Assholes – Page 71

Signs of life

Posted on May 4, 2020May 4, 2020 by Mike

Even in Amerika v2.0’s most liberal-fascist state, Real Americans aren’t quite dead yet.

They’re just, y’know, under arrest.

Last Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters he was “weeks not months” from any “modification” of his lockdown order, and the California Highway Patrol was barring any protest at the state Capitol. On Thursday, Newsom shut down state beaches and parks, and on Friday May 1, Californians hit the streets by the thousands, blocking a mile of Pacific Coast Highway down in Orange County, and as Fox News reported, staging protests in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In the state capital of Sacramento, as Katy Grimes of the California Globe noted, “Thousands of flag-waving Californians descended upon the State Capitol Friday for a protest of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s statewide stay-at-home lockdown order, which has caused millions of residents to lose their jobs and businesses.”

The protesters, organized by “Re-Open California,” were not pleading for handouts from the government. For the most part, they were working people who wanted to get their jobs and lives back.

“Reach out to the government and make their concerns, worries, fears, anger, frustration known,” protester Erik Leisten told KCRA News. “Exercise their freedom of speech and right to peacefully assemble and let him know that he’s destroying the state economically, but more importantly our freedoms.”

California Highway Patrol officers in full riot gear formed a line and pushed people off the Capitol grounds. Police arrested 32 demonstrators for disobeying a lawful order, demonstrating without a permit and resisting or delaying a police officer. As Katy Grimes recalled, “police were far less aggressive and few arrests were ever made at Black Lives Matter rallies, which were destructive and violent.”

After the police shooting of Stephon Clark in March of 2018, Black Lives Matter disrupted a Sacramento City Council meeting, blocked fans from entering a Sacramento Kings game, and shut down traffic in both directions on Interstate 5, California’s major north-south artery. A racist mob essentially took over downtown Sacramento, terrorized innocent citizens, and violated laws, but as KCRA reported, police made “no arrests,” during the protest.

By contrast when embattled workers show up at the state Capitol on May 1 to protest their losses, police make 32 arrests. With Gavin Newsom in office, that should come as no surprise.

And it doesn’t. Which is the saddest, most depressing part of all.

The wrong shutdown

Posted on May 4, 2020May 4, 2020 by Mike

Oh, we definitely need a shutdown, all right. But this time, let’s try and get it right.

For whatever reason, many governments persist in destroying resources and fundamental liberties on the basis of a debunked epidemiological model. The national government should actively intercede, as it did to protect Americans’ rights during the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement, neither of which were very civil. But even if it doesn’t want to interfere with states’ rights today, under no circumstances should it FUND their oppression. Verily, I believe any attempt to do so will lead to a tax revolt, probably of the quiet variety at first. There is just no way Americans in the free states are going to fund the continued subjugation of their fellow Americans in California, Michigan, and elsewhere, which have essentially been invaded and occupied by their own governments.

But what then shall the poor state and municipal governments do? Obviously, they need to lift most economic restrictions so that taxes again begin to flow in. And they also need to cut their “nonessential” workers, which is essentially most of them. In the short term anyway, we need courts and police officers and other first responders. (Ultimately, we do not need any of them but this is no time for novelty, even if we have rich comparative and historical examples from which to draw.) But teachers, recorders, prothonotaries, and all sorts of other bureaucrats need to be furloughed immediately. (If you think that many will then join the ranks of protesters, you’re starting to understand the power of the purse! They can arrest some protestors, but not all of them, especially with their budgets so tight.)

There is no reason to exclude national government employees from furloughs either. The bailouts and other forms of hush money already paid out has to be repaid somehow, through higher taxes or lower expenditures. Why do we need parts of the SEC if no corporations are issuing securities? What good is the EPA if factories are shuttered? The USDA if meat processors are closed? What does the Department of Education do even in normal times? Surely most of the Department of the Interior can be let go.

Is furloughing 75 percent of government workers a draconian suggestion? Absolutely, but why shouldn’t government employees suffer along with the rest of us? You can’t expect civvies to bear all the burden of flattening an already pretty flat curve indefinitely. Plus, unlike the private sector, which is all “essential” or it wouldn’t exist, we know from budget battle government shutdowns that much of the national government is nonessential. Life goes on, and some think improves, without it.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the deadweight loss of the 35-day partial federal government shutdown in early 2019 at only $3 billion. We will be lucky to get out of the current mess for $3 trillion in deadweight losses.

Governments messed up by botching testing, then not stopping the spread of the virus when it was still manageable, then did so again by shutting down too much of the economy for too long to cover their incompetence, and now they want to be rewarded with continued nonessential employment, and the forced redistribution of wealth from all Americans to Constitution-smashing state governments? Where is the last straw?

There isn’t one, near as I can tell. Which brings us one step closer to the dropping of the post I mentioned at the end of this one, and am still putting together.

Land of the treed, home of the craven

Posted on May 2, 2020May 2, 2020 by Mike

We are being conditioned to accept the bit. The truly nauseating thing is how very many of us ARE accepting it—when they’re not actively demanding it, screaming for it, that is.

We live in a country where one may be arrested for opening her store or having too many friends at her house for a social gathering. Whiling away the hours under a modified house arrest, we wait for a relative handful of megalomaniacs in government to tell us when we might hope to return to normal life.

Strangely, the American people seem to have swallowed this new reality whole—no questioning, no scrutiny, but complete, embarrassing credulousness at the claims of politicians, bureaucrats, and pundits frantically waving around little more than shoddy, dubious models and barely hiding a lust for tyrannizing innocent people.

This suggests that Americans, thought to be freedom-loving people, will now believe almost anything, conditioned to be fearful and obedient. Even those who had long since abandoned belief in this myth of America as the Land of the Free might have expected at least some resistance in the face of such open attacks on basic freedoms.

William Graham Sumner eloquently exposed the problems with supposing that every social or economic question is susceptible to solution through the “inelastic and arbitrary” means of legislation or regulation. He saw the “mania for interference” as revealing “the prevailing ignorance of what a society is and what methods of dealing with it are rational.” Faced with a particularly complex, vexatious social question, Sumner teaches, “the last thing to do is to legislate about it,” “for it is not possible to experiment with a society and just drop the experiment whenever we choose. The experiment enters into the life of the society, and never can be got out again.”

In America That Was, the old sheep/wolves/sheepdogs analogy has been perverted. For any who have forgotten, or never heard of it:

Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the situation: We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin’s egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without its hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers and other warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful. For now, though, they need warriors to protect them from the predators.

“Then there are the wolves,” the old war veteran said, “and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy.” Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.

“Then there are sheepdogs,” he went on, “and I’m a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.” Or, as a sign in one California law enforcement agency put it, “We intimidate those who intimidate others.”

We are a nation of sheep all right. But the sheepdogs have chosen to switch sides, and are now working for the wolves. And…well, here we all are.

Now, can any of you honestly tell me that this looks even remotely like the now-defunct America v1.0 to you? If so, may I have some of whatever the hell it is you’re smoking? Sundance’s headline says it all:

33 People Arrested During Sacramento Freedom Protest…
Sometimes the headlines tell a story all by themselves…That’s the case in Sacramento California where a group of frustrated and rebellious citizens sought to petition their home confinement order by using the first amendment.

Apparently protesting a governor for redress of grievances, during a time of arbitrary suspension of the first amendment to the U.S. constitution, is grounds for arrest.

As a result 33 Californians were were arrested for not complying with the governor’s order they were protesting against.

Their failure of citizens to keep distant from each-other made them scofflaws to the dictates of the state government.

Video from the scene shows California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered fully armored riot police to surround the capitol building; and face down a group of rebellious moms and business owners.

The subversives who did not remain socially distant, during their protest about having to be socially distant, were promptly arrested.

Ahh, but nobody should be surprised or shocked; Commissar Newsom is only a petty liberal tyrant doing what liberal tyrants do, after all, and he’s making the most of the opportunity presented to him just as any other of them would—and have. The question is: who was it who put Newsom in office in the first place? Worse yet: how likely is it that the self-same people currently so angry at Newsom, Whitler, Coomo, and DeBalledZero, and other tinpot despots currently flaunting their true colors in our fearful faces, will happily march off to the polls to re-elect them next time they get the chance?

A near-certainty, that would be my bet. Nobody had to take their freedom away from them; “Americans” willing gave it away themselves, without hesitation. Which leaves me to saw away at the world’s tiniest violin in sympathy with their complaints, while singing a melody whose lyrics were first set down by the prescient Benjamin “A Republic, if you can keep it” Franklin:

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech…Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

And, in the end, will surely find themselves deprived of both.

More on Mia

Posted on May 1, 2020May 1, 2020 by Mike

The son of the artist involved reveals yet more on the shameful Land-O-Lakes brouhaha.

With the redesign, my father made Mia’s Native American connections more specific. He changed the beadwork designs on her dress by adding floral motifs that are common in Ojibwe art. He added two points of wooded shoreline to the lake that had often been depicted in the image’s background. It was a place any Red Lake tribal citizen would recognize as the Narrows, where Lower Red Lake and Upper Red Lake meet.

In my education booklet, “Rethinking Stereotypes,” I noted that communicating misinformation is an underlying function of stereotypes, including through visual images. One way that these images convey misinformation is in a passive, subliminal way that uses inaccurate depictions of tribal symbols, motifs, clothing and historical references. The other kind of stereotypical, misinforming imagery is more overt, with physical features caricatured and customs demeaned. “Through dominant language and art,” I wrote, “stereotypic imagery allows one to see, and believe, in an invented image, an invented race, based on generalizations.”

I provided a number of examples. Mia wasn’t one of them. Not because she was part of my father’s legacy as a commercial artist and I didn’t want to offend him. Mia simply didn’t fit the parameters of a stereotype. Maybe that’s why many Native American women on social media have made it clear that they didn’t agree with those who viewed her as a romanticized and/or sexually objectified stereotype. Instead, Mia seems to have stirred a sense of remembrance and place, one that they found reassuring about their existence as Native American women.

I don’t know why Land O’Lakes dropped Mia. In 2018, the company changed the image by cropping it to a head shot. That adjustment didn’t seem like a bow to culturally correct pressure. Perhaps her disappearance this year is about nothing more than chief executive Beth Ford’s explanation that Land O’Lakes is focusing on the company’s heritage as a farmer-owned cooperative founded in 1921. But questions remain.

Mia’s vanishing has prompted a social media meme: “They Got Rid of The Indian and Kept the Land.” That isn’t too far from the truth. Mia, the stereotype that wasn’t, leaves behind a landscape voided of identity and history. For those of us who are American Indian, it’s a history that is all too familiar.

The Lid blog sums it all up.

Excellent work, cancel culture. In your zeal to purge the world of racism, you have (what’s that word you use for it) ‘erased’ an actual piece of legitimate, iconic, and native-crated artwork.

And like everything else the left does, you did it ‘for our own good, or as Albert Camus once wrote. “The welfare of the people, in particular, has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”

How long until you admit you’re just another stripe of totalitarians glibly burning down everything in society that doesn’t fit neatly into your narrow little world view.

They don’t check into a logo’s background before they call a logo bigoted, Just like the complaints about the Washington Redskins. The cancel culture calls the team logo racist. But the logo was “first designed in 1971 in close consultation with Native American leaders. Among those who unanimously approved and voiced praise for the logo was Walter “Blackie” Wetzel, a former President of the National Congress of American Indians and Chairman of the Blackfeet Nation. Years earlier, Mr. Wetzel had been deeply involved with U.S. President John F. Kennedy in the movement for civil liberties, civil rights, and economic freedom for all. In 2014, Mr. Wetzel’s son Don commented, “It needs to be said that an Indian from the State of Montana created the Redskins logo, and did it the right way. It represents the Red Nation, and it’s something to be proud of.”

Huh. Didn’t know that. But in the end none of this will matter to the SJW’s—for whom history is rewritable; facts are malleable according to political convenience; and truth is what Kryptonite is to Superman.

Flipsides

Posted on May 1, 2020May 1, 2020 by Mike

A reasonable cop unloads on DeBalledZero.

In an exclusive interview with this reporter Wednesday, President of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, an NYPD union, Ed Mullins called New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio “an idiot” for instructing his officers to arrest people gathering in large groups after hundreds of Jewish people attended a funeral for a well-respected rabbi on Tuesday night.

“You can’t tell law enforcement to go out and violate people’s rights,” he said.

No, you can’t. The flipside to that being that if he does anyway, you do NOT dishonor your badge and place yourself in collusion with his criminality by going out and obeying the illegal order anyway. If you do, not only do you compound his crime by aiding and abetting it, you also take a full measure of its weight onto your own soul.

Mullins, who has served in the NYPD for 38 years, said that the Jewish community regularly has large gatherings, and “what occurred last night is not new. This happens all the time. What occurred last night was different because the community was given out masks. They were trying to keep things organized.”

“So why did you target people of faith at a funeral? Ironically, there’s a video of a woman. She had her husband’s body, I believe it was, in an apartment for several days. So, what do you expect people to do? The city’s not responding. We have people who are sick, go to hospitals, they have no family members, they’re dying alone, some of them are doctors and nurses, and then they’re being buried with really no funerals,” Mullins explained.

He added, “So you have a community that’s doing what they always do. They’re in their own community. They didn’t have a problem with it. I wasn’t at the funeral. I wasn’t infected myself with anything, but I just looked at photos and they’re wearing masks. So, this is what your biggest complaint is that you felt it’s necessary to get out of bed and go yell at people from a funeral? You took away Easter Sunday church from us. I’m Catholic, I didn’t get to go to mass on Easter Sunday. How much more of this can you expect people to take?”

He and his fellow newly-minted despots all over the nation expect people to take as much as he chooses to dish out, and like it. The big question is: will New Yorkers re-elect him again? Because if so, then as far as I’m concerned they’re getting what they deserve.

In his press conference on Wednesday, the Mayor defended his comments saying he was trying to protect police and those gathering, however, Mullins didn’t find his argument convincing.

“We’ve had cops killed under him, cops injured under him, cops abused under him,” Mullins said. “So don’t tell me you’re trying to keep police safe and it puts us in harm’s way.”

As you seem to grasp, Sergeant, it isn’t about safety, nor is it about any overhyped virus. It’s about DeBalledZero being exactly what he was all along. No more, no less.

Still waiting for DeBalledZero to offer a single peep regarding Moslem religious gatherings. Oh no, wait, he finally did.

De Blasio to give 500,000 meals to Muslims but threatened to close churches & synagogues permanently

So, are you Christian and Jewish New Yorkers beginning to get a clue about your place in the official hierarchy now?

Go to work, go to jail

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Mike

Are we tyrannized yet?

Yesterday, I wrote about a disturbing incident involving a tattoo parlor owner here in North Carolina who was handcuffed and escorted out of his shop Wednesday by police officers after he tried to reopen his business.

Matthew “Jax” Myers, 38, told the Raleigh News and Observer that he had no options left but to open back up because he needed the income, so it was a risk he was willing to take.

Click here to watch the video clip of Meyers being led out of his business by police.

In a separate incident that happened earlier today, police in Roxboro, North Carolina showed up to a woman’s hair salon to get her to shut it down after she attempted to reopen.

For the record, Person County – which is where Roxboro is located – has had a total of 20 cases diagnosed, and one death.

Words fail. But on that note, remember last night when I was all pleased and proud to report the Gaston County insurrection?

Gaston County officially reopened for business yesterday at 5:00 PM. Unlike Gov. Cooper, officials of the North Carolina county have enough sense to understand that endlessly shuttering businesses is a worse situation than coronavirus itself.

Tracy Philbeck, a commission chairman of Gaston County, explained that the return of the county’s economy is “health-minded.” Philbeck additionally noted that a one-size-fits-all solution is not appropriate. Shortly thereafter, he cited precautionary measures to prevent health issues; these precautionary measures entail sanitation, good hygiene, and social distancing.

In Gaston County’s announcement about reopening, they noted that vulnerable individuals should remain at home. The order also states that anyone who doesn’t wish to reopen their business is not obligated to do so. As of yesterday, Gaston County gave gyms, restaurants, movie theaters, churches, and sporting areas the green light to resume operations. Thus far, schools, bars, and activities for young people in Gaston County remain shuttered.

Sounds good, right? Yeah, well, about all that.

As it happens, close on the heels of Philbeck’s announcement, the daughter of a close friend of mine received a call from her boss instructing her to report to work at five. Having inexplicably bought into the frenzied Shanghai Sniffles panic-mongering herself, she was alarmed and VERY reluctant, but in the end screwed up the wherewithal to risk all-but-certain death and head on over to the small Belmont restaurant/pub that employs her anyway, a brand-new place that’s only been open a few months.

This was at five (5) PM.

At six, several black-and-whites from the town Schutzstaffel surrounded the place, and po-po strolled in to enforce Comrade Cooperovitch’s illegal edict. The owner, having already done hard time once years ago, saw no reason to risk arrest and immediately complied. And that was that; the Empire struck back, the nascent Rebel Alliance was quickly crushed.

Now, you people know I am not one to reflexively hate on cops. But I can only come up with one ugly little word in reference to LEOs who execute orders they know damned well are invalid, well outside the authority of our pissant little shit of a governor to issue. Such cops are pigs. Sorry and all, it pains me no end to have to say it, but…well, there it is.

Excuse me no excuses about being obliged to comply with the commands of your superiors, boys. “Just following orders” didn’t suffice to wash away the stain of guilt from the Nazis, and it isn’t going to absolve any of you now. The truth is, you all recited a few words before the badge was pinned on your chest:

The widely used oath embraced by the International Association of Chiefs of Police reads, “On my honor, I will never betray my badge, my integrity, my character or the public trust. I will always have the courage to hold myself and others accountable for our actions. I will always uphold the Constitution, my community, and the agency I serve.”

As AG Barr so concisely put it the other day, there is NO pandemic exception written into the Constitution. And just because our professional politicians speak similar oaths with forked tongues, harboring no intention whatsoever of living up to them right from jump, it doesn’t mean that YOU should do the same.

Comes a time when a man—any man, every man—has to decide to stand up for the right, to refuse to go along with things that are patently wrong. Orders of magnitude more so for cops, for soldiers, for any toting a similar weight of communal trust and responsibility. A cop willing to flout the Law Enforcement Oath Of Honor, a solemn and serious covenant, in order to enforce dictates he knows to be unrighteous should never have become a cop in the first place, no matter how polite he might be as he slips the cuffs onto some blameless soul for the crime of trying to keep a roof over his family’s heads in extremely difficult times. He has shown himself to be morally unfit for the job.

Instead of arresting desperate small business owners who stand to lose everything they have or ever will have, LEOs should consider heading to the Governor’s Mansion instead. There’s far more upright and honorable work awaiting you there, fellas.

Oh, by the way: as of yesterday, Gaston County has all of twenty active C-19 cases, and a total of three deaths.

Railroaded

Posted on April 30, 2020April 30, 2020 by Mike

Steyn on the Flynn travesty of justice.

So one conversation, with disgraced corrupt rogue agent Strzok, without counsel present and without the defendant being aware that this was an interrogation of him as opposed to just a friendly intragovernmental chit-chat, has consumed three years of Flynn’s life and all his savings.

I heard Kellyanne Conway being asked this morning about whether Trump should now pardon Flynn. No. It is for the court, as an act of judicial hygiene, to accept Flynn’s withdrawal of his enforced guilty plea (made under threats by the feds to destroy the lives of various family members, too), quash the conviction as a miscarriage of justice, and invite the defense to lay before His Honor a wrongful prosecution suit.

If it requires a presidential pardon to bring garbage like this to an end, then we are all in trouble. Because if the Deep Staters can do it to Flynn, they can do it to anyone.

Sheeeit. Can there be anyone out there so naive, so gullible, so out of touch with the cold realities of life in Amerika v2.0, that they don’t know full well that it’s already happening, and has been for years?

Misremembering to the FBI should not be a crime – especially not on the basis of a politically motivated policeman’s supposedly contemporaneous “notes”, rather than an audio or video recording. Instead of a presidential pardon, why not repeal this vile pseudo-crime that mocks due process? I take it that, the GOP having lost the House, Congress will not enact a new Strzok Act, restoring the citizen’s right to misremember to a corrupt police agency’s goons, but why cannot Bill Barr suspend this “crime” pending an investigation into its misuse by prosecutors over recent years?

While we’re at it, how about another modest reform? Me again, three years ago:

During the stupid and anachronistic two-and-a-half-month electoral ‘transition’, the outgoing Administration worked round the clock to de-legitimize and cripple their successors.

No other government in the free world requires this long to respect the results of an election. Even before the Obama-Biden Administration decided to weaponize the “transition”, it served as the most obvious example of the general sclerosis of Swampland: why be surprised that in an emergency the government takes months to get out your relief check of twelve hundred bucks when even in normal times it requires three months to clear out its desks? How about a constitutional amendment to the Twentieth Amendment shortening the transition to three weeks?

I think it’s sooooo cute that Mark still thinks the Constitution means a goddamned thing, even after all this.

The FBI has been entirely corrupt, malevolent, and a deadly threat to supposed American rights and freedom since its Constitutionally-dubious inception. It was originally birthed under the direction of J Edgar Hoover, conceptualized and structured in accord with his own warped vision. As twisted, treacherous, and power-mad as he was personally, how could his brainchild be anything other than the nefarious affront to the most fundamental concepts of true justice America claims to cherish that it has been from the beginning?

The FBI doesn’t need to be “reformed” or “restructured” or “rethought.” It is rotten root, branch, and bough; meaningful reform is an impossibility for so cancerous a blight on the former Republic. The danger it represents, the grievous harm it has done, the extraordinary malfeasance that is its stock in trade, is engraved all across its appalling history. It should be removed—dismantled, disassembled, decontructed

That so treacherous, dishonorable, and altogether toxic little worm as Comey could rise through the FBI hierarchy to eventually occupy its highest seat of power is indictment aplenty. That any organization would countenance such a one in even its lowest ranks, much less at its head, ought to be all that’s required to pass judgment on whether that organization lives on or dies. Its continued existence, on the other hand, is no less grave an indictment of us.

Update! Swiped from Francis.

He follows on with this:

As Friedrich Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom, the desire for power and the willingness to do anything to get and keep it are strongest in those who would abuse it. So with the passage of enough time, the corridors of power will be filled by criminals. Worse, let a little more time go by, and the lesser criminals will be replaced by the greater ones: strong-armers, rapists, and murderers.

Think Ruby Ridge and Waco.

A bit later Fran contends that “…we haven’t yet descended to the level of a banana republic,” to which I can only say: after what we’ve witnessed over the last six weeks, how sure can we be of that, really? Seems to me about the only thing that has kept us from fully meriting that designation up ’til now is our general affluence, which is being wantonly destroyed before our very eyes. After we’ve been impoverished, humiliated, and enslaved to the satisfaction of our masters…well, then what shall we call ourselves?

The real criminals

Posted on April 29, 2020April 29, 2020 by Mike

Corrupt, dirty bastards.

Explosive New Flynn Documents Show FBI Goal Was To ‘Get Him Fired’
New documents filed under seal last week by the Department of Justice provide the clearest evidence yet that the investigation and subsequent prosecution of former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was a set-up from the beginning. Handwritten notes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that had been inappropriately withheld from Flynn’s defense team for years show that a key goal of the agents investigating Flynn was “to get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”

In the handwritten FBI notes, the note-taker, whose identity was not made clear in the document production, wrote that an alternate goal is to “get [Flynn] to admit breaking the Logan Act,” a reference to a 1799 law restricting communications between private citizens and foreign governments. The law is widely viewed as unconstitutional and has never been used to successfully prosecute a single American citizen. The previously secret notes do not explain that Flynn was not a private citizen, but rather the incoming national security adviser at the time of his conversations with world leaders.

The explosive new documents support Flynn’s latest claims that Obama-era Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI officials had conspired to set him up from the beginning and that they never had any legitimate basis for investigating him.

The author of the handwritten notes filed under seal last week also wrote, “We have a case on Flynn and Russians,” and “our goal is to resolve case.” Despite those claims of treasonous Russian collusion, Mueller found, after a sprawling, multi-year, multimillion-dollar investigation, that there was zero evidence of illegal collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to steal the 2016 election from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

In reality, the only Russian collusion that happened during the 2016 campaign was between the Clinton campaign and a subcontractor it funded, who was at the time working on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch. That agent, former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, created for the Clinton campaign the entire basis for charges of illegal collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. That document, known as the Steele dossier, has been thoroughly debunked since it was first released in early January 2017. The Clinton campaign, in cooperation with the Democratic National Committee, secretly funded the creation of that document and its distribution throughout the media. To date, none of its key collusion claims has been corroborated.

Sundance offers a reminder:

Keep in mind, the Mueller special counsel knew this all along…

Keep in mind, former DAG Rod Rosenstein knew this all along…

Also keep in mind, current FBI Director Chris Wray and current FBI Legal Counsel Dana Boente knew this all along…

These documents have been inside the DOJ and FBI for more than three years; while they prosecuted him and drove his family into bankruptcy.

It remains doubtful at best that the filthy scum will face any meaningful consequences for these abominable, heinous acts—their corruption, their casual indecency, their raw sedition, the human misery and destruction they so cruelly inflicted. Our only solace is that they’re sure to burn in Hell for them. May their torment be unbearable, and may it last for a thousand years.

The numbers are clear

Posted on April 29, 2020April 29, 2020 by Mike

And they still aren’t dissipating that fishy aroma wafting off of the Corony “crisis.”

Data are coming in, and their import is clear. The coronavirus pandemic is not and never was a threat to society. COVID-19 poses a danger to the elderly and the medically compromised. Otherwise, for most who present symptoms, it can be nasty and persistent, but is not life-threatening. A majority of those infected do not notice that they have the disease. Coronavirus presents us with a medical challenge, not a crisis. The crisis has been of our own making.

On March 16, Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London predicted a coronavirus death toll of more than two million in the United States alone. He arrived at this number by assuming that infection would be nearly universal and the fatality rate would be high—a terrifying prospect. The next day, Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis sifted through the data and predicted less widespread infection and a fatality rate of between 0.05 and 1.0 percent—not that different from the common flu. The coronavirus is not the common flu. It has different characteristics, afflicting the old more than the young, men more than women. Nevertheless, all data trends since mid-March show that Ferguson was fantastically wrong and Ioannidis was largely right about its mortal threat.

In epidemiology, nothing is certain. The facts may change in the future. But as of now, this much is certain: Current data point to a disease that is far less deadly than was feared when our country hurled itself over the cliff of mass lockdown. The WHO was at that time issuing warnings that presumed a death rate 20-30 times higher than what now appears realistic.

We need fact-based policies. COVID-19 spreads rapidly, and any fast-spreading disease can strain medical resources as incidences rise. Long recovery times increase patient loads in hospitals. Careful planning and resource allocation are therefore essential. They were accomplished successfully in New York, much to the credit of medical professionals here. The American people need to be told of that success, which, given the density of New York, shows that we can and will succeed everywhere in our country.

We’ve been stampeded into a regime of social control that is unprecedented in our history. Our economy has been shattered. Ordinary people have been terrorized by death-infused propaganda designed to motivate obedience to the limits on free movement. We have been reduced to life as medical subjects in our condition of self-quarantine. As unemployment numbers skyrocket and Congress spends trillions, the political stakes rise.

The experts, professionals, bureaucrats, and public officials who did this to us have tremendous incentives to close ranks and say, “It is not wise to tell people that the danger was never grave and now has passed.” Sustaining the coronavirus narrative will require many lies. It will be up to us to insist on the truth.

Personally, I’d insist on an abject, groveling apology for the damage the panic-ninnies and grasping state/local officials have done if I thought there was a chance in hell of ever actually getting one out of ’em. Instead, though, we can expect plenty of self-congratulation about the wonders their self-serving lockdown orders wrought in saving us all. Which is going to taste all the more sour after perfidy like this:

I was going to do this as a video, but decided that I'm a bit too angry to be trusted with a camera and a microphone. The governor of Tennessee told everybody that he would not be extending his safer at home executive order, and that he would allow local governments to begin reopening their businesses when it expired.

Business owners reacted, bring in inventory, stocking shelves, bringing back employees, and spending money to get ready to reopen.

Today, just a couple of days before businesse were going to reopen, the governor issued a new executive order. Only some businesses would be allowed to reopen. Others would have to remain closed. Restaurants could open, but bars could not. Gyms could open, but swimming pools and bowling alleys could not. Stores could open, but playgrounds, amusement parks, theaters, auditoriums, arcades, race tracks, etc could not.

All of the theaters in Pigeon Forge were planning on reopening following the governor's original announcement. They brought back their casts and crews, spruced up the theaters, and got everything ready to open up.

Now they can't. All that time, effort, and yes, money, has been wasted as the governor, at the last minute, took away their hope.

This will be devastating to these businesses. Many of them will fail because of the governor's about face. In a cruel parody of the last minute reprieve of the death row inmate, instead of offering a reprieve, the governor's call has pulled the switch on Sevier County.

I cannot state this strongly enough; this eleventh hour extension of the shutdown will do irreperable harm to the county. It will be far more devastating than the fire of a couple years ago because there will be no coming back for many of these businesses. The governor's order will destroy even those businesses he so graciously deigned to allow to open. How will restaurants survive with no patrons? The locals won't be able to afford to eat there, and the tourists won't come because there's nothing to do. The only thing more corrosive to a bottom line than a closed restaurant is an open one with too few customers, and Governor Lee has ensured that is exactly what will happen.

And for what? Saving lives from COVID-19? Feh. The numbers are clear and getting clearer. COVID-19 was never the monster it was made out to be. Serious? yes. Devastating? Not hardly.

What will be devastating is the countless lives destroyed by this continued overreaction on the part of the governor.

It's sad; just a couple of days ago, I was praising him for allowing each local jurisdiction the dignity of decideing for themselves exactly how to transition back to a functioning economy.

I should have known better.

Considering that clear-eyed skepticism of government is supposed to have been bred into the American DNA, yeah, we all shoulda. And yet.

But let’s close this thing out on a more uplifting note, shall we? A good friend of mine texted me something C&P’d from another Fakebook post, and I thought it was worth sharing.

Perspective! It’s a mess out there now. Hard to discern between what’s a real threat and what is just simple panic and hysteria.

For a small amount of perspective at this moment, imagine you were born in 1900. On your 14th birthday, World War I starts, and ends on your 18th birthday. 22 million people perish in that war. Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until your 20th birthday. 50 million people die from it in those two years. Yes, 50 million.

On your 29th birthday, the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, the World GDP drops 27%. That runs until you are 33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy. When you turn 39, World War II starts. You aren’t even over the hill yet.

And don’t try to catch your breath. On your 41st birthday, the United States is fully pulled into WWII. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perish in the war. At 50, the Korean War starts. 5 million perish.

At 55 the Vietnam War begins and doesn’t end for 20 years. 4 million people perish in that conflict. On your 62nd birthday you have the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War. Life on our planet, as we know it, should have ended. Great leaders prevented that from happening. When you turn 75, the Vietnam War finally ends.

Think of everyone on the planet born in 1900. How do you survive all of that? When you were a kid in 1985 and didn’t think your 85 year old grandparent understood how hard school was. And how mean that kid in your class was. Yet they survived through everything listed above.

Perspective is an amazing art. Refined as time goes on, and enlightening like you wouldn’t believe. Let’s try and keep things in perspective. Let’s be smart, help each other out, and we will get through all of this.

Wise and encouraging words.

Hitting the reset button

Posted on April 29, 2020April 29, 2020 by Mike

Lee Smith opines at length on what must be done.

The novel coronavirus that swept out of the Chinese city of Wuhan in midwinter to infect millions around the globe has now forced world leaders to reassess their relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The superpower conflict between the United States and Soviet Union helped push China onto center stage nearly 50 years ago. Over the past three decades, Beijing has come to dominate the international system, thanks not only to the world’s largest pool of cheap, unregulated labor and a burgeoning consumer marketplace, but also the craven delusions and greed of Western political and business elites, especially in the United States. COVID-19 has now compelled the most significant geostrategic rethink since the end of the Cold War.

Whatever the origins of the virus, there is no question that the Chinese have leveraged it as a weapon of social and economic warfare. Could the ruins of a shooting war be much worse than those of a virus that, as of this week, has left more than 50,000 Americans dead and nearly one-tenth of the population unemployed, turning the businesses, life savings, and dreams of our neighbors to ashes?

But no one in Washington wants to call it war—and for good reason. The massive amount of wealth that America’s political and business elites have transferred to the CCP over the past 30 years has put the United States under China’s thumb. Our manufacturing base, as well as our debt, is controlled by the CCP. The United States, senior U.S. officials say, would likely lose in any major confrontation, financial or military, with China. Even the medicines we would need to treat our wounded are in Beijing’s hands.

As implied above, this is a long ‘un. But you’ll want to read all of it nonetheless.

Update! Father Raymond De Souza says this could be China’s “Chernobyl moment.” It damned well ought to be, and in fact it MUST be, by hook or by crook. Failing to inflict a heavy price on the ChiComs for this atrocity will only guarantee future repeats.

The Soviet Chernobyl moment came three years after U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, which was, at the time, ridiculed by the international diplomatic establishment. Yet when the liberation of Europe from the Soviet empire followed six years later, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist two years after that, the courageous dissidents behind the Iron Curtain revealed that the forthright condemnation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” was a critical turning point.

A few months ago, the likelihood of the Chinese experiencing an evil empire moment was less than nil. Recall how things stood in late 2019.

After more than a year of ramped-up religious persecution, including a prohibition on children attending religious services, the replacement of crosses in Christian houses of worship with state symbols, the demolition of churches and the imprisonment of clergy, not a single word of protest was issued by the Vatican.

After months of protests to protect democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, support for the protesters on the world stage was minimal. And not just governments were afraid to upset the CCP. For example, when the CCP propaganda machine voiced outrage after the Houston Rockets’ general manager’s tweeted support for the protesters during a basketball tour of China, the National Basketball Association went into full craven apology mode.

All of the above examples are nothing short of disgraceful, and wholly despicable. Bottom line?

The power of the evil empire speech was not that it informed people that Soviet communism was evil in itself and an evil force in global affairs. Everyone knew that, even those whose interests lay in denying it. What was novel was that the American president was willing to say it. Truth has its own power.

The novel coronavirus has brought novelties of all kinds. Might a moral clarity about the Chinese Communist party be one of them?

I repeat: the one big thing to know is this: Commies gonna Commie. There is no good rationale—none—for any even putatively free nation to truck with Communist regimes in any way, shape, or form. For Americans to have allowed their political and business “leadership” to sell We The People down the river for a fistful of yuan is likewise inexcusable, and led directly to the current dismal pass. We must now demand that this situation be rectified—and I don’t mean slow, either.

The way forward

Posted on April 28, 2020April 28, 2020 by Mike

Schlichter puts forth a fine agenda.

Red China must be dealt with as what it is – an enemy. If the country’s Maoist mullahs had decided that they wanted China to spin-up into a first world power and responsibly assume a place at the world’s head-table by trading fairly, respecting human rights, not stealing our inventions, and not sending weird bugs across the globe, cool. But Red China wants to dominate the world.

We need to take this moment to understand that Red China is a hostile power seeking to defeat us economically. We need to aggressively repatriate critical industries home from China. We need our own drug industry back, our own rare-earth mining capacity, our own steel sector. We need to waive the frivolous regulatory nonsense that made China attractive to businesses in the first place. If the EPA keeps us from mining rare earth elements, it’s the EPA that needs to go, not our capacity to obtain these critical resources.

We need to do what China does without hesitation: bar Chinese companies or Chinese-controlled companies from participating in critical infrastructure like 5G.

We also need to stop pretending China is a developing nation and demand it fund all international organizations at America’s level. That it owns the WHO, yet pays a fraction of what we do is ridiculous. In too many ways – including in the idiotic climate hoax arena – China gets an edge by pretending it is not a First World nation and getting breaks we do not.

We need to clamp down on espionage, both strategic and economic. We need to openly tell the truth: China targets the Chinese diaspora to use as spies. That’s not racist. That’s a fact. But let’s not let the traitors who are not of Chinese descent off the hook. There are too many people who will sell out their country for a few renminbi. We need to get the FBI out of domestic politics and massively focused on uprooting these foreign agents. All spies should be subject to lengthy prison sentences. This nonsense about just a year or two in jail needs to end. And we need to clear out academia of Chinese nationals, both students and faculty. Why are we training our enemy? Plus, we must ruthlessly expose just who China has bought in our universities, the corporations, and the media.

China is largely to blame for the Wuhan Flu pandemic, but the idea of suing it for compensation is as useless as it is politically attractive. Here’s the way to kill two bats with one stone: impose a penalty tariff on all Chinese goods to create a huge pot of money to compensate the victims of ChiCom lies as well as give our industries a chance to recover.

Most of all, we need to get serious about this conflict, and it is a conflict. We tend to see other people from our own perspective. We are reasonable, fair, and just. But communists are none of those things. These red bastards exploit the patriotism of the Chinese people – who have every right to seek prosperity and freedom – to consolidate power and turn the spotlight off their own manifest failures and tyrannies. We need to get woke, as the hep kids say, woke to the fact that the Mao pals are bad people and we better understand that before one morning we wake up with their boot on our neck forever.

Seconded from here, every word of it, eleventy million bazillion percent. The very idea that we just had a goddamned out-and-proud, Red-in-tooth-and-claw Bolshevik actually make a credible run for one major party’s nomination for President ought to freeze every Real American’s blood, right down to the very marrow.

The Boomers vs the Zoomers

Posted on April 27, 2020April 28, 2020 by Mike

Or: the Geezer Resistance.

By turning the nation into a weird form of North Korea. the new class gets new perks. Instead of standing in long lines dressed like idiots, they will soon have private shops where they can shop like normal people in a normal society. The next phase of liberal democracy is concierge shopping to go along with concierge health care. You see, who we are is a nation of equals with one set of rules for the Cloud People and another for the Dirt People.

The hero nonsense does not stop with the boot to the masked face. Just as happened in communist societies, fanatics are now rising up among us to hector the rest of us about our adherence to the new rules. This plague first started on-line with the “Cucks and Karens”, as one commenter called them, tone policing anyone questioning the mass idiocy we see all around us. Now they have spilled into the real world, furiously looking to heroically tell people to keep their distance.

Since I will not stand in the idiot line for the market I usually solicit, I went to another market that is not as heroic. They have a fat broad making sure everyone entering is dressed like a train robber. The greeter has not become the enforcer, but you don’t have to stand outside like a moron. This store serves the working and middle-class, while the really heroic store serves managerial types. There is a strong correlation between class and the willingness to suspend the sense of disbelief.

Inside the store they have arrows on the floor, meaning you have to walk up and down every aisle in a specific order. Apparently, heroism now means having to examine every product on every shelf before you leave the store. This is actually dumber than the Soviet-style lines to enter the store. No one is going to traverse the whole store because they forget to get something in aisle one. As a result, people are violating the edicts and going about their business like sane people used to do.

I was one of those sane people, going against an arrow to get something when a Cuck and Karen in their TikTok costumes said something to me about the arrows. The Cuck did the “Sir! Sir!” bit, but I just ignored him. After I got what I wanted, I turned around and he was saying something, but I could not hear it because my hearing is not good and he was talking through his sissy rag. I was ready to ignore him, but then he did the same “Sir! Sir!” bit to an old guy who was violating arrow policy.

Having reached the age where I no longer bite my tongue in public, I said to the guy, “It is bad enough we have to put up with nonsense, we don’t need idiots like you pretending to be the police of us.” He then heroically said something about it “being about all of us” and I reminded him that the most likely way for him to end up in the hospital was to keep talking. The old guy, heroically chimed in with a vigorous “Fuck you, asshole” and a middle-finger at Cuck and Karen.

The Boomers get a lot of grief from certain people and some of it is surely justified, but the only rebels I see in my travels these days are old-timers. This was not the first time I’ve seen an old person tell one of these prissy heroes to do an unnatural act when confronted about a mask or other dumb stuff. All the butch young guys are sheltering in place, heroically self-isolating while whining about the Boomers. The growing protests we see are almost all old people. Zoomers ain’t our heroes.

I myself have taken to saying “Moron” whenever I walk by another masked pissypants—not whispering it, not muttering it under my breath, just saying it in a normal tone of voice and passing right on by. Not saying it threateningly or angrily either, mind, just making a casual observation and moving on. It’s the native curmudgeon in me being brought to the fore at last, maybe. But I can’t help but feel that I probably should have been doing it long before this whole shitshow descended on us.

Bait and switch

Posted on April 25, 2020April 27, 2020 by Mike

Uncle Gropey might be about to join Albert “Arnold The Pig” AlGore, Bolshevik Bernie, and HILLARY!™ in the official ranks of Those Who Will Never Be President.

While the mainstream media has mostly kept a lid on this story, the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden aren’t going away soon. As PJM’s Rick Moran reported earlier this week, the D.C. police are treating the allegations as an “active and ongoing” investigation. Many liberals are turning a blind eye to the story, but there are some who have a vested interest in keeping this story alive and front and center: Bernie Bros.

In fact, Briahna Joy Gray, Bernie Sanders’ former campaign press secretary, who has been a vocal critic of Biden, suggested in an interview with The Atlantic that the allegations might just thwart Biden’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

Gray told Emma Green that the Democratic primary is far from over. “The Democratic Party would like us to believe [we’re now in the general election season], and they behaved that way even before Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race. But we are, in fact, still in a Democratic-primary season. Biden is only the presumptive nominee,” she said, before adding, “And there’s all kinds of whispers and rumors about whether or not something might happen at the convention, which might mean Joe Biden isn’t even the nominee.”

Try as Enemedia might to insert their fingers into their ears and loudly sing tra-la-la I can’t heeaaar you until it all goes away, Reade’s accusation is entirely credible, with far more evidence to support it than was ever the case back when the self-same rectal polyps were defaming poor Brett Kavanaugh.

OF COURSE Gropey did it; a leap of faith as gargantuan as Evel Knievel’s ill-fated Snake River Canyon fiasco would be required to believe otherwise, given his long history of sniffing, nuzzling, feeling up, and just generally forcing his unwanted attentions on every appalled female within his reach, whatever the victim’s age. How much that really matters to high-level Democrat-Socialist Party conspirators is another thing entirely.

Gray suggests that Democrat voters were conned into believing that Joe Biden was the most electable candidate while Reade’s allegations were ignored for over a year. A new report from The Intercept published on Friday says that new evidence supports the credibility of Tara Reade’s allegations against Biden.

I think it’s clear, based on Gray’s comments in her interview, that Bernie Bros who are not happy about Biden being the presumptive nominee are going to make sure the Tara Reade allegations don’t get swept under the rug, in the hopes that they can pull off getting a different candidate on the ballot. While this is highly unlikely, in my opinion, I’m inclined to believe that there are enough Bernie Sanders supporters who will do anything they can to thwart Biden’s nomination. Even without the Tara Reade allegations, there’s enough for Democrats to be concerned about. Biden has an enthusiasm gap that is likely not going to change, and his cognitive decline will likely become a huge liability in the fall.

Throw in Uncle Gropey’s rapidly-escalating cognitive dysfunction and there ain’t gonna be enough popcorn in the world for this shitshow.

Are they sick, or just sadistic?

Posted on April 24, 2020April 24, 2020 by Mike

Your tax dollars at “work.”

Feds Were Buying Cats from Chinese Wet Markets, Fed Them to American Cats for Research: Report

Wait, what?!?

Do you find your stomach turning when you think of the treatment and handling of domestic animals, and the apparent disregard for sanitation, at China’s now-infamous wet markets?

According to one report, you may have been providing those markets financial assistance for many years.

A March 2019 report from the White Coat Waste Project — a watchdog group that wants to “drain the swamp” by ending federal spending on projects that use dogs, monkeys, cats and other animals as guinea pigs — revealed that U.S. taxpayer funding went to these repulsive centers for death and disease.

And it gets worse.

According to the the report, U.S. government researchers had been conducting “kitten cannibalism” experiments — spending taxpayer dollars to buy cats and other animals from Chinese wet markets and then feeding their tissue to kittens in the U.S.

Well hey, it’s right there in the Constitution, you know.

The practice had apparently gone on for some time, too.

“Since 1982, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has conducted, and continues to perform, toxoplasmosis experiments on cats,” the report said.

“The currently approved protocol for this project calls for up to 100 kittens to be bred each year at ARS’s Animal Parasitic Disease Laboratory (APDL) in Beltsville, Maryland. At eight weeks old, the kittens are fed raw meat infected with the Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) parasite, and their feces is collected for up to 3 weeks so experimenters can harvest oocysts (eggs) for use in food safety experiments. These healthy kittens — who briefly pass the parasite’s eggs and become immune within weeks — are then killed and incinerated by USDA because they are no longer useful.”

That’s where the wet markets come in.

Now, I am not a scientist, a doctor, or a veterinarian, and can lay no claim to expertise about such things. Nonetheless, I have to ask: dude, what the fucking actual fuck???

Tyranny, straight up

Posted on April 24, 2020April 24, 2020 by Mike

You guys know I am neither a reflexive cop-sucker nor a knee-jerk supporter of the police. I’ve known enough of them over the years, more than a few quite closely, to know that they’re every bit as diverse in their attitudes, beliefs, and overall outlook as any other group of humans is. Some are selfless and heroic. Some struggle mightily to rise above their own flaws and frailties, with varying levels of success. And some have absolutely no business whatsoever wearing a badge, carrying a gun, and wielding power over others.

The Chink-N-Pox clampdown is underlining those distinctions in bright, bold red, whether we like it or not.

On Tuesday, an Idaho mother was arrested in front of her children for refusing to leave a playground that was apparently closed by the city due to the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.

Video of the confrontation shows a woman later identified as Sarah Brady, 40, being cuffed for refusing to leave an area playground. “Do it,” Brady dared an officer threatening to arrest her.

“Her kids are here! Her kids are here! What is going to happen? Who’s got her kids?” another woman at the playground can be heard saying as Brady is taken away in handcuffs.

“After receiving several calls to Ada County Dispatch, Meridian Police responded to Kleiner Park on April 21 2020 at around 3:50PM,” said a press release from Meridian Police Department.

“Upon arrival, officers saw that metal signage and caution tape announcing the playground closure due to COVID-19, was removed,” the department continued, adding, “Officers informed those gathered several times that the play structure was closed, and that they were welcome to utilize other areas of the park if they chose.”

After asking questions about the public playground’s closure and refusing to leave when asked, Brady was arrested and hit with one count of misdemeanor trespassing.

Brady was “non-compliant and forced officers to place her under arrest to resolve the issue,” the department said. “She was arrested for trespassing.”

In fairness, Brady’s arrest was the culmination of a planned protest against the lockdown, and Brady was inarguably acting in a, shall we say, intentionally provocative manner. Near as I can make out, the cops performed their duty as professionals, with restraint; no surprise, since they had been sent out by their masters to do a job that was in all likelihood distasteful to at least some of their number. All in all, I’m more inclined to put most of the blame on the city authorities whose nonchalant assumption of dictatorial powers placed the Meridian PD squarely between a rock and a hard place. I note, too, that not ONE of those city authorities seemed to be present to oversee the proper execution of his edicts. This, then, is key:

An extended video of the incident shows an officer earlier in the exchange apologetically saying that “someone” had taken down the caution tape from the closed-off area before Brady — who is reportedly married to a law enforcement officer in another department — and others argued that they are on public grounds supported by their tax dollars.

That same officer suggested the issue should be taken up with the mayor, rather than law enforcement.

Bingo. On the other hand, though, staging a protest DOES amount to “taking it up with the mayor” in practical terms, probably in way more effective fashion than sending a strongly-worded letter or speaking at a city council meeting. I truly hate that petty local and state-level tyrants are driving wedges between honorably-intentioned cops and the citizenry they’d prefer to be protecting than oppressing, a wedge that’s already doing damage even in small-town Idaho.

No, I don’t hate cops, I really don’t. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve been even-handed and rational with this post so far. That said, though, I just can’t find a way to make myself comfortable with this:

WELL! I know I certainly feel a lot safer with this dangerous predator removed from our midst, don’t you?

Total number of deaths in all of Idaho as of today: 54. Population of Idaho as of 2020: just under 1.83 million.

Sefton, from whence the above pic etc etc, says:

I’m pausing for a moment because I am honestly on the verge of tears as I collect my thoughts and try to write something coherent. I’m also enraged because what we are enduring amounts to a Reichstag Fire moment. Please do not fucking lecture me about the massive deaths from Chinese Lung AIDS that warranted the actions taken. The models and statistics are about as reliable as a Magic 8 Ball and the confirmed mortality rate is somewhere in the 0.1-0.3% range which is akin to a bad flu season. What is being done to us has never happened before; not during all the other outbreaks, not after the stock market crashes, not after 9/11. Never. This is tyranny, straight up. It’s at our throats with a My Pillow in one hand and a Khalid Shiekh Mohammed rusty hacksaw in the other. The past three years were a complete refutation and rejection of the anti-American progressive globalist enterprise. In fact, it might have been down for the count. This virus was not planned, but it was an opportunity that was seized upon not only to destroy Trump, but to punish us for electing him, and now the opportunity to subjugate us permanently.

There is indeed a plague upon this nation. It is the Globalist Left that includes the Democrat Party, the propagandist media, governmental bureaucracy, academia and anyone and everyone who support it. Ronald Reagan once said:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

You tell me if what is going on right here and right now is not an extinction-level event. Because it sure as hell is. Tick-tock-tick-tock.

Thanks to the now-evident authoritarian streak that lurks within the hearts of so many American politicians and goobermint officials at every level, we’re all going to be confronted with some difficult choices as this illicit lockdown drags on and on—a lockdown which now threatens to rip the already-tatterdemalion fabric of American society completely asunder. If they don’t care about the rest of us, you’d think the politicians and bureau-hacks would at least be canny enough to recognize how much danger they’re putting their own decidedly non-essential carcasses in with this crap.

And yet.

Update! Government is force.

Let’s start with the good news. Americans are starting to push back against all the authoritarian COVID-19-related edicts and, if social media is an indication, shaming people who call the authorities to report neighbors who are violating social-distancing rules. In Michigan, voters are circulating a recall petition against a governor whose illogical list of permitted activities bans the purchase of seeds to grow food — but allows the purchase of lottery tickets.

It’s a start, but only a small beginning. It’s a shame that it would take such monumental government overreach to spark a backlash. We’re all used to the nonstop, slow-motion infringements, which are imposed (albeit in different ways, perhaps) by leaders of both parties. Finally, as we’re all prisoners in our homes and subject to hastily drafted and arbitrary suspensions of our fundamental liberties, Americans are learning a civics lesson.

Fears of a pandemic have exposed government for what it really is: a collection of petty tyrants who will grab any power they can to impose any idea they prefer. And it all comes to force. The news reports are infuriating. A man is handcuffed after playing ball with his six-year-old daughter in a park. A paddle-boarder, enjoying the surf alone off Malibu beach, is arrested and taken to the police station, as if the latter isn’t more dangerous than the former.

In one social-media posting, two New York police officers apparently threatened to cite a couple for sitting next to each other outdoors — even though the two are married. Increasingly, American policing is all about blind obedience to authority. It’s about the letter rather than the spirit of the law. If you think officers will resist an order to confiscate your weapons once the order comes down, then you are woefully naïve.

“[P]ublic officials at all levels of government are now exercising emergency powers rarely seen outside the context of total war,” Healy wrote. Yet the “crisis hasn’t yet led to massive new presidential power grabs” and “Trump has been a piker next to FDR, George W. Bush or even Barack Obama.” My only wish is that Americans would consistently stand up against all such power grabs, regardless of the party affiliation of those who engage in them.

Newsom and governors in Oregon and Washington have come to a collaborative agreement for “reopening” their respective states, but the guideposts are imprecise and still come down to this: People will be free to go about their lives again when they say so. Even in a health emergency, this is not how an even free-ish country should operate. I’m astounded at how quickly and totally every constitutional protection has evaporated.

Since so many folks misunderstand what the Constitution is, does, and does not do, I’ll say it again: The Constitution protects NOTHING. Being no more than words written on paper, how can it possibly “protect” or “guarantee” anything? The Constitution enumerates, specifies, codifies rules and principles. It must BE protected, by a morally-upright, vigilant people who harbor no illusions about the true nature of government. The Constitution hasn’t let us down. Its home truths are all right there still, clear as crystal, inspiring and ennobling just as they will forever be. Intact, indomitable, unbreakable.

Still there…waiting. Waiting for us to step up, to honor it properly by requiring every one of our so-called leaders, highest to lowest, to maintain the respect that is its due. To fulfill its promise in the only way possible: by meeting its challenge. By proving ourselves worthy of that promise.

I can’t say I expected as sudden a power-hog stampede as this, but the rebellion against Obama’s “fundamental transformation” that resulted in Trump’s election—along with the repeated failure of every attempt so far to discredit, hogtie, or remove him from office—seems to have driven the Ruling Class into frenzied desperation. The thing I find most surprising is that, after so many years of incremental federal encroachment, the big-daddy power-grab of them all emanated not from Mordor On The Potomac but from governors, mayors, and city councils. I have to admit I did NOT see that coming.

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