Starvin Larry

Kit Lange | Jul 3, 2015

Every year on this day we are reminded of the significance of our independence.  We are told the timeless story of 56 men who pledged their lives and sacred honor, knowing they would be hung as traitors for daring to believe that they could be free men.  The story of American independence is one that for many of us, embodies all that we believe about our nation and about ourselves.  It fills us with pride, with hope, with love for our country.

This post is not a retelling of that story.

Instead, I’d like to direct your attention to our present.  After two hundred and thirty-eight years, what have we done with our independence?  Have we guarded with jealous attention the jewel of liberty, as Patrick Henry admonished us?  Have we remembered that “patriotism is as much a virtue as justice,” as Benjamin Rush reminded us?  Have we all studied politics and war, as John Adams did, to protect our children’s freedom to study mathematics and philosophy? Above all, have we remained mindful as a collective nation that “those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it,” as Thomas Paine warned us?

Back then only 3% of the colonists took up arms against the tyrannical English government. Now, do we even have that many people willing to stand up? In order to understand the price of freedom, to understand the grave and critical responsibility that we have as guardians of our own liberty, we must be educated about history, about conflict and truth and character. We must understand the events that led up to that fateful decision made by those 56 men. We must know about a lot more than celebrities and athletes and fashion and the price of weed in our area. Unfortunately, we are far, far behind both our allies and our enemies in all of that and more.

In this country, 14% of American adults cannot read. Another 21% read at a 5th grade level. Even more staggering is that 19% of the high school graduates each year cannot read, adding to the total number of illiterate. How can we claim that we “study politics and war” when as a nation, so many of our citizens cannot even read English (not even counting the millions of illegals in this country who will never learn English)? And what of those who can? A 2004 study found that half of all American adults between 18 and 44 do not read books for pleasure. As a result, “reading comprehension skills are eroding.” As Twain pointed out, “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” An uneducated man is an easily enslaved one, and we see this all over today in the hordes of goverment-dependent, in the shallow masses who subscribe to empty liberal philosophies and childlike emotionalism, in the absolute lack of critical thinking skills among our fellow Americans.

As a nation, we are horribly undereducated in all of the areas that matter. I’m not even talking about knowing the capitals of obscure third world countries, I’m talking about knowing how the United States came to be; her faults and her strengths, the character of the men who gave their all so that we could live in liberty. We claim to be grateful and thankful but are we? So many Americans don’t know enough to be grateful. The really horrifying part is, we don’t even care.

And where is our courage? When did the traits of bravery and integrity get so perverted that we actually expect and accept lies and corruption from our own elected officials? When did American exceptionalism become a dirty concept to be ridiculed and mocked? When did being a patriot become synonymous with terrorism? The answer is simple: We let this happen. We have lounged in the water, ignoring the temperature as it rose. We watched, docile and compliant, as our liberty was taken from us one piece at a time, by presidents and Congresses led by both sides of the aisle. Uneducated and shallow, we believed what we were told. It’s to keep you safe. It’s for your own good. As a nation, we don’t know any better. In fact, we have learned through decades of slow, steady indoctrination to mistrust those who call on us to stand up for freedom. We have learned to ridicule them, to call them racists. We have even learned that maybe perhaps it would be better if all of those people weren’t in our society. It has gotten so bad that for those few of us who get it, the idea that we could be arrested and imprisoned by our own government—for nothing more than believing in and acting in the cause of liberty—is a sickening knowledge that sits in the pit of our stomach every single day.

The state of our society is pathetic, the flame of liberty is dying in the blackness of tyranny, and yet we do nothing. We have a president hell-bent on the destruction of all that was intended with that first document, a Congress who by-and-large has no intention of stopping him, and a Supreme Court that can only be trusted to uphold the Constitutional intent about half the time. We are under surveillance everywhere we go, our every move and purchase cataloged and saved. We are taxed to insanity to pay for gluttonous and ill-conceived programs that should not even exist. We are told what we can grow, where we can grow it, and whether we can eat it. Our food is contaminated, our water impure, our children overmedicated. In every single facet of your life, there is government influence and control. It’s so prevalent that we don’t even pay attention to it anymore. And yet every year we get together on July 4th and praise the idea of “independence” like we have a clue what that actually was intended to mean.

Read the rest @ http://www.patrickhenrysociety.com/july-4th/

h/t NCRenegade

Hmmm-“water balloon” filled with the extracted oil launched out of a PVC potato gun?

In February 2014, Drug Enforcement Administration task force officers at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport seized $11,000 in cash from 24-year-old college student Charles Clarke. They didn’t find any guns, drugs or contraband on him. But, according to an affidavit filled out by one of the agents, the task force officers reasoned that the cash was the proceeds of drug trafficking, because Clarke was traveling on a recently-purchased one-way ticket, he was unable to provide documentation for where the money came from, and his checked baggage had an odor of marijuana. (He was a marijuana smoker.)

Clarke’s cash, which says he he spent five years saving up, was seized under civil asset forfeiture, where cops are able to take cash and property from people who are never convicted of — and in some cases, never even charged with — a crime. The DEA maintains that asset forfeiture is an important crime-fighting tool: “By attacking the financial infrastructure of drug trafficking organizations world-wide, DEA has disrupted and dismantled major drug trafficking organizations and their supply chains, thereby improving national security and increasing the quality of life for the American public.”

But the practice has become contentious, in part because agencies are generally allowed to keep a share of the cash and property they seize. In cases like Clarke’s, where local and federal agents cooperate on a seizure, federal agencies typically keep at least 20 percent of the assets, while local cops split the remainder among themselves. Critics argue that this creates a profit motive and leads to “policing for profit.”

Two local agencies were involved in the seizure of Clarke’s cash: the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport Police, and the Covington Police Department, which is the home office of the DEA task force officer who detained and spoke with Clarke. But according to the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties group now representing Clarke in court, 11 additional law enforcement agencies — who were not involved in Clarke’s case at all — have also requested a share of Clarke’s cash under the federal asset forfeiture program. They include the Kentucky State Police, the Ohio Highway Patrol, and even the Bureau of Criminal Investigations within the Ohio Attorney General’s office.

Read the rest @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/30/drug-cops-took-a-college-kids-life-savings-and-now-13-police-departments-want-a-cut/