My absolute favorite Canadian journalist, by far, is Brian Lilley. There is no one like him in the Canadian media. I think that he is more informative than even Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant.
Take a look at this Daily Beast column warning Americans about bills that set up gun registries.
Excerpt:
Last year Canada ended its national long gun registry, a national database of every rifle and shotgun in the country that was supposed to help police track the movement of and sale of weapons. When it was introduced twenty years ago critics said the registration of firearms would eventually lead to confiscation, a criticism dismissed as ridiculous, yet that’s what happened and more right up until its dismantling.
As recently as last winter law abiding gun owners who had complied with the registry were having their rifles confiscated. In late 2011 hundreds if not thousands of people who had legally purchased the Armi Jager AP80, a .22 calibre variant of the AK47, were informed that their rifles had been deemed illegal and must be surrendered .
“You are required by law to return your firearm registration certificates, without delay, either by mail to the address shown in the top left corner of this page or in person to a peace officer or firearms officers. You have 30 days to deliver your firearms to a peace officer, firearms officer of Chief Firearms Officer or to otherwise lawfully dispose of them,” read the letter sent by the Canadian Firearms Centre.
The reason for the need to surrender what had been legal firearms was simply cosmetic, the AP 80 looked too similar to the AK47. There were no interchangeable parts between the two rifles, the rifles used vastly different ammunition, had vastly different uses but they looked the same.
What was more worrisome was that the decision to reclassify what for years had been a legal rifle was made by a bureaucrat not by elected officials. There was no debate, no vote just a decision by a bureaucrat who felt the AP80, legally owned for decades, was too dangerous to be privately owned by Canadians.
It is important for us to look at what is being tried in other countries, especially ones that have similar cultures, so that we can see the consequences. Gun registries should be opposed with the same vigor as gun confiscations, because they are the same thing, eventually. Individuals have a right to defend themselves from crime, and that is not a right that is meant to be enjoyed only by our smooth-talking politicians in Washington. I can guarantee you that those same politicians that want to confiscate your weapons will be themselves guarded by armed men. Hypocrites!
As I expected. I wonder if the mainstream media will apologize now that the truth is out.
Expected:
As the regime of Bashar Assad disintegrates, the security of his chemical arsenal is in jeopardy. The No. 2 general in Saddam Hussein’s air force says they were the WMDs we didn’t find in Iraq.
King Abdullah of neighboring Jordan warned that a disintegrating Syria on the verge of civil war puts Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons at risk of falling into the hands of al-Qaida.
“One of the worst-case scenarios as we are obviously trying to look for a political solution would be if some of those chemical stockpiles were to fall into unfriendly hands,” he said.
The irony here is that the chemical weapons stockpile of Syrian thug Assad may in large part be the legacy of weapons moved from Hussein’s Iraq into Syria before Operation Iraqi Freedom.
If so, this may be the reason not much was found in the way of WMD by victorious U.S. forces in 2003.
In 2006, former Iraqi general Georges Sada, second in command of the Iraqi Air Force who served under Saddam Hussein before he defected, wrote a comprehensive book, “Saddam’s Secrets.”
It details how the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria in advance of the U.S.-led action to eliminate Hussein’s WMD threat.
As Sada told the New York Sun, two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, and special Republican Guard units loaded the planes with chemical weapons materials.
There were 56 flights disguised as a relief effort after a 2002 Syrian dam collapse.
There were also truck convoys into Syria. Sada’s comments came more than a month after Israel’s top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam “transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria.”
Both Israeli and U.S. intelligence observed large truck convoys leaving Iraq and entering Syria in the weeks and months before Operation Iraqi Freedom, John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told a private conference of former weapons inspectors and intelligence experts held in Arlington, Va., in 2006.
Well, there you have it. Should you believe the mainstream media?
Biopic of aircraft designer R.J. Mitchell whose Spitfire became one of the mainstays of the RAF in World War II. Mitchell worked for Supermarine who specialized for many years on developing seaplanes. He enjoyed a good deal of success winning prestigious air races with the help of his test pilot Geoffrey Crisp. Money was always in short supply however and the government was always hesitant to invest. When Supermarine is bought out by Vickers, Mitchell has a bit more leeway. After a visit to Germany in the 1930s, he sees the Nazi threat first-hand and decides to design a fighter with a completely new engine. The result was the famed Spitfire.
What does the title of the movie refer to? It’s from a speech by the Conservative prime minister of Britain during the war – Sir Winston Churchill.
Excerpt:
The great air battle which has been in progress over this Island for the last few weeks has recently attained a high intensity. It is too soon to attempt to assign limits either to its scale or to its duration. We must certainly expect that greater efforts will be made by the enemy than any he has so far put forth. Hostile air fields are still being developed in France and the Low Countries, and the movement of squadrons and material for attacking us is still proceeding. It is quite plain that Herr Hitler could not admit defeat in his air attack on Great Britain without sustaining most serious injury. If after all his boastings and bloodcurdling threats and lurid accounts trumpeted round the world of the damage he has inflicted, of the vast numbers of our Air Force he has shot down, so he says, with so little loss to himself; if after tales of the panic-stricken British crushed in their holes cursing the plutocratic Parliament which has led them to such a plight-if after all this his whole air onslaught were forced after a while tamely to peter out, the Fuhrer’s reputation for veracity of statement might be seriously impugned. We may be sure, therefore, that he will continue as long as he has the strength to do so, and as long as any preoccupations he may have in respect of the Russian Air Force allow him to do so.
On the other hand, the conditions and course of the fighting have so far been favorable to us. I told the House two months ago that, whereas in France our fighter aircraft were wont to inflict a loss of two or three to one upon the Germans, and in the fighting at Dunkirk, which was a kind of no-man’s-land, a loss of about three or four to one, we expected that in an attack on this Island we should achieve a larger ratio. This has certainly come true. It must also be remembered that all the enemy machines and pilots which are shot down over our Island, or over the seas which surround it, are either destroyed or captured; whereas a considerable proportion of our machines, and also of our pilots, are saved, and soon again in many cases come into action.
[…]The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and b~ their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
But before you can have “the few” fighter pilots who saved Britain, you have to have the fighter! That’s why R.J. Mitchell, the inventor of the fighter, is the First of the Few.
It’s very important that we in the West understand the importance of investing in defense research, so we can develop new weapons, so that we can deter aggression. This is the doctrine of peace through strength.
WESTMORELAND: O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!
KING HENRY V: What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian.’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered- We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
WINTERY KNIGHT 