The United States was nearly destroyed last month.

Thankfully, alert public servants intervened to avert America’s destruction; like Gandalf facing down the Balrog they cried “you … shall not … pass!” – and sent Boris and Natasha scurrying back to their sinister overseas nation.

Oh, and Marilyn Monroe’s remains are safe also.

Dum dum dum da dum dum, I feel free ….

Dawn Kamin, who owns an optometry office in Germantown, Tennessee, received a notice that flying the American flag outside her office is a violation of the complex’s bylaws. … According to a letter sent to Dr. Kamin by the business condominium group that owns her building, she must take down the flag by Aug. 22 or face the consequences – fines and paying for the cost to remove the flag and staff.

What our soldiers do for us

“I have family in the military and we have really become aware of our freedoms and what our soldiers do for us,” she said. [You are permitted to gag here.] – RTL “It’s not tacky. It’s just out of respect for our military and the wonderful country that we have the privilege of living in.” …

Patriotic Americans are not the enemy! WE MUST POUND CONGRESS until they pass legislation that will protect Americans from encroachment on our Fourth Amendment rights and protections!

So in other words, however much conservatives may like to talk about private property rights, as soon as those rights come into conflict with the myths and symbols of the Federal imperialist leviathan demigod (which I’m sure is all one word in German), property rights get thrown under the bus.

(But wait, Roderick – do the condo owners have legitimate title to their complex under natural law? Well, I don’t know. But clearly no such questions are troubling the senders of these alerts.)

(And speaking of German, if Dawn Kamin is so patriotic, why is she living in Germantown? Wasn’t Americantown good enough for her?)

The only bearable part is the bit where they’re ripping off the Peter Gunn theme.

“I’m appalled and outraged. What the BBC are doing is stealing Scotland’s heritage. It is a kick in the teeth to one of our most iconic industries.”

Before you click, try to guess what monstrous crime the BCC has committed.

The Chinese government is banning tv shows about time travel because they treat “serious history in a frivolous way.”

But wait, there’s more. The powers that be are also training their sights on shows featuring “fantasy,” “mythical stories,” “bizarre plots,” “absurd techniques,” “feudal superstitions,” “fatalism,” “reincarnation,” “ambiguous moral lessons,” and “lack of positive thinking.”

  
– all I can think is: “you’re such a professional, you always have your lunch money ready for the school bully ahead of time.”

It rose in tortured triumph, speaking its denial of pain, its hymn to a distant vision. … The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It was a ‘no’ flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break free. … The sounds of torture became defiance, the statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the song of rebellion – and of a desperate quest.

Atlas’s description of Halley’s Fifth Concerto:

It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.

What the movie is giving us as the “John Galt Theme”:

Parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus.

Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be treated like a thief and a fence respectively, because our rulers need to conspire secretly with each other, and it would be gauche for the rabble to inquire into the doings of their betters. Thus speaks the director of Cato’s Center for Constitutional [sic] Studies. (CHT Walter Grinder and Stephan Kinsella.)

By the way, a special prize to anyone who can figure out how to make sense of the word “duplicity” in Pilon’s final paragraph.

“Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.” — Alabama’s new governor, moments after his inauguration

I seem to recall some Jewish guy expressing a somewhat different opinion.

Alabama governors are famous for putting their feet in their mouths, but this one may have beaten the speed record ….