WHILE THE TOWN’S SWORN OFFICERS COULDN’T GET THEIR THUMBS OUT: Off Duty BORTAC Agent Drove 40 Miles To Storm the Uvalde School and Take Down the Killer.
Archive for 2022
May 28, 2022
BUT THERE IS AN EPIDEMIC OF FEAR. There Is No Epidemic of School Shootings. The media and the White House’s fearmonger-in-chief are spouting deceptive numbers to scare people into believing that mass school shootings are commonplace in America. They’re not. The odds of a child dying in a mass school shooting are about the same as the odds of being struck by lightning or dying in an earthquake. Such numbers, of course, are no consolation to the grieving families in Texas, but neither is the frenzy to manipulate these tragedies for ratings and political gain.
SHOULDA BEEN MORE THAN ALMOST: “There was almost a mutiny”: Uvalde cop says force is furious that they were held back. “Judge for yourself whether People magazine’s source is telling the truth or whether this is self-serving spin to deflect blame now that the Uvalde PD has become a national laughingstock.”
Plus: “You’ve got a ballistic vest. You know what the kids have? Crayons.”
And: “I don’t know how this town and its police force will ever again coexist happily.”
HONESTLY, THAT NUMBER SEEMS LOW TO ME: A quarter of world’s Internet users vulnerable to infrastructure attack.
HOW’S THAT WELCOME WAGON PROGRAM COMING ALONG? The escape from New York is accelerating.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: This week a West Virginia woman legally carrying a handgun stopped a mass shooter with an AR-15 dead in his tracks.
AS DO WE ALL: T cells found to require rest and maintenance.
HERE’S HOW WE KNOW GUNS AREN’T THE ROOT CAUSE OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS:
I’m not about to fall into the trap of pretending the past was somehow better simply because it was the past. I recognize that things weren’t necessarily better back then. However, it’s ridiculous to believe that nothing has changed, either.
What was the rare exception back in my day is now an all-too-common occurrence, despite the fact that we had more ready access to firearms at schools back then. It seems that something else has happened, something that has fundamentally changed how people think and act. Clearly, it’s not just the mere presence of guns in American life that’s driving our modern problem. We had guns before we had this sickness.
Lawmakers and activists would do well to try and get to the bottom of this deeper rot, rather than blaming firearms. Then we might actually be able to make a meaningful reduction in these horrific atrocities.
As Christian Adams wrote in 2018: Flashback 30 Years: Guns Were in Schools… and Nothing Happened.
What changed? The mainstreaming of nihilism. Cultural decay. Chemicals. The deliberate destruction of moral backstops in the culture. A lost commonality of shared societal pressures to enforce right and wrong. And above all, simple, pure, evil.
Before you retort that we can’t account for the mentally ill, they existed forever.
Paranoid schizophrenics existed in 1888 and 2018. Mentally ill students weren’t showing up in schools with guns even three decades ago.
So it must be something else.
Those who have been so busy destroying the moral backstops in our culture won’t want to have this conversation. They’ll do what they do — mock the truth.
There was a time in America, before the Snowflakes, when any adult on the block could reprimand a neighborhood kid who was out of line without fear.
Even thirty years ago, the culture still had invisible restraints developed over centuries. Those restraints, those leveling commonalities, were the target of a half-century of attack by the freewheeling counterculture that has now become the dominant replacement culture.
Hollywood made fun of these restraints in films too numerous to list.
The sixties mantra “don’t trust anyone over thirty” has become a billion-dollar industry devoted to the child always being right — a sometimes deeply medicated brat who disrupts the classroom or escapes what used to be resolved with a paddling.
Instead of telling the kid to quit kicking the back of the seat on a plane, we buy seat guards to protect the seat.
If you think it’s bad now, just wait until the generation whose babysitter is an iPhone is in high school. You can hardly walk around Walmart these days without tripping over a toddler in a trance, staring at a screen.
The high school kids who shot rifles in school in 1985 were taught right and wrong. They were taught what to do with their rifle in school, and what not to do. If they got out of line, all the other students and the coach would have come down on them hard. There were no safe spaces, and that was a good thing.
Flash-forward to today: Please don’t judge him, he had his reasons, says mother of Texas school shooter.
As a wise woman once wrote, “It is the fear best expressed in the precept, ‘Judge not, that ye not be judged.’ But that precept, in fact, is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: How Biden Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Inflation.
“Government was making the wrong decisions,” Biden told the Atlantic. “As much as 5 or 6 percentage points on the inflation rate were due to oil. Another 5 percent was due to Vietnam. And so you have 10 or 11 percent on top of the inflation that had accumulated since 1932, as conservatives had predicted, and BAM—everything’s gone.”
If those conditions sound familiar, it’s because they are. Inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years—driven in part by the war in Ukraine, rising oil prices, and an unprecedented amount of federal spending—and it risks completely sinking Biden’s presidency just as they sank Carter’s.
Yet the Biden of the 1970s and the Biden of 2022 might as well be two different people, with the latter challenging economic orthodoxy and alleging that new entitlements and stimulus in the form of Build Back Better will actually bring consumer prices down. As a young, reform-minded senator in the 1970s, Biden introduced bills to slash tens of millions of dollars from what believed were ineffective and useless federal agencies and insisted the only way out of America’s stagflation nightmare was massive spending cuts. His 180-degree change reflects the leftward lurch of a Democratic Party and White House staffed with ideologues (many of whom never lived through the 1970s) able to convince a nearly 80-year-old president that everything he once understood about how the economy worked was completely wrong.
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After reviewing then-president Gerald Ford’s budget, Biden expressly attacked the White House for not doing enough to address high gas prices and for its tax hikes on corporations, arguing there were better ways to cool demand. During a Senate hearing in 1974, Biden chastised liberals for forgetting “the vast resources of the ocean and their importance to us … [which] range from lobsters to oil.”
Although Biden called for some tax hikes on the margins, his plan to curb inflation was defined mostly by spending cuts. During his Senate reelection campaign in 1978, Biden took out a full-page advertisement in the News Journal, one of the largest newspapers in his home state of Delaware, to promote his “sunset bill” that would force “a thorough and complete review of federal spending programs every four years … [that] would automatically end a program that wasn’t proved useful or effective.”
“The spiraling costs of inflation are ripping into the fabric of American society,” the ad reads. “We must bring these problems under control and the first place to start is with the cost of government.”
Today of course, spurred on by his far left base, Biden sings a quite different tune, proclaiming that inflation-hawk “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” and leading others to wonder: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
HIGHER SPENDING ON MOST THINGS IN THE U.S. DOESN’T SEEM TO IMPROVE OUTCOMES: Study: Higher spending on cancer care in U.S. doesn’t improve outcomes.
WELL, IT’S MICHELLE GOLDBERG: “Residents of the Cobble Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, forced to rely on the New York Times to tell them what’s happening out in the provinces, can be forgiven for thinking latter-day Sturmabteilung have taken over vast swaths of America.”
Of course, if Nazis ever did take over America, the staff of the NYT would mostly collaborate with them.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE IN THE MIDDLE OF YET ANOTHER CALIFORNIA DROUGHT: California is about to begin the nation’s largest dam removal project. Here’s what it means for wildlife.
After decades of negotiation, the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history is expected to begin in California’s far north next year.
The first of four aging dams on the Klamath River, the 250-mile waterway that originates in southern Oregon’s towering Cascades and empties along the rugged Northern California coast, is on track to come down in fall 2023. Two others nearby and one across the state line will follow.
The nearly half-billion dollars needed for the joint state, tribal and corporate undertaking has been secured. The demolition plans are drafted. The contractor is in place. Final approval could come by December.
Now, among the last acts of preparation, scientists are trying to make sure the fish and wildlife that are intended to benefit from the emergence of a newly wild river will thrive. While the decision to remove the hydroelectric dams was financial, it was urged — and enabled — by those hoping to see a revival of plants and animals in the Klamath Basin.
The native flora and fauna in the region are bound to prosper as algae-infested reservoirs at the dams are emptied, the flow of the river quickens and cools, and river passage swings wide open.
“At its heart, this is really a fish-restoration project,” said Mike Belchik, senior fisheries biologist for the Yurok Tribe, which has long lamented the decline of salmon on its ancestral territory in the basin. “That’s why we’re doing this.”
Flashback to those crazy right-wingers at the Associated Press last year: Years later, California voters still wait on water projects.
In 2014, in the middle of a severe drought that would test California’s complex water storage system like never before, voters told the state to borrow $7.5 billion and use part of it to build projects to stockpile more water.
Seven years later, that drought has come and gone, replaced by an even hotter and drier one that is draining the state’s reservoirs at an alarming rate. But none of the more than half-dozen water storage projects scheduled to receive that money have been built.
The largest project by far is a proposed lake in Northern California, which would be the state’s first new reservoir of significant size in more than 40 years. People have talked about building the Sites Reservoir since the 1950s. But the cost, plus shifting political priorities, stopped it from happening.
Now, a major drought gripping the western United States has put the project back in the spotlight. It’s slated to get $836 million in taxpayer money to help cover it’s $3.9 billion price tag if project officials can meet a deadline by year’s end. The Biden administration recently committed $80 million to the reservoir, the largest appropriation of any water storage scheduled to receive funding next year.
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Storage was once the centerpiece of California’s water management strategy, highlighted by a building bonanza in the mid-20th century of a number of dams and reservoirs. But in the more than 40 years since California last opened a major new reservoir, the politics and policy have shifted toward a more environmental focus that has caused tension between urban and rural legislators and the communities they represent.
As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in 2015, Then-Gov. Jerry Brown “and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Losing weight may boost fertility for obese men.
DON’T GET COCKY: Red Tsunami Watch: Cook Political Report Shifts 10 Races Toward the GOP.
ROGER SIMON: Why We Are Praying for John Durham.
We humble citizens, or “normals” as Kurt Schlichter puts it, have been living under a government in which Sussmann—although just another $800-an-hour (from testimony) Beltway lawyer—is a useful symbol. Lying is the way of the Washington Deep State and its most powerful. To them, it’s almost like breathing. Lying for their own benefit and those of their friends are the respirators from which they will never get off.
In March, the New York Post called many of these individuals to account in their editorial “Spies who lie: 51 ‘intelligence’ experts refuse to apologize for discrediting true Hunter Biden story.”
“They are the supposed nonpartisan group of top spies looking out for the best interest of the nation.
“But the 51 former ‘intelligence’ officials who cast doubt on the Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories in a public letter really were just desperate to get Joe Biden elected president. And more than a year later, even after their Deep State sabotage repeatedly has been shown to be a lie, they refuse to own up to how they undermined an election.
“The officials, including CNN pundit and professional fabricator James Clapper—a man who was nearly charged for perjury for lying to Congress—signed a letter saying that the laptop ‘has the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’”
While not directly in Durham’s purview—although who knows, since so much these days is interconnected—this is the kind of thing the special counsel may be calling to America’s, and the world’s, attention.
It’s literally in his hands to steer our ship of state back to the rule of law. If not him, who? Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz walked up to the edge of truth in his report and then did an about-face before making the obvious conclusions, as if concerned that his Deep State card would be revoked.
The legacy media, so many of whom are deeply implicated in these lies themselves (I worked with some of them and can’t even be near them now, let alone talk to them), will do everything they can to hide or obfuscate this information.
It’s our job, every one of us, to disseminate it—factually and with a minimum of rancor—as widely as possible as the truth emerges.
We can also pray for Durham. Another verse from Mahalia won’t hurt.
Earlier: Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now?
STAY COOL FOR SUMMER: Carhartt Men’s Original Fit Short Sleeve Shirt. #CommissionEarned
HELEN WILL BE ON FOX & FRIENDS BETWEEN 7:30 AND 8:00 ET THIS MORNING, talking about kids who kill, an area of special expertise for her.
UPDATE (from Helen) : You can watch the video of the interview here.
You can hear the longer podcast interview here.
HOW THE HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE SUCKS THEM IN: Students overestimate post-grad earnings by 100 percent, survey finds.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Cargo Freeway Expansion Canceled in L.A. Due to ‘Racist’ Roads.
The cancellation means that the 710 will remain congested, leaving trucks idling on the road longer, creating more pollution than they would if they were able to travel consistently at the optimum, efficient speed between 45 and 65 miles per hour.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
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The 710 Freeway is the main artery for the nation’s largest port complex, through which nearly a third of the nation’s imported goods move. Big rigs carrying a crush of goods — as varied as electronics, auto parts and shoes — often clog the road. Activists call it the diesel death zone, but Americans with their appetite for click-shopping, have come to rely on the web of warehouses and deliveries that the port is built around.
The “Americans with their appetite for click-shopping” is a nice sneer by the L.A. Times, doing their damndest to put the best spin on the Biden administration’s supply chain woes, in much the same way they dubbed unemployment during the administration led by Biden’s former boss as “funemployment:” “For the ‘funemployed,’ unemployment is welcome!” — after all, it’s a chance to “Keep rockin’”!
Earlier:
● CNN’s April Ryan asks Pete Buttigieg to address the ‘racism’ built into our roadways.
● Washington Post fact-check admits it was wrong for ‘knee jerked’ defense of Buttigieg’s racist bridge comments.
GOD FORBID A CONSERVATIVE GROUP SHOULD HAVE CONSERVATIVE VIEWS SHARED BY TENS OF MILLIONS OF AMERICANS: Conservative student group loses faculty advisor, club status after pro-life Instagram posts.
IF YOU SUFFER, GAIA WILL BE APPEASED, AND YOUR BETTERS CAN KEEP THEIR PRIVATE JETS: Majority of American Families Have Canceled Vacation Plans Due to Inflation.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
THE BABYLON BEE. TOMORROW’S NEWS TODAY: Parents Begin Disguising School Buildings As The Capitol So Congress Will Spend Billions To Protect Them.