Category: Good and Hard

 The Great Unraveling.

For the last few weeks we have been watching one of the greatest collections of weaponized autistics in the world going happily about their task of unraveling exactly how much of our money was directed through previously undetected means for previously undetected and wholly curious ends. The Doge crew are going at it with the zeal and joy of unleashed rat terriers turned loose on a field of suitable prey, in tracking millions of dollars’ worth of our money into various progressive slush funds.

And interesting things are suddenly happening. Although coincidence is not causality, by any means … still, there are things that people on the conservativish side of things have wondered about for the last decade. Things like … strangely well-choreographed protests, with tens and hundreds of participants (who mostly have no obvious means of support) appearing almost like magic, carrying professionally-printed signs. Hmmm … we all wondered in times past: who is footing the bill for all this?

It may very well turn out that we all were – just as it has turned out that USAID grants went out to support practically every cause beloved by progressives nationally and world-wide. To non-governmental organizations playing hopscotch with international migrants. To champion the causes of LGBTWXYZLOL-whatever, around the world in our own back yard and in our elementary schools. To progressive media voices, like the BBC. What the ever-loving H-E-double hockey sticks? Don’t those smooth-talking euro-snob Jew-haters get enough moola from their own government, they have to vacuum up from us as well, like a coke addict snorting a line as long as the US-Canada border?

And while I’m on the topic of our very own dear media, what about the ongoing slaughter of careers and the driving rain of pink slips falling at CBS and NBC? Joy Reid, Lester Holt and other expensive performers are being pried out of their comfortable sinecures. Personalities whom I have never particularly followed and only hear about when they have been spectacularly stupid on camera and the conservative blogosphere takes notice. I imagine their superiors pried them loose, like a dentist with an impacted molar – but why now?

Is it because top management at the various media enterprises have suddenly realized with the election of Trump that a large chunk of the public ignores them – and they have not anything like the power that they thought they had? Have they figured out that advertising on their programs was money wasted, and business sponsors know it? This is a new world for our national establishment media organs, where CBS Sixty Minutes counts for naught, and a podcaster like Joe Rogan may have put Trump and Vance over the top with an important segment of the voting public through doing searching, free-form long-format interviews.

Or could it be that laundered government funds were holding up our own media, at least as much as paid advertising? Now that such funds are being short-stopped – is that another reason for the collapsing of our media’s house of cards, now that the gravy train has come to a halt?

What Kash Patel Should Do As Acting ATF Director

I spent the weekend with a number of Second Amendment advocates, including some names you’ll probably recognize. That’s where I first heard that Kash Patel, in addition to being director of the FBI, was named to helm the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He wasn’t who I thought would get tapped, but the general consensus was that this was a good thing.

And I agree.

But now that Patel is in charge, what is on the agenda?

He started at the FBI by getting rid of some of the dead weight in that agency as well as some who used their positions to push their own agendas. Now, he’s got a chance to do that again.

With Kash Patel now in the position of Acting Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the agency is in for a shake-up.

One thing that Patel can do is get rid of problem employees who have gone out of their way to infringe on the rights of Americans to keep and bear arms. This purge has already started with the firing of the ATF’s Chief Council, Pam Hicks. Hicks was a rabid anti-gun attorney that chose to defend very constitutionally dubious rules. Although Hicks was a good first step, without removing other problem members, nothing will change.

The first person that Patel should remove from the Bureau is the ATF’s Deputy Director, Marvin Richardson. Mr. Richardson has been behind some of the ATF’s most controversial rules. He was the driving force behind the reclassification of pistols equipped with braces. Mr. Richardson proposed reclassifying pistols with braces and unfinished firearms frames during a 2020 meeting with the Biden transition team without President Trump’s knowledge….

Mr. Patel should look at Matthew Varisco. Mr. Varisco is the ATF Assistant Director for the Office of Field Operations. When he worked out of the Philadelphia Field Office, he pushed the targeting of companies selling firearms precursor parts, including issuing a cease-and-desist letter to JSD Supply. This action was taken before the rule change of pistol frames. He pioneered the idea of firearms “structuring.” According to Varisco, if someone buys firearms parts from multiple companies to build a working firearm, that is “structuring.” This use of the term was the first time it was used outside banking crimes. He claimed that the possibility of “structuring” meant that all 80% firearm frames needed to be treated like completed guns. Mr. Varisco’s idea of “structuring” made it into the final rule.

Other names are, of course, mentioned, and I happen to agree. Far too many people achieved success in the ATF by supporting gun control, which would expand the agency’s authority by virtue of trampling on the rights of the American people and by reinterpreting rules as much as possible to expand it.

And a lot of names went into that.

However, there’s a lot more to be done than just clean house. Patel needs to also purge the ATF of some of the problematic interpretations of federal law, and do so in the way Brandon Herrera talked about in a video regarding what he would do as ATF director. No, the AK Guy isn’t calling the shots at the ATF, but Herrera says he came up with this after close consultation with groups like the Firearms Policy Coalition and Gun Owners of America and they happen to be smart ideas.

Whether the end goal is to merge the ATF with the FBI and get rid of the agency entirely or not, the truth is that we have a golden opportunity to preserve gun rights for the next generation. Kash Patel strikes me as the kind of guy who would be interested in doing it just this way, too, so I’m incredibly hopeful going forward.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel (and Dan Bongino at the FBI), we’ve got the opportunity to make the FBI great again and bring the ATF to heel. The two-tiered system of justice that we’ve seen from the Biden administration is a thing of the past and the bureau is on its way back to being America’s premiere law enforcement agency.

The AP’s feelings get hurt; it’s a First Amendment crisis!

The Associated Press (AP) makes its money selling stories to other media outlets. It pays “stringers”—reporters and photographers—around the world to submit stories, which it makes available to its subscriber outlets who can’t afford to send reporters and photographers around the globe.

That’s a good thing for smaller media outlets like local new stations, but it’s also a very bad thing because then the AP makes mistakes, or goes woke, so do its subscribers who have no way of knowing they’re making those mistakes. They do know they’re going woke, but even if they’d rather not, their choice is to play along or drop the AP feed. A good example of the AP’s wokeness and anti-Americanism is this:

Shira Bibas’ sons “died in captivity.” An honest and accurate account would say Bibas and her boys, 4 and 10 months, were savagely strangled by Hamas terrorists, and their bodies were clumsily mutilated so Hamas could claim they died in an Israeli airstrike, a perversely stupid and easily exposed lie.

The AP also uses its style guide to enforce wokeness and media outlets, including the majors, happily go along. It’s an enviable perch atop the media hierarchy and the AP has become used to certain perks, among them, a prominent chair in the White House Press Room.

Until, that is, the AP decided to keep calling the Gulf of America the Gulf of Mexico, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, surely with the permission of President Trump, banished them, also from Air Force One and other places and events. This is also surely a part of Leavitt’s reshuffling the Press Room deck, booting established outlets replacing them with new media.to give new media a chance.

The horror.

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Trump’s pick for FCC chairman…..

We Are Living in Interesting Times

We are living in interesting times. Tulsi Gabbard will be taking the role of Director of National Intelligence, John Radcliffe will be Director of the CIA, Matt Gaetz will (I predict) be the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy will be the Secretary of HHS, and the rumor is that Kash Patel will be Director of the FBI; if Gaetz and Patel aren’t confirmed, the rumor is they will be investigating senators’ federally-funded hush-money payments for the senators own sexual peccadilloes (which is why I predict they’ll be confirmed).

This reminds me of other interesting times.

During and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lot of the Soviet client states own governments collapsed. Sometimes violently, as with Romania or the fission of Yugoslavia, sometimes more quietly, but pretty uniformly, the Soviet-aligned satrapies were replaced by their own people.

The unification of East and West Germany wasn’t particularly violent, but the Germans on both sides of the Wall were very interested in finding out what The German “Democratic” Republic was doing, and to whom, during its reign.

Central to that and one of the largest parts of the GDR government was the Minsiterium für Stattssicherheit, familiarly abbreviated to the Stasi. A good summary is at the link (at least now, that is, Wikipedia), but in short, the Stasi arrested upwards of 250,000 people and extended its hooks into every aspect of East German life.

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi’s case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi’s tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, “Stasi:The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police”

After the “Peaceful Revolution” of 1989, Stasi offices were taken over by the German people, while former Stasi officers desperately tried to destroy files and records, unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

But why did the Stasi collect all this information in its archives? The main purpose was to control the society. In nearly every speech, the Stasi minister gave the order to find out who is who, which meant who thinks what. He didn’t want to wait until somebody tried to act against the regime. He wanted to know in advance what people were thinking and planning. The East Germans knew, of course, that they were surrounded by informers, in a totalitarian regime that created mistrust and a state of widespread fear, the most important tools to oppress people in any dictatorship.

—Hubertus Knabe, German historian

The files were massive and damning. It was no wonder they were trying to destroy them. As I say, they were interesting times.

Now we’re having our own interesting times. I think we’re in nearly similar times to the German Peaceful Revolution. Oh, I don’t mean to imply that the FBI, CIA, and DoJ were as bad as the Stasi — I would be very much amazed that there were hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned for Wrongthink.

But thousands? Seems likely. And more thousands were intimidated, charged, and harassed. All of them are in government files that are now vulnerable to being disclosed. Jeremy Epstein’s passenger lists. Records of the FBI agents and informers who were supposed to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. Records of Crossfire Hurricane and DoJ cooperation with Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg, and Letitia James. And most interesting of all, files covering people we don’t know to expect. That’s the way political police work — they don’t intimidate and investigate and collude with only the people we expect.

As I say, we live in interesting times.

BLUF
There is nothing wrong with Trump doing just that, and the worst results of that process would not be as bad as what we’ve seen with the military being suborned on a wholesale level by the left.

Donald Trump’s Pledge to Rid Our Military of the ‘Woke’ Virus Causes Consternation in the Right Places


The observance of Pride Month, celebrated every June, was first recognized by the Department of Defense in June 2012. It is a time when the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community come together to celebrate love and authenticity. Maj. Rachel Jones is an example of this, serving openly as a transgender female Soldier. Jones is the U.S. Army Sustainment Command’s Cyber Division chief, G6 (Information Management). (Sarah Patterson)

That -whatever that is -shouldn’t be anywhere near a uniform, and should be discharged. Miles

Former President Donald Trump’s use of a mashup of scenes from the 1987 Stanley Kubrick film, “Full Metal Jacket,” interspersed with clips of today’s military, has caused some outrage on the left, but mostly, it has caused consternation among some of the right people.

I think it is inarguable that the military created by Joe Biden and Kamala is only fractionally as effective as the military under Trump. And even in Trump’s first term, the rot of DEI and “gender equality” had already taken root.

The failure of Biden and Harris is made clear every day as the only way the services make their manpower goals is by cutting end strength. We’ve seen the US Navy in the Western Pacific on the cusp of being unable to operate because of a lack of fleet oilers.

The official and institutional embrace of sexual fetishes as a normal part of the military has been shocking. The clips Trump shows are nowhere near as bad as the situation really is.

Trump’s promise to fire the generals behind this insanity is viewed by Kamala’s flailing and undirected campaign as a campaign issue.

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Woman arrested after trying to remove squatters from her New York home
“I’m arrested for being in my own home,” she said as cops escorted her off the property.

A 47-year-old New York City woman was recently arrested for unlawful eviction after trying to prevent squatters from re-entering the $1 million property bequeathed to her by her family.

Adele Andaloro changed the locks on the Flushing, Queens home, which according to NYC law is not allowed if “tenants” have inhabited a building for more than 30 days, which in this case, some had.

According to ABC7, a number of people began occupying the home on February 6 and refused to leave. When a crew went out to interview Andaloro, one of the squatters arrived at the property and unlocked the door. After being confronted, however, she fled.

With the door wide open, Andaloro and the crew entered. In addition to her furniture, she discovered two men sleeping in a room at the back of the house, one of whom had only been “renting” for two days. A number of 911 calls were placed, and when police showed up, they took the men away.

Andaloro explained that police told her they could arrest her if the locksmith she had called earlier that day went ahead and changed the locks. Nonetheless, she told him to do it.

A short time later, the two men who had been apprehended returned to the property and confronted her, calling 911.

“Why is it that I have to leave and he doesn’t have to leave?” Andaloro asked officers when they showed up, to which one replied, “Technically he can’t be kicked out. You have to go to [housing] court.”

One of the men claimed to have signed a lease in October, but failed to provide any proof. Andaloro, on the other hand, came prepared with all the necessary paperwork showing that it was, in fact, her home.

In the end, Andaloro was arrested and the men were allowed to remain in the home, pending further legal action.

She lamented the fact that, “by the time someone does their investigation, their work, and their job, it will be over 30 days and this man will still be in my home,” referring to the second squatter who had only been there for two days.

Klamath Dam Removal: ‘It’s an Environmental Disaster.’

‘They purposefully made a disaster and are leaving taxpayers and the locals to clean up their mess’
This is the first article in a series about the Klamath Dam Removal project in Siskiyou County. 

The removal of dams along the Klamath River in Siskiyou County, Northern California was sold as necessary to save salmon – specifically, “to restore habitat for endangered fish.”

The dams are part of the Klamath project, a series of seven dams built in the 1910’s and 1920’s in the Klamath Basin to bring electricity and agricultural water mitigation for Southern Oregon and Northern California, the Globe reported in 2020. However, in recent years, concerns over the dams’ effect on the wildlife and fishing industry have been raised, especially regarding claims of fish facing extinction because the dams.

Klamath Dam Removal Project. (Photo: KlamathRenewal.org)

In 2018, plans were released to destroy the dam system. However, those plans halted in 2019 because of data errors and issues over who owns the dams. The Bureau of Reclamation swiftly issued a study on the dams’ effects through 2024, leading to California to again push for destruction of the dams.

In June 2020, the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee halted plans again, ruling that PacificCorp, an Oregon utility company owned by Warren Buffett’s Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway, would have to transfer it’s hydroelectric license and co-licensee with the Klamath River Renewal Corp., as well as pay $250 million toward getting out of the demolition project to avoid any liabilities around the demolition.

Governor Newsom implored Buffett to back the demolition project to save the salmon populations that Native American tribes in the area rely on. “The river is sick, and the Klamath Basin tribes are suffering,” said Newsom in his letter. “The Klamath dam removals are a shining example of what we can accomplish when we act according to our values.”

Many tribes also issued a joint letter with Governor Newsom in support of the dams destruction.

Continue reading “”

Portland Declares Emergency Over Fentanyl Crisis Three Years After Decriminalizing Drug Possession

The idiots running Portland, Oregon have declared a 90-day state of emergency over an ongoing fentanyl crisis, just three years after decriminalizing possession of all drugs.

State, County and City officials declared the ‘tri-government’ fentanyl emergency following recommendations by the governor-established Portland Central City Task Force late last year. As part of the response, the city, state and county will work together to ‘tackle the crisis’ (sure!), which will include the establishment of a “command center” in the central city to coordinate efforts and “refocus existing resources.”

Fentanyl addicts who interact with first responders in downtown Portland over the next 90 days will be triaged in this new command center.

“Our country and our state have never seen a drug this deadly addictive, and all are grappling with how to respond,” said Gov. Tina Kotek (D).

According to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, “We cannot underestimate the tremendous value of bringing leaders from different disciplines in a room on a daily basis who all account for a different part of the solution.”

Mike Meyers, director of Portland’s Community Safety Division will head up the command team, while deputy police chief Nathan Reynolds of the state’s Office of Resilience and Emergency Management will be the state’s incident commander. Continue reading “”

Leave The Pews

College campuses across the country were erupting in Jew-hating outbursts, and parents were rightly worried about their Jewish college-aged kids caught up in the frenzy of hate. On Facebook, a group called Mothers Against College Antisemitism (M.A.C.A.) was founded and grew quickly to over 50,000 members. They shared information, emailed, called, and signed petitions. They stood united against the oldest hatred rearing its head again.

But just as fast, fissures formed. The cudgel of DEI – that is, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies that had been used against Jewish students – was the subject of feverish debate. Sure, the policies were bad for Jews, but weren’t we all good liberals after all? Shouldn’t that take precedence here? People earnestly wondered whether other minority groups would be mad at them if they fought to end DEI instead of simply fighting to get Jews included in the special identity groups recognized by the absurd system.

It wasn’t just DEI, either. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a plan to fast-track Jewish students who were feeling unsafe in their own universities who wanted to transfer to Florida colleges where he pledged they would be protected, commenters in the group warned not to accept his kindness as he was on the wrong political side.

What became clear within that Facebook group and in so many other quarters since Oct. 7 is that much of secular Judaism, in both the Reform and Conservative branches, had become overtly political and not really religiously based at all. For many Jews, their religious identity had become so intertwined with leftist politics that they couldn’t force a separation even when they themselves were being targeted with their own bad ideas.

They pledged allyship to other groups in their tent, not to Judaism or Israel. This was evident in 2019 when daily attacks began on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. Activist synagogues in places like Park Slope, which would have been at the forefront of marches had any other group come under attack, spent years staying silent about it. The attackers, often caught on video, were frequently other minorities, not MAGA hat-wearing white people as they would have hoped, so it was awkward to raise a fuss. Progressive politics was the code they followed, and Judaism was an identity umbrella like all the others in their movement. “As a Jew …” they would begin their lectures. As a Jew, they were rarely interested in Judaism.

The Oct. 7 attacks in Israel woke many in the diaspora from their comfortable slumber. Jews in America and elsewhere, traumatized already from images of Jewish children stolen from their homes and Jewish teenagers mowed down while dancing at a music festival, also had to contend with a huge outpouring of hate in their own countries.

For many liberal Jews, it was hard to ignore that it wasn’t the boogeyman white supremacists that they had been warned about their entire lives. No, it was their professors, their co-workers at the nonprofit, friends of their college-aged kids calling for an end to Israel and celebrating the murder of Jews. And these hateful marches were not happening in rural Alabama, in the places they were taught to fear, but mainly in the bluest of blue cities.

The political bedfellows they had slept beside were sharply opposed to Israel doing anything but simply accepting the attacks of Oct. 7.

By Oct. 8, their “allies” had already taken to the streets, some in grotesque glee over the slaughter of Jews in their homes, others tearing down posters of kidnapped children, to say Israel should just sit down and take it.

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“Everybody want to sanctuary until it time to do sanctuary stuff”

How it got started:
Mayor Rahm Emanuel: ‘Chicago Always Will Be A Sanctuary City.’

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson Blames City’s Illegal Immigrant Crisis on ‘Right Wing Extremism’ (Video).