This is another from Seth’s video archives, a bit of his favorite opera in which he and I both seem to have different icons. His is Maria Ewing (I wonder why) while my favorite here is Gino Quilico, who appears below as Escamillo.

Maria Ewing is the woman in red (Carmen).

Also more than noteable here is soprano Judith Howarth, who plays Frasquita, one of the two bar girls, and whom you see singing that high note near the end of the song.

The only drawback is that it’s in French (the cloud to an otherwise purely silver lining), but the singing and indeed the harmonies are incredible.

Yesterday I began reading Mark Steyn’s new book, After America Get Ready for Armageddon, and like everything Steyn writes, it’s like horses coming out the gate at the Kentucky Derby, grabbing your attention and hanging on from the first word.

It’s a perfect follow-up to America Alone, which he wrote a few years ago, and so far very much worth the read.

This is a writer who has a total grasp of the realities of where our country is heading, and he breaks everything down with his usual humorous twist — in the reviews on the book, Ann Coulter sums it up perfectly when she writes that “Only Mark Steyn can write about the decline of America and leave you laughing.”

I’m already more than halfway through and will probably have finished it by late tonight or early tomorrow, and thus far what I’ve read makes me recommend it completely.

From Seth’s music archives.

Does anybody remember a great British group called YES?

Seth’s interim post hit the nail right on the head, reflecting all our thoughts here at Hard Astarboard.

On the same token, we all agree on one thing, and that is that of all the PACs and PAC oriented organizations purporting to fight for our rights, the single one we can always count on to keep their nose to the grindstone and remain ever vigilant on our behalf is the National Rifle Association.

To that end, whatever else happens in the red light district of politics, we will not neglect to remind readers of the importance of our Second Amendment rights.

That said, a letter that’s making the rounds, from an eight year United States Marine to Senator Dianne Feinstein regarding that leftie legislator’s war on American gun ownership, appears at The Blaze.

Senator Dianne Feinstein,

I will not register my weapons should this bill be passed, as I do not believe it is the government’s right to know what I own. Nor do I think it prudent to tell you what I own so that it may be taken from me by a group of people who enjoy armed protection yet decry me having the same a crime. You ma’am have overstepped a line that is not your domain. I am a Marine Corps Veteran of 8 years, and I will not have some woman who proclaims the evil of an inanimate object, yet carries one, tell me I may not have one.

I am not your subject. I am the man who keeps you free. I am not your servant. I am the person whom you serve. I am not your peasant. I am the flesh and blood of America.

I am the man who fought for my country. I am the man who learned. I am an American. You will not tell me that I must register my semi-automatic AR-15 because of the actions of some evil man.

I will not be disarmed to suit the fear that has been established by the media and your misinformation campaign against the American public.

We, the people, deserve better than you.

Respectfully Submitted,
Joshua Boston
Cpl,
United States Marine Corps
2004-2012

Those are our sentiments, exactly….

….but acknowledging a reality I never thought I’d live to witness in this great nation;

I first want to thank Mrs. Wolf, along with her big bad husband and our good friend Chuck for holding the fort here in my absence — especially Mrs. Wolf who has put in such an effort for so long….

However, while I have been out of the mainstream as well as away from the blog for so long — I still have a few issues to contend with before I can return, though as far as Hard Astarboard is concerned, I don’t know exactly to what, though, again, possibly not politics as I see little point in playing against a stacked deck, which is what the United States of America has become, and blatantly so.

I spent a couple of days in New York recently and in walking around Manhattan found it rather depressing.

A few examples:

Yesterday’s immigrants, largely from east Asia and Europe, came over, assimilated into our society and contributed to the whole as new Americans, leaving their own legacies while becoming, as we say, “Americanized”.

Today’s crop, however, seems to come entirely from third world shitholes with little if any concern about becoming Americans. Rather, they bring said third world shitholes over here with them and this baggage they bring becomes the new American standard.

Sub Saharan Africans line the sidewalks, even in front of large established department stores, with stands purveying cheap knock-offs, others appear like magic right as rain begins to fall and sell cheap umbrellas that fall apart as soon as a slight breeze strikes them, so inevitably as one walks along one sees every corner trash receptacle overflowing with broken umbrellas in every level of disrepair. Still others illegally sell counterfeit watches (hundreds of them out there doing it daily from Canal Street all the way through midtown Manhattan), posting lookouts to warn them of approaching police officers. Hundreds of others run tables selling the same cheap items, from wallets to cell phone cases to scarves to gloves to who knows what all…

Jihadi wagons (those eyesore, unsanitarily maintained stainless steel “Hallal” food carts, many with a Muslim inside, many with one on the sidewalk in front of a grill) are virtually everywhere, all but underscoring the number of legitimate restaurants, cafes and diners, sometimes as many as four or five along one side of a block and the numbers keep growing, as though there’s no limit to how many can be out there to compete with regular eateries.

Most of the smaller retail businesses you go into are staffed by people who have no concept of that great American tradition known as Customer Service, nor have they any clue about the concept of product knowledge. All they know is how much an item costs.

You go into a stall in a public restroom, and you can rest assured that if some brownskinned guy from a third world shithole is coming out, he has just finished urinating without lifting the seat and hasn’t bothered flushing the commode, either.

The modern New York cab driver is a Muslim from one or another of those Third World shitholes (many even wear shalwar kamiz, the outfits seen in Pakistan and Afghanistan consisting of a long, loose shirt falling low over loose fitting pants — Wolf tells me that before he retired from service, he had occasion to punch a few holes in some shalwar kameez from time to time) who, despite a legal condition of a hack license being that he takes a fare wherever said fare wants to go in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx or Brooklyn, tends to make a potential fare stand there, hat in hand, and say where he or she wishes to go before getting in the cab and if the driver doesn’t see the trip as revenue advantageous, he turns down the fare.

So now those same New York liberals who so fight to force multiculturalism on us have accepted the fact that now they have to stand there like sheep and hope a cabbie will agree to take them where they want to go.

Since it’s an illegal practice, many cabbies keep their “off duty” light on so they can say “I was off duty — if they wanted to go in the direction I was going, I could have taken them.”

This is multiculturalism in action.

While these barely civilized third world shitholers are being imported in droves, men and women from countries whose natives are infinitely more compatible with our sensibilities, our culture and our sanitary standards have to jump through hoops for the opportunity to live in America.

What a concept! Thank you so much, liberals.

Of course, this is all just cosmetic where the real problems we’re having are concerned; the real problem is that while Constitutionally, the federal government isn’t supposed to have the power to stomp our economy into the ground and spit on it or to micromanage our lives, they are doing a great job of both nonetheless. They are screwing us royally, without even a kiss, while feathering their own nests at our expense.

For some time, the far left has been firmly in charge of the media, our education establishment, American labor and the U.S. government, and in the latter case they’ve had a whole lot of help from those whores we conservatives have been electing to represent us in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

That’s right, whores.

The so-called “Republicans” have sold us out. Last time out, they used the Tea Party movement to advance themselves, then turned around and started denouncing those true patriots when they didn’t need them anymore.

As Mrs Wolf pointed out recently, prior to that, we had six years of a Republican presidency underlined by Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate…

…and our country STILL moved steadily to the left.

Meanwhile, our children are being dumbed down by the left-controlled education system that turns out a product that seems to have no concept as to political reality, who’d probably tell you Kathleen Sibelius is a long deceased famous composer and Joe Biden used to be the Tidy Bowl Man (actually, that has possibilities…). They’re voting irresponsibly, based on malarkey generated by a propagandizing mainstream media that, if there were any justice and the First Amendment notwithstanding, would be mass-prosecuted for treason.

But somewhere along the bottom line, that’s neither here nor there;

What is, is the fact that we’ve become a country of sheep, our politicians, who were supposed to be serving us, our shepherds. They enact unconstitutional laws and we tolerate them, they vote themselves (again unconstitutionally) health care and retirement and now Obama’s given them and the rest of the government an opening to get still more compensation… a bribe to vote his way, which you know they’ll accept in a heartbeat.

Slowly stripping our freedoms and raising taxes until…what? The 75% Gray Monk informed us in his comment to Mrs. Wolf’s last post that the French are now subject to? Will they not stop before America dies from an Overdose of Redistribution?

Yet throughout all this, our inboxes fill up with urgings from various “conservative” politicians, the GOP and a whole gaggle of Republican PACS to donate money so they can “continue to fight for the cause“.

What cause is that, exactly? Or better, whose cause?

It’s no conservative’s cause that I know of, in fact flushing our money down the commode would probably do more for any conservative cause than sending it to those RINOs in Washington.

They’re not using the money for any proactive results that I can see, yet it’s getting spent.

I’ve reached the point, in fact, where I’m about to mark every single email that comes in from any politicians, PACs or the GOP as Spam, because anything they say is pure bullshit.

They make a lot of conservative noises and, as Mrs Wolf puts it, rattle their sabers, and that’s all they do, as the country lists farther and farther to port.

Meanwhile, in New York there are more and more cops on the street along with some patrolling in unmarked black vans dressed in combat gear and armed with M4 assault weapons like those carried by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — these guys will stop and deploy for no known reason at some point in front of a store or along a stretch of sidewalk, just to be seen… to get citizens accustomed to seeing a military or paramilitary presence in the course of the day, as we see National Guardsmen in Penn and Grand Central Stations on a daily basis now.

Is eventual Martial Law on the table now, as well?

All I see is the end of a great nation, sold down the river by the same self seeking politicians who so falsely purport to be American patriots.

So, while we’re not throwing in the towel just yet, neither are we going to concern ourselves with the politics of the day as enacted by the whores we’ve elected to enact them.

When I eventually return to full time blogging, I may go to topics other than politics, because the more we here at Hard Astarboard post from our conservative political point of view, the more we feel as though we’re flogging a dead horse.

I believe the writing was on the wall when Barack Obama was reelected. America as we longingly remember her, the Constitution we so love and the morality that once underlined American thought have all gone by the wayside, kicked unceremoniously aside by the very system that once supported them as the system was corrupted and bastardized from within by the far left, abetted by and with the spinelessly treasonous cooperation of a gaggle of whores masquerading as Republican Party politicians.

Every last one of those sniveling RINO toilet cakes, from Boehner on down, should be hung as traitors from the nearest lamp post.

So while Hard Astarboard will remain, we will put the fickle, defeatist politics of the GOP on the back burner and hope that somewhere in the future, with any luck in our lifetimes, those elected to give voice to the conservative viewpoint in the governing of the United States will once again be issued spines, pride in America as it was in the days of our youths and some semblance of patriotism….