Economic Marxism wants to destroy your property.
Cultural Marxism wants to destroy your civilisation.
Environmental Marxism wants to destroy your species.
Progress!
Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith)
Posted on X April 6, 2024
Alice Smith claims to be the great-great-great-granddaughter of Adam Smith.
It would be trivial to get multiple quotes of high quality each and every day from her X feed.
America has been cleaved into two separate and antithetical ideologies — two opposing worldviews — with the communists and radical takers of the country supporting a dark vision of tyranny and the conservatives and independent producers supporting the light of truth and a vision of freedom and liberty. They are both hanging in the balance and waiting for gravity or some monumental event to throw the lever that moves them to act and take the country by storm, with the Democrats willing to use every illegal means imaginable.
Justin Smith
April 6, 2024
America Is Hurtling Toward a Full Blown Hot Civil War – The Burning Platform
I’m not convinced “the conservatives” support “the light of truth and a vision of freedom and liberty” but I do regard them as the lesser of the two evils.
Prepare appropriately.
My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways in the most important time periods.
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And so I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information.
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So can you help me? Because I’m really – I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems.
Ketanji Brown Jackson
Justice of SCOTUS
March 18, 2024
Judge Jackson’s ‘chilling’ First Amendment comments leave Jonathan Turley ‘very concerned’ (msn.com)
I’m reminded of something I thought the NRA had repeatedly published. But I can’t find it now. The closest I could find was this:
You know why there’s a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one.
It would be best for everyone if SCOTUS understands this. As the people of Scotland are learning, if not vigorously defended, free speech is easily lost:
The police and the CPS have agreed the following definition for identifying and flagging hate crimes:
“Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person’s disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity.”
There is no legal definition of hostility so we use the everyday understanding of the word which includes ill-will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike.
It is not about guns. It is about control.
Several social media companies were ordered by a New York state judge to face four lawsuits seeking to hold them responsible for helping enable the avowed white supremacist who killed 10 Black people in 2022 at a Buffalo, New York grocery store.
Justice Paula Feroleto of the Erie County Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the more than 40 plaintiffs could try to prove that Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)’ Facebook and Instagram, Reddit, Google’s YouTube and other platforms were designed to addict and radicalize users like the shooter, Payton Gendron.
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“We must hold accountable every single bad actor that prepared and equipped the shooter to target and kill members of Buffalo’s Black community,” said Eric Tirschwell, executive director of the gun control advocacy group Everytown Law, which filed two of the lawsuits.
I am reminded of Quote of the day—Joseph Stalin.
California continues to push out a steady stream of absurd, unscientific, and flat out impossible regulations across many industries in an attempt to impose its extremist, green agenda on the whole country by forcing manufacturers and businesses who want to do business in California to toe its far-left enviornut agenda.
It has become so pervasive that 17 states have banded together to sue the federal Environmental Protection Agency to cancel the special rules it has for allowing California to make its own environmental rules. That began in 1970 when the federal government added that carve out to the Clean Air Act.
But, what we see here is just another example of how far California is from every other state and even from the federal government on its commitment to the shrill environmentalist agenda. And it is long past time California’s absurd regulations are reigned in and to end its special powers to coerce the rest of the country to abide by its extremist agenda.
Todd Huston
March 1, 2024
Coast Guard Refuses to Enforce California’s New Environmental Regulation (msn.com)
If only the Feds would reign in California gun laws as well. It wouldn’t be that hard. Just prosecute and send the governor, attorney general, a few senators and representatives to jail and/or death row, and California would be much better behaved for several years.
I’ll never forget the @FBI calling me into their office in Seattle in 2020.
They were looking for footage of a suspect I had taken during one of the many riots.
That’s when I asked them about Antifa.
The FBI agent told me Antifa was NOT a cause of concern, nor were they a terror group.
That’s when I lost all respect for the agency and refused to take any further calls.
I watched Antifa assault police, press, and innocent bystanders, as well as burn Seattle and Portland to the ground for nine months.
All without repercussions.
Imagine if a conservative did this?
Katie Daviscourt @KatieDaviscourt
Posted on X February 18, 2024
I’m reminded of stories in Gulag Archipelago. The police ignored and even encouraged criminal activity against the opponents of communism. History may not repeat but it does rhyme.
Prepare appropriately.
That’s where we seem to fall down as a society. Not that we take constitutional rights away from people, but rather that we be more careful about who it is that we allow to exercise those rights in our society.
Frank Figliuzzi
February 18, 2024
Figliuzzi: More Caution Needed on Who’s Allowed to Exercise 2nd Amendment
How about we be more careful about who is allowed to exercise their 1st Amendment rights? We are not going to take Figliuzzi’s constitutional right away, we just aren’t going to allow him to exercise his right to say stupid crap like this in our society.
It doesn’t matter if robbery, rape, or murder is in the mind of the attacker — maybe it’s all of the above, plus cannibalism — what matters is the will and the ability to destroy the attacker. Forcible felonies are almost never one-and-done actions committed on the spur of the moment. Anybody you shoot has likely done this before and will, unless incapacitated, do this to others. Violence will be escalated, and the predatory conduct won’t cease until somebody stops them decisively.
Oleg Volk
January 20, 2024
The motive of your enemy is not relevant to the choice of remedy. | VolkStudio Blog (olegvolk.net)
Prepare appropriately.
Some people probably think I have a sick sense of humor.
They may be correct (the next to the last paragraph is the punch line):
THREAD: Proof that every White American should pay Reparations to every Black American.
Anthony Johnson, the first legal slave owner in America, was an Angolan Moor who achieved freedom in the early 17th-century colony of Virginia. In 1651, Anthony Johnson owned 250 acres and the services of four white and one black indentured servant.
The Committee and Select Subcommittee have obtained documents showing that FinCEN distributed slides, prepared by a financial institution, explaining how other financial institutions can use MCC codes to detect customers whose transactions may reflect “potential active shooters, [and] who may include dangerous International Terrorists / Domestic Terrorists / Homegrown Violent Extremists (‘Lone Wolves’).” For example, the slides instruct financial institutions to query for transactions using certain MCC codes such as “3484: Small Arms,” “5091: Sporting and Recreational Goods and Supplies,” and the keywords “Cabela’s,” and “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” among several others. Despite these transactions having no apparent criminal nexus—and, in fact, relate to Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights— FinCEN seems to have adopted a characterization of these Americans as potential threat actors. This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with and at the request of federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private transactions is alarming and raises serious doubts about FinCEN’s respect for fundamental civil liberties.
Jim Jordan
Chairman Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government
January 17, 2024
Letter to Noah Bishoff, former Director of the Office of Stakeholder Integration and Engagement in the Strategic Operations Division of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)
Via email from John S.
See also Financial Big Brother is Watching You – by Matt Taibbi (racket.news).
We live in interesting times. Prepare appropriately.
I just listened to the California “Assault Weapon” ban oral argument before the Ninth Circuit in Miller v. Bonta. I will do extremely detailed breakdown of the argument later. In short, 2A will NOT win with this panel.
The questions and comments from the two liberal judges Berzon and Nguyen were unimpressive. Judge Berzon called AR-15s “A-15s” (seriously).
Based on today’s argument and the efforts by the two liberal judges to avoid applying Heller/Bruen, I now understand what it was like watching a court argument in 1950s Alabama/Mississippi over racial desegregation where intellectually dishonest, results-oriented judges worked overtime to avoid the obvious, legally-compelled outcome based upon clear, binding US Supreme Court precedent.
Mark W. Smith/#2A Scholar @fourboxesdiner
Posted on X January 24, 2024
And, no surprise, it was the same political party deliberately infringing upon the rights of people in both instances. There is an reason they are called the evil party.
I’ll shut down the FBI & ATF and here’s one more reason why. A voter in Iowa recently reminded me of the story of Ruby Ridge & the Weaver family. In 1992, Randy Weaver sold a sawed-off shotgun to a federal informant & was then surrounded at his cabin for refusing to appear in court. First they killed his dog, then they shot & killed his son, *14-year-old* Samuel Weaver. His wife, Vicki, also was shot & killed by an FBI sniper while holding their 10-month-old daughter inside their house. Weaver was later acquitted & awarded a $3mm settlement by the DOJ. Another classic case of entrapment & a disproportionate, politicized abuse of federal police power. I will *shut down* toxic 3-letter agencies like the FBI & ATF that are beyond the point of incremental “reform,” using my Constitutional authority as U.S. President to do it.
Vivek Ramaswamy @VivekGRamaswamy
Posted on X January 9, 2024
I would vote for that.
A horribly written law that would make criminals out of careful, law-abiding citizens is not a solution to the tremendous problem we face with gun violence and firearm accidents. Publicly supported and funded, age-appropriate firearm safety education ought to be a part of it.
Brad Johnson
Anoka County Attorney
Letter to state representative Jaime Becker-Finn.
Via MN Gun Owners Caucus @mnguncaucus on April 3, 2023.
We must recognize we have allies in government.
It wasn’t too long ago that I read a book about the resistance to Nazi’s in Italy. A young woman got a job as a maid and nanny to a Nazi officer and his wife. She was also a spy who obtained information which was smuggled to the allies which was used to save countless lives. As the Nazis were retreating out of Italy local “patriots” rounded up the Nazis and collaborates they could find and killed them without trials. The young woman was among them.
Gun laws in the United States are an unmitigated disaster. The amount of asinine minutiae that can send you straight to jail is downright embarrassing, and it requires a conscious effort to believe we’re in this situation because of incompetence rather than malice. All this to say: I’ve made a genuine effort to work on this project without running afoul of any state or federal gun laws, like Tom Frickin’ Cruise navigating a hallway of laser tripwires.
Evan @ Cottage Arms
Posted in 2022
Meet Shirley: The .22LR built for the year 2022 from Cottage Arms on Vimeo.
Because the point of government is to create social trust. I started this talk by explaining the importance of trust in society, and how interpersonal trust doesn’t scale to larger groups. That other, impersonal kind of trust—social trust, reliability and predictability—is what governments create.
To the extent a government improves the overall trust in society, it succeeds. And to the extent a government doesn’t, it fails.
But they have to. We need government to constrain the behavior of corporations and the AIs they build, deploy, and control. Government needs to enforce both predictability and reliability.
That’s how we can create the social trust that society needs to thrive.
Bruce Schneier
December 4, 2023
AI and Trust
Via a message from Stephanie.
Schneier raises my hackles. It seems to me, that far too often he concludes more government is the solution to problems he imagines. What would he have us do when it is extraordinarily clear that the government is less trustworthy than any corporation or AI?
I’m far more inclined align myself with:
The end of Law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge Freedom: For in all the states of created beings capable of Laws, where there is no law, there is no Freedom.
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Chains are but an ill wearing, how much Care soever hath been taken to file and polish them.
John Locke
Two Treatises of Government
Explicitly and from a source far more important, just governments are created to protect the rights of individuals:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
To the extent that a government does not align itself with this goal is the extent to which it is unjust and illegitimate.
With all the people moving to Idaho (“Idaho has been one of the top five fastest growing states in the nation since 2016.”) the question comes up, “Are they bringing their failed politics with them from California and other failed states?”
The Idaho Secretary of State has some data to shed some light on the topic. The short answer is that Idaho has 58% Republicans, 28% unaffiliated, and 13% Democrats. The incoming mixture is 65% Republican, 21% unaffiliated, and 12% Democrats. So, that says the incoming people is make the state “redder”.
But that is not the whole story:
See also what Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times has to say.
And for my county of Clearwater:
There are only 8,734 people in the entire county. Hence, over 7.5% have moved there recently.
How much power does the government claim on private land?
“Unfettered,” according to a Commonwealth Court decision in a case pitting the Pennsylvania Game Commission against two private gun clubs.
On Sept. 29, a court ruled against two hunting clubs in their lawsuit accusing the Game Commission of private property rights violations.
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In its ruling, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania noted the government’s absolute power to “roam private land without consent, warrants or probable cause.”
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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said “possessions” do not include private land.
Chris Bennett
January 25, 2023
Pennsylvania court rules against gun clubs in private property case
Interesting. Perhaps I should see if I can find those old bear traps, abandoned wells, and explosives testing grounds so as to make sure no government agents get hurt when they venture beyond the no trespassing signs.
Prepare appropriately.
In CCP’s China, one can find a Party Branch (党支部) in any workplace.
According to the CCP, its function is to propagate & implement the Party’s principles, policies, & resolutions.
In America today, we have a DEI office in every institution.
Xi Van Fleet @XVanFleet
Posted on X December 21, 2023
I read and really like her book.
Well, “like” in the sense of interesting and enlightening. She grew up in China during the cultural revolution and then moved to the U.S. where she now sees frightening similarities to her native country. Daughter Jaime refuses to read it because it sounds too dark.
Some of the terrible stuff in China would not fly in the U.S. because of the widespread ownership of firearms and a substantial number of the population tend to distrust the government and highly regard individualism. But other stuff can be seen closing in all around us.
Via mothmoo @MothMoo:
Excellent point.
And, of course, there is that little thing about it being unconstitutional.
1 New Hampshire
2 Florida
3 South Dakota
4 Nevada
5 Arizona
… …
14 Idaho
… …
37 Washington
… …
46 Oregon
47 New Jersey
48 California
49 Hawaii
50 New York
See also The American Voter’s Flight to Freedom
Washington has some advantages but I would rather be in Idaho. Washington seems to want to oppress their citizens just for the meanness of it and in total spite of the state and Federal Constitutions..
