UPDATED: The British Foreign Office Warns About Dangers From American Bathroom Privacy Laws

but not about the dangers of being shot or killed in lead- and red-riddled streets of America's bloody, Democrat-controlled cities, including Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.

In England, a soldier returning to his base is murdered in a cold-blooded attack by a radical Islamic terrorist.

In England, for the first time, sex crimes reported in a single year have surpassed 100,000. The murder rate is skyrocketing.

In England, cybercrime is up.

In England, the problem of how to kill someone, complicated by the difficulty in obtaining a handgun, has been resolved by resort to the cutlery drawer, and you can actually research the areas of London bearing the highest risk of knifing attacks.

Yet, in England, dear old friend and long-time ally England, the Foreign Office has another danger on its mind. Not radical Islamic terrorist attacks at home, not rape or other sexual violence, not cybercrime, and not cutlery attacks. Rather, the Foreign Office wants English subjects traveling to the United States, particularly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered travelers to be aware of the dangers of traveling in North Carolina and Mississippi.

Here’s the travel advisory update on the Foreign Office’s USA travel advisory page:

 

“LGBT travellers may be affected by legislation passed recently in the states of North Carolina and Mississippi.”

“May be affected by legislation.” There’s a helpful bit of guidance. I wonder just how LGBT travelers may be affected?

Here in North Carolina, for example, we have not had a spate of attacks on visitors from the UK, or at least, if we have had such, it has been ignored in the news media. We certainly haven’t had a spate of attacks targeting gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered Brits, and I’m fairly confident that if we did, that too would be headline news.

So, I am, again, left wondering what dangerous condition might threaten British LGBT travelers in North Carolina?

Inexplicably absent from the travel warnings for the USA-bound Briton are some rather dangerous places, including Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. Just whom must the powers that be in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, DC know in Britain's Foreign Office to keep a justifiable and sensible travel advisory from being issued for UK residents headed to those dark and bloody grounds? Crimes, particularly murders, in those three cities alone, drove a spike in violent crime in the USA in 2015, and the murderous jungle of Chicago is on pace for another banner year of bloodletting. Here's a link on the role those three cities played in America's violent crime spike last year. As that article mentions:

About half of the increase in murders is attributed to Baltimore (up 63 percent), Chicago (13 percent), and Washington, DC (51 percent). Violent crime reports in general ticked up 3.1 percent in 2015, largely due to substantial increases in Los Angeles (up 25 percent), Baltimore (19 percent), and Charlotte (16 percent).

Far be it from me to suggest that Britain's Foreign Office does a disservice to Britons traveling to the USA by their warning ... a warning that is oblique and unhelpful in any event for its lack of specificity about the dangers presented to LGBT travelers ... yet, it does seem strange that the kind of "steering" of travel destinations that may result from such a warning just might land unsuspecting Britons in such shooting galleries as Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC.

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As of at least June 23, 2016, the British Foreign Office Travel Abroad Warnings no long advise Britons traveling to America of the dangers inherent in traveling to a nation that maintains sex segregated toileting and showering facilities in public places.

Apparently a cooler head prevailed.

In place of that warning, others that seem to make more sense, are now being fronted. Included are hurricane season warnings, the Pulse shooting advisory, and Zika virus exposure risks.

Oddly absent yet is any specific warnings about the dangers attendant to visiting cities with Democratic Party mayors and city councils. Nothing about the fact that Chicago is on track to hit 300 gun murders this year and perhaps 4000 nonfatal casualties. Oh, there is this caution:  "You should be alert to the dangers of car and street crime." That guidance would be greatly enhanced in its helpfulness if it distinguished between the risks of street crime in Mayberry versus street crime in Chicago, Baltimore, and, for example, Washington, DC.

Arsenic and Old Lies

Growing up, there were a few favorite old movies I remember watching. One, "Arsenic and Old Lace," is a farcical comedy about an elderly pair of aunties who took bachelors in as boarders, and then gave them elderberry wine laced with arsenic, was a favorite. Cary Grant, the loving nephew, begins in the story with no idea of his aunts' proclivities to murder. He does know that his uncle, a bit demented, thought himself to be Teddy Roosevelt, and in that role, he was regularly digging new "locks" for the "Panama Canal" in the aunties' basement. His construction activities conveniently provided burial plots for the poisoned bachelors.

If you haven't seen the play or the movie, you are missing a gem. I am including this excerpted clip to set the stage for this post:

You really should give "Arsenic and Old Lace" a try.

Remember, when I watched the movie as a kid, there was no such thing as John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy or other, now notorious, serial killers, at least not whose mayhem came into our home in the drum beat of the 24 hour news cycle. So two elderly women poisoning lonely bachelors could still be funny, and the play did speak to an audience that could distinguish Teddy Roosevelt from his cousin Franklin.

Today, however, we are living inside the farce. We are under the ministrations of Arsenic and Old Lies.

This notion came to mind as I thought about the recent Democratic Candidates' debate.

Excepting Jim Webb, whose Democratic party credentials are undoubtedly doubted by Democrats (after all, he made out a case during the debate that "an enemy" was someone that was literally trying to kill you with a grenade (an episode from his wartime service in Vietnam), the candidates, answering a question about the enemy of which the candidates were most proud of making, America was treated to a laundry list of American freedom and enterprise, represented by such "enemies" as health insurance companies, the National Rifle Association, Wall Street, the rich, and Republicans.

So the association whose fairly moderate positions regarding the right to keep an bear arms is a worthy enemy for a political candidate to have acquired?

Why?

Why would a candidate for the Nation's highest office take pride in so positioning themselves politically that an organization that supports a clear cut provision of the Constitution -- the Second Amendment -- might be considered by them as an enemy?

And why is it a matter of bragging rights to have exacerbated the economic liberties of health insurance companies or of "Wall Street" (whatever "Wall Street" is supposed to mean in that context, it carries the connotation of American businesses)?

The answer is simple.

Again, setting aside Jim Webb, the candidates seeking the Democratic nomination are not Democrats as John Kennedy was, or as Truman was, or even as Franklin Roosevelt was.

As a group, and as individuals, they are Statists, they are progressives, they are Socialists.

Now we have lived, as a People, long enough to watch the rise of socialism in Europe, the Americas, Asian and Africa. Its collapse, in the Soviet Bloc, we have witnessed too. Were it has not been abandoned, its wreck and ruin continues unabated.

The depredations of socialism are evident in the land of Obama's new best buddies, the Castro brothers. Cuba's organized and planned economy has the been operating inefficiently since Castro's revolution, and the nation's inability to mount a successful domestic and international economic enterprise is well understood. Those very same ideas of central control and management of economy put the Soviet Union in the position of being unable to sustain a long term move-for-move build up in competition with the United States, and ultimately resulted in the USSR collapsing under its own weight. The current terrible economic suffering in Venezuela is the direct result of these same socialistic ideas put in practice.

Yet here we have old lies being fed to us in an unction of elderberry wine. Our old uncle, Bernie Sanders, thinks he can build up the house by digging holes of taxation under the foundation. Old auntie Hillary will "do us good" even if it means killing us.

I prefer the movie to the threatened reality of a farcical America under their poisonous, tired, and disproved old lies.

The Monster in the Senate Closet: The Filibuster

Imagine the innocence of childhood.  No fears of tomorrow.  No concerns about mortgages, taxes, illnesses, broken families.  Yet, even into the innocence of childhood, monsters will creep.  In my childhood, the boys in our family shared to large rooms in the basement of our Falls Church, Virginia home.

I love basements.  There is a moldering smell due to dampness.  There are crevices and hideaways to explore.  They are indoor playgrounds of manifold opportunities.

When the night comes, though, and the lights go down for bed time, a basement, just like a bedroom with a closet, becomes a place of great danger to a child's active imagination.  I am not ashamed to admit creeping from the bed to our little half-bath when I had to relieve myself.  Creeping along the basement walls and ducking low as I passed underneath the high set windows that were, as much as anything else, a means of ventilation, since they were at ground level outside the home.

Why did I creep so softly and gingerly?

For fear.

Fear of what was outside that might be looking in.

Others had the same experience of fear, but their childhood spent in bedrooms with closets, they feared the boogeyman in the closet. Movies are made in the horror genre that feature the child's bedroom closet because so many know that gripping fear of the closet.

Of course, we grow up and realize the true horror of what is in the closet:  handme down clothes, stinky socks, the odd spider, toys.  Nothing to fear. Now we laugh at our childhood fear.

The United States Senate has lived under the grip of a mortal terror for nearly two centuries.  Far too long, the Senate, a mature institution of popular sovereignty and governance, has laid about under the grip of that monster in the closet.  Oddly, at a time when we, who belong to the fellowship of former closet monster victims, are long past being held hostage to the imagined monster, the Senate continues to quake in fear and inaction.  And it appears that even removing the Democratic majority in the Senate will not snap the Senate out of the grip of its terrorized paralysis.

Here are a couple examples drawn from the headlines:

At the beginning of the new Congress, socialist Bernie Sanders summoned up the boogeyman in an effort to prevent adoption of the Keystone pipeline legislation:



Not to be outdone, New York Democrat Chuckie "Where's the Camera" Schumer and other Democrats threaten a filibuster of the separate funding legislation for the Department of Homeland Security:

During the tenure of George W. Bush, the Director of the nonprofit where I worked asked me what could be done about the filibuster being used by Democrats to block confirmation votes for Bush's judicial nominees.  There was, of course, talk about the "nuclear option" but what was that option, how would it work, how could it be given effect and why should it.  These were his questions to me.  That set me to the task of reviewing the Senate's filibuster practice, the Senate Rules governing that practice, and the political wisdom of that practice.

Based on my research and study, I concluded that the Senate, at any time a majority of those present and voting wished to do so, could amend the Senate Rules and eliminate the filibuster by the vote of a simple majority.  I also concluded that eliminating the filibuster was a sound political decision that our organization, The American Center for Law and Justice, should support.  I have not waivered from that view since then, even when the Senate filibuster allowed Republicans in the minority to hold the Senate hostage to their demands.  (While the document bears the names of two other ACLJ attorneys, it is solely the product of my research and writing).

Today, we are once again being terrorized.

Yes, terrorized.  Just as when parents soundly sleeping are startled awake by the nightmare screams of their child, whose horrified screams simply embody their fear of the monster in the closet.  Our body politic is disturbed by the pretended fear of Republicans that they will be held hostage to Democrats in minority through the device of the filibuster.

The problem for Republicans is that the monster in the closet no longer terrorizes those who were minding the legislative store during the last session of Congress.  Then, in a fit of pique, the Democrats finally pushed through a change to the Senate's ridiculous and time-honored practice. Harry Reid bullied those changes through to accommodate Obama's petulant demand for judicial confirmations and Republicans' skillful play of the filibuster rule to prevent votes on certain judges. Because Reid, via a simple parliamentary procedure, changed the filibuster rule and practice as applied to judicial and executive nomination votes, we now know a parliamentary truth:

A simple majority vote of the Senate -- taken at any time the Senate is in session -- can be used to amend the Rules of the Senate.  Such amendments may change even long practiced senatorial privileges as the filibuster.

Once you have gone into your closet with a matured judgment ... and with the lights on ... you begin to realize the infantilism in your night terrors.  You chuckle at how you were held in rigid paralysis by the certainty that a monster would leap out and take you wherever it is that closet monsters take their unwitting victims.  And so it is here.  We know that the only reason that Democrats can obstruct the Senate Republican majority is if the Senate Republican majority chooses to play terrorized child, captive to a rule that has no more merit or substance in this era than does the closet monster of our childhood in our adult lives.

While the horror genre provides entertainment, and perhaps even serves a psychological purpose of providing manageable doses of fear that we can conquer by confronting, it is a poor framework for the exercise of, or for preventing the exercise of, political will.  The Republicans should overthrow the vestiges of the filibuster, and legislate apace.

Democratic Walruses, Republican Carpenters, and Sheeple Oysters

As I watch Disney's 1951 classic, Alice in Wonderland, I cannot avoid the clear parallel between the Walrus and the Carpenter, and our two party system.  We sit in our oyster beds, living our lives, getting along as best we can. 

Along comes the oafish pair, the Walrus and the Carpenter.  We are, in turn, teased into the parade following them along, straight into the Carpenter's makeshift seafood house.  The only question is are we eaten alive by the Walrus, or by the Carpenter?

The Walrus and the Carpenter, Modestly Updated:


The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
"If this were only cleared away,"
They said, "it would be grand!"

"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

"O Voters, come and walk with us!"
The Walrus did beseech.
"A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each."

The eldest Voter looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Voter winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head--
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the voter-bed.

But four young Voters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat--
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn't any feet.

Four other Voters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more--
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And all the little Voters stood
And waited in a row.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

"But wait a bit," the Voters cried,
"Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!"
"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.

"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, Voters dear,
We can begin to feed."

"But not on us!" the Voters cried,
Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!"
"The night is fine," the Walrus said.
"Do you admire the view?

"It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf--
I've had to ask you twice!"

"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"The butter's spread too thick!"

"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.

"O Voters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.

Digging to China

Democrats think that the best policy for growing employment is government spending.

This policy is best understood as 312 million people standing in a large hole in the ground.  From this 300 million,  about 4 million step forward (federal employees, including postal service and military forces), take shovels, and begin digging as a way of getting out of the hole.  As they dig, they can't throw the dirt out of the hole, it's too big, so they throw it on the other 308 million.

The hole gets deeper.

As the hole deepens and the dirt is being tossed, some of the 308 million get covered by the dirt.  Eventually some of those folks actually disappear.  According to publicly reported information, some 90 million of those remaining 308 million folks have been buried to the point of invisibility.

The hole gets deeper.

When will the madness stop?

When the number of those not yet buried shrinks to the point that those remaining can no longer support those with shovels?

No.

Because, outside the hole, there are others, who are happy to lend their moral support to the madness.  Folks who will lend to the endeavor.  Folks who know that if they can convince the diggers to keep digging, the hole will be, eventually, so deep that there can never be an exit to level ground, to the sunlight, to life, to prosperity.

But because Democrats only know taxation and government spending as the solution to a weak economy and high unemployment (hole digging), they readily accept the cheer offered from Red China.

When will enough Americans be so insulted by the tossing of dirt on them by Democrats and their taxing and spending that they will understand that this life or death struggle cannot be won by toleration, by a friendly disposition, and by "taking it."

Here is a truth from the framers of our Independence:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

You see, so long as the Democrats (and their RINO fellow travelers (John McCain, for example)) seem apologetic for the dirt that gets tossed on folks, there is that natural, human, tendency to "suffer, while evils are sufferable."  Not that such apologies are sincere, for we know that the faking of sincerity is the politician's gift.

But the time comes when the evils are NOT sufferable.  There comes a time when those who suffer understand those whose sole aim seems to be economic enslavement through confiscatory taxation.  And in that day, the great will rise, if necessary, by force, and throw off the tyranny of those whose economic compasses point only to the wallets of others.