Turning Brownouts Into Blackouts

In the latest insanity emanating from California, we see this:

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed a regulation aimed at “Small Off-Road Engines” on Thursday that will ban the sale of portable generators in the state — which includes generators mounted in recreational vehicles.
The ruling bans the sale of gas-powered leaf blowers and lawnmowers in the state beginning in 2024. Portable generators will be required to meet more stringent standards in 2024 and meet zero-emission standards starting in 2028.
In the 2024 model year, portable generators will have to improve their efficiency by somewhere between 40% and 90%, which seems unrealistic in such a short period of time, so the reality is, it will be very hard to find a generator in Cailfornia in two years.

The song will be rewritten to show that the lights all went out not in Massachusetts, but California.

Morons, fools, imbeciles.


N.B.:  Insty wants to open up a portable jennie store in Nevada, just over the CA border.  Won’t work:  California will be stationing some Stasi state agents in the parking lot to report the car numbers back to the Fuehrer HQ , and woe betide the CA plates caught “smuggling” generators back into the Dark State.)

Responding To Tyranny

Holy shit.

Devid R killed himself, his wife Linda and their daughters after he faked a Covid-19 jab certificate and feared his children would be taken away when it was discovered.
Police found two adults, both 40, and three children aged four, eight and 10 dead from gunshot wounds in a family home in Koenigs Wusterhausen south of Berlin on Saturday.
In a farewell note found by police, the man, named as Devid R, said he forged a vaccination certificate for his wife Linda. Her employer had found out, prompting the couple to fear they would be arrested and lose their children.

This is the result of totalitarianism, where someone is so fearful of disproportionate government punishment that they end up doing something horrible.

This is a catalogue of catastrophes, from government putting pressure on companies to enforce Covid-related regulation, to a man doing something stupid just so his family’s income can be protected, to the threat of losing his children for doing so, and the whole tragic consequence.

Understand:  I’m not excusing this guy nor his actions.  What I’m saying is that excessive government action — most especially when it comes to threats against families — can have the direst outcomes when a man (rightly or wrongly) perceives that he is cornered and helpless.

And something else the government — in this case the German, but it could be any government — should note is that they got off lightly.  Our late friend happened to shoot his own family on this occasion;  but he could just as easily have shot the government agents first when they showed up to take his kids away, and then turned the gun on his family.

Perhaps he should have,

Kindred Spirit

SOTI:

Earlier this month, a man was arrested after he allegedly threatened to kill TSA agents. “This is a free country,” he said before swinging a line post at officers who shocked him with a stun gun, according to charges brought against the man. Shortly before his confrontation with TSA, he was reportedly seen headbutting TV screens, stripping naked and masturbating in the airport.

Now who among us can claim never to have wanted to do all that?

I know:  you never go Full Belushi.

Eucalyptus Now

Impossible?  I don’t think so, and nor does this guy, in a very thoughtful and clear essay:

Talk of insurrection, secession, civil conflict and civil war is no longer the chatter of the gullible and the mentally ill.

The year 2021 has thus far been a spectacular year for signs of political decline: the US has now seen all the notable “horsemen of the apocalypse” that historically herald strife and revolution appear, one after another. Political division among its elites, increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the population, military defeat abroad, and a new and very ominous crisis in the real economy, with no end date in sight.
Any one of these crises would be bad enough on their own; taken together, they represent a truly serious threat to the stability of the current order.

Read the whole thing.

To my mind, the question is not whether the U.S. would survive a civil war (because it would);  it’s what it would look like afterwards.  The situation is nowhere close to the First Civil War of 1860, the end of which simply restored the country to the status quo ante.  That’s not going to happen this time.

I don’t need to remind anyone on this website that National Ammo Day is in two days’ time, do I?

Payback. Bitch.

I report, you decide.

A cyclist who sparked outrage in Belgium last year after he went viral for kneeing a young girl to the ground during her family’s Christmas Day walk is now suing her dad for sharing the video online.
The footage was filmed by five-year-old Neia’s dad, Patrick Mpasa, during their family walk in a nature reserve in Baraque Michel, Liege Province, on December 25, 2020.
In the video, the five-year-old girl is seen walking by her mother’s side on the snow-covered path as the cyclist approaches them from behind. Just as he rides alongside the girl, he seemingly extends his knee out, hitting the little girl and knocking her to the ground before continuing on his way unbothered.
The cyclist was taken to court in Verviers, only to be given a suspended sentence on the grounds that he had been criticised enough on social media and was ordered to pay the girl’s family a symbolic and pitiful €1 in compensation.

And the best part:

Now, almost a year after the incident, the cyclist is heading back to court to sue the girl’s father for defamation on the grounds that the backlash the video received resulted in him feeling so threatened by the public he was scared to leave his own house.

Act like an asshole, get treated like one.  And for the legal action?  Dismissed with costs, if there’s any justice left in the world.

Cyclists act like they own the fucking road, anyway.

Selling Air

I remember my dad’s quizzical look when he first learned that water was being sold in bottles.  “Selling water?  Why don’t they sell air with it?” was the printable part of his response,  (Yeah, I know, apples, trees… whatever.)

I confess to having pretty much the same reaction when Combat Controller pointed me at this latest example of foolishness:

Now I have to confess that I thought that this was a spoof / satirical website, and actually refused to believe my friend’s statement that this was, in fact, a bone fide  “product” and not some gag to be played on the gullible.  Or a piece of Harry Potter merchandise.

However, Doggery’s “craft ice” is being sold in stores, and CC sent me photographic proof thereof.

JHC.

There are two schools of thought on this kind of thing.  The first is that of people like Combat Controller, who suggests that we as a nation are so prosperous that we can afford to sell stuff like this, and find a market for it.

I, however, see this as some kind of portent, similar to those things and events which may have appeared a couple of years before the Roman Empire collapsed into ruins.

On the other hand, my dad thought the same about bottled water, and here we still are, lo these many years later.

Your thoughts in Comments.