Tag: Government

“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.

Just One

Gummint, Resistance

I don’t want anyone to read something sinister in what follows;  it’s simply a thought exercise.

A couple of days ago I read this article:

Two FBI special agents were fatally shot Tuesday morning while serving a warrant in Sunrise, the agency confirmed, calling it “a very dark day for the FBI.”

The agents, it turns out, were serving said warrant on some scrote who is a child molester and who did the right thing by offing himself after whacking the two feds, thus saving us all the hassle of a trial.  He’s not important to the story, so forget all about him.

The article’s headline is what caught my attention, because what it showed was just how easy it is to ambush law enforcement officers;  and what it reminded me of is a story of a WWII British fighter pilot who, during the dark days of 1940 when the Nazis had overrun Western Europe and were seemingly poised to invade Britain as well, went home for a brief bit of leave/furlough.  Sitting chatting with his father about the state of the world, he was surprised when his father asked him if he could get him a pistol or revolver.  When the pilot asked why, his father simply said:

“So I can get my one.”
“One what?”
“German.”

The old man, who’d fought in WWI, explained that he was too old to join a military unit, but he was determined to “do his bit” for the war effort, and had decided that if he and thousands of others could all just kill a single German each, the task of occupying Britain would be impossible.  The fact that he would almost certainly be killed in return didn’t bother him at all, because his death would be part of a greater good.  “After all,” he concluded, “if Britain is going to ask its young men like you to sacrifice themselves in this war, why shouldn’t we all be prepared to make the same sacrifice?  We’re all in this together, after all.”

What makes this subject so current is all the threats being oh-so cavalierly thrown our way by the Left, whether by loony Leftist politicians or by their equally-loony acolytes in the Press and academe, with talk of “deprogramming”, “universal gun confiscation” and the like — in other words, compelling those who disagree with their politics (the “seditionists” or “Trumpists”) to change their philosophy and/or behavior and be forced to show support for and comply with their ghastly policies and governance.

There sure is a lot of compulsion being talked about, isn’t there?  But none of that is possible in the face of a mass of people who, like the pilot’s father, are prepared to “get their one”.  That’s what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was lamenting when he wrote these words:

What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people?

Nowadays, of course, there’s a problem with Solzhenitsyn’s proposition in that the modern State knows so much about people that a concerted effort at resistance — even by half a dozen people — might well be anticipated and probably doomed to failure.  Efforts to create a “militia” or any kind of ur-Maquis French Resistance are going to be compromised by infiltration by law enforcement and subsequent destruction.

But if the above stories from Florida and WWII Britain tell us anything, it’s that properly-motivated individuals acting alone are quite capable of deadly resistance, even when facing the nigh-certain consequence of death for themselves.

It’s an interesting hypothesis, isn’t it?