Category: Bureaucraps

FBI Admits It Has Lots Of Documents About Targeting Christians

If ever you thought that the Biden Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Deep State that we knew had been used to punish groups since the days of the Obama administration, had been weaponized to target Christians, here is hard proof.

I mean, we already HAD proof in the horrendous case of Mark Houck, who was arrested by the FBI (after a SWAT raid at his home that traumatized his family) for alleged violations of the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act. Houck was acquitted in federal court, which left a whole lot of egg on the face of the DOJ. But it has become increasingly clear that the DOJ has a target on pro-life activists and parent groups that support traditional values – and as a result, it has turned its Eye of Sauron onto those they call “radical traditionalist” Christians.

The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) submitted a FOIA request to the FBI, and then sued when the FBI failed to comply. Well, the FBI did finally submit a response, which chief counsel Jay Sekulow (whom you may remember as one of Donald Trump’s lawyers from his first impeachment) is now highlighting on Twitter/X.


For some clarity, here is some of what the ACLJ requested in the FOIA.

Some of our specific requests are reproduced below:

1) All records of communications between or including the FBI’s Director, Deputy Director, Chief of Staff, General Counsel, or any of their senior staff or assistants, or of any other FBI official of a GS-13 or appointee level or higher personnel (including forwarded email messages or CC or BCC email messages), about pro-life people OR Catholicism (including adherents of Catholicism) OR Christianity (including adherents of Christianity) – all in the context of analysis, threat assessment, domestic terrorism, or the monitoring of such people.

2) All records of briefings or communications between or including the FBI’s Director, Deputy Director, Chief of Staff, General Counsel, or any of their senior staff or assistants, or of any other FBI official of a GS-13 or appointee level or higher personnel (including forwarded email messages or CC or BCC email messages), that mention the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, No. 19-1392, 597 U.S. __ (2022).

3) All records of communications between or including the FBI Richmond field office personnel, including analysists, senior staff or assistants, or of any other FBI official of a GS-13 or appointee level or higher (including forwarded email messages or CC or BCC email messages), about the memo described in the “Background” section above.

4) All records of communications between or including the FBI Richmond field office personnel, including analysists, senior staff or assistants, or of any other FBI official of a GS-13 or appointee level or higher (including forwarded email messages or CC or BCC email messages), about pro-life people OR Catholicism (including adherents of Catholicism) OR Christianity (including adherents of Christianity) – in the context of analysis, threat assessment, domestic terrorism, or the monitoring of such people.

Congratulations to Catholics and Protestants – full ecumenical parity has been achieved, for we are all seen as threats to the Department of Justice if we follow Biblical teachings! Wow. Mary I and Elizabeth I are surely thrilled with this development.

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Liberty Safes apparently builds in a ‘backdoor’ passcode – like a master key – on its safes with electronic digital dials. Maybe all electronic dials are made with such.

Is liberty safe with Liberty Safe?

Last week, an Arkansas man was arrested in connection with the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Nathan Earl Hughes has four charges pending against him, including a felony count of interfering with police during a civil disorder. Arkansas Online has an article (archived links) detailing the investigation and the charges against him.

With ubiquitous cellphone cameras, the video of Hughes’ arrest quickly made it online (archived):

 

There is an important sentence in the above tweet/post from the Hodge Twins, and that is this:

“The feds called the manufacturer of his Liberty Gun Safe and got the passcode to get into it too.”

It comes as a surprise to many of us (although it shouldn’t) that an electronic keypad has a secret factory default passcode that allows entry into the safe besides the customer-configured passcode. We don’t know if this default passcode is unique to each safe, or if it’s a model default passcode (like a silly default “admin/admin” username/password combination you find in most wireless routers) that will get you entry into any Liberty Safe of the same model. (Looking at the customer FAQ’s on the Liberty Safe website, it looks like the default passcode may be unique to each safe.)

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Tree Euthanasia? Climate Alarmists Now Warn That Our Forests Will Worsen Global Warming

Back in the 1970s, when trees became almost a protected class, we heard that we had to ditch paper supermarket bags (and move to plastic) because we were decimating too many forests. Now, 50 years later, with more tree cover in the U.S. than a century ago, the greentopians have another complaint:

American forests will become CO2 emitters by 2070, they aver, joining 10 protected forests worldwide that already are net spewers of the gas.

Reflecting the complaints many misanthropic leftists have about people, the issue is that as trees age they become takers: Their growth slows and they use less CO2. In fact, the amount metabolized is lower than that produced by wildfires and dead-tree decomposition.

True to form, some scientists have suggested as a “remedy” what is already applied to people: euthanasia — with the arboreal version involving destroying senior-citizen trees and replacing them with young whippersnapper ones. Whether such a great replacement would involve foreign-tree imports was not revealed.

(Thankfully, U.S. Department of Agriculture experts dismiss this idea as being based on poor science.)

As for the tree-villain story, ScienceAlert informs:

An alarming report from the US Department of Agriculture predicts that by 2070, the nation’s forests will release substantially more carbon than they store.

Forests in the US – bar those in Alaska – will no longer absorb 150 million metric tons of carbon a year within five decades, experts say.

That carbon is equivalent to the emissions of roughly 40 coal power plants.

To understand how a carbon sink can become a carbon tap, we have to consider the lifecycle of a healthy forest, where new growth matures into old growth and old growth dies and makes room for new growth.

But today, in North America, not enough young trees are being planted and allowed to grow up.

This means that mature forests are outpacing young forests, which are also more likely to be harvested or killed due to climate effects like wildfires, drought, or storms.

The overall shift to an older age cohort of trees means that in the future, forests in the US could be dying more than they are growing.

Practically, this turns forests from carbon absorbers to carbon emitters.

Old growth trees hold the most carbon in total, but after reaching a certain size, their growth seems to slow. Young trees, on the other hand, rapidly take up carbon for growth.

My, not since Babes in Toyland have big old trees seemed so frightful. What’s really supposed to terrify us, though, is the big bad gaseous “threat” CO2. Yet this fear is as irrational as worrying about walking, talking trees.

The first suspicious thing about the climate-alarmist appeal is the terminology: Calling CO2 “carbon” is like calling H2O “hydrogen.” “Man, am I thirsty. I gotta get me a big glass of hydrogen.”

Then there’s, “The lawn’s lookin’ a bit brown. Tell Timmy to get the hose and hydrogen the grass.”

Yeah, it’s that ridiculous.

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New Data Says You Stopped Mass Murder Most of the Time

We live in a media driven culture. We also have government agencies putting out biased reports that serve their political masters. It is rare that the media even questions the agency reports. That wouldn’t matter, but many of us confuse media headlines with facts. I’ve seen people on Facebook say that there were hundreds of “mass shootings” this year and that our children are not safe in school any longer. They are wrong, and you stop mass-murder most of the time.

Please let me pose a different question.

If an ordinary citizen stops mass-murder and the mainstream media refuses to report it, did it really happen?

According to the FBI, the answer is almost always, “No!”

I am a data geek and I love to explore the deeper questions around public events. For example, how do we define “mass-murder”, and has that definition changed? How are the murderers stopped? It turns out that you get wildly different answers depending on subtle changes in the questions you ask.

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ATF’s proposed definition of “personal collection” of firearms is missing something

The ATF’s proposed rule expanding who is “engaged in the business” of selling firearms is being lauded by anti-gun groups like Giffords, which says the rule “moves us closer to universal background checks than we’ve ever been,” while the National Shooting Sports Foundation is panning the new proposal as yet another example of executive branch overreach by the Biden administration.

Under the proposed rule, anyone that so much as attempts to sell a privately owned firearm for a profit could be deemed by the ATF to be an unlicensed firearms dealer, even if the sale doesn’t take place or no profit is gained. At the same time, the agency maintains gun owners won’t be deemed “engaged in the business” of selling firearms if they make only “occasional sales to enhance a personal collection, or for a hobby, or if the firearms they sell are all or part of a personal collection.”

While the ATF declined to define “occasional sales”, it has attempted to define the term “personal collection”, and I couldn’t help but laugh and roll my eyes when I saw it.

Personal collection, personal collection of firearms, or personal firearms collection.

(a) Personal firearms that a person accumulates for study, comparison, exhibition, or for a hobby (e.g., noncommercial, recreational activities for personal enjoyment, such as hunting, or skeet, target, or competition shooting). The term shall not include any firearm purchased for the purpose of resale or made with the predominant intent to earn a profit.

Notice anything missing from the reasons why someone would accumulate personal firearms? Yep, the ATF has ignored the single biggest reason why people purchase a gun: self-defense.

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Team Biden Continues Two-Pronged Assault on 2nd Amendment and Small Businesses

Happy Friday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Ertenzo felt most purposeful when adding a secret fourth bean to his three-bean salad for the annual Cornhole Club picnic.

The commie puppet masters who run Joe Biden’s brain have made no secret of their contempt for the Second Amendment and law-abiding American gun owners. They’ve had their senile mouthpiece babbling about “assault weapons” almost from the moment he was installed in the Oval Office.

Democrats don’t have a lot of luck with sweeping gun control legislation for a couple of reasons. First, they keep passing laws that make gun owners who have adhered to the law criminals overnight. These laws eventually find their way to a judge or a court that says, “Yeah…no.”

The other reason — and this is the big one — is that there are a lot of Democrats who own guns and are fond of their Second Amendment rights. Most of them are in flyover country, which is why a lot of the D.C. Dems are out of touch with reality.

Team Biden is nothing if not relentless in its pursuit of an anti-American agenda, however. Instead of the legislative process, the bureaucracy is being used to choke the life out of the Second Amendment, which Catherine wrote about yesterday:

The Biden administration, failing to get enough congressional cooperation to trample on the Second Amendment, continues its war against gun dealers.

Bingo.

As we examine the story further, it’s important to remember that Democrats have contempt for small business owners. People who can’t be forced into unionizing and stuffing the coffers of the Democratic Big Labor slush fund are useless to them.

Here’s more from Catherine’s post:

I previously wrote about how hundreds of gun dealers suddenly lost their licenses to Biden’s ATF, in what the gun industry says is a back-handed way of undermining gun rights  Some dealers informed the media that the federal government is hurting a major ally in identifying “suspicious gun buyers” by targeting legitimate gun dealers.

But the Biden administration is successfully hurting gun dealers’ business. “We were making $1 million a year, now it’s less than $100,000,” gun dealer Anthony Navarro told the Wall Street Journal. “This policy is designed to be a backdoor violation of the Second Amendment.” Now there’s the new ATF rule, also aimed at gun dealers.

I’m an Arizona resident. Rules regarding private gun sales are practically nonexistent. Both parties have to be Arizona residents and after that, YOLO. The Grand Canyon State has functioned with minimal gun laws for a very long time. My grandfather owned a gun store when I was a kid, so I know whence I speak (write). What the feds want to do now is get their fascist little fingers all over the transactions between individuals, which Ryan Petty explains at our sister site Bearing Arms:

The White House outlined that under the suggested guidelines, individuals would be expected to obtain a federal license and conduct background checks if they meet one or more of several conditions. These include frequently selling firearms shortly after purchasing them, offering guns in near-new condition, selling multiple units of the same gun model, or selling business inventory as a previously federally-licensed dealer without transferring it to a personal collection for at least one year, effectively targeting the so-called fire sale loophole. The proposed rules would establish criteria around the frequency and type of gun sales by unlicensed sellers, along with the condition of the firearms.

The Second Amendment infuriates leftists because the federal government hasn’t been able to wrest control of it from the states. It’s a perfect example of how the country is supposed to work. My good friend, colleague, and “Unwoke” podcast co-host Kevin Downey Jr. once asked me if all of my guns were legal. I replied, “In this state they are.” Were I to move back to California, the story would be different.

The anti-2A crowd is fond of saying, “We don’t want to take away your guns.”

They do, of course, but until they can, they’d like to make the legal acquisition of firearms so onerous that people just give up.

Federal Court Temporarily Halts ATF’s Labeling of Forced Reset Triggers as Machine Guns

The Northern District of Texas Federal Court has issued a temporary restraining order in favor of the National Association for Gun Rights in their legal battle against the ATF. This order will maintain the current situation in the case until either September 27, 2023, or until a decision is made on the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction.

The Association cited a precedent set by the 5th Circuit Court in the Cargill case, arguing that bump stocks should not be considered machine guns. Judge O’Connor concurred, suggesting that the Association has a strong likelihood of winning the case based on existing laws.

In a 2022 communication to federal firearms dealers, the ATF had classified ‘forced reset triggers’ (FRTs) as ‘firearms’ and ‘machine guns’ according to the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act.

Rare Breed Triggers initiated the sale of their Forced Reset Trigger in December 2020 after extensive legal review. However, by January 2021, the ATF had started campaigns to ban these triggers. Despite the ATF’s claim that public concerns initiated this action, Freedom of Information Act requests revealed no such concerns from the public had been recorded.

Dudley Brown, the President of the National Association for Gun Rights, commented that the restraining order represents progress in refuting the ATF’s questionable redefinition of ‘machine gun’ and aims to cease the agency’s overreach towards Rare Breed Triggers.

The lawsuit’s objective is to revoke the ATF’s prohibition on FRT triggers and safeguard the owners of these triggers from undue ATF intervention.

According to existing federal legislation, a ‘machine gun’ is a weapon capable of firing multiple rounds with a single trigger action. This longstanding definition, which the ATF is purportedly disregarding, makes it clear that Rare Breed Triggers’ FRT only enables the firing of one round per trigger action.

Hannah Hill, the Executive Director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights— the National Association for Gun Rights’ legal division—expressed optimism that the temporary restraining order is a positive indicator for a future preliminary injunction that would protect all their members.

Biden Administration Proposes Plan to Expand Who Needs a License to Sell Used Guns

President Joe Biden has announced a new proposal to expand the scope of federal gun dealing regulations to cover more people who sell used guns.

On Thursday, the Department of Justice submitted a new plan for determining who must obtain a federal firearms license to legally sell guns on the secondary market. The proposed rule would set limits on how frequently an unlicensed seller could offer up guns to customers, how often they can sell the same kind of gun, and what kind of condition the firearm has to be in before the seller would be required to get a Federal Firearms License (FFL). Anybody who violates the proposed regulations and sells a gun without a license could face up to $250,000 in fines and five years in federal prison or both.

“[U]nder the proposed rule, a person would be presumed to be required to become a licensed dealer and run background checks if they meet one or more of the following criteria,” the White House said in a release. “Offer for sale any number of firearms and also represents to potential buyers that they are willing and able to purchase and sell them additional firearms; Repetitively offer for sale firearms within 30 days after they were purchased; Repetitively offer for sale firearms that are like new in their original packaging; Repetitively offer for sale multiple firearms of the same make and model; or as a formerly federally-licensed firearms dealer, sell firearms that were in the business inventory and not transferred to a personal collection at least a year before the sale, addressing the so-called’ fire sale loophole.’”

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New Bill Would Stop VA Bureaucrats From Gaming The System To Grab Veterans’ Guns

A new bill from Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas would keep Biden administration bureaucrats at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) from meddling with veterans’ Second Amendment right to buy and own guns.

The legislation, introduced on Friday by Reps. Roy, Eli Crane of Arizona, Lance Gooden of Texas, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Andy Harris of Maryland, and Mary Miller of Illinois, specifically bars the VA from sending veterans’ names to the Department of Justice to be added to the federal government’s no-gun list.

Currently, the VA forces any veterans who want to appoint a fiduciary to manage their benefits to risk losing their Second Amendment rights. The expressed purpose of the fiduciary program, according to the VA, is “to protect Veterans and beneficiaries who are unable to manage their VA benefits through the appointment and oversight of a fiduciary.”

At no time during the fiduciary evaluation process does the VA determine if a veteran is a danger to himself or others. Yet, any veteran who is deemed “unable to manage” their benefits on their own by the VA is automatically barred from purchasing or owning firearms or ammunition.

Their names are distributed to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which federal firearm dealers use to determine a person’s eligibility for a gun purchase. There, veterans with fiduciaries are placed in an “adjudicated mental defective” category that indefinitely neuters their Second Amendment rights.

FBI data from 2023 shows that nearly 98 percent of the names placed in the NICS “mental defective” category by federal agencies were handed over to the FBI by the VA.

“You may be fined and/or imprisoned if you knowingly violate this law,” the VA warns.

A memo released by House Veteran Affairs Committee Chairman Mike Bost notes that the decision to name a fiduciary and disarm veterans is often made by “VA general schedule employees, not a court or similar judicial authority.” There is an appeals process for veterans who want “relief of firearms prohibitions imposed by the law” but whether or not that relief is granted is once again determined by the VA.

The committee estimates that “hundreds of thousands of veterans and their family members have been denied their constitutional right to bear arms” based on the judgment of low-level bureaucrats.

“America’s heroes should never have to fear losing their God-given right to self-defense simply for seeking the care they have earned in the process of protecting our republic,” Roy told The Federalist. “Yet, instead of focusing on securing the border or defeating foreign enemies like China, Democrats are set to take aim at our veterans’ Second Amendment rights. I am proud to take a stand for our veterans with this legislation and to fight to prevent the Biden administration from infringing on their fundamental human rights to bear arms in self-defense.”

ATF Has NO Authority To Change Rules & Definitions Of Guns Without Congressional Approval

The Second Amendment Foundation and its partners in a challenge of the “Final Rule” issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives redefining frames and receivers as firearms, have filed an appellee’s brief in the case, known as VanDerStok v. Garland.

The brief explains how ATF redefined the term “firearm” without any Congressional action. Last year, the agency announced a Rule expanding the definition of a firearm to include unfinished firearm components and kits used in the process of manufacturing a firearm. SAF and its partners are asserting ATF violated the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).

A federal district court judge agreed and concluded that ATF had acted in excess of its statutory authority and granted summary judgment.

SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb recently promised the organization will pursue this case “vigorously” as it winds through the court system.

“This case challenges the authority of the ATF to change rules and definitions of firearms without Congressional authority,” Gottlieb said. “We simply cannot allow any federal agency to make up its own rules as it goes along, without Congressional approval.”

SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut said the foundation “expects to prevail on the portions of the Final Rule that we challenged.”

“The district court entered a judgment deeming the Rule illegal and vacating it,” Kraut said, “and we are asking the Fifth Circuit to affirm the district court’s decision to issue relief based on the APA. By promulgating the Rule, ATF has appropriated authority reserved for Congress. Such a usurpation of power is antithetical to our system of government and must be stopped.”

Federal judge refuses to moot lawsuit challenging ban on handgun purchases by under-21s

Good news out of Virginia, where a federal judge has rejected a motion by the DOJ meant to moot a challenge to the federal statute barring handgun sales to adults younger than 21. Fraser v. ATF was filed back in June of last year by John Corey Fraser, a student at Hamden-Sydney College in Farmville, and despite efforts by the DOJ to have the case dismissed, in May U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne granted summary judgment in favor of Fraser and his co-plaintiffs, ruling that the law violates the Second Amendment rights of young adults.

DOJ had argued that because federal law only prohibits the commercial sale of handguns to under-21s, their rights were still intact because they could have a parent purchase a firearm for them, or could buy a handgun themselves in a private party sale. Payne rejected that reasoning, ruling that the Second Amendment not only encompasses the right to keep and bear arms but to buy one as well: “Even though an 18-to-20-year-old can possess a gun given by a parent, the constitutional right of that 18-to-20-year-old to purchase that gun would still be implicated by the regulations.”

That favorable ruling wasn’t the end of the story, however. Even before Payne’s decision, there was an unanswered question about whether Fraser’s case could be certified as a class action, and shortly after the judge granted summary judgment, Fraser and his attorneys filed a request for an injunction halting enforcement of the statute in question. Payne instructed the two sides to confer and come to an agreement on the next steps. According to the judge, DOJ and Fraser’s attorneys couldn’t find common ground on the class certification, which doesn’t surprise me. After all, if DOJ can keep the case stalled until Fraser and the other plaintiffs all turn 21, government attorneys could argue that the case is now moot. Certifying all under-21s as a class, on the other hand, would make it impossible for plaintiffs to age out of the litigation.

Fraser has, in fact, now reached the age where he can now walk into Farmville Sporting Goods and purchase a handgun himself, but his younger brother Justin asked to be added to the list of named plaintiffs just to ensure that the case can proceed. As expected, DOJ objected to the move, arguing that the motion wasn’t filed in a timely fashion and was an “improper attempt at post-judgment intervention.”

On Thursday Judge Payne once again rejected the DOJ’s position and granted the motion for the younger Fraser to become a party to the lawsuit. In a stinging rebuke to government attorneys, Payne scoffed at DOJ’s assertion that adding Justin Fraser would prejudice their position in the case by “allowing a litigant to reap the benefits of the Court’s summary judgment ruling without having to assume the risks of litigation.”

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IRS Backdating Of Documents Highlights Festering Cultural Rot: ‘If The IRS Doesn’t Play By The Rules, They’re The Mob.’

Bloomberg, IRS Backdating Court Order Spotlights Culture, Attorneys Say:

An unusual Tax Court order requiring the IRS to report what it knew and when about misstatements in a conservation easement case, as well as mounting claims of backdating forms at the agency, are highlighting what some tax attorneys said are festering IRS cultural problems, years in the making.

The Tax Court this week ordered the IRS to identify when agency personnel found out about misstatements to the court about the date that a $15.2 million penalty against conservation easement donor LakePoint was approved. …

Rod Rosenstein, former deputy attorney general under President Donald Trump, is representing LakePoint in a FOIA lawsuit against the IRS and told Bloomberg Tax he’s reached out to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

He plans to refer to the watchdog claims made by three other partnerships—Arden Row Assets LLC, Basswood Aggregates LLC, and Delwood Resources LLC—who are asking the IRS to admit its staff backdated penalty approval forms in their cases as well.

“The question is whether we’re seeing one isolated case or whether were seeing evidence of a pattern of misconduct in IRS,” Rosenstein said. “I think if you’ve looked at these other three cases, it does suggest that there is a pattern.” …

Tax attorneys say it’s the latest chapter highlighting festering issues of IRS culture being taken over by adversarial us-versus-them attitudes at the agency. Conservation easement cases have been especially contentious [Michelle Abroms Levin, a former Justice Department Tax Division attorney,] said.

“What they have now is a win-at-all-costs culture, and I hope we can shift back to a ‘Let’s find a right answer. Let’s find the correct amount,’” she said.

[Frank Agostino, a former IRS lawyer and Department of Justice criminal prosecutor] … said this attitude is eroding much-needed trust in the institution and fueling attitudes among taxpayers that the agency is breaking the rules to extract as much money from them as it can.

“We’re not the mob, but that’s the worry,” he said of the agency. “The IRS, if they don’t play by the rules, gets the perception of being the mob.”

August 25

79 – After 2 days, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius ends.

1609 – Galileo demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.

1814 – On the second day of their raid on Washington D.C.,  British troops torch the Library of Congress, United States Treasury, Department of War, and many other buildings.

1875 – Captain Matthew Webb becomes the first person to swim across the English Channel, traveling from Dover, England, to Calais, France

1894 – Kitasato Shibasaburō discovers the infectious bacteria of the bubonic plague – Yersinia pestis – and publishes his findings in British journal The Lancet.

1914 – Japan declares war on Austria-Hungary.

1916 – The United States National Park Service is created.

1942 – The Battle of the Eastern Solomons ends with U.S. aircraft from Guadalcanal sinking the Japanese destroyer Mutsuki, crippling and finally sinking the transport Kinryu Maru and damaging the cruiser Jintsu, causing the Japanese fleet to withdraw out of range at the northern Solomon islands.

1944 – Paris is liberated by the Allies.

1945 – In Xuzhou, China, Chinese Communist soldiers kill U.S. intelligence officer John Birch

1948 – The House Un-American Activities Committee holds the first televised congressional hearings with Whittaker Chambers testifying against suspected spy Alger Hiss.

1950 – To avert a threatened strike during the Korean War, President Truman orders Secretary of the Army Frank Pace to seize control of the nation’s railroads.

1981 – The Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Saturn.

1989 – The Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Neptune

1991 – Belarus declares its independence from the Soviet Union.

2001 – American singer Aaliyah and several members of her record company are killed as their overloaded aircraft, a Cessna 402, crashes shortly after takeoff from Marsh Harbour Airport, Bahamas.

2005 – Hurricane Katrina makes landfall in Florida as a Category 1 hurricane, before continuing on towards Louisiana, strengthening to  Category 5.

2012 – Voyager 1 becomes the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong dies at age 82 in Cincinnati, following surgery

2017 – Hurricane Harvey makes landfall in Texas as a Category 4 hurricane, killing 106 people and causing $125 billion in damage.

ATF’s director says the quiet part out loud and refers to inalienable rights as a ‘privilege’

What a bizarre development in American politics that has seen the federal government cultivate and embrace a fiery disdain for the very ideals upon which itself was founded.

An item published at The Western Journal [on the 19th] reported that the ATF is intensifying its war against the pro-gun portion of the body politic; from the article:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is escalating efforts to strip gun dealers of their federal firearms licenses.

The licenses, which enable businesses to sell firearms for profit, are being revoked in increasing numbers….

The ATF has yanked 122 federal firearms licenses, or FFL’s [sic], from dealers this fiscal year alone.

That’s up from 90 in all of fiscal year 2022, and merely 27 in fiscal year 2021.

In June of 2021, Department of Injustice’s Merrick Garland announced a new “Gun Crime Prevention Strategy” which in part, focused on compliance inspections of FFL businesses. Some of the offenses which would result in “notice of [license] revocation” included:

  • Refusal to allow an IOI [Industry Operations Investigator] to conduct an inspection
  • Transferring a firearm to a prohibited person
  • Failing to conduct a required background check
  • Falsifying records
  • Failing to respond to a trace request

Now aside from the fact that the ATF has absolutely no right to exist, I know enough about the bureau to know they have one of the worst reputations out of the more than 438 federal agencies, so it’s reasonable to assume at least some of the “compliance” investigations weren’t “lawful” — as loosely as you can use that term for an agency that’s unlawfully operating. Just because the ATF calls their unreasonable searches and seizures a “request” or a compliance “inspection” doesn’t make it so; I can only wonder if 122 firearms dealers last year told federal agents to take a hike until they came back with a warrant?

According to the Western Journal article, Joe Biden’s ATF Director Steve Dettelbach said of the business owners with revoked licenses, “They’re not going to have the privilege of being a gun dealer anymore.”

Someone needs to remind Dettelbach, and every other aspiring despot in Biden’s regime, that rights come from God, not government — the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, was written to affirm this reality, and this government, this brilliant and extraordinary new government conceived in liberty and born out of a rebellion to tyrants, would guarantee that it was not a benevolent authority doling out “privileges” at it saw fit, but rather a safeguard for inalienable rights that came from a moral Authority; nothing more, and nothing less.

Of course, the Founders emphasized that human beings have a right to self-defense, or to keep and bear arms as noted in the Second Amendment, and we have a right to autonomy and privacy, or the right to be secure in our persons, houses and effects, as noted in the Fourth Amendment.

Death by bureaucracy, or regulation, is the modus operandi of the gun-grabbers. They come after the brass mines with OSHA; they use the CDC to declare “gun violence” an epidemic; they buy out reloading supplies on the market for years to come via FDA and NIH government contracts ; they choke out the points of sale with the ATF’s “Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Policy.”

Strangely, you rarely read news stories about the ATF targeting anybody other than the gun community; it was never really about alcohol or tobacco now was it?

Leaked Photos Show Jan 6 Prisoner Tortured, Held in Horrific Conditions for Months

New photos have been leaked from a Philadelphia prison, exposing the horrific conditions that a Jan. 6 prisoner is being subjected to.

The images show Jan. 6 prisoner Ryan Samsel pictured in the closet room he has been held in isolation for the past five months. Samsel has been held in prison without trial since January 2021.

During his two-and-a-half years in jail, Ryan has been moved around to 17 different facilities. He has been beaten, abused, tortured, and neglected since his arrest in January 2021.

The new photos were leaked from the FDC in Philadelphia to The Gateway Pundit.

The cell was a size of a closet with a light on 24 hours a day. The cell doesn’t have a bed and only offers a thin blue mattress on the floor with no sheets or blankets. With no clothing, Samsel was kept in this cell for five months straight.

In a conversation this week, Samsel told The Gateway Pundit: “I was kept in … a hard cell.

“And in that particular cell about five, six months. I even told you what was happening is the judge was actually calling, trying to get in contact with me because I wasn’t in a named cell.

“They were missing me and they were saying I wasn’t showing up to court. They were saying I wasn’t showing up to medical. But they were pretty much keeping me in there… Like I said, it was cold, the light was on, there’s zero window. And that followed me from Virginia. When I was in Virginia, it was the same exact conditions.”

Ryan described the same situation in Virginia.

“I was kept in and they called it booking hard cell, which is you get zero phone, zero commissary, zero clothing because they think that you’re going to hang yourself and you’re on constant surveillance. You’re under surveillance constantly. The light has to be on 24/7. You’re locked in a cell. There is no getting out,” he noted. The windows in Virginia were covered by a black mat, so you weren’t able to see. And it’s constant nothing. It’s deprivation of everything.”

Samsel believes the government tortured him for months so he would testify against the Proud Boys. Samsel says he was beaten numerous times and was kept locked down so he couldn’t communicate with anyone.

He is not alone, however.

Numerous Jan. 6 prisoners have been held for months in torturous conditions, dozens have been sentenced to extreme sentences for non-violent crimes. A fundraising campaign has been set up to help raise money for Sansels legal fees.

Freedom

After reading stories about the abuse suffered at the hands of police that are detaining J6 defendants for trial, knowing how cops will abuse and torture prisoners, and how they are transferring them to Supermax prisons, I am not surprised at the J6 defendants that are simply skipping out on their trials and sentencing hearings:

The people who are doing this have realized that they have nothing left to lose. Their freedom, property, and likely their lives are forfeit at this point. The cops will eventually find them, and if they aren’t killed during the arrest, they will spend the rest of their lives in prison, or at least the parts of it that matter.

With nothing left to lose, it’s only a matter of time before someone in this position decides to give the left the insurrection that they are already accused of perpetrating.