constitutional issues

Arrests! We Got Arrests!

Mark Noonan14 Comments

We did get some arrests! More are promised…but Don Lemon’s arrest warrant wasn’t signed because the Judge’s wife is an Assistant AG in Keith Ellison’s office.

Think about that. It isn’t a statement of guilt. It isn’t about evidence. It is merely law enforcement saying they want to arrest a person on alleged charges. Book him, Dan-o. That’s it. He’d be out on bail probably within hours. But the Judge wouldn’t sign…because the Judge knows that the job isn’t about law, it is about protecting Friends and punishing Enemies. He was protecting a Friend.

This is what we’re up against – all up and down the line on every level of government, we have committed Leftist fanatics who’s only loyalty is to the Party. Trump is weeding them out of the federal level and in the Red States serious efforts are being made to get rid of them…but in the Blue areas – which includes the Blue areas of Red States – the fanatics are firmly in power and will hamstring all operations of law if those operations harm the Left. It is going to be hard to get indictments. Hard to get judges who won’t just toss the cases. Hard to get convictions in jury pools made up of Leftist fanatics.

The good news? In the end, we don’t have to get a lot of convictions all at once. In fact, to start, we only need one. Just one person looking at years in jail but holding information which will put dozens in jail. Information to trade for a get out of jail free card. There’s nothing quite like looking at 10 or 20 years in the pen to concentrate the mind…to make one reconsider if loyalty to the Party is all its cracked up to be. These people figure they are immune…that they mostly won’t even get arrested and, if arrested, will be allowed to skate. And even if convicted they figure a Democrat President in 2029 will pardon them. It will be hard to get any of them to flip…but if we can get just one, the whole thing unravels.

And they are all corrupt – every last one from the most minor official to the highest elective offices. They are all on the take. They all have skeletons they must keep hidden. Everyone is at risk if anyone starts to help find the bodies. Once one flips, it’ll be a stampede of mostly lower level miscreants desperate to get out of the way. We can start to unravel it all…backed by the testimony of those who made it all happen. You think some Somali just off the boat can work up a multi-billion dollar welfare scam? No. That takes local talent. A lot of it. The Somali is just the face – the way to call all attempts to stop it racism. If that bit of lead shielding no longer works and if people are facing serious jail time, it will all come out.

And nobody has ever tried this before. The GOP has routinely let slide massive corruption because they are a mix of on the take, themselves, or just too gutless to go after it. Afraid of being called bad names. But not any more. The charge of racism just doesn’t work on us – we know we’re not and, actually, the more they shout it the more angry and determined we become…because we know we’re not and for goodness sake, these people are robbing us blind. Trump is the first man in ages who feels that cheating is bad, as such and must be stopped. It probably was set deep in his soul by how he was cheated in 2020. Nothing like that sort of rip off to make you thoroughly sick of all con artists. Be that as it may, he seems determined to go get it…and if you look at what’s been done, it is clear the Left has been set up…essentially forced to defend the indefensible against a President who is willing to let it all come out because he and MAGA are not at all involved.

We’ll see how it goes – if it works, corruption is rooted out and the Democrats suffer another body blow (the corruption provides most of Democrat campaign funds – nobody really donates to them; they kick back to Democrats some of the swag stolen from the taxpayers).

Do We Have Any Guts?

Mark Noonan35 Comments

The word at this moment is that the DOJ is going to charge Don Lemon and the rest of the Commies who invaded a Minnesota church yesterday under the Klan Act. The teeth of it:

…That any person who, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage of any State, shall subject, or cause to be subjected any person within the jurisdiction of the United States to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution of the United States…

…That in all cases where insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combinations, or conspiracies in any State shall so obstruct or hinder the execution of the laws thereof, and of the United States, as to deprive any portion or class of the people of such State of any of the rights, privileges, or immunities, or protection, named in the Constitution and secured by this act, and the constituted authorities of such State shall either be unable to protect, or shall, from any cause, fail in or refuse protection of the people in such rights, such facts shall be deemed a denial by such State of the equal protection of the laws to which they are entitled under the Constitution of the United States; and in all such cases…it shall be lawful for the President, and it shall be his duty to take such measures, by the employment of the militia or the land and naval forces of the United States, or of either, or by other means, as he may deem necessary for the suppressions of such insurrection, domestic violence, or combinations…

Nutshell: if you do anything – even under the color of law or custom – which denies the rights of an American, you are in violation of the Act and if the local and State government wherein you reside refuse for any reason to secure your rights, then the President may use any means which come to hand to secure your rights, local law notwithstanding. Lemon’s assertion is that he was merely exercising his First Amendment rights to report on the incident…but the videos he’s posted show he had advance knowledge of and participated in the invasion of the Church, thus being part of a combination designed to deny the right of the people to free exercise of religion. Given that the government of Minnesota has done nothing – and has, indeed, encouraged such actions – it is now fully within the power of the President to see to it that the free exercise rights of the people of Minnesota are secured.

But, as they say, there’s more! 18 US Code 247:

Whoever, in any of the circumstances referred to in subsection (b) of this section…intentionally obstructs, by force or threat of force, including by threat of force against religious real property, any person in the enjoyment of that person’s free exercise of religious beliefs, or attempts to do so; shall be punished as provided in subsection (d).

Lemon and co are lucky nobody was physically harmed…but just for walking in there, they each face a year in jail. But the main thing to keep in mind here is that there are a host of laws on the books protecting civil rights, they are race and gender neutral, they have teeth…and they simply haven’t been applied to the Left, ever.

If we have just a small bit of guts, we’ll be able to destroy the Left…and they walked right up and asked us to. Keep in mind: the Klan doesn’t even exist any longer. Nobody will incorporate a Klan organization under the laws of the United States or the several States because doing so just makes you liable in court…so it can be with Antifa and all these Commie terror groups organizing protests and riots around the country.

Obstruct law enforcement. Block a road. Harass a citizen over beliefs. Any and all of these are massive federal law violations. And everyone involved in the organization doing it is completely liable both as to criminal and civil penalties.

Fight, Fight, Fight!

Mark Noonan29 Comments

Some people are in a bad way today and it got me thinking of a passage in the upcoming (promise!) Book X of the Mirrors series:


It is never time to be depressed – get out there and, well live. And if that gets us a bullet in our brain, then at least we didn’t crawl.

One of the smartest people I follow in X has pointed out that if we dispense with the filibuster we’ll soon find ourselves in a cold civil war…which may then become hot. And, he’s right. There is a dreadful risk in such a thing but there’s dreadful risk in all action, and even inaction is fraught with danger. We’re rather on the knife edge here.

You see, the Democrats just elected in Virginia a man who has fantasized about killing Republican children. The Democrat leaders did not distance themselves from the man. This indicates two things, both bad:

  1. The Democrat base is horrifically violent and ready to kill.
  2. The Democrat base is incapable of the basic due diligence of being a citizen.

Whether any particular Democrat want us dead or is simply very stupid it all works out the same…because those who want us dead count on the votes of the stupid for power. The whole Democrat edifice is a standing threat to our lives, our fortune and our and sacred honor. We have to start behaving accordingly. And, actually, Trump has – certainly since Butler. The thought you might be killed any moment by these lunatics does concentrate the mind wonderfully. But at the moment most of us don’t feel like we’re in the crosshairs so our minds aren’t as concentrated as Trump’s. But we are in the crosshairs. It is time to concentrate.

If we dispensed with the filibuster we would have at least 14 months in which to enact laws without any hindrance by Democrats. We could do quite a lot which would gut their power. Trump already is, but if you do it legislatively then it is a very deadly blow. And, sure, if the Democrats win a trifecta before the Left is destroyed this will go badly for us…but if the Democrats get a trifecta and we’ve never struck a blow, then that just goes worse for us. Might as well do what we can.

I am reminded that the anti-Communist forces in Russia in 1917 didn’t lift a finger to save the Provisional Government. They all pinned their hopes on this, that or the other thing happening after that government was gone. But the trouble was that once Lenin kicked out the Provisional Government and assumed power he had the ultimate levers of power in his hands. The time to stop Lenin wasn’t after his October coup, but before. Even if that meant a few norms were tossed aside. Nothing that could have happened in getting rid of Lenin was worse than what Lenin was going to be. And, so, like that, nothing we do to hit the Democrats is worse than what they’ll do if we don’t hit them.

So, hit them.

And be happy about it – be a happy warrior. Our goal in life is to have a tenured Harvard professor struggling to make ends meet bagging our groceries. To bring down the Ruling Class. To overturn the system. To have a revolution. They must lose – and lose, in the end, everything. No power. No money. No position. No prestige. Ridiculous, useless relics of a dead past that will never return. We do that, first and foremost, by taking away their access to government money.

Not for nothing did a Democrat Senator float the idea of funding the government merely on Trump’s promise that he won’t fire any more government employees. It is that crucial to them. It can’t be overstated how utterly dependent the Democrats are upon essentially laundering taxpayer money into DNC coffers. How much they depend on their ability to get useless people well paid government sinecures. How if they don’t have access to money, nobody will pay any attention to them. Their whole existence since the 1930’s has been based on passing out government cash. And this is our best chance to take that way – we have the trifecta. If we don’t have to get 60 Senate votes to cut spending…if we only have to get 50 plus Vance, we can gut the Deep State.

And, sure, with a risk that the Democrats – facing total destruction – will provoke a violent civil war. That is always in the cards with them – especially now after they’ve been fed for ten years on the lie that Trump is Hitler and they are the Brave Resistance. These lunatics are already killing based upon lies…won’t take a lot more to get them killing in droves. But it will go better for us, should it come to blows, if we’ve already cut off the funds. If they are on the outside trying to overthrow, rather than on the inside pretending they are defending America.

So, let’s do it. Risks and all! Better to have it out right now rather than desperately trying to undo things after a future far Left Democrat victory at the polls (however engineered). My bet is that the Democrats simply don’t have a lot of people willing to kill for them – that is, not enough to pose an actual threat to a heavily armed MAGA population. That even if they try violence, it will end badly for them and pretty quickly. But we’ve also got the hope that if we just cut off the funds, this all ends…the Left vanishes in a puff of intersectional smoke…and we all look back and wonder how those people ever were in power.

What the Riots Reveal About California

Mark Noonan15 Comments

…what they do create is anarchy; and the difference between these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and finality. Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only produces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about the beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone conquered; something occurred. You can only knock off the King’s head once. But you can knock off the King’s hat any number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but only wanted to be a nuisance, he could, possibly, have prevented any government arising successfully out of the Revolution. But such a proceeding would not have deserved the dignified name of rebellion….

War is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably—numbers, and an unnatural valor. One does discover the two urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are ready to be dead. But a tiny minority, even an interested minority, may maintain mere disorder forever… – G K Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World?

In that passage Chesterton was discussing what was called at the time the “militant suffragettes” – and his complaint, as can be seen, is that they weren’t really militant. They were just causing disorder on a continual basis in order to irritate the political system into giving women the vote. Trouble is that disorder is mere disorder…and while the positive thing did happen (votes for women) the precedent of irritation was adopted in the broadest sense by the overall political Left in the Western world. But you can’t do it that way – or, at least, you shouldn’t do it that way. And the votes for women finally occurred not because militant suffragettes knocked off the King’s hat, but because non-militant suffragettes simply set to work with peaceful political lobbying – both of government and the public – until the female vote was secured.

You might recall in the past that I’ve had a kind word or two to say about a riot. As Chesterton noted, it isn’t necessarily about violence, but about finality. Violence is to be avoided, of course. We should compose our differences via reasoned debate according to law. All rioters – like all revolutionaries – are doing something which risks the ultimate penalty being imposed by the other side. Don’t do it. If you do, know what you’re getting into. And, also, if you are doing it, have a resolution in mind. Like this:

Julius Jacob von Haynau was an Austrian army officer who was instrumental in suppressing the Hungarian rebellion in 1848. A man of notably bad temper, he was quite brutal in dealing with rebels who came into his hands. After it was over, he had the thanks of the Austrian government and the opprobrium of just about everyone else. A few years later he was visiting England and was recognized by some British workers who promptly got up a riot against him and basically chased him away covered in filth. Total violation of the law. Violence that was dangerous and could get someone hurt. But it was violence with a specific end in mind: letting a foreign brute know that he wasn’t welcome in a land of free men. The cockney’s who threw dung at him broke the law, but they did a right thing. They weren’t trying to merely create disorder…they had a goal in mind and achieved it. Violence is wrong; but if there is to be violence, there has to be a specific end to it.

If I had to say what is wrong with the Left – other than, you know, the fact that they are Left – I would say that they’re Leninists without a Lenin. When Lenin said to loot the looters he wasn’t trying to make a society of looters but working to obtain a certain thing: power for himself. By having the poor loot the rich he knew that the poor would remain poor, but very importantly the rich would become poor…and poor people have a very hard time fighting back. The modern Left does assert that the looters should be looted, but none of them have that single minded determination to seize all power and impose a new order. This is good, in a sense, because Lenin was evil to the core but it is bad that we don’t get a resolution…just continual disorder.

When the current LA riots started someone posted a picture of burning police cars and Gavin Newsom – the alleged governor of California – noted that the picture was from 2020. He was quite triumphant in noting this fact…not at all understanding that it merely indicates he’s let California burn routinely under his watch. Newsom is an evil man. He’s a liar and a crook. He likes being governor because it allows him to lie and steal on a grand scale and he’d like to be President so he can lie and steal even more. But there is no hard center to him – nor in any of the Democrat leaders. They just like to lie and steal and so they need a system which allows them to lie and steal – and a system that allows this is a system which retreats from rioters because you can’t lie or steal about riots and, anyways, any lives lost or property destroyed won’t be theirs so no worry. The main thing is that they don’t want this to end – because a system which suppresses riots is a system which won’t allow them to lie and steal. The disorder must go on forever.

But there is a risk. Somewhere in that mass of masked anti-American rioters there are people who do have a specific goal in mind. There are lots of Lenins out there. None has emerged into leadership. Keep in mind that Lenin got involved in the Marxist revolutionary circles as early as 1887 but it wasn’t until 1903 that he split the Marxist movements and created his Bolsheviks so he could have a movement entirely under his control and dedicated to taking power by any means necessary. So, we might still be a while out before an American Lenin arises…but once one does, that person will ruthlessly suppress dissent on the Left and move on a united front not to just create disorder so corrupt people can steal, but in order to provoke a revolutionary crisis to be taken advantage of.

What this means is that we can’t afford to play this game where the Left uses continual disorder to make governance impossible. And think about it for a moment – the schools suck, the roads are crumbling, burned houses aren’t being rebuilt. Why not? I mean, seriously: none of these are difficult tasks for any reasonably intelligent person. But they keep utterly failing at all of them. Why? Because any attempt to really fix this stuff will lead to renewed, petty disorder orchestrated by the people in charge of schools, roads and housing construction…and so the complete failure keeps going while those who deliberately allowed the petty disorder in the past continue to lie and steal. If it was just California screwing itself – or the Blue States, in general – then we might just smile and move on. But we can’t risk that – we can’t afford, that is, the continuation of a corrupt system where thieves and liars use riots as an excuse for maintaining a corrupt system. Eventually this can spill over into our areas…or throw up a tyrant who will rule us all. We must put a stop to this.

We can cite 10,000 examples of total governmental failure in California – from city to county to State. Nothing is working. Nothing is being done correctly. And this is before we get to the riots, themselves. What it all adds up to is that in their desire to steal, the California Ruling Class has abdicated all actual authority. That is, they were vested legally with certain powers to do certain things…and none of those things are being done. The money is getting spent! That’s for sure – and by “spent” I mean “stolen”, of course. But the things directed by law to happen, aren’t. And the people vested with the power to carry out the law, aren’t. Essentially, the mindless riot of the streets is also a mindless riot in the halls of government. Nobody is in charge – save those in charge of passing out the stolen cash. Everything else is a charade…a pretense. Make-believe government…the form absent any content.

The Constitution enjoins the federal government to ensure a republican form of government in the several States. Donald Trump – and the Congress and Judiciary – are duty bound to carry out the provisions of the Constitution. There is no actual government in California. There is a morass of people feeding off taxes and that’s it…nobody there is actually doing any governing. And that means, in my view, that the federal authorities should step in, dissolve the facade of California governance and call for new elections under strict federal supervision to obtain a government of California which will carry out government responsibilities.

It is time, once again, to enter the real world – in the fake world of the past, we pretended that California was just a bit weird. It isn’t. It is entirely dysfunctional…and flooded with illegals who are used by gangsters and government officials as a third-party cut out to steal taxpayer dollars. California in its current condition is a direct challenge to the Constitution and the territorial integrity of the United States. It must be brought under control and given a government with genuine consent of the governed.

Democracy, Limit Thyself

Mark Noonan27 Comments

The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. – G K Chesterton

This is why I sometimes say I’m the last democrat on Earth – because I understand that if God did create us (and He did) then a democratic system is a necessity. Someone will now object here: but, Mark, you also have said that you are essentially a Monarchist! This is true. I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said that the test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold to two contradictory opinions in mind and not go insane. So, maybe I’m just first rate?

Probably not! But there is no real contradiction here. And a huge part of the problem is that people think there is. That is, both Monarchists and democrats have fought each other quite bloodily on the assertion that there is a contradiction between Monarchy and Democracy when there really isn’t. But then you ponder it a bit and you understand that they weren’t really fighting against each other…they were fighting to hold all power. And neither a Democracy nor a Monarchy may reasonably hold all power. Only God can hold all of it.

The UK was supposed to be a model for sane government: a synthesis of Monarchy and Democracy – and for a while, it was. So sane that it managed with minimal effort to conquer one fourth of the world’s landmass and totally dominated the seas. There was a King and there was voting and there was hereditary nobility and big business and the Church and an independent judiciary and a free press and while there were problems there are always problems and the darned contraption worked. And it was the Reform Act of 1832 which set the UK on the path to self destruction.

Don’t get me wrong, there was need for serious reform – especially in getting rid of what were called the “Rotten Boroughs” where a handful of Electors would send a man to Parliament, often via straight up purchase. Meanwhile, huge communities in the UK had little or no representation at all. Needed to be fixed. The problem wasn’t what was fixed, but what was broken in the fixing…the franchise was extended to renters. Now, to be sure, you had to pay what was at the time a pretty hefty rent…which means you simply had to be a well off, middle class person. But the key was the law finally saying that non-landowners get the franchise. Once that was done, no way that everyone else wasn’t going to eventually get the vote. How can you possibly say ‘no’? Once the cat is out of the bag, it is out of the bag.

And in 1867 was another Reform Act extending the franchise to urban workers – higher paid urban workers, but still lower class. And the 1884 Reform extended it further. And the 1918 Reform yet further…and on and on and on until every Tom, Dick and Harry in Great Britain who is breathing at the time of an election gets to vote. And now with everyone voting all fair and square the UK has its largest cities under the control of recent migrants while the laws say you’re under arrest if you make a meme on social media…and you’re also disarmed in the face of a knife-wielding migrant lunatic. From ruling one fourth of the world to hiding at home in silence…all done by voting! They just happened to vote for suicide.

Turns out, having Viscount Twiddle-Dee sitting in the House of Lords by right of inheritance was more conducive to liberty than having Prime Minister Tweedle-Dum elected by universal suffrage. You see, Twiddle-Dee had only limited power while Tweedle-Dum’s power is unlimited. Therein lies the problem…not so much who has the power, but how much power the person has. That some nitwit heir of a noble house is in the Lords is far less a problem to the average Nigel than the police knocking on his door to ask him about a meme posted on X.

The USA is a little different, of course. The USA is different from everyone. Nobody better forget Bismarck’s statement about there being a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America. We are the invented country. A bunch of guys sat down in 1776 and declared it into existence and then returned in 1787 to declare it now had a government with such and such limited powers. Nobody had ever seen anything like this and nobody ever really would again. That is, no class of rulers – even rebel rulers – was ever going to make the Founder’s mistake: limiting the power of government. People who look at government simply can’t stand the thought that there’s something it can’t do…that there is an element of life simply outside the competence of government. But this is why the USA rose to global dominance pretty much in tandem with the decline of British dominance even though from Day One the franchise was fairly extensive in the USA and became more so over time. Why didn’t this kill us as badly as it was killing the UK? Because, as noted, the powers of the US government were limited…you couldn’t, via votes, obtain all power. Even if you controlled all 3 branches of government you didn’t have all power. You had a lot! But not all. And so the thing worked…until people decided to act like they did have all power.

The first person to do this was actually Teddy Roosevelt but his imagination was small…he set his sights on national parks and the Panama Canal. Wilson had a much grander vision on the uses of total power but even he wasn’t completely brazen about it. FDR was. There was simply nothing that FDR would ever say was outside his purview. Once in office he just did whatever he wanted, confident that a Congress controlled by his Party would never stop him and that it would eventually bring the Judiciary to heel (and he was right about this). FDR’s successors just followed along – usurping one power after another that didn’t belong to them, using bribery (ie, taxpayer subsidy) to obtain compliance at the State level (another brake on total power in the USA – the States are sovereign). Mostly it was done by promising at election time that every good thing would come to you if you voted the right way – and people by and large went along with it because they simply couldn’t see, in a broad majority, that the government with the power to give is the government with the power to take away. In short, the overwhelming majority of people – of all political stripes – were simply incapable of determining the best course of action…because they were being asked to decided the entire course of action.

Do understand that – it is totally reasonable for limited people to make decisions about limited things. In fact, this is the way it must be for a rational society. Only I can determine what color to paint my house…just as only I can decide who I want to marry, who I want as friends…on and on. It is when I propose to decide things for you that the limitations must come in…and the higher up we go (person, family, extended family, social group, town, county, State, nation) there must be continually increased limitations on what you can do (ie, “Congress shall make no law”). We’re human beings. Amazingly strong but also pathetically weak. We can’t know enough to make decisions on everything. And the whole failure of the world – what you see all around you in the USA and the entire world – is the logical conclusion of trying to get people to decide on everything.

To get back to the Reform Act of 1832, the fatal flaw in it was not limiting the power of government. Britain, famously, has no actual written Constitution. It is just the unrepealed acts of Parliament plus judicial precedent. It would take far too long a time to explain why it was like this but the bottom line is that the whole fight was between Parliament and King and it all worked out until the King was made a political cipher. Now it wasn’t a fight between King and Parliament but between Parliament and itself. There was no practical limitation on the power of Parliament except for the fact that the franchise was limited and so only people with a substantial stake in the community could direct the government. By extending the franchise without limiting the power the British set up the nightmare they have now. They really needed a First and Second amendment…and these should have been inserted in the Reform Act along with some provision making it nearly impossible to repeal. But, they didn’t see it. Because the people involved weren’t interested in sanity, but in how to get more power (essentially, the Reform people felt that they’d be rewarded with power for extending the franchise…and they were right).

We all know that unlimited government power is bad. We need to limit government; it must be kept in close constraints and strictly limited powers lest it get large enough to destroy us, the people it was created to serve (remember that: we institute government to secure our rights…not give us a welfare check!). But we can’t have limited government unless we limit the people, too. As per usual in human affairs, its not 100% one way or the other. It is a little bit of both. Human affairs requiring striking a balance, film at 11.

We must balance the need for responsible government with the need for limited government. Some years back a friend of mine bought a house he was going to rent out but, naturally, it needed cleaning and painting before that happened. For a variety of reasons he couldn’t get to the cleaning in a timely manner and asked if I’d help him out. Sure: that’s what friends are for. Plus, as he was going to paint it was really just a matter of cleaning sinks and bathtubs and so forth. I decided to start in the master bath and as I walked in, I noticed that the shower enclosure seemed an odd color…it was kind of a brownish grey and not at all nice looking. But, hey: who am I to judge? Someone wants a nasty color on their bathroom, not my concern. But when I go close and examined it I found that it wasn’t brownish grey…it was a white shower.

The house was about twenty five years old at the time and had one owner prior to my friend purchasing it. I scraped my fingernail along the brownish grey and it peeled off and I realized that the prior owner had never, not even once, cleaned their shower. They had used it year after year after year with it getting increasingly coated with soap and oil and dead skin particles and it never occurred to them that it might be time to hit the thing with a bit of a cleanser. Just absolutely nauseating. And it took me the better part of an hour to get all that gunk off.

But here’s why I’m telling you about this: that person who used that filthy, disgusting, unsanitary shower gets to vote. Just like I do. Just as much power as I have…and, like me, he’s voting for a government which has – or at least wants to have – total power over everyone. The guy who is so lazy he won’t even clean his darned shower gets to decide if I get to live, ultimately. Because that is what government power ultimately is, guys: the power to kill. We’re deciding who gets to kill and under what circumstances. Might not seem like that, but that is what it is. Filthy shower guy/Me = same/same. No, sorry; it ain’t. Filthy shower guy shouldn’t be deciding anything…for heaven’s sake, he can’t even decide to clean his shower.

We’re going to have to limit things, my friends. The only path to a limited government which secures our rights is a government which is under the control of people with some sense and responsibility. Unlimited voting just means unlimited power and power corrupts. Always.

We need a series of laws which restrict the franchise. Everyone can come up with their preferences here and we can debate and then enact, but some limitation on what the people can do is necessary if we are to have a government limited in what it can do. I would start with a basic literacy and civics test – to register to vote you have to write out the preamble to the Constitution and then answer some pretty simple questions about the government: name 3 Justices of the Supreme Court, name the current Speaker of the House, how many States are there…I’m not talking genius level stuff here, guys. Just something that lets us know you’re literate and have some concept of the government you are voting to empower. After that, I’d also remove the franchise for all fit, adult persons between the ages of 18 and 67 who receive 50% or more of their income from government (active duty military would be excluded from this restriction). Basically, if you live off government – even (and especially) by working for government – you have a vested interest in government power and thus a conflict of interest in your vote…so you don’t get to vote. And by “living off government” I do mean even if you work for a State-supported school, NGO, etc. And anyone can restore their voting rights by getting off the government dime. It is a matter of personal choice – because remember that I said “fit”…if you can work and choose to be on welfare well, that is your choice…and you’ve chosen disenfranchised dependency.

It will have to be. Civilization cannot survive without this. It is only a matter of time before this happens – and it would be better if we controlled it rather than waiting for someone else, perhaps hostile to us, to make it happen.

The Last Chance

Mark Noonan19 Comments

In poll after poll and in vote after vote what is happening all across the West is that youth is turning away from the Establishment. It is most marked among young Western men but it is also happening with women. Meanwhile, it is getting to be that the older the voter, the more likely to be Left…including among older voters who used to vote for ostensible Right parties in the past. None of this is too shocking – the youngsters see a dying world and don’t like it – and young white people especially don’t like the part they are being assigned in it: the evil ones who must be punished for the alleged sins of their elders and ancestors. For the older folks (call it 60 and up), it also makes sense they are going Left – the Left is defending the system the old folks grew up in and in which they became well off. They still watch TV news, of course, and sincerely believe the drivel put out there. But it is to youth that we look – because the future belongs to whoever is there. That ain’t you and me, fellow old folks!

Today I saw a video clip where King Charles III of Great Britain, visiting Canada, issued a “land acknowledgement” before his speech before the Canadian parliament. Basically, this was the King asserting that Britain and all her works were a crime. If he had an ounce of courage he would have abdicated before making such a hateful statement. But, he’s old and this is what the Ruling Class told him he has to say and that its an evil statement is neither here nor there…it is how he gets to remain King. Nothing quite so typifies the Boomer, does it? But one thinks about the heroic people of Britain’s past and you almost weep over it all – whatever one might wish to say about Sir Garnet Wolseley, when he burned Kumasi it was to clear out a nest of slave-traders. Today Charles would probably go there and apologize for that.

Another thing I saw today was a news report that 80% of Britain’s Down Syndrome babies are being aborted. One of the great achievements of Christianity was to end the practice of killing “unfit” children…but with the destruction of the Christian character of the West the barbarism has returned. Putting these two things together made be rather disgusted with quite a lot of things. I don’t want to be allied, for instance, with people who kill their children or insult their own past. And I don’t want the domestic versions of these people to have a say in how we’re governed. You see, I quite like living in a world where I have rights and I carry out my responsibilities and my property is protected, criminals are punished and weirdos aren’t allow to destroy the public square. Basically, I’ll see how Trump does: if he’s able to push through the necessary reforms, then I’ll be ok. But if the Establishment manages to stop him, then I’m seriously looking for a Sulla or Caesar.

And in that, I’ll be siding with youth – because youth has very little patience with or respect for the “norms” or the Establishment. They see through the scam. They are also, though, badly educated so they do, from time to time, fall for other cons as long as they are anti-Establishment cons. This is a problem and I’ll see my goal – if it comes to it – to guide youth away from these aberrations. And they can be guided it: I know it because I’ve already done it. They do listen to reason. You’d better have it all down pat! Answer for every objection! But if you do have knowledge and some patience you can reach this discontented youth…which is filled with a desire for freedom and is generous to a fault. But I won’t fight them on things I view as non-critical. They are youth and it is their world they are building. I offer my advice and my encouragement, but I do not offer myself as a leader. They’ll have to find their own.

I do see this as a time future historians will view as the breaking point – the end of one era and the start of another.

Ancient: European and Near-Eastern civilization to the Muslim conquest of Syria (638).

Medieval: Muslim conquest of Syria to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648).

Modern: Treaty of Westphalia until today.

But the Modern Era is rather done. Nobody believes in the basic assumptions any longer. Too many lies and too many crimes…and, in the end, it didn’t even work. We see outrages against basic human decency and civil rights and we joke that the Constitution (the highest human expression of the Modern Era) will break out of its case any minute now and save us…but those charged with applying the Constitution are too stupid and corrupt to defend it. So youth sees it as useless and seeks something else…just as they seek for something else regarding all major issues and events. I don’t envy them their task if we do ultimately fail – and let us hope that this last, desperate hope we elected last November turns the tide.

The Biden Problem

Mark Noonan9 Comments

The Biden family is asserting that Joe has an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Yes, asserting. We don’t know if they’re telling the truth. They are such egregious liars that nothing they say – even about something like this – can be taken at face value. I have said a prayer for Joe over it because that is what God commands us to do. Though at 82 our thoughts should be more towards a holy death rather than recovery. But that will be as it will. But even with all that, I just don’t know. I can’t know – I can’t rely on Bidens, I can’t rely on the MSM.

Truth or not, the issuing of this news – which none of us would need to know if the Bidens were normal – if it was designed to knock the Hur tapes out of the News Cycle isn’t working. To be sure, Democrats, MSMers and the Usual Suspects on the Never Trump Right are saying we’re all rat bastards if we don’t lay off Biden at this point…but that kinda shows the whole point of the exercise: getting us to shut up about Biden’s cognitive decline. In my view, the Hur tapes show conclusively that Biden was mentally incompetent no later than October of 2023 (my bet is that he was mentally incompetent prior to the 2020 election, but figuring and proving are two different things) – and that means that Harris should have exercised her authority under the 25th Amendment no later than then…that she didn’t and the entire apparatus of the Executive Branch and the complicit media tried to cover up Biden’s condition is the biggest scandal in political history.

Nothing compares to it. We did not have a functioning Executive under our Constitution. Nobody knows who was issuing the orders. And every order issued after October of 2023 is obviously legally invalid – just like you can’t get a senile person to sign a new will transferring all their stuff to you, so you can’t get a senile Executive to, say, issue you a pardon. The political and legal ramifications of what happened are going to be a huge problem – the whole thing needs to be thoroughly investigated and legislation enacted to retroactively deal with what happened (we can’t actually dispense with all Executive actions taken under dubious authority: some things are water under the bridge and just have to be accepted…but we need to make sure that, legally, they stand up to the future). And the people who covered it up in the Executive branch need to go to jail. You think about the huge number of people who had reasonable access to Biden and none of them ever came forth – as was their legal and patriotic duty – to say the man was gaga. And this means they were essentially participating in a fiction…a conspiracy to defraud.

And we have also learned that the 25th Amendment isn’t enough. If we have an Executive branch willing to lie in cooperation with friendly media, then the Executive can be zombie. Keep in mind that if they kept Biden together long enough to get re-elected, they’d still be hiding his condition. But our Constitutional order requires that the person elected to hold Executive power be mentally and physically capable of doing the job. Executive power is vested in the President…not the President’s family, cronies and senior White House aides. We need an amendment whereby Congress can force a cognitive test on the President. Some sort of majority vote in both houses and a third party does a full medical check on the President. The purpose of this isn’t to get the President to a physical…but to let the Executive branch know that if they try to pull another Biden, it will be exposed…if the guy is gaga, get him out of there.

Nuke the Judges: Restore the Constitution

Mark Noonan93 Comments

It has been noted that we have 677 Federal District Court judges and if just one of them objects to a Trump action, it is stopped…and we are instructed that only the nine Justices of the Supreme Court can really do anything about it…when and if they decide to get around to it. This is not, however, how our Constitutional system works. Or at least is supposed to work. Another person has pointed out that the Covid response kinda showed the entire Constitutional system is gone – if they could lock us down for a bad cold, then what rights do we really have? This is a strong point – but I’m still going to stick with the Constitution.

We simply have to make it work – because the alternative is a Caesar and I don’t want that. I’d bequeath the next generation liberty, if I can. If pressed to it I will bequeath them mere sanity…but I’ll try for liberty. And that means we have to make this system work – make the Constitution do its job.

The more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion that Trump must have a showdown with the judges. A direct defiance of a court ruling – written down as an Executive Order. No mistake about it – the ruling will not be enforced, all those charged with ignoring the ruling are granted a preemptive pardon. Basically telling the courts to jump in a lake – and challenging Congress to impeach and remove because that would be the only thing anyone could do about it. But it has to be done with care – and Team Trump is already setting the table for it…because the Constitutional crisis isn’t in a Trump defiance, but in the courts issuing rulings. It is the judges who are busting the deal, not Trump.

Some on the Right are still not getting this – and Chris Withans (@chriswithans on X and a definite must-follow; he’s a kid compared to us so you will get polls on which weird 2010 band is best, but he’s sharp as a tack on politics) gives the reason:

Literally the only reason why they think Trump is pushing the limits of the law too much is that the legal right has never fought as much as the legal left has, so we don’t see how fast-and-loose Obama and Biden play with the law and the Constitution.

I remember so many legal conservatives saying there was no point in challenging Biden’s student loan actions because of standing and the vagueness of the laws in question (which surprise surprise is meant to give discretion to the executive branch), but fortunately Missouri did so we ended up with a couple of key decisions to block it.

And then Biden of course violated the orders but because the legal right already undermined the case by saying we had no standing, they put themselves in a disadvantageous position to complain about Biden’s post-SCOTUS executive actions.

Nutshell: we’ve never really fought this out. Think about the 2000 election court cases – W naturally fought tooth and nail over Florida because that was the decisive electoral college State. Those EC votes decided who was going to be President. And Florida was as close as it was likely due to voter fraud…but so, too, were Iowa, New Mexico and Wisconsin. It is very likely, in my view, that a full audit of all 4 very close 2000 States would indicate W won all of them…and likely won the popular vote once you backed out the fraudulent votes. The 2000 election was the perfect time to fight out the overall issue of Democrats stuffing ballot boxes, which is something they’ve always done and GOP insiders always knew was done. There was zero chance we were going to lose Florida once the first recount was done as long as the W people kept an eye out for Democrat skullduggery (in this case, trying to post-facto manufacture just enough votes to get Gore over the top). But had it been fought out in all 4 close States, it would have exposed the Democrats then and there because such a fight would show that Gore did not come remotely close in Florida, either…that some late night ballot box stuffing was the source of the disputed election result…and this fight would have created a massive backlash against Democrat cheating and lead to a much more secure and honest election system. Nope. Nothing doing. W and his people accepted the stuffed ballots in Florida and held on to merely saying (in effect) that the Democrats didn’t cheat enough. The W team just wanted to get the power…not actually do something with it. That was the point of the Florida 2000 exercise…and that is the way the GOP has always fought legal battles: on the narrowest possible grounds.

We can’t be narrow – it has to be point blank we’re right, they’re wrong and our way will prevail. A district court judge does not have the power to issue a nationwide injunction and the Article II powers of the Presidency may not be taken away by any law or court ruling. The President may hire and fire at will and does not have to expend appropriated money. We have to make the battle the People vs the Judges. It is a fight we must have, it is a fight we can win – and by winning restore the actual Constitutional order. The judiciary is not a referee nor a last resort for the losers of the last election. Political matters are to be settled by politics. Period.

Defending Law

Mark Noonan34 Comments

This is going to cause some controversy:

The quote is attributed to Napoleon and it is very much in line with his thinking. True enough even if he never uttered the exact phrase. But, what does it mean? That a leader should go off and be lawless and claim as justification that he’s saving the country? Well, we get that on the regular right now. The world has always been filled with such de-facto assertions. But Napoleon wasn’t asserting a national policy for his government – he of the Code Napoleon knew that law was crucial – but simply making an observation. Keeping in mind that he had turned out the Directory in a coup…to the immense joy of most French as they were, by 1799, sick to death of endless Revolution. I believe that this is the sense in which Trump is working.

The law, from the Constitution on down to the lowest county ordinance isn’t a suicide pact. We cannot, of course, have a civilized society if we don’t have laws. But the law can become destructive of its own ends – like, for instance, when we have people asserting that the 14th Amendment secured a right for foreigners to illegally enter our country and give birth to citizens. If the law explicitly said that, then only an insane person would abide by it – and everyone who violated it would be saving the country, and thus violating no law.

Another example – the law clearly states that Hunter Biden is pardoned for all violations of federal law from January 1st, 2014 until December 31st, 2024. And that, by law, ends that. But it isn’t at all just. It isn’t what the law is for – the power of pardon isn’t intended to get your drug-addicted son off from his serial violations of laws. And, so, while it would be a technical violation of the law to now rake over every action of Hunter’s starting on January 1st, 2025 (he will break the law again; there is no doubt about that) and then throwing the book at him, it would be just. You see how this works?

Personally, I think what Trump has done here is fire a shot across the bow of those in the country who are willing to go along with Democrat efforts to hamstring the Executive. We know what the Democrats are doing and why – and that is fine. But nobody else should be helping them at all. If, for instance, the Supreme Court decides not to intervene in these ridiculous lawfare cases against Trump’s Executive actions (or just delays action based on some absurd adherence to established judicial procedure), then Trump will wait a while…but then act. The laws we have on the books that are supposed to protect us from unjust government actions are not there to allow well-funded Leftwing activists to stymie via lawsuits actions by the duly elected Executive. You are not being oppressed if your federal meal ticket is taken away and no host of Leftwing judges can make it so.

And, in the end, if Trump does act against a court order after giving fair time for it to be worked out, then he will be saving Law. Keep in mind that if the Lawfare actually worked – if it actually prevented Trump from doing the legal things he was elected to do – then it would go into the public mind that the law is useless. Even downright evil. If working within the system and winning fair and square by the book gets you nothing, then you will seek other means of getting what you want. Trump won the election. The Republican Party won the election. The MAGA voters won. And when you win you get what you want. That is the rule. And they’d better darn well get it – or things will start to happen that nobody likes.

Our Government is Bad. Like Really, Really Bad

Mark Noonan62 Comments

So I guess the FBI employs 13,000 agents – which seems like a heck of a lot – and 5,000 of them were employed going after J6 people. Little back of the envelope math and that means 38% of the FBI was concentrating on that.

In 2022 (the last year complete stats are available) 73,654 Americans died of fentanyl overdose.

You’d think the FBI would have concentrated on that problem.

Even if J6 had been an actual insurrection that caused the death of cops, you’d still think that 73,000 people dying from a drug overdose would draw a little more attention than J6. You know, given that if J6 was an insurrection then not only did it fail, it didn’t even appreciably slow things down.

Why did the FBI do this?

  1. It is easy. Fighting the drug cartels takes a lot of very hard work, often in very bad locations, at great personal risk. Going after J6ers involved finding a law-abiding patriot who was somewhere in proximity to the Capitol and then dragging his/her unresisting a** through the judicial wringer.
  2. It is what the political bosses wanted. The pay and promotions were going to be handed out based on who did the most to nail the J6ers.
  3. Regardless of how things came out long term, the FBI agents were sure that the GOP would never do anything to them and would keep referring to them as “our brave and dedicated FBI”.

Guessed wrong on that last one, guys! But more importantly, what this reveals is the utter rottenness of the FBI – and, indeed, all agencies of government. Even if one wants to put the worst possible reading on J6, hardly anyone involved committed an act of actual violence. Most of the people brought to court had just been in the area or had peacefully entered the Capitol for a few minutes (this also tells us that the actually violent were probably agents – even if free-lance – of the FBI). No decent, moral human being would do more than pass out fines to these people…maybe in one or two more egregious cases give them six months in jail. What the FBI did to the J6ers was simply horrific – they did this to Americans. To us. It was nightmare stuff out of some dystopian novel where the Nazis won WWII.

The other day I watched a documentary called American Nightmare. It is one of those true crime docuseries and when I turned it on, I had never even heard of the case – though as it went on, it was clear that it caused at least a bit of a media sensation when it was happening (I haven’t watched much TV news over the past many years – though, full disclosure, since Trump was elected I have watched more than usual to get my gloating in). The basics of the story is that a lunatic broke into a home in the middle of the night, tied up the guy after drugging him and then kidnapped the girl. When the guy woke up from the drugs – and sat in fear doing nothing for a while because the kidnapper had threatened him if he went to the police – he called the cops who then immediately suspected him of murdering his girlfriend. It got worse when the girl was let go (after being held for two days and raped twice); the cops then decided this was all some scam worked up by the girl based on a recent movie plot. The cops were getting ready to charge the couple with felonies over making a “false” police report when, lo and behold, a totally unrelated cop – just doing her job, no special intelligence or ability needed – found the clues that indicated the story was real…and then they got the guy.

Who had also done this sort of thing before. But nobody believed the accusers. Now, to be fair, the MO of the perp was absolutely bizarre. If someone came up to me and told me that story, I’d be doubting it heavily. But the cop’s job is to check things out. You know: investigate. Had the cops done some investigating they would have found sufficient in the earlier cases to nab the guy before the poor girl featured in the story had been kidnapped and raped. But, that’s hard, you see? Much easier to just aggressively interrogate the victim(s) and hope you can catch them in a lie that you can prosecute.

The bad guy was caught almost by accident. A good cop just doing her job put two and two together. But there were probably scores of cops involved over a period of years when the creep was operating who never did put two and two together. And I’m not saying they just missed something – they didn’t look. And in questioning the victims, the cops routinely lied to them. About what they were after as a police force. When the victims were given their police files after it was all over, it was clear that the cops never did anything but first try to nail the guy for murder, then tried to nail the girl for false report when she turned up alive. After I finished watching, I turned to the Mrs and said, “are criminals only caught because they’re dumber than cops?”

Guys, I think it is really bad: that we’re living entirely on luck right now. Or had been until 1/20, at least. I wouldn’t trust an employee of any government agency with a burned out match right now. When not overtly corrupt, they’re lazy and stupid. Maybe one in a hundred is actually trying to do a useful job in the day to day. Now we better understand why US Naval warships are rusted, why planes on routine flight paths crash, why a train wreck with chemical spills is just left to sort itself out, why fire hydrants in LA don’t have water…the people running the show haven’t a clue what to do. Right now the Left is filled with whines about the uncertain economic futures of the people on the DOGE chopping block and I’m like, “what would you say you do around here?”

In response to us playing The Bobs here, multiple FBI agents have filed suit against President Trump…claiming it is a violation of their rights if he gets a list of FBI agents who worked on J6. The Democrats will find some federal judge to issue an injunction. I hope Trump just ignores it – of course the President – who is the chief law enforcement officer of the USA – gets to know what the cops were working on. It is all so very stupid – but, hey, its what they’re going with.

I had estimated some years back that about 1 in 3 federal dollars was wasted – just uselessly spent when not outright stolen. I massively underestimated it. And now we get to find out just what its all been wasted on…and how many people have had their rights violated by the thieves.

I really hope the security people for Trump, Vance, Rubio..heck, all of them…is tip top. The Blob will not go down easy.