Category: Enemies Foreign and Domestic

Beware of liberals bearing bugs

Lately, Glenn Reynolds has been sounding the theme that liberals are trying to make the lives of ordinary Americans worse. As here, for example:

MAKING ORDINARY PEOPLE’S LIVES WORSE IS THE GOAL, THE ENVIRONMENT IS JUST THE EXCUSE.

I wavered on this. Does it go too far?

No. No, it doesn’t. These are horrible people–sadists, basically–who want to make your life worse. Not their lives, your life. I imagine this scene:

Hey, I’ve got a good one–let’s make them eat bugs!

Bugs? How in Hell are we going to do that?

To save the environment, of course! How else?

Yes, yes, that’s genius! Bugs!

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha ROFL

When I tell people that liberals are working on substituting insects for meat, they often think I am imagining things. But it is true. The beachhead is “flour.” You can dry insects, turn them into powder, and put the powder into foods. This is actually starting to become common. Thus, from Italy, “Italy bans insect flour from its pasta despite the eco buzz.”

The growing use in cooking of flour made from crickets, locusts and insect larvae has met fierce opposition in Italy, where the government is to ban its use in pizza and pasta and segregate it on supermarket shelves.
***
Packed with vitamins, proteins and minerals, flour made from crickets is increasingly seen as an ecological way to obtain nutrients, and the market is forecast to reach $3.5 billion by 2029. The EU has already authorised foods made from crickets, locusts and the darkling beetle larva. In January mealworm larvae was added to the list.

Happily, the Italians are standing up for civilization. I think Giorgia Meloni can be counted on here.

All four insects are cited in the Italian decrees, which will require any products containing them to be labelled with large lettering and displayed separately from other foods.

“Whoever wants to eat these products can, but those who don’t, and I imagine that will be most Italians, will be able to choose,” [Francesco Lollobrigida, the agriculture minister] said.

Choice being antithetical to liberals, this won’t satisfy them. The battle is only now beginning.

Today it’s flour, tomorrow you will be expected to boil grubs and toss locusts on the grill. Why? To combat global warming, of course! For the same reason you won’t be permitted (at anything like a cost you can afford) to fly in an airplane, enjoy reliable electricity, heat your house in the winter, drive a normal motor vehicle, cook on a gas stove, and so on.

It is true: liberals are trying to make your life worse, in every way they can get away with.

People Can Win.
We’ve been trained to think that endless rule by tiny minorities of really horrible people is the natural order of things, but that turns out to be just another lie

Earlier today Susan Schmidt and I published an article about a series of changes at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a creepy sub-division of the Department of Homleand Security. It turns out that CISA, which just a week or so ago was busted for scrubbing embarrasing text from its website by the Foundation for Freedom Online, quietly eliminated its so-called “MDM” or “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation” subcommittee.

Just a year ago, the Department of Homeland Security was going all-in on the fight against “MDM.” The notion that America is fatally infected with “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation” was in fact the animating idea begind the asinine plan the Biden administration announced last April to institute a “Disinformation Governance Board,” which was to be headed by Nina Jankowicz, a self-styled Mary Poppins of digital rectitude:

America took one look at Jankowicz and at most a few fleeting moments considering the “Disinformation Governance Board” plan before concluding, correctly, that it was a beyond-loathsome expression of aristocratic arrogance that needed shutting down before the first Jankowicz presser. Characteristically, the press lied about the public reaction, claiming that the only displeasure was heard from the “GOP.” In fact, all sane people across the spectrum were instantly nauseated, their distress loud enough that the DHS hit “pause” on Jankowicz and the batty MinTruth plan after just three weeks.

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The demoncraps don’t like the idea that their houses of indoctrination may have some oversight by parents.

‘Parents Bill of Rights’ wins zero votes from Dems who attack it as ‘fascism,’ ‘extreme’ attack on schools
The bill is the GOP’s response to growing anger about lack of access to school information across the nation

The House voted to pass the Parents Bill of Rights Act on Friday over objections from Democrats who argued the bill is aimed at promoting “fascism” and “extreme” views of Republicans by making it easier for parents to ban books and out LBGTQ+ students.

The GOP bill is a response to growing anger across the country about access to information on everything from school curricula to safety and mask policies to the prevalence of gender ideology and critical race theory in the classroom. Parents’ anger over these issues at school board meetings led to an effort by the Biden administration’s Justice Department to examine the “disturbing trend” of violent threats against school officials.

House Republicans reacted by approving the Parents Bill of Rights Act, which would require school districts to give parents access to curriculum and reading lists and would require schools to inform parents if school staff begin encouraging or promoting their child’s gender transition.

The bill passed narrowly in a 213-208 vote that saw just a handful of Republicans vote against it, along with every Democrat.

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U.S. contractor killed, five service members and contractor wounded in drone strike in Syria

US retaliates with airstrikes in Syria after Iranian drone strike kills US contractor

The U.S. military carried out several airstrikes in Syria on Thursday in response to a drone strike Iranian forces conducted earlier in the day on a coalition base that killed one American.

The Defense Department said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps crashed a UAV into a building near Hasakah in northeast Syria at approximately 1:38 p.m. local time, leaving one U.S. contractor dead. The attack also wounded five U.S. service members and another U.S. contractor.

U.S. intelligence assessed the UAV and determined it to be of Iranian origin — so President Biden authorized the military to retaliate, the Pentagon said.

Three service members and the U.S. contractor were medically evacuated to Coalition medical facilities in Iraq while the other two wounded service members were treated on-site.

“As President Biden has made clear, we will take all necessary measures to defend our people and will always respond at a time and place of our choosing,” Secretary Austin continued. “No group will strike our troops with impunity.”

He added: “Our thoughts are with the family and colleagues of the contractor who was killed and with those who were wounded in the attack earlier today.”

The Pentagon said the U.S. took “proportionate and deliberate action” that limited the risk of escalation in its targeted response.

The U.S. has roughly 900 troops stationed in Syria.

The epitaph for the ruling class:
“Trading credibility and potential for spiteful self-indulgence.”

Vulgar Displays of Power.

I thought little of Michel Foucault when first assigned some readings my freshman year at Brown. We were clearly supposed to revere him, but his bio was terribly unappealing—especially the alleged child abuse—plus his obsessions with surveillance and punishment felt far from the whip-smart problem solvers I was bound to join.

Foucault and co. seemed like cultishly kinky sociopaths, a Rocky Horror Picture Show for tortured intellectuals, while I was focused on smarter social services for the people. Yet over the years I’ve become ever more grateful for early exposure to the pervy Frenchman and whole expanse of critical theorists, who proved stunningly prophetic about these modern times.

Most immediately for introduction to the panopticon, a centuries-old scheme for constant observation of the guilty—or at least making them feel watched, ostensibly for their own good. What once was reviled as Orwellian nightmare is now embraced by much of the establishment.

More fundamentally, for orientation to the central conceit of theory: that reality lies downstream from language, and social conditions are but constructs imposed by power that the right redefinitions might resolve. Some of the philosophical work is actually pretty interesting, but as bastardized into politics and policy becomes a cheap excuse for magical thinking.

It isn’t merely that the experts have brilliant plans for enlightened global technocracy, but that it is the very acts of objection and criticism that create the possibility of failure. The ideal is the default of things, any deviation due to naysayers and troublemakers, so silencing opposition equals solving the problem. Dirty tricks become moral imperatives; with just a little more money and militancy, we’re about to reach the promised land.

Not that abstruse points of theory come up much in polite company, but that the convenient assumptions have come to dominate the intellectual atmosphere. With our beautiful future just one last horde of assholes away, what means aren’t justified for beating the enemy?

During the Obama years professional progressives could afford a certain smug magnanimity, confident that demographic change had bequeathed permanent lock on power. It was smarter to nudge the great unwashed toward what was decided than boil the frog too quickly.

So the populist reaction of 2016 struck many as profound betrayal: perpetrators had to be punished, examples made, and push brought to shove. What began as institutional resistance amid the Trump interregnum has become actively vengeful governance under the Biden regime—a policy agenda nonsensical as to most of its official objectives but coldly strategic as retribution against structural opposition, not just punishing saboteurs but putting subjects in their place.

Whether wrecking American energy to wreak far worse environmental damage elsewhere, printing enough funny money to substantially devalue the dollar, insisting on demonstrably harmful Covid mandates, or ushering in millions and millions of unvetted migrants, it amounts to a sort of shock treatment to corral and humiliate an unruly electorate that has been found wanting.

Yet the crass opportunism only guarantees greater backlash and further delegitimizes the actual progressive project, or whatever’s left of it. Generations of hard work and good faith have been squandered in just a few short years, trading credibility and potential for spiteful self-indulgence.

Perhaps electoral apocalypse over several cycles might chasten the powers that be, but I doubt it. Beyond all the money and inertia, too much of the establishment truly believes enough coercion can make their fantasies come true, with all manner of carrots and sticks to force others into line.

Nonetheless, stubborn reality burbles on beneath even the best-funded manipulation. The Emerging Democratic Majority might’ve really materialized had Dem apparatchiks any discipline to appear to give the slightest shit about what most voters think. But with society supposedly determined by fungible narratives from up top, the peasantry’s ignorant superstitions are irrelevant.

So while a swerve back toward representative government remains theoretically possible, all institutional trendlines point to ever more extreme enforcement of the day’s dominant ideology. The future of democracy thus teeters on a knife’s edge between true popular sentiment and whatever the global bureaucracy decrees—an increasingly technological contest of idiosyncratic humanity versus its elites’ machinations.

More Caught Illegally Crossing Southern Border in 1 Year of Biden Than Entire Trump Presidency.

“Our top priority is to keep terrorists and their weapons from entering the United States.” So says the website of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The same webpage that makes this declaration includes a table that provides some relevant data for the fiscal years from 2017 to 2023. It lists how many individuals on the Terrorist Screening Dataset (commonly known as the “terrorist watchlist”) were encountered by the Border Patrol as they were trying to illegally sneak into the United States between the ports of entry on our southern border.

The Terrorist Screening Dataset, says the webpage, “originated as the consolidated terrorist watchlist to house information on known or suspected terrorists (KSTs) but has evolved over the last decade to include additional individuals who represent a potential threat to the United States, including known affiliates of watchlisted individuals.”

In fiscal year 2017, when Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, the Border Patrol encountered just two individuals on the terrorist watchlist trying to sneak across the southern border between the ports of entry. In fiscal year 2018, it encountered six. In fiscal year 2019, it encountered none; and, in fiscal year 2020, it encountered three.

In fiscal year 2021, the year President Joe Biden was inaugurated, there was a substantial shift in the trend. That year, the number of individuals on the terrorist watchlist that the Border Patrol encountered trying to sneak across the southern border increased fivefold to 15.

Then, in fiscal year 2022, it climbed to 98. So far in fiscal year 2023, which isn’t even half over yet, the Border Patrol has encountered 69 individuals on the terrorist watchlist trying to sneak across our southern border between the ports of entry.

How many on the terrorist watchlist have actually succeeded in illegally crossing our southern border into the United States? There is no way to know.

What we do know is that it only took 19 foreign terrorists who had made their way into the United States to hijack four domestic flights on Sept. 11, 2001.

While the Border Patrol managed to catch 98 on the terrorist watchlist trying to illegally cross our southern border between the ports of entry last year, is it possible there were 19 the Border Patrol did not catch?

There has also been a massive upward trend in the number of aliens the Border Patrol has “apprehended” or “encountered” as they tried to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border between the ports of entry.

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Well it appears that “Devout Catholic” Joe Biden has the same definition of sin as his former boss: “Being out of alignment with my values.”

‘Close To Sinful:’ Biden Floats Possibility Of Nation-Wide Transgender Law.

President Joe Biden appeared to criticize Ron DeSantis on his handling of transgender youth and floated the possibility of a nation-wide transgender law in an interview clip released Monday.

“What’s going on in Florida, is as my mother would say, ‘close to sinful.’ I mean, it’s just terrible what they’re doing,” Biden said while speaking with actor Kal Penn.

“It’s not like … a kid wakes up one morning and says, ‘you know, I decided that I want to become a man or I want to become a woman … I mean, what are they thinking about here? They’re human beings, they love, they have feelings, they have inclinations,” Biden continued. “It’s cruel.”

“And the way we do it is we make sure we pass legislation like we passed on same-sex marriage. You mess with that, you’re breaking the law and you’re going to be held accountable,” Biden added.

DeSantis has led an administration-wide effort to ban sex change treatments for minors. He has said doctors should be sued for performing sex changes on children and suspended a state attorney refusing to adhere to the child sex change ban.

DeSantis also requested public universities report how many students they treated for “gender dysphoria,” and in October, the Florida Board of Medicine voted to ban sex change surgeries and hormone therapy for children under 18.

Dylan Mulvaney, a man who identifies as a woman and has garnered attention on social media for using hyper-feminine stereotypes, asked Biden in October if he thinks states should “have the right” to ban “gender-affirming health care.”

“I don’t think any state or anybody should have the right to do that, as a moral question and a legal question,” Biden responded.

“I just think it’s wrong,” Biden added. “I feel very, very strongly that you should have every single solitary right, including, including use of your gender identity bathroom in public.”

Florida Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Jason Weida told the Caller that “the ‘gender-affirming’ model pushed by the Biden Administration is decades behind other developed countries, including Sweden and most recently Norway.”

“What is ‘sinful’ is the establishment pushing harmful surgeries and treatment with long-term effects on minors with no accountability or transparency,” Weida said.

“Last year, the Agency conducted a thorough review of several services promoted by the Federal Government to treat gender dysphoria and found that these services – sex reassignment surgery, cross-sex hormones, and puberty blockers – are not consistent with widely accepted professional medical standards and are experimental and investigational with the potential for harmful long term affects,” he added.

New Student-Led ‘Red Guard’ Installed in Maine School District Causes Fury at Board Meeting

If you’re unfamiliar with the Red Guard instituted by Chairman Mao in China, get ready to understand it better than you ever wanted to. Critics of the sweeping transgender ideology infecting the school and medical systems have likened the ideology’s proponents to China’s Red Guard, a group of students trained to turn against their parents and other adults to usher in a brutal dictatorship. The Red Guard famously tortured its own teachers and parents in the name of the Communist cultural revolution. It was a dark and dangerous time in China for anyone who would not bow to the demands of tyrants.

A school system in Maine has instituted its own burgeoning Red Guard called the “Civil Rights Team.” This benign-sounding organization of kids is supposed to ensure that student rights are upheld. What has happened instead led to parents sounding off at the latest school board meeting to complain that the Civil Rights Team is just a bullying organization with an agenda. The Maine Wire covered the story:

Kristen Day said students affiliated with one of RSU 14’s Civil Rights Teams harassed her daughter. When her daughter refused to speak about her sexuality, two students affiliated with the club began to bully her and call her homophobic.

“They insisted she was gay because she dressed gay and listened to gay music,” Day said of her daughter, who was a 7th grader at the time of the alleged harassment.

“She was then called homophobic because she wasn’t at least bi,” Day said.

“She’s not political, but she does not want to talk about her sexuality in school,” she said.

Day went on to describe how the CRT (Is it a coincidence that their acronym mirrors Critical Race Theory?) founded by the Maine Attorney General’s office, pressured the kids into wearing pronoun pins.

Civil Rights Teams (CRTs) operate in Maine schools as a project of the Maine Attorney General’s Office, and the nominal goal of the student organizations is to reduce “bias-motivated” bullying and harassment in schools.

Day said her daughter was harassed about her sexuality by students affiliated with the school’s CRT under the pretext of opening a discussion about student sexuality.

CRT members also created surveys for their peers to take with questions about sexuality and gender, and they pressured them to don “pronoun” pins, Day said.

Windham Superintendent Christopher Howell, instead of investigating the allegations, wrote an email denying it ever happened.

“In short, the focus of [Civil Rights] teams is on helping to create a safe school environment for all,” said Howell.

“We are not aware of the Civil Rights Team being involved in the situation you’re referring to,” he said.

Using students to pressure other students into “group-think” is right out of the Commie playbook. It is not only disturbing that the Attorney General of Maine is complicit in doing this, but it should be a shocking wake-up call to parents nationwide. This threat of Communism is real. It is happening right now in this country. The question is, what are you going to do about it? If left unchecked this only ends one way: the same way it ended in China. NPR reported the sad reality in China as a result of the cultural revolution.

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DC Freaks Out Over DeSantis’s Ukraine Comments; Voters Shrug.

Salent segment:

Rah-rah, Slava Ukraini, and all that, but there’s a limit to American largesse. And people get miffed when Biden jets to Kyiv with a suitcase full of money but avoids East Palestine, Ohio.

Politicians in both parties must understand that their first responsibility is to their own nation; allies come second. Forget this, and the people will toss them on their tin ears. DeSantis makes his priority clear: the United States of America.

Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz asked every new US ambassador a simple question. “I’m going to spin the globe and I want you to put your hand on your country.”

When they pointed to the nation assigned to them, Shultz corrected them. “Your country is the United States.”

DeSantis has passed this test. Biden has not.

Losing My Religion?
Reflections on falling away from unbridled tech-optimism.

So I’ve installed an all-new sound system in my study and the other day I was calibrating my subwoofer, as one does.  The way I like to fine tune things is by listening to music I know intimately, and adjusting the levels until it sounds the way it should.

In this case I used my own 2001 album, which I released under the name Mobius Dick, Embrace the Machine.  “Do not rage against the machine,” say the lyrics to the title cut.  “Embrace the machine.”  (Sorry, I don’t have this online anywhere at present; I should really do something about that.  I was too sad about the demise of MP3.com in to put it up elsewhere at the time.)

Listening to that song reminded me of how much more overtly optimistic I was about technology and the future at the turn of the millennium.  I realized that I’m somewhat less so now.  But why?  In truth, I think my more negative attitude has to do with people more than with the machines that Embrace the Machine characterizes as “children of our minds.”  (I stole that line from Hans Moravec.  Er, I mean it’s  a “homage.”)  But maybe there’s a connection there, between creators and creations.

It was easy to be optimistic in the 90s and at the turn of the millennium.  The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, the Berlin Wall fell, and freedom and democracy and prosperity were on the march almost everywhere. Personal technology was booming, and its dark sides were not yet very apparent.  (And the darker sides, like social media and smartphones, basically didn’t exist.)

And the tech companies, then, were run by people who looked very different from the people who run them now – even when, as in the case of Bill Gates, they were the same people.  It’s easy to forget that Gates was once a rather libertarian figure, who boasted that Microsoft didn’t even have an office in Washington, DC.  The Justice Department, via its Antitrust Division, punished him for that, and he has long since lost any libertarian inclinations, to put it mildly.

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Who’s Running America?

Last week the Senate Democrat majority was hospitalized with Senator John Fetterman dispatched to a psych ward and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who doesn’t seem to know where she is, hospitalized for shingles. Fetterman and Feinstein didn’t let being hospitalized slow them down and went right on co-sponsoring bills even though the former had to be hospitalized because he couldn’t take care of himself and the latter no longer recognized colleagues.

Even in the Senate, Fetterman couldn’t understand what was being said and Feinstein wasn’t aware that she had announced her retirement. Despite that there are press releases from their offices and they’re cosponsoring legislation as if they’re functional and able to make decisions.

Senator Feinstein just introduced the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2023 to mandate abortion nationwide while outlawing state restrictions on late-term abortion when babies can feel pain. Considering Feinstein’s own mental capacity may not be that much greater than an unborn child, she might want to reconsider the value of human life even when it can’t articulate its feelings. But Feinstein isn’t really introducing or sponsoring bills, her staffers, who announced her retirement without her knowing about it, are legislating in her name. That’s a coup.

Or what we used to call a coup before it happened and just became how things worked.

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New York lawmaker admits proposed ammo tax is meant as “disincentive” to gun ownership

Thank you very much to New York Assembly member Pat Fahy for saying the quiet part out loud when talking about her proposed tax on ammunition. The Albany Democrat wants to see anywhere from a 2-to-5-cent tax on each round of ammunition sold in the state (basically, the bigger the bullet the higher the tax), with the money going towards community-based violence intervention groups. We’ve seen similar schemes enacted to great fanfare (and little effect) in cities like Seattle, and lawmakers have even proposed this idea in New York before now, but rarely are lawmakers so explicit in their intention to tax people out of a right.

“So, if you buy 50 rounds, it’ll be just a couple of extra dollars,” said Fahy. “So, it’s not a huge tax, but another disincentive to arming up.”

If New York Democrats do end up adopting Fahy’s bill and turning into law, that statement is going to come in very handy during the inevitable court challenge that will ensue. The Supreme Court doesn’t look kindly on taxing the exercise of a constitutionally-protected right, especially when it is designed to chill the exercise of that right.

The Court took up this issue back in the 1940s, in a case called Murdock v. Pennsylvania. At issue was an ordinance imposed by the town of Jeannette, Pennsylvania that required “all persons canvassing for or soliciting within said Borough, orders for goods, paintings, pictures, wares, or merchandise of any kind” to obtain a license from town officials in addition to paying a fee for the privilege of doing so. When a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses were fined under the ordinance for selling religious tracts without acquiring the mandated license, they sued, and eventually the Supreme Court found in their favor.

In its decision, the Court declared:

“the First Amendment, which the Fourteenth makes applicable to the states, declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .” It could hardly be denied that a tax laid specifically on the exercise of those freedoms would be unconstitutional. Yet the license tax imposed by this ordinance is, in substance, just that.…

A state may not impose a charge for the enjoyment of a right granted by the Federal Constitution. Thus, it may not exact a license tax for the privilege of carrying on interstate commerce although it may tax the property used in, or the income derived from, that commerce, so long as those taxes are not discriminatory.

Fahy’s proposed ammo tax isn’t a flat licensing tax like the ordinance in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, but thanks to her comment to the press there should be no doubt that the tax on every round of ammunition is designed to be discriminatory in nature against any and all New Yorkers who dare seek to exercise their right to keep and bear arms. When she talks about disincentivizing arming up, she’s really saying the bill disincentivizes the exercise of a constitutionally-protected right, and that’s a no-go according to SCOTUS.

An ammo tax is also a terrible idea from a policy perspective. Seattle, Washington imposed a tax on the sale of both firearms and ammunition back in 2015, and it’s brought in far less money for violence prevention programs than supporters had predicted. They were boasting of $500,000 in tax revenue every year, but in 2019 about $85,000 was collected from the handful of remaining gun stores inside the city limits. Many FFLs chose to simply relocate beyond Seattle’s borders, and many Seattle residents have chosen to buy their guns outside the city limits as well.

Seattle’s violent crime, meanwhile, has gotten exponentially worse. There were 24 murders in Seattle in 2015; far fewer than the  55 homicides reported in the city last year. Seattle’s gun and ammo tax hasn’t made the city a safer place, and Fahy’s proposal would be just as ineffective in New York. But as Fahy herself has made clear, her tax isn’t about preventing crime. It’s about preventing responsible New Yorkers from keeping and bearing arms for self-defense.

Antifa Thugs Firebomb Atlanta Public Training Facility Construction Site.

A few weeks after a shootout with police left an Antifa protester dead and a Georgia State Trooper injured, the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement of far-left goons has firebombed the construction site of a future public training facility for the city of Atlanta.

The domestic terrorist action came about as part of a “Week of Action” that the far-left group announced last month.

The “action” began as a series of protest marches in Atlanta on Saturday but culminated in the violent act of terrorism that took place on Sunday night.

You can see the throngs of “protesters” coming to do damage to the construction site in the second image here.

“Forest defenders have taken over the police surveillance outpost on the power line clearing near Intrenchment Creek,” reports the Unicorn Riot Twitter account. “Police retreated after crowd arrived at barbed wire fence and shot fireworks into the area.”

“People are smashing and destroying the outpost’s remains, sirens can be heard in the distance,” the tweet thread continues. “A security light post is on fire.”

These people are brazenly flaunting their handiwork. They don’t even care who knows anymore.

“There was a massive police presence along Key Road in southeast Atlanta early Sunday evening as FOX 5 was told protestors were actively clashing with officers,” reports Fox 5. “Officials said at least one construction vehicle was set on fire.”

The good news is that police have locked down the site and put out the flames, and SWAT crews are in place.

Because it’s Sunday night, we haven’t seen statements yet from the city of Atlanta, Mayor Andre Dickens, or Gov. Brian Kemp.

This is a developing story, and we’ll have more information as circumstances warrant.

It’s only ‘radical’ and causes chaos for the courts who judges don’t really like the idea that securing individual rights is what government is actually all about (see our Declaration of Independence) and hate that a higher court has told them to get back in line.

The Supreme Court’s Radical Second Amendment Jurisprudence is Sowing Chaos in the Lower Courts

In New York State Pistol & Rifle Ass’n v. Bruen, decided last June, the Supreme Court issued one of the most unusual and dangerous opinions in American history. Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion instructed lower court judges to rely exclusively on history and tradition to resolve Second Amendment cases and to completely ignore the government’s asserted safety interests in passing gun control laws. Assuming that a person’s conduct is arguably covered by the Second Amendment’s text, the Justices said, the government can only prevail if it demonstrates that similar laws were enacted in the past.

According to Second Amendment scholar Jake Charles in an excellent new article, since Bruen was decided last June, there have been over 100 state and federal cases challenging gun reform laws. These courts “have received Bruen’s message to supercharge the Second Amendment…. Their collective decisions in the months since the ruling have been scattered, unpredictable, and often internally inconsistent.”

The Court’s exclusive focus on history and tradition in Bruen is a radical departure from how the Court has traditionally decided constitutional law cases. Prior to Bruen, the Justices examined the strength and importance of a constitutional right and compared that to the interests put forward by the government to justify the restriction of that right.

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One Year in the Russo-Ukrainian War: the Big Pixels

Last Friday we looked at the seven points we discussed a year earlier the day the Russo-Ukrainian War broke out. As promised, today we look at seven points a year in everyone needs to hoist onboard.

Though I nibble on the edges a bit, these are not detailed, tactical “lessons learned.” Land combat details simply are not my bag. No, these a big pixel items. Mostly land centric like the war, but are directly transferrable to the maritime and other domains.

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It may be to his sorrow, but I considered there was never any common ground with commies.

To My Sorrow, There Can Be No Common Ground With the Left

I am a preterist. But with that in mind, these words from 2 Timothy ring truer than ever:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.

Having been raised a liberal who became a conservative, I have long been an advocate of dialogue. Of finding the middle way. Of reaching a consensus. Knowing both sides of the aisle as I do, I had thought that there might be some point at which our two sides might find common ground or a way of living with one another.

I will now finally admit that is simply not a possibility. I take no joy in that, but there comes a time when one must admit that compromise is impossible, and that to search for it involves capitulation with alleged human beings who have blinded themselves to all but the basest of pursuits and desires. There comes a time at which hope ends, and one realizes that we can no longer live with one another.

It is a sad realization, but one that is based on a harsh, unforgiving reality. Long had I hoped that cooler heads might prevail, that we could see eye to eye on something. But whether it is because of the internet, our feckless leaders, or the inherent sinfulness of mankind, we must admit that the breach between the insanity of the Left and the rest of the world is simply too large and wide to bridge. It would take an act of God to bring about reconciliation.

And for better or worse, He has chosen to leave us to our own devices. The Old Testament prophets warned that those who sought their will above all else would reap the whirlwind. And the people in power have done just that. How long they evade the chaos that they have seeded will be up to the Almighty.

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