SO YOU WANT TO REPEAL THE SECOND AMENDMENT
Jabba the Hutt Michael Moore thinks it’s time to repeal the Second Amendment.
“Who will say on this network or any other network in the next few days, ‘It’s time to repeal the Second Amendment?’”
Bad idea, Lardo Calrissian.
You can’t repeal the Second Amendment, any more than you can repeal any of the other nine. It was a package deal, you see, an absolute prerequisite to ratifying the main body of the Constitution. Repeal one, you repeal them all. Do that, and you repeal the whole Constitution — and with it, any legal authority that the government has to exist (let alone repeal the Second Amendment).
— Alexander Hope
That comes from chapter five of Hope, by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith. The style makes me think that particular passage was penned by Neil (and it seems like he had a stand-alone essay to the same effect), but I don’t believe Aaron would have let that go into their co-authored novel unless he agreed with it.
As a casual student of history, who has read much about the ratification of the Constitution, I also agree.
Lose one, lose them all. Lose it all.
I suspect that Moore, and most Dims currently in DC — and far too many Repugnicans, as well — would be happy to lose the few remaining Constitutional limits on their power. They don’t particularly care about “legal authority” just power.
The problem is… if our wanna-be tyrants are no longer restrained by that pesky Constitution, neither are the people.
The people pissed off at senseless bans, and illegal ballot drop boxes, might just decide that turning to constitutionally-enabled courts — who already defecate on individual rights at the slightest provocation — really isn’t necessary.
Voting out scumbags, and voting in new replacement scumbags who promise to use KY while screwing us? Why bother with that discarded constitutional process? Wouldn’t high-velocity lead be cheaper and faster? Not to mention proactively educating would-be replacements.
Court-blessed “constitutional” takings of property? Get rid of the Constitution and former property owners might resort to ex-constitutional re-takings, enforced with ropes and lamp posts.
Lose one, lose them all. Moore himself might want to consider the ramifications of chucking his First Amendment protections to defame folks for a buck. The people might decide, lacking that lost constitutional recourse, to go bowling for lying documentarians.
Get rid of the Constitution, and the people’s pretend recourse… and they might stop pretending they do.
Maybe the tyrants will be counting on the out-numbered police to prop up their post-Constitution regime. How many officers would continue to be willing to do that once they’ve lost “constitutional” sovereign immunity, and the people know it?
Perhaps the Constitution has only been an illusory paper restraint on government. But it has been a potent symbolic restraint on the people, preventing them from eliminating abusive politicians and government agents out of hand. I do not truly comprehend the willingness — nay, the eagerness of the Left to go there, to surrender that protection, given the likely consequences.
We’d be starting from scratch, with new rules written by the survivors.
I know how to stop a looter and that looter still won’t spend a day in prison!
Two George Soros-backed prosecutors in suburban Washington, D.C., bounced a serial looter who committed multiple grand larcenies and assaulted a cop between their offices for years without a felony conviction.
Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) and Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) since 2020 dismissed or declined to prosecute a 25-year-old Maryland resident for nearly a dozen charges related to larceny. The looting incidents amounted to thousands of dollars in stolen merchandise and include felony offenses, including two grand larcenies and one assault on a police officer, making the offender eligible for years behind bars. The prosecutors found the looter guilty of just a few misdemeanors. No verdict levied more than a few hundred dollars in fines, and he served no time in prison.
The out-of-state offender, Ronald Thomas, spent virtually no time in jail after his arrests thanks to bail reform policies instituted by Descano and Dehghani-Tafti. At least five times he was charged for committing crimes in one jurisdiction while on pretrial release in another. He was twice charged for committing larcenies within a day of having similar larceny charges dropped—with one of those incidents happening in the same county.
The case exemplifies the degree to which lightened sentencing can embolden repeat offenders. Studies have shown that releasing defendants before their trial increases crime. A few years after Cook County, Ill., instituted bail reform, a 2020 study by the University of Utah found a 45 percent increase in the number of released defendants who were charged with committing new crimes and a 33 percent bump in released defendants charged with violent crimes. Continue reading “”
Remember, this is from the establishment that won’t show pictures of people jumping from the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks because that would be ‘prejudicial and inflammatory’.
Comment O’ The Day
Lets do the same for the massive carnage taking place in Americas major cities every single day – the black on black death count is staggering
There were 13,654 black American victims of homicide in 2020 – that’s 37 a DAY
In 2020 those identifying or identified as Black or African American
made up 13.5% of the U.S. population, according to CDC estimates (that
for definitional and other reasons don’t quite match the results of the
2020 U.S. Census). They also made up 55.6% of the homicide victims, and
65.6% of the increase in homicides relative to 2019. To put it another
way, the homicide rate for Black Americans rose from 22.9 per 100,000 in
2019 to 30.7 in 2020. For all other Americans, the rate went from 3.2
to 3.8.
And to point out about the above; By the FBI’s own uniform crime report, most black Americans (88%+-) are killed by other black Americans
It’s time to show the real horror of mass shootings. In pictures.
****
I lack the moral standing to tell a parent to accept and approve, for the greater good, the public display of photos of his or her dead child. Only they can judge the additional weight that doing so would place on them, at a time when they are already struggling with unimaginable grief. Nor do I suggest the release of any images in particular. But something graphic is required to awaken the public to the real horror of these repeated tragedies. Robb Elementary School in Uvalde is a crime scene. If there were a case to go to trial, the prosecution would have to present publicly the shocking evidence of guilt. Put another way: Why must innocent schoolchildren, for the rest of their lives, carry the vivid memories of the executions of their teachers and classmates, while federal and state lawmakers (and the adult constituents who elect them) are spared?
When even the Washington Post calls you a liar…….
As a StunnedTater, SloJoe got away with his meandering windbag storytelling and lies because the caricature of the blowhard politician speechifying on the floor of Congress, who no one really pays attention to, is an accurate one.
He got used to it because there never were any consequences to it; He always got reelected, so why worry?
He’s now too far gone mentally to get out of the rut he dug for himself and also realize that the BS he spouts has a real effect, as people do pay attention to the President of the U.S….. even if he is a senile lying blowhard.
Biden: CEOs told me my plan would save $500 per household in utility costs. WaPo: Lie.
A Four Pinocchio lie, in fact, as Glenn Kessler reports this morning. Joe Biden has a very bad habit of exaggerating and confusing details, but this claim goes well beyond that into sheer fantasy. In his op-ed at the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Biden claimed that utility-company executives told him that his economic plan would save American households an average of $500 a year, starting immediately:
“A dozen CEOs of America’s largest utility companies told me earlier this year that my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500 and accelerate our transition from energy produced by autocrats.”
Not only do those numbers not add up, Kessler concludes, Biden’s flat-out lying about the conversation:
But when we located the transcript of Biden’s conversation with utility executives on Feb. 9, we found no reference to $500 in utility savings. The figure was also not mentioned in the White House readout of the meeting.
Biden’s also lying about the numbers. He pulled the $500 figure from a friendly analysis by the Rhodium Group that was prepared in October. That report predicted $500 annual savings in overall energy costs, not just utilities, and not until 2030. Most of that savings came from eliminating gasoline from family budgets as cars would go completely onto the grid. The actual projected utility savings would be, er …
Indeed, the report notes that, if the Biden climate plan were adopted, home electricity bills by 2030 would be between one dollar more and five dollars less than under current policy. That might pay for an extra ice cream cone over the summer.
This is fanciful for other reasons, too. Moving tens of millions of personal vehicles onto the electrical grid would create a vast spike in demand for electricity. We can’t keep up with current demand now, thanks to increasingly restrictive policies on sources for electrical generation. Several states right now are warning about plans for rolling brownouts and blackouts as a means to ration access to limited electricity, including car-happy California. Prices would go through the roof by 2030, as supply won’t match current demand without expanding the fossil fuels used for electrical generation. Expecting the transition to be cost-free to households ignores the large amount of kilowatt hours it will take to keep vehicles charged, too.
But even apart from that, the economic situation has changed since October. Much of the increase in energy costs for households has come with gasoline, but electricity costs are also rising — both in price and rationed access in a price-controlled environment. Energy costs money regardless of how it originates, and gas-powered vehicles at least allow consumers to operate independent of grid shortages.
Kessler drops four Pinocchios on Biden in his conclusion:
[H]e didn’t hear that from utility executives. And the report he is citing is not about household utility-bill savings. Most of the claimed savings comes from the reduced cost of driving. And the estimate is for 2030 — when he would no longer be president, even if he served a second term.
Is there any doubt the president earns Four Pinocchios?
No doubt at all. Four Pinocchios is the minimum allowance for Biden on a daily basis. And if Biden wants to keep the US from being dependent on “autocrats” for our energy needs, then he needs to work to expand exploration, extraction, and refining in the US, rather than doing the opposite over the last 17 months.
With Inflation at Historic Highs, Biden Stoops to New Low in Blame Game.
Polls show that inflation has become the top issue for Americans, and as it hit historic highs, it’s been absolutely killing approval ratings for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. In response, Biden has blamed COVID-19, Putin, Republicans, big oil — pretty much anyone whose name he can remember will get blamed for the 40-year-high inflation we’re experiencing.
However, Biden’s blame-everyone-else strategy hit a new low this week; The Washington Post reports that Biden is now blaming White House aides for the nation’s inflation woes.
“Biden has privately grumbled to top White House officials over the administration’s handling of inflation, expressing frustration over the past several months that aides were not doing enough to confront the problem directly,” the Post reported…………….
Trump.
Afghans.
Americans.
Businesses.
Democrats are selective in which shootings matter
Before I get started, let me make it clear that I know there are some pro-gun Democrats. I don’t think there are any left in Congress these days, but among the voters, there are. In what follows, I’m not talking about them and they should be excluded from this.
However, for the rest, which happens to be something like 90 percent-plus of all Democrats, this all applies.
What applies, you ask? How about the fact that while anti-gun Democrats will scream to high heaven about a Uvalde or a Buffalo, they only seem to care about certain tragedies. Why is that?
Because only certain tragedies help advance their agenda:
Democrats are silent after more than 30 people lost their lives this weekend to violent crime waves that continually sweep through the nation’s cities.
Why hasn’t President Joe Biden, who recently visited Uvalde, Texas, after 19 children and two adults died in a school shooting, tweeted something or planned trips to Nebraska, Illinois, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania, where violence and shootings took the lives of dozens of people including children?
Why hasn’t Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke executed another political stunt at a local press conference somewhere to call attention to a rise in domestic altercations that escalate into shootings? Mostly because none of the violence was politically advantageous for them.
The violence that took the lives of dozens of Americans over Memorial Day weekend either did not involve firearms such as AR-15s, which the left has openly admitted they want to confiscate, or occurred under the wrong conditions for grandstanding. Democrats pick and choose which tragedies to milk for their anti-gun agenda based on how much political leverage firearm-related deaths grant them.
It’s not wrong, folks.
Think about how many people die every weekend in gun-controlled Chicago. The numbers tend to be staggering, and we hear relatively little in the mainstream national media about that. Why don’t we? Because it not only fails to advance their anti-gun agenda, it actually undermines it.
Illinois has many of the measures Democrats have pushed for at the federal level, and none of it has seemed to do a damn thing. While officials are quick to blame other states for their problems, the truth is that gun control simply doesn’t work.
So what happens is that Democrats become selective in their outrage. They lash out when it’s convenient and stick their heads in the sand when the incident isn’t.
Think about how quickly Sacramento dropped from the headlines. A couple of criminals who had guns illegally, one of which had a full-auto switch which is even more illegal. Everything about it proved that criminals will keep getting guns no matter what you do.
It was a big story before we knew it was one of gun control failing. Now, Democrats and their allies in the media like to pretend it never happened.
But Buffalo and Uvalde? Those aren’t going anywhere because they get to demonize the AR-15.
See, all tragedies are awful, but for anti-gun Democrats, it’s only awful enough to talk about when it advances the narrative.
The state with the most restrictive gun laws had the most active shooter incidents last year
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is out with a new report on active shooter incidents across the United States last year, and there are some significant findings worth talking about, including the fact that several of the incidents were stopped by armed citizens.
The report details 61 “active shooter incidents” last year, which the agency defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in ai populated area.” Specifically excluded are acts of self-defense, gang and drug-related shootings, and domestic incidents, as well as “crossfire as a byproduct of another criminal act”. And while gun control activists invariably point to these types of attacks as justification for their attempts to criminalize the right to keep and bear arms, the report’s data suggests that gun control doesn’t serve any sort of preventative benefit to stopping these attacks.
According to the report, the most restrictive state in the Union when it comes to gun control laws also led the way in the number of active shooter incidents. California had six such incidents last year, more than any other state, though Texas and Georgia were close behind with five such incidents reported in each state. Active shooter incidents were reported in 30 states altogether, up from 19 states in 2020, with a total of 243 Americans killed or wounded in the attacks.
The FBI report notes that in 17 of the 61 incidents, law enforcement “engaged the shooter,” while there were six incidents where citizens either “engaged” the attacker or where “citizen involvement impacted the engagement.” It’s unclear to me what differentiates those two categories, because in both cases there were armed citizens who put a stop to the attack or prevented any further bloodshed.
One example of “engagement” noted by the FBI was the attack at a Metarie, Louisiana gun store in February of 2021, in which a suspect shot and killed two people and wounded two more before he was shot by multiple armed employees of the business. An example of “citizen involvement” in the FBI report was the shooting at an Agrex grain elevator in Superior, Nebraska last October when a recently fired employee left the building only to return a short time later with murder on his mind.
NSP said [the suspect] made his way into the door and shot a manager, Darin Koepke, 53, twice in the chest and the arm, the former of which was fatal. Roby said [the suspect] shot Koepke again as he lay on the floor.
The entire shooting event lasted under 20 seconds, according to NSP, and was briefly halted due to the gun jamming. NSP said [the suspect] fired a total of five rounds in the incident.
NSP said there were eight employees in the building at the time and others outside. Roby said supervisors were on scene during the shooting due to the termination and other employees were there “because they worked there.”
Roby said Koepke likely saved “countless lives” by barricading a door.
In addition, troopers say the man who returned fire did prevent it “from becoming even worse.”
Troopers say the Nuckolls County Attorney will not prosecute the man who returned fire.
… “The Nebraska State Patrol considers all the survivors of this terrible incident to be victims,” said Capt. Jeff Roby.
Roby said NSP would not be naming the man who returned fire “and actively stopped this active shooting event. That man’s quick actions likely saved lives.”
Of the six incidents in which civilians either “engaged” or “involved” themselves in stopping the active shooter, four of them involved the defensive use of a firearm (the other two involved citizens tackling the shooter after five people were shot, and an Idaho teacher who talked a 12-year old girl into giving up a gun that she had used to shoot three people at a middle school). None of the incidents involving armed citizens took place in “may issue” states, by the way.
Just two of the 61 incidents covered in the FBI’s report took place at a school, with three other incidents unfolding at other government buildings. The vast majority of these targeted attacks took place in “areas of commerce” (32 incidents) or “business environments open to pedestrian traffic” (28 incidents).
The FBI report also notes what the agency calls an “emerging trend involving roving active shooters”; individuals who shoot in multiple locations and in some cases over multiple days, though it didn’t provide any details on exactly how many of the 61 incidents could be classified as such.
President Biden’s wayward remarks a cause for concern, clarification
The president of the United States is a blowhard — again.
If the country thought that it was getting a buttoned-up, by-the-books communicator after four wildly undisciplined years of Donald Trump, it knew nothing about Joseph R. Biden’s long career as Washington’s standout long-winded, seat-of-the-pants, poorly informed and misleading talker.
Biden blew up two presidential campaigns with his verbal idiocy, and no one thought during his decades as a senator that he was just the statesman the country needed to handle sensitive international questions with precise, cogent communications.
Winston Churchill famously mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. Joe Biden tries to muster the English language but confuses and dispirits it, until the poor language slinks off ready to get its discharge papers and return to civilian life.
Biden’s handling of Russia and China in recent months has been marked by a basic inability to stay within the lines of U.S. policy — by seeming to give a kind of greenlight to a “minor” Russian incursion into Ukraine, by calling for Vladimir Putin to go, and by committing to defend Taiwan by force.
All these wayward statements required immediate and utterly predictable cleanup by a White House staff that must be on constant alert to explain on a moment’s notice what the president meant after he says something completely different.
Rarely have so few had to clarify so much.
L-o-n-g unroll of a thread, but read the whole thing.
Andrew Follett says ‘the media is telling you two major lies’ about mass shootings and gun control
A thread on how the media is telling you two major lies about mass shootings and gun control
1: Other countries with vastly stricter gun laws than the US have higher rates of mass shootings.
2: US jurisdictions w/ gun laws have exponentially higher rates of gun violence
Although events in the U.S. tend to get the lion’s share of media exposure, mass shootings are clearly a worldwide issue.
The US makes up about 1.15% of the world’s mass shootings while having almost 5% of the world’s population.
Out of 97 countries with data, the US is 64th in frequency of mass shootings and 65th in murder rate.
And rates of mass shootings elsewhere are rising faster
4 times as many per capita died in mass shootings in FRANCE as in the US. 21 times in Norway.
Inconvenient Truth: CNN Admits Majority Doesn’t Want More Gun Control!
You can’t tune into Morning Joe nowadays without hearing it trumpeted that somewhere between 85-90% of Americans want more gun-control laws.
But over on CNN, Wednesday morning’s New Day was telling an inconvenient truth. Check out how co-host John Berman framed matters. You might normally expect him to present things from a strongly pro-gun control perspective, but this is how he teed up Enten:
“One thing you hear is that around 90% of Americans support background checks, but does that tell the whole story about how much agreement there really is? . . . Maybe not exactly what you think.”
They pointed to a Gallup poll showing that a majority of Americans are either satisfied with the current level of gun control—or actually want less gun control!
Enten displayed numbers showing that only 36%, barely one-third,of Americans, want more gun control, whereas 54% are satisfied with current laws or want less gun control!
Enten also cited two recent state referendums on background checks. He noted that in Maine, the proposal to expand background checks was actually defeated, and in Nevada, passed with the slimmest of margins, at barely over 50%.
Summing up, Enten said:
“So you look at those polls that say background check: 80%, 90%! When you look at people actually voting on the measure, it’s not anywhere close to that! It’s much more of a 50/50 proposition.”
Meanwhile, back at Morning Joe, it’s more gun control, all the time.
This NewsBuster is a regular New Day viewer, and for some time now has noted inklings of a move away from the hard-left line it had taken for years. The Chris Licht [CNN’s new head honcho] effect? But MSNBC seems committed to toeing the liberal line — to the bitter end?
In the hearing, @RepCohen claims that wanting to go buy a gun should be a red-flag. We would suggest he get outside his anti-gun bubble and meet the countless Americans who safely and responsible exercise their Second Amendment rights everyday.
— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) June 2, 2022
Mirsad Kandic Faces Up to Life Imprisonment for Becoming an ISIS Fighter, Recruiting Other ISIS Fighters, and Providing Weapons, Equipment, and Battlefield Intelligence to ISIS
A New York man was found guilty by a federal jury in Brooklyn, following a three-week trial before U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis, of one count of conspiracy to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and five substantive counts of providing material support to ISIS.
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Mirsad Kandic, 40, of Brooklyn, New York, and Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, was a high-ranking member of ISIS, a designated foreign terrorist organization. He had multiple responsibilities within the global terrorist organization, including recruiting foreign fighters, trafficking foreign fighters from the West through Turkey and into Syria, and obtaining weapons, military equipment, maps, money, and false identifications for ISIS fighters. In carrying out these responsibilities, the defendant worked directly with ISIS emirs and battlefield commanders, including Bajro Ikanovic, who commanded an ISIS training camp in Syria beginning in or around 2014. Ikanovic, in turn, reported to Omar Shishani, then the top military commander for ISIS, and a key advisor to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was, at the time, the leader of ISIS and the self-declared Caliph of the Islamic State.
Suspect dies from shooting linked to Fayetteville home invasion
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — Police responded to a home on South Shield Drive in Fayetteville on Wednesday morning as a suspect was killed in a shooting that happened after a home invasion.
Police said a man, who they consider a suspect, was found shot outside a home just before 4 a.m. He was pronounced dead shortly after their discovery.
Another man, who lived at the home, was found shot in the leg and is in stable condition at the hospital. Police believe a man they feel is another suspect in the shooting left the home before their arrival.
Several officers, detectives and a forensics team were parked along the street in a residential area after sunrise. Crime scene tape surrounded the home.
Preliminary findings revealed the shooting was the result of a break-in in the 7700 block of the road.
One neighbor told WRAL News that she heard a lot of noise around the time of the shooting., but couldn’t make out what exactly was happening. Many retired military members live in the neighborhood.
BLUF
The truth is that proposals for a prison society of disarmed and surveilled subjects shepherded by public employees are unworkable. The state can’t defend us from danger, and nothing obligates us to pretend otherwise. If you want to protect yourself and your loved ones, you have to do it yourself.
If You Want Protection for Your Loved Ones, Do It Yourself
Police in Uvalde, Texas, face a barrage of criticism for delays in confronting the shooter who slaughtered children and teachers last week. Officials admit law enforcers screwed up; worse, they impeded parents who wanted to intervene, leaving the crime to be ended by agents who ignored police orders. As politicians rush to leverage tragedy to advance legislative agendas, we’re reminded again that it’s foolish to place our trust in authority or to surrender our ability to protect ourselves and our loved ones.
“From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, admitted of police choosing to wait for backup and equipment before intervening in a massacre that took the lives of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers. “It was the wrong decision, period. There’s no excuse for that.”
That decision delayed the response for over an hour. Finally, a Border Patrol team that drove 40 miles to the scene defied orders and stopped the shooter’s rampage.
“Federal agents who went to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday to confront a gunman who killed 19 children were told by local police to wait and not enter the school — and then decided after about half an hour to ignore that initial guidance and find the shooter,” noted NBC News.
The feds weren’t the only ones willing to intervene. Instead of taking on Ramos, local police tackled, pepper-sprayed, and handcuffed parents rather than allow them to take action at which officers balked.
“The police were doing nothing,” said Angeli Rose Gomez who was briefly arrested for challenging official indecision.
“Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children,” reported The Wall Street Journal. “She sprinted out of the school with them.”
This isn’t the first time police faced criticism for dithering in response to danger. By the time officers entered Colorado’s Columbine High School in in 1999, 47 minutes had passed allowing the shooters to do their worst before killing themselves. Columbine was supposed to spur changes in police policy, but that wasn’t apparent during a 2018 incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.
4 killed in shooting at Tulsa medical building, shooter dead
A gunman carrying a rifle and a handgun killed four people on Wednesday at a Tulsa medical building on a hospital campus, police said, the latest in a series of deadly mass shootings across the country in recent weeks.
Tulsa Police Department Deputy Chief Eric Dalgleish confirmed the number of dead and said the shooter also was dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“Catastrophic”: Five Dead Including Shooter At Tulsa Medical Building
Update (2030ET): Authorities in Tusla, Oklahoma, confirm five dead, including the shooter. Police said the man used a rifle and a handgun during the shooting on the second floor of the Natalie Medical Building.
In the 1960s, campus protesters rejected adult authority, writes William Deresiewicz. Now the “young progressive elite” want the grownups to protect them from emotional and psychological harm, writes William Deresiewicz on Bari Weiss’s Common Sense Substack.
Not much has changed since he wrote Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of America’s Elite in 2013, he writes.
We are back to in loco parentis, in fact if not in law. College is now regarded as the last stage of childhood, not the first of adulthood. . . . The nature of woke protests, the absence of Covid and other protests, the whole phenomenon of excellent sheephood: all of them speak to the central dilemma of contemporary youth, which is that society has not given them any way to grow up — not financially, not psychologically, not morally.
. . . The attributes of adulthood — responsibility, maturity, self-sacrifice, self-control — are no longer valued, and frequently no longer modeled. So children are stuck: they want to be adults, but they don’t know how.
“Beware of prepackaged rebellions,” he tells the Class of 2022. “That protest march that you’re about to join may be a herd.”
Becoming an independent person isn’t easy, writes Deresiewicz. “Childhood is over. Dare to grow up.”
Stanford University (motto: “Let the winds of freedom blow.”) doesn’t want to let students grow up, writes Bill Evers of the Independent Institute in the Washington Examiner.
The Office of Student Affairs, which had fewer than 50 employees just three decades ago, now employs more than 400 administrators who micromanage students and infantilize adults who pay for an education at Stanford.
Under the ResX plan, students are assigned to a campus “neighborhood” for their undergraduate careers, Evers writes. They will find ethnic-themed dorms for the “Black Diaspora” and “Chicanx/Latinx” students to apartment buildings promoting “the IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning community).”
Students’ social life is regulated: Students must register any party they host, he writes. Get-togethers during “dead weeks” before finals are banned, as is hard liquor and drinking games, even for students 21 and older.
These measures “have drawn widespread condemnation from students, including a student-led health and safety initiative that provides snacks and water at parties and walks students home on the weekends,” Evers writes. “These students say that the rule changes have spurred an increase in binge drinking.”
When you’ve lost NBC……………
I love this part:
Beyond policy, Biden is unhappy about a pattern that has developed inside the West Wing. He makes a clear and succinct [yeah, sure baby] statement — only to have aides rush to explain that he actually meant something else. The so-called clean-up campaign, he has told advisers, undermines him and smothers the authenticity that fueled his rise. Worse, it feeds a Republican talking point that he’s not fully in command.
Well, when you have apparently have senile dementia, making stupid off the cuff remarks that constantly get corrected by your staff the lackeys of your puppet masters, and also sound like a broken record repeating utter crap-for-brains nonsense, it sure does appear that he isn’t in command of anything.
Just me, but the question arises about SloJoe™ feeling his staff ‘undermines him’. If he feels that way, why weren’t those people fired the second time it happened? (figuring you’d warn them after the first time to stop it) One obvious answer is that he can’t, because he’s been told who is really running the show, and it ain’t him. He’s nothing more than a figurehead who gets ordered about like an actor.
BLUF
“We’re on a track — a losing track,” Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said of the Democrats.
Inside a Biden White House adrift
Amid a rolling series of calamities and sinking approval ratings, the president’s feeling lately is that he just can’t catch a break — and that angst is rippling through his party.
WASHINGTON — Faced with a worsening political predicament, President Joe Biden is pressing aides for a more compelling message and a sharper strategy while bristling at how they’ve tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets.
Biden is rattled by his sinking approval ratings and is looking to regain voters’ confidence that he can provide the sure-handed leadership he promised during the campaign, people close to the president say.
Crises have piled up in ways that have at times made the Biden White House look flat-footed: record inflation, high gas prices, a rise in Covid case numbers — and now a Texas school massacre that is one more horrific reminder that he has been unable to get Congress to pass legislation to curb gun violence. Democratic leaders are at a loss about how he can revive his prospects by November, when midterm elections may cost his party control of Congress.
“I don’t know what’s required here,” said Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., whose endorsement in the 2020 Democratic primaries helped rescue Biden’s struggling candidacy. “But I do know the poll numbers have been stuck where they are for far too long.”
President Joe Biden warmly welcomed New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to the White House on Tuesday, expressing his interest in her views on gun control and online censorship in her country.
“We need your guidance,” Biden said as he welcomed Ardern to the Oval Office. “And it’s a pleasure to see you in person.”
He praised the prime minister warmly for making progress on issues like climate change, combatting “violent extremism online,” and gun control.
“You understand that your leadership has taken a critical role on this global change, it really has,” he said.
Ardern has become a darling of the left after she pushed forward strict gun control laws in New Zealand, banning most semi-automatic rifles after the horrific Christchurch shooting in 2019. She also has repeatedly called for more tech censorship of online extremism, blaming the internet for radicalizing the shooter.
Biden appeared impressed.
“I want to work with you on that effort and I want to talk with you about what those conversations are like if you’re willing,” he said.
Biden expressed sadness that mass shootings continued happening in the United States, renewing calls for change.
“There’s an expression by an Irish poet that says too long a suffering makes a stone of the heart,” he said, claiming he had been to more “mass shooting aftermaths” than any president in American history.
Biden said he met with about 250 of the family members of the victims of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, for about four hours on Sunday.
“Much of it is preventable, and the devastation is amazing,” he said.
Ardern said she was willing to work with Biden on issues of violence, noting that there was a need for global progress on the issue.
“If there is anything we can share that would be of any value, we are here to share it,” she said.
Biden told reporters he planned to meet with members of Congress on the issue of gun control.
“I will meet with the Congress on guns, I promise you,” he said.