Archive for the 'Politics' Category

How awesome would it be for Paul Nehlen to unseat long-time gun controller Paul Ryan?  I guess we can wish, and hope and pray.

The Alaskan remarks thusly.

Had he been a precision sniper, given the target rich environment and the ability to follow up shots in such an environment, his gruesome tally would’ve been much deadlier, I believe.

The manner in which he carried out his mission seems to have been weighed more heavily towards the political sphere and the “shock” of it all, than the actual “targeted” killing of individuals, as would have been the the case if optics and precision shooting had been the tactic.

Bump stocks just aided in his mission of “shock and awe,” which really seems to have been his motive to his madness.

I believe so too, and that’s just the point made by Mark Quimby (via Codrea).  I believe that this is the Mark Quimby here.

When we discussed Spenser Rapone, remember that I said this.

But to the collectivists, there are still tried and true, staid institutions such as the military, and even football.  The Marxists have managed literally to transform the culture of the college campus, a battle that was begun some 50 years ago and won well before the attention turned directly (rather than opaquely) towards white, middle class, Christian America.  The battles aren’t just beginning for them.  This is the end game for them, unless America turns to weapons to settle the war decisively.

The end game involves the terraforming of the institutions in which America has [foolishly] placed its trust.

So it doesn’t surprise me at all to read this.

Rapone has come under fire and become the subject of an Army investigation after reports emerged of his open and unabashed support for communism and tweets he made calling for political violence and referring to Secretary of Defense James Mattis as an “evil, vile f***.”

In a Reddit post regarding Manning, Rapone spelled out some of his motivations for remaining in the military and exactly what he wanted to accomplish while serving as a second lieutenant in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division. Those motivations included Manning’s decision to leak national security documents to WikiLeaks.

Notably, Manning was also part of the 10th Mountain Division.

“I’m currently an infantry officer at Ft. Drum, NY assigned to the same brigade that she was while enlisted,” Rapone wrote in a post. “Every single day I think of the contradictions of being a communist while in this organization, and her courage and tenacity gives me strength to continue the long march through the institutions.”

The “long march” comment refers to a strategy of institutional infiltration and subversion coined by student activist Rudi Dutschke but originally developed by Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist thinker whose thought developed in the wake of the failure of economic determinism to bring about a revolution.

Think deeply about what you’ve seen happen over your lifetime and what you’re seeing now and this will all make perfect sense – if you’re even half awake and sentient.

Here is a recent graduate of West Point.

His name is Spenser Rapone.  His introduction to fame and glory apparently came from being associated with “Veterans for Kaepernick.”  AR15.com has a discussion on him, and West Point has issued a statement of condemnation of his actions.

Don’t be surprised.  And be aware that the NFL protests, childish and sophomoric that they are, aren’t about the American flag any more than the Antifa protests are about freedom and liberty.  Spenser and the NFL are related.

On the one hand, there are those who [mistakenly] say that “While I don’t support their views, they have a constitutional right to do what they’re doing.”  There are others who assert that no true patriot should risk his life for the benefit of multinational corporations.  Both of these views miss the point of all of this.

True enough, I begged my youngest son Daniel to get out of the Marine Corps when it came time to reenlist back in 2008 – 2009.  I told him he could possibly fight and lose a limb or die for the sake of helping one Islamist army defeat another Islamist army, the entire purpose being to open up rat lines for oil and weapons plays in Northern Africa for American elitists.  That warning turned out to be prescient, and I’m glad to say he listened to me.

But to the collectivists, there are still tried and true, staid institutions such as the military, and even football.  The Marxists have managed literally to transform the culture of the college campus, a battle that was begun some 50 years ago and won well before the attention turned directly (rather than opaquely) towards white, middle class, Christian America.  The battles aren’t just beginning for them.  This is the end game for them, unless America turns to weapons to settle the war decisively.

The end game involves the terraforming of the institutions in which America has [foolishly] placed its trust.  It’s no mistake that gun controllers and collectivists such as David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal were flag officers, and even into the ranks of staff officers there were many like Lt. Col. Robert Bateman, who is well known to most of my readers.  My son Daniel had some very direct thoughts about Bateman you might want to read again.  You can add to that growing list of collectivists young, ideologically leftist officers like Spenser Rapone.

Writing as @punkproletarian, He attacks his very alma mater as racist, but if you read into the first several paragraphs, you’ve read enough.  This may be managed by a wealthy benefactor such George Soros (who of course has hired many of the Antifa protesters), or it may not be.  It doesn’t matter.  The rot is so deep that the cancer cannot be excised.

As to the NFL protests, if you believe in property rights, contracts and covenants, you must hold to the view that a player doesn’t just have the right to do anything he wants to do, any time he wants to do it, any more than I do as an employee of a corporation.  I have no right to disparage my corporation in public, and as an at-will employee, my company has a right to fire me should I violate that trust.  The first amendment has no bearing on this subject.

This all leads us to the conclusion that the NFL owners must be in agreement with the protests, or at least not in disagreement enough to risk angering their employees.  Their employees, the players, want more bling to wear when out clubbing, or something, they know not what, and cannot communicate it to us because most of them are as dumb as a bag of rocks.  But we have nothing in common with them, not even a point of contact or agreement to which we can point.

If they object to overbearing police presence because of some black boy who didn’t pay taxes, lived off the public dole his whole life, stole whatever he wanted, and decided to walk down the middle of a road he didn’t own before he beat the hell out of someone, or if someone objects that Philado Castile was shot by the cops, we may object that white people have guns pointed at them all the time, have their dogs shot all the time, and get bullied all the time.  This has nothing to do with race, notwithstanding whatever the blacks who take the knee want us to think.

Here’s the point.  What the statists are telling you is that not even the flag, the U.S. military, or something so watched as NFL football constitutes a point of collaboration between you and them.  There can be no compromise.  They are in this to win, and just like the Chinese who sent men until the machine guns barrels overheated into South Korea, they are willing to sacrifice anyone or anything to get their way.  Civil war is coming should America eventually decide to settle this conflict with weapons.  If not, it’s essentially over.

As a final thought, I haven’t watched a professional sports game for so long I can’t remember.  I don’t do professional sports.  For those of you who do, find another way to spend your time.  Go hiking.  Find some intermediate or advanced single track and go mountain biking for the workout of your life.  Go to a park and read to your children or grandchildren.  Enjoy the shooting sports.  But if you sit on a couch all Sunday and watch someone else play games, you’re the same as a crack addict who devotes his life to something that pays no return.

Via Eugene Volokh.

Like Secretary Clinton, the supporters of the bills put before Congress to repeal PLCAA argue that no other industry enjoys the legal shield that the gun industry does — giving as counter-examples firms such as auto companies, pharmaceutical drug companies and even tobacco companies.

They are right to some extent …. [But] would there be widespread tort liability for gun companies were both PLCAA and state pre-emption laws all repealed?

The central argument I will put forward is that it is not easy to find good examples from other important industries of defendants being held liable for the sorts of cases that gun victim plaintiffs would like to win.

Take the motor vehicle accident problem. It is well understood that car companies make vehicles intended to be sold to ordinary drivers that are capable of going more than 100 miles per hour even though that is well more than the maximum road speed allowed. Surely the car companies know that some owners regularly drive faster than, say, 75 miles per hour and cause accidents because of their speeding. Product liability law today generally requires product makers to take into account foreseeable product misuse.

Does this make cars involved in very high speed crashes defectively designed? Although there is something appealing about this idea, I don’t see successful cases being brought on this theory, and given the record so far I’d be surprised if they were successful.

Next, I imagine that in today’s high-tech world motor vehicles could be engineered so that (perhaps absent an emergency) they could not be driven faster than the posted speed limit on the road on which they are currently travelling (and I assume that self-driving cars currently have and will continue to have this feature). Does the failure to include this speed-control function in all of today’s new motor vehicles make them defective so that the manufacturer would be liable in tort to victims of drivers whose speeding (at any speed) causes accidents? This too is an appealing idea, but I don’t see such cases.

It’s only appealing if you’re a nanny-state control freak.  As for cars engineered with governors, don’t give the progressives any more ideas for things they can regulate.

I’ll just remark one more time that the free-for-all hippie culture –love, peace and feel-good – which made its living complaining about signs and other such rules, believed in absolutely nothing and held to no morals or scruples.  Their empty minds became vessels for the poison fed to them, and within short order (one generation), the generation of free wheeling liberty became the cabal of controllers.

The sons and daughters of hippies are nanny-state, government-worshipping control freaks searching for the next thing to regulate so they can bring ubiquitous sameness and monolithic utopia to the world.

BPR:

The group’s website also seeks to abolish of gender and calls for its members to steal tools and lands so that it can build its own state, independent of the United States.  RAM also plans to build local “defense teams” and councils as well as national councils.

The group models its movement on the far left Rojava Revolution in Syria, and praises communism as providing a “foundation in communal and council based political organization and militant defense.”

A website video rife with anarchy and violence heavily hints at an armed revolution to destroy the government.

One of my commenters, Fred, said this.

I’m not a fan of genocide so this has my attention. The fact that I appear to be on the menu for genocide has my undivided attention. It should be noted that both the right and the left want Christians gone so I’m back to neutral. Events may dictate any number of things. If either side wants to hang me on a cross so be it but I ain’t nailing myself to it. People are going die, lot’s of people. As you and many commenters here have noted, Jesus was not pacifist pussy.

These guys will eventually be arrested – all of them.  They are nothing more than the shock troops for the deep state, just like the Sturmabteilung, and the Night of the Long Knives will come for them too.  But it behooves us to be paying attention to the cold winds, just like Fred.

Via WRSA, Brent Bozell:

There is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Put them together. They are the swamp.

Just as Republicans have the power to enact the agenda they’ve pledged in toto, so too do they now own the federal government, in toto. It’s no longer Obamacare. It’s GOPcare. It’s no longer crazy liberal Democratic spending. It’s crazy liberal Republican spending. It’s no longer socialist Democratic Party taxation, it’s socialist Republican Party taxation. All the legislation authorizing all these programs, all the graft, all the waste, all the obscenity, all the immorality, and where Planned Parenthood is concerned, all the killing — all of it is now formally authored by the Republican Party.

Ayup.  Nailed it.  And yet the GOP goes blithely along, thinking that all will be well.  Collapse is coming, a collapse in civility, a collapse of the economy, a collapse of order, and a collapse of liberty when the deep state begins to sense that it is losing control of things.

Be prepared.

Roy Cooper has called for the removal of Confederate monuments on North Carolina state property.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper says Confederate monuments “should come down” and wants the legislature to repeal a law preventing state and local governments from removing them permanently and limiting their relocation.

In a message posted Tuesday on the website Medium, Cooper said North Carolina “cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery.”

This is worth a bit of discussion.  Before the war between the states, the understanding that it was a war “against the United States of America” presupposes the outcome of the war.  Or in other words, membership is said states was seen as the right of association, and secession was seen as the exercise of that right.

Furthermore, no one I know who really understands the war between the states thinks that it was fought over slavery.  In order to understand the thinking at the time, one must understand that slavery was on its way out, would not have lasted, and was effectively obsolete given industrialization.

My now-deceased professor, Dr. C. Gregg Singer, could quote sermons from R. L. Dabney and James Henley Thornwell virtually from memory, as well as many lesser known pastors in the South.  None of the discussions at the time had to do with preserving slavery, but they all pointed to whether the states could allow a centralized government to dictate to them much of anything seen as rightfully under the control of the states.

The notion that the war between the states was fought “in defense of slavery” is nothing more than virtue-signaling by Cooper, or else he is an idiot.  Reverence to confederate monuments has to do with a philosophy of decentralized government, not slavery, smaller government, not more control, reverence for time-honored institutions, and liberty from a quarrelsome, meddlesome government and ruling class.

Roy Cooper’s project in North Carolina won’t be the last you see of this.  Stone Mountain is next, and then CNN has an entire list of monuments they think need to come down, essentially all of them.  This is a war against what America was, and what the progressives want it to become, with the skirmishes (and ultimately the larger battles to come) being so much the better because it justifies more state control for the purpose of safety, security and stability.  You can see law enforcement in the role of national stability operations as we speak, and even aiding and assisting the transition.  The police will never say there isn’t a need for greater stability.

Now, enter the fake-conservative Rich Lowry, at National Review.

… his statue is now associated with a campaign of racist violence against the picturesque town where Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. The statue of Lee was already slated for removal by the city, but the Battle of Charlottesville should be an inflection point in the broader debate over Confederate statuary.

The monuments should go. Some of them simply should be trashed; others transmitted to museums, battlefields, and cemeteries. The heroism and losses of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated, but not in everyday public spaces where the monuments are flashpoints in poisonous racial contention, with white nationalists often mustering in their defense.

[ … ]

For supporters of the Confederate monuments, removing them from parks and avenues will be a blow against their heritage and historical memory. But the statues have often been part of an effort to whitewash the Confederacy. And it’s one thing for a statue to be merely a resting place for pigeons; it’s another for it to be a fighting cause for neo-Nazis.

I have nothing to do with neo-Nazis, and my knowledge of the culture of the South, the lead up to the war between the states, and how my brethren in the South see their station in life now far surpasses anything Lowry could muster.  He’s just virtue-signaling as well, just like Cooper.  The good news for him is that this seals his place in the Cocktail parties in the beltway.  He can continue to drink with his progressive buddies in peace and respect.

The bracing news for the rest of us is that this battle is coming our way, and no one has the stomach to tell the truth about things, certainly not the fake conservatives inside the beltway or in Northeast.  Monuments are just that, symbols.  They are important symbols to be sure, but in the end they are still just symbols.  What’s significant is that they represent the first fruits of the war against Southern and conservative culture.  The progressives won’t stop with symbols.

Courthouse News Service:

A Cleveland security guard claims in court that the city has refused to return his guns that were used as evidence after he shot and killed a home invader, even though the case against the intruder’s accomplice is over.

Brian Bridges sued the City of Cleveland, Mayor Frank Jackson and Police Chief Calvin Williams on Thursday in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, alleging violations of his Second and Fourth Amendment rights.

In March 2015, Bridges came home to find two men robbing his house. During the ensuing confrontation, Bridges fatally shot one of the invaders, Joseph Eason.

“The shooting was in self defense and was justifiable,” Bridges’ lawsuit states.

The other suspect, Anthony Akins-Daniels, escaped, but he was eventually found and arrested. He pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for causing the death of his “best friend,” Eason.

Bridges claims Cleveland police unlawfully seized his property, “including a Glock 21 semiautomatic handgun, ammunition, holsters and a redcherry piccolo,” to be used as evidence in Akins-Daniels’ case.

Despite the fact that the criminal proceedings against Akins-Daniels are over, police have not returned Bridges’ guns, he says.

Bridges noted in his complaint that he is a professional security guard and has a license to carry a concealed handgun.

He sued for replevin and violation of the Second and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Bridges seeks $20,000 in compensatory damages and $50,000 in punitive damages. He also wants an injunction to stop the city from “enforcing any policy and/or actions that infringe upon a lawful gun owner’s right to keep and bear arms.”

The temptation of any attorney is to play up the ideas that (a) he’s a “guard,” he (b) has a permit, and (c) he was exonerated.

None of those things matter.  What matters is that asset forfeiture and seizure, even if supported by existing laws, are immoral.  They reek of royal ownership of personal property, and thus don’t even consider that a war was fought over just such things.

The owners of property, even if convicted in court, should get a chance to sell their property, give it to their family, or otherwise dispose of it in any way they deem appropriate.  It’s theirs.  Their property doesn’t belong to the state, to the king or queen, or to society at large.

This is one reason I oppose the modern concept of incarceration, as well as the notion and phrase that any man has a “debt to society” that must be paid.  No man has a debt to society.  If he has stolen he has a debt to the victim.  If he murders, rapes or kidnaps, he should be put to death.

Here’s a quick note to lawmakers everywhere.  Get rid of asset forfeiture and seizure laws.  Men’s property isn’t yours.  It doesn’t belong to you.

He seems like a good, decent and honorable man.

“The Second Amendment, while it allows citizens to protect themselves from other citizens, goes well beyond just allowing us to defend ourselves from a criminal,” Green said at a pro-gun rally in 2013.

He has withdrawn his name.

President Donald Trump’s choice for Army secretary withdrew his nomination Friday after mounting criticism over past statements he made about gays and lesbians, Muslims and other groups.

Mark Green, a Republican Tennessee state senator from Clarksville, pulled his name from consideration in a short statement Friday afternoon that said his nomination had become a distraction “due to false and misleading attacks against me.”

His decision came before confirmation hearings had even started for the West Point graduate and former Army medic — just four weeks after Trump picked him for the post.

“Tragically, my life of public service and my Christian beliefs have been mischaracterized and attacked by a few on the other side of the aisle for political gain,” Green said. “While these attacks have no bearing on the needs of the Army or my qualifications to serve, I believe it is critical to give the president the ability to move forward with his vision to restore our military to its rightful place in the world.

“Camie and I look forward to finding other opportunities to use our gifts to serve others and help make America great again.”

Once again, he seems like a very good, very decent and very honorable man.  I wish he were president instead of the jerk we’ve got who apparently wouldn’t fight the good fight to get him confirmed.  When I think of the Senate and House I think of a gaggle of demons, gargoyles and pit vipers, or perhaps the consortium of pigs in “Animal Farm.”

Color me unsurprised that Trump didn’t want to fight for him.  Color me unsurprised that the collectivists and God-haters wanted him defeated.  And color me unsurprised that he was gracious in his withdrawal.  Again, he seems like a very good, very decent and very honorable man.