a bit of melody to go with the power chords, you’ll like Collective Soul.

Regardless of your position in life, please consider removing your child from America’s awful public education system. I know, that sounds radical, but I’m right. It will be better for your children. It will be better for America if your children are removed from such a negative force in our society.

One thing for you to consider is to home school your child. Remove yourself from the rat race of Suburbanization. Remove yourself from renting your “owned” home from the greedy local school district. Power down your “earnings,” move to a low tax area, and power up your child’s learing. It is a good choice.

Home Schooling Goes Mainstream

“I never really told anybody about my music at school, only my really close friends,” Cheyenne Kimball told People Magazine in 2006. “Then [school officials] actually aired the show around the whole entire school, and that caused a lot of problems. I was a straight-A student and all of a sudden I didn’t want to go to school anymore because of the things people were saying. That’s why I’m homeschooled now.” Cheyenne, winner of NBC’s America’s Most Talented Kid at age 12, recording artist, and star of her own MTV show, is just one of many high-profile Americans whose educational choice is home schooling. Movie stars Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, married in 1997, home school their two children along with Will’s nephew. Why? “For flexibility,” Pinkett Smith told an Essence reporter, “so they can stay with us when we travel, and also because the school system in this country—public and private—is designed for the industrial age.

Cyber Charters are an option as well.

After three decades of explosive growth, the rate of increase in home schooling has begun to slow somewhat, and home-schooling rates are even declining a bit in some states. In Pennsylvania, there were 24,415 reported home schoolers in 2002, the largest figure the state had ever seen. But in 2003 the number of registered home schoolers dropped to 24,076. In 2004 it declined again to 23,287, a decrease of 3.3 percent from the previous year.

Among the possible explanations for declines in home schooling is the increased use of home-based public charter schools, often called “cybercharters” because of their extensive use of online curricula, by families that had previously been home schooling independently. Home schooling is blending with other education movements to lead the way toward a 21st-century education matrix that is far more dynamic and adaptive than the schooling patterns of the past.

“Dynamic” and “adaptive!!” Those two words are death to corrupt teacher’s unions. Please by dynamic. Please be adaptive. Please kill the teacher’s unions.

“The New Home Schoolers” explode the myth of “diversity in public education. Public schools are the anathema (look it up) of diversity, as they stifle an entire nation with a patently awful form of monothought conformity.

Survey research has revealed a heterogeneous population of home schoolers and higher rates of minority home schooling than expected. Economist Guillermo Montes’s analysis of data from the massive 2001 National Household Education Survey found that 70 percent of respondents cited a nonreligious reason as the top motivator in their decision to home school. Home schoolers whose motivations are primarily religious have certainly not gone away, but they are now joined by those whose reasons range from concerns about special education to bad experiences with teachers or school bullies to time-consuming outside activities to worries over peanut allergies (see Figure 1).

Increasing participation in home schooling among African Americans has drawn media attention in recent years. The U.S. Department of Education estimated that by 2003 there were 103,000 black home schoolers (see Figure 2). Nonprofits, including the Children’s Scholarship Fund, founded in 1998, have provided vouchers to help low-income families afford private schools, and some are using the money to home school. Several nationwide support groups have been formed by African Americans to build momentum; the newest and largest is the National African-American Homeschoolers Alliance, cofounded in 2003 by Jennifer James. By 2006 the organization had 3,000 members. James learned of home schooling by watching the success of home schoolers at the Scripps National Spelling Bee and embraced it for her family. “Families are running out of options,” James told the St. Petersburg Times in 2005. “There’s this persistent achievement gap, and a lot of black children are doing so poorly in traditional schools that parents are looking for alternatives.” Home schooling is becoming the method of choice for many, and as such “the Black homeschool movement is growing at a faster rate than the general homeschool population,” according to J. Michael Smith, president and cofounder of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), the nation’s most powerful home-school advocacy organization.

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My homeschooling group includes Moslem, Jewish, Quaker, Baptist, Messianic Jews, Pagan, Baha’i, atheist, agnostic, Catholic, unity, evangelicals, other Protestant denominations, and probably more. We have African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Middle Easterners, and other minorities. We have stay-at-home dads and single mothers. We are FAR more diverse than the neighborhood school I pulled my oldest child out of 10 years ago.

Please home school. Please help destroy the awful, greedy, corrupt, and inneffective American public school bureaucracy.

I haven’t read Powerline in a while. I think I might start looking at it again on a regular basis. They have a great post about how the police in Mumbai, though armed, did nothing to defend citizens in train station.

The report comes from a brave photo-journalist.

Somebody get me a Gun!

D’Souza describes his experience at the railway terminal where many innocent Indians were murdered:

“I first saw the gunmen outside the station,” Mr D’Souza said. “With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles.

“Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop,” he recalled. “The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down.”

But what angered Mr D’Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. “There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything,” he said. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.” …

I wondered earlier today how a mere ten terrorists could bring a city of 19 million to a standstill. Here in the U.S., I don’t think it would happen. I think we have armed security guards who know how to use their weapons, supplemented by an unknown number of private citizens who are armed and capable of returning fire. The Indian experience shows it is vitally important that this continue to be the case. This is a matter of culture as much as, or more than, a matter of laws.

Another storyline that is just plain ticking me off is how “brilliant” the attack was…

The audacious attack which took a year to plan

Ten terrorists dedicated to fighting for an independent Kashmir were selected for an operation from which they were likely never to return.

The tactics were relatively simple: to strike at multiple targets while simultaneously slaughtering as many civilians as possible before going “static” in three of the locations within the city.

But such a plan would require a year of planning, reconnaissance, the covert acquisition of ships and speed boats as well as the forward basing of weapons and ammunition secretly hidden inside at least one hotel.

Am I the only person that doesn’t think this was difficult? Why does the media act as if these Bozos are brilliant because they can stash weapons and synchronize watches? How hard is it to get in shape, learn to operate a few explosives and guns, and kill innocent people?

We don’t have all of the facts yet, but if the goal was to take hostages, these folks failed right off the bat. If their goal was to kill civilians, then all you need to do to minimize the next attack, and eventually prevent others, is to arm the citizenry.

Legalize concealed carry in India, and these a-holes don’t last 5 minutes, no matter how well trained they are. This isn’t rocket science.

This nugget of extreme wisdom comes from a Politico article written by Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina.

“Unity in the essentials, diversity in the nonessentials, and charity in all things”

Of course, we could all quibble about what is, and what isn’t “essential.” Some angry white males probably think it is “essential” that the GOP work to kick every Hispanic out of the USA. Others think it is essential that we become an open, assimilationist party (as opposed to the Democrats “Balkanizationalist” model).

That said, Sanford’s, and Augustine’s advice is pretty good. I just don’t know if the party has the ability to heed it.

What’s next for the GOP?

We would be wise to start with the biblical notion of first taking the log out of your own eye before worrying about the splinter in someone else’s. In other words, Republicans would do well to first focus on how we were beaten in November not by Democrats, but in many cases by those in our own party.

Our party took nothing short of a shellacking nationally. Some on the left will say our electoral losses are a repudiation of our principles of lower taxes, smaller government and individual liberty. But Election Day was not a rejection of those principles — in fact, cutting taxes and spending were important tenets of Barack Obama’s campaign.

Instead, voters rejected the fact that while Republicans have campaigned on the conservative themes of lower taxes, less government and more freedom, they have consistently failed to govern that way. Americans didn’t turn away from conservatism, they instead turned away from many who faked it.

GM should be broken up and sold to any buyer who wants it. All assets should be turned over the the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. to cover the costs of taking over GM’s responsibilities.

Pension Agency Sounds Alarm on Big Three

“We take our obligations very seriously, managing our plans with integrity and prudence even during difficult times,” a Ford spokesman said. Chrysler declined to comment and GM couldn’t be reached. Each company has said a bankruptcy filing would be prohibitively expensive and could threaten car sales. However, GM and Chrysler have said they could run short of cash in coming months, barring federal aid.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. steps in to take over failed pension plans. After studying updated pension information for the auto makers in recent weeks, the agency has grown increasingly concerned that it might have to cover billions of dollars in pensions if one or more of the car companies should file for bankruptcy-court protection.

The agency’s letters were sent as the auto makers scramble to assemble blueprints for congressional leaders demanding viable business plans in exchange for a $25 billion bailout.

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When writng books about the “fall” of Western Civilization (worry not, it will rise again eventually), future analysts and historians will be able to point to the “Pension” as one of the root causes of decline. As our society was able to throw off so much ‘value’ (in terms of lifestyle choices, baubles, and geegaws as well as food and shelter), the society became enamored with the absurd notion that its most productive citizen could quit at age 55 and live of the next generation(s). (which they then, in their laziness and narcissism, decided not to even produce)

This worked for a while, but as millions of public employee unions decided to go along for the ride, and increasingly disconnected soccer moms rubber stamped every increase in a bloated public bureaucracy that was failing miserably (education, fire, police, municipal, - and coming soon! - daycare!) , the system eventually failed.

With the rich lacking all political will to challenge the “tax eaters”, and the corporate chieftans shilling for “free healthcare” instead of challenging the unproductive “zeitgeist” of the times, each layer of burden laid upon the productive induced them to become less productive. EVERYONE wanted their “bailout.”

It was a nice idea, but the system can’t / couldn’t withstand the effects of human nature, which even Barack Obama will not be able to change.

Pensions and retirement that rely on anything other than your own efforts ought to be outlawed.

“Saving” our schools is NOT the function of one person, and it never will be. America is seems to be caught in the grip of the absurd notion that a “Czar” or an “Education President” can “fix” our schools.

Can She Save Our Schools?

The U.S. spends more per pupil on elementary and high school education than most developed nations. Yet it is behind most of them in the math and science abilities of its children. Young Americans today are less likely than their parents were to finish high school. This is an issue that is warping the nation’s economy and security, and the causes are not as mysterious as they seem. The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research. And Washington, which spends more money per pupil than the vast majority of large districts, is the problem writ extreme, a laboratory that failure made. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

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Rhee took over Anacostia High and the district’s 143 other schools in June 2007, when Mayor Adrian Fenty named her chancellor. Her appointment stunned the city. Rhee, then 37, had no experience running a school, let alone a district with 46,000 students that ranks last in math among 11 urban school systems. When Fenty called her, she was running a nonprofit called the New Teacher Project, which helps schools recruit good teachers. Most problematic of all, Rhee is not from Washington. She is from Ohio, and she is Korean American in a majority-African-American city. “I was,” she says now, “the worst pick on the face of the earth.”

But Rhee came highly recommended by another prominent school reformer: Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City’s schools. And Rhee was once a teacher–in a Baltimore elementary school with Teach for America–and the experience convinced her that good teachers could alter the lives of kids like Rhodes.

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Each week, Rhee gets e-mails from superintendents in other cities. They understand that if she succeeds, Rhee could do something no one has done before: she could prove that low-income urban kids can catch up with kids in the suburbs. The radicalism of this idea cannot be overstated. Now, without proof that cities can revolutionize their worst schools, there is always a fine excuse. Superintendents, parents and teachers in urban school districts lament systemic problems they cannot control: poverty, hunger, violence and negligent parents. They bicker over small improvements such as class size and curriculum, like diplomats touring a refugee camp and talking about the need for nicer curtains. To the extent they intervene at all, politicians respond by either throwing more money at the problem (if they’re on the left) or making it easier for some parents to send their kids to private schools (if they’re on the right).

If there is one sign of hope regarding education, it is that the drones in the media are starting to understand just how useless and corrupt the education bureaucracy has become. If they are starting to write sentences like the one bolded above, they may start to realize that the entire bloated ediface of education bureaucracy is worthless - EVEN in the SUBURBS.

Those of you reading this post need to know that no one person can “fix” education. YOU can fix education by telling all your friends the following four words.

Fund Children, NOT Bureaucracy.

It’s hard not to buy into the “America in decline” mantra with our financial system imploding around us. But rumors of our demise are STILL greatly exaggerated. Here is one of the latest articles cataloging our fall from power.

Is America’s new declinism for real?

But last week the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at Texas A&M hosted a conference designed to discuss the latest, markedly gloomy world view issued by America’s intelligence establishment. Every four years the National Intelligence Council – which oversees America’s baroque collection of intelligence agencies – releases a global trends report, which is given to the new president.

The latest report, published on November 20, has made headlines around the world. The front page of Britain’s Guardian newspaper shouted “2025: the end of US dominance”. For once, the headline is broadly accurate. As the NIC frankly notes, “the most dramatic difference” between the new report and the one issued four years ago is that it now foresees “a world in which the US plays a prominent role in global events, but the US is seen as one among many global actors”. The report issued four years ago had projected “continuing US dominance”.

The NIC report has made people sit up because it comes from the heart of the US security establishment. But it is part of a broader intellectual trend in America: a “new declinism”. This mood marks a complete break with the aggressive confidence of the Bush years and the “unipolar moment”. Its starting assumption is that America, while still the most powerful country in the world, is in relative decline.

In the middle of all of this financial meltdown, it is hard not to agree. OTOH, if America isn’t the world leader, then who is? China?

China fears job riots

China is most concerned about the growing labor unrest, the human resources minister, Yin Weimin, said at a news conference. The increase in unrest has paralleled the increase of business and factory closings and job losses.

Yin noted that in the past two months, some businesses, mainly smaller ones, have been forced to close or suspend production.

Several hundred taxi drivers went on strike Wednesday in Chongqing, in southwestern China, after the government said it planned to put more cabs on the district’s roads, thereby increasing competition, the Gansu Daily newspaper said.

The beginnings of a disintegrating China - Part I

With all of this positive news, who should be worried? My answer: anyone that understands the ripple effect, that’s who! The leaders say one thing to pacify the people while on the streets another world exists. I want to delve into the beginnings of a disintegrating China.

I sat in disbelief reading a recent Shenzhen local paper stating that “Some 9,000 of the 45,000 factories in the cities of Guangzhou, Dongguan and Shenzhen are expected to close down in the next three months according to the Dongguan City Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment estimates. Those closures would see up to 2.7 million jobs cut as overseas demand for consumer goods and clothes fades.” That’s more than 50,000 a day if you believe official figures, which I do not, and I believe the number is actually higher.

The association says that, by end of January, demand will shrink by 30 per cent, and these are just mainland factories. The Federation of Hong Kong Industries said that about 25 per cent of the 70,000 Hong Kong-owned companies in southern China “could go to the wall by the end of January”. Yet on the very next page I read an article quoting the Ministry of Commerce as stating, “Although it is likely to cause a decline in China’s external demand, our stock market and financial system will not be fundamentally affected”.

I can understand the flip-flopping stories as a means to keep a population from panicking; after all the Shanghai A-shares have declined more than 60 per cent from their bubbly peak at the beginning of the year. The Hang Sang in Hong Kong and the Shenzhen indices are not doing much better. Real estate prices have slipped 20 per cent in the last six months, all of the recent factory closings with many more to come and this is just the beginning of a prolonged feedback loop.

The central government’s plan to reverse a foreign trade decline is to increase domestic consumption, restructure industry and boost innovation to change its economic development mode; that’s fine but first you need to have an expanding domestic economy to do that.

I worry about the moral degradation of our people as much as the next person. The public sector screws the worker out of their future with their obscene pensions and payroll bloat while the rich MBA skanks screw us out of our futures with their opaque debt instruments.

It isn’t pretty.

But at the end of the day, do you really want to bet against America?

As I was surfing the web this morning, looking for as much information on the Mumbai terrorist attacks as I could find, it occured to me that these types of attacks - coordinated attempts at hostage-taking of civilians - would be nearly impossible in a society where law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry guns.

While the limp American media elite view this type of thinking as extreme, the fact is that is obvious to anyone applying a modicum of common sense. Regardless, in my search for information, I Googled the words “India’s Gun Laws.”

What a stunning series of links!! The best is right at the top of the page.
Gun Ownership in India

Colonial Roots of Gun-Control

I live in India and I am a proud firearm owner - but I am the exception not the norm, an odd situation in a country with a proud martial heritage and a long history of firearm innovation. This is not because the people of India are averse to gun ownership, but instead due to Draconian anti-gun legislation going back to colonial times.

The quotes alone are worth the time spent on the page.

An example of British thinking in colonial times:

“No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.” –James Burgh (Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses) [London, 1774-1775]

And thoughts (on this subject) of the man who wanted to rule the world:

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.” — Adolf Hitler (H.R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talks 1941-1944)

Patrick Henry

“I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

Here is the sad truth, folks. The many shootings/events by nuts and/or terrorists show that the absence of the ability to defend ourselves creates an “attractive nusiance” for such predators.

Terrorism alone is another reason to arm the citizenry.