Textbook Steps

Let’s open with a little received wisdom:

“There’s no way to rule innocent men.  The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.  Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them.  One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

That first sentence says it all.  As long as you keep on the right side of the law, you have nothing to fear from authority.

Now’s when it gets tricky, because politicians cannot resist making laws, and as the number of laws grows, so does the chance that you will fall afoul of one of them, no matter how hard you try.  As one FBI agent once put it:  “This is America.  Nobody can go a day without breaking some law or other.”  And that was said in 1998.  The fact that this could be said with pride — or resignation — makes me want to reach for the tar and feathers, but that’s only my reaction to the first step.  There are more.

The next step is to make transgressors into “Enemies Of The People” or (in the case of the Chinkvirus) a “Menace To Society”.  In sociological terms, this is called “scapegoating” or in extreme cases, demonization.  We’ve seen this in the past, of course, such as when the disgusting Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) publishes their various “hate lists” which set out to demonize as “hate groups” first the easy targets such as the KKK, and eventually the most innocuous organizations (e.g. campus-based Republican organizations).  From that. it’s easy to apply the perjorative term du jour  (“racist”, “Nazi”, “fascist” etc.) to whomever doesn’t agree with your position on anything.

Beyond labeling, of course, lies social shaming, “doxxing”, and the “cancel culture.”  After that, the force of law.  (We already have such laws on the books;  murdering someone in cold blood:  bad.  Murdering someone and calling them a dirty nigger at the same time:  somehow worse.)  At some point, it will become an actual crime to say the word niggerniggernigger anywhere, even inside your own home, First Amendment be damned.  And why not? seeing as racism has become punishable by law, any number of asterisks can be attached to the freedom of speech, of course.

“But the Supreme Court will intervene!”  Don’t make me laugh.  As an entity, the fucking Supreme Court has shown itself to be as useful as a paper-towel birdscreen on an airliner’s jet engine when it comes to protecting our rights.

Which leads us to the next Amendment, of course.

Now the Second has some issues for our wannabe-tyrants, of course, because gun owners are, well, armed (always a decent albeit drastic check on government excess).  And disarmament is likely to prove difficult if not impossible, simply because even if only 1% of gun owners turn violent, that’s still a greater number than the number of law enforcement officers who would be tasked with doing the job.

There is another way to disarm gun owners, and it’s quite legal:  pass a law or regulation that requires gun owners to pay a tax on some or all of their firearms, and when they refuse… ta-dah!  Not only can the government use the I.R.S. to harass and prosecute, but because the refuseniks are de facto  lawbreakers (refusal to pay federal taxes is a federal crime), they can be prohibited from owning firearms altogether once convicted of said crime.  (Remember, trying to win a case against the I.R.S. in their own court system is 99.99% impossible, as to win, all they have to do is show that they acted properly in terms of their own regulations.)

Which is why the Socialists’ plan to tax “assault rifles” is such a pernicious act.  If it ever becomes law (or a regulation under an Executive Order), we gun owners are fucked, pure and simple.

We can expect no help from the judiciary, as I noted above.  We can likewise expect no help from local law enforcement refusing to enforce these un-Constitutional acts either, because the Biden Administration will just deploy federal agents (I.R.S., FBI, Fish & Wildlife, Postal inspectors — anyone they can bring to bear) and bypass your friendly sheriff’s deputies altogether.

And don’t think that there will be some kind of passive resistance from local law enforcement, either.  If little Ector County in Texas (!!!) can deploy Meal Team Six just to shut down a fucking bar which stayed open defying a stupid Chinkvirus lockdown order passed by some local asshole mayor, believe me, you’re not going to be safe in your little suburban or rural bunker no matter how angry you are and how many rounds of 5.56mm ammo you have on hand.

I’m not often a doomsayer, but this is one of those occasions.

I’m also not given to issuing threats or warnings, so don’t expect some kind of challenge to come from me either.  Let’s just see what happens, shall we?

Test

I think I may have figured out what was happening with WordPoop (think “automatic update” and you won’t be far from the truth).  To test this, please respond in comments if the entire passage below gets posted (it ends, “So Jules licks the symbol at the end of the first chapter…” )

Julia (“Jules”) Wakefield is a twenty-five year old secretary who works at a British government agency, in a department so boring and inconsequential that everybody who’s ever worked there leaves it off their resume.

That’s during the day. At night, however, she is a fantasy maven: a mistress of a popular Internet website which explores and plays in the world of fantasy, and she is constantly looking out for The Next Big Fantasy Thing for her many hundreds of online fans and followers.

So when she discovers that her little neighborhood bookstore has found an obscure fantasy series from the 1930s, she buys the books; but when she reads them, she’s puzzled. The writing isn’t much good, the characters nothing unusual for the fantasy world, and the scenarios, while filled with erotic adventure, are quite bland, even though they do feature the standard fare of goblins, trolls, fairies and elves.

She posts her opinion online, and is mortified at the response from her readers in the comments section: “Missed the point,” “How could you be unmoved by the experience?” and the most cutting, “I thought you were smarter than this” are but a few of the remarks. She’s about to close the comments, when the very last one appears: “Did you not lick the symbol?

Jules has no idea what this means, so she emails the commenter for an explanation, and in the response, she discovers the secret of the books’ popularity.

At the end of each chapter there appears a large, strange symbol (a different one for each book). Her reader tells her that if Julie licks the symbol, she will instantly be transported into the book and story itself, and will appear as a participant in the story at the beginning of the chapter, as the storyteller. (All the books are written in the first person.) When the chapter ends, the reader explains, she will be returned to reality, none the worse for wear, with absolutely no time having elapsed since she licked the symbol, and the chapter will have been magically rewritten with herself as the new storyteller, and the symbol will have disappeared.

The only problem is that while in the story, if she changes any part of the storyline in any way, even by misquoting the dialogue, the entire story will change from that point on, and she will not be able to control what happens. Only the occurrence of the last sentence in the original chapter can bring her back to reality—e.g. “At that moment, the door to the room opened, and a strange figure entered the room.

The kicker is that if the last sentence cannot occur—say, if the door has already been destroyed by a phantom attacker—then she will no longer be able to return to reality, and will be trapped inside the story until the end of the next chapter. Worse still, if she happens to be killed in the story, she will instantly be transported back to reality, and could suffer a fatal heart attack, or not.

So Jules licks the symbol at the end of the first chapter…

And yes, it’s the premise for a series of novels I had planned to write several years ago, but lost interest therein because “fantasy”.


Update:  Okay, I think I’ve figured it out.  Normal service will resume tomorrow.

Monday Funnies

Is it just my imagination, or are the weeks getting short?  I’m pretty sure that some bastard stole my Saturday… not to mention a couple of my posts.  And my email is still fucked (sendee, no receivee).

So to escape Teh Worries, Teh Funneez:

Good question.  Let’s ask Brie Bella, twin sister of last week’s Nikki:

Now go away and let me tackle my systems issues… aaaaargh.

A Short Stroll Through The 70s

When talking about 1970s music, too much time is spent on the loud stuff:  Zep, Foreigner, Grand Funk Railroad, and so on.  Ditto all the prog-rock of the era like Pink Floyd, Genesis.  Yeah, I love listening to all that;  but I also like the quieter stuff — and I don’t mean the Carpenters or Abba, either.

Many of the 70s stars actually got their start in the 1960s, but it was in the following decade that they really got going.

Here’s an example:  the peerless songwriter Dave Mason, formerly of 60s band Traffic, doing We Just Disagree.  If you listen to this as an appetizer for the rest of this post, I think you’ll get in the proper mood.

In that vein, here’s Stephen Stills and the others doing Southern Cross, and while we’re there, let’s also consider Orleans doing Dance With Me  and Exile being naughty with Kiss You All Over.

But it wasn’t all ballads like Kate Bush doing The Man With The Child In His Eyes, of course;  not when David Bowie was performing songs like Lady Grinning Soul, or .


Update:  I think WordPress ate half my post.  Apologies, and I’ll add the rest when I can retrieve it.

Wiki-plead-ia

If you happen to go to Wikipedia nowadays, you’re confronted with this banner:

Neutral and verified information?  And yet, time and time again we’re faced with situations like this:

Since the election of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Wikipedia editors have been downplaying or removing mention of controversies from her page. This has included minimizing mention of antisemitism controversies over her comments about Israel and its supporters, excluding mention of personal scandals, and censoring details about Turkish lobbying ties. Editors have meanwhile given considerable attention to alleged mistreatment of her by others, particularly President Donald Trump who editors tied to threats Omar received.
Omar’s treatment on Wikipedia regarding antisemitism, where editors have kept such allegations out of her page’s introduction in favor of more benign descriptions of her views on Israel, stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of various Republican officials.

And there are more, much more examples.  Even one of their founders thinks they’re full of shit.

So to the Wikipedia people who want my money:  fuck you.  I hope you dance the wokey-pokey.