Time for Intolerance and Exclusion

Mark Noonan19 Comments

Before anyone gets their knickers in a knot over that, lets review something: Anti-racism and anti-fascism.

Our Leftist friends are very keen on both of those things but you have to take a look at what they’re really saying. When they say they are anti-racist/anti-fascist they don’t just mean they are opposed to racism and fascism. They way they mean it is that unless you are actively anti-racist, you are racist. And of course the only way you can be actively anti-racist is to sign on, completely, to whatever policy prescriptions they are pushing at the moment. Failure to sign on is proof that you are not anti-racist and are thus actually racist…and so you shouldn’t be tolerated. You should be excluded. Essentially, the Left has already laid down the marker that tolerance and inclusion are not their desired goals.

And we must tit for tat on that.

We tried tolerating those who hate us. Who hate the United States. The theory was that in order to remain free we had to be tolerant. And to a certain extent, this is true. A free people must allow wide latitude of belief otherwise they simply can’t be free. But life, like art, consists in drawing the line somewhere. There is a definite point beyond which tolerance for different ideas works against the very concept of tolerance and while the exact point is debatable, that it exists is as hard and fixed as a geometrical fact. When we tolerate people who seek to undo us – who seek to end, entirely, the nation founded in 1776 and replace it with something else – then we are tolerating our own destruction. We are letting our murderer into the house, arming him and then letting him attack us. Kinda hard to survive when you’re doing that.

We’ve let this go on so long that we are already, all of us, at risk of losing our jobs and social position for a single, unguarded phrase. If the Left decides, they can turn an apparatus of social opprobrium on us and most of us would find our employer and our friends abandoning us as they sought shelter from the storm. We already self-censor. We already leave certain subjects alone or only discuss them with people we entirely trust. We’re already living under totalitarian tyranny. And we’re living under it in the name of tolerance and inclusion. We can’t do this any longer.

We have to push back – we have to start firing them. Ruining them. Making their lives a living hell. Get corporate boards more terrified of us than they are of the Left. We have to set the standard that anyone who holds the United States to be racist and/or that white people are inherently racist cannot obtain employment and is to be shunned in public. It is harsh, I realize that – but it is the only way we can remain free and, indeed, tolerant. Tolerance, as it turns out, only applies to the tolerant: those who aren’t are to be excluded from it’s protections.

Some of this is already started and I applaud it. Disney has gotten hammered in stock price and public perception since they waded into the trans issue. There have been – though only a few – fired for holding views which are opposed to sanity. But we need to do more of it. We have to hammer back, twice as hard. Those who hold views which make us out to be the bad guys should be afraid to speak up…afraid that if they say the wrong word, they are ruined. It is kick them out of society, or get kicked out, ourselves.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan12 Comments

Feeling better! Covid does take it out of you. But, now I’m down to a cough and some general tiredness – sense of taste and smell is back.

That said…

The Democrat insanity on abortion has been on display all week and I think for many people it is their first real look at how Democrats – or at least their fanatic base – views the matter: they actually held a useless vote in the Senate to write Roe on steroids into law…it failed but their plan was to federally fund it on demand to the moment of birth with no conscience exemptions for medical providers. Thing would have been ripped to shreds at the Supreme Court had it passed. But that they even tried this useless thing – on a platform that, at best, has about 20% support – shows how insane they are about it. They’ve spent 50 years defending a Court ruling which, even if you’re pro-choice, is clearly unconstitutional and just horribly immoral…even liberal countries like France only allow abortion up to 14 weeks…and then only after two medical consults.

Meanwhile, China Joe and the Democrats continue to sink in the polls…and we’re starting to see that in primary voting, GOP enthusiasm is massively outpacing Democrat. We could be on the run up to a very large GOP victory.

Not that the GOP won’t do their best to blow it. I get people being sympathetic to Ukraine and disliking Putin’s Russia. I understand a desire to help them out – but for the majority of House GOPers to vote in favor of $40 billion no-strings-attached to Ukraine is just stupid. We know huge amounts of it will be siphoned off in graft. Meanwhile, here at home we’ve got an invasion at the southern border and our supply chains are so jacked up that in some areas there are shortages of baby formula.

Our domestic problems are large enough. And our foreign problems are China and drug cartels…even Islamist extremism simply isn’t worth our while to concentrate on at the moment. We have to get our house in order…not send billions to a Ukraine war which at any moment could drag us into open conflict with Russia. But there goes the Congressional GOP, nodding along with a Democrat/MSM Narrative. Wouldn’t be so bad if we could find a principal, but you just know they’re so in the Beltway that they’re seriously afraid we’ll think they’re Putin Puppets if they don’t go along with this boondoggle.

People are furiously fighting over Oz and, now, Barnette in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Lots of ostensibly pro-Trump voices being raised against them – in both cases over statements they made or may have made in the past. As I said regarding Oz, I won’t hold anyone to statements made in the past: especially if the statements are pre-2018 or so. We’ve all had a massive education these past few years and all of us view things a bit differently. As I pointed out on Twitter – what’s worse: a person who made ant-MAGA statements in the past, or a person who talks MAGA all day long and then knifes us? Plenty of the GOPers who voted for Ukraine aid probably have impeccable Conservative GOP credentials. I take everyone at face value these days: what do you propose right now? And sure I know that con artists will try to take advantage of this…but I’m at no more risk, and maybe a lot less risk, rolling the dice on a newly-minted MAGA than I am on the GOPe which has betrayed me for decades.

In the end, it is up to the votes of Pennsylvania to sort it out – but my advice to everyone is don’t take anyone’s word for it. Look it up yourself. We know that the most fierce voices are raised against those who fight for us – Trump, Greene, etc. And that tells me something: somebody doesn’t want me to have a champion. So, my first inclination when someone is attacked from the right is to question the attacker’s motives.

Court ruled that California’s ban on gun sales to under-21 is unconstitutional. Which, of course, is “no duh”. And I hate to break it to you, but as soon as someone sues on the cigarette and booze bans, they’ll go down as well. An adult is an adult. Period. Personally, I think we should never have lowered the age to 18 – stupid mistake. But if you make 18 the age where you can vote and enter into contracts, then that covers everything an adult is able to do…so, if you want your ban on booze to 19 year olds to stick, better amend the Constitution to return the voting age to 21.

Team Pudding Brain wants to turn American health care over to WHO – in the name of fighting the pandemic, but actually because (a) they hate the American people and (b) would love to be able to shrug and say “hey, we understand your anger here, but this is a WHO decision” whenever the global elite decides it is time to crush us under useless medical mandates.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Sorry I haven’t been around, but the Chinese Bat Flu finally got me – felt my first symptoms on Saturday evening and tested positive on Monday morning. Basically, I’m ok – but it is a miserable cold. I seem to be pretty much past the fatigue/fever/ache part of it and am now in the cough/nasal congestion area – which is what I always hate the most about any cold. Anyways, not much inclination to write.

The leak of the supposed overturn of Roe is, in my mind, a desperate, last ditch attempt by Democrats to keep urban woman on board…as prices and shortages continue, there becomes less and less incentive for any Democrat constituency to show up in November and I guess they felt that it was slipping away so badly they needed to move on this now rather than wait for the decision to come in June.

And I think this leak is worse than a crime, it is an error. Democrats have been able to sustain a significant level of support for abortion by making sure nobody knows that Roe legalized it to the moment of birth. Poll after poll shows that solid majorities favor restrictions or bans on abortion after the first trimester. And, so, you never hear that talked about in the MSM…because the Democrats can’t afford to have people know that their abortion position is radical. Heck, the Alabama law in question only bans after 15 weeks…which makes it roughly line with France…hardly a hotbed of Christian fundamentalism (and in France you have to have two medical consults before the abortion is performed – which, to me, is still wrong, but it is at least reasonable).

Trump endorsed candidates swept the boards in Ohio…which shows the continuing power of Trump within the GOP. The sensible part of Never Trump (there really is such a thing) has been so desperately hoping that Trump was at last fading…but I’ve been pointing out to them that for a lot of people, the worse Team Pudding Brain gets, the more Trump will shine in hindsight. I really got under their skin a week or so ago by suggesting this will even most people to believe 2020 was stolen as nobody will want to admit they were suckered by the anti-Trump media op.

Quid est veritas?

Mark Noonan19 Comments

The famous question of Pilate to Jesus: what is truth? Now, we Christians answer that by saying Jesus is the Truth…and that is true and sufficient for all events. But as we are no longer a Christian civilization, perhaps we need to expand on it a bit more? For the heathen…and, maybe, a lot of those who call themselves Christian but live as practical pagans.

The basic issue of truth has been rolling around in my head a lot lately, but Team Pudding Brain setting up a Disinformation Governance Board gives the matter urgency. To absolutely no surprise to you or anyone on our side, there are already Never Trump squishes trying to explain or explain away this board – which cannot but have a nefarious purpose of suppressing dissent. The way NT writes it up, there is a need for someone to clamp down on “misinformation”, though when pressed they’ll admit that a board inside the Department of Homeland Security isn’t the best place for it. There is, naturally, no best place for it – there is no place for it, at all.

We know that when the Left says “misinformation” what they mean is anything they disagree with. It is why they say “misinformation” rather than “lies”. Keep in mind that Leftist fact checkers will take someone which is 100% true and call it “partially false”, based on what they say is the relevant context. Meanwhile, bald faced lies by the Left are held to be “mostly true” because once you think about the whole situation, that Leftist lie speaks to a larger truth. You see how it goes: anything we say is false, anything they say is true…and so even when we say factually true things, we’re spreading “misinformation” and that has to be stopped. Now by Pudding Brain’s Cheka inside DHS.

But the larger problem we have is that a lot of people don’t know what truth is any longer. We’ve been conditioned for decades to think that divorce (ie, breaking a promise) is ok and that we have to tell “little while lies” just to get on in society. It was under Bill Clinton that this was rammed home. It would have eventually been rammed home by the Left but Clinton gave it urgency because just about everything he said was false…but as it was all in the service of the greater good (ie, advancing the Left) we all had to be taught that some times lies are good.

There is a poll out there were people were asked questions like “what portion of the population is gay?” and “what portion of the population is white” and the overall results show that people haven’t a clue about their own nation. The question about gay was very revealing in that the “vote” for gay was about 20 percent when the actual gay number is 3 percent. People are walking around thinking that one in five are gay. But, who can blame them? Turn on popular culture and it is shot through with gay characters. It seems that every move and TV show has to have a significant number of gay people in it when, in reality, most Americans might personally know one or two gay people because there simply aren’t that many out there (for myself, I personally know two gay people – and one of them is only distantly known via a second party mutual friend). People think America is barely majority white when the reality is that we’re seventy percent white. People think that twenty percent are millionaires when it is less than one percent.

And this is all because the people have been lied to and they have been conditioned to accept and repeat lies.

Here I would like to point out that a lie does no have to be false. In fact, a lie can be entirely factually correct and still be a lie. Like this:

Here are your facts. Jack went to the store where he pulled out a gun and shot the clerk and stole fifty dollars. He then went home and had a beer and told his wife he loved her.

Here is your news report: Jack came home from the store and after having a beer, told his wife he loved her.

There is nothing false in the news report, but it is a completely false story all the same. It is a fact that the most effective lies adhere as close to the truth as possible in order to transmit the lie. Recently, Marjorie Taylor Greene was accosted by an MSMer who tried to ask her why she brought up the possibility of martial law to prevent Biden from becoming President. She stopped and asked the MSMer to read the actual text (all the while refusing to confirm it was even her text – my bet is that it isn’t, but she didn’t want to get drawn into an argument on that level). Once she really pressed, the MSMer (not facing the camera while he did so) read the whole text and thus we found out that it wasn’t MTG saying we needed to go to martial law, but someone saying that some people are talking like that. And some people were – but some people talking about a thing doesn’t equate to anyone advocating for a thing.

But there was the MSM, trying to slander MTG into being an insurrectionist. And the lie was merely the MSM not reporting the whole text – they just latched on to a word and then started asking everyone “why was MTG advocating martial law?”. Now, MTG ably destroyed the MSMer – calling him a liar to his face – but you can bet on it that if any of the video is shown in the MSM, it won’t be the parts where MTG calls the MSMer a liar or the MSMer having to admit that the text doesn’t verify MTG calling for martial law. Whatever gets into the MSM show will, by selective use of words and facts, work out to the MSM viewers being told that MTG favored martial law to stop Biden. And it will have the true things in it that MTG was part of a text thread where martial law was mentioned…and that will sound oh, so ominous! But it will also be a lie.

I think our first step here is to define a lie – and it isn’t just the statement of a falsehood. It is the attempt to deceive which differentiates a lie from the truth. And while it is possible to deceive someone with an outright falsehood, the reality is that the most effective deceptions use truth as their foundation. It is the difference between an adult pulling a toddler’s leg by asserting the Moon is made out of green cheese and the con artist trying to sucker the unwary out of their money. The adult isn’t really trying to get the kid to believe the Moon is made out of cheese…but the con artist is definitely trying to get the money. This is why Trump grandly saying that Mexico will pay for the wall (implying to the unwary – or the malicious – that Trump was saying Mexico will cut us a check for wall construction) wasn’t an attempt to deceive, but Obama saying “if you like your doctor, you can keep him”, was. Trump was trying to drive home a rhetorical point about the necessity and benefit of the wall…Obama was just bald faced lying to save his political bacon because if he had come out and told us what ObamaCare was going to do, he would have lost the 2012 election. Obama lied to fool us into keeping him in power, Trump exaggerated to make a point – there is a gigantic difference here.

“Safe, legal and rare”: remember that? This was the supposedly centrist Democrat answer to the problem of abortion in the 1990’s. It sounded so good, but it was an attempt to deceive. And it by and large worked. It sounded so right. “Hey, I don’t like abortion, but as long as it is rare, then I’m ok with it.” Democrats went with that angle because saying “federally funded abortion on demand to the moment of birth” (their actual position at the time and now) would have been politically disastrous. But it has been lies like that which have kept the Left in power because the lies, which all contain aspects of truth, are so relentlessly hammered home by the MSM and popular culture, help people make a coward’s bargain. That bargain is: I’ll pretend you’re not lying, if you’ll leave me alone.

But that bargain never works, long term. The trouble is that the liars never stop lying: they just see if you’ll swallow the next one as readily as the last. And I think the Left has gone too far – and the trans issue seems to be the dam buster here. Trying to get people to agree that men can get pregnant and that kids are old enough to decide if they should transition was just a step way too far. But even with the rising pushback here, we have a long way to go. Many other lies have been very firmly implanted into the American mind. People – large numbers of of them – believe complete drivel because it has been endlessly and slickly imparted to them in popular culture for decades.

To take an example: Columbus. Once such a hero that we named our capital city after him, he’s now nearly universally despised, and by extension every explorer, pioneer and colonist despised with him. Most people, if you query them on the subject, will at least go along with some concept of Columbus and his successors being bad. Never mind that they recently dug up 1,000 female skulls in Mexico and, after first thinking it was a mass grave of Cartel victims, discovered it was instead a 1,000 year old site of mass female human sacrifice. Had Columbus and the Conquistadores not come along, that stuff would have just kept on going.

So, too, with all of it – there is no indication that my Irish ancestors, left alone, would have set in motion a train of events which got me to sitting in my air conditioned home in the desert with a pool out back and a pantry stuffed with food that I didn’t have to sweat in the fields to obtain. Sure, there were probably some ancestors back there who were hung for stealing a sheep and I am firmly against hanging sheep thieves…but the bottom line is that absent the Limey bastards, I wouldn’t be living nearly as well as I do today. So, thank God for the colonists!

But we can’t even have that discussion these days because the lies have been so deeply implanted that most wouldn’t know what you were talking about and a determined minority would seek to socially destroy you for pointing out relevant facts which place the Current Narrative in a bad light.

We have to get back to truth – the real truth. Telling the story which places all relevant information in the public square in a timely manner so that people can react properly to events. To do this, lying – intentional deception – is going to have to be punished. The liar,when caught, can’t be allowed to give us a “my bad” and move on. There has to be pain involved. Lots of pain. So much pain that people might start to think that honesty really is the best policy.

Hey, its either that or get ready for a future where you die of easily treatable diseases as your doctor in his ignorance throws up his hands – not knowing the simple treatments because after a century of lies, it was decided that being a doctor doesn’t require knowledge of human physiology. But he’s dead certain that men can get pregnant.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan30 Comments

I don’t actually trust Elon Musk. Maybe he’s a nice guy and that’s cool. If I ever hang out at places billionaires gather, I’ll let you know. Absent that, all I know about the guy is that he is a billionaire…a class not noted for their friendliness to, well, me. Donald Trump being one of the rare exceptions which prove the rule – and maybe Musk is another of those exceptions. But don’t go setting him up as some sort of icon. He appears to be committed to free speech and that is great – but he’s also decisively left of center in most of his views and we still might find that his idea of free speech isn’t the same as ours.

That said, the Meltdown of the Liberals when word came of Musk’s purchase of Twitter was glorious. The only event topping it was Trump’s 2016 win (and that event could only be topped by a 2024 win for Trump). It was hilarious for them to suddenly realize that they had set the standard at “private companies can do whatever they want”. They set that standard because they were confident that the private companies they cared about would always be run by their ideological allies. Now they’re rather caught in a bind – but, hypocrisy is their middle name so they’re already shifting over to demands to regulate social media.

Here’s some alleged audio of a Twitter meeting after the Musk news came out.

As it turns out, I am still in favor of regulation of social media. No matter the private aspect of their ownership, the bottom line is that social media is becoming the primary means whereby public debate is carried on. To me, if a platform does not ban all political/controversial speech, then it has voluntarily entered the public square and become part of it – and the public square is for all, especially those we hate the most.

In their renewed love of regulation on this, the Left hopes to ban “hate speech” and “misinformation”, which we know will amount to banning anyone who disagrees with the Left. To get out in front of it, we need a law (which may end up having to be an Amendment) along the lines of:

No free to use public media platform shall deny access to any person or entity who wishes to comment on matters of public controversy.

Nothing in this law shall be construed as permitting sexual indecency, slander, incitement to violence or the promotion of activities illegal under US law.

That pretty much covers it – though it can be refined as we like. But we dare not let anyone start to place into law anything related to the content of speech. Nothing about “hate speech” or “disinformation”. Because that is a slippery slope.

Democrats, ruthlessly exercising their State legislative power rammed through some of the most amazing Gerrymanders in history…all the while suing GOP States for far less offense. But, it looks like the Democrats went too far – in New York, their ridiculous map was tossed and the judges will find some people to draw new ones. Because Democrats are Democrats, you can expect this new map to still be favorable to Democrats…but not by the lopsided amount the rejected map had. Here’s a sample of how ridiculous the Democrat map was:

Zoom in on that a bit to see that in areas it literally goes down a street to connect parts of the district together. Democrats felt they had to do this to try to save their bacon in November…now, they won’t save as much. But, in the end, I don’t think it was really going to matter…they might be heading for such a blowout in November that all they’ll have accomplished was to lose seats they could have won, but they shifted too many Democrats out of them to try to shore up weaker seats.

Related: Pudding Brain’s approval is underwater in 40 States….in a poll historically Democrat-friendly.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

Representative Henry Cuellar (D-TX) is sounding the alarm about Democrat chances in November…but, there’s an odd wrinkle here: Cuellar’s office was raided by the FBI a little while back and he’s embroiled in a scandal. OTOH, we know that Democrats use the FBI and DOJ to punish political opponents and the last thing Team Pudding Brain wants right now is a Latino Texas Democrat warning that they’re going to get destroyed in November because Latinos are going to vote GOP…and a lot of the reason will be Biden’s Border Crisis.

Democrats are getting alarmed here in Nevada, as well. All 4 of our House seats are up along with 1 Senate seat and the governorship. 3 of 4 House seats are currently Democrat as is the Senate seat and governorship. Democrats thought they had this sewn, don’t you know? With total control of the State government it was Fun Time! Part of their fun was redistricting and the Democrats took their Life Seat (NV-01) which was packed full of Democrats and broke it up a little bit to provide more Democrats in other House districts. That was before gas prices sky rocketed and polling started to show a big shift of Latino voters to the GOP. But now they’re kinda stuck…NV-01 is still a high hill for the GOP to climb but in a Red Wave year it could easily go GOP. Meanwhile, Senator Cortez-Masto (D-Zombie Reid) is a nonentity running against Republican Laxalt who is proving an excellent campaigner and the GOP has two good prospects to run against Governor Sisolak (D-Whatever the DNC Tells Him to Do). Could be some very good news in Nevada this November.

Ron DeSantis does it again. No, not smacking Disney down. Not stopping grooming in kindergarten. No: this time, its limiting tenure as public universities. This sort of thing is small but crucial. Progressives get themselves deep inside and then change everything … and one of the best ways to be “inside” is to be tenured in a university. You are practically untouchable. Its like being a made man in the Mafia. There is a huge argument about whether we should go Trump or DeSantis in 2024. I don’t care which one of them gets it – either is going to be a fighter for us.

Remember the lunatic conspiracy theories about people having their organs removed for transplants? Well, looks like the Conspiracy Theorists were just ahead of the curve. Again. But, really, this is bestial what the Chinese are doing – all very Soylent Green which, along with Rollerball and Network are the three 1970’s movies to most accurately predict the future.

What Are Human Rights?

Mark Noonan12 Comments

There has been much debate this past week over Florida removing Disney’s special tax and governing provisions and as it went on it occurred to me that the concept of “rights” isn’t properly understood in America these days by a lot of people. We know that the Left doesn’t understand the concept at all, but even many on the Right seem to be pretty hazy on the subject. So, let’s take a stab at defining what a right is:

A human right is something that an individual inherently has: to determine if something is yours by right, you must consider whether or not any human being, at least in potential, can think, say or do a thing on their own: if they can, it is almost certainly a right. If thinking, saying or especially doing something requires the cooperation of one or more additional people, it isn’t a right but a privilege.

In our Declaration, we assert that we are endowed by God with these rights. It isn’t necessary to believe in God to hold that rights are inherent, but it is a lot easier if you do. The main thing about it, though, is the assertion that a human being, as such, simply has them. They aren’t granted, they are secured. And that is the crucial thing – because we go on to assert that governments are instituted among men to secure our rights. That’s the only purpose of government: to make sure that everyone’s rights are secured: left up for debate is just how to secure the rights, but that the individual has the rights and government must secure them to be legitimate is a bit of dogma absent which the United States has no reason for existing.

It is also important to remember that rights are individual in nature. They don’t adhere to a group: they adhere to you and me, as people, simply because we are people. There are no black rights or gay rights or women’s rights: there are only human rights and only individual human beings have them.

What has gone very wrong in America over the past century, and especially the last fifty years or so, is the loss of this understanding of human rights, and what our government is supposed to be doing. When a Leftist says that the Constitution doesn’t give you a right to own a machine gun, all he’s doing is talking drivel. Of course it doesn’t give you a right to a machine gun. It doesn’t give you anything. It secures all your rights (or, that is what it is supposed to do). To say it doesn’t specifically authorize machine gun ownership, or their other argument that gun ownership is dependent upon militia membership (with the further assertion that the militia is now the standing Army) is to talk nonsense. The Constitution also doesn’t specifically say I can have a ham sandwich – and I doubt anyone will try to enact common sense ham sandwich control. I have, as a human being, the inherent right to do anything that any individual human being has the potential to do on their own: as long as I’m not required to obtain the consent of another to do a thing, then I get to do it and the only purpose of government is to secure my right to do it.

I can thus own any property that someone wishes to sell me. I can say whatever I want. I can believe whatever I want. I can go in the public domain anywhere I wish. I don’t have to account for my actions to anyone unless I’ve tried to take something from them (ie, their life, their liberty or their property). Most people don’t get this concept: that we are all free agents. We’re not supposed to have to fill out a form. We don’t need permission. To take it to a small level as an example: in most places, every year you have to re-register your car and pay for the privilege of not getting a traffic ticket while driving your property in the public domain. What possible argument can be made that I, as a person, should have to tell the government what I own? Why should I have to pay each year to tell them what I own? I have an inherent right as a person to own a car and that’s the end of it. You might reasonably be able to tell me that I have to keep it on the roads, that I can’t exceed certain speeds as a means to protect the rights of others on the roads…but you don’t need to know if I own a particular car. But we’ve grown so used to this sort of thing that we don’t even see it for the imposition that it is. And because we do things like register cars, the Left says it is reasonable to register our guns. And, hey, please have your child fill out this form telling the government what religion you are and what language is spoken at home. One thing leads to another, doesn’t it?

The Left makes their arguments because they (a) don’t know what a right is and (b) haven’t the foggiest notion of how the United States Constitution and government are supposed to function.

But it also infects the Right. Plenty of voices rose up as Florida removed Disney’s special protections to say that we on the Right are violating Disney’s right to free speech. They are asserting that Disney corporation, in engaging in the debate about sex education in school, was merely exercising its right to free speech and to take away Disney’s tax breaks was unjustly punishing speech. This is an absurdity. Disney is a publicly traded corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees…it is a collective thing and thus has no rights at all. All it has are privileges…and the Florida legislature has decided to revoke some of those privileges. Each Disney employee is, of course, free to say whatever they want – and the employees of Disney are also empowered to range their corporation on any side of the political spectrum they wish. Nobody can make the least move against any individual Disney employee for speaking out…but the collective entity called Disney has no rights and, as it enters the political debate, it is entirely legitimate for their political opponents to use their constitutional powers against the Disney entity. In this case, the power inherent in government to decide what the tax bill is going to be.

These days, we’re so used to asking permission to do things that even many on the Right seem to think that as long as you can go to court and have a judge say you can do a thing, you’re free. But that isn’t how it is supposed to work. It isn’t for me, as an individual, to argue I have a right – it is for those who say I don’t to argue that I don’t have it. Like this: what was wrong in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case was that the owner of the shop had to defend himself. He had to go through a long, tortuous, expensive legal process just to get a judge to say, “hey, turns out he as an individual doesn’t have to bake a cake if he doesn’t want to”. Do you see how utterly ridiculous that is? Who the hell was anyone to think, even for a moment, that they had the right to tell a person they must do anything? Free people can’t be told to do something they don’t want to do. The end. The whole case should have been five minutes:

Plaintiff: Your honor, I want that man to bake me a cake.

Judge: Defendant, do you want to bake the Plaintiff a cake?

Defendant: No.

Judge: Ok, sorry, Plaintiff, he doesn’t want to do it. Case dismissed. Oh, and Plaintiff: you owe the Defendant his legal costs.

But because we’ve got into this “mother, may I?” attitude, it went on for years. And because it was allowed to go on for years, the people trying to destroy Masterpiece Bakeshop simply tried again and again with different plaintiffs and slightly different arguments. But they all came down to the same absurdity: an assertion that Person A has a right to order Person B to do something. That in this or that circumstance, a person loses their rights as an individual depending on the supposed need of another individual.

We must get back to the understanding of human rights – it will be crucial as we reform America. The old America we grew up in (and especially that, say, our grandparents knew) is gone. We’re at the crossroads where we are going to decide if America will remain free, or become a quasi-Socialist society of Rulers and Ruled. But for us to recreate a free America, then Americans are going to have to re-learn what being free means. They’ll need to re-learn, that is, that we don’t need permission. My grandfather used to make massive business deals on a handshake. There was no contract. There were no lawyers involved. They were free, adult Americans presumed by all concerned to be in full possession of their faculties and so if the deal went belly up they’d all take their lumps and move on. They didn’t need to fill out a government permission form (and the very concept would have amazed them): they saw their opportunity to make money and agreed to give it a try. We must restore that mental attitude – something in the mind which assumes we’re all able to do a thing without permission from anyone save those directly involved.

Because if we don’t, then even our victory over the current Left will be hollow – unless people are imbued with a spirit of liberty, they won’t remain free. They won’t, that is turn from Marx to Madison, but from Marx to Franco. In the end, Franco is still vastly better than Marx…but Madison is better than both, by a long shot.

We Need a Tribune

Mark Noonan30 Comments

The title, of course, is ancient Roman – tribuni plebis. Tribune of the Plebes. The common folk. You know: you and me. While the title Tribune was applied through Roman history to a variety of offices and functions, the part I’m most concerned with is the actual tribuni plebis. Those charged with protecting the people from the Ruling Class.

In the Roman Republic there were ten Tribunes, one for each of the Roman tribes and they had the power of legislative veto and ius intercessionis – they could veto Senate legislation and they could intervene to protect any commoner. That isn’t exactly what I have in mind for an American Tribune because I also take a bit from the Roman Censor – who was periodically elected to look after public morals and how the officials were conducting their offices. I just want one Tribune and here’s the powers I want it to have:

  1. The ius intercessionis: I want the Tribune to be able to intervene in any federal prosecution and simply annul the charges against the accused, prior to or after conviction. It isn’t a pardon (though it would work out to one given our Constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy): it just releases the accused and prohibits the government from prosecuting over the crimes charged at the time ius intercessionis is invoked.
  2. The Tribune is empowered to investigate any elected or appointed official of the federal government. No elected or appointed official can refuse access by agents of the Tribune to any federal document or property: the investigative power of the Tribune is to be absolute, not subject to review or check, no official can refuse a Tribune’s demand for documents or access. For appointed officials (the bureaucrats) the Tribune would have power to prosecute (with a jury trial) and punish without recourse to federal appeals courts. For elected officials, the Tribune presents the evidence to Congress and calls for expulsion (of Congress members) or impeachment (of Executive or Judicial office holders). The Tribune would not have the power to investigate State or local officials, nor any citizen who isn’t employed by the federal government. The Tribune is a watchdog on the federal government, nothing more.

I’d have the Tribune elected in odd numbered years by national popular vote with a limit of one term per Tribune who cannot seek another federal office until seven years after leaving office. The election would be held on the second Tuesday of December, the Tribune taking office at the stroke of midnight, New Years Day with a four year term. The Tribune would be limited to a staff of no more than 100, the budget provided by a set tax which can’t be reduced or abolished but which does rise indexed to inflation to keep the budget stable in real terms (it wouldn’t really require much: no more than a few million dollars a year; we could probably fund it by a penny tax on the sale of shoes or some such).

What I want here – and others can modify my idea – is a person, elected, who has no other role than to check up on the government. That is all the office is empowered to do. It can’t be interfered with by other branches, it would be very difficult to bribe, it can’t be used as a launching pad for a different office as the gap between running for a new office is long. What is wanted is a looming threat over all officials of government…that their game will be exposed. True, a Tribune with a small staff couldn’t find all problems…but it could find a lot of them, and merely exposing them would often be sufficient to force reforms. And it would also serve as a fallback for Americans oppressed by their own government – there would be a lot less chance of trespassers being held in solitary confinement or people being entrapped in a FBI scam to kidnap a governor if there was an official who could, just on their say so, stop the whole thing in its tracks.

We had thought the checks and balances of the Constitution were sufficient. They weren’t. To secure justice for ourselves and punishment for corrupt officials, we need a new power in the land…one which only we, the people, can raise up and who has no other job than to glare at those who would rob our substance and oppress us.

Happy Easter!

Mark Noonan10 Comments

I’m a little late in getting to this, so we’ll go ahead with what Peter had to say about it afterwards:

Peter proceeded to speak and said:
“You know what has happened all over Judea,
beginning in Galilee after the baptism
that John preached,
how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth
with the Holy Spirit and power.
He went about doing good
and healing all those oppressed by the devil,
for God was with him.
We are witnesses of all that he did
both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem.
They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.
This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible,
not to all the people, but to us,
the witnesses chosen by God in advance,
who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
He commissioned us to preach to the people
and testify that he is the one appointed by God
as judge of the living and the dead.
To him all the prophets bear witness,
that everyone who believes in him
will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Acts 10:34a, 37-43

To me, it is impossible to not be moved by this – as well the reading where Peter and “the apostle Jesus loved” run to the tomb and find it empty…still not knowing and still not sure, but you know they were running through their heads things from “they stole his body” to “didn’t he say he would rise again?” and in hope and fear wondering what was going to happen.

And as my pastor did this morning, I’ll ask all Christians reading: do you believe in the resurrection? Because if you don’t, then there’s no point in going to Church. That is the unique thing about the Christian faith…to have it make the least of sense, the resurrection must be believed. I do believe it, as it turns out.

God bless you all!

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

8.5% inflation, but you know it is a lot higher than that – they’ve clearly fudged the numbers. My guess is that it is closer to 20%: prices are just out of control. The Fed says inflation may have peaked in March…but, that’s just a lie and the Fed knows it. As long as we’re pouring money out while also not producing at home, inflation will continue to rise. Might have a few ups and downs going forward, but the only way to stop this is to choke off the money supply – in other words, we have to go into a recession to stop inflation. And we only get out of the resultant recession by increasing domestic production on all levels, but especially energy. Side note: Team Pudding Brain is absolutely opposed to increasing domestic energy production.

Oh, they’ll say they want to switch to green energy but that stuff doesn’t work. It isn’t easy to find news reports about it, but solar just sucks. Uncle Sam kicked in more than $700 million for the solar plant in Tonopah, NV (with his nephew the Nevada State government kicking in a bit more than $100 million more) and the damned thing never worked. It is now shut down (after emitting poison gas and frying untold numbers of birds) and in bankruptcy.

And I do get the appeal of solar energy – the sun does shine, after all! But not brightly everywhere all the time. At best, something like solar can be a supplement. And it seems to me that if we’re going to shell out taxpayer funds for it, they should go to put solar panels on residential roofs – especially in the desert southwest. But, that doesn’t really work, now does it? If the panels are on my roof, how does the power company profit from it? So, build the 100 acre blight on the desert and have the power sent to my home…if the thing works. One thing I’ll bet about that plant in Tonopah is that everyone who made money off it was connected to Harry Reid and his machine.

Meanwhile, supply shortages continue – and not just in energy. I read that there’s a shortage of baby formula. How does the United States ever have a food shortage? We’ve never had one except in a few areas of the South during the depths of the Civil War – and that wasn’t really a shortage of food but the inability of the crumbling Southern economy to transport the food to where it was needed. This is the land of plenty. We have something like 500,000 square miles of arable land in the United States – and that’s without bringing anything like all arable land under cultivation. And American farm land is good – it is, for the most part, very fertile and either naturally well watered or easily watered by irrigation. Its why we have been – until just recently – the bread basket of the world. And here we don’t even have enough food for infants!

And this looks to get worse. I’m sure you’ve seen your local store out of or low on very common items – but various disruptions, including the war in Ukraine, look to cause all sorts of production and transport problems as the year progresses.

And what is Team Pudding Brain up to? Blaming the inflation on Putin and getting set to green-light an absolute flood of illegal immigrants over the southern border. It is just insane.

As a result of all this, the Democrats are in trouble? How deep? They’re heading towards wipeout territory. One recent poll Joe in the 30’s on approval rating – and in the midterms, the party in power’s vote share usually mirrors the incumbent’s approval rating. Now, to be sure, some are convinced that the Democrats are serenely pushing ahead with the Progressive insanity because they’ve already rigged the mid-term vote for a Democrat win. But that isn’t possible in this circumstance. To rig a vote, you have to have total control not just of the count, but of resolving all disputes about the count. Democrats have this total control in the deep Blue cities, of course, but not much else – Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona have all done at least a bit to tighten up voting controls. They won’t, that is, get away with 2020 in those States again. Personally, I think Democrats are going Full Progressive for two reasons:

  1. The people actually running things for Joe don’t care about the upcoming vote.
  2. Those who do care figure might as well quadruple down and at least hold the enthusiasm of the big cities.

The guy who shot up the subway in NYC was on the FBI radar, has been arrested multiple times and posted insane, violent rants on You Tube. Too bad he wasn’t a middle class housewife who complained to the school board – might have been able to do something about this. I mean, the FBI only has so many people – think of all the strings attached to garage doors which would have gone uninvestigated if the FBI was spending time on the NYC shooter?