Conservation vs Environmentalism
After decades of environmentalism, many Americans are burnt out on the movement’s constant sky-is-falling hype and never-ending Defcon 5 emergency messaging. Environmentalists’ craving for full control of our every motion and breath understandably scares the daylights out of normal Americans.
Though environmentalism is sold as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition by its proponents, the truth is that it represents an unnecessarily confrontational and expensive approach to environmental and public health, with misplaced priorities and unmeasurable outcomes.
Simply put, Environmentalism is the over-reliance upon government coercive force, command-and-control, one-size-fits-all sledgehammer policies to problems that might require a screwdriver, if needing anything at all.
The premise behind environmentalism is that mere daily acts of human existence are pitted against a static natural environment that must be defended at all costs, in the face of change being this planet’s biggest constant. Un-anointed humans are vermin in environmentalism.
Oh, sure, pollution and environmental destruction from human activity do exist: Over-fishing of the shared oceans is resulting in catastrophic population reductions of the most valuable fish (tuna, sharks, some salmon). Low-density residential development and warehousing goes up on our flattest, best, most fertile farmlands while national food security is an ever growing concern. Where will we grow our own clean food, if not on our best farmland closest to our largest population centers? Preventing water pollution is a constant effort. And certain chemicals were not vetted properly, with the burden of proof placed on the hapless citizenry before they were discovered to pose unacceptable health risks.
Republican President Richard Nixon said it best: “What a strange creature is man, that he fouls his own nest.” This is just being honest, though the very people most radicalized about environmental issues are also and equally fouling our collective nest with their own reliance on cars, iPhones, and hip clothing. They aren’t special. In fact the most “special” among them have their own personal jets and huge cars and boats with daily carbon footprints the size of small towns. Hypocrisy has a way of passively degrading and delegitimizing people, and that has happened with environmentalism’s biggest messengers, like Al Gore, Leon DiCaprio, et al.
Each of the real environmental health issues we face can and will be tackled with all of our best Yankee ingenuity. Not every day needs to be the summer of 1968, and not every environmental issue is Love Canal or will result in Planet Earth’s extinction if we don’t implement drastic policies right now. At its worst, environmentalism is virtue signaling and fake moral outrage.
A more measured, more adult approach is needed.
America is hopefully about to see a blossoming of conservation. Aldo Leopold called it a “conservation ethic,” where a sense of stewardship results in concrete steps to protect natural resources for future generations of Americans.
Yet, conservation is mostly boring as hell. It lacks the screaming and yelling, the gnashing of teeth, the drama of environmentalism. It lacks the big demands for dramatic lifestyle changes and income redistribution that falsely substitute for self-examination, introspection, personal change.
By relying on market forces and free choices by people inside those markets, conservation empowers the very people environmentalists despise. Conservation involves a lot of actual heavy lifting among and by people who care: Raising private money and judiciously spending public taxpayer money on carefully ranked projects that are of both great symbolic and tangible meaning to the citizens.
It involves natural resource management and planning, which environmentalists decry while using more than their fair share of those same resources.
While land conservation is the best example of conservation, there are plenty of successful, subtle, fish and wildlife management models and even agricultural management models (with pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fertilizer inputs). Back in 2002, I co-founded the Conestoga River Nutrient Management Project in Lancaster County, to use market forces to address waterway sedimentation finding its way to the Chesapeake Bay.
These are definitely not sexy policies. Conservation does not involve the glitzy rock star concerts, Hollywood celebrity interventions, and spectacular claims of imminent world-end that environmentalism has going for it.
Conservation is for adults, and now the adults are in charge. Hopefully the adults can teach the children to eat their vegetables, so to speak.
New York Times Invents Time Machine
The New York Times was once the flagship news source in the whole world. It was the standard by which all other news sources and newspapers were judged.
What happens when a trusted news source becomes an active partisan in politics is inevitable: The credibility banked over decades is spent in a fury of attacks, which then blow away like dust after the contest is ended.
Partisans of all sorts inevitably find themselves clawing for survival, as it is the nature of choosing artificial sides in a world of holism. Sliding over the cliff, partisans act like a drowning victim on the way down. They’ll do anything to keep from going under, no matter how futile or self-defeating. It’s like using the wood from your home’s walls to run the fireplace.
So back in January of this year, the NYT ran headlines about how Trump was wiretapped. Why not? The NYT was one of the partisan proponents alleging an official investigation into Trump, and wiretaps are part of those kinds of investigations. The NYT was doing its best to damage Trump’s credibility, his standing, his ability to act as president. The NYT was trying to delegitimize Trump, and reporting that he had been wiretapped had all the trappings of a bad guy being surveilled by official law enforcement good guys.
Fast forward a couple months, and now “wiretap” has a whole new meaning: Today it means that the Obama administration illegally wiretapped and conducted illegal domestic spying against political candidate Trump. We now know there was no investigation of Trump, ever. But we also know there was eavesdropping aka wiretapping of Trump. The leaked transcripts of his calls prove it.
In this context, “wiretap” sounds awful, even damning when an Obama ally like the NYT reports it, and if you are in the business of bashing Trump and protecting Obama, which the NYT is, then you certainly don’t want to support evidence of the greatest political scandal since Watergate.
So the clever NYT invented a time machine. They went back in time to their January 2017 headlines that screamed “WIRETAP” and digitally altered them, on their website. No kidding. I do not lie. Check it out.
They “fixed” the NYT headlines, which might have a double meaning that applies here quite well. The NYT “fixed” its own headlines from months ago, so that going forward it would appear that the NYT had never said that Trump was wiretapped by Obama. Because now that sounds like an admission that Obama was conducting his illegal domestic spying on a US citizen and politician. The NYT retroactively changed its own history to support the narrative it currently promotes.
Being partisan, and not a news organization, the NYT will do whatever it can to support its allies (Obama) and damage its enemies (Trump, America, traditional values, Christianity, etc.), so the record has been forged to preserve a current version of events that are most favorable to Obama.
Now the forged January 2017 NYT headlines say that Trump’s name came up in “data intercepts” conducted by the NSA while spying on Russian officials stationed here in America.
Data intercepts. Doesn’t that sound a lot more acceptable, more palatable? A lot less invasive? A lot more normal than the actual spying via wiretaps we witnessed going on against Trump by the US government under Obama’s stewardship?
Like a drowning man, the NYT is going down the tubes. Its credibility is shot, gone, spent wildly like a drunken sailor during the recent political contest which saw Trump elected over the NYT’s favored Clinton. Trying to alter what it wrote months ago is simply fakery, forgery, really, and the NYT has been caught red-handed doing what it would never allow anyone else to do: Go back in time and re-invent reality to fit today’s immediate purposes.
If this isn’t fake news and alternative facts, then what is? But this is surely news.
Ryan’s NobamaCare Plan
RINO Paul Ryan, Speaker of the US House, is unveiling a complicated “reform” of ObamaCare as I write these words.
To say his plan is complicated is a gross understatement. The fact that it requires so many charts and graphs tells us everything we need to know: No.
The main problem with Ryan’s NobamaCare plan is that it becomes part and parcel of an already clunky and complicated federal tax code.
We don’t need no more stinkin’ federal tax code stuff, unless it is a total overhaul. Like elimination and replacement.
Ryan’s plan just makes it all worse, both the health care part and the federal tax part.
Only elimination will suffice.
One of the issues with political careerists like Ryan is that they are unwilling to think or act outside the box. They accept certain premises handed down by previous elected officials, instead of questioning why and how they did what they did.
I mean, look at federal and state pension problems alone. What on earth motivated previous elected officials to create these monstrosities? It sure wasn’t a careful and judicious use of limited taxpayer funds! Why, you could be led to believe that those former politicians had used taxpayer money to create largess and thus buy votes, so they could stay in office….
Career politicians like Ryan are terrified of making a mistake, because they are terrified of losing their cozy job and benefits. He refuses to make a principled stand when it can count. So he\they stick to what is politically safe, ie palatable to the special interests that control him\them and then those interests that control the opposition party.
The concerns of us citizens factor in way last, if at all in their calculations.
So, ObamaCare must go, as it is the Unaffordable Care Act, and no, you could not keep your health plan, and no, you could not keep your doctor. It was a disaster. You cannot fix a disaster. You get rid of a disaster.
And while we are at it, can we get rid of RINO Ryan, too? America needs a principles-focused person, man or woman, in that congressional seat. Ryan ain’t gettin it done. In fact, as we see this morning, Ryan is making it a lot worse than it already is.
If I couldn’t keep my doctor, then why do I have to keep Ryan?
Say bye to both problems.
Obama the Domestic Spy Part 3
You know what all this “Russia hacked the election for Trump” noise was all about?
It was a distraction to draw attention away from the fact that Obama had an aggressive and totally illegal domestic spying program against his political opponents.
Including and especially Donald Trump, who threatened everything Obama had done to America over eight years.
The illegally gathered and illegally “leaked” Flynn transcript, the leaked transcripts of Trump talking with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. These are wiretapping results from people controlling the levers of government power. They are the remnants of Obama’s administration, dug down deep in the DC bureaucratic morass, dishing out their best efforts to undermine and damage Trump by whatever means they can.
Before the leaks they were simply wiretapping Trump, when he was a candidate and after he was elected, in his home, his business, his car.
Oh sure, the Obama folks have tried to cover their tracks by saying this was all a legitimate “investigation” of Trump.
But there never was an investigation of Trump. Unlike with Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Russia, there is zero evidence of any wrongdoing by Trump.
Trump didn’t do anything wrong or illegal. His only “crime” is that he opposed the Obama machine, which illegally weaponized the federal government against its political opponents, using the IRS , the NSA, EPA, Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, etc.
Obama took this risk because the information was highly valuable for the campaign, and he bet that Clinton would win. Obama expected this whole thing would be swept under the rug and no one would ever really know after Clinton was elected.
But now that Trump is president, and the facts are coming out, Obama’s malicious persona is becoming public knowledge. He is not a nice man. He is not an honest man. Obama makes president Richard Nixon look like a puppy, a kitten, a baby monkey, whatever image of a cute, cuddly, non-threatening adorable little pet you can imagine.
That is the contrast. That is the truth. And the truth is becoming more widely known. Russia didn’t hack anything, and they didn’t make Clinton run a terrible campaign nor did Russia force people to vote a certain way. Russia is a false flag by a group of people who we now see deserve to be treated like the deposed tyrants of Europe, at the hands of a mob.
What ever will we now do with this illegal squatter in our midst, this criminal alien with his anti-democracy machinations against the American People?
Is there no one who will rid us of this meddlesome priest?
Where are all the rogue judges when they are really needed to administer true justice?
Obama Wire-Tapped Trump Part 2
If past president Barack Hussein Obama did not wiretap Donald Trump (Obama did not deny doing it but rather clumsily dodged the question), then what have the “Russia investigation” and secret-but- disclosed transcripts of President Trump phone calls been about? Where did they come from?
The fake Russia connection claim and fake investigation demand are a result of Obama illegally wiretapping Candidate Trump, and getting caught by President Trump.
No evidence of Trump benefiting from Russia, but tons of official big bucks relationship between Putin and Clinton, like the sale of huge quantities of Uranium to Russia and the insane Iran-Russia-empowerment deal. Those never merited investigation before, apparently. And the same political party still wants no one looking into those Clinton influence peddling deals on the taxpayer dime.
Trump wasn’t wiretapped, you say?
Well we know he was “investigated.” What do investigations involve? Wiretapping? You bet!
And what are these supposedly secure and secret phone call transcripts between Trump and other international leaders being released to the press from government sources?
Where did these transcripts come from? Probably from people left over from the Obama administration using their official positions for partisan gain. The same as they did while illegally wiretapping Candidate Trump and calling it an “investigation.”
The partisan yelling and screaming about Trump and Russia is just a noisy diversion from the increasing recognition that Obamagate is worse by far than Watergate, that Mister Wonderful Obama was in fact an illegal Spy.
The continuing demands for an endless investigation into Trump and Russia is just a smokescreen, an obfuscation designed to make Trump look bad and draw away attention from the truly bad fact that our former president Obama was in fact, much worse than Nixon. Obama makes Nixon look like an incompetent rookie.
May be the first time that an ex president goes to jail. But hey, Obama knew the risks and he decided to illegally spy on his party’s nemesis anyhow. Now the time has come to pay the price.
Poison Candy: Spymaster Obama now officially worse than Nixon
Obama craved power and control, no one disputes that.
In fact his supporters admired him for it, even the American media when he spied on them. They cheered when he had the US National Park Service police actually block Americans from visiting open-air national parks like the Lincoln Memorial in downtown DC.
Obama weaponized the entire government apparatus against his political foes. From the Obama IRS subverting conservative non-profit groups, to the National Security Agency surveilling reporters, American civilians, and political conservatives, as documented by Edward Snowden (who fled from Obama to Russia).
Now it turns out the Obama Department of Justice was spying on the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, before the election and afterwards. In his home. In his business.
The reasoning is murky, but the purposes are like all the other crimes Obama committed against Americans: Control. Obama wanted to know what candidate Trump was doing, what he was planning, what he was going to say.
Knowing this information would help the Democrat candidate, who was endorsed by Obama, and who would preserve Obama’s legacy and cover his many criminal tracks.
Because the Democrat candidate was expected to win, the Obama administration probably believed this was a low-risk crime, because their Democrat successor would not hold them accountable.
But irony of ironies, the Democrat did not win, and the Republican victim of illegal government spying did win. So history looks different now than was expected just a few months ago.
What little we know at this point is that Obama is already far worse than Richard Nixon ever could have been, could have even dreamed of. Obama is a much bigger criminal than Nixon ever dreamed of being.
And how will our nation hold Obama accountable? He has left the White House, but he has stayed inside the country. He walks freely among the good citizens of this nation. He is as arrogant and stupid as he was before. At some point he will be held accountable in a court of law, as will his criminal associates Valerie Jarrett, Eric Holder, Huma Abedin, and Loretta Lynch, among others.
Revenge will be sweet, “sweeter than honey,” says our Bible.
I love the smell of brown sludge in the morning
When I get a snoot full of that brown sludge in the morning, it brings back warm memories. Doesn’t happen all the time. Not as often as I would like. The period for brown sludge is often almost over as soon as it begins, though when I was a kid at Stone Valley Lake, the period lasted for a good eight weeks.
Memories of cold mornings, even cold nights, sometimes lugging a sloshing bucket by headlamp, stumbling through the brush, tripping over vines and branches, picking bugs out of the buckets. Sometimes the bugs concentrate in the buckets, drawn by the smell, and the taste. Trying not to spill it, good God don’t spill it! And then the long nights. Yes, you might start in the daylight, but at six the next morning you were up all night, running for the bucket every ten minutes, tired out, cramping, sleepy.
You see, modern maple syrup is nothing like it was. It is now a victim of technology. Where maybe just five years ago maple syrup producers used fire to boil maple sap down, now they have reverse osmosis machines, and spectrometers and spectrographs that tell the syrup maker how concentrated the sap sugars are, and thus when to start and when to wait longer. When to keep adding to the huge coolers, and freezers, and when to begin condensing.
In the big maple syrup production outfits today, the sap collection is mechanized, run through a spider web of tubing across the sugar bush. The sap is pumped, and gathered in big tanks, then stilled, separated, distilled, purified, filtered over and over, sterilized and then jugged. This is maple syrup today. How it is created looks nothing like how it was made for the past 15,000 years until very recently.
And frankly, as a result of this industrial processing, it no longer tastes like maple syrup. It tastes bland.
Sure, you can try to buy the old Grade B dark brown maple syrup. You remember, surely, the maple syrup that puts the phrase “maple flavor” in maple syrup? You can try to buy it, and some sellers will try to sell it to you. And it will indeed look amber-ish, with a hint of brown. Now they will disclaim it, or add some caveats, or sheepishly try to explain that it is dark for maple syrup “these days,” but it is not quite like what you remember from just a half dozen years ago, let alone your childhood.
And you will taste it, this modern creation, and you will not taste maple syrup. Instead you will taste Maple Product.
Maple Product is the result of the industrialization of even hand-crafted specialties like maple syrup. It is mechanized, industrialized, and heavily filtered, and it has very little real taste. No rich taste, for sure, not the unique and authentic maple taste you came for in the first place.
That is why we have been making our own maple syrup. It started out really small, like when I was a kid using plastic milk jugs hung on string from hand- cut wood spiles. Maybe a couple cups of syrup, and it lasted one day. A treat from Mother Nature, the whole family enjoying it, gathered round like families have over nature’s bounty since time immemorial. A natural and innately healthy moment.
Then I ordered a bunch of old maple buckets with metal spiles, and boiled lots of sap on the stove top. That was a bad idea because the whole house steamed up and smelled vaguely of damp earth. The small amounts of sugar in the steam hardened to a clear armor on everything in the kitchen, and cleaning with water just made it sticky. Getting closer!
Then I ordered a stainless steel evaporator pan from a young guy in the Midwest. Couple hundred bucks and worth every penny. With a threaded spigot and a valve on the end, it can release as much boiled down sap as I want to take to the next stage of boiling. The only filtering we do is from the big sap collection tank in the back of the pickup, through an old cotton tee shirt, and some skimming in the evaporator. Bits of bark, the occasional rogue ant, “stuff” from inside the maple trees is all skimmed off. But what we do not do is filter out the taste.
We gently and carefully finish off the concentrated brown sap inside on the stove top, and then pour the finished syrup into old whisky bottles with cork stoppers. This is real maple syrup, and it is so rich tasting it knocks your socks off. This is what maple syrup used to taste like, and it is what maple syrup is supposed to taste like.
So when I hit the bottom of one of those old whisky bottles because the syrup was mostly poured out over pancakes or hot cereal, then all that remains is the thick brown sludge. This is the stuff you could make maple candy from. My son and I pour cold milk into the bottle, swill it around until the brown sludge has turned the milk brown and slightly viscous, and we heartily quaff it down.
You just can’t beat it.
p.s. sorry we make just enough for our own family use, and we do not sell it. But you can make your own, and because you worked so hard to make it, you will truly enjoy every drop, every molecule, every rich taste you take.
Anti-Jewish activity in your town? Thank Obama
Over the past week a spate of vandalism and bomb threats against Jewish community facilities and cemeteries nationwide have not only scared people, understandably, but brought out the very worst from within the American Jewish community. Hate to say it.
Yesterday morning I was walking into the Harrisburg JCC at about 10:00 am. It is two blocks from my home and I am a member there; at around ten in the morning the gym is practically vacant. It is perfect time alone for me to do physical therapy on my knee and do some body-wide muscle conditioning. After all, keeping off all the weight I lost in hunting season is only possible if I keep on moving. When the gym is empty, I can do my routine unimpeded.
As I walked into the building, staff told me to turn around and walk out as a bomb threat had been phoned in, and everyone was being sent outside.
What followed over the next twelve hours is simply shameful. Disgusting, really, and self-defeating.
Constant emails, texts, and FakeBook posts from members of the Jewish community flooded in to the newspaper, TV news, and Harrisburg residents, every single one of them blaming Trump and his supporters for the bomb threat. Even today the emails continue to fly, with people blaming “ethnic nationalism,” ie the patriotic pride people like me felt when Trump ran and then got elected.
Even US senator Al Franken got in on it, headlining a Democrat fundraising email that somehow found its way to me. Sorry, goofball Franken, I won’t be donating.
There is no evidence that Trump or his voters have anything to do with the vandalism and threats, and yet so many American Jews keep publicly demanding that there is an association.
Folks, if you really want to upset people, keep poking them in the eye. Keep telling them how horrible they are, how racist they are, how antisemitic they are, how “intolerant” they are, when in fact they are none of those things, and in fact are the best friends Jews ever had. At some point you will burn out your fellow American and they will become tired of being unfairly maligned.
The overwhelming proportion of the people making these unfounded accusations are liberal Jews who emphatically embraced Obama, who overlooked all of his failures and bigoted associations. Obama was surrounded socially and professionally by a huge number of proud anti-semites. Not the least of which is his spiritual guide, Jesse Wright, who is also racist against whites.
During the past eight years, under Obama’s disastrous watch, the federal government willfully ignored federal law and allowed millions of illegal aliens to simply walk into America. Some fake notion of fairness was the public excuse, but the private purpose was to artificially bolster Democrat voter rolls with new recruits.
Well, among these illegal invaders are declared Islamic extremists associated with ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Hizbulla. All of these groups have pledged openly to bring destruction to America and to American Jews specifically. What happened over the past week is most likely a result of these kooks beginning to implement their plans. After all, Trump is incredibly supportive of Israel and Jews, and that upsets the kooks more than anything.
And Trump is starting to weed them out, and they know they have to act soon.
So if you are really looking for someone to blame for this spate of anti-Jewish activity, you can blame Obama, the guy who happily allowed the anti-Jewish kooks to walk right in to America. Either as illegal aliens or as un-vetted refugees from Muslim countries torn apart by intolerance.
The problem is, most American Jews are so liberal that they are committed more to one single political party than they are to their own safety. So they will continue to protect their political allies like Obama, and blame their political opponents, and not their actual, known enemies.
Someone somewhere said Jews are smart. Sorry, I am not buying it. There is nothing more stupid than self-destruction.
UPDATE: At least eight bomb calls and several email threats to Jewish institutions around America were made by one guy, according to the FBI. A young man who was a former reporter is accused of a significant portion of those crimes. Was he a “Trumpie” as my lawyer friend Devon said he would be? Was he a “white nationalist” as so many others said? The answer is No. The man is a super leftwing black Muslim anti-Trump activist. But hey, at least he votes, so he gets some credit there. But he also appears to be seriously disturbed. How many other threatening calls and emails come from leftists is unknown yet, but it is probably most of them.
How is sexualizing children “open minded”?
For about a decade proponents of “alternative” sexual identities have been increasingly promoting the ideas that sexual identity begins at age four, that government must use its coercive force to promote this, and anyone questioning it is a bigot subject to the greatest displays of public shaming since the Catholic Church’s Inquisition.
After our 2012 primary campaign for state senate, in which the PA GOP gerrymandered me out of the senate district at the last second, and the state supreme court put me back in at the last second, and we went on to do extremely well and change the outcome of the race, a lot of us spent time on FakeBook lamenting the outcome but enjoying the policy debate shift in our direction.
One of the policy subjects was sexual identity, which in that debate quickly was posed as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition by one side. Anyone who similarly stuck to their guns on the other side, usually due to religious beliefs, was mob attacked and accused as a “bigot.”
In that debate, one unanswered question kept coming up, and that was why so many activists believe it is necessary to discuss sex with little kids, tiny children, not their kids but the children of other people, who traditionally have been shielded from sexual subjects for obvious reasons.
This question is up front again, in light of a recent National Geographic magazine cover that invaded our home a few months ago, and in light of recent comments by reporter Chris Cuomo.
National Geographic magazine recently posed a small child on its cover, with the title that sexual identity is fluid and begins at a very young age. How this pertains to geography is a question unanswered by NatGeo.
Last week Chris Cuomo stated matter of factly on public television that if a twelve year old girl does not want to see a penis in the locker room, then “she is not open minded enough.”
Added into the mix here is the recently debated idea that men, women, children should all share the same bathrooms simultaneously, taking hold in some places and being soundly rejected in others.
I cannot help but ask: Why do children now have to be sexualized?
How is this being construed as being open minded?
Why is there no safe space for little kids to retain their innocence?
What does someone truly need in all this, or is it just an adult fantasy playing out as a legitimate policy issue?
Sexuality is powerful, it is potent, it is dangerous, and it can be toxic when misused. Why are some adults getting away with sexualizing our children in the name of being “open minded”?
And how are protective parents like me ‘bigots’ if we reject this notion as anything but poorly masked pedophilia?
I am a protective parent because I love my children. Like all children, mine deserve to be kids, to have kid thoughts, to be left alone from the adult world of politics, especially identity politics. Yes, I understand that many gay people felt different at pretty young ages, usually around twelve or thirteen, and I have two gay friends who did not know they were different until they were eighteen years old. But what does this have to do with someone else’s kids?
Do you really believe that your interest in my kid’s welfare is greater than my interest? And do you really believe that this entitles you to talk to my children about sex, graphic sex?
I have to admit that this whole idea makes me angry, because I feel like I am watching mass pedophilia unfold in front of my eyes, and the force of political correctness is so strong that normal, healthy, good people, good parents, are being damaged and mowed down by bullies in control of government force, while simply trying to protect their children’s (my children’s) innocence.
If a tolerant guy like me is starting to feel this way, then I can only imagine that a lot of other Americans are feeling a lot more upset. This does not bode well for true and honest tolerance for adult behavior among consenting adults, which has unfortunately become part and parcel of an open war against childhood innocence and on children. Either you stand with the kids, or you stand against them.
National Geographic and Chris Cuomo are against all kids, against my kids. Duly noted.
Tyranny by Ten
This Tuesday, two and a half days ago, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals created a new law about guns and gun ownership in America out of thin air and completely contradicting recent US Supreme Court decisions the lower courts are bound to follow
If you want to see why citizens’ faith in the judiciary branch has declined, this bizarre decision is the best latest example.
It is gross over-reach far exceeding the court’s authority, and nullifying all of the judicial precedent litigated and decided before by the highest court.
Recall that judges cannot make up law.
They are fully bound by precedent.
They cannot make up policies.
They cannot come to a conclusion that is outside the subject of what has been litigated in front of them.
They cannot second-guess Congress.
They cannot ask what personal motives were behind a president’s executive order.
It does not matter what a judge personally thinks. None of this is supposed to enter into a judge’s ruling. When it does, the ruling is meaningless garbage.
Judges can only interpret the laws that are passed by Congress and signed by the President, or the state equivalent. That is it. That is their sole scope and ability.
At their most precise and honest moment, judges simply determine if a law is Constitutional, or not, or if it needs to go back to the state or federal legislative branch for re-work.
Brazen activism like this week’s decision serves only to undermine the judiciary, not strengthen it, because people will either utterly ignore these wayward judges, or they will seek to have them removed from their office, for good cause. Or both.
I myself do not feel bound by this illegal decision, and I will not comply with it no matter who says I must. These ten judges-gone-wild do not outweigh the collective decisions of the populace. If this court wants my guns, the authors of this decision can come to my home and try to take them away.
Come and (try to) take them!
In this particular instance of judicial malfeasance, ten of the court’s fourteen judges decided on their own that a new legal test was needed, a test that had never been used before by Congress, by the framers, the Constitution, or prior courts.
These ten judges decided to call it the “weapons of war” test, and they simply state that the Second Amendment never intended for American citizens to possess “weapons of war,” which according to these judges include the basic AR-15 rifles that are commonly used to hunt coyotes every week across the nation. Never mind that this new test would have eliminated from their personal possession the very military grade guns the American Patriots used to defeat the British.
But obviously logic is not of concern to these judges. The language of the majority decision and supporting decision is florid, full of political and emotional hyperbole, uses sophomoric logic and impolitic language (“the American people deserve a break”), and is simply disconnected from Constitutional text or legal precedent.
It is the equivalent of my kids saying “So, there!” in an argument.
But wait, there’s more!
Beyond being merely political, the majority bizarrely state that the decision is consistent with the US Supreme Court’s Heller decision, when it is in fact completely contradictory. Talk about shades of Orwell’s “1884,” where up is down, black is white, etc.
This is not a legal decision, it is a political decision. It is a bold, defiant “I dare ya!” act by ten radical politicians wearing sombre black robes. And it is not just about guns. This decision is about rogue, out-of-control judges destroying the fabric of our Republic, which was not designed to turn over all issues to the judiciary, as if they make our every decision for us. This court throws the whole delicate machine of democracy out of kilter.
These judges are anti-democracy, plain and simple. They want a certain policy outcome, and because they cannot get it legitimately, legally, through the established legislative process, they simply want to wave a magic wand and make it so.
As much as this illegal decision shocks me, I do have to thank these judges, because they have outed themselves. By engaging in such egregious over-reach, illegally reaching deep into the realms of policy and law, they have willingly exposed themselves as frauds deserving of the most serious correction our system of government allows for – removal from the bench.
Now it is up to those American citizens who want to ‘drain the swamp’ and reclaim American government so that it serves We The People, to remove these anti-democracy activists from their sacred judicial roles. We can push to have them impeached or removed administratively.
Either way will do. Tyranny by ten cannot stand. We the People demand our rights.