… or just a lame excuse to post this:

I’m a dad. Two boys, 6 and 2. They’re young, they’re insane most of the time (I mean, who jumps off a sofa onto a hardwood floor while giggling other than completely crazy people … seriously now …), and most of all they’re impressionable.

I can’t count how many times I’ve told my 2-year-old, “No hit Daddy!” when he’s whacked me on the skull for no reason. Then my 6-year-old will chime in, “Yeah! Hit Daddy!” and whack me on the skull, only to be shortly followed by a now maniacally giggling 2-year-old who whacks me on the skull again.

Hey, they’re young kids. I get it. When they turn 18 I’ll have my revenge with thousands of pictures of them doing all manner of embarrassing kid things that will be painstakingly examined by myself and any female friend they decide to bring over for dinner. Heh.

I digress …

I want to raise these boys right. I want Americans as kids. I want them to know about the Revolutionary War, understand what soldiers do, know the meaning behind the flag, the pledge, and the anthem. Respect for one’s country doesn’t come easy though, not for kids. They’re being assaulted on all sides by the un-American, the disrespectful, and the ungrateful among us. In addition to that, they have no frame of reference. I can tell him until I’m blue in the face that in some countries, girls aren’t allowed to go to schools (my 6-year-old barely believes that fact). Or a government can take away anything you own. Or you can be put in jail because some idiot mugger broke into your house and tried to take your money, and you tried to defend yourself. Having not lived in that scenario, it’s hard for a child to understand and feel reverence for the freedoms that are afforded him as a citizen of the United States. They don’t know that kind of hell because we’re in a great country and most of us our great parents that give anything to make their life comfortable - to allow them to live as a kid … jumping off the sofa, running around soaking wet through a sprinkler and laughing on a hot summer day without any care - no Iraq war - no Presidential primary … just being safe, secure, happy kids living in the exact moment their in.

So how do you go about raising a Patriot? Learning about historical figures ends up helping - factoids about Ben Franklin, the story about the Boston Tea Party. At six, my son has a basic understanding of “taxation without representation” and why it got lots of people pissed off. This is all a part of raising him to be respectful. He knows what “one if by land, two if by sea” means. At six, he should, if you ask me.

This is part of the reason as a gun-owner I show my 6-year-old my firearms whenever he asks. Answer his questions, engage him, teach him. He knows the rules, he knows safety, and they aren’t mystical items locked away in the basement. And by the way - this isn’t a concerted effort such as sitting down and learning about some specific event like a classroom. It’s subtle things. See a flag at half-mast? I’ll ask him why he thinks it’s not all the way up. Engage and talk about the answer.

Which brings me to this book:

How To Raise An American. My wife and I bought this because it’s something we’re interested in - Patriotic projects. Now, if you just look at the “discussion” about this book on Amazon, you’re treated to this kind of tripe under the discussion heading, “PROPAGANDA”:

I am afraid a book on how to be an American is, in itself, UNAMERICAN! I fear this book aims to program children with a noncritical, non intellectually curious point of view so desirable in the current manifestation of the right wing. Protect your children. LET THEM THINK, LET THEM INVESTIGATE, AND LET THEM MAKE UP THEIR MINDS. That is what Americans are supposed to do!

Of course, if they think, make up their minds, and decide that this is in fact a great country, they’re idiot knuckle-dragging neocons! This is what I mean by “assaulted on all sides”. There’s no shortage of un-American dumbasses out there who are more than willing to teach you that America is somehow born of illegitimacy because we stole it from peace-loving Indians Native Americans. We stomp all over other countries and thus we’re all evil. Our military kills people and thus they’re all evil too.

Think about what your child has the potential to learn on a daily basis … All of the EARTH’S ills - everything from raising the temperature of the sea to make the world’s population suffer and burn and die, to cave-dwelling religious nutcases wanting us to submit, convert, or have our heads sawed off on camera is ALL OUR FAULT. Starvation in Africa? America’s fault. Gas prices? America’s fault. Global warming cooling “climate change”? America’s fault. Anti-Americanism? America’s fault.

America the Big Bully. Full of Americans who are inconsiderate, brash, holier-than-thou, violence-loving bastards.

I’ll be damned if I let my child become diseased like your average America-hating liberal “intellectual”. This is what’s being taught in schools, peddled in articles, thrown on television, and instilled in children’s mind by lesser parents who grew up with their own parents who flashed their peace signs, protested against whatever they could, spit on veterans, and are so closed-minded and short-sighted as to not understand that an America that accepts every identity individually is an America with no identity of it’s own.

I’m not going to link to the book or anything - I’ll give it a healthy endorsement sans any prospect of an affiliate sale. Most of all, it just has those small ideas that make you think. The book had a question in it that I’ve been thinking about nearly every day since I heard it:

“At what moment do you feel the most patriotic? At what moment do you feel the least patriotic?”

My answer was simple … Most patriotic? At the range. The founding fathers wrote the 2nd, and I’m doing it more than 200 years later. That’s an amazing thing to me. Least patriotic? Paying taxes. :-)

When we asked my son, his answer really took me by surprise … before I get to that, just a quick backstory so you can understand his answer …

My wife walks with the kids a couple times a week. They go through the town, a few neighborhoods, and through a nice cemetery. As a six-year-old, a cemetery is just curiosity-central. “There’s DEAD PEOPLE under there!?” Fascinating stuff. He sees graves of people who have died more than a hundred years ago. He sees stones marked with dates such as “1983-1986″ and has begun to understand that yes, some people haven’t lived as long as he has at six years old.

So his answer to the question, of when do you feel the most patriotic?

“When we’re walking through the cemetery, and I see that American soldiers who died in wars are buried there and I can remember them.”

See that? It’s possible. Possible in the face of a swirling storm of anti-Americanism to raise a Patriot. A child who is proud to be a part of this country, who understands not everything - but at least a little about what it is to have an independent spirit and have gifts passed down from earlier generations. One who knows the concept of sacrifice, but can still giggle, laugh, jump off a sofa and land on his head, or run through a sprinkler without a care in the world.

I’m not issuing a call to action on all you parents out there. This is more of a, “hey, this really isn’t so bad” piece from my heart. It’s not hard to teach little things, ask questions, and put some positive thoughts in your kid’s head so their first exposure to Americanism isn’t one of shame, guilt and disdain. Teach them a little bit about history, teach them to be proud, and teach them to have an American identity that’s all their own.

This time in Sydney Morning Herald …

At present sales of weapons sold privately or at gun shows are not subject to background checks for criminality or mental instability.

Okay then.

And you know, the simple concept of requiring background checks for a private sale of anything is maddening. What a slippery slope … what’s next? Background checks for knives? Crow bars? Baseball bats? Nailguns? Got a used ‘78 Honda sitting in your driveway and you want to sell it for $300 bucks? Background check first pal, that person with $300 cash just might use it to plow through a parade! After all, there are considerably more deaths by automobile or swimming pool in the U.S. than there are guns.

Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day …

… teach a man to use a fish, and he can run miles of ethernet cable throughout his home!

What a farking mess, eh?

Awakened before dawn by police officers who battered down the door to his home, Basil Parasiris said he acted in self-defence when he shot at a stranger at his bedroom door.

In Canada. Amazing that this guy was acquitted. Look at this mess:

Constable Serge Lauzon, the first officer to enter the house, headed for the wrong bedroom, so it was Constable Tessier who went to the master bedroom.

Awakened by the noise, Mr. Parasiris grabbed a Ruger .357 magnum revolver, one of three guns he kept in his closet.

He testified that he fired after seeing “this big man all dressed in black and a white face” at the door.

Three shots hit Constable Tessier, killing him. The last shot struck another constable in the arm.

Jurors heard that Constable Lauzon and Constable François Leblanc mistakenly thought the shots had come from a door in front of them, so they fired 10 shots at the bedroom of Mr. Parasiris’s 15-year-old son.

While backing up, Constable Lauzon bumped into Detective-Sergeant Nathalie Allard as she fired at the master bedroom.

And this …

One of her shots struck Constable Tessier as he lay dying; another wounded Mr. Parasiris’ wife, Penny Gounis, in an arm.

Damn …

The IRON RIVER! (*ominous music interlude*)

The rise in cartel violence in Juárez has made U.S. law enforcement officials all too aware that many of the weapons used for crimes in Mexico come from the United States.

Then build a fucking fence, douchewad. Or would that harm the reproduction cycle of indigenous aardvarks? After all, they’re just doing the jobs that Americans won’t do. Like humping female aardvarks for little or no pay.

I don’t know about any of you, but I’m well beyond sick and tired of being blamed for Mexico’s ills. It’s a poor, crime-ridden, third-world mess that’s corrupt to the core, right in line with some of the worst socialist hell-holes and dictatorships you’ll ever see. I feel a small measure of compassion for the uneducated sheep that live there and get raped by their nanny government on a daily basis … but some individual responsibility would be nice. Stay on your side of the fence, demand answers, and fix what’s broken.

The U.S. should seal the border, pull every last nickel of giveaway money we funnel over to that socialist cesspit, and encourage tax-payers to sue state and federal government if one cent of their “contribution” to Uncle Sam is spent on an illegal’s health bill or education. Find a company that hires illegals for cheap labor?

No problem …

Fine them an exorbitant amount of money for breaking the law and threatening the sovereignty of this nation, then use that cash to fund the fence.

In no time you’ll have a fence, you’ll have employers who are terrified of hiring illegals, and the ones that do it anyway and end up getting caught will help provide collective punishment for all of them.

2 teens wounded in Springfield gun fight:

Must be toy guns since teens can’t get them in that state. Right?

SPRINGFIELD - Two teens suffered gunshot injuries this afternoon in what police are describing as a gang-related gun battle at 11 Standish St. in the Forest Park neighborhood, said Capt. Peter J. Dillon.

Must be a mistake.

One of the teens, a 17-year-old boy, suffered a gunshot wound to his lower stomach, Dillon said. He underwent surgery at Baystate Medical Center and was being kept overnight in the pediatric intensive care unit, he said.

The other teen, an 18-year-old boy, suffered two gunshot wounds to the arm, Dillon said.

Please … 17 and 18 years old? And you call them “boys”? Must be to pad the whole statistic of “children wounded by gun violence” along with the chorus of, “our CHILDREN’S LIVES are in DANGER!”

If you’re old enough to drive your ass to a recruiting station, get deployed and kill yourself some terrorists, you’re not a “boy”.

The proper term to describe these two is, “thug.” Brainless, dumbass, thugs.

Both victims are believed to be members of the Eastern Avenue street gang, Dillon said.

Okay. So you ban guns, you know who these thugs are, you know what gang they’re in, you know where they hang out, but you still can’t stop them from shooting each other. Funny that.

Tam broke the news that Obama is an Assyrian demon that eatz babies. Now we have proof:

Hide your children!

And … you know … if you have one of these:

Send it to lolbama AT fightingforliberty DOT blah blah blah you figure it out. I will post and link.