The Government You Deserve

It’s a trap!

Posted on January 18, 2020January 18, 2020 by Mike

The problem here can be inferred from the headline: “Tyranny at the Door in Virginia.” Sorry, but tyranny came right in the door, raided the fridge, sat itself on the couch, and made itself right at home already.

It began when Ralph “Blackface” Northam became the governor of Virginia in 2017, then advanced another step when the Democratic Party took control of the Virginia General Assembly last year. In part, these events transpired because of the efforts by Michael Bloomberg and George Soros to put Virginia in their crosshairs by dumping millions of dollars into state and local elections.

And when the collaborationist GOPe failed to even bother running candidates in multiple races across Virginia, lest we forget.

Earlier this week, the state senate judiciary committee, voting along straight party lines, passed bills that would require background checks on all private transfers of firearms, let owners keep their banned firearms only if they register with the Virginia State Police, and ban suppressors and any magazines over 10 rounds. The committee also passed red-flag legislation.

The good news is that Virginians are not taking the Democrats’ efforts lying down. Across the state, the grassroots have come alive. To date, 124 counties, cities, and localities have declared themselves sanctuaries for the Second Amendment (consider there are 95 counties and 41 independent cities total in the entire state). These jurisdictions have made it clear they will refuse to enforce any anti-Second Amendment legislation coming from Richmond.

The response of Northam and Attorney General Mark “I’m also into blackface” Herring is to insist that any laws passed regarding gun control will be enforced. Really? By whom? The sheriffs? Not likely. County police? Probably not. State troopers and the national guard? Not likely, either.

Besides, do you really think many Virginians are just going to hand over their guns? The only thing they will be handing over is rounds fired in the direction of anyone seeking to confiscate their rifles and pistols.

Well, maybe. But then again, maybe not.

As far as I can tell, the VCDL is trying very hard to tread lightly and responsibly with their upcoming rally, going way out of their way to emphasize that they’re a mainstream group of law-abiding citizens intent only on peaceably assembling to petition their government for redress of grievances, as is their good right, on a day specifically provided in Virginia each year for that very purpose.

Unfortunately, the more I see of this, the greater the likelihood of a bloody disaster intentionally created by the very malefactors responsible for this confrontation in the first place seems. The sorry fact is that the time for peaceful protest is far, far behind us. The war to preserve the US Constitution, the rights enumerated therein, and for liberty itself was lost many decades ago. The America of our Founders is no more.

The Virginia Democrat-Socialists certainly seem to think so, anyway; they’re marching boldly on without the slightest apparent concern over the possibility of igniting a powderkeg underneath their own worthless asses. They seem quite confident that ultimately, Virginia 2A supporters will sit complacently back and let their rights be stripped from them just like they have so many times before, not just in Va but all across the nation. They’re placing all their chips on this bet.

Honestly, I’m not at all sure I’d be willing to bet against them.

As I’ve said so many times: the most important thing the Left learned from their ill-fated stab at Prohibition was the proper way to boil a frog. Ever since, they’ve been devouring American liberty not in huge gulps, but in bite-size morsels—slowly, patiently, one piece at a time. Whatever a massive public protest in Va may or may not have achieved in the distant past, it will accomplish nothing now. Virginia gun-grabbers see the end-game, the culmination of all their fondest dreams of unchecked rule, within their grasp at last. No mere public show of opposition is going to dissuade them now.

And that really is too bad. One likes to imagine that, as American citizens, our rulers might be responsive to the wishes of those they rule, mindful not to flex their muscle too assertively, too aggressively. But as they get elected and re-elected over and over again, perpetrating the most stunningly brazen acts of corruption and abuse of power imaginable with near-total impunity, they’ve lost all fear of the voters’ wrath. Hell, the very existence of a professional, career-politician class itself—in direct contravention of the most dire warnings of the Founders—is but one of a long list of unsavory developments that have emboldened them.

No sane, decent person wants to have to shoot a neighbor, a cop, a friend or relative to safeguard his own freedom. Ironically, though, it would seem that an altogether human abhorrence for violence is the very thing ensuring that someday, those decent folks will be forced to hoist the black flag and start slitting throats. Many Virginians will probably get busy burying guns in the backyard in response to the passage of these abominable laws. But as Bracken says: if you think it’s time to start burying your guns, it’s actually time to start digging them up. Aesop submits:

If this is a war, fight it like a war. Holding a parade on your enemy’s quarterdeck isn’t going to get you anything you want, but it’ll get you a lot of what you don’t want. Oh, and in about 97 ways, you’re not ready for a war yet. So maybe start working on that first.

And if it’s not quite a war yet, you’ve damned sure got better things to do than grabbing your crotch and waving your shortcomings in the enemy’s face. So maybe start working on doing operations-other-than-war a helluva lot better too.

Which leaves no time for childish tantrums. Stop playing in the street, pull your heads out of your asses, and start doing serious things in a serious way, like this was serious business, and not a grade school food fight.

The tree of liberty may indeed be due for another good watering; I dunno, it’s not for me to say. But we all better be very damned sure about that first.

Update! The shitshow just got shittier.

I guess we now know why Virginia Governor Ralph Northam outlawed all weapons at a pro-gun rally organized by the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), the state’s best known pro-Second Amendment group. Antifa’s showing up.

Vice News and other media outlets breathlessly reported Friday that Antifa and the right-leaning Second Amendment supporters have much in common and so will stand shoulder-to-shoulder on Monday to battle against the state.

“I think it’s been pretty important for us to focus on the fact that gun control in America has a legacy of racist enforcement,” said Antifa Seven Hills spokesperson James (who asked that his name be withheld to avoid getting doxxed online). “Like taking guns away from black people, because black people were perceived as a threat to property and the sanctity of the state.

This is our fight as much as anyone else’s,” James, who identifies as an anarchist, added. “It’s our state, and we are left largely out of the debate. The presence of an armed left is not discussed, it’s not understood.”

Ohhhh yeah, THIS is gonna end well.

Getting what you voted for

Posted on January 16, 2020January 16, 2020 by Mike

My heart bleeds.

California has overreached in its effort to address the challenges in today’s tech platform gig-work economy.

The live music sector, the progenitor of the term “gig” work, is being swept up by this law. The irony would be comical if it were not such a serious problem.

There are some worthy arguments to be made for Assembly Bill 5 by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, San Diego Democrat.

Like hell. There really is only the one argument, explicitly made by some Cali congresswoman or other when, in a rare burst of accidental candor, she complained that the state wasn’t glomming enough in tax dough off of rideshare drivers. Despite the property tax they pay on their cars, the fees for their license plates, the tax on every set of tires or quart of oil they buy, the tax on every gallon of gasoline, and their own yearly income taxes, they weren’t paying “their fair share,” see.

Funnily enough, though that revealing statement was fairly prominent in the reportage I saw at the time, it now seems to have vanished down the ol’ memory hole for some reason. I can’t imagine why.

Anyways, the writer quoted above is a California musician who feels “there are some worthy arguments to be made” for letting goobermint’s grubby thumbs dig deeper into any and everything it wishes, as long as they just leave him alone. His evident shock over this bit says it all:

However, the law has created a tangle of red-tape and administrative expense for large portions of California’s cultural sector.

NOOOO! Why, I can’t believe it! I WON’T believe it! Fret not, though; I’m sure things can all be ironed out with even more legislation, right? Right?!?

Under AB 5, we will be required to inform all U.S.-based musicians that they must now become employees of San Jose Jazz, or incorporate themselves before they will be allowed to perform for us.

If band leaders choose to pursue incorporation, they will then need to take on the responsibility of payroll and HR administration for the rest of their band.

In many performing arts disciplines, such as jazz, musicians are constantly reconfiguring line ups, performing as sidemen in various bands, and as one-time special guests for specific performances.

We will now be obliged to devote tremendous time and resources to constantly hiring, managing and tracking of musicians through this cumbersome process.

AB 5 unnecessarily complicates other work arrangements found in community cultural programming such as small festivals, neighborhood street fairs, parades and summer music series in our local parks.

San Jose Jazz is best known for producing our large Summer Fest which brings tens of thousands of visitors and requires hundreds of temporary roles to execute.

The vast majority of previously contract work roles will now be required to be employees.

Tough noogies, pal. You voted for it, by electing nothing but Democrat-Socialists in your state for years and years. As the old saw has it, sooner or later they always get around to something you DO care about. And now they have. More SHOCKING yet:

Typical of such legislation, AB 5 comes with a hefty list of exempted categories that are a Who’s Who of the politically connected and well-funded: lawyers, doctors, accountants, brokers, builders, and others.

Actors, choreographers, dancers, directors, producers, and musicians are among numerous roles in the performing arts that exhibit a multitude of contract work arrangements. None of these are exempt from AB 5’s rules.

So? If there are indeed “worthy arguments to be made” for handing government the power to make workplace rules of all sorts, why should performing artists be exempt from them, pray tell? Why should ANYBODY be? And can you really be so impenetrably naive as to find it surprising that the wealthy, powerful, and connected exempted themselves from the wonderful benefits of the law? Y’know, just like US Congresscritters routinely exempt themselves from having to comply with any and every piece of burdensome bushwa they roll downhill onto the rest of us?

Personally, after reading this whiny, clueless twaddle it would be a-okay with me if every last theater, concert hall, arena, neighborhood dive bar, and neo-hippie coffee house featuring annoying solo-acoustic singer/songwriters on the Left Coast closed up shop for good tomorrow as a result of this law. Voting the most intrusive, power-hungry nanny-staters extant into office again and again ought to be painful—not just for Uber and Lyft drivers struggling to eke out their meager living, but for everybody, right down the damned line. The lesson will be learned only after the misery is spread around widely enough for all to suffer. Let elections have consequences at last, I say.

You broke it, you bought it

Posted on January 11, 2020January 12, 2020 by Mike

The government you deserve brings you the lifestyle you voted for.

The presence of fecal bacteria in water is usually the result of problems with sewer systems and septic tanks. But water quality officials agree that the source of at least some of the fecal bacteria is California’s growing homeless population, most of whom don’t have reliable access to toilets.

“I’ve carried 5-gallon buckets that were unambiguously being used as toilets,” said David Gibson, executive officer of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, describing his experience cleaning up homeless encampments. “They were taking it to the San Diego River, dumping it there, and rinsing it out there.”

Fecal contamination of waterways is a widespread problem and becoming more urgent in states with large homeless populations. In Seattle, homeless people living in RVs are accused of dumping raw sewage straight into storm drains, which flows directly to local waterways. In Oregon, workers cleaning up homeless camps along the Willamette River in Eugene routinely find feces and needles.

In Sacramento, regulators have been measuring elevated fecal bacteria levels in the lower American River for more than three years. Located near downtown Sacramento, it is a popular destination for water sports, even as hundreds of homeless people camp nearby.

Some recreational areas, including Tiscornia Beach, where families picnic, BBQ and wade in the river, had E. coli levels so high in the past year that they hit the upper limits of what the water board’s laboratories could measure — more than seven times higher than the state standard, said Adam Laputz, assistant executive officer of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Trump needs to continue that Big Beautiful Wall of his right up Cali’s eastern border and all the way north to Canada, so as to ensure that West Coast liberals fully enjoy all the amenities of the shitholes they created for themselves, instead of fleeing to more livable places to fuck them up too.

(Via Gateway Pundit)

Not scared

Posted on January 11, 2020January 12, 2020 by Mike

Hey, remember back when they were called “public servants,” anybody?

It turns out it was Virginia State Senator Dave Marsden who called gun rights advocates “children” on a hot mic at a public meeting over the weekend. But calling them “children” was just the beginning. Things just got worse. Much worse.

Marsden is in support of Democrats’ planned rollbacks of Virginia gun laws at the behest of anti-gun PAC man Michael Bloomberg:

Democrats are calling for, among other things, a ban or curbs on AR-15s, gun rationing, limits on ammo magazines, and a red flag law – a bill that would take guns away from people on the word of a third person who labels them mentally ill.

So it was not an accident or an oopsie when Marsden said in a radio interview on Wednesday that the people who were “emotional” about losing of their Second Amendment civil rights were “mentally ill.”

“I’ve been having this experience for weeks. I’m getting calls day and night,” he said. “Obscene, vulgar, threatening phone calls. I mean, we’re not talking a couple, well over a hundred.”

Jeez, only a hundred? Shoulda been a lot more than that. Ahh, but the arrogant whackadoo was just getting warmed up.

marsden-letter-to-constituent-phone-number-out.-.jpg

That’s a letter Marsden sent out to his “constituents,” slandering a significant portion of them as “childish,” “boorish,” and afflicted by “mental health issues” after being appropriately confronted over his intention to deny Virginians their plainly-enumerated Constitutional rights. If you ask me, they damned well OUGHT to be angry, at any and every scheming politician who imagines for a moment he has a right to run roughshod over the Constitution and treat citizens as subjects, and have not only a right but a duty to express that anger clearly. “People” like Marsden damned well OUGHT to be vilified, with no room left for making any mistakes about what the consequences of all such actions will be.

This “man” is the living incarnation of absolutely everything the Founders warned of; he and his loathsome breed are the reason they wrote the Constitution in the first place. And if those farsighted men were still with us, they’d have already been shooting by now. Harsh, heated words are but a meager down payment on the bill Marsden is racking up for himself.

Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty. Striking some proper fear in the hearts of crawly things like Marsden is long overdue.

Update! They’re leaving no stone unturned.

But as Democrats voted along straight party lines on Friday to ban people from carrying concealed handguns at the state Capitol, they worry, despite all evidence to the contrary, that there is a real danger to letting people continue carrying guns. This vote foreshadows Democrats’ opposition to allowing people to defend themselves and their loved ones.

While Democrat House Speaker House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn can’t point any problems in their state Capitol, she claims that this ban is necessary “to keep everybody safe.” But it isn’t just that there hasn’t been a problem in Virginia where people have been able to carry for decades. There hasn’t been a problem in the other 22 states that allow legislators and/or civilians to carry guns on Capitol grounds.

The problem with gun-free zones, which ban law-abiding civilians from carrying, is that they don’t exactly scare off criminals. In fact, they have just the opposite effect. Disarming everyone, including legislators or staffers, on their way to and from the buildings leaves them easy targets to criminals and terrorists. The murderers have an incentive to disobey the law precisely because the law-abiding obey it.

Um, I can’t honestly say that I have much of a problem with politicians voting to increase their own risk of grievous bodily harm, maiming, and/or death. In fact, I think they ought to disarm the Capitol Police and their own private security details while they’re at it, to REALLY boost “safety.”

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