Tag: Government

A Good Start

Elections

Here’s some good news, for a change:

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced Wednesday that 97,795 voters were removed from the rolls after Ohio’s 88 county boards of elections identified the abandoned registrations as part of the maintenance process required by Ohio and federal law.
“Getting rid of bad voter data from the voter rolls helps prevent fraud, makes it easier for county boards of elections to do their jobs, and strengthens the confidence Ohioans place in our elections,” LaRose said. He then said: “And by the way, if anyone attempts to use one of these defunct registrations to vote in the next election, we’re going to execute them right there on the spot.”

Okay, I added that last sentence.  But you know…

 

“If It Means Saving Lives…”

Gummint, Mocking Furriners

Where have we heard this before?  O, Canada.  Unsurprisingly, this is Ontario (motto:  We’re more socialist than New York), where the forces of police power are rapidly becoming unlimited.

As an aside — and I admit that it’s been years since I was last in Ontario — I’m pretty sure that the above Gestapo attitudes will work in places like Toronto (a.k.a. Woke City, CN).  But Ontario is a really big state, and I would be really interested to see what happens oh, about a hundred miles north of Toronto, when the Sturmtruppen  start playing their little reindeer games.  (Warning:  link can cause extreme rage.)

Or have all Canadians become so cowed by Government?

Example

Bad News, Gummint, Resistance

A few days back, I penned a gloomy little piece entitled Isolated, wherein I said the following (talking about the government agents arrayed against us):

“They can concentrate their forces against us; we can’t do the same against them.”

Well, here’s one such example:

In the early Tuesday morning hours, motion sensors alerted the occupant, hereafter referred to as John Doe (names have been changed to protect the innocent) that there was movement along the driveway to his home. Given the time of day, the location of the home, and some recent history that will be discussed later, Doe knew he needed to react, but in a non-threatening manner. His decision was to put on a pair of pants, remain barefoot and shirtless, and move to the front porch with his hands raised in the air. What appeared in the driveway was the lead vehicle of three BearCat armored personnel carriers – commonly referred to as personnel tanks (pictured left) – in a convoy of over thirty total vehicles.
The BearCats are armed with a rotating turret for housing customer-specific weapon systems. Five gun ports are located on each side of the vehicle, and an additional two on the rear. The vehicle are often equipped with .50 BMG or 7.62mm rifles. It is a military-grade vehicle often used by U.S. Special Forces and the Australian military.
But on this day, they were cruising the Flathead Valley with thirty other police vehicles in tow.
Also surrounding the house were one-hundred-plus federal agents with a helicopter in support.

Sounds like this John Doe guy was some kind of super-terrorist, right?  Not exactly.

Doe’s former girlfriend from North Carolina filed a restraining order (a civil matter, not criminal) against Doe in that state claiming he was homicidal, suicidal, a threat to her, and had bomb-making materials with the intention to cause harm.  She also claimed he had booby traps all over the home and the surrounding property.  But none of this was true.

So the feds armored up, and based on the fears (and aggrievement) of someone in North Carolina, deployed all this force against a guy living in Montana.

Read the whole thing to appreciate the full extent of the bastardy.  (They even arrested his neighbor, FFS.)

Then remind me again how much hope we stand if this happens to any one of us.

Open Letter To TX.gov

Bad News, SHTF

Now that things have returned to normal (ice melted, water restored, power turned back on), we need to look very hard at ourselves and make sure that none of the past month’s nonsense ever happens again in Texas.  In case the Big Brains haven’t figured it out yet, let’s look at the problems and their solutions.  First, the overriding principle:

Texas needs to become completely self-sufficient in power generation.  That includes during times of inclement weather such as we’ve just had.

1.)  Wind power fails in a crisis.  That’s not an assertion, that’s a truism, and it’s not just true in Texas:  it’s true everywhere in the world.  So if we’re going to continue to generate power from wind, that power needs to be sold outside the state to, say, California [irony alert] because they apparently love the stuff.  But not a single part of the Texas energy supply should come from wind power, ever again.

This means that to replace wind power as part of our energy supply system, we have to build more gas-powered and nuclear power stations.  And we need to do it quickly, in the next couple of years.  But before anyone starts blathering on about environmental regulations as excuses for not getting it done, here’s the mandate:  get it done or we’ll elect people who can.

2.)  Texas has its own electricity distribution grid, and it sucks — once again, a statement of fact.  Texans don’t want to hear about pipelines freezing or cables breaking because of extreme cold, ever again.  When it gets cold — and no matter how cold it gets — Texas needs to continue functioning.  Our energy transmission grid needs to be made bullet-proof.

3.)  All of this is going to cost money.  Don’t care.  We also know that a lot of people have a lot of money and political capital invested in the “renewable” power generation business, and we don’t care about them either.  Find the money by cutting pork-barrel expenditure items from the Texas budget — if you need to know where they are, ask Dan Crenshaw for a list, because I bet he has one — or else, lean on the utility companies to get their own house in order, because apparently they’ve been unable to do it for themselves.  And if they do, that can’t come at the expense of higher utility bills.  We pay enough for electricity already, and given the energy resources Texas has at its disposal, we should be paying even less.  (And while you’re there, eliminate this nonsense.)

4.)  Pass legislation that enables all the above.  Generally speaking, we don’t like our state legislature to pass that many laws (see:  biannual legislature sessions, two-year budgets), but this is one time we’ll make an exception.  If you can get everything done under existing legislation, fine.  If not, pass the laws to enable them.

Texans are proud bunch, and when we see statistics like “3 million people have no electricity in the United States;  2.3 million of them live in Texas”, that pisses us off, big time.  Not having heat, water or power in our homes when it’s 15°F outside is not acceptable.  Just to hammer the nail in up to the head:  we’re talking millions of pissed-off voters.

I know that in any financial system there’s a calculus that says you can’t budget for extremes.  It’s the reason why Brownsville, for example, has no supplies of road salt and no trucks to scatter it on icy roads.  I’m not talking about that.  What I’m stating is that electricity is not a luxury, it’s a necessity — and it’s exponentially more necessary in inclement weather.

As a rule, I ignore the disaster weenies who are always forecasting doom because of climate change, wild swings in weather conditions and so on.  While their stupid predictions are not worth thinking about, the inescapable fact is that the Big Freeze of February 2021 has exposed our vulnerability and the fragility of our energy supply grid.  This time it was freakish weather, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen again.  The consequences of failure are too great for us to do nothing, and hope that the law of averages will come to our rescue in the future, because if averages tell us anything, it’s not to rely on them.  A polar freeze which happens every fifty years on average means that you could have one every year for the next ten years and not another one for the next five hundred.  That’s the way to look at averages, and it’s no way to gamble with the well-being of your citizens and the state economy.

Get it done.  And don’t even think of imposing a state income tax to raise the money — I shouldn’t even have to mention it, but some idiot will.

Fracture Lines

Gummint, Mocking Furriners

Looks like the Euros are having a problem or two:

The French blame the Germans and the Germans blame the French.  The Eastern Europeans blame the Western Europeans.  The Southern Europeans blame the North.  And everyone blames the officials in Belgium.

As Douglas Murray adds:  “In other words, business as usual.”

Once again, we see proof (if any were needed) that massive bureaucracies don’t respond well to a crisis.  In this case, the Euros thought that they could get both research and supplies of Chinkvirus vaccines from the UK, but when the Brits told them to shove it — all hail Brexit! — the Euros were left holding the short end of the stick, and squabbling ensued.

The lesson is well learned Over Here, for all those who think that Big Gummint is the answer to our woes.  In a crisis, it seldom is.

 

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From Peter Hitchens, brother of the late Christopher:

“Officials and politicians dare not relax the measures they took in a panic, in case they are blamed if anything ever goes wrong afterwards. And millions genuinely believe they are safer as a result.”

What that means is that a series of panics will inevitably cause our freedoms to be ratcheted into oppression via the “concern for security”.  And the ratcheting goes one way, irreversibly.