Category: Gummint

Papieren, Bitte

Bureaucracy, Mocking Furriners

…or however they say it in French.  This story made me howl with laughter, although I still think the paras should just have turned their little Fairburn-Sykes stickers on the bureaucrats.

If they’re still allowed to carry them, that is.

I see that the above is actually a replica, the FOX Fairbairn-Sykes FX-5934.  I love Fox knives, already have their 685 bush knife, and now I want this one really badly.

If anybody else is interested (and who wouldn’t be?) it’s apparently on sale here (as above) and here (in “tactical” black).

New Technology, Same Old Government

Drive Time, Gummint, Two-Minute Hate

Here’s some “interesting” news about driving in the Eeeew and Britishland:

UK drivers have been issued a four-week warning of motoring laws being tightened in an attempt to crackdown on the number of speeding fines and accidents.

From July, the UK could see EU speed limiters being installed in cars. All showroom vehicles will be required to come equipped with Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA) technology. Cars that have already been manufactured but have yet to be sold will also have to adhere to the new rules.

“The new rules,” a spokesperson for Motor Match said, “introduce ‘mandatory’ speed limiters, changing how we drive on roads.”

Question:  when is Brexit not Brexit?  When the BritGov slavishly follows an EU diktat. And note that the foul ISA thing is labeled (Orwellian style) as “Assist” and not “Control” (which is its true function).

Of course, that could never happen in Murka, you might say.  Well, technically, Kalifornia isn’t really part of the republic, so:

California could soon join the European Union in requiring all new cars to alert drivers when they break the speed limit, a proposal aimed at reducing traffic deaths that would likely impact drivers across the country should it become law.

The federal government sets safety standards for vehicles nationwide, which is why most cars now beep at drivers if their seat belt isn’t fastened. A bill in the California Legislature — which passed its first vote in the state Senate on Tuesday — would go further by requiring all new cars sold in the state by 2032 to beep at drivers when they exceed the speed limit by at least 10 mph.

Of course, the Golden Shower state’s little exercise in statist nannyism is just an “advisory” device…

I leave the rest to your imagination.

My Kinda Guy

Government Thugs

Forgotten in the mists of time is the awful totalitarianism perpetrated on us by the fucking dotgov, whether Federal or state, during The Great WuFlu Insanity.  Of course, the legal nonsense — charging, trying and so on — has dragged on and on and persists to this day, but at least there’s been one happy outcome so far:

The co-owner of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey, who fiercely defied tyrannical lockdowns in 2020, has won a monumental victory after a court dismissed all 80 charges against him.

Ian Smith famously reopened his gym in the middle of lockdown, defying Democrat Governor Phil Murphy’s draconian COVID-19 lockdown orders.

At the time, Smith challenged the Murphy administration’s mandates, arguing they were unconstitutional and detrimental to small businesses.

Wait:  80 charges?  Even for the People’s Soviet of Noo Joizee, that’s a little much, don’t you think?

Anyway, here’s the story:

A swarm of police officers burst through the door of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey arrested the owners for violating Governor Murphy’s authoritarian shutdown order.

“Well, this was a first,” Dowlen said in a Facebook post. “I stayed the night in the gym writing, my book clients Ian & Frank were just waking up, I’m gathering my computer & notebooks, just waiting for the guys to come out for a few final questions, and then a SWARM of Camden County Sheriffs & local Bellmawr police (with K-9 units waiting in a vehicle) come bursting thru the door….to me, sitting there, writing, by myself.

Surprisingly:

First & foremost, the law enforcement officers were polite & respectful.

Lucky they were only NJ cops, not the Oz Schutzpolizei.  But it’s a good thing he didn’t have a gun, though, or else the NJ fuzz would have gone all Canberra on his ass.

Anyway, it got worse;  much worse.

The State’s aggressive response did not end with the arrest. In a controversial move, Governor Murphy and his administration seized $165,000 from the gym’s accounts—funds that Smith claims were amassed through donations and apparel sales to support the gym’s legal battles. This act was a punitive strike meant to cripple the gym financially and serve as a stern warning to others who might consider similar defiance.

“Governor Phil Murphy seized 100% of our assets today – $165k, all of which came from donations and apparel sales. This is done in the middle of ongoing litigation defending ourselves against these fines, our 80 charges, the revocation of our business license, and the unconstitutional health department shutdown.⁣ This was never about protection, it was always about control.”

However, since he has been acquitted of all the bullshit charges — with prejudice! — Our Hero has not gone humbly off into obscurity.  No sir.  Instead:

Smith did not mince words, directly challenging Governor Murphy with a phrase that has since gone viral: “Suck my dick Phil Murphy.”

…which is why he’s my kinda guy.

What He Said, And More Besides

Bureaucracy, Economics, Management, Marxists

Actor James Woods is a well-known conservative, despite his profession and location, and in this case he’s right on the money, as usual:

Specifically, here, is the fact that Democrats make it almost impossible for small companies to survive, weighing them down with not only horribly-burdensome but hostile regulations (as above) like minimum wage dictates.

Then, when the inevitable happens and the small companies go out of business or sell out to larger ones, the socialists like Warren moan about the concentration of trade and the need for “more competition”.  (“Price gouging” as referenced by Warren here is meaningless and a red herring.)

May we remind ourselves of food rationing, endless lines formed to get what little food there was, and fixed pricing which led to the ford shortages in the first place?  Where was this so prevalent… wait, it’s all coming back to me…

Ah yes, in the Soviet Union, where the State owned all means of production and likewise the entire food chain.

And Warren, lest we forget, is an outright Stalinist whose remedy for the current situation here would involve State control of pricing (and of course of production and the entire food chain), just to make the market more “efficient”.

Do people like this ever experience cognitive dissonance between what they think and say, while constantly seeing evidence that completely repudiates their worldview?

Clearly not, and Woods has the absolute truth of it.

Our Northern Neighbor

Rights

Here’s an interesting story:

Canadian Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was booted from the House of Commons for the day on Tuesday after a heated exchange where he refused the House Speaker’s request that he remove from the record his comment calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “wacko” and “extremist.”

So much for that “parliamentary privilege” thing in Fidel Trudeau’s Canukistan, eh?

Firstly, under parliamentary privilege, the House Speaker can only “deplore” or “censure” scurrilous language — expulsion for expressing an opinion is strictly disallowed in a parliamentary setting — and secondly, even without parliamentary rule, it’s an abridgement of the politician’s freedom of speech.  (I know, I know:  foolish Kim for believing that such things still exist.)

I guess none of that applies anymore in Castro Country.

Conundrum

Deep Thoughts, Rights

The old saying goes, “Those who choose security over freedom deserve neither.”

And yet… you have a situation like this one:

The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.

When he won reelection in a landslide, liberal media outlets ran headlines stating that democracy had ended in El Salvador and that the country had become a one-party state. However, El Salvador is not Cuba.

Bukele did not eradicate opposition parties, nor did he imprison them or seize control of the press. Instead, he delivered on his promises. He made the country safe by locking up criminals.

And how did he do this?

In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.

Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.

But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.

They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.

If this makes one think, “That sounds like the foul MS-13 gang”, then one would be correct.

I have often thought about doing this right here in the U.S. of A., as whole areas of the country have become terrorized by gangs like MS-13.  And as the gang members proudly wear their clan tattoo, why not just arrest them as self-confessed criminals?

Because that’s wrong — basically, it’s un-Constitutional, and on more than one level.  And here’s how it was done in El Salvador:

Bukele decided to let logic prevail, arrest the gang members, and put them in prison. He was more concerned about the rights of street vendors, business owners, school children, working people, and ordinary citizens than he was about the rights of violent criminals.

The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.

Believe me, there’s a lot to be said in support about measures like those of Nayib Bukele.  After all:

Bukele claimed that his country went 365 days without a murder. And while the exact number has been called into question, it is an indisputable fact that the country now has the lowest murder rate it has seen in 30 years, plummeting by 70%, and now stands at only 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023, making it the second lowest in the Americas, just behind Canada.

Okay, maybe that worked in El Salvador, which started off being a shithole country, and just dug itself a deeper one over decades of corruption and your standard Third-World degeneracy.  Desperate measures were called for.

But the U.S. has never been a shithole country, in no small part because of the protections that our Constitution affords everybody — and not just non-gang members, either.

I am profoundly disturbed by the tone of articles such as the one I’ve linked to and quoted from in this post.  Of course I can see the benefits of actions like that of Bukele.

But I can also see how that kind of thing can be turned around and used against, oh, people like MAGA supporters or, for that matter, gun owners.

And to quote a wise man (not a politician, but a playwright), who saw where this could lead:

“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

— Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons