Tag: Government

“Losing”?

Gummint, Law and Order, Media Assholes, Military

I yield to no man in terms of my respect for Victor Davis Hanson, but I’m afraid the worthy professor is extremely late to this party.

Losing Confidence in the Pillars of Our Civilization
Millions of citizens long ago concluded that professional sports, academia, and entertainment were no longer disinterested institutions, but far Left and deliberately hostile to Middle America.
Yet American conservatives still adamantly supported the nation’s traditional investigatory, intelligence, and military agencies — especially when they came under budgetary or cultural attacks.
Not so much anymore.

He then enumerates said institutions:  the FBI, the military (senior officers), Big Tech / Woke journalism, federal health agencies, and the criminal justice system in general.

I will admit that the above are relative newcomers to the conservatives’ hall of shame, but as we all know, we’ve always loathed and distrusted the alphabet soups of the IRS, ATF and DHS, as well as Cabinet departments like the EPA, Energy, Interior and Education — to name but a few.

Wake up, VDH:  they’re all on the shit list.  They are very close to being — and in some cases very much already — not the “pillars of our civilization”, but active destroyers thereof.

And if you Readers want proof of this, ask yourself this question:  would you rather deal with your local law enforcement, or the FBI?  Your county tax office or the IRS?

Q.E.D.

Of Course You Can’t Do That

CRT, Education, Homeschooling, Marxists

It IS the most fundemental issue facing us right now:

The American Left (aided and abetted by some conservatives) believes that the government, not parents, should determine the content of a child’s mind—their ideas, their principles, and their values. A few weeks after McAuliffe’s tone-deaf faux pas, two authors writing in The Washington Post summed up the Left’s position in the title of their op-ed: “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” Parents should have neither the right nor the authority, according to the Post’s writers, to determine the ideas taught to their children. This task should be left to the “experts”—to the experts of the Education Establishment. The authors go on to claim that “education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of their parents.”

And:

“When it comes to society’s interest in protecting children, the legal precedent is unambiguous: The rights of parents come second.” But the question is, if parents’ rights come second when it comes to protecting or educating their children, then whose rights come first? And the authors’ answer is obvious: society’s rights, the government’s rights, the rights of the public-policy experts trump those of parents.

I need to quit now, because bullshit like this makes one of my fingers twitch really badly.  Let’s call it this one, just for the official record:

(but I could be lying)

And that’s even after having completed my own kids’ homeschooling many years ago.  But despite that, this is a hill I’d be prepared to die on, if called to do so.

Quick reminder to the “experts” and the State-sponsored thugs they use for “enforcement” :  if you want to see a serious piece of social upheaval, start fucking with people’s kids.  Virginia parents’ reaction to the CRT curricula isn’t even an appetizer.

Our kids are ours.  They are not the possession of the State.  But go ahead and poke that nest of rattlesnakes with your short little sticks…

Something Wrong

Health, Resistance, Sports

Down in Ozland, the Melbourne Cup Race is probably the only occasion where the entire country shuts down for the day.  It is one of the biggest horse racing events in the world — indeed perhaps one of the biggest sporting events, period.

So last weekend this monster took place Down Under in, as its name would suggest, in Melbourne, and here are a few pics of the festivities:

Anyone notice anything missing?

Face masks.

And lest we forget, this is the city which saw thuggish cops teargas old ladies, arrest people for walking in parks without a mask, check to see that people were locked up in their homes, and all the other WuFlu-related atrocities brought to them courtesy of the Victoria state government.

There was, however, this:

Punters at the track had to be fully vaccinated and they were separated into three zones which they were not allowed to leave.

Sort of house arrest at the track.

One might have expected at least some of the attendees to be wearing a face condom, but as far as I can see:  none.

I don’t know what this means, if anything, but it sure is interesting.

When “Private” Isn’t

Gummint

Here’s an interesting story:

Jeremy Clarkson has been granted ‘urgent’ planning permission to build cattle shed – in time for his herd to calve in the New Year.

To any American farmer, this would cause a certain amount of head-scratching:  you need a new shed on your farm, you build it.

Not, of course, in Britishland, where ownership of property gives one no rights at all, except of course the obligation to pay taxes on it.

And if the “emergency” part hadn’t been granted, requiring an endless wait while the permission process wound its tortuous way around bureaucratic inertia, “public” input (objections from people who think farmers should be able to carry on with Saxon-era buildings) — resulting in Clarkson building an “un-licensed” shed to save his calves’ lives — why then, he’d be fined and forced to tear the thing down.

Government at its finest.

Quietly Seething

Resistance

After reading this, I think I can safely say that I’m with the author.

We Americans have been asleep for a long time now, failing to surveil our politicians and bloated bureaucracy. As our Declaration of Independence tells us, “…all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
In the very next sentence, however, this same document states that when the people suffer from “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” then “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.”

I think we’re getting very close to that point, but what interests me, from a philosophical standpoint, is whether we’re going to do the “Irish democracy” type of rebellion — whereby laws are just generally ridiculed or ignored:

I don’t think we’ll go for the French “Aux barricades!”  stuff;  that’s more the Pantifa style, and we ain’t them:

…which leaves the American kind of rebellion:

It sure is going to be interesting, and if I were our modern-day tyrants, I’d be hoping for the Irish kind.  The last would be… interesting.