Category: Bureaucracy

Petty Tyrants

Bureaucracy

We’ve all seen stories about homeowners’ associations (HOAs) setting themselves up as mini-fiefdoms, and holding people accountable for stuff like “maintaining community standards” and “keeping property values healthy”.  The stories are legion, and I can bear witness to some of them myself — the best one being that when we were encouraged by the Plano authorities to start collecting rainwater in large storage barrels (a Good Thing, in semi-desert north Texas), we went off and bought from the city one of said barrels — i.e. the thing was city-approved.

So I installed the blessed thing at the side of the house and attached a drip hose system so that the lawn at the side of the house could get watered.  Two weeks later some dickless wonder knocked on my door and said that the barrel was “unsightly” and we had two days to remove it, or face “consequences”.  When I asked if any of my neighbors had complained (they hadn’t), he said that their “inspection team” had made the determination.

My response should not be repeated in polite company, but it did contain the words “fuck” and “off”, as well as a few choice words of a personal nature and a warning that any attempt to force “consequences” on me would be met with, shall we say, strong opposition.  He left, never to be seen again, and the barrel stayed (it’s still there, some twelve years later).

One could only imagine my response, then, if I lived in Port St. Lucie, Florida, and was faced with an HOA ruling that forbade carrying of guns.

And the local cops feel about the same way as I would:

Breitbart News reported on the HOA’s gun ban May 18, 2026, noting that the St. Lucie Police Department made clear they would not enforce it.

AG Uthmeier contacted the HOA and gave them a deadline to cease enforcement or face legal action.

In a post to X, Uthmeier wrote: “Enforcement of its discriminatory policy against anyone for exercising the constitutional right to keep and bear arms will be met with legal action by my office.”

Needless to say, the HOA has backed down.

And these little gauleiters  thought they could get away with this bullshit… in Florida?

Yeah, I Don’t Buy It

Bureaucracy, Politics

Here’s a piece about former-AG Blondie and the power hierarchy she inherited at the DoJ:

She inherited an agency riddled with holdovers, careerist prosecutors, and institutional muscle memory tuned to the prior regime’s priorities. Her mandate, executed with the cold ferocity of a Florida prosecutor who once stared down the Clintons and lived to tell it, was never to play the long public game of show trials. It was to do the lethal, invisible labor: purge disloyal elements, redirect investigative task forces, shutter the foreign-influence shops that had become political protection rackets, and…most critically…build the factual scaffolding of cases that could survive judicial scrutiny once the political headwinds shifted. That is precisely what she delivered.

And:

First-term chaos taught the lesson: the Senate-confirmed loyalist who survives confirmation must serve as the institutional wrecking ball. The public demands scalps; the law demands airtight cases. Bondi supplied the latter while the former were still being assembled. Those who call her tenure “incompetent” reveal either their ignorance of how the executive branch actually functions or their desire to keep the machine broken so it can never be turned against its former masters. She was never meant to be the permanent face of the Justice Department. She was the architect who laid the rebar and poured the concrete under fire. The structure now stands. The new tenants can furnish it with indictments. That is not failure. That is lethal, disciplined statecraft.

Yeah.  Unfortunately, while I may be ignorant of the big-league governmental powerplays and what have you, I’m not ignorant of the need to look after the interests of ordinary folk, i.e. the voters, who put this lot in power to do all the above, but also to address and right the wrongs perpetrated by the previous bunch of scumbags on ordinary people.

How difficult would it be for the AG to look at, say, the case of Patrick Adamiak — you know, the innocent man railroaded by the ATF (who fall under the DoJ, lest we forget) — and get him out of jail?  Or to withdraw the dozens upon dozens of criminal cases that are still being prosecuted by the DoJ despite the cases being prima facie contrary to both new policy and the law?

Doing both the above may be difficult, but when you are the CEO of an outfit, it’s easy to say to a small task force, “Find all the cases that are being prosecuted but shouldn’t be;  set out a legal (or Constitutional) rationale for nolle prosequi, and I’ll sign the authorizations.”  That’s called “delegation” and it’s what good managers do.

And Pam Bondi didn’t do that.

Let’s just hope that her successor does.

Un-Constitutional, Illegal And Nonsensical

Anti-Gun Nannies, Bureaucracy, Government Thugs, Rights, The Gun Thing

…and yet the National Firearms Act (NFA) is still with us, becoming evermore ridiculous, evermore illogical, and always (still) un-Constitutional.

Here’s the best history of the disgusting thing I’ve ever seen which — as with so many of the bullshit laws and bureaucracies that still bedevil us to this very day — stemmed from the diseased liberal New York mind of the sainted Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

And the Act’s very vagueness of terminology makes it almost unique among our forest of laws in its ability to turn any gun owner into an instant felon without him knowing about it until the AT-fucking-F agency thugs drag him away in chains.  And said feature alone should make it legal poison, except that the Department of (alleged) Justice is too busy fucking around with irrelevancies like the Epstein files.

Kill the NFA.  Kill it stone dead, and then abolish the ATF in toto, because the government has no business in the alcohol, tobacco and (especially) the firearms business.  I might make a teeny exception for the oft-elided “E” — explosives — part of the agency’s nomenclature, but those first three initials?  X marks the spot in the back of the neck, for each of them.

Otherwise?  Line ’em up.

Food For Thought

Bureaucracy, Economics, Gummint, Marxists

Here are a few A.I. videos that I think are worthy of consideration, so if you care for the thesis — and you might, because it’s all very much focused on the economic scenario in various countries and not so much on politics (although the two are pretty much entangled, as you will see).

The first has to do with Canada;  the second with France; the third with the EU and the fourth with the U.K.

Finally, if you want to see yet another (but shorter and more superficial) article which (because it’s CNN) looks at the actions rather than the motivations behind the actions, there’s New Zealand.  And if you want to really chuckle, note that the fleeing New Zealanders are mostly heading for Australia — as the video calls it, “the new Argentina” (and to be clear, they’re referring to Peronist Argentina, not the Argentina of Milei).

Now the chilling bit.  If you distill all the events in the above, it will become clear that even with MAGA, with DOGE, and with all the Trumpism reorgs, the U.S. is heading down the same path.  The manifestations thereof are well known:  the citizens of ur-European soviets (New York, California and Illinois, etc.) fleeing their failed states for states that aren’t being run into the ground by their respective state governments.

And the spoiler:  all the above — all of it — can be ascribed to Marxism and the mindset it creates.

Firing The Deadwood

Bureaucracy

This isn’t about campfires, oh no.  This is so much more satisfying than a roaring fire on a cold winter’s night:

Approximately 50,000 federal workers in “policy-influencing” positions will lose specific protections against firings and become more at-will employees in the next month, per a new Trump administration rule announced Thursday.

The new rule, published by the Office of Personnel Management, will move senior career civil servants in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” positions into the Schedule Policy/Career category, formerly known as Schedule F.

Going forward, federal workers in those roles will lose their ability to appeal firings, suspensions or disciplinary action to an independent board.

Administration officials can dismiss those employees if they engage in “misconduct, poor performance or obstruct the democratic process by intentionally subverting Presidential directives.”

I think I speak for all my Readers when I say that while 50,000 is a nice round number, I’m thinking that 200,000 is a much nicer, rounder number.  But I’m open to other, more ambitious suggestions.

Of course, the response has been predictable:

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing non-postal federal workers, said in a statement that the rule would “chill protected speech” and “weaken enforceable protections against retaliation.”

“This rule is a direct assault on a professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service and the government services the American people rely on every day,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said.

Two issues jump off the page.

Firstly, let’s just suggest that right off the bat, the very idea of a government-employee union is an abomination.  It’s time the AFGE was abolished.

Secondly, if the current crop of bureaucrats had actually behaved like a “professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service” over the past, oh, eighty years then this action wouldn’t have been necessary.  But they haven’t, so here we are.

The bitter joke is that the civil service has always been the structure whereby Democrat policy has been implemented regardless of which party is in the White House.  This new Executive Order from DJT is simply rectifying that attitude, and it’s about damn time, too.