VDH makes some good, if politically incorrect, points.

The (Near) Death of the State by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Yesterday was one of the worst days in decades for the power elite. It was one of the best for liberty.

I knew Tiger Woods was a terrific golfer, but this is ridiculous.

(I love it!)

Big Time Crooks

Somebody knew something in the days before the Bear Stearns debacle. This kind of behavior is criminal; it is theft on a grand scale, but I guarantee you that no one will go to prison for it. When it is bankers who rob the banks, and bankers who write the rules, you can be sure no bankers will ever serve time.

On Marriage

My (common law) wife and I have a marriage, but we have never had a wedding. In previous times, I might have said that we lack "the benefit of a wedding", but I no longer think a wedding confers any benefits. Here's why.

We each had previous weddings. We each had the official sanction of both church and state governments, and when push came to shove, neither the state nor the church did a thing to help us keep our original marriages intact. If there is some alleged benefit to having the official sanction of the government and/or the church in the initiation of marriage, we sure didn't see it.

Now the state - and some churches, including my denomination, the ECUSA - are granting the status of "marriage" to homosexual couples. If homosexuals want to make a commitment to one another, that's fine with me. I figure you take love where you can find it. But for the entire history of the human race, a "married couple" has had a male "husband" and a female "wife". Now the state has decided that "marriage" doesn't mean that at all. Now it just means, "Bruce and Steve want the legal right to file their taxes as if they were married." And if Bruce and Steve want to get a divorce, then the state grants them that as well, no questions asked. It won't be long before the state grants a marriage license to any conceivable combination of entities, sentient or not. If a guy wants to have a marriage contract with his Pepsi Machine and his pet hamster, the California Supreme Court will allow it and the rest of the moron governments will follow suit.

The churches are mostly toothless in the face of this debacle. The ones that just follow whatever the gubbmint says, like the idiot Episcopal Church of the USA, (I can call it idiotic 'cause it's my church), will not draw the line anywhere; they are clueless. Some of the more "conservative" churches, (I use scare quotes because the only thing they are conserving is their imaginations of the past), will fuss and fight and condemn the godlessness of the culture but will not do the one thing that will make a difference: quit getting in bed with the government.

The churches in America act as agents of the state when their ministers announce that the happy couple is now married "according to the authority vested in" the minister himself by the state. If the church has the authority to make a couple married, then that authority should be coming from God, not from the state. And if the church does indeed possess that authority, then she should exercise it without apology and without qualification.

The Bible has a lot to say about how a couple should treat one another if they are married, but it is utterly silent on how a couple goes about becoming married. When a man and woman choose to live together as if they were married, then the only biblical response is to hold them to scriptural principals of behavior towards one another. If the church is going to claim the authority to marry people, then they better come up with a good explanation for how they gained that authority. Otherwise, please just shut up.

Those who spend much time around me know that I have a deep interest in matters economic and financial. In fact, I know enough economics to truly understand why it is known as "the dismal science". Nevertheless...

This presentation is well worth your time. Since we are in an election year, we'll have the candidates and the talking heads in the media telling us what is going on. Do yourself a favor: instead of listening to them, (let alone believing them), educate yourself. This presentation tells exactly where we are financially, how we got there, and what will happen in the future without some significant changes.

I repeat - take the time to educate yourself. Don't depend on someone else to tell you.

This is hysterically funny if you take the point of view that our country is totally screwed - which I do. Not so funny if you harbor any hope of us getting out of this mess with our freedoms or our constitution intact.

A bill winding its way through the Congress, (the so-called Dodd-Shelby Bill, also known as HR3221), is supposed to help "troubled homeowners" keep their homes. The reality is that the bill will use $300 billion in taxpayer money to bail out banks that made stupid loans.

Oh, and the bill was basically written by Bank of America.
And BofA is trying to buy Countrywide, but doesn't want to be responsible for all the bad loans Countrywide wrote.
And Countrywide made an extra-special, super-duper home loan to a guy by the name of Christopher Dodd, who just happens to be the sponsor of the "Dodd-Shelby" bill.

Ain't that just a knee-slapper?

Here's the actual BofA presentation from March 11 of this year proposing what is now the Dodd-Shelby bill.

When the revolution comes, the first people up against the wall are going to be the bankers.

I've retired from the Boar's Head Tavern, (thanks for six great years, Michael), but I guess I still need a place to talk about what's on my mind. So R/A is back in business.

When my marriage broke up several years ago, Mary Gauthier's CD Mercy Now, served as the soundtrack for the dissolution of my life. I queued it up today for the first time in several years, and I must say it has aged very well. IN other words, I like it because it's good, not just because it made me feel good back then.

Arthur Robinson has written a terrific article on the politicization of science for Human Events. We are teetering on the edge of a return to the dark ages when the UN decides that scientific fact can be better determined by polling and politics than by the scientific method.

If you haven't discovered it yet, Gary North's website is well worth at least a weekly visit. He updates it daily, and I almost always find something worthwhile there.

Hit 'Em Where It Hurts

As most of you know, I traveled to New York last month to protest the bailout of Bear Stearns by you, the taxpayer. Perhaps you pay no attention tpo what is happening with our country's finances, and if so, that is fine. The short version of the story is that speculators made spectacular bets that they could rich with mortgages. It turns out they were wrong, and now they have gone to the government and asked to be bailed out. They are going to raise YOUR taxes to do it.

Do you like paying for other people's mistakes?

Would you like to do something about it?

There is something VERY powerful and VERY simply you can do about it.

(I like simple and powerful.)

Here's the what you do: Between June 5 and June 15 this year, pull all your cash out of the bank. All of it. For those who want to know more, here's a website describing it. In short, what will happen when you pull your cash out of your bank is that the banks are forced to lend less money. Since the bankers are the ones who made the bad bets, lost a ton of money and are now asking Congress to make good all their bad bets with YOUR tax money, it only makes sense to hit them where it hurts.

Let's do this together.