In His Image and Likeness

 

Both Judaism and Christianity teach that humankind is made "in the image and likeness of God", but what that means, exactly, has always been something that has puzzled me.  What does that mean?  Since God is a spiritual being (I suppose), God has no 'image' for us to be made 'in'.  Alternatively, a spiritual being may be able to assume any image at all, but that makes the claim even more mysterious.  It could simply mean that we are created as spiritual beings ourselves.  In that vein, someone once responded to the statement: 'you have a soul', with: "You do not have a soul.  You are a soul; you have a body",  which I thought at the time was a very perceptive observation.

What if that original claim, that we are made in the image and likeness of God, is a promise rather than descriptive?  Instead of 'every man a king', perhaps we are working our way toward 'every man a God'.  Galileo famously quipped

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them." 

Since then, scientific knowledge and talent have grown by leaps and bounds at an ever-increasing velocity.  Moore's Law is a rule-of-thumb among the IT profession that posits 'technology doubles in 14 months'.  Were Benjamin Franklin asked 'how long does it take for technology to double?' he might have said '25 years'.  Carl Sagan would have answered '4 years'.  Now we say '14 months', and there is some speculation that it's now less than Moore's boast when he first made it.  In other words, progress is increasing exponentially.  At some point, the answer may become 'Well, it just did!'.  Our surgeons now do operations that, just a few hundred years ago, would have gotten them burned at the stake for witchcraft.  Clarke's Third Law (Arthur C., not me) stipulates that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".  The frontier of our knowledge is advancing so fast that we can envision a world in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard can command his wall unit to produce Earl Grey tea, hot, and fully expect that the requested product will appear in seconds, and that travelling from the Earth to the Moon is done not with loud, noisy, complex, and expensive rockets over the course of a week, but by stepping into a matter-transporter and being beamed there in the blink of an eye.

What if we are made in the image and likeness of God because God expects us to be like Him, to fashion ourselves into the Gods He gave us the capacity to become?  Perhaps being God is a lonely situation and He would enjoy having others of His kind — made in His image and likeness — to keep Him company... as soon as we earn the privilege by figuring out what that entails.

 

The Presidential Race — 2024

 

I am not a Republican.  I am not a Democrat.  I am a Libertarian.  In fact, I am a radical Rothbardian Libertarian.

Given that, I now propose a radical suggestion for winning the 2024 Presidential race.  For the Republicans.

Donald Trump cannot do for the GOP what he did in 2016.  He is 'old news'.  If he runs for President, although he has an elevated chance of winning, he has no chance of doing good things for the Republican Party as a whole.  But there is a slate that would radically transform the political landscape forever, and in a positive way.

If Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida can be cajoled into abandoning Florida for national office, he could not possibly choose a better running mate than Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI).

"OMG!" someone just gasped, "what kind of moron would suggest a Democratic Vice-President for a Republican President?"

That person does not know that in the early days of this nation, the candidate with the most electoral votes was declared 'President', and the runner-up was declared 'Vice-President', and their party was not considered.  It is a fairly recent modification that a 'slate' of President+Vice-President ran conjoined, and electors were pledged not to a candidate, but to a pair of candidates.

I have seen Ron DeSantis at work, and I approve his methods.  There is no one else within the GOP whose evident philosophy I approve more than the erstwhile Democratic Congresswoman from Hawai'i.  Were a DeSantis-Gabbard team sent to Washington, there could not rise against them any plausible opposition.  The GOP certainly would not.  The Democrats' only ploy would be to eject Gabbard from their party, cutting off their collectivist noses to spite their collectivist faces.

Pass the popcorn.

—==+++==—

Update (10-11-2022):  Aw, crap!  Tulsi Gabbard today announced that she is leaving the Democratic Party because of their abandonment of all the principles (!) that she thought they were committed to.  So, there goes DeSantis' chance to make history.  If he gets the GOP nomination in 2024, it would still be a good idea to tag Tulsi as VP.

Career Reflections

 

It was 50 years ago today, November 1st, 1971, that IBM began paying me to write programs.  I often call that one of the smartest business decisions I ever made — transferring from accounting to systems.

I only worked for IBM's Field Engineering Information Systems (FEIS) unit for another almost-eight years, before leaving to do contract programming at IT&T and American Can Co., leading to a permanent job with Aramco in Houston, Texas in August of 1981.  By 1984, due to Aramco deciding to Saudi-ize the workforce, I reconnected with IBM and moved to Florida's Suncoast.  Gruesome details on that journey, should you wish to revisit them, can be found on this blog at Life after IBM and Dave Boyd and the STSS.

It has been, all things considered, a very pleasant, productive, and profitable 50 years, and I'm still glad I did it.

 

The Four Laws

 

News media are reporting that actor Alec Baldwin yesterday fired a 'prop gun' on the set of the movie 'Rust' (now filming) killing a crew member and injuring another.  Reporters are calling this 'an accidental shooting'.

Let's be clear about one thing — if we are clear about nothing else:  there is no such thing as 'an accidental shooting'.  There are 'intentional shootings' and there are 'negligent shootings'.  There are no other categories into which to place any shooting.

What makes this ironic is that Alec Baldwin is rabidly anti-gun.  He is said to be deeply distressed over the so-called 'accident'.  Unfortunately, this is a perfect example of the principle that those who are anti-gun rarely-to-never know anything at all about guns.  What a shame, then, that with but a very little serious investigation on Baldwin's part, he might have positioned himself to avoid killing his co-worker, but the anti-gun crowd are ignorant and they like it that way.  They don't want to know anything about guns.  Guns are yukky.  Who needs to know anything beyond that?

BANG!  You're dead.

Alec Baldwin should be deeply distressed that his intentional ignorance has now resulted in a negligent homicide.

Preliminary investigation suggests that something, perhaps a bullet from a prior use, was still lodged in the barrel and when a blank cartridge was fired from the gun, it provided enough pressure to dislodge the (old) bullet.  As with so many other such incidents, it wasn't just a single error that caused tragedy;  it was several points of failure, any one of which, with but a little care, would have prevented a needless death.

There are four 'laws' of gun safety — often attributed to Col. Jeff Cooper — that, if followed religiously, will completely eliminate death-due-to-negligence:

1. Treat every gun as if it is loaded.
2. Never point a gun at anything you aren't ready to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you have decided to shoot.
4. Know what is behind your target, because you will miss.

These all seem, on brief reflection, to be so intuitive that no one should have to be taught them, yet multiple failures yesterday took another innocent life.  Some crew member picked up that gun to give it to Baldwin, but they didn't check to see if the action was clear, as you would for any gun you suspected was loaded.  Alec Baldwin didn't check, either.  Baldwin then pointed the gun in an unsafe direction, put his finger on the trigger, and fired.

This wasn't 'an accident'.  This was a crime.

 

Winter Driving

 

I just spent a pleasant few hours watching YouTube videos of horribly inept drivers (not) coping with winter weather.  It caused me to wax nostalgic.

During my years at IBM, I had the good fortune to be paired with a grizzled old-timer named Dave Boyd.  Dave, by then, had over 30 years as an IBM employee, many of those in 'systems' having written the first AutoCoder syllabus and then taught the first AutoCoder class.  He was a true 'Renaissance Man', and it would not surprise me one bit if he actually fit Robert A. Heinlein's definition:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly.  Specialization is for insects.

Among many other things, he was a 'German car nut', owning, at one point, a 2L Porsche 914, a 1.8L Porsche 914, a Porsche 356 that he had lovingly restored to showroom condition, a BMW 2002, and a Volkswagen.  He used the 914s to race gymkana on frozen Lake Winnipesaukee NH each winter, and cherished his nickname, 'Iceman'.

He taught me many valuable lessons, not the least of these being 'how to drive in winter'.  One day he asked me "What steers a car?" and I replied "The steering wheel, of course!"  Dave smiled as he shook his head side to side.  "No, the rolling wheels steer the car.  A wheel that isn't rolling is either stopped or sliding."  I was reminded of that as I watched cars from Michigan to Arkansas zipping down icy hills, all four wheels locked-in-place and careening into other cars, some moving, some not.

Mr. Miyagi advised Daniel-San

Best brock is 'no be dere'

and the best way to avoid crashing into another car because of icy conditions is to stay home that day, but if you must be behind the wheel on a snowy or sleety day, remember this:  when you press down on the brake pedal, you stop the wheels from rolling and you stop them from steering, but you don't overrule Newton's First Law: an object in motion tends to remain in motion.

The same lesson applies when you're going through a tight turn on dry pavement: if you step on the brake pedal, you have just offered to pay whatever penalty the laws of physics charge.

Only the rolling wheels can steer a car.

 

An Outline of Post-Western Civilization

 

I think this is important enough to reproduce and save:

An Outline of Post-Western Civilization

I also think it is important enough for you to invest your time reading.

With thanks to Paul Rosenberg (Freeman's Perspective) for being the OP, and Thomas Knapp (Rational Review News Digest) for highlighting it.

 

The Governmental Upside to Vaccines (sic)

 

There is a '(sic)' next to the word 'vaccine' because it is a fact that the vaccines we are being cajoled into taking are not actually vaccines in the accepted sense of the word.  For the record:

A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease.  A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins.  The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and to further recognize and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future.
    — Wikipedia, 9-21-21

(Whenever, following, I use the term 'vaccine', I am using it as a convenient shorthand only.)  The Covid-19 vaccine does not fit this description.  It is not synthesized from the C19 virus itself.  It does not provide immunity from C19, neither does it prevent future infection.  It's only claim is that it attenuates the severity of C19 should the vaccinated victim become infected.  Anecdotal evidence, largely from Israel, the most vaccinated country on Earth, suggests that the vaccine may, in fact, be more dangerous than C19 itself.  This is especially true for the so-called Delta variant.  That evidence takes the form that hospitalizations and deaths related to C19 closely parallels vaccination rates.  That is: as vaccinations go up, so do deaths.

Meanwhile, news out of India and Africa is being suppressed because it does not follow 'the narrative'.  That news strongly supports the view that Ivermectin (IVM) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) are effective prophylactics when administered early in the disease progression.  In the case of Africa, side-by-side graphs of 'vaccine countries' and 'IVM countries' show that death rates in IVM countries are a puny fraction of that in vaccine countries.  In the case of India, Kerala province went the vaccine-route while much of the rest of the country relied on early widespread HCQ/IVM use and the death rates in Kerala are substantially higher when compared to the rest of the country.

It isn't possible that our government doesn't know this, yet we are urged and coerced into getting vaccinated despite mounting evidence that other options have better outcomes.  Why would our government foist an unproven vaccination regimen on us when there are options that, it now appears likely if not 'certain', are better?

Given that these vaccines are by definition untested — there simply hasn't been enough time to know their long-term effects — could there be an ulterior motive?

Well, there's this:

If a third or more of our population were killed in [a nuclear] attack (a conservative estimate by the standards of the Rand Corporation's "Study of Nonmilitary Defense"), a stronger estate tax would have a tremendous revenue potential.
    — from a 1963 Federal Reserve System planning document

A new mRNA 'vaccine' whose long-term effect was to shorten life spans would likewise provide much-needed relief from Social Security's fast-approaching woes, especially if that vaccine or the disease it purports to treat were highly fatal to an older population.

Alternatively, it has been suggested that our planet is severely over-populated.  A nice little pandemic could fix that — if effective treatments can be suppressed.  It isn't outside the envelope of possibility that the vaccines are simply used as 21st-century snake oil.

In medicine, it has long been recognized that even a quack remedy that is harmless in itself can be fatal when it substitutes for an effective medication or treatment.  The time is overdue for that same recognition to apply to politics.
    —— Thomas Sowell

—==+++==—

Update:    As of July 8, 2021, IVM is recommended by CDC/NIH for treating C19.

 

It was 20 years ago today...

 

The day after 9-11-2001, I wrote Another Day of Infamy as an analysis of what had transpired the day before.  20 years later, I find that I wouldn't change a word.

That's sad when you think about it.  In 20 years we have learned virtually nothing about dealing with other sovereign nations.  Nothing.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

 

Media and banks as censorship tools

 

The government is forbidden, via the First amendment, to censor the speech (written or oral) of citizens.  Recently, there was an incident where some government operative suggested that the federal government ask prominent media companies (Google, Twitter, FaceBook, &c.) to put a stop to (that is: censor) 'misinformation'.  Opinion on this issue fell into two rough categories.  One side opined that this should be illegal since government was effectively doing an end run around the First amendment.  The other side asserts that those media companies are non-government corporations and are not bound by the First amendment, and can thus censor or not, as they see fit.

A similar public-private partnership involving banks and other financial operators was used during the Obama years to put the squeeze on gun manufacturers and sellers.

Which side do you come down on?

Back on February 3rd, I pointed out that corporations are 'creatures of the state' and have no more authority to censor anyone than does their creator.  When FaceBook demonetizes one of their users or when Twitter cancels a user's account for 'violations of the terms of service', they are exercising powers the state could never have granted them — because the state never possessed those powers to begin with.

Somebody with spine and bankroll needs to sue one of these companies and let the Supreme Court rule on whether they can or cannot censor — at the behest of government or without it.

 

Whose Fault Is It?

 

It's August 31st, 2021.  The last USAF plane has left Kabul — that is, the last USAF plane that wasn't abandoned in our rush to be gone by Biden's deadline.  There also seems to have been a fair few American civilians left behind.  Whether they chose to remain behind or were simply unable to get to the airport in time is as yet insufficiently clear.  Also left behind, apparently, are a large number of Afghans who served as interpreters during the occupation, even though they are at serious risk of Taliban retaliation.

There are rumors that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unvetted refugees made it onto airplanes to be whisked away to centers of Afghan immigration like Wisconsin.  One YouTube video claims that the U.S. State Department emailed blank visas, presumably to vetted addressees, with instructions to "fill them out and bring them with you to the airport".  A blank form such as that can be replicated easily and filled out by others who (presumably) have not yet been vetted.  Beyond that, the roads leading to the airport were by then under the control of the Taliban, and it is not guaranteed that everyone who ought to have been admitted to the airport actually got close enough for that to happen.  It also appears that something like $83 billion (with a 'b') worth of planes, helicopters, armored vehicles, and other weapons (including over 350,000 M-16s and ammunition) were left behind at Bagram airbase.

Clearly, this pull-out was bungled in a way that has no immediately-comparable example in our experience.  Why?

People of all stripes are asking piercing questions like:  "What level of military expertise is required for a leader to understand that the order of evacuation has to be (a) civilians first, (b) expensive and/or militarily-sensitive equipment next, and (c) military last ?"  And if the leader doesn't have that kind of military expertise, isn't there someone close by who does have it?

FOX News and Republicans in general are blaming this incredible series of fuck-ups (sorry, there's just no pleasant way to say it) on Biden, and Democrats while CNN and MSNBC are pointing their fingers at Donald Trump.

Well, whose fault is it?

The Democrats shrug and say "that's the evacuation plan Trump left us with!" and expect everyone to shrug along with them.  But Biden, on his first half-day in office, signed 40 Executive Orders undoing many acts of the previous President.  Is it possible that in the seven months since, no one at the Pentagon pointed out the error in Trump's horrible plan?  No, it's not possible.  If that were Trump's plan, it would have been changed as easily as those 40 EOs.  Therefore, the plan we witnessed being executed in the last two weeks was not Trump's plan; it was Biden's plan, either because he changed Trump's plan or because he didn't.

This was Biden's fault.  The buck stops there.

 

How To Drain A Swamp

 

There has been considerable blather since... oh, around mid-2016 or so... about when Donald Trump announced he was interested in becoming President of the United States... about how he would 'drain the swamp'.  That didn't happen to anything like the extent most of his supporters expected it would, and it might be instructive to ask why those exalted expectations never seemed to come to pass.

 

A new President coming into office typically receives the resignations of all political appointees of the prior administration.  Often, this includes the Directors of FBI, NSA, and CIA, but not always.  A newly-elected President who really wants to drain the DC swamp will signal that resolve by immediately accepting those proffered resignations — and summarily dismissing any who do not resign — and then cancelling the security clearances for all those persons.  Given the atrocious condition of the military currently, several high-ranking flag officers should likewise be relieved of command and separated from the service.

All such persons, military and civilian, should be relieved of their passports.  Why their passports?  Because a President, the head of the Executive Branch, also heads the Justice Department that would be potentially prosecuting other heads-of-departments (possibly including the DoJ itself), and it is necessary that those high-ranking (and therefore wealthy) defendants not be able to flee the jurisdiction.  The President also heads the Department of State that owns those passports.  The President is thus entitled to recover State Department property. 

That's insufficient, unfortunately.  The next three (at least) management levels below those Directors need to be furloughed.  They may not be able to be fired outright if they are 'civil service', but they can be placed on administrative leave, minus their security clearances, pending an investigation to determine if they are safe to have in sensitive positions.  The personnel remaining will be charged with operating their functions without the encumbrance of the upper echelons.  It strains credulity to wonder if those organizations cannot function effectively when run by the people who actually run them day-to-day.

Such actions following hot on the heels of Inauguration would send tremors through the halls of Congress.  There are — I have not the slightest doubt — many Congressional staffers who, seeing U.S.Marshals and State Department functionaries stripping the highest ranks of DC Officialdom of their badges of office, would begin to consider 'turning state's evidence' before it was too late.  A President truly set on draining the DC swamp would only need one or two such turncoats, and even the New York Times could not decline to publish the news of the forthcoming indictments.

All that is needed is a President who doesn't care that somebody who hasn't yet been sufficiently neutralized is going to leak pictures 'in bed with a dead girl or a live boy', as one unfortunately forgotten wag once predicted.

Does such a person exist?

 

Underground Houston

 

In 1981, I accepted a position with Aramco Services Company (ASC) in Houston TX.  'Aramco' is derived from ARabian AMerican Oil COmpany.  Aramco and its sister companies are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the House of Saud.  During the interview process leading up to ASC offering me a job, the recruiter had me follow him from one ASC office to another a few blocks away in downtown Houston.  To do this, we took the elevator to the lobby and an escalator to the basement.  From there, we walked through what was effectively an underground strip mall, corridors leading from one downtown building to another, and lined with shops and restaurants.  It was a surprise because I had never seen anything like this before in my life.

The story I was told was that sometime in the recent past (pre-1981), the owner of one building opened his basement as rental space for retail establishments.  The owner of the building across the street took notice of the action and did likewise.  At some point, one of them proposed cutting a path beneath the city street to join the two spaces, and workers in building A could then get to the shops and offices in building B without subjecting themselves to 100°F temperatures and 98% humidity.  As building owners one by one converted their basements to retail/rental space, new tunnels were added until today, the Houston tunnel system connects 95 separate buildings, is 6 miles long, and it is a piece of cake to get so lost that your only hope of rescue is to get to street level and find out where (exactly) you are.

It almost qualifies as 'a tourist attraction'.  It was stunningly extensive when I left the area in 1985.  It was more elaborate when I worked on contract for EXXON/Mobil in 1998, and it has certainly gotten longer since then.  It was and is literally possible to walk crosstown without ever risking being rained on.  In fact, when I worked for Aramco in the 80s, I often went to lunch with the local Mensa group by walking (underground) from One Allen Center at Dallas and Smith to The Shops at Houston Center, San Jacinto at McKinney.  It was a longer walk than it would have been at street-level, but it was air conditioned all the way.

 

Pot Legalization Looms

 

Congressional Democrats are responding positively to a call from the Biden White House to legalize and reschedule marijuana and to expunge all non-violent federal pot-possession convictions.

It's about time.  This has been a plank of the Libertarian Party Platform for 49 years — a tad shorter than the lifespan of the actual 'War On Drugs'.  How nice that someone in D.C. seems to still have a shred of common sense.

This, of course, is bad news for the Republican Party.  Most legacy Republicans still think of pot as 'the Devil's lettuce' or 'demon weed'.  Well, they better get religion pretty fast or they're going to be left in the dust of the Democrats when all those former felons suddenly discover that they can now vote.  And who, pray tell, do you think those former felons will vote for?  Hmm...?  Will it be, do you think, the party of Richard Nixon who started the brutal and ill-fated War On Drugs and began shipping Hippies off to the Graybar Hotel?  Will it be, do you think, the party of George W. Bush who ramped up that war (along with a few others)?  The GOP might save themselves — somewhat — if they're able to successfully get out the word that William Jefferson Clinton (who didn't inhale, let us recall) put more pot smokers in federal slam than any other President before or since.

No, the GOP's single chance will be to publicly congratulate Senator Charles ("Chuck is also a verb") Schumer on a courageous position and then get foursquare behind the effort such that Pot Legalization and Rescheduling passes the Senate 100-0 and the House 435-0.  Anything short of that is going to label the GOP as 'stuck in the past' (which is true, but they don't have to prove it every day, do they?)

 

MartyrMade Twitter Feed

 

The following is a copy of the Twitter feed from user MartyrMade which may be gone by the time you read this.  The viewpoint appears to be from one who is neutral regarding left-right politics.  It contains several observations that are important for people on both sides of that divide to be aware of.

—==+++==—

I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective.  It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself.

• Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them.
  


• Here are the facts — actual, confirmed facts — that shape their perspective:  1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign.  We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc).
  


• These are Tea Party people.  The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios.  The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.
  


• Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could.  We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order.  Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew.
  


• This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff — who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t — all the way down the line.  In the end we learned that it was ALL fake.
  


• At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn’t make it up out of nothing.  When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov’t when it didn’t happen.
  


• We know as fact:  a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign,  b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op,  c) Steele’s source told the FBI the info was unserious,  d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying.
  


• Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back.  They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution — agencies, the press, Congress, academia — gaslit them for another year.
  


• Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration.  They knew their entire lives would be investigated.  Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees.  The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.
  


• This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naïve belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries.  Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.
  


• GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan.  They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.
  


• It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem.
  


• They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government.  But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them.  They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.
  


• The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable.  If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story.  The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline.  Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.
  


• This is profoundly disorienting.  Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was.  They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.
  


• They watched the press behave like animals for four years.  Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN.  And CNN seems proud of that.  They led a lynch mob against a high school kid.  They cheered on a summer of riots.
  


• They always claimed the media had liberal bias: fine, whatever.  They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered.  Now they don’t.  It’s a different thing to watch them invent stories [out of] whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence.
  


• Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect.  In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.
  


• Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures.  It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc).  After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now.
  


• Re: “fake impeachment”, we now know that Trump’s request for Ukraine to cooperate w/the DOJ regarding Biden’s $ activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request.
  


• Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal.  Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate.  Period.  Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a “mistake” — but, ya know, the election’s over, so who cares?
  


• Goes w/o saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr’s laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn’t have been banned.
  


• Think back:  Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source.  The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.
  


• The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!”  That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012.  This is different.  Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.
  


• And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote.  He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got!  As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope.  But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.
  


• Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories.  They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real.
  


• Media & Tech did everything to make things worse.  Everything about the election was strange — the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc — but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!).
  


• Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr’s laptop would’ve been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would’ve been Taken Very Seriously.  See 2016 for proof.
  


• Even the courts’ refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence.  They’ll say, w/good reason:  What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house?
  


• It’s a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won.  Sure, they were “protests”, but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant.  Judges have families, too.
  


• Forget the ballot conspiracies.  It’s a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.
  


• They knew it was unconstitutional, it’s right there in plain English.  But they knew the cases wouldn’t see court until after the election.  And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules?  The threat of mass riots wasn’t implied, it was direct.
  


• • a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, 
  • b) The press is part of the operation, 
  • c) Election rules were changed, 
  • d) Big Tech censors opposition, 
  • e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, 
  • f) Trump is banned from social media.


• They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it.  Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.

 

End Times

 

I recently had a set-to with my cardiologist.  While sitting in the examining room, I remarked out loud that it seemed silly that I, fully vaccinated, still needed to wear a mask, especially considering the size of the CoVid-19 particle compared to the limits of an N95 mask.  Specifically, the particle is about 1/4 the size of the smallest particle the mask will filter out.  It goes through the mask material like sand through a cyclone fence.

My cardiologist basically 'flew off the handle', accusing me of being a moron who didn't understand why masks were so important.  Then he walked out of the room, my examination still unfinished, telling me "Call me when you've changed your mind."

I came very close to leaving, demanding that the clinic not charge me for the visit since the doctor had refused to treat me as a patient.  Before I did, he wandered back into the room to finish the exam.

Those who reject the notion that a cloth mask can do much to defend against an aerosolized virus are called 'science deniers' by those who hold the opposing view, but I think the situation is exactly reversed.  There are several peer-reviewed studies that suggest masks are essentially useless against CoVid-19, and none that suggest otherwise.

Likewise, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was touted early on (primarily by 'the right') as an effective prophylactic when applied before the onset of serious respiratory symptoms.  The mainstream media (MSM) pooh-poohed this idea, largely, it seems, because Trump was for it.  It didn't matter that HCQ was a 70-year-old formulation on which the patent had expired, and that could be manufactured by any reasonably-well-equipped pharmacology lab for peanuts.  Or perhaps that did matter.  If HCQ had taken hold, there would not have been the opportunity for Big Pharma to make billions (with a 'b') producing vaccines whose effectiveness is suspect and whose long-term consequences are unknown.  (HCQ has even been banned for use against CoVid-19 because of a series of 'studies' where it was shown conclusively that it had no value 'curing' the virus in patients where the virus had already gained a foothold.  This was not a surprise to those clinics where it had been studied by applying it in the early stages of the disease.  Nobody had ever claimed it was a cure; it merely blocked disease progression during onset.  Most Americans didn't understand the difference.)

The Ivermectin (IVM) story replicates the HCQ story above save only that IVM is somewhat more expensive to buy than HCQ.

To make it economically feasible for Big Pharma to produce vaccines for Operation Warp Speed, vaccine producers have been, themselves, immunized from lawsuits that might arise should those vaccines produce unpleasant side-effects.  You can't sue them if something goes wrong.

It occurs to me that anyone who doesn't have to take the vaccine, shouldn't.  What will happen if one of the as-yet-unknown side-effects of the vaccine is a shortening of the human life span by 5 or 10 or 15 years?  (That might go a long way toward helping Social Security weather the coming economic downturn(s).)  What will happen if the as-yet-unknown side-effect of the vaccine is a reduction in human fertility by 10% or 15%?  What will happen if the as-yet-unknown side-effect of the vaccine is an increase in stillbirths?  These are all possibilities because there has not been time to study any long-term effects.  What will certainly not happen is that any court will allow a civil suit for damages for any of these potential calamities.  We are just now hearing of an increased incidence of myocarditis among young people who have taken the vaccines, and at least one case of a 14-year-old who suffered a heart attack within two days of getting vaccinated.

All of this for a disease with a 99.7% chance of survival.  Have we become a nation of cowards?  I think it's clear that we have become a nation of idiots.

 

California AWCA Struck Down

 

I'm just going to drop this here and let any interested reader draw their own conclusions.

https://thepriceofliberty.org/2021/06/14/californian-lies-so-blatant-even-a-judge-recognizes-them/

 

UPDATE:  6-22-2021

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals has extended the judge's original 30-day stay indefinitely, but didn't, apparently, reverse the ruling, although it's difficult to imagine a different reason than that the panel disagrees with the ruling's holding that the law was unconstitutional.

 

Well, well, well...

 

So, the EU has just reached an agreement with UK on how they will deal with each other post-BRexit.  According to Deutsche Welle:

"The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) was the result of nine long months of negotiations and set up a relationship of zero tariffs and zero quotas on goods traded between the EU and UK." 

If this sounds like the EU is going to treat UK as if they were still part of the team, then you and I read this the same way.

And why wouldn't they?  Trade is how wealth is acquired.  If you have a pie and I have five dollars and we trade those, you now have five dollars that you value above having a pie, and I have a pie that I value above those five dollars.  We both gained in that transaction.  Wait... what?

Yes, unless governments get in the way to impose taxes and tariffs, trade — that is 'free trade' — always results in profits to the traders.  Taxes and tariffs steal some or all of that profit (or more) and funnel it to the government so it can be wasted on things you normally wouldn't spend your own money for.  People who cheered Trump's tariff policy will by now be scratching their heads: "What in tarnation is he talking about?"

The EU seems to have decided that trading with UK (and making profit from trading with UK) is a better idea than cutting off trade with a country that has Chunnel access to the Continent, and is even better than taxing their own citizens to impel them to reject UK produce (that, until a few months ago, was all perfectly fine).  One wonders what sort of drug they're on that induces such common sense?  Perhaps we can get prescriptions for our own U.S. politicians?  Would they take the medicine?  Forget it, Jake, it's D.C.

 

50 Laboratories

 

Back on February 7, 2017, I wrote about problem-solving using massively-parallel trial-and-error and suggested that this method almost always results in the optimal outcome, and gets very close to it when it misses the bulls-eye.

We just went through a period where this method was applied, and it has (apparently) worked as expected.  Fifty states each dealt with Covid-19 using a handful of models such that we now have several different solutions, each demonstrating different levels of success.

New York, New Jersey, and California, along with several others, went the 'hard lockdown' route, while others, notably Florida and Texas, eschewed mask mandates and forced isolation.  The results are in: lockdowns don't work if the desired result is the health of the populace; mask mandates seem to have no observable effect on infection rates; forced isolation is (as was predicted early-on) a recipe for economic catastrophe and very little in the way of 'preventing infection'.  The CDC is now admitting that the chance of acquiring Covid-19 from hard surfaces is approximately zero.  If only someone would have been aware of how useless most of these draconian non-solutions were earlier in the process!

Well, it turns out that someone was aware of how useless mask mandates, hard lockdowns, and economy-crippling isolation measures were.  By and large, what the mainstream media sneeringly refer to as 'right-wing media' was on this case within weeks of the initial outbreaks, and they warned whoever would listen that (a) Covid-19 was far less dangerous than 'the experts' were saying it was, and (b) that there was no reason to torpedo the economy in order to keep people healthy.  In fact, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and NJ Governor Phil Murphy both sent infected seniors back into the nursing homes from which they had come, the better to infect any seniors who had thus far escaped the virus.  The instant this happened, 'right-wing media' was on the issue 'like white on rice' warning (as if no one could figure this out for themselves) that placing infected persons in close proximity to uninfected persons was an excellent way to infect the uninfected.  Those warnings were dismissed as conspiracy theories, but we now know that they were something else.

The left is keen on 'common-sense gun laws', but they're not quite as keen on common-sense health policies, and now I think we can speculate as to 'why'.  Common-sense gun laws (which are thoroughly divorced from common-sense) give them more power.  Common-sense health policies take power away.  The common denominator is that whatever gives the left power is good, and whatever takes power away is bad.

Let that sink in for a moment.

 

A Small Difference of Opinion

 

I have come to understand — somewhat reluctantly — that Mike Vanderboegh was more right than he could imagine when he opined that Americans are now two distinct people occupying the same territory.  The implications of this are ominous.  They almost guarantee that the United States will eventually — maybe soon — disunite, probably via a civil war, perhaps via a shooting civil war.

It has been obvious for some time, certainly since Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, that Democrats as a class are unprincipled and mendacious, with minds closed to any idea that does not fit the narrative set by the demagogues by whom they are pleased to be ruled, and violently opposed to all who question their accepted dogma.  In this sense, they are largely indistinguishable from Muslims who are perfectly accepting of the notion that the only good unbeliever is a headless unbeliever.  The rise of "cancel culture" (that oddly seems to affect only conservatives) provides adequate proof.

The things they believe can only be believed by turning a blind eye to uncomfortable facts, while simultaneously declining to fact-check their own sources.  For instance, we have the glaring example of Adam Schiff who, almost weekly for the entirety of the Trump presidency, proclaimed that he had "seen clear and convincing evidence" that Trump and his team colluded with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.  Of course, Robert Mueller at the head of two dozen highly-paid and Democratically-aligned A-list attorneys couldn't find anything prosecutable despite spending two years and 30 million dollars.  When asked directly whether he, Mueller, had inquired into the Clinton campaign's documented connection to the Steele dossier, Mueller demurred because "that was not within my purview".  That is, in lawyer-speak, an admission that Mueller was charged with finding wrongdoing by Trump and his team to the exclusion of everyone else.  As a consequence, the $30 million resulted in a few minor 1001's and very little else.  The persecution of General Michael Flynn never rose to the level that any Democrat would have been bothered by the complete absence of due process because, you see, Flynn was a Republican and thus unworthy of fair treatment.

Since Second Amendment issues are always high on my priority list, most discussions zero in on that pretty quickly.  "I'm not trying to take your guns!" she loudly proclaims.  Well, no, you aren't, but the people you voted for are.  That's where anything resembling "a discussion" usually ends.  No Democrat wants to have to fight that battle under any conditions that might lead them to have to change their mind.  The facts are not on their side, so they argue emotion.  As soon as one party forces the debate back onto a factual base, they execute a strategic withdrawal.

Big Tech and Big Media have together conspired to make a Trump re-election unlikely if not out-and-out impossible.  The treatment of Hunter Biden is illustrative.  Hunter sent his laptop in for repair and then apparently forgot about it.  When the laptop repairman exercised a workman's lien and began peering deep into the innards of the device, he discovered evidence of potentially criminal activity on Hunter's part.  He made a safety back-up copy of the laptop's contents before turning it over to the FBI which (presumably) is still looking into it.  When The New York Post ran a front-page article based on that "safety copy", FaceBook and Twitter shut down NYPost access to their platforms.  No Democrat raised an eyebrow.  The existence of evidence that Hunter Biden may have engaged in criminal activity remained (and remains) unknown to the bulk of the American people.  Had Hunter been linked to anything Republican, he would now be in federal prison awaiting trial.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic provides a wealth of confirming data for the overarching premise.  Mario Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York, issued an order early in the course of the pandemic that forced NY nursing homes to re-admit Covid-positive patients back among their untested populations.  That this resulted in the deaths of a number of elderly patients that might otherwise have survived the experience is undisputed.  Trump (a Republican) dispatched a Navy hospital ship to NY harbor to help the (Democratic) mayor isolate Covid patients.  When the ship was finally recalled to regular duty some weeks later, they had handled exactly ZERO patients.  It just wouldn't do for any Democrat to place themselves into a position from which they would have to give credit to a Republican for doing something good, even if citizens have to die to prevent it.  Despite this, the governor won an Emmy for his daily press briefings!

Despite widespread lockdowns that crushed their economies, NY, NJ, CT, and CA have experienced high case rates, high hospitalization rates, and high death rates from the virus.  States that rejected hard lockdowns, FL and TX prime among them, have recorded lower rates for hospitalizations and deaths.  Even so, those "free states" are routinely panned in Big Media as being hotbeds of infection.  Only among so-called right-wing media is there speculation that lockdowns might not have been as effective as we were promised.  NY, with very high death rates, even insisted that travelers from "hotbed states" like FL quarantine for two weeks on arrival.  Recently, CBS' "60 Minutes" so blatantly misquoted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis regarding his response to Covid-19 that the (Democratic) mayor of Palm Beach County felt obligated to go public in defense of his (Republican) governor.

In short, Democrats believe many things that are provably false and disbelieve many things that are provably true, and insist that everyone who doesn't believe as they do is a traitor, a terrorist, an insurrectionist, a conspiracy-theorist, or some combination of those.  Given their propensity to destroy the economy and their compatriots' wealth in the process, the only real traitors seem to be the ones with a "D" next to their names.

 

Gun Control and El Salvador

 

Tucker Carlson tonight aired an interview with the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele.  Bukele fretted over the fact that it was the bold, the risk-takers, the entrepreneurs, the economic drivers that were fleeing El Salvador and making a hazardous trip north to the United States.  The incentives the United States offers to new immigrants are draining the lifeblood out of his country.

As I watched him describe how murders in his country have been reduced by 75% in recent years, I wondered what 'gun control' looked like there.  This is what WikiPedia has to say on that topic:

Salvador law aims to allow and regulate civilian possession of firearms.  In order to get a firearm license one must have no criminal record, be at least 21 years of age (24 for a carry license), pay a tax stamp (around $32 dollars) and undergo a written test.  The process takes around three hours in total.  In 2017 there were 344,587 registered firearms in El Salvador, or 5.6 per 100 people (1 in 18).

All things considered, that's pretty easy-going for a Central American country, and that may be related to the sudden drop in murder.  An armed society, after all, is a polite society.

What does that say about Salvadorans who flee the poor economic climate at home for the United States?  People like David Codrea worry that Central American immigrants are going to be heavily Democratic in their politics.  This says something different: Salvadorans are going to expect to be able to arm themselves in this country, and I suspect they will not be closely attuned to Democrats' traditional stance on guns and gun ownership.  I suspect they're going to be joining the NRA or GOA and thumbing their collective noses at Democrats' efforts to disarm the American people — of which they hope to soon be part of.

Such a population merged with others from the same or similar cultures constitute a contractable virus.  Salvadorans are going to infect their compadres with the desire to be free (at last) from the fears that drove them north.  They're going to want to be free — freer — than they were back home.  They're going to want their own guns.  They're not going to be Democrats, at least when it comes to 'gun control'.  On that issue, they're going to be Americans.

 

On The Epilogue of "Tipping Point"

 

Several people have remarked to me regarding the ending of "Tipping Point" that they didn't understand what happened (or what was happening) in the Epilogue, chapter 28, specifically with reference to the interactions between Lulu Pleasance and Bobbie Farquhar and between Florence Persky and Steven Miller.  This is as I intended.  You have to write your own ending for this tale.  That's not simply 'fair', it's necessary — for no one can predict the outcome of a civil war in all its ramifications.

As of that point in the story, the U.S. Constitution has been amended to make clear that secession is within the powers of the states, and several states have taken advantage of that power to separate themselves from what was once the United States of America.  Deliberately left unsaid is whether or not any of the naturally expected changes (the contraction of the federal government chief among them) have acted to draw any of those states back into the "united States" (as the Declaration of Independence itself identifies them), or whether or not there now exists two (or more) independent polities within that territory.  What do you think?  That is the most important question left unanswered as Tipping Point closes:  how do you think this has all worked out — if it has worked out.

What is the significance of the crossbow pins and emblems?  Have the erstwhile "freedom fighters" been able to come out into the open or are those pins the equivalent of "a secret handshake" among people whose involvement can only be known among others in the same situation?  What do you think?

Those pins are all of a single design it seems, yet are differentiated by small, perhaps barely noticeable decorations.  What's the significance of a diamond chip as opposed to an amethyst chip?  Those who can read the language of flags may sometimes be able to say something on the order of "that cruiser is Brazilian and is commanded by a Rear Admiral; the crew is on shore leave, and there's no smoking allowed just now because they're transferring ammunition".  The decorations on the pins are of such a nature, but to catalog the meaning of each is not relevant to the story.  If you really need an explanation, you could just as easily make one up yourself.

Some have scoffed at the notion that states ought to be able to secede at will, yet the 10th amendment seems to leave such powers with the states, and the notion of secession vs. permanence of the union is nowhere else addressed; the 10th amendment would seem to be the controlling law.  Viewed from a strictly rational vantage, one has to wonder what benefit is gained by forcing some region or people to remain united after changes to their worldview have separated them (philosophically) from their former neighbors.  If we are to treat each other as comrades, does that not require us to wish each other the best of futures?  And, if our neighbor thinks their best future is attained by independence, should we not wish them well and let them go?

As well, to think that such questions can be adequately answered by civil war has proven to be wishful thinking of the highest order.  The first U.S. Civil (sic) War is still being fought — it did not end at Appomattox; only the shooting and the killing ended there.  Would any sane person suggest that we could finally get a definitive answer by doing it all again, but this time bigger and better?  I don't believe that, and I hope no one else does, either.

"But, wait..."  I hear someone say,  "that implies that regions could secede from nations, counties secede from states, neighborhoods secede from cities, and neighbors secede from neighborhoods!  That's madness!"

That is, in fact, what such an attitude implies.  It's the ultimate "freedom of association" that we are free to associate or to disassociate down to the individual person.  That is, after all, what marriage and divorce are, is it not?  We call it 'independence' as if it is something different when practiced by nations, but it is precisely the same thing.  Why can we not go to court and get a decree separating ourselves?  Why, in fact, might we need a court?  The answer is that, in a rational society, political dissociation ought to be as simple as "I'm done here!"  Imagine how much bloodshed might have been prevented over the eons by simply understanding that keeping a polity — or a person — captive harms both sides?

Forced unity is, in fact, a way to maintain one’s power — nothing more.  The king, the duke, the earl always has the wherewithal to force the peasants to stay where they are.  There’s no need to negotiate when armed soldiers are ready to enforce the will of those at the top of the food chain, yet... if the duke can get the peasants to do the work voluntarily — because they see it as a win-win situation — the duke no longer needs to maintain so large an army and so needs less revenue, making the peasants better off.  ‘Coercion’ always has a cost associated even if we can’t see it.  So it is with nations.  So it is with all of us. 

Some have specifically asked about 'Steven Miller', the man who rents a car from Hertz rental agent Florence Persky in the very last paragraph of Chapter 28, and as in several other cases, I have declined to further identify him.

Like the character 'V' from "V For Vendetta", Steven Miller is 'Everyman'.  He is you and me and your cousin Bob and the neighbor you don't particularly like.  In the grand scheme of things, he is nobody, and therefore he is everybody, and he made the events of "Tipping Point" possible.

 

 

Corporate Charters

 

Here's a question you may have never before considered:  How does a corporation come into being?  Here's how:

A corporation comes into being because a group of investors, having decided to incorporate, asks a State for a (corporate) charter.  When the State issues that charter, the corporation springs into existence.  The corporation is a creature of the State that issued the charter.

People (and courts) sometimes treat corporations as if they were persons; they are considered 'artificial persons', 'artificial' meaning 'created'.  Because of this, they are often considered to have all the powers and rights of real persons, but this is not logically defensible.  A real person is the biological output of other real persons and can participate in producing other real persons, all without the intervention of the State.  None of that is true for artificial persons like corporations.  Corporations cannot create other corporations without the approval of the State;  they are, in this respect, sterile like mules.

Because a corporation is a creature of the State, it has only the attributes acquired by heredity from its parent.  That is, it can have only those powers that were endowed to the State by the State's creators, viz.: the people of the State.  Conversely, any powers that were withheld from the State by the people cannot have been passed on to the corporation.

A wide variety of powers were withheld from the States and from the federal government that, via Congress, creates new states.  Most of us are familiar with the Bill of Rights — which probably should have been called 'The Bill of Prohibitions' since it mostly lists things the federal government (and, by extension, States) are forbidden to do;  things like:  interfere with the free expression of peoples' opinions,  discriminate among customers based on their exercise of rights retained by real people,  &c.

So, if a State is forbidden to discriminate among its customers (i.e.: citizens), how can a corporation, a creature of that State, have such a power?  If a State is forbidden to block the free exercise of expression by its citizens, how can a corporation, a creature of that State, have such a power?  The answer is that a corporation cannot and does not have any such power.  Doing such acts is a violation of the corporate charter.  The proper remedy for a corporation that violates its charter is for the State to withdraw the charter, killing the corporation.

Adios, FaceBook, Inc.

Adios, Twitter, Inc.

Adios, MasterCard, Inc.

There are plenty of others waiting to feast on your carcasses.  There are lots of companies anxious to take up any slack your absence creates.  You will not be missed.

 

 

Timing Is Everything

 

There's a fresh new piece of anti-gun legislation being groomed for its prime-time appearance before a largely Democratic Congress.  It's called H.R.127 and it has all the elements of a gun-grabber's wet dream:

• universal background checks,
   
• psych evaluations on entire households,
   
• a ban on vast categories of heretofore-otherwise-lawful weapons,
   
• HUGE taxes and fees required for mere possession of what's left,
   
• mandatory periodic training,
   
• a publicly-accessible database of all gun owners (and their inventory?),
   
• and increases in the budget, authority, and power of the most corrupt of all corrupt federal bureaus and agencies, the Bureau of Alchohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

Totally unconstitutional, of course, but when has that ever stopped Congress?  Why is it unconstitutional, you ask?  Stop me if I get any of this wrong...

Rule #1 of 'jurisprudence' world-wide is that later law trumps earlier law.  A law passed today can be repealed by a law passed tomorrow.  That's so straight-forward it almost doesn't rate putting it down on paper.  Then

1. The fundamental axiom of the American System is that 'rights' are an endowment from God or Nature or some other metaphysical entity that is outside of and above government and, in fact, pre-exists government.
    
2. Governments do not have rights;  they have powers and authorities granted to them by we the people, from whom all such power originates ('the consent of the governed').
    
3. The vehicle for granting such powers and authorities is The U.S.Constitution.  The Constitution was ratified and came into force in 1789.
    
4. The Second Amendment, concerning the right of the people to keep and bear arms, was ratified in 1791, two years after the Constitution.
    
5. In 1934, and then again in 1968, Congress passed gun control laws, justifying them as part of Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce.
    
6. Both of these acts should be considered unconstitutional because the power to regulate interstate commerce was granted in Article I of the Constitution in 1789.  If those powers ever included authority over firearms and other weapons, that authority was revoked in 1791 with the passage of the Second Amendment.  Timing is everything when it comes to 'constitutionality'.
    
7. That 'fresh new piece of anti-gun legislation' being prepped in the House suffers from the same disability.

But the worst part of H.R.127 isn't that it's unconstitutional.  The worst part is that it will be impossible to comply with.  The monstrous cost of attempting to comply will price most poor or minority families out of the market or, alternatively, send millions of them to prison.  Clearly, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) either hasn't given this much thought or simply doesn't care that she has codified a brand new poll tax on many of her constituents.

The former marks her as more stupid than Maxine Watters;  the latter as more cruel than Bull Connor.

Keep up the evil work, Sheila.

 

Executive Orders

 

There's a lot of chatter on social media about how many EOs Biden is producing, so I thought this might be an opportune time to talk about Executive Orders and their effect.

"All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives."
      — U.S.Constitution, Article I, Section 1

Pretty plainly, laws come from Congress.  How to explain, then, the off-handed remark by Paul Begala, an aide to President Clinton:

"Stroke of the pen.  Law of the land.  Kinda cool."

on how Clinton was going to use EOs to make happen what he wanted to happen.  The explanation is that Begala got it wrong, although most Americans, being not-too-well-versed in their own Constitution, probably didn't realize it.

Executive Orders cannot be law, because they don't come from Congress.  Okay, so what are they?  They are instructions to employees of the Executive Branch from the Chief Executive, their ultimate boss.  They tell those employees in the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Treasury, the State Department, and all the other less-well-known departments and bureaus how they are to operate.

They can't tell you what to do or not do, because then they would have the force of law, and the President can't make law.  Only Congress can make law.  That's what it says in Article 1, Section 1.

The fly in this ointment is that the way employees of the Executive Branch operate on a day-to-day basis often affects citizens who are not themselves employees of the Executive Branch in ways that are indistinguishable from laws that Congress passes.  When the guards at the Capitol are told to "admit no one who is not wearing a mask", the effect is that you must wear a mask in order to get in to see your Congressman — without Congress having acted.  That's why EOs sometimes feel like "the law of the land" even though they're not.

Occasionally, a President will issue an EO that a President clearly has no authority to issue.  This happened when, for instance, President Obama (who was, let us recall, a 'Constitutional scholar') committed us to the Paris Climate Accord.

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.
      — U.S.Constitution, Article II, Section 2

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
      — U.S.Constitution, Article VI

but the Senate did not concur.  The 'treaty' was never presented to the Senate for their consent.  So, when President Trump issued an EO taking us out of the Paris Climate Accord, he was undoing something his predecessor had no authority to do in the first place.  President Biden just (illegally) put us back in, reversing Trump's (legal) EO.

It will be interesting to see if anyone objects to any of Biden's EOs on the grounds that some of them do attempt to make law without involving Congress.  I'll actually be surprised if that happens.

 

 

Cleaning house in the Senate

 

The House of Representatives has impeached former President Trump for a second time.  With much fanfare, the (Democrat) House Impeachment Managers then solemnly marched across to the Senate and delivered the Articles of Impeachment to their (Democrat) majority leader.  Yesterday, Sen Rand Paul of Kentucky introduced a resolution declaring the proceeding moot because Trump has already left office.  The vote failed 55-45 with five Republican Senators voting to continue to trial:  Susan M. Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah), Ben Sasse (Neb.) and Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.).

It's true that someone who has already left office may be impeached, and if convicted, can be barred from holding public office in the future.  This is the purpose of impeaching Trump again: to prevent him challenging President Kamala Harris in 2024 when she runs for re-election.

I'm not a fan of Trump.  I think he's boorish and (quite frankly) stupid.  People hold that he's a 'street fighter from Queens', but the last four years haven't shown that.  Boorishness, yes; street savvy, no.  If he were as smart as people think he is, his first official act should have been to fire anyone in DOJ, FBI, CIA, or NSA who was even suspected of being less than 100% on his side.  That's what 'draining the swamp' looks like.  He didn't do that, and there can be only two reasons:  one, he really wasn't serious about draining the swamp, or two, he really isn't that smart.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

But there's something else going on here.  In case after case, Republicans drop the ball on this hot-button issue or that one.  They seem always one step behind their Democrat foes.  That's why issues like gun control seem to always get worse: the Democrats make it worse, but the Republicans never make it better.  If the GOP is to survive this, it has to change its thinking in a radical, fundamental way.  They have to adopt 'no prisoners' as their modus operandi, and they have the perfect opportunity to do that right now.  I mean 'today'.

The RNC must pull those five Senators aside and tell them in no uncertain terms that their defection on this issue has consequences, specifically, that they are ejected from the party, that they may no longer present themselves to their state party officials as 'Republicans'.  The RNC should start with Romney, Collins, and Murkowski who typically vote with the Democrats anyway.  If they're going to vote like Democrats, let them run like Democrats.

Now, I am not a member of the Republican Party, and I don't expect them to pay attention to my opinions, but there are plenty of Republicans out there who see the GOP's record of failure and wonder why those wily Dems seem always to be ahead of the game.  Their party will listen to them and, if their voice is heard, it may not be necessary to burn the GOP to the ground, My-Lai-fashion, in order to save it.  Better to lose a few incumbents now than the whole shebang in 2022.

 

 

On Abortion

 

Received in email today from The Babylon Bee an appeal from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to sign a petition in favor of the "Life at Conception Act" (LACA) that would define 'personhood' as beginning at conception.  Should such an act ever be passed, abortion would be summarily reclassified as 'murder'.  A number of typical and ordinary medical procedures would likewise be summarily recategorized as 'murder'.

How odd that the pro-life movement waited until both houses of Congress and the Executive Mansion are all in the hands of Democrats to bring this issue forward.  They should have done this in 2017 when both houses of Congress and the Executive Mansion were in the hands of Republicans.  Perhaps they were anxious that, were such legislation to fail under perfect laboratory conditions, their entire movement might collapse.

It's not even theoretically possible that LACA might pass now, but this appeal does have the potential to raise money.  Beyond that, LACA would suddenly and, in the manner of unintended consequences, affirm the legitimacy of rape.  How so, you ask?

From a strictly non-denominational perspective, a strictly non-religious perspective, we Americans have a few axioms by which we maintain our society:

1. we assert as a foundational principle that all political power originates in the people.  What powers the government has it has because we the people granted those powers to the government.  There are powers we have not granted, and powers that we have previously granted that we may at some future time un-grant.

2. we have thus far as a society declined to define when life begins, although it seems quite certain that 'birth' is the latest point at which anyone may claim that life has not yet begun.  Conception, likewise, is the earliest point that life can be claimed to have started.

Let us assert, for the sake of argument to be refuted later if necessary, that when two persons (instances of 'we the people') behave in such a manner that it is fair to assume their intent was to create life (as by engaging in unprotected sex), then if pregnancy occurs they have created life.  It would be fair in such a case to assert that life exists from conception because of the ability of those persons — from whom all power originates — to create life.

We are forced to address a second scenario, one in which two persons engage in unprotected sex but do not intend to create life.  This is the situation in a rape, whether statutory or otherwise.  In statutory rape, society has already determined that one party cannot, by operation of law, have intended to create life and, therefore, life has not been created.  The fact that Nature disagrees with the legislature by enabling both parties to conceive is a side issue I am unable to address, but suffice it to say that LACA would severely warp the doctrine of 'statutory rape' by forcing a victim to carry the proceeds of a crime to term.

Relieving the victim of the burden of carrying an unwanted fetus to term is, by this act (LACA), unlawful.  It must therefore be true that rape has been elevated to, if not a completely lawful act, at least to the status of 'not entirely criminal'.

Now, if a person requests an abortion for an unintended pregnancy, the question only need to be asked: "Has life been created?"  For cases where one party was an unwilling participant (rape) there ought to be a criminal charge against the other party, thereby proving that both parties did not intend to create life.  If there is no criminal charge, this should be taken as prima facie evidence that both parties intended to create life, that life was therefore created, and an abortion cannot therefore be legally allowed.

Perhaps one or both parties used a contraceptive and one or both failed and a pregnancy ensued.  Given the nature of consensual sex, proving that contraception was used is problematic, and that's also an issue I can't adequately address.  If one can prove via a civil action that there was not consent to create life, the fact that consent was absent should be enough to disprove life and thus an abortion would be permitted.

Any abortion should be accompanied by a criminal charge or a civil action for damages.

 

Strange Times

If you burn down Minneapolis, Democratic Congressfolk will excuse your behavior as protected by the First Amendment and CNN talking heads will describe the event as "a mostly-peaceful demonstration".  Police will herd you as well as they can in the desired direction, but you can expect to go home tonight if you don't go to jail.  If you assault the Capitol and do little more than break glass and upend furniture, Congressfolk from both sides of the aisle will berate you and call you an insurrectionist, and the police will pepper-spray you and shoot you dead.

And why are the people assaulting the Capitol?  Well, they're protesting what they see as an entirely illegitimate election.

"But," you say, "there's no proof that the election was illegitimate!" and, in fact, there seems to be no 'proof' (in the accepted sense of that word) of improprieties.  There is, however, a column of smoke smelling distinctly like 'election fraud', and where there's smoke, there's fire.

This is what's causing that awful smell:  Joe Biden ran almost no campaign — the result of Covid-19 restrictions, obviously — and was lashed to the mast of his ship-of-state with Kamala Harris who was so unpopular among Democrats that she terminated her Presidential campaign early for lack of funds.  When Trump held a campaign rally, 25,000 supporters showed up;  When Biden held a rally, he was lucky to see 400 attendees — including the camera crew.  Despite this, he managed to garner more votes than Hillary Clinton did in a hard-fought campaign four years ago, and more votes than a wildly-popular Barack Obama did eight years ago.  Let's not even touch on the mysterious appearance late election night of several thousands of ballots all, by some accounts, for Biden, and many of which contained no votes for down-ballot races.  If you can't smell that, you may be positive for Covid-19.

There's an old adage in medicine:  "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."  Once a mail-in ballot is separated from its enclosing envelope, the ability to identify any ballot as either legitimate or illegitimate is gone irretrievably and forever, so, yes, there's no evidence this election was stolen.

That doesn't mean it wasn't stolen.

74 million American voters no longer believe voting is a good way to express the will of the people.  That's a problem.  Democrats don't care because they 'won'.  That's a much bigger problem.  It means there will be no change to the way elections are run from here on out.  If you're a Republican, you can resign yourself to never winning another federal election.  Your best hope is that the Democrats who now hold both Congress and the White House will screw things up so badly over the next few years that there will be no way to pull off another magical midnight ballot-dump in 2022 or 2024.

Don't hold your breath.