Mrs. Elizabeth Powel asked Dr Benjamin Franklin, “ so what have we got? A Republic, or a Monarchy?”

Dr Franklin answered, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

But today you find so many talking about “Democracy”. Democracy is two wolves and a lamp arguing about what to have for dinner. It is mob rule.

The republic our founding fathers gave to us is amazing. The people have done much to damage it, making the election of senators a popular vote being one of my least favorite changes.

The fact that they were able to put it all on four pages plus the bill of rights is in itself amazing. If you were to look at other constitutions you find hundreds if not thousands of pages, most of which translate into “Unless the government wants to.”

Our Constitution lays out our form of government and then sets acknowledges the some of the rights given to us by our creator. Rights the exist regardless of government.

The Atlantic is left leaning. They love to pontificate from the basis of false premises and to build their arguments.

The Constitutional Flaw That’s Killing American Democracy is one such article. Yes, our Constitution protects the Republic, not “American Democracy.”

So what does Jedediah Britton-Purdy think the flaw in the Constitution is? According to the author it is the fact that it is just so darn hard to change the Constitution.

The Constitution doesn’t have to be something we merely inherit; it could be something we can change ourselves—starting with rewriting the too-stringent rules for making such changes.

People on the left seem to crave power. How the get there never seems to bother them, as long as they get the power they want. When the Democrats were in the majority in the Senate they decided to kill the filibuster in regards to judicial appointees, because the Republicans were just nah sayers. All they ever did was say “NO”.

So the filibuster was killed. The Democrats loved it. Until that exact moment when the Republicans took control of the Senate. At which point they started screaming that the filibuster should be reinstated. It is always the way of the Left. They change the rules and tell us the new rules are good, up until the moment those same rules are used against them.

Some federal judge in California doesn’t like Trump’s executive order because it will harm some set of people or return to the status quo of pre Obama? Then it is just wonderful that the judge puts a nation wide injunction against that EO.

Some judge in Texas finds that Biden’s EO is unconstitutional and articulates the reason why and it is absolutely unacceptable that a single man in a black robe stop a Presidential Executive Order.

But the Constitution is too fundamentally antidemocratic a document to serve democratic purposes reliably. If we want to make it genuinely and lastingly democratic, we will first have to consider changing it in the most basic way: by amending Article V, which governs amendments and so serves as the gatekeeper for living generations …

For years SCOTUS turned out liberal opinions that were only loosely based on the Constitution but reflected “the will of the people.” The will of the people is written in our Constitution. The will of the people can change that document. Having a “living constitution” which is malabule to whatever the current leftist judge wants it to say is not good law, it is not good government.

The Constitution limits our Government. It is not there to limit us. It is not there to give the government power over us.

But the root of judicial oligarchy is that the Constitution is almost impossible to change. Article V requires that amendments be ratified by three-quarters of the states, either through the state legislatures or in special conventions. (The convention route has happened only once, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933.) The upshot is that it takes only 13 states to block a proposed amendment. And to send an amendment to the states in the first place, the proposed language must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.

Today many of the arguments by the left start with an ad hominem attack. Instead of looking at what the Constitution actually says they attack it because it was written by “cis white males”. Here’s the thing, just because you don’t like the person or the people, that doesn’t mean that what they created isn’t good or true.

We must continue to stand up to the lies our opponents tell. We must continue to call out the messages of hate the spue. We are freemen and will continue to be free for as long as we can keep it.

My family recently started watching The Big Bang Theory My wife hasn’t laughed this hard since she was watching reruns of Friends. My family has fun laughing at Sheldon while looking right at me as I have some of the same tendencies.

I stumbled upon an article in The Pudding that is a good insight to the sort of censorship that happens, often in a klutzy heavy handed way.

Just ask somebody that saw Salor Moon in Japan coming to American and hearing it is a children’s show. Censorship happens.

This article is from a person that was watching in China

I quickly became a fan of the sitcom when it was officially introduced in China on a video streaming website in 2011. But when I rewatched the show in 2022 on Youku, a Chinese video streaming website backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, I couldn’t help but notice weird jumps, pauses, and disconnected canned laughter.

In 2014 streaming platforms in China received a notification from regulators:

imported American and British TV shows must be ‘reviewed and approved by officials before streaming to the public

The article has some neat graphics work in it to show what was cut and what wasn’t. It looks OK on mobile but better on a full screen.

Go read for an idea of what the Chinese government censors internally:
The Big [Censored] Theory

That peculiar institution of The South was a euphemism for slavery. Today people point to the south and blame the south for slavery.

Slavery existed before the first European explorers arrived in the New World. Slavery existed between the North American tribes long before they met the white man. Slavery and human sacrifice existed in south and central America before they met the white man.

The slave trade in africa started long before the Europeans got there and continues to this day.

To make money you want to buy when at a lower cost than you will sell. The price you can sell at is changes according to changes in demand. Sometimes you can move goods to where they are more valuable by moving through time. It gets more valuable over time.

It is much faster to increase the value of something by moving it from where it costs little to where it sells for more.

A simple two legged trade route has the lowest profitability. There is easier to compete on a two lagged route and in general the value does not increase as much as when you have a multi-legged route.

In the 17 hundreds, Boston was known for making rum. The base for making rum was molasses. Since there were many places in Boston making rum it was relatively cheap to purchase in Boston. On the other hand, the demand for molasses was very high. Trading rum to the sugar plantations of the caribbean wasn’t very profitable as the caribbean islands made rum themselves.

On the other hand, the pirates and slavers of the african gold coast were more than willing to trade the nearly worthless slaves for the much more valuable rum. So the ship owners of Boston sent their trading vessels to africa to trade rum for slaves.

Those slaves were transported to the caribbean and sold. The profit from the sale of the slaves was then used to purchase molasses to be brought back to Boston.

This generated huge profits for the ship owners of Boston.

At a time when England was actively suppressing the taking and transporting of slaves, including into the English colonies, the caribbean islands did a brisk trade in slaves.

And the traders of Boston shipped out rum and came back with molasses.

From the movie 1776 is a scene where the they are working to create the Declaration of Independence. One of the members from the southern states throws the triangle trade route in the face of John Adams in song.

Hawaii has finally issued a gun permit. They are now at 1 issued.

They have have records going back 20 years and according to Guns and Gadgets this is the first permit issued in that time frame.

Even when the McDonald opinion was issued requiring that every state have a method of issuing, I.e. No Issue was found to be unconstitutional, Hawaii had standards that were impossible to meet.

They make the claim that their very strict gun laws keep “gun violence” at a very low rate.

Gun ownership v. Violent crime with guns and Gun Permits v. Violent crime with guns are both cherry picked statistics. Some states with very limited gun ownership and permits have low violent crime with guns rates and some states with constitutional carry and significant gun ownership have low violent crime with guns rates.

In both cases, the gun rights infringers refuse to actually look at violent crime rates, they always limit it to violent crimes committed with guns.

There was a situation back in the 80’s or 90’s where a small town in Michigan(?) passed a city ordinance requiring every citizen of the city to be armed. Their crime rate dropped. Of course the infringers screamed because the crime rate in adjoining towns went up.

Hawaii has issued 1 gun carry permit since high court ruling

There are also reports flowing out of New Jersey that people are starting to receive their carry permits.

Things are changing for the better for gun rights.

There are times when you just know it is an article from the Babylon Bee…

And then you find out it’s not…

It’s now illegal for anyone under 21 to buy canned whipped cream in New York, officials say it’s to stop teens from inhaling nitrous oxide

Yep, that nanny state of the east has decided that nobody under 21 is allowed to purchase whipped cream, because some of them might be inhaling nitrous oxide.

The law, which went into effect in November 2021, is meant to prevent teenagers from using canned whipped cream to inhale nitrous oxide, otherwise known as “whippets.”

“Inhalants are invisible, volatile substances found in common household products that produce chemical vapors that are inhaled to induce psychoactive or mind-altering effects,” according to a US Drug Enforcement Administration factsheet.

Approximately 1 in 5 young people have used inhalants like whippits by the time they reach eighth grade, the DEA said. Abusing inhalants can “cause damage to the parts of the brain that control thinking, moving, vision, and hearing.”

I just can’t. The fear mongering from conflating nitrous oxide and other inhalants is pitiful.

Laughing gas, they are stopping adults from buying whipped cream because they might inhale some laughing gas.

As part of a “firearms enforcement blitz” from June 16 to July 31 in 41 southern Illinois counties, including St. Clair, Madison, Monroe, Clinton and Randolph counties, state police officers performed 710 “compliance checks,” which resulted in 295 people being “placed into compliance” with the state’s Firearms Owners Identification Card, or FOID card, law.

This Orwellian language actually means that the Illinois state police took people FOID cards from them and then forced those people to turn over their firearms. It would not surprise me if the Illinois state police keep records of who purchases what firearms. I know this did happen in Maryland. In Maryland you nad to fill out a 4473 and a MD version of the 4473 but with a lot more questions. The MD version was then sent to the state police and they kept records.

In the best of all worlds, these people would be people that had become prohibited persons under federal law. If you know that somebody is a prohibited person then it makes sense to revoke their FOID and require them to get rid of their firearms.

In order for one of these people to come into compliance they had to:

• Surrender their FOID card
• Transfer all firearms out of their possession
• Complete a firearms disposition record to detail the guns involved

Why do they need a firearms disposition record unless the IL state police are tracking what firearms people own. No wonder they hate firearms that are made by people for themselves according to federal law and according to the second amendment.

In still more Orwellian language:

Compliance checks are not about confiscating guns, but about ensuring individuals who have lost their firearms rights to transfer their firearms to law enforcement or someone who is legally able to possess them

Hmm, not confiscating guns… True, you have to transfer all firearms out of their possession. And they say right there that these people have lost their firearms rights. That means they are prohibited persons?

Nope, they don’t have to be a prohibited person to lose their FOID card and firearms rights within the state of Illinois. Law enforcement, school administrators and others are required to report when they believe a student or person should have their rights infringed.

Nearly 300 southern Illinoisans have to give up their firearms after gun rights revoked

At 0001 on 2022-08-24 (yesterday morning) the ATF’s new rules on building your own firearms went into effect. There were three big cases that were attempting to get an injunction to stop the rules from going into effect. Two were denied by the judges and one was granted in part but the final decision isn’t due until next week.

In addition to the new rules going into effect, they aren’t the same rules that were available for comments. Three days ago the ATF changed the new rules. The injunction to stop the rules from going into effect over that was also denied.

In Florida, Rebeka Jones was disqualified from running. Being a democrat she ran to the Courts and got them to overrule the law. She was on the primary and won. She will be running against Matt Gaetz.

Gun Owners of America brought suit to block the NY state law that makes places such as stadiums, hospitals and Times Square “sensitive locations” Gun rights group asks judge to block NY gun ban in Times Square, other ‘sensitive’ places

I hit a personal goal yesterday, 4 months ago I was at 330. Yesterday I weighed in at 298.5. I credit Miguel with being part of the reason I got the drive to do something about it. The changes I made were to go from a standard dinner plate to an 8in dinner plate. This let my wife feel like she was showing her love but with about 1/3 as much food going onto my plate.

I got back on the exercise bike and do 30 minutes per day, 5 days per week. When the weather gets a bit cooler we’ll be clearing the weight machine so I can use that as well. Dealing with some other issues has helped reduce my cravings and I’m just not as hungry all the time.

Is losing weight an important health goal?

Gun rights advocates cheered the Supreme Court’s June decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen as a reaffirmation of the Second Amendment’s protections of an individual right to bear arms. Gun control advocates grumbled that the decision would prove a costly disaster for states desperate to address sharply rising rates of gun violence.

And yet, as states are already proving, the truth is likely to be more complicated. Rather than an abrupt change to American gun laws, the Bruen opinion may accelerate existing political and legal trends, driving state laws toward more permissive and more restrictive gun regulations.

Red-state legislatures will likely continue their efforts to make it easier to own and carry guns — citing Bruen as a reason to relax their gun laws, repeal existing laws or vote against gun regulation. Blue states, by contrast, will likely continue to expand restrictions, citing passages in Bruen that bless gun licensing, the designation of sensitive places unsuitable for the presence of firearms, the prohibition of dangerous and unusual weapons, and the restriction of gun ownership to those who are “law abiding, responsible citizens.”

—State gun regulations are a messy patchwork. The Supreme Court’s Bruen decision won’t help

In case you didn’t hear, CNN got roasted because they claimed that the decrease in gas prices over the last couple of months should be greeted as a $100/month pay raise. Totally ignoring the fact that gas is still way up from what it was before Biden took office.
America just got a $100-a-month raise

The lame street media is finally starting to admit that it is men fucking men that is spreading Monkeypox. Of course they only admitted this after the rest of the population doubled over in laughter over the claim that it was going to affect everyone.

I agree with J.Kb., every child that comes down with Monkeypox should be treated the same as an under aged girl coming in pragnent. They might have caught it from innocuous source but at least investigate.

Sex between men, not skin contact, is fueling monkeypox, new research suggests

As soon as they admitted it was spreading between gay men the next great pandemic just evaporated.

The Citizen Times published an opinion that is so full of straw man arguments and general bad logic that it was worth a full article debunking every other sentence. You are smart, you can read and laugh or swear as you like.

Opinion: Madison County’s new AR-15 initiative is about gun rights, not student safety

The Huffington Post publishes a confession of a teacher that is willing to go on record as violating Florida law, as long as she can use a pseudonym. Like every other teacher and teacher’s union spokesperson the author has to lie in order to make it look like she’s the victim.

Lady, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Florida Has An Outrageous New Law Targeting Teachers. Here’s Why I’ll Be Breaking It.

I’ve known a couple of people with Lyme disease. It is a nasty not fatal disease. It can affect your ability to do physical labor, walk or have any energy at all. Not to mention the pain it can cause.

A vaccine for Lyme disease is in its final clinical trial

Words still have meaning, no matter how often the democrats try and change the words and meanings. One of my first introductions to this was my kids kindergarten teacher telling me he had to be nicer to his friends. They had changed the word used for “classmate” to “friend.”

My child was suppose to be “friends” with everybody in his classroom. The education industry has a long history of making up new terms and words for the same old thing and then laughing at the parents that are using last months terms and words. Nobody is as professional as them. Leave education to them.

In the same way Gov Hochul of NY has redefined “convicts” and “inmate” as “incarcerated person”. Because “convict” and “inmate” is dehumanizing and people think of them as “less than people”.

Kathy Hochul, Democrats demand ‘inmates’ must now be called ‘incarcerated person’

In 2012 a black man was spotted casing houses in a gated community. A neighborhood watch member spotted the young man and called in a suspicious person. During the conversation with the 911 operator the neighborhood watch member did not mention skin color until directly asked by the 911 operator.

At some point he lost sight of the suspect and left his vehicle to investigate. He was still talking to the 911 operator. At some point the black animal attacked this watch member taking him off his feet. The animal straddled the man and starting throwing punches “MMA style” driving the man’s head into the concrete multiple times. (See the multiple postings by J.Kb. about one punch kills).

Afraid for his life the watch member drew his legally licensed and carried firearm and shot the animal that was attacking him. Killing the animal.

The police arrived, did a preliminary investigation felt it was a justifiable homicide and declined to arrest the neighborhood watch member.

A few weeks later a media blitz struck. The media used a picture of the animal from years before, showing a bright happy smiling child. They media told us that a white man full of racial hate hunted this child (He was not yet 18 years old) and killed him.

The image used in describing that animal was always the innocent child image.

This certainly looks like a young man who has tattoos and is attempting to look like he is a part of thug life. Not a 12 year old child looking forward to a wonderful life.

There are other images that Travon posted of himself showing he was part of the thug life. There aren’t any of him doing community service or hanging with local civic groups doing good things. Mostly there are images of his self styled thug life.

On the other hand we have another 17 year old. We have multiple pictures and videos of him doing community service. He was a member of a couple of youth groups that did things like learn police procedures and learn what it means to be a law enforcement officer. He expected to go to college and was doing the prep work to get accepted.

After riots destroyed parts of Kenosha Wisconsin, he went back to his hometown to help clean up some of the vandalism the animals of the previous night had done. While still in Kenosha his friend was asked to help stand guard at couple of car lots. He agreed.

When he arrived on scene he was carrying first aid gear as well as an AR-15 style rifle. Throughout the day and evening he attempted to help people multiple times. He is seen on video attempting to extinguish a dumpster fire. He is being interviewed and breaks off the interview to lend first-aid.

Later that night he became separated from his group and a violent animal started to chase him. There is video of this animal taunting the young man multiple times earlier in the day.

The young man became cornered and when the animal grabbed at his rifle he fired. The animal went down.

Kyle original started to lend first aid when sounds of the mob screaming for blood are heard. Kyle started running towards the police line. He stumbled and fell to the ground, a man attempted to kick him in the head (see one punch kills). Kyle fires and misses. Another man swings a mace (longboard skateboard) at Kyle and connects. Kyle fires again and hits. That man drops.

A forth man approaches, Kyle turns to face him. The forth man has a pistol in his hand. He holds his hands up for a brief moment then lunges forward. Kyle fires another shot and “vaporizes” lefty’s right bicep.

Kyle retreats to the police line. Attempts to turn himself in and told to go home. He is later arrested.

After over a year, Kyle had his day in court and was found “Not Guilty” on all charges.

Which brings us to now. Kyle was spotted by a police officer in Texas. The police officer asked for a selfie and Kyle obliged him. The police department posted the selfie to their social media and immediately the hounds of the left started baying for blood.

Here is the image the media used :

You have to wonder why they choose the image of him at trial and with law enforcement standing over him? Maybe the are trying to send a message?

Growing up we had music in the house. One of the groups that was played over and over again was “Peter, Paul, and Mary”.

The stories they told with their songs would transport me.

Sometimes when reading a good Heinlein story I’d hear the trio playing the sound track to his story.

I had the privilege of seeing them in person. They had just gotten back together and were giving concerts in small venues. In this case it was a small hall in Lansing, MI. They put on a great performance and afterwards my friends and I were just hanging out talking about how good it was.

And the three of them came out to just talk with the dozen or so people that were still in the hall. I’m not one to be at a loss for words but here were three of my “heroes” within easy speaking distance, just talking. I went mute. I had no idea what to say or do. I just stared.

Paul turned to me and said something like “Are you ok? Is there anything you need?” and I stumbled out something about how I had grown up listening to them and how much of an honor it was to hear them in person.

Well about a year later there was a big event on campus. Know that there were about 65,000 students at MSU that year. The headliners for the event was Peter, Paul, and Mary.

It was a cold rainy day and we started to gather hours before they were set to perform. I’d guess there were about 5,000 to 10,000 people standing in the rain in a big field facing the stage waiting for the concert to begin.

The anointed hour arrived and Paul steps out on stage with Peter and announces. “We are so sorry, Mary has laryngitis and can’t perform.” They were very apologetic but there wasn’t going to be any concert.

And then the chant started “Mary. Mary. Mary.” growing louder and louder. The two of them left the stage and the chant continued. They came back out and there was silence and they announced again that there was going to be no concert.

The chant started up again. They were looking very concerned. Suddenly the blond hair of Mary is seen coming on to stage.

Not a single person had left at that point.

When we saw Mary a huge cheer rose up over the field. Applause echoed from the buildings 100s of yards away. Mary waved to the crowd and the clapping when on and on.

The three of them raised their hands together and took a bow, and then another. The cheering and applause never dimmed.

Then they turned and walked of the stage and those students, many of whom were not yet born when they played their first gig, turned and left the field.

This is a song from PP&M which is a theme song for me and my lady.