Well Now

Was directed to a Microsoft page explaining terms of use and all that stuff, which will take effect in mid-June.  Just for once, I decided to plow through the MEGO document, which is mostly all the usual guff, and not much jumped out and stuck me in the eye.

Until I saw this (highlights added):

3. Code of Conduct.

a. By agreeing to these Terms, you’re agreeing that, when using the Services, you will follow these rules:
i. Don’t do anything illegal.
ii. Don’t engage in any activity that exploits, harms, or threatens to harm children.
iii. Don’t send spam or engage in phishing. Spam is unwanted or unsolicited bulk email, postings, contact requests, SMS (text messages), instant messages, or similar electronic communications. Phishing is sending emails or other electronic communications to fraudulently or unlawfully induce recipients to reveal personal or sensitive information, such as passwords, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, passport numbers, credit card information, financial information, or other sensitive information, or to gain access to accounts or records, exfiltration of documents or other sensitive information, payment and/or financial benefit.
iv. Don’t publicly display or use the Services to share inappropriate content or material (involving, for example, nudity, bestiality, pornography, offensive language, graphic violence, or criminal activity).
v. Don’t engage in activity that is fraudulent, false or misleading (e.g., asking for money under false pretenses, impersonating someone else, manipulating the Services to increase play count, or affect rankings, ratings, or comments).
vi. Don’t circumvent any restrictions on access to or availability of the Services.
vii. Don’t engage in activity that is harmful to you, the Services or others (e.g., transmitting viruses, stalking, posting terrorist or violent extremist content, communicating hate speech, or advocating violence against others).
viii. Don’t infringe upon the rights of others (e.g., unauthorized sharing of copyrighted music or other copyrighted material, resale or other distribution of Bing maps, or photographs).
ix. Don’t engage in activity that violates the privacy of others.
x. Don’t help others break these rules.

So, for instance, calling Chuck Schumer a rancid Commie cocksucker could possibly cause Big Redmond to yank me off Microsoft?   Or posting pictures like these could cause the same?

Then there’s this:

How about:

or this:

Asking for a friend.  Because he wants to know who, precisely, is going to determine what constitutes “offensive”, “inappropriate”, “extremist content” and “hate speech”.

Not Quite

Over in Britishland, a bunch of cops raided a church during a Good Friday Mass and told everyone they had to leave because they were offending the Gods Of State by breaking some petty Covid-related restrictions.  (I am simply astonished that in a religion which glorifies martyrdom, not one parishioner let themselves be arrested rather than be hounded out of a church on the holiest day of the Christian calendar.  Of course, being meek British Christians, they left the church without fuss, instead of making the cops leave with their tails between their legs, like that Polish priest did in Canada.)

Which led Peter Hitchens to say this:

“When police start raiding our churches, you know the revolution has begun.”

Au contraire, mon cher Pierre:  that is not the start of the revolution;  that is merely the evidence of creeping governmental thuggish totalitarianism.  (And saying “sorry” after the fact doesn’t excuse or exonerate them, the bastards.)

The revolution will begin when the Stasi are chased out by a storm of invective, or bullets.

I am so angered by this that I can barely write about it.  And I’m not even a Christian.

Small wonder there’s an outbreak of “Kill The Bill” protests and riots in Britain.  (“The Old Bill” is a nickname for cops Over There;  I prefer “The Filth”, myself.)

SHTF Prep

An email from Longtime Friend & Reader PeteG contained the following:

“A friend is trying to get some local Media Darlings to take him up on a bet and all they do is hang up on him. The bet?
“$2500 in ready on-hand cash, even odds, that if Chauvin is found not guilty Black Lives Matter and Antifa run out of rioters, looters and arsonists before store owners and homeowners run out of ammunition.”

Which inspired this:

So… how are y’all planning to celebrate Chauvin Not Guilty Day?

The Pride Of Wisconsin

…and I’m not talking about cheese, or the Green Bay Packers.  No, I’m talking about Ed Gein of Plainfield, who lived a life which fed horror-film screenwriters for decades.  I knew his story, of course, but I was reminded of it by a newspaper article about him:

As well as the body of Bernice Worden – decapitated, strung up and gutted “like a deer” – they discovered a hoard of macabre keepsakes, from bowls made from human skulls to a belt made from female nipples and a lampshade covered with a face.

A nipple belt?  Even among the buxom, corn-fed Wisconsin women of the area, that’s a lotta women you have to kill to get that amount of material.

After Gein, all other mass murderers and nutcases look like amateurs, and the movie types (like Psycho‘s Norman Bates and the guy in Silence of the Lambs ) are pale imitators.

Brrrr.

Mass Disobedience

This article made me think:

THIS is the moment more than 30 conspiracy theorists descended on a Tesco store without masks in a “selfish” protest.
Dozens of people flouted Covid restrictions and brazenly went about their shopping trip in the store in Chelmsford, Essex.

Basically, a bunch of people got fed up with all the bullshit about the Chinkvirus, and in a wonderful gesture, said “Fuck you!” to authority and went shopping without their masks.

There are a couple of things to take away from this.  Despite the article’s blatant editorializing (calling them “conspiracy theorists” and calling what they did a “selfish protest”), this group of people could be  characterized by a couple of factors:

  • this was quite definitely a grassroots protest — no group nor even a leader spurred them on to to it — and:
  • this was not a crowd of Lefties — the Usual Suspects one sees doing the protest thing — but from what I can see, a group of ordinary middle-class people, in fact the kind seldom seen protesting.

Despite the bluster, Brits are usually quite a subservient lot — even without the Chinese Plague, they are bossed around by officialdom and petty bureaucrats on a day-to-day basis to a degree that would amaze most Americans — and also quite law-abiding (the two are not the same).

So for this to erupt is going to be quite worrisome to a whole bunch of the little Stasi-wannabes.  And indeed, from the article:

The council and police are now working to find out how this maskless protest was able to happen.

“Organising a maskless shopping trip is not big, not clever but it is illegal.”

And a little editorializing and scolding from the article’s author:

Customers are required by law to wear masks inside all shops, unless they are exempt for medical reasons.

And social distancing must be enforced unless you are from the same household or bubble.

Well, Our Heroines didn’t actually care about the government’s fucking little “bubbles”, did they?

Here’s why this little activity got me thinking.

In his excellent article American Exodus, Angelo Codevilla makes a telling point (and read the whole damn thing).  He says this about the stranglehold that today’s oligarchy (politicians, Press, corporations and technology companies) have over our society Over Here:

The federal government, the governments of states and localities run by the Democratic Party, along with the major corporations, the educational establishment, and the news media set strict but movable boundaries about what they may or may not say—on pain of being cast out, isolated from society’s mainstream. Using an ever-shifting variety of urgent excuses, which range from the coronavirus, to the threat of domestic terrorism, to catastrophic climate change, to the evils of racism, they issue edicts that they enforce through anti-democratic means—from social pressure and threats, to corporate censorship of digital platforms, to bureaucratic fiat. Nobody voted for this.

Then he offers up this little nugget:

Some sort of mostly peaceful exodus is within our powers to achieve.

We can withdraw our compliance, go our own way, and build anew.

And:

Our American exodus won’t be led by a Moses. The Republican Party, with the exception of a few national-level personages, may be as useless as ever. But politics is a collective activity, and the lack of top-down leadership notwithstanding, our exodus is already in progress, thanks to Americans’ legal structures and traditions of state and local autonomy, as well as our Tocquevillian taste for organizing ourselves into ad hoc groups for the common benefit.

Ordinary citizens who are oppressed by COVID-inspired overregulation have also organized themselves to take advantage of the fact that safety in numbers is the first rule of civil disobedience. Thus, hundreds of California restauranteurs jointly defied the governor’s order to keep them closed, and sued him. Joint action is also the key to transforming what the authorities want to treat as disciplinary or criminal matters into political ones.

And finally:

That is why going one’s own way, while paying no more attention to the woke than is absolutely necessary, should be the agenda of the country party, which in this case includes all of those who still feel an attachment to the ideals of republican citizenship that we once shared in common as Americans.

And returning to those doughty British women once more:  there were only thirty.  No doubt, the Filth will be going after them, aided no doubt by the many little Quislings that exist in today’s tattle-tale culture.

Now imagine if there weren’t thirty, but three thousand, spread across every store in town?  Think the cops would be able to go after all of them?  Here’s the kind of job facing the Brit authorities elsewhere in the country.

Codevilla calls it the American Exodus:  the severing of ties by ordinary people like us with the foul bureaucrats, technocrats and their Leftist sympathizers in all the institutions.

Many weeks ago, I talked about my refusal to use Google products as much as is possible (Chrome, Google search, and so on), having no Twitter or Facebook accounts, and my absolute refusal to have anything to do with anti-2A corporations like Levi Strauss — to name but a few.  I make no claim to be a groundbreaker in all this, of course — in fact, I admit to being something of a latecomer to the party — but this is something we need to do en masse from now on.

Withdraw from those societal institutions which are part of this totalitarianism.

Become homeschoolers if you have small kids, or offer to homeschool your grandchildren because the poison that is being dripped into their ears every day not just by state schools but lamentably even by some private schools is the poison that will infect future generations of Americans.  And if you can’t do that, confront your schools and demand that they stop teaching children monstrosities like “critical race theory” (anti-White racism is what it is, and what you should call it).  And by all means enlist your state legislators to your cause (as Ohio did).

We have to do something, anything;  and even though what we each do may seem small and insignificant, those little grains of sand may turn into a landslide, if we all get involved.

And don’t forget to teach your children and grandchildren how to shoot.  In times to come, it may be as important as knowing how to read and write.