On Shooting Oneself In The Foot

I'll go out on a limb here and make a wild prediction: that Trump will win re-election in 2020 (unless someone shoots him first, in which case we'll get Pence -- oh, joy), and that the wiser heads among the Democratic National Committee know it.

No, really!  Back in my wild and woolly youth I did a lot of grassroots political work -- in Michigan and Chicago, where I also worked for minor but well-run newspapers.  One thing I learned was that when a political party is facing an election, when it knows it's going to lose, it will put up at least one candidate who's severely "ideological" -- i.e. flogs the party's wildest and most extreme policies.  Why?  In order to win the loyalty of the new young voters -- preferably voting for their first time: the idealistic, politically inexperienced and naive youngsters, the kids who really believe they can change the whole world with one vote if they can just turn out enough voters.  Offering the kids their political dream is a good way to win their loyalty for the next 20 years, hopefully.  It doesn't matter if the candidate is too far out to possibly win the election;  the party was going to lose it anyway.  This is why the Republicans put up Barry Goldwater in 1964.  Check your history.

This would also explain, as nothing else can, the DNC and its media-flacks frantically hyping members, policies, and candidates that are totally unelectable -- while doing its best to shoot down its one really electable candidate.  Over the past year we've seen the usual Democrat crew fawning over grotesque Jew-haters like Tlaib, Omar and Sarsour, with no sense of how these characters annoy and actually worry the majority of American voters.  We've also seen them trying to rehabilitate "Socialism" by selling it to high school students who have little to no idea what the term means, but just might be eligible to vote in 2020, much to the dismay of their parents.  And then there's the amazing circus of the Democratic candidate debates, which have spurred the candidates to astonishing feats of public idiocy.  Swalwell took himself out of the race early by promising to ban all civilian firearms and send the police from house to house confiscating them.  And then no less than Robert O'Rourke (who's 100% Irish-American but took the nickname "Beto" in order to snuggle up to the Latino voters, who would have to be prize idiots to trust him) not only boasted of loving the same policy but proved himself outrageously ignorant about firearms by claiming that the AR-15 was a "weapon of war" and the AK-47 could be easily bought by civilians anywhere in the US.  And then, at the last debate, the other candidates turned on Joe Biden, of all people, and accused him of being too old and senile to take the job of president;  this will not sit well with the older Democrat voters.  If this was intended to funnel Democrat voters into going for Warren and Harris, both nicely liberal women (as Hillary was supposed to have been), it's too little and too late;  smart Republicans have already dug up political and financial dirt on both of them, and will doubtless find more.  About the only selling-point the Democrats have left is hate-Trump-get-Trump-anything-but-Trump, a tune which the voters are growing bored with hearing.

So why are the Democrats so determinedly shooting themselves in the foot like this?  If it isn't the losing-year sacrifice, what's the reason?  They can't really believe that their way-out agenda actually appeals to to the majority of voters, can they?  Do they think that their bloated media-campaign will make up for contrary information which voters can see for themselves?  Or are they thinking ahead not to 2020 but 2024, hoping that by then they will have dutifully propagandized enough of the new young voters to bring in a Democrat landslide? 

Or have they so thoroughly brainwashed themselves that they actually believe their own propaganda, and think that voters hate Trump and adore their people and policies as much as they themselves do?  Such thundering stupidity is hard to believe, but stranger things have happened. 

Still, going on the assumption that the average politically-active Democrat has at least average intelligence, I'll hold out for the ideological-sacrifice theory and a foreseen second term for Trump -- or maybe a term for Pence.

--Leslie <;)))><      

CORRUPTING SCIENCE

Have you ever heard of the Milankovitch Climate Theory?  You should have. 

Milutin Milankovitch was a Serbian astrophysicist and mathematician, born in 1879, who became fascinated with discoveries about the Ice Ages, and determined to find what caused them.  First he studied variations in the cycles of Earth’s orbit and noted how seasonal and latitudinal variations in solar radiation hit the Earth at different times and in different ways.  Then, working without the aid of any computer, he calculated back over 600,000 years to analyze the rise and fall of global temperatures, particularly in the northern latitudes where the great glacier sheets began.  He came up with an astrological theory which thoroughly explained the advance and retreat of Ice Ages.

He concluded that Earth’s orbit varies in three cycles of reliable, but different, lengths.  The shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun varies from more to less elliptical in cycles of about 96,000 years.  Then there’s axial tilt;  this tilt changes from 21.5 to 24.5 degrees and back again every 41,000 years.  Third, Earth’s axis of spin wobbles in a cycle of 23,000 years.  When the three cycles coincide with each other, they can produce a difference of 20% in the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth’s surface in the northern latitudes.  In 1941 he published “The Canon of Insolation and the Ice Age Problem” which laid out his climate theory. 

Milankovitch died in 1958.  Since then, advanced techniques in paleontology showed that the Ice Ages did, in fact, follow his analyses.  In 1976 the journal Scinece published confirmation of Milankovitch’s theory and showed that it corresponded accurately to various cooling and warming periods in Earth’s history.  In 1982 the National Research Council of the US National Academy of Sciences adopted Milankovitch’s theory as solid truth.  Then, in 2000, NASA published information on its Earth Observatory website, cautiously confirming the Milankovitch Climate Theory, and showing that Earth’s climate depends far more on external factors than any human activity.  If anything, human deforestation of the planet, over the last 5000 years, has had far more to do with the climate than carbon dioxide – or methane or water vapor -- added to the atmosphere. 

In fact, all those three gasses occur naturally, and have limitations imposed by nature.  Water vapor condenses into rain and falls where the winds drive it.  Methane is created by decomposition of organic materials, and is burned by lightning – which strikes 200 times per second in Earth’s atmosphere -- into water and carbon dioxide.  Carbon dioxide is promptly inhaled by plants, and encourages their growth.  If excess CO2 is worrisome, the obvious answer is to plant more plants: preferably big and long-lived ones, like trees, especially fruit and nut trees, which produce food.  Any biologist could tell you this.

What particularly worries me is not just that the biologists haven’t been speaking out on the cure for “global warming” but that NASA knew – almost 20 years ago – about the true cause of “climate change”, and kept the knowledge quiet.

 

Why?  What did NASA, or the country’s biologists for that matter, have to gain by allowing the global-warming/climate-change panic to reach such ridiculous proportions?  What did these scientists have to gain by letting politicians rant about “carbon taxes”, subsidizing electric cars, banning plastic or pushing vegetarianism?  One can guess at the old standby carrot-and-stick of research grants offered or reputations spoiled, but why did so many fall prey to it?  Has the scientific community become so thoroughly dependent on the good will of politicians that it let’s itself be this thoroughly corrupted?

And by the way, the cure to the plastic-garbage problem is depolymerization – reducing the plastic back to crude oil – for which there are several patented processes.  Go look them up.

--Leslie <;)))><         

Gardening Rough

Now for something completely different: the fun and games of mini-farming in a small town in rural Arizona.  Doubtless most of you have heard about my little house on a large lot in Buckeye, AZ, and my efforts to grow a small (less than 20 trees) orchard.  So far I have eight pomegranate trees of different breeds, colors, and flavors, plus one surviving grapevine, one pecan tree, two (one may not survive) apricot trees, one stunted tangerine tree, one struggling almond tree, and a sour orange tree that started out to be a Bearss lime tree (long story).  That's not counting my breed of super-smart cats.  I put together a legal club -- the Ralston-Fish Land Club -- just to have a legal entity (I can't afford to create a legal "trust") that I can will the land to, that will continue to keep the trees and the cats alive if I should knock off suddenly.  I've got a Go Fund Me project to support the club which I don't report to nearly often enough.

Anyway, the main problem with doing any kind of farming or gardening in Arizona is water.  The heat is secondary, and after that there's the salt in the soil (which is why I can't grow avocados here), and after that the #%!&*@ gophers.

Starting from the top, this year started out wonderfully cool and rainy, perfect for farmers, but almost exactly on May Day everything changed.  The temperature rocketed to over 110 F and stayed there.  The summer Monsoon became a Non-soon -- all of two small rainstorms and then nothing.  I've had to go out and water the trees by hand every other day.  This has not made my water-bill easy to pay, and the trees took heat damage anyway.  The pomegranates fruited all right, but the fruits are small and hard.  I'll go out this week and gather all the ones that are ripe (and when they're this hard it's difficult to tell just which ones are ripe) and run them through the juicer.  I'll be lucky to get a single gallon of juice from the lot of them. 'Twas even worse for the grapevine;  the only grapes that grew were snatched up by the local birds.  And I lost the little American Chestnut tree, and won't be able to replace it until December, damn.  I may have lost one of the apricots, but the other's surviving.  The pecan tree was sunburned and stunted, though it's surviving too.  I'll need to get another pecan, of a different breed, to cross-pollinate with it in order to get nuts off either of them.  Oh, headache!

Nothing can be done about the salt in the soil;  most of Arizona is old sea-bed silt.  The best I can do is keep adding fiber and compost.  Given all the vegetable-trash that the local grasses and weeds produce -- not to mention the available stable-sweepings from my neighbors who keep horses -- that wouldn't be a problem except for the effects of the @#$%&! gophers.

The local critters are a breed called "pocket gophers" -- which means they're small enough for a cat to catch when they poke their noses above ground, if the cat happens to be crouching in ambush at the right place, at the right time.  Alas, that's not enough kills to cut down on the gopher population.  Getting at the damn diggers when they're in their network of tunnels as another story.  I haven't been able to find any source of gopher-snakes anywhere in the state, and hiring an exterminator costs a good chunk of change.

Even so, that wouldn't have been much of a problem (gophers don't like the taste of pomegranate roots, or pecan or citrus roots) if it hadn't been for the tenant's dogs.  We  had a couple of tenants living in the trailer outside who had dogs, and both dogs enthusiastically declared war on the gophers.  They'd chase the gophers into their holes and then try to dig them out.  The result is potholes all over the yard, some of them nearly a yard deep, not to mention the equally-large mounds of dug-up dirt.  The yard would look like a fairy-sized barttlefield, except that -- as in the famous World War One poem -- the grass, and the native weeds, did their work.  All that loosened soil made fine bedding for every kind of seed in the territory, and my necessary tree-watering benefited the damned weeds as well.  The result is that my orchard is more like a miniature jungle.

The cats love it.  They can hunt through the tall weeds or stay cool under the leaves during the heat of the day, or they can stroll back into their roofed kennel, or hop through the pet-door into the back room of the house, as they please.  It's not so much fun for me, since I have to drag the watering-hoses up and down the yard full of thick weeds and disguised pot-holes that could easily catch and twist my rather-fragile ankles.

So I've got to go out and mow that sizable yard, then rake up all the vegetable-trash and run it through a wood-shredder, dump it in a compost-pit, and then flatten out the ground.  This kind of mowing can't be done with a lawnmower;  it'll take a weed-whacker, a machete, a hoe, a pick-axe, a tiller a wood-shredder and maybe an axe.  Yes, the weeds grow tough in Arizona!  Aside from the wood-shredder, I've managed to collect the tools -- including a new weed-whacker which I've named Goses, because I want him to Mow Down the land -- but the problem is the time and labor that all this is going to take.  Between me and Rasty and Jerry Marin, our current guest, we don't have a single body athletic enough to do all this in a single day -- or weekend, or week.  Neither can we assemble enough $$$ between us to hire professional landscapers to come do the job for us.  Damn.  We've got to do it ourselves, and it'll take a month at least.

So this is another reason (besides finances) why I didn't show up at CokoCon this weekend, and don't foresee going to any other local cons soon.  No, I haven't given up on fandom, really.  If anyone asks what Leslie's doing this season, tell them she's hacking her way through the fairies' jungle, trying to reclaim the land for her orchard.

Now you know.

--Leslie <;)))><  )O( 

    

The Seven Stupid States

This is an expansion on a post I made years ago, so let me repeat that one first:

ON ABORTION

by Leslie Fish

One of the not-so-minor points in the recent presidential race was the abortion question.  Obama stated that he believed in a woman's right to abortion.  McCain and Palin announced that they didn’t personally believe in abortion but, if elected, they would not make a federal case of it but would leave the legality of abortion to the individual states.  Still, the word went out: “If McCain gets elected, you can kiss Roe vs. Wade goodbye.”  That helped tip the balance toward Obama.  It’s pretty obvious that, no matter what the Family Values crowd may think, a vast number of Americans – particularly women –  want to keep abortion legal.  Those who don’t had best consider the following facts.

First, abortion can take place only during the first trimester of pregnancy.  After that it becomes dangerous to the mother, and no doctor will do it for anything less than a direct threat to the mother’s life.  Now, during the first trimester of pregnancy the object in a woman’s uterus is certainly not a “baby”;  it won’t become that until the last trimester.  It isn’t even properly called a “fetus”;  it won’t be that until the second trimester.  The proper scientific name for it is “embryo” – as in “embryonic” – and it is absolutely not a human being.  It does not have a human heart or a human spine or human lungs, and it certainly does not have a human brain.  For the religious-minded, consider that without a brain you cannot grow a mind, and without a mind, how can there be a soul?

Yes, an embryo is made of human tissue, but then, so are your toenails. Yes, it’s technically alive, but then, so is a virus.  Yes, it will eventually develop to become a human being, but then, given enough time, so will whole species of monkeys;  the only difference is time – six months versus six million years.  The physical condition of an embryo is somewhere between that of a primitive worm and a salamander.  Its life is certainly not worth the life, or health, or freedom, of a real human being – such as a woman – not unless you’re going to claim that women are not really human beings.

Now, on the question of the “value of life”…  Ask: whose life?

No man has ever died in childbirth, but countless hundreds of millions of women have.  Childbirth is not safe.  It has not been safe since human beings began walking upright, and growing big brains and big skulls to hold them.  Even in America today with all our boasted medical science, according to the medical actuarial tables, for women between the ages of 15 and 50, of the 12 most common causes of death, childbirth is not the last.  Any woman who becomes pregnant is placing her life at risk.  No one should be forced to place their life at risk without their consent.  No one should be forced to risk their life for someone else’s beliefs.  No man has the right to order a woman to risk her life for what he wants.

In any country that calls itself free, to risk your life or not must always be the individual’s choice.  Therefore, to abort or not must always be the individual woman’s choice – and nobody else’s.  Anything less is tyranny.

                                                                      *****

As you can tell from the names of the contestants, this was originally written a few elections ago.  Since then, the political divisions -- and stupidities -- have grown worse.   Trump won the 2016 presidential election, driving the Democrats into a continuing fit of hysteria which has led them to become blatant Socialists.  The Democrats then won enough seats in the 2018 congressional election to start openly pushing their Socialist agenda, which scared the Republicans at the state level to start passing some ridiculously Reactionary laws.  Among these were the various laws in the Seven Stupid States which restrict access to safe legal abortions down to almost nothing.

Now whatever your attitude toward abortion itself, a bit of reflection will show that these laws -- and the politicians who voted them in -- are just plain stupid.  For one thing, they make those states (I'll name no names) look like hotbeds of religious fanaticism and misogyny.  Any business with female managers or corporate officers will avoid building or investing there, which will do those states' economies no great good.  Neither will the lawsuits already in the works, launched not only by women's-rights groups but by medical organizations which rather resent politicians practicing medicine.

For another thing, these laws will do nothing to cut down on the actual numbers of abortions.  There are still the other 43 states where abortion is legal, often right next door to the Seven Stupids, where determined women can go to get the operation done -- often cheaper than they could have at home, even counting the cost of travel and an overnight motel stay.  Where that cost becomes burdensome, the burden will fall -- as it did back in the days when abortion was illegal all over the US -- on the poor, the people most in need of baby-making restriction.  Women too poor to get out-of-state abortions will certainly wind up on welfare, if they aren't there already, and so will their unwanted children.  States that won't pay for poor women's abortions today will find themselves paying for the support of those children for the next several years.

the only advantage gained by those laws is to make the politicians who voted for them feel wonderfully self-righteous.  The taxpayers who will have to live with the effects of those laws are not likely to be grateful, and they are likely to make their opinions known at election time.

Moral grandstanding doesn't really pay well, and it's ultimately stupid.

--Leslie <;)))><

LIMITS TO THE BIG LIE TACTIC

It’s been a lively couple of weeks in for the mainstream news.  First, the second debate of the Democratic presidential hopefuls revealed some amazing planned policies.  Second, a teenaged lunatic shot up the Gilroy Garlic Festival, killing three people plus himself.  Third, a vicious young punk shot up a packed Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 people before he surrendered.  Fourth, the next day, another vicious young punk shot up a shopping mall and bar in Dayton, Ohio.  Fifth, during those same two days 47 people were shot in Chicago, by different shooters and at different specific locations.  Sixth, a vicious gang-banger killed four people during a two-hour stabbing spree in Los Angeles.  Seventh, the Democrat hopefuls, and their allies, responded to the tragedies with even more amazing accusations and threatened policies.

To start with the end, various Democrat pundits pulled out their usual boilerplate about gun control, demanding: 

1)      “universal background checks” – which already exist.  Federal law requires all licensed gun-dealers, whether in their shops or at a “gun show”, to check potential buyers’ ID against the NCIS database to see if said buyers have criminal records or have been adjudicated “mentally incompetent”.  Private sellers – say, a neighbor selling his spare shotgun to another neighbor, or a grandfather giving a basic .22 bolt-action rifle to his grandson – are not allowed to perform background checks, even if they want to, because (thanks to a law passed by the dear old ACLU) they’re legally forbidden to access the NCIS database.  All that’s needed to make “background checks” truly “universal” is to abolish that stupid law and let private citizens us the NCIS database.

2)      “red flag laws” – which have been judged unconstitutional.  Allowing police to confiscate people’s property (in this case firearms) without due process of law, purely on the complaint of anybody (such as an ex with a grudge) that so-and-so is “crazy and dangerous” is a wide-open  invitation for abuse. 

3)      Ban the sale of “military-style assault weapons” and “extended magazines”, which are definitions so vague as to be unenforceable.

…and these are the more reasonable demands.  Others include banning all semi-automatic firearms, house-to-house searches to collect them, and declaring all Republican voters “mentally unfit” to buy guns. 

     

And it gets crazier.  Of course one could expect Democrats to blame every tragedy on Trump and his “divisive rhetoric”, but singer John Legend claims that the president’s “racist venom” and “bigoted policies” directly “inspire killers”;  this is ironic, considering that Legend himself has publicly called on people to harass Trump officials, and do anything to throw “flaming racist…piece of shit” Trump out of office. 

Never mind Maxine Waters’ exhortations of the past year for civilians to go out and harass Trump voters everywhere in public – “in restaurants, in department stores, and in gas stations” -- which many Democrat voters have faithfully gone and done.  She has never been charged with “incitement to public violence”. 

And more: Reza Aslan, former CNN executive went on TV to claim “The President is a white nationalist terror leader.  His supporters – ALL OF THEM – are by definition white nationalist terror supporters.  The MAGA hat is a KKK hood.  And this evil racist scourge must be eradicated from society.”  Considering that some 40 million citizens voted for Trump, this could be considered “divisive rhetoric”. 

Wilder yet, MSNBC’s national security analyst Malcolm Nance claimed on the program “Hardball” that mass shootings in the US are fueled by “far-right white supremacist ideology by shooters who want to eliminate liberalism.”  He insisted that “these people feel that…Donald Trump is giving them subliminal orders in their head.” 

And more yet; Beto O’Rourke said of Trump’s “rhetoric”: “the only modern western democracy that I can think of that said anything close to this is the Third Reich, Nazi Germany”, and it’s issuing “an invitation to violence.”  And MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski claims that in “inciting hatred, inciting violence, inciting racism…this is a president who seems to want these things to happen.”  Nicolle Wallace, likewise on MSNBC, goes her one better, claiming “You now have a president…talking about exterminating Latinos.” Princeton professor Edward Glaube, on “Meet the Press”, said that simply using the phrase “illegal immigrant” somehow “set the stage for people who are…on the extreme to act violently”.  Weirder still is former FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi’s statement that Trump ordering the flags that had been lowered to half mast raised again was a secret Nazi signal, because he happened to order it on the 8^th of August – and August is the 8^th month;  since the 8^th letter of the alphabet is H, “the numbers 88 together stand for ‘Heil Hitler’.”  It couldn’t possibly be, say, a commemoration of Nagasaki Day, could it?  That is, if he thought of it at all.

The general theme of these claims is that Trump is a white-nationalist/white-supremacist/neo-nazi and so are his voters – all 40+ million of them.  Right. 

Now I’ll be the first to admit that Trump is a boorish lout with all the subtlety of a bull in a china-shop, that he’s very likely the reincarnation of P. T. Barnum – part businessman, part showman and part con-man – though a much worse speaker, and he’s probably the worst public speaker I’ve ever seen in public life, but where’s the proof of real racism?  He’s quite fond of his Jewish daughter and son-in-law, boasts of his black friends, and – actions speaking louder than words – has done more economically, educationally and socially for People of Color than his predecessors.  According to several federally-commissioned Pew studies, this year both Black and Hispanic unemployment hit record historic lows.  Also Black and Hispanic rates of college graduation reached record highs.  So did numbers of Black and Hispanic independent businesses.  And never mind the educational, economic and social gains by American Asians.  It’s an odd racism that has given such real advantages to “non-whites”.

So the usual claimed evidence for “racism” is Trump’s “divisive rhetoric” and the idea that the mass-shooters of the past two weeks are all neo-nazis who adore Trump.

To deal with the first, all of his claimed “divisive rhetoric” lambasts illegal immigrants, particularly the ugly M-13 gangster cartel, and certain Muslim-majority countries which have – according to the FBI and Interpol – nasty histories of funding, training, and supplying the majority of the world’s Jihadist terrorists;  gangsters and terrorists are not nice people, and not the sort you want to welcome into your country, state, or town.  There’s nothing “racist” about that fact.  To restate the obvious, “Mexican” is not a race, and neither is “Muslim”.  More, words are not actions;  rude or thoughtless words are not the equivalent of physical attacks.  In fact, professionally-offended Democrats – particularly Democrat Socialists – have used far more “divisive rhetoric” than Trump and all his working associates put together.  The proof of that is the “intersectional” politics that have plagued our educational institutes for the past three years and more.

Now as for the second charge, the more the police learn about those incidents, the more complicated the story grows. 

First, the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter – Santino William Legan, 19 – drove to the park with a shotgun, an AR-15, a clown mask, a passport and several other odd items in his car.  He cut a hole in the fence to sneak in, then ran through the park shooting people at random until the police came after him, whereupon he shot himself fatally in the head.  Also found among his belongings was a “hit list” of widely different targets: religious institutions, political groups of both parties, federal buildings and courthouses.  According to FBI agent John Bennett there was no manifesto but Legan was “exploring violent, competing ideologies” and “there was nothing that was all one-sided or the other.”  He was not a “white supremacist” but a chaotic lunatic.

Then there’s the El Paso shooter, whom the media have obsessed upon for days, claiming he had left a “white nationalist manifesto” on the Internet.  The manifesto was quickly taken down, but enough sites copied it to keep it available – such as here: https://pulpitandpen.org/2019/08/05/heres-the-el-paso-shooters-full-manifesto-read-it-before-you-believe-the-news/ 

The commentaries on the site are also well worth reading.  But the point is, Patrick Crusius was not a proper “white supremacist”;  he hated unchecked immigration, but his screed is also full of Left-wing tropes about “corporate elites” and overpopulation.  He also mentioned that he didn’t like Trump.  It’s understandable why the Internet platforms censored his manifesto;  it doesn’t neatly fit the stereotype the Democrat politicians and their media allies wanted to spread.

Worse is the conclusion, by FBI agent Steve Hooper, on the Mike Broomhead TV show, that Crusius’ “triggering event” for the shooting was, if you please, an incident during the Democratic candidate debates. MSNBC personality Savannah Guthrie asked this question:  “This is a show of hands question and hold them up so people can see. Raise your hand if your government plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants,” Guthrie said to the candidates Thursday night. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennet, Marianne Williamson, John Hickenlooper, and Eric Swalwell all raised their hand.  Hooper claims:  “When the most recent debate when they all said free healthcare, they all raised their hands. That’s what pushed him over the edge. He felt he was justified. He felt he ran out of alternatives.”

Less thoroughly mentioned in the media, interestingly enough, is the case of the Dayton, Ohio shooter, Connor Betts, whose schoolmates described him as a Leftist bully who hated women.  On his own Internet sites he described himself as a Satanist, and an Antifa member, who wanted to kill ICE agents and Republican voters, and signed his posts with “Kill every fascist”.  He attended an Antifa rally last May, wearing the usual face-mask and sunglasses, with a semi-auto pistol exactly like the one he used in his shooting spree. The first person he killed in his rampage was his own sister, and there’s no evidence that it was a random shot.  Note the accounts at: https://lauraloomer.us/2019/08/05/dayton-shooter-satanist-member-of-antifa-despised-ice-interacted-with-left-wing-media-outlets/#.XUmQUJNKhBw

All this, likewise, does not fit the stereotype the Democrats are trying so hard to push.

Other exceptions to the scenario include 47 people shot, 8 of them killed in Chicago, over the same two days as the El Paso and Dayton shootings, which the media avoided mentioning – possibly because Chicago has had a Democrat government for nearly a century, and has had fiercely strict gun-control laws nearly as long, and the perpetrators in all those cases were Black.  So were most of the victims.

Another exception to the Democrat story was the mass-stabbing and robbery spree done by gang-banger Zachary Castenada, across Garden Grove and Santa Ana, California, in a scant two hours just last Wednesday, which left four dead and two wounded.  The police who caught him claimed that he gave no motive for the killings, though he had a long record of violent and drug crimes.  Castenada is Hispanic, as were four of his victims.  This case too has received only brief and local media coverage, possibly because he used only knives, although he had a handgun in his possession.

More carefully ignored facts:

1)      the vast majority of mass-shootings happen in carefully-chosen “gun-free zones” --  https://spectator.org/mass-shootings-in-gun-free-zones/?utm_source=American%20Spectator%20Emails&utm_campaign=df0dac76f6-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_08_07_11_41&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_797a38d487-df0dac76f6-104254389

2)      The majority of mass-shooters in 2019 so far have been Black – 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274538/51-mass-shooters-2019-were-black-only-29-were-daniel-greenfield

3)      The US is not the world’s worst country for mass shootings, including civilian mass shootings --https://pjmedia.com/trending/no-the-united-states-doesnt-lead-the-world-in-mass-shootings/

So, no – it’s not Trump’s fault, there is no “surge of white supremacism”, the majority of voters are not neo-nazis, and the picture which the Democrats and their allied media have been crafting – and blatting on the airwaves for 20 hours per day for the last two weeks is false. 

The Big Lie tactic was not invented by Hitler’s minions, but only made famous by them, and it can be defeated.  I don’t mean just by repeating the verifiable truth by every available outlet, like little drops of water slowly wearing away the Grand Canyon;  I mean a weakness which is built into the tactic itself. 

That weakness is the tendency to overplay your hand – to make sure that everybody hears the same story, with the same carefully-crafted words, spoken by the same carefully-groomed Talking Heads, accompanied by the same carefully-chosen weeping sympathetic victims, on every available media outlet, 20 hours out of every 24 for as many days as possible.  For one thing, the audience tends to become bored.  For another, once calmed down a bit, the audience tends to think about the story and notice the details that don’t quite fit, and then begin to think about other possibilities.  Worst of all, with enough repetition, fear wears out. 

I repeat: fear wears out -- and this is the doom of all tyrants, from wherever, physically or politically, they may hail.

This is why the Democrats are pushing to pass more gun-control laws – fast, fast, before the voters have time to calm down and think.  This is also why wiser heads among the DNC are leaning on the fringey-er members of Congress to tone down their “rhetoric”, lest they cause a “backlash” that will throw the election to Trump. 

Scariest of all is the possibility that the propaganda-jaded voters just may grow tired enough of the partisan squawking to turn on both of the Big Two parties and agree:

A plague on both their houses: vote Libertarian!  To misquote Shakespeare even further, “’Tis a consummation greatly to be wished.”

--Leslie <;)))>< 

On Exile

Given the state of education in America these days, it’s likely that precious few students today have ever read the once-classic story, “The Man Without A Country” – therefore most people today would be surprised to learn that “exile” was once a serious part of American law.  The assumption was, “If you can’t live with our society, live without it”.  The early American colonists relied on “banishment” as a legal punishment for civil or religious infractions.  For example, Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635 for complaining about the colonists’ practice of stealing land from the local Indians.  Cast out, Williams went to the Indians and took care to buy land from them, on which he founded the colony of Rhode Island.  

As I recall, the laws concerning application of that particular sentence are still on the books, and I think it’s time we considered them again.

At present, only non-citizens can be deported from the US.  Citizens can be exiled only for engaging in war or espionage against the US – in other words, treason.  Technically, “engaging in private diplomacy” may get you exiled and stripped of US citizenship, though that has never been invoked.  Exile or “banishment” from a state is a little more complicated.  Sixteen states have constitutional provisions prohibiting banishment, and others have banned the practice through appeals courts decisions, on the grounds that citizens have a right to live where they choose.  It remains on the books in a handful of states, and Maryland prescribes it as punishment for “corruption”, but such sentences are usually overturned on appeal. 

Still, a lot of prosecutors are arguing for a restoration of the practice – among other things, noting that federal courts already have a form of voluntary exile as part of the plea-agreement system.  In effect, the crook is given a suspended sentence so long as s/he stays out of the country for a particular number of years – but if s/he returns before then, the axe drops.  It’s generally assumed that banishment can’t be open-ended but must have a term-limit – generally the same length of time that the convicted would otherwise spend in prison.

         

Whether or not people have a right to live wherever they want to – and whole countries, as well as states and cities might argue with that – not even the ACLU can claim that banishment/exile is either unusual or more cruel than locking people up in prison.  The legal justification for incarceration, besides keeping proven criminals away from the rest of society, is to “rehabilitate” them.  This is why prisons in the US offer all sorts of educational programs to inmates, not to mention the reliable chaplains.  This hasn’t proved nearly as useful as the legal theorists hoped;  all too often prisoners pick up criminal tactics and contacts in prison – not to mention a taste for Jihadist terrorism – which they put to bad use when they’re released.  And never mind the sheer cost of keeping such a large portion of our population in prison.  It would be cheaper, as well as more merciful, to banish/deport/exile our convicted felons – citizens or not – to whatever other country will have them, and let them work out their own rehabilitation on their own time and at their own expense. 

Who knows?  The exiles might actually do a decent job of it.  Historically, gangs of exiles, thrown out on their own resources, have founded not only successful colonies – like Rhode Island – but successful whole countries, such as the USA, Australia, and ancient Rome.  When considering mass rehabilitation, one could do a lot worse.

So yes, it’s time to seriously consider widening the laws on exile – under any name.

--Leslie <;)))>< 

Tales From The Border

--Leslie <;)))><  )O(

There’s a tale that Rasty’s been telling for the past week or so, about a time some ten years ago that he stopped at a border-town restaurant, where the border patrol troops tended also tended to show up.  While he ate lunch he overheard a group of them bragging about the illegal border-crossers they’d arrested in the past few days.  They got into one case in particular, and he realized they were talking about having gang-raped a 12-year-old Mexican girl.  They seemed to think that this was one of the perks of the job.  He got out of there soon, and never afterward would trust an ICE-man.

What’s particularly interesting about this is a tale that I heard at nearly the same time.  ‘Twas about ten or twelve years ago, when I was in southern Cal for a large Sci-Fi convention (I think it was a LosCon, but don’t quote me).  One of the filk-fans took me out for dinner at what he called “an authentic Mexican restaurant;  you can tell by the amount of sea-food”.  We got seats, ordered some authentic Mexican sea-food, and had settled into eating it when we noticed a bunch of authentic Mexicans seated at a table in the corner near us, who were having a lively conversation over dinner and pitchers of Sangria and beer.  My dinner companion was listening, and his expression was growing grim.  Finally he leaned over the table and quietly asked me: “How fast can you finish?”  I replied, “As soon as we can get a doggy-bag”.  He signaled for the waitress, we got the doggy-bag and packed up, he paid, and we quietly got out of there.  Once we were several yards from the door, I asked him what that was all about, and he explained that despite his Anglo looks, he spoke and understood fluent Spanish, and he’d overheard what those jolly fellows were talking about.

It seems they were successful Coyotes, who were celebrating having escorted a couple of large convoys across the border, for considerable money. The one whom the others were admiring was bragging about his favorite technique;  he’d bought a 12-year-old girl in Guadalajara, “cleaned her up”, bought her some sexy clothes, trained her carefully – and when he got her to the border, he’d handed her over to “maybe half a dozen” ICE-men to keep them distracted while he sneaked the rest of the convoy past them.  He simply dumped the girl, left her with the border troops, when his convoy was safely past.  As he finished his tale, his fellow Coyotes began talking about the price of children of different ages in particular Mexican towns.  At that point my dinner companion decided to get the hell out of that restaurant. On hearing that tale, I decided that Coyotes were the scum of the Earth.

Another tale I heard from an old friend who’s been dead for some half a dozen years now.  He’d been living with the Tohono O’Odam tribesfolk down near the Arizona-Mexico border, and they’d asked him to help them with their tribal border-watch problem.  It seems that the border of the tribal lands extends a few miles into Mexico proper, and the Coyotes had taken it into their heads that this would be an easier place to cross than further west, at the federal border.  As they scampered across the Indian lands, the Coyotes would also help themselves to whatever they found on the way: houses and their contents, livestock, unlucky women they encountered, and the occasional tribal policemen.  The US border patrol couldn’t legally work this far south of the US border, but the tribal militia could.  Therefore a rotating crew of tribal ranchers went out and patrolled the tribal border themselves, on horseback, with dogs and CB radios. 

They caught illegal crossers every week, at least.  Among them were a disturbing number of men who didn’t speak Spanish, had very long beards, and carried pages from the Koran in their pockets.  When stopped, the “migrants” seemed oddly fearful of the tribesmen, as if they’d never met real Indians before.  Those who threatened to fight were shot, usually in the leg, unless they tried to fight further.  Those who tried to run had the dogs set on them until they stopped running.  The rest were cuffed with zip-ties and then marched across the Tohono O’odam lands to the US border, where the patrol would call the local ICE office and then wait for the troops to come pick up the illegals.  This tended to be frustrating, since the ICE-men would usually keep the migrants for a few days and then let them loose – on the Mexican side of the border, from which they would soon enough come back again.  Just what the Indians did with their frustration my friend never said, but I did note a few years later that the majority of “migrant” convoys – and drug-smugglers – had stopped trying to cross through the Tohono O’odam lands.

Nonetheless, an average of half a million “migrants” have been coming across our border every year, for the past 20 years and more.      

For the past year, I’ve been hearing different tales from all along the border – usually second-hand, via the Internet, and contradictory.  What you can find from the Internet is that a group called Pueblos Sin Fronteras organized, funded, guided and supported the “migrant caravan” starting in Guatemala, marching and driving through Honduras, El Salvador, and finally Mexico, intending to push into the US on the “asylum” excuse.  A bit more searching shows that Pueblos Sin Fronteras gets its considerable funding from rich Democrats, particularly George Soros, all of whom support the Globalist policy.  It’s obvious that the purpose of this campaign is to flood the US border patrol, overwhelm the immigration system, and eventually get open borders all through North America.  The migrants in the first caravan were offered jobs and housing in Mexico, but didn’t take the offer.  They made it clear that their purpose was not to get away from drug-cartels but to get into Goody-land and make money – bigger money than they could get in Mexico.  So they got up to the US border, started their “asylum” claims, and also stole across the border every chance they could get.  Of course it did overwhelm the immigration system, which meant the processing of migrants slowed to a crawl. 

Part of the problem was that the “migrants” had brought a lot of children with them, and existing law forbids putting children in adult jails, with adult prisoners.  So, where were the kids supposed to go?  They’re sent to Department of Health and Human Services centers, and from there to the state Child Protective Services, which don’t have anywhere near the resources to care for thousands of kids.  As for handing the children back to their relatives, the problem there is finding the relatives – and making certain that they really are relatives.  Once turned away, a lot of those adult migrants tend to disappear.  Where do they go?  A few of them have decided, on second thought, to take Mexico’s offer – without the children.  Still others sneak across the US border, likewise without the children.  This leaves the kids stuck in whatever housing the overwhelmed HHS or local CPS can find for them.  As of June 15, there were roughly 12,000 kids spread among 100 HHS detention centers in 14 states, and there’s no available record of how many have been placed through CPS offices with sponsors or foster-families.  The kids go first through the central processing center in McAllen, Texas, where they can stay for no more than three days before being sent to another federal detention center or to a state holding center.

Democrat Congresscritters looking for dirt on Trump went first to the McAllen center, which was built during the Obama administration as cheaply as possible.  https://www.npr.org/2018/06/19/621065383/what-we-know-family-separation-and-zero-tolerance-at-the-border

   The Associated Press first labeled the chain-link cells as “cages”, and Democrat “investigators” have embellished the term.  The cells do indeed have concrete floors, and the furniture is minimal: foam mattress-pads for beds, cheap sleeping-bags or plastic thermal blankets for bedding, cheap folding tables and chairs.  The children usually get only one or two showers and clothes-launderings per stay, because they’re legally moved to another center within 72 hours.  These are facts well known – and published – by the DHHS.  https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/qa-on-border-detention-of-children/ 

It’s when politicians and media “activists” get into the act that facts get muddled and stories get contradictory.  Various members of Congress, most noisily Alexandria Occasional-Cortex, made visits to the federal detention centers in Florida, Texas and Arizona, made several exciting claims of abuse, had some photos made of herself, yelled curses at the detention officials, and held a press conference denouncing Trump.  A group of Hispanic pastors, questioning her statements, went to the detention center themselves and came up with some different stories. https://www.unitedamericanews.com/articles/hispanic-pastors-visit-the-border-tell-a-very-different-story-than-aoc/ 

Most recently, Trump promised a round-up of illegal residents in the US, and about a dozen mayors and governors promised to obstruct any such efforts, which will be an interesting sight to see.  Trump’s easiest response would be to cut off all federal funds earmarked for those cities and states, which the federal-executive bureaucracy could easily do.  Also, the various federal police certainly know, already, with no help from the local police, where the particular illegals they want to pick up are located.  His actually doing that would be a show of muscle to the Democrats.  But in any case, the current state of immigration can’t go on.  The USA now has the third largest population in the world – behind China and India, but ahead of everyone else – including some 20 million “non citizens”. Our physical, social and economic resources are straining at the seams, and we simply can’t take in any more population, especially ‘migrants” with no loyalty to our laws or culture or the people here already.  Despite the insistence of the Progressive-wing Democrats, unlimited immigration is not a blessing;  just ask any – heh! – Native American.  We have to close the border, declare a ten-year moratorium on all immigration, re-route those “asylum” seekers to Argentina, or Chile, which are willing to take them in, and start seriously deporting the “undocumented” migrants here already.  It’s either that or face social and economic collapse, and the Progressive/Liberal Democrats will never accept it.

What worries me most is the lengths the US’s political Left will go to in order to support their policy, their agenda, and their vision of what the country is really like.  In my years’ experience working for a labor union newspaper, I learned a bit about Photographic Analysis.  I also saw plenty of examples of “Reichstag”, “False Flag” and “Potemkin village” political campaigns, and I’ve been seeing a lot more of them in the media lately.

For example, consider these photos:  https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1AVNG_enUS658US658&q=migrant+father+and+daughter+drowned+photo&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiPhIDm2K7jAhW8Ap0JHTiMBUYQsAR6BAgGEAE&biw=1014&bih=600

Look carefully at all of them, including on the previous and following pages.  Note the details.

Also remember two facts about the Rio Grande:  it flows from west to east, and for most of its slow and narrow and meandering length it’s no more than three feet deep. West of Texas, migrants don’t swim or raft across the river, but wade.  Since the border patrol is stretched thin, illegal migrants have a very good chance of getting into the US without being noticed – and processed, and registered, at all. Why cross at Texas, then?  Because that’s the quickest way to the central processing center at McAllen and a good chance of acceptance into the US.  The drawback is the 50% possibility of being rejected and sent back to Mexico.  For videos of Texas crossings, Google “video crossing the rio grande”.     

According to CNN, the family tried to cross at Brownsville, Texas, because they were tired of waiting in Mexico to be processed.  Had they bothered to go a hundred miles west, they could have walked safely across the river.

Note the details in the pictures.  The tops of the heads of the man and child are at the same level, but the child’s feet are down by the man’s hip;  is that really a 23-month-old child, or closer to thee or even four years old?  Note the angle of the sunlight and the angle of the shadows on the water and estimate the time of day that those pictures were taken.  Note the height of the reeds and branches sticking out of the water, and calculate just how deep the water is.  Note the thickness of the reeds and the solidity of the riverbank where the migrants’ heads are pointed;  that’s solid ground, as confirmed by the number of beer-cans lying in the reeds.  Look at pictures taken from different angles and compare them.  Note the size and direction of the wavelets on the surface of the water and calculate how strong the current of the water is.  Is that current strong enough to sweep a grown man off his feet?  Note the blue “floaty-noodle” and the wooden branch under the bodies, that were used as a small raft to float them.  Notice the small rowboat nearby, visible only at a particular angle.  Note that in two of the pictures the boat and the nearby reeds have changed position.  Especially note the one photo which shows the heads of the pair turned so that their right ears are visible.  That means that, in that photo at least, their faces are not in the water.              

Judging from what we see in the photos we have to ask, are those bodies really dead?  If so, did they die where we see them lying or were they moved into that spot?  Could they possibly have been floated there by the current, or did someone tow them into position and arrange the bodies for maximum effect?  What was that small boat doing there? Note which of those photos was chosen by the media (CNN first) to be sent around the Internet to rake in pity and even win a comment from the Pope?  Well, it didn’t show right ears or the boat. 

What, do I think that respectable news companies or compassionate political activists would actually lie about the drowning of a poor father and child, or stage photos, or manipulate bodies for dramatic effect?

Well, it’s not as if we haven’t seen this sort of thing done before, is it?

--Leslie <;)))><