Even a Leftist Admits the Dangerous Hypocrisy

H/T to Tim for the link on my feed.  Greenwald is a progressive.  But he’s an honest man.  He believes in the concept of equality under the law.  And he sees that the Justice Department has been weaponized against its enemies.  And he knows once equal protection has been eliminated everyone is the potential target.  He knows that the Deep State has then become an unassailable tyrant.

That’s when the FBI starts killing old crippled men and tossing them in the street as a warning.

 

Putting the Fox in Charge of the Henhouse

Garland appoints the same guy who is currently trying to bury the Hunter Biden investigation as special counsel so he’ll have even more power to bury it.  In fact. he’ll probably use his office to investigate the people trying to get to the bottom of Hunter’s crimes.  I expect him to indict all the whistle blowers and even the Republican congressional committee members.

And now that the special counsel’s work is ongoing the congressional committee can be held off as trying to interfere in an active investigation.  What a wonderful system we live under.

Well, Maybe

I get an e-mail whenever Curtis Yarvin writes a post in his Substack; Gray Mirror.  Now Yarvin is a lunatic but an engaging and clever lunatic.  His answer to all of the ills of our society is always the same; install a king.  So, I’m always a little daunted when I consider reading his posts, not least of all because they are usually between five and ten thousand words long.  Yikes!  Luckily this one was on the low end of that range.

It was a gentle chiding of Richard Hanania for becoming a moderate.  I guess Hanania was being attacked in the media for being an alt-right partisan in his younger days.  Well, who wasn’t?  Anyway, after a few thousand words to ridicule the concept of classical liberalism Yarvin gets down to his bottom line.  Any and all progress against the woke left is hopeless because the oligarchy protects it and the only way to get rid of the oligarchy is with a king.

Well, maybe.

So, because our representative democracy has been hijacked by an oligarchy, according to him we should welcome a dictator.  And you wonder, how did that work out for the Romans?  Julius Caesar and Augustus were pretty good.  But after that, what a nightmare.  How do you keep the king from being a madman or an incompetent?  Yarvin has this idea that it would be like some kind of CEO for the country and there would be a board of directors who could hire and fire the king.

Well, maybe

But I’m guessing that stuffing that board would be like stuffing the Supreme Court.  And truth be told the board would be the oligarchs and they would just choose one of their oligarchi-est oligarchs to run their show.  And how in hell do you get something like this started?  No, there is no way out that way.

What seems to be the case is that we are heading for a crisis.  The old system and the way that it works is reaching a breaking point.  Those in charge seem to have a plan to permanently make the voting system just a rubber stamp for their regime.  And at the same time, they want to change the class system in this country from a middle-class dominant model to a feudal system with the peasants working for the oligarchs.  And to be totally honest it sure looks like they’re way ahead getting their plan done.  A big chunk of the millennials and zoomers have serf written all over them.

Well, maybe.

But the best laid plans of oligarchs and serfs oft time go to hell in the real world.  I still think it’s too soon to just throw in the towel.  The demolition of the American economy is preceding at such a breakneck pace that it is somewhat possible that a popular revolt might miraculously sweep the Democrats completely out of power long enough to allow actual representatives of the people to make drastic reforms and restore our interests.

Well, maybe.

After reading about the FBI gunning down that old guy in Provo, Utah I’m not feeling so chipper today.  I know the radical nature of the killing should help to delegitimize the institutions like the FBI.  And it probably does.  The man as described was obviously no threat to anyone.

“Neighbors who spoke with the Deseret News described Robertson as a markedly different person than what he portrayed online. One person called him a “teddy bear” known for his woodworking who would sit in the same seat at church every Sunday; another said he was barely mobile, weighed nearly 300 pounds and was unable to walk without a cane. He would drive to church, despite it only being about 200 yards from his home, because he had so much trouble moving around.

Neighbors also described a harrowing scene, with dozens of agents converging on the Provo house, rifles drawn and hiding behind bulletproof shields as flash bangs exploded.

“I just can’t believe that this man warranted that kind of response,” said Travis Clark, who lived up the street from Robertson.”

It makes me sick to think that the FBI has become a secret police agency, no different from the Stasi and the KGB.  In fact, worse than those organizations.  At least the KGB wouldn’t have allowed BLM and Antifa to burn down their own cities.  But maybe it will be this kind of gestapo tactics that convinces a solid majority of the American people that our “leaders” are really our overlords now and need to be replaced with something better.

Maybe, maybe not.

Tough day to be optimistic.

The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth

Damning.  Will anything come of it?

 

If This Goes On … Then What? – Part 4

The next aspect of the mess we’re in that I’ll touch upon is the surveillance state.  For generations, but much more severely since the 9/11 attack, the intelligence agencies; the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, NSA, etc.; have been surveilling the American people and punishing anyone who speaks against them.  And lately they’ve taken it a step further and now have an effective veto on any elected office holder in the federal government.  What they did to Donald Trump when he was elected president shows that they can disrupt the activities of the President of the United States to such an extent that they effectively nullify his ability to select his own personnel and carry out his agenda.  And now they even prosecute candidates for high office to rob the electorate of their only effective means of control over the federal government.

Unlike the earlier installments of this series of posts there is only a binary choice.    And of the two paths forward, the preponderance of evidence indicates things will only go one way.  But I’ll lay out the two scenarios.

The first choice is that we solve this problem.  And what would have to happen to fix this?  The first step would be for the Congress to refuse to re-authorize the Patriot Act and the FISA courts.  And this would be an enormous action.  After the 9/11 attacks the American people willingly acquiesced in allowing the government to spy on us to prevent further terrorist actions occurring within the United States.  But just as some people on the Left warned us back then, the intelligence agencies have used these weapons against us.

The next step involves de-weaponizing these agencies but especially the FBI and Justice Department.  In plain language what it means is removing from power the whole upper echelons of these agencies.  These people would either have to be fired or transferred from their present positions into jobs where they effectively have no control over law enforcement responsibilities.  They would have to be given make-work positions and left to rot until they retire.

And the budgets of these agencies would need to be severely reduced so that we no longer have a situation where the NSA can afford to spy on all Americans simultaneously in real time and effectively controls the internet and the economic activity on it.

And finally, the agencies in question would need to have their charters rewritten to reduce their capacity to do harm.  And robust oversight would have to be built into other agencies and the presidency to more easily step in if criminal activity resurfaced.

So that’s scenario one.

The second scenario is simple.  Nothing gets done.  We continue on the present track where the Justice Department is the de facto enforcer of the banana republic junta we presently have running the country and by extension the whole western world.  What we’ve already seen of this thugocracy will only increase in scope when it becomes obvious that nothing can be done to correct the problem.  Who knows, we may even cease to go through the charade of elections and instead go to a permanent martial law basis where some committee “appoints” a dictator for life who will be rubber stamped by the Senate or whatever other clique of ruling class apparatchiks emerge.

I have to confess.  I’m pretty pessimistic about this.  The Deep State enjoys enormous power.  It seems more likely that the United States itself could unravel than for the intelligence agencies to be ripped out by the roots.  I think the bureaucracy in general and the intelligence agencies in particular are the Achilles heel of our republic.  They’ve become our masters and we don’t have the wherewithal to throw them off.

What do you think?

Will the Deep State be Toppled?

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Weaponized Justice Against Jim Justice

You couldn’t make something up that was more blatantly partisan and cooked.

 “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief

DeSantis Keeps Getting Better

Boy, I wish I lived in Florida.

Who Runs This Country?

Of course, that title question is a joke.  Everyone knows who runs this country.  Just ask the people who thought they were protesting on January 6th.  The managerial class runs this country.  They control the federal bureaucracy, almost all of the private corporations, the non-profits, the media, the colleges and the schools.

Using the federal bureaucracy, they can crush any resistance regardless if the threat is a well-financed opposition party or a single citizen speaking his mind against tyrannical overreach.

I was reading an article that speculated that the Supreme Court was likely to rule against the long-established precedent that allowed federal agencies to essentially write laws by utilizing “expertise” to decide how a law allows them to regulate some aspect of life in America.

For instance, the EPA gets to decide that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.  The gas that is emitted by every living thing on earth is a threat to the planet that needs to be taxed, banned and demonized.  This ignores the fact that fire has been a human tool that produces light, heat and power for eons while producing a carbon dioxide as a necessary part of the combustion reaction.  It also ignores the fact that penalizing the use of fossil fuels is already bankrupting western countries and threatening the health and well-being of poorer individuals.

So, there is the chance that the Supreme Court could decide that Congress and the courts should be allowed to overrule unelected lawmakers in the federal bureaucracy when they decide to promulgate laws that no one voted on and most people don’t want.

But the first thing that came to my mind was that this will push the next Congress to add six more justices to the Supreme Court and in the meantime the agencies will just ignore whatever the Supreme Court says that they don’t like.

The Trump administration proved to me that the managerial class can and will game the system to resist any attempt by the common people to wrest power away from them.  It’s as simple as that.

Now that might sound both horribly pessimistic but I think the happenings of the last few administrations bears it out.  No outrage by anyone working for a federal agency has caused the least harm to that individual.  Even the one guy who was convicted of perjury during the Russia-gate scandal was reinstated and had his conviction reduced to a misdemeanor that didn’t even cause him to lose his law license.

And on the flipside every enemy of these bureaucrats has been put through a meat grinder where just waiting for a trial is made an ordeal that may include imprisonment in a dungeon with unbelievable abuse heaped on innocent Americans.

So, our enemies are immune from punishment for any and all offences and at the same time they can destroy the reputations, livelihoods and even lives of anyone who dares to challenge them.

I’d like to think that disgust at the tyrannical methods being used by this junta would eventually rally enough Americans to vote the Democrats out of office and allow the Republicans to defang the FBI, CIA, IRS and the other enforcers of the regime.  But I no longer think that likely.  The younger people in the country are mostly brain-washed to obey their masters.  And a huge chunk of the country is made up of people dependent on the federal government to continue a lifestyle that doesn’t include work.

I realize this is a pretty depressing post.  But I also think it’s necessary to face facts.  As far as any bright side, well, I guess the only advantage is you’re almost completely immune to horrible surprises.  You can basically see these things coming a mile away.  And alternatively, if anything goes unexpectedly right, you’re always pleasantly surprised.

I hope I haven’t ruined anyone’s week.  As I’ve been writing about lately it’s still possible to work around these odious people but expecting the feckless Republicans to beat them is laughable.  And America isn’t united in wanting them gone.  For the foreseeable future they own the country.