Obama’s War Against the Cops Becomes More Deadly

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My good friend Mike Simonelli has an interesting article in today’s New York Post about the epidemic of murdered cops across the country.  He explains how many of them could have been avoided.

One of the biggest problems is the sheer number of the mentally ill on the streets.  The other major problem are the Soros funded District Attorneys that refuse to enforce repeat offender statutes that would take career criminals off the streets for long stretches .Here’s one example:

“That includes one who on Dec. 29 ambushed Riverside County, Calif., Deputy Sheriff Isaiah Cordero, fatally shooting him during a traffic stop. The killer had a long history of violence dating back to the 1990s that included kidnapping, robbery and assaults with deadly weapons. Having received his third strike in 2021, Deputy Cordero’s killer should have been locked up and serving 25 years to life.

“We would not be here today if the judge had done her job,” fumed County Sheriff Chad Bianco. Months earlier, Officer Santana’s mother voiced a similar refrain: “I blame the death of my son and his partner on [Los Angeles District Attorney George] Gascón”; they were “murdered by a criminal [who] should have been in jail.”

Mike’s a cop and he understands the specific risks that the present situation has created for police.  But at this point anyone living in the large cities with Democrat governments is taking his life into his own hands living there.  After all, if these lunatics will shoot it out with the police what chance does an ordinary citizen stand?  Getting out is the only way to reduce the risk of violent assault to a reasonable level.

Update:

I was pleased to see former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton link this article on his twitter feed.  I can only imagine what someone like him who knows how things should be done feels about the NYC Criminal Justice travesty we have now..

Men and Dogs and Women

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A7 III with Sigma 150 – 600mm MC-11 adapter

Dog is man’s best friend.  But woman is dog’s best friend.  Or should that be mommy.  I went with Camera Girl to the vet’s office with Kaylee, our older dog.  She’s a 13-year-old German Shorthaired Pointer and she’s starting to wear down.  Camera Girl loves her dearly and has been very worried that she won’t make it through the winter.  Now this seems like an unnecessary concern.  Other than progressive arthritis and a certain amount of mental confusion she seems relatively healthy.  She still enjoys her food enthusiastically and can keep up her normal activities, only at a slower pace.

But because of her concerns I went along in case any bad news was forthcoming.  When we got there, we entered the office and the receptionist began engaging in the typical female baby talk that is reserved for pets.  Then we got to the examination room and the vet tech came in and she too commenced with the mewing and cooing that passes for woman to dog communication.  And finally, the vet showed up and she also began the embarrassing babbling.  Now I will admit that both the tech and the vet were pretty adept at their medical tasks.  They vaccinated Kaylee and cut her nails quite skillfully.  And the vet convinced Camera Girl that Kaylee will make it through the year at least.  But as a man it was pretty comical listening as three grown women coaxed and comforted a large dog as if it were a three-month-old infant.

Now, full disclosure.  I have a very soft spot in my heart for all our dogs past and present.  And since I’ve had to be the one holding them when the vet puts them to sleep for the last time, I know exactly how close is the bond between a man and his dog.  Of course, they’re not human and certainly not our children.  But they think they are.  And that obligates us to treat them as family.  Since they lack the wherewithal to be responsible for themselves in human society, we become their guardians and keepers.  So that’s the logical underpinning for our position.  But the emotional relationship is much, much closer to a parent-child relationship than anything else.

So, fine.  We treat them in many ways like children.  But why do these women pretend they’re talking to newborns?  Dogs have the intelligence of a young child in many ways.  And they have the ability to respond to verbal commands and prompts of all kinds.  Why do these women chirp at them in this embarrassing manner.  As a mother and grandmother Camera Girl has always been quite good at teaching and disciplining little children and once they’re beyond a year or so she speaks to children in English with a minimum of singsong and baby words.  Why does she insist on using it for dogs.  In fact, why can’t she discipline her dogs as well as she did her children?

For the majority of our married life, I’ve been at the office during the week and she was home with the kids and dogs.  And without exception she has spoiled every one of our dogs rotten.  All of her cooing and babytalk is useless in getting the dogs to obey her.  Finally in desperation she asks me to take over and I have to growl at the dog to get obedience.  And this is a very bad situation.  For larger sporting breeds bad training can be dangerous.  But my protests have always been in vain.  She just can’t treat a dog as anything but a baby.

But at last, there will be a changing of the guard.  When in the fullness of time we need to get a new puppy in the house I will be home much more of the time than formerly and I intend to train this dog.  And it will be a revelation to Camera Girl.  This dog will obey my commands immediately and unerringly.  This dog will be a manly chap who will eschew all baby talk and respond to the curt guttural syllables reserved for a dog in the field.  Sit!  Heel!  Down!  He’ll be used to good solid pats to the ribs when he succeeds in his chores and maybe a scratch behind the ear while we’re watching tv together.  I’ll allow this dog a modicum of self-respect as a carnivore in good standing.  No goo-goo gah-gah.  Sure, I won’t stop Camera Girl from chirping at the dog and lavishing affection on him but I will not allow her to undermine the training.

A man and his dog.  A woman and her dog.  So different.

05JAN2023 – Just a Regular Old Thursday.  The Calendar’s full of Them

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As the tragicomedy of Kevin McCarthy continues to unfold in the Emerald City of Oz, I was tasked with filling out and presenting my documents to Cthulhu’s minions inside the precincts of the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh.  Well maybe it was the Dunwich town hall.  But there was definitely a lot of eldritch horror somewhere close by I can assure you.

My hand was a virtual claw from having to sign my illegible signature hundreds of times to the various documents.  I was made aware of the 11 billion separate types of discrimination that Dunwich recognizes and prosecutes along with the blessings of diversity, equity and inclusion that seem to seep out of every document that I was forced to read.  It was inspiring.

It was a particularly dreary day weatherwise, drizzling and forty degrees, but I was kind of happy to foray out into the world just to convince myself it was actually still out there.  Apparently not having a Speaker of the House hasn’t managed to disrupt the space-time continuum.  And the zombies wandering around town looked neither more nor less mindless and homicidal than usual.  So, all’s right with the world.

Maybe I’m becoming acclimated to the present levels of dysfunction and unreality in the world around me.  I noticed it didn’t rankle me as much as it used to.  Of course, that could mean I’m becoming zombified myself.  But whatever the cause it eased the pain while moving around town.

I read a post by Curtis Yarvin on his Substack that referenced Heinlein’s story Waldo.  Now Yarvin is a neo-monarchist who is mostly interested in the political situation we find ourselves in.  But he’s also a technologist and here he hypothesizes that one of the more promising areas of technological progress could be in providing human/machine interfaces that allow humans to utilize their manual dexterity at different scales and remotely.  So, he sees a sort of virtual reality setup where a surgeon could utilize microscopic equipment as if he were the size of the miniaturized characters in “Fantastic Voyage.”  Or a gigantic machine hundreds of feet long could be controlled by a human with the point of view of a giant.  His premise is that human intelligence and dexterity after proper training is much more responsible and skilled than an AI.  After reading about some of the failures of self-driving cars he may be correct.  I never thought Robert Heinlein and Curtis Yarvin would intersect in this version of the multiverse.  But there it is.

Will Cain did an interview of Tucker Carlson.  What I found interesting was Carlson’s answer to what had red-pilled him.  He described his mindset as we went through the Iraq War (from 1:36 to 3:19 in the video) and I found myself remembering a very similar evolution.  I went from believing that we were there to make America safer to eventual disillusionment and a sense of absolute betrayal by the Republican establishment.  And Carlson echoed that.  I didn’t watch the whole thing yet because it’s too long but that little snippet stuck in my mind.  Millions of people in this country feel totally betrayed by the Republican party and will never forget that.  And that is the reality that gives me hope.  If people as different from each other as Tucker Carlson is from me can both come to essentially the same point of view about our political system then it must be the truth.  And if it is the truth then I’m finally working from correct assumptions.  And that is what I’ve been trying to achieve all these years.  It’s not that the truth guarantees that things will work out.  It’s that basing your actions on false assumptions guarantees failure.

As this was finishing up I se that McCarthy is still furiously negotiating to buy off his enemies with committee seats and promises of accountability.  Ah, what a circus.  We really should require all of Congress to wear the red nose, baggy pants and size 20 shoes.  And the Speaker should always arrive at the podium in a tiny car.  As I said in a comment on the last post, we must be terrible people to be sentenced to leaders this atrocious.  Robespierre and Caligula were paragons of sanity compared to the bozos we’ve got working for us today.

Well, that’s enough.

The Power of No

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It never occurred to me that maybe the anti-McCarthy coup might actually have a chance to succeed but what if they did dig their heels in for a few weeks?  Maybe the rest of the House Republicans might start wondering if maybe there were a few more candidates that almost everyone could easily agree on.

It’s so pleasant to dream about what might happen if our elected “leaders” somehow developed backbone and started acting like leaders.  Of course, in reality most of them are either completely useless or worse.  They vary from hacks and grifters to actual sociopaths.  But maybe there are a few that want to do the right thing.  And if they show some resolve and take advantage of a rare situation where the actions of a few can impact a whole institution like the present situation in the House, then maybe something unexpected and positive might result.

Just for the sake of argument, suppose after a couple of weeks of yelling at each other behind closed doors, it occurs to some of the more moderate representatives that a more productive way of solving this problem would be asking each member to provide a list of names that they absolutely would refuse to vote for.  Taking everybody’s lists, they could then add up the negatives and disqualify anyone who had more than four no-votes against it.  Whoever is left would constitute a pool of names that had the potential to be approved.  Then after a couple of test ballots using that pool of names as the source, they could pretty quickly come up with the four or five names with the largest support and begin to do some horse trading to see who could become the Speaker.

Obviously, my idea would require that most of the Republican House members were reasonable human beings.  And we already know that’s not true.  I suspect at least half of them are nitwits.  But I’m sure that the more intelligent members of the group could persuade their more cognitively challenged brothers and sisters to follow some simple instructions.  Surely there are three or four Republican representatives who are both competent and haven’t sold their souls to Mephistopheles yet.  Jim Jordan is one name that has come up often.  Maybe there are some others.

The point is the MAGA wing of the party has found a silver lining to the 2022 mid-term meltdown.  Their 20-member coalition can wreck the Uniparty’s party.  Short of the GOP establishment letting a Democrat become Speaker, their backs are to the wall.  And if they did elect a Dem then the whole charade would be exposed and the Uniparty would be truly unmasked for all to see.  And from my point of view that would be almost as good as Jordan getting the Speaker’s gavel.

Now, this is all nonsense.  None of this will happen.  McCarthy will whine and hector the dissidents and they will be threatened by the donors who paid for their campaigns and eventually they’ll vote for good old Kevin.  But for just a day or two they did give me something to cheer about.  Listening to all of those politicians screeching apoplectically about irresponsibility and the storied history of the “People’s House” gave me a good laugh.

And who knows?  Miracles do happen.  Very rarely.  But not never.