Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

Not Incompetence – Not Anymore

Immigration, Law and Order, Two-Minute Hate

This is part of a much larger personal story, but I just want to share with you something I said a long time ago.  I’d just launched a major new marketing program involving supermarket customers, their buying and their support for that new program.  Three days after the program’s launch, I went to look at the store sales figures to see how it had all shaken down.

The IT department had lost all the data.  Worse still, they couldn’t tell me when they’d be able to show me any data, going forward.

In a rage, I stormed into the CFO’s office and told him what had happened.  If anything, his shock was greater than mine.  He’d seen my sales projections, my gross profit projections and likely market share gain — but all that was gone.  I looked at him, and said, “It is really difficult for me to come to terms with such gross incompetence and profound indifference of its consequences.  I cannot begin to understand how such incompetence even exists in a huge corporation like ours.”  He looked at me, and nodded.  Then I said, “In fact, if I were a paranoid person — which I’m not — I would actually ascribe negligence on this scale to sabotage.”  And I turned and left.

I have had the same reaction to this situation in south Texas.

Law enforcement officials are seeking a “Mexican male” in connection with a shooting that left five people dead in Cleveland, Texas, Friday night, Fox News reports.
The San Jacinto Sheriff’s Office received a “harassment” call and responding deputies found four victims shot to death and an eight-year-old boy critically wounded. The boy was transported to a hospital, where he died.
All of the victims are believed to be from Honduras, according to San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers.
Capers said his office received the “harassment” call at 11:31 p.m.
Capers said law enforcement is actively searching for the “Mexican male subject” believed to be the shooter and have “a copy of his consulate card.”
He said the Mexican man “has been known to shoot his .223 in the front yard, which is evident from the shell casings in the front yard.”
Capers believes the suspect has fled the area.

And this update:

San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers indicated Francisco Oropesa, the Mexican national who allegedly shot and killed five people in Cleveland, Texas, on Friday, has eluded police and “could be anywhere now.”
The FBI is warning people to stay clear of the 38-year-old suspect if they spot him, FOX News reported: “Reminder, if you see him DO NOT approach him. He is armed and dangerous. If you have a tip about his whereabouts call the San Jacinto County Sheriff’s Office at 936-653-4367.”
On Sunday, FBI special agent in charge Fred Smith said police and agents have just been “running into dead ends” in their search for Oropesa.
He added, “Right now, we have zero leads of him.”

And the last little cherry on top of this shitcake:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials provided updated information on the suspected killer of five Honduran migrants. Officials report that an immigration judge first ordered Francisco Oropeza Perez-Torres, 38, to be removed from the United States on March 19, 2009. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers deported the migrant to Mexico later that month.
Subsequent to this, Oropeza illegally re-entered the U.S. and was removed, once again, in September 2009. He was removed two more times in January 2012 and July 2016.
In January 2012, a Texas court in Montgomery County (which neighbors San Jacinto County where the alleged murders took place) convicted the Mexican national for driving while intoxicated. The court sentenced him to an unreported period of incarceration.

So this murderous asshole has been deported before, not once but four times.  On his last entry into the U.S., he somehow got hold of an AR-15 rifle (despite all the fucking laws that exist to prevent felons and illegal aliens from possessing guns), with the depressingly-foreseeable outcome.

Between Immigration, local law enforcement, the Justice Department and the FBI, there has been not just one cockup, but a multiyear succession of cockups which eventually ended in the death of an entire, innocent family.

So, to go back to my original story:  at what point do we stop ascribing this disaster to gross incompetence, and start thinking about actual sabotage — a deliberate undermining of our immigration laws and the legal system?

By the way, a week after my meeting with the CFO, the head of IT was ignominiously fired.

Do not expect anything like this, though, to happen to anyone in government or the legal system.

The “Clean Vs. Dirty” Thing

Conservatism, Essays, Marxists, Wokism

One of Jeff Goldstein’s fine statements in Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand (as discussed in the above post) is this one:

The Global Elites behind BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, the WEF, the WHO, the UN, et al., have never liked that presumptuous, barely-credentialed nobodies, can get on planes and travel the globe, just as they do. They never accepted that the filthies can eat a fine rib eye, or drive a nice car, or own a comfortable home — and not have to rely on their largess, or answer to their diktats.

For those who missed the allusion to “filthies”, here’s its foundation:  another Jeff (Tucker) wrote a brilliant piece called Clean vs. Dirty: A Way to Understand Everything, and here’s its basic premise:

It is possible to understand nearly everything going on today – the Covid response, the political tribalism, the censorship, the failure of the major media to talk about anything that matters, the cultural and class divides, even migration trends – as a grand effort by those people who perceive themselves to be clean to stay away from people they regard as dirty.
…
They don’t want pet waste on their carpet, thus comparing ideas with which they disagree with a nasty pathogen. They are seeking to stay clean.
In this case and in every case, they are glad for the government to operate as the clean-up crew. It’s dirty ideas and people who hold them they oppose. They don’t want to have friends who articulate them or live in communities where such people live.

And the reason they don’t want to deal with people like Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Elon Musk or, for that matter, any unwashed scum with uncomfortable ideas supported by incontrovertible evidence and/or historical precedent — the reason is that their own worldview is based upon theory and (they think) altruism.  The thing about both theory and altruism is that these are clean philosophies — their motives are pure, you see — and they hate to see those cherished ideals get messed upon when some Unwashed (like, for example, me) points out that their climate “science” is based upon shaky data and wishful thinking, while their predictive models are hopelessly in accurate and cannot form the basis of social or political policy.

The Cleanies likewise hate it when someone lowers income tax rates, because revenues will be “lost” — except, of course, that anyone with the slightest knowledge of history (never mind economics) can point out that when tax rates are cut, tax revenues increase, in some cases massively.

But those messy, messy realities sully the purity of their philosophy, so best to ignore — or better yet, suppress — those dirty realists.

Of course, the reality I’d like to impose on them is fairly simple:

…but no doubt, someone’s going to have a problem with this Occamic proposition.

It might, however, be the only solution — messy though it is.

Lies Upon Lies Upon Lies

Eco-Crap, Two-Minute Hate, Watermelons

Thanks are owed to Jack Hellner at American Thinker  for taking the time to do what I’ve been too lazy to do:  cataloguing all the climate lies of the past fifty or so years.

I’m reminded of Hitchens’s Razor, that statements presented without evidence can equally be dismissed without evidence.  Trouble is that the Climate Charlatans have repeatedly presented evidence, except that the data themselves have been not only fallacious but outright lies, fabrications and distortions.

So… when can we begin the mass hangings and firing squads?

The Tightening Spiral

Deep Thoughts, Resistance

Bear with me while a gather all sorts of straws, political, social and policy.  Some will have links you can follow, most won’t because you’d have to have been in a coma not to have seen them.

So Government — our own and furriners’ both — have all sorts of rules they wish to impose on us (and from here on I’m going to use “they” to describe them, just for reasons of brevity and laziness — but we all know who “they” are).  Let’s start with one, pretty much picked at random.

They want to end sales of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, and make us all switch to electric-powered ones.  Leaving aside the fact that as far as the trucking industry is concerned, this can never happen no matter how massive the regulation, we all know that this is not going to happen (explanation, as if any were needed, is here).  But to add to the idiocy, they have imposed all sorts of unrealistic, nonsensical and impossible deadlines to all of this, because:

There isn’t enough electricity — and won’t be enough electricity, ever — to power their future of universal electric car usage.  Why is that?  Well, for one thing, they hate nuclear power (based on outdated 1970s-era fears), are closing existing ones and will not allow new ones to be built by dint of strangling environmental regulation (passed because of said 1970s-era fears).  Then, to add to that, they have forced the existing electricity supply to become unstable by insisting on unreliable and variable generation sources such as solar and wind power.  Of course, existing fuel sources such as oil. coal and natural gas are also being phased out because they are “dirty” (they aren’t, in the case of natgas, and as far as oil and coal are concerned, much much less so than in decades past) — but as with nuclear power, the rules are being drawn up as though old technologies are still being used (they aren’t, except in the Third World / China — which is another whole essay in itself).  And if people want to generate their own electricity?  Silly rabbits: US Agency Advances New Rule Targeting Portable Gas-Powered Generators. (It’s a poxy paywall, but the headline says it all, really.)

So how is this pixie dust “new” electricity to be stored?  Why, in batteries, of course — to be specific, in lithium batteries which are so far the most efficient storage medium.  The only problem, of course, is that lithium needs to be mined (a really dirty industry) and even assuming there are vast reserves of lithium, the number of batteries needed to power a universe of cars is exponentially larger than the small number of batteries available — but that means MOAR MINING which means MOAR DIRTY.  And given how dirty mining is, that would be a problem, yes?

No.  Because — wait for it — they will limit lithium mining, also by regulation, by enforcing recycling (where have we heard this before?) and by reducing battery size.

Now take all the above into consideration, and see where this is going.  Reduced power supply, reduced power consumption, reduced fuel supply:  a tightening spiral, which leads to my final question:

JUST HOW DO THEY THINK THIS IS ALL GOING TO END?

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that increased pressure without escape mechanisms will eventually cause explosion.  It’s true in physics, it’s true in nature and it’s true, lest we forget, in humanity.

Volcanoes erupt when the pressure of expanding gas and magma becomes too much for the Earth’s crust to prevent.  The English once executed their king because his rule became too tyrannical to bear.  (Side note:  when the Cromwellian republic also became too tyrannical, they brought back the kingdom, but the next king was a much gentler and more controllable one than his father was.)

Here’s the historical truism when it comes to tyranny, and it’s true for all totalitarian regimes:

Totalitarian states suppress their peoples and impose misery on them.  When the people rebel against that suppression and misery, the State uses that as an excuse to suppress them yet further, and increase the misery thereby.

But at some point the dictator will be executed, the soviet will be cast out (by force if necessary), and the walls will be brought down.

Sic semper tyrannis.

I just hope I’m still alive to see that day, to help reload the machine guns, and to hold the coats of the gunners while refilling their tray of martinis.