Category: Gummint

Textbook Steps

Anti-Gun Nannies, Gummint, Marxists

Let’s open with a little received wisdom:

“There’s no way to rule innocent men.  The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.  Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them.  One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

That first sentence says it all.  As long as you keep on the right side of the law, you have nothing to fear from authority.

Now’s when it gets tricky, because politicians cannot resist making laws, and as the number of laws grows, so does the chance that you will fall afoul of one of them, no matter how hard you try.  As one FBI agent once put it:  “This is America.  Nobody can go a day without breaking some law or other.”  And that was said in 1998.  The fact that this could be said with pride — or resignation — makes me want to reach for the tar and feathers, but that’s only my reaction to the first step.  There are more.

The next step is to make transgressors into “Enemies Of The People” or (in the case of the Chinkvirus) a “Menace To Society”.  In sociological terms, this is called “scapegoating” or in extreme cases, demonization.  We’ve seen this in the past, of course, such as when the disgusting Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) publishes their various “hate lists” which set out to demonize as “hate groups” first the easy targets such as the KKK, and eventually the most innocuous organizations (e.g. campus-based Republican organizations).  From that. it’s easy to apply the perjorative term du jour  (“racist”, “Nazi”, “fascist” etc.) to whomever doesn’t agree with your position on anything.

Beyond labeling, of course, lies social shaming, “doxxing”, and the “cancel culture.”  After that, the force of law.  (We already have such laws on the books;  murdering someone in cold blood:  bad.  Murdering someone and calling them a dirty nigger at the same time:  somehow worse.)  At some point, it will become an actual crime to say the word niggerniggernigger anywhere, even inside your own home, First Amendment be damned.  And why not? seeing as racism has become punishable by law, any number of asterisks can be attached to the freedom of speech, of course.

“But the Supreme Court will intervene!”  Don’t make me laugh.  As an entity, the fucking Supreme Court has shown itself to be as useful as a paper-towel birdscreen on an airliner’s jet engine when it comes to protecting our rights.

Which leads us to the next Amendment, of course.

Now the Second has some issues for our wannabe-tyrants, of course, because gun owners are, well, armed (always a decent albeit drastic check on government excess).  And disarmament is likely to prove difficult if not impossible, simply because even if only 1% of gun owners turn violent, that’s still a greater number than the number of law enforcement officers who would be tasked with doing the job.

There is another way to disarm gun owners, and it’s quite legal:  pass a law or regulation that requires gun owners to pay a tax on some or all of their firearms, and when they refuse… ta-dah!  Not only can the government use the I.R.S. to harass and prosecute, but because the refuseniks are de facto  lawbreakers (refusal to pay federal taxes is a federal crime), they can be prohibited from owning firearms altogether once convicted of said crime.  (Remember, trying to win a case against the I.R.S. in their own court system is 99.99% impossible, as to win, all they have to do is show that they acted properly in terms of their own regulations.)

Which is why the Socialists’ plan to tax “assault rifles” is such a pernicious act.  If it ever becomes law (or a regulation under an Executive Order), we gun owners are fucked, pure and simple.

We can expect no help from the judiciary, as I noted above.  We can likewise expect no help from local law enforcement refusing to enforce these un-Constitutional acts either, because the Biden Administration will just deploy federal agents (I.R.S., FBI, Fish & Wildlife, Postal inspectors — anyone they can bring to bear) and bypass your friendly sheriff’s deputies altogether.

And don’t think that there will be some kind of passive resistance from local law enforcement, either.  If little Ector County in Texas (!!!) can deploy Meal Team Six just to shut down a fucking bar which stayed open defying a stupid Chinkvirus lockdown order passed by some local asshole mayor, believe me, you’re not going to be safe in your little suburban or rural bunker no matter how angry you are and how many rounds of 5.56mm ammo you have on hand.

I’m not often a doomsayer, but this is one of those occasions.

I’m also not given to issuing threats or warnings, so don’t expect some kind of challenge to come from me either.  Let’s just see what happens, shall we?

And?

Eco-Crap, UN and other scum

Sometimes, I just wanna shoot people.  Here’s one reason:

The world’s wealthiest 1% account for more than twice the carbon emissions of the poorest 50%, a new UN report has found.

And what, exactly, are we supposed to do with that information?

FFS:  The world’s wealthiest 1% also account for about 75% of new job creation, about 99% of the world’s yachtbuilding industry, all the top end car / watch / jewelry / etc. business.  They drive cars, fly around the world (on business, mainly — business which helps sustain the poor and gives them jobs), and as a result of their industry, the world is a far better place than it was in the Middle Ages, for instance.

I know:  the hidden meaning behind this “study” is that we should take away their wealth so they can’t emit carbon or whatever.

I would also like to point out that the poorest 50% of the world’s population account for about 90% of all terrestrial and maritime pollution (i.e. garbage) and if you don’t believe me, take a trip anywhere in the Third World:  look at the garbage carried out to sea at the river mouths of the Ganges, Congo, Yangtze and Amazon — to name but some — and drive for any distance outside the major cities to see how the Pore & Starvin just fucking trash the place.

The sooner we defund or otherwise destroy the United Nations, the better off we’ll all be.  Ask me which is my preference.

Total Bullshit

Gummint

Not 25 miles south of where I’m sitting, this nonsense happened:

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is sending state police resources to the City of Dallas in response to a spike in violent crime. The governor responded to a request for assistance from the Dallas Police Department after city leaders cut the police overtime budget by $7 million.

So the “city leaders” cut the police budget and then discovered that the resulting resources were inadequate for the task (Bullshit Item #1, like they couldn’t have seen that coming), and then (Bullshit Item #2) the TexGov bails them out of their stupidity instead of letting them stew in the soup of their own making?

I should point out, by the way, that like Houston, Austin and San Antonio, the “city leaders” of Dallas are irredeemably Democrat, ergo  in thrall to the BLM pustule that has infected big cities anywhere.

Abbott should have told them to go pound sand, and sent in the Texas State Guard when the thing got really nasty.

Commonsense 0, Greens 72

Business, Eco-Crap, Gummint

Like nobody could see this coming:

The inquiry into the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in London has revealed how the styrofoam thermal insulation layer in newly-fitted wall cladding enabled a small domestic fire to rapidly engulf most of the building, resulting in the loss of 72 lives.
The type of cladding installed complied with advice given to local authorities in 2010 by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to reduce emissions through installing new boilers and insulation in apartment blocks.

Read the details.  Anyone with the slightest bit of business experience could have foretold a tragedy like this.  But because Gummint was involved…

Night Follows Day

Crime, Gummint, Modernism, Vermin

From Knuckledragger, talking about his old neighborhood (happens to be in California, but could have — and has — happened anywhere):

The shooting happened in the 200 block of Semple Street, I used to live at 238 Kimble, one street over. Most of the houses there were built in the 1920s.
…
When I first moved there in 1996, it was a nice neighborhood – quiet with a lot of older folks that would sit out on their front porch in the evening drinking tea and talking with other neighbors that were out for their evening walk. As time went by, those folks either died or sold their homes to go into retirement communities or whatever and younger folks moved in. Then they opened up an apartment complex on Johnson, 2 streets over, to Section 8 [low-income] housing and shit really went downhill after that.

One of the biggest failures of “progressive” philosophy is the “magic dirt” theory:  that transplanting people from a bad place to a better place will somehow magically make them change, and act more like the people in the better neighborhood than they did in their old one.

As any amateur* student of human nature will tell you, that’s completely wrong.  Instead, the transplantees will bring all their old behaviors to the better place, and infect it with thuggery, crime and general lawlessness, to the point where the original inhabitants of that (no longer) “better” area simply pack up and move.  Then that’s referred to derisively by the “planners” as “White flight” or, to be more accurate, as “middle-class flight” (which is what it is).

Then the neighborhoods go to shit, as Kenny observes, the schools start to fail, businesses also leave and voilà!  a shithole is created where no shithole existed before.  By social redistributionism.  (In this case, not of wealth but of antisocial behavior, to make it somehow more “fair”.)

And no matter how often it fails, the Leftists (as always) continue the practice, again and again, because Leftist activity only concerns itself with intentions, and outcomes are always the fault of others rather than of the basic Marxist principle.  (The “others”, of course, being “capitalism”, “greedy businessmen”, “bankers” or, more recently, “racism”.)

*the “professional” students of human behavior are the ones who initiate and perpetuate this foolishness, reminding me of the (paraphrased) expression that so stupid and wrongheaded a precept could only have been produced by an academic — academia, of course, never having to live with the consequences of their folly.

Acceptable Risk

Disaster, Gummint, Nannies

The inimitable Heather Mac Donald takes the Nannies to task, in her inimitable way.  This paragraph in particular struck home for me:

We set highway speeding limits to maximize convenience at what we consider an acceptable risk to human life. It is statistically certain that every year, there will be tens of thousands of driving deaths. A considerable portion of those deaths could be averted by “following the science” of force and velocity and enforcing a speed limit of, say, 15 miles an hour. But we tolerate motor-vehicle deaths because we value driving 75 miles an hour on the highway, and up to 55 miles an hour in cities, more than we do saving those thousands of lives. When those deaths come—nearly 100 a day in 2019—we do not cancel the policy. Nor would it be logical to cancel a liberal highway speed because a legislator who voted for it died in a car accident.

Bill Whittle once said more or less the same thing about accidental gun deaths:  while even one such death was tragic, the plain fact of the matter is that some freedoms come with risk, sometimes deadly risk;  and the overall benefit to our society is far, far greater than the danger that may (or may not) ensue.   Using statistics of “gun deaths” (even correct ones) to bolster calls for gun control / -confiscation is likewise irrelevant.

It’s called the price of freedom, and We The People have been balancing those freedoms against the collateral harm to individuals ever since our Republic was formed and the Constitution and Bill of Rights promulgated.  All individual rights are potentially harmful, whether it’s freedom of speech, assembly, religion, gun ownership, privacy or any of the others.

And to Heather’s point above:  driving isn’t even a right protected by the Bill of Rights.  How much more, then, should our First- and Second Amendment rights (and all the other rights for that matter) be protected, even when we know that some tragedy is bound to follow thereby?

“If it saves just one life” sounds great on a bumper sticker, but as a basis for public policy, it’s not only foolish but in many cases more harmful in the long run.  Heather again:

We could reduce coronavirus transmission to zero by locking everyone in a separate cell until a vaccine was developed. There are some public-health experts who from the start appeared ready to implement such radical social distancing. The extent to which we veer from that maximal coronavirus protection policy depends on how we value its costs and the competing goods: forgone life-saving medical care and deaths of despair from unemployment and social isolation, on the one hand, and the ability to support one’s family through work and to build prosperity through entrepreneurship, on the other. The advocates of maximal lockdowns have rarely conceded such trade-offs, but they are ever-present.

The current wave of totalitarianism and loss of freedoms caused by State overreaction to the Chinkvirus needs to be rolled back, and fast.  It just sucks that we have to rely on judges — many of whom, to judge from their records, are not especially friends of freedom — to hold back the mini-Mussolinis in their totalitarian quest for absolute power over the governed.

And just so we know what kind of “acceptable risk” we’re talking about, comes this from Fox News: