What do NY's Smoking Ban and NY SAFE Act Have in Common?

Simply put, they are both egregious infringements on individual rights to own and use property as seen fit.

Smokers have lived with numerous assaults on their personal decisions for years, but the smoking ban rose to another level and attacked small business owners throughout the state effectively denying them use of their personal property, that they worked hard for and built, for a specific purpose as if they were nothing more than caretakers of public property.

This is certainly not a partisan party issue.  The final votes in the Assembly and Senate were greatly mixed showing both parties infiltrated with control freaks.

Democrats:    Assembly  84 yes - 11 no  ~  Senate  20 yes - 4 no
Republicans:  Assembly 13 yes - 33 no  ~  Senate  37 yes - 0 no

Assemblyman Daniel Hooker’s comments made on the floor of the Assembly during debate on the smoking ban, Wednesday, March 26th, 2003:

I am from a rural district as well, and while we don’t have any cities, we do have a lot of restaurants, taverns, and diners, and this bill will hurt their business. We also have a lot of VFW Posts, American Legion Posts, and Marine Corps League Posts. I can’t help but think of the irony of the situation where a soldier or Marine comes home from the war, goes into a local VFW for a beer and a cigarette, and the bartender says "I’m sorry, young man, while you were overseas fighting for freedom, your State Assembly was quietly legislating it away here at home."

However, Mr. Speaker, I am chiefly opposed to this bill because it presumes that people are incapable of thinking and acting for themselves without the government telling them what to do.

At present, people are free to choose to work in an environment that is smoke free or not. A lot of waitresses who smoke choose to work in a bar specifically because it is a smoke-friendly environment. This bill would limit that freedom.

I don’t smoke but believe that others should be free to smoke if they choose to.

I am not insensitive to the health hazards of smoking. My Dad smoked, and he died of lung cancer. Cause and effect? Probably, but he died a free man who made his own choices.

My general philosophy is that our government spends way too much time telling people what to do and this seems like a good example of that practice.

I am opposed. 

Even though I wasn't from his district, I had written Mr Hooker to thank him for his stand, and he replied with a hand-written and personally signed note providing me with the full text of his speech.  All I got back from my own two representatives were form letters praising the great courageous stand they took standing with the majority to figuratively lynch a minority constituency.

 

We don't want to merely die like Dan Hooker's dad as free men, we want to live our lives as free men, unmolested by tyranny.

 

Why am I writing about this long dead issue now?  Well, first of all, it's NOT dead, it was just a lost squirmish in the never-ending battle for liberty.  And when it was a raging battle, we were severely chastized during that crusade for even insinuating that this assault on individual property rights would snowball down the slippery slope.  Yet today, we have Mayor Bloomberg assaulting individual rights nearly every day with stop and frisk and even denying your right to choose how big of a soft drink you'd like to buy.  Bloomberg rules NYC with an iron fist, but his crusades, especially against the 2nd Amendment are affecting people outside his jurisdiction.  We also have Gov Cuomo, rushing through the ill-conceived NY SAFE Act to attack another group of citizens to deny them their 2nd Amendment rights to own certain property to defend themselves, their families, and their property.

 

The assaults won't ever end until enough people wake up to just say NO!  We must honor the Constitution's legal framework that was set up to defend individual rights against usurpations of the collective and the tyrannical majority.  And just saying no once or twice here or there isn't enough.  We must demand that all such laws be reviewed and those that infringe on individual liberty must be rescinded or repealed.  A single such law makes a precedent for others to follow.

 

There's a reason for the many levels of government and the central powers are enumerated and severely limited.  Even statewide laws should be extremely limited.  Where freedom of association comes in is at the local level.  Don't like the colors your neighbor may paint his house, then join a local homeowners association and dictate away to attract like-minded people to your neighborhood sort of like what's going on in Kiryas Joel.

 

I can go on and on comparing the smoking ban and the NY SAFE Act to a myriad of social issues pertaining to individual rights such as one with the Defense of Marriage Act and the individual right of a citizen to marry whomever he or she pleases that is essential to maintain your right of free association.

As I continually stress, if you petition the government to limit the rights of any other individual to do anything you personally dislike, you empower them to come after you to limit yours.  Think long and hard about it and please ~ Help stop the madness!

NY SAFE Act - A Crime in Itself

My letter to my county legislator requesting support in condemning this egregious act.

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Sir,

I'm writing to you, as the county legislator for the district in which I reside, to register my disapproval of the NY SAFE Act and request you please support a County resolution to condemn it.

With the fast and furious loss of so many of our rights as citizens of a free republic in the past decade under the guise of necessity in the war on terror that brought us the Patriot Act, NDAA, targeted assassinations, proliferation of swat team raids, stop and frisk, TSA gropings, and DHS immigration checkpoints and suspicionless searches miles inland from our physical borders, to mention just a few, our second amendment rights are the last defense that we can ill afford to lose. When is it going to stop?
 

The right to defend ourselves, our family, and our property is a natural right. The police forces cannot physically perform such a duty, for if it is even possible to contact them during a life-threatening situation, they often arrive well after the crime has been committed and the perpetrator long gone. Even if they could always arrive in time, the Supreme Court of the US has consistently ruled that police forces have no special duty to protect anyone but themselves. Mayor Bloomberg's own NYC lawyers are using such defense in a lawsuit by Joseph Lozito against the NYPD, where officers present and actively engaged in a citywide manhunt for the murderer Maksim Gelman allegedly hid behind a locked subway door to protect themselves and watched as Gelman attacked and seriously wounded Mr Lozito until after he had subdued the culprit himself.

http://gothamist.com/2013/01/27/city_argues_nypd_had_no_special_dut.php

I find it amazingly ironic that so many like Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg are mindlessly and emotionally engaged in trying to disarm American citizens and have succeeded here in NY in rushing through this horrendous act. Yet the NY State Constitution still clearly states "The defense and protection of the state and of the United States is an obligation of all persons within the state." So our government servants expect us to be required to help defend the state and our country even after they've disarmed us from bearing any of the most effective self-defense tools, but police departments and officers they commission to enforce the laws that they've enacted have no legally binding duty to protect us citizens from criminals while we are taxed to pay for their services. That's insane.

It's even more disturbing in light of seeing Mayor Bloomberg's own security forces made up of NYPD officers follow a reporter who was armed with nothing more than a soda for simply asking the mayor a question and attempting to harrass him, demanding he show identification while acting well outside their jurisdiction .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCC-rEx81PE

Again, I request you please support condemning this egregious Act and help us keep our state and country free.

Thank you,

v/r

Frank Koza

The Battle of Athens, Tennessee, 1946

All this crap about gun control and useful idiots like Piers Morgan, who isn't even a real American, leading the Obama deception asking why do citizens need firearms like the AR-15.

How come we don't ever hear about the Battle of Athens which took place in 1946?  Returning WWII vets, some of the first Oathkeepers, took on corrupt local officials to keep local elections fair and honest after State and Federal authorities failed them.  Another account, with similar incidents in other areas, can be found here.

I just found out about it from theoldmarine1 with his posting of this video on youtube.

Keep the faith and hold on to your arms.

ARMAGEDDON - Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn gave a particularly insightful speech (links at bottom) about the decline of America as a world power in various concepts in his book, "After America, Get Ready for Armageddon", which drills down towards the roots of what we see going on today.  In it, he touches on subjects that fit neatly into the categories he has crafted into an acronym for Armageddon:

• A - Addiction
• R - Redistribution
• M - Monopoly
• A - Arteriosclerosis
• G - Global Retreat
• E - Educational Social Engineering
• D - Decay
• D - Disintegration
• O - Open Season
• N - Nuke's Away

In this speech, he talks about many things that I have been highlighting some examples here, but I still fail to capture the intrinsic interrelations as well as Mark has in this speech. 

Take a look, for it's well worth your time.  I'm not going to add anything here in this post, but if you see anything in his speech that warrants additional discussion based on what you know, feel free to leave a comment or two.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Uncle Joe's Shack

We have a strange slang word , Uncle Tom, in our language that has come to be a slur to mean according to on-line Merriam-Webster: 

1. : a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals)
2. : a member of a low-status group who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority <the worst floor managers and supervisors by far are women … Some of them are regular Uncle Toms— Jane Fonda>

That certainly was not Harriet Beecher Stowe's intent, but that is lost on the prevailing attitudes of the heavily indoctrinated minds of today.  Joan Hedrick discusses a little of how it has come about:

Grafted onto the minstrel tradition, the stage versions of Stowe’s novel often portrayed Stowe’s hero as a shuffling, humorous Sambo. 

The Christ-like pacifism that ennobled Stowe’s Tom appeared to many in the increasingly confrontational racial politics of the twentieth century as subservience, or as James Weldon Johnson wrote in 1912, “foolishly good”—behavior that became branded as “like Uncle Tom.”

Stowe’s literary reputation, very high in the nineteenth century, was also declining as modernist critics viewed the work of Stowe and other politically motivated women writers as “melodramatic” and "sentimental.”
 

Such critic's views and the slur that gained acceptance are pure poppycock.  Uncle Tom's overt subservience was simply a survival technique in the face of an unbearable situation.  It's no different than people today swallowing their pride, integrity, and opinions to please their masters and keep their job.

Unequal Justice

David Gregory, a TV news anchorman, is not prosecuted for displaying a prohibited ammunition magazine on a nation-wide broadcast conducted in Washington DC. 

Not so for at least five military veterans who were mercilessly prosecuted to include James Brinkley, an Army veteran and federal employee. 

Others include Marine Cpl Melroy Cort, former Army Specialist Adam Meckler, Sgt Matthew Corrigan, and Lt Augustine Kim (links to stories of Corrigan and Kim are in the story on Meckler).

I'm sure those are only the tip of the iceberg.  These cases indicate there is something very seriously wrong with the convoluted legal system in the US.  That's what it is, a legal system, for there is no justice.

People Control

Here we go again.  Another deranged psychopath and all things important are dropped to start attacking the second amendment.

The interpretations of the second amendment that a bunch of rebels who just fought a bloody war to overthrow control of a tyrannical government would so carelessly cast their fortunes under the creation of a similar one while adamantly preserving their right to keep a hunting rifle always amaze me.  The second amendment has nothing to do with hunting rifles for game or guns to defend property against common criminals, it's the right to bare arms, period. 

One of the arguments that anti-gun people use is for that sure, a few may be allowed for personal self-defense, presumably citizen against criminal.  However, using that same argument against our founders' thoughts, the King's army was protecting them so no need for those pesky rebellious colonists to have armories and military grade weapons of their own.  That first shot heard around the world was against the British march to seize their armories at Lexington and Concord to disarm the colonists.  They would take them, but they didn't care about their hunting rifles, they wanted their cannons.  Those patriots who founded this country and wrote that Constitution were traitorous rebels.  Representatives from several of the original colonies had very serious reservations over handing power over to a central government to maintain a standing army and giving up their arms as that would have meant they risked their lives overthrowing one tyrannical government for another.  No, I don't think preserving their right to keep a hunting rifle handy to get dinner was the top thing on their mind at the moment.

If all this fuss is over so-called "assault" weapons (which they're not, they're only semi-automatic firing), perhaps you can explain the rationale behind the police, national guard and even regular army troops being used to go door to door and confiscate small caliber handguns from little old ladies in their own homes after hurricane Katrina and leaving them defenseless?  Also, why does our government go around the world arming rebels in other countries, as they continually try every method they can to disarm our own citizens?  Don't they trust us as much as they trust all the potential terrorists they're arming around the world?  And with all the misnamed 'assault' weapons in circulation out there, where are all the huge gun battles and big shootouts that we see in hollywood movies like between the old gangsters and the feds during prohibition even though swat team raids are escalating across the country over little things like food co-ops, farmers selling raw milk, and even delinqency or fraud on student loans? 

And it's almost always a lone, deranged gunman we hear about firing up these gun (people) control debates.  You don't control guns, you control people - by taking away their defenses.  I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I sure wouldn't rule out false flags to achieve exactly that.  Mentally unstable people can be coached or coaxed to do just about anything.

Sultans of Swat

In regards to "natural" or "inalienable" rights, there is a very disturbing trend of the increasing use of swat teams across the country even against non-violent offenders of civil laws or agency regulations.

The main point is that these raids are becoming routine especially against non-violent offenders such as participants in food co-ops and that recent one in California for the suspected fraud on student loans. Why on earth would anyone authorize use of a swat team for something like that?   That is the question everyone should be asking our elected officials.

John Whitehead sums it up nicely in SWAT Team Mania: The War Against the American Citizen at the Rutherford Institute.  (h/t to Publius Huldah for the link who also has an interesting post about Cut, Cap, and Balance at that link which is worth a read)