Posts Tagged → freedom
Midsummer report
My apologies for the long absence here. Summer is in full swing and our family has been operating at full tilt speed. Time only for doing things, and none for writing about it all, until now.
First off, our oldest kid was married on Independence Day. Held at a pretty and historic farm, it was a fantastic wedding, and we feel like we acquired a wonderful addition to our family. However, the preparation necessary for that event took up a lot of time and energy, for many months. And then there was the recovery week. And then there was the vacation week. Hence no blog posts. Full credit to my wife for all of the wedding planning.
At least I myself am back in the saddle, while other people around me are still recovering from their vacation. Not everyone does well with the surf fishing bum lifestyle, including sleeping on the beach, eating questionable food from a warm cooler that has been pawed over and drooled on by feral raccoons, and drinking fetid water. I myself thrive in this kind of environment, and so I am back to report back to our three readers.
What can I say about the wedding other than I fired our small black powder cannon seven times, for good luck. It was Independence Day, and while the venue does not allow fireworks, they did allow the cannon (it’s a cast iron, steel sleeved replica swivel gun with a 1.75″ bore). And in my speech as the bride’s father, how could I miss an opportunity to point out that Independence Day was brought to us by citizens with guns? That is a fact, is it not?
And (of course, I guess) I heard back afterwards that some of our wedding guests were offended by the cannon and also offended by my mention of the origins of American freedom – citizens with guns. You can’t make this stuff up if you tried, like it’s a Hollywood movie script caricature of spoiled rotten children who get everything that Planet Earth can provide and yet nonetheless complain about it. Something like “The food here is terrible and the portions are so small.”
Are Americans now really offended by Independence Day fireworks? Are they offended by displays of patriotism and mentioning of historical facts that unfortunately run contrary to some evil political narratives that privately owned guns are bad and our freedom was brought to Americans by a immaculately conceived federal government that descended from Heaven? Are some wedding guests now so crass that they actually complain about the bride’s father setting off his celebratory toy cannon for the enjoyment of all the normal fun-loving people in attendance?
I have a hard time believing these things, but I did get to witness this stuff. America is in big trouble when its own citizens, young and old, hate its founding and can’t give a proud father his one moment and some space to celebrate it. Jiminy crickets.
Just returned from a subsequent beach trip to a a long spit of federally managed property on the east coast. The National Park Service rangers were 99% normal, nice, intelligent Americans, thank you very much, Gage, Donald, and Stephen.
In this national park there is a problem with artificially high numbers of deer, foxes, and racoons. They have no natural predators and they are multiplying at breakneck rates and having huge negative impacts on the environment and local ecology. Vegetation shows a distinct deer browse line about four feet above the ground, and the racoons are everywhere, aggressive, and aiming to ruin your trip. I watched a red fox steal a camper’s breakfast sausage meal right off of his plate on the guy’s picnic table. We had raccoons patrolling our campsite and under our table as soon as we broke out our food. They will grab your food right out of your hand. It is a fact that raccoons are host to some nasty parasites they excrete in their poop, which was abundantly displayed all around the campsites. Raccoons are also the number one vector for rabies among wildlife.
Aside from posing health threats and incessantly badgering the humans who are trying to enjoy the park, the foxes and raccoons also eat the eggs of rare nesting shore birds. These rare birds enjoy huge swaths of cordoned off human-free dunes and beaches in the park (and also on federal and state lands out on Long Island, like Orient Point and Montauk). And yet the same exact NPS staff enforcing the human no-go dune zones policy are absolutely fine with the overabundant nest-raiding foxes and raccoons that render all the no-go zones meaningless. The staff do not support hunting or trapping these destructive pests, either to improve the park visitor experience or to protect the natural environment.
How can the rare birds successfully nest on the ground and hatch their chicks there when the artificially super overabundant egg-eating raccoons and foxes are allowed to roam at will?
Talking with various National Park Service staff about this problem resulted in exposure to various levels of education and serious/unserious mindset. Most of the NPS staff acknowledged there is a wildlife problem on site that must be addressed. Hunting the deer and trapping the foxes and raccoons is the normal and responsible way to deal with this artificial human-caused environmental problem. These are the responsible and serious ways of addressing a visitor problem on land that is owned by the US taxpayer and whose management is entrusted to taxpayer-paid bureaucrats.
However, when I mentioned the above normal solutions to a young, handsome, tall NPS Park Policeman patrolling our campground, he responded “The same can be said about humans — there are just too many humans. And your solution to the overabundant raccoon problem is not humane.” He would get rid of the humans and allow the artificially high numbers of nuisance wildlife to proliferate. With taxpayer-paid federal employees of this guy’s low caliber and high wokeness quotient, the park visitor experience is going to degrade. C’mon, NPS, you can screen your employee applicants better than this. This foolish people-hating young guy should never have a gun and a badge, much less wear an NPS uniform.
Overall the surf fishing was fun if mostly unproductive. Probably due to the high heat and ferocious sunshine. I can report that catching cownose/ bullnose rays on strong surf tackle is a hoot, but then safely decoupling that animal from the tackle is a whole other thing. They whip their barbed tails around trying to nail the fisherman, who is trying to release them back into the ocean (I learned to place something heavy on the tail while using heavy pliers to remove or break off the hook). We did witness a large shark violently feeding close to shore, and it would be a fair guess to say it was probably eating these rays, which we caught and saw in abundance on both the bay side and the ocean surf side.
So that is the mid-summer report. Fast action, lots of family, some big family celebration and lots of family movement across the beautiful American landscape for work and vacation. I hope that you the reader are also enjoying your summertime. Summer is such a glorious time to be with family and friends, to visit new places, to camp out under the stars and cook over an open fire, to think through life’s normal challenges and to spend time with people we love…and then it is over just when we are all starting to really get into it.
So make the most of your summer.
Campsite neighbor Steve, a PhD engineer ex-patriot Brit and defiant leftist, helped MAGA Maniac Josh fix my malfunctioning headlamp, demonstrating that it’s easy to be enemies when separated by keyboards and easy to be friends when living side by side
Nice level NPS campsites with fire ring and grill
Each campsite has a pavilion and a picnic table. Is this really camping?
Asbury Park Brewery is a local flavor that I was happy to support. No sign anywhere of Bud Lite or Budweiser anything, thankfully
Symbol of foolish National Park Service policies seeking to protect rare shore birds by excluding people from their habitat, but allowing artificially overabundant populations of nest-raiding raccoons and foxes to roam at will.
Beach goers nonetheless entered this area because there were zero nesting birds in it and there were literally tons of foxes running around in it. Come on National Park Service, you can do much smarter than this
Ahhhhh… summer vacation on the Atlantic Coast
Career politicians ended representative democracy
At its founding, America was envisioned as a representative government, a constitutional republic, where We, The People would vote for good citizens from amongst our ranks to represent our interests in government. Guy leaves his farm and plow behind to do his civic duty, returns back to the farm four or six years later. It is a good idea, because it does away with unfair feudalism and hierarchy, where only a few people at the top have power and everyone else is a powerless serf/slave/peon with no individual rights. The people making the laws are the same people who will be subject to the same laws. Everyone is treated fairly under the law.
And for a long time America worked pretty well on this model. Yes, there have been some political scandals along the way, and some power grabs that were turned back. Typically the American citizenry have been jealous of their rights and understandably suspicious of government in every way, and so they “throw the bums out” when the collective situation gets bad.
But somewhere in the past sixty years, maybe eighty years, America got deeply into political careerism. You know, where elected officials Mary Jane and Billy Bob were so respected and maybe even revered, either for their honorable traits or for their ability to deliver taxpayer funds to private beneficiaries, that the voters routinely, even habitually vote for them at every election. And so these people who kept getting elected in primaries and in general elections became career politicians. Either their entire career or most of it was spent working their way up a sort of “ladder” from local positions of authority to national positions of authority. And thus did people aim to have a career in politics, because of all sorts of reasons, some good, some bad, some corrupt, but there developed an entire culture within the two main political parties, Democrat and Republican, where party bosses would work with special interest groups to line up tame candidates who owed their political career not to We, The People, but to the party bosses and special interest groups.
And career politicians began to get really rich from their relatively low-paying public jobs. All the more reason to just stay in there and not do anything else with your life!
And so here we are, mid 2023, and career politicians in both political parties are willfully destroying America (e.g. faux “debt ceiling” wild spending spree that no one can ever pay for, Department of Defense can’t track expenditures below $100,000,000 and so our tax dollars are wasted and stolen from us, $83 billion worth of American military hardware is abandoned to our enemies in Afghanistan by Biden, neither party will hold Rep. Adam Schiff accountable for being a serial liar needlessly costing taxpayers $32 million etc).
Because career politicians are so personally invested in their political careers that if they deviate and try to do the right thing, then they stand a good chance of losing their elected office. And then doing the wrong thing becomes accepted and then promoted by the various established information outlets.
And so career politicians continue to make one bad decision after another, to hold onto their own personal power. To the point where even when Americans lose, when America loses, career politicians still win.
And so we reach the present financially and culturally unsustainable points that will inevitably result in America failing, and everyone losing their individual rights, and then some feudal overlords take over and use brute force like everyone else around the world lives under.
I know, I know, so many readers here laugh out loud when I write this stuff.
“America destroyed! Unsustainable! Ha ha ha that Josh guy sure is an idiot, because he obviously doesn’t know America is waaay waaay too big to fail!”
And so despite a long human history littered with wrecked human civilizations, the warnings from taxpaying worker bees like me go not just unheeded, but mocked and belittled by career political staffers and career politicians in both parties as they all continue to make financially and culturally unsustainable and reckless decisions for the collective rest of us. And at the end of their day, all the careerists see is money and power, and so anyone within their orbit can commit the most grievously corrupt behavior without being held accountable. As one of my mentors Frank used to say, the longer a career politician is in office, the tighter the horse blinders get, until they see nothing except what is right in front of them, which is money and power.
The rest of us? The We, The People worker bees? We see the corrupt rot all around us eating away at America. We see Rome beginning to burn, while the career politicians feast and live carefree lives devoid of discipline or honesty. This is not going to last, friends. If we all continue to re-elect career politicians, then our freedom-loving civilization is probably going to end within the lifetimes of the people reading these words, and everything we take for granted will be gone. All of it. It will all be History, as they say.
Trans-conversation not allowed
“Trans” Definition: Across, beyond, through, changing thoroughly (Random House dictionary, 1987, the best printed book you can have in your home, because it represents the pinnacle of Western Civilization English language before it was thoroughly corrupted with non-definable nonsense which has resulted in the internal collapse of our nation).
To have a meaningful conversation and exchange of ideas (which results in increased understanding and personal growth) across, beyond, and through our natural personal and cultural differences and boundaries, all humans have historically talked to one another. Fifteen thousand years ago, the multitude of Mongolian tribes who had migrated across the climate change Bering land bridge into the Americas all ended up speaking different languages as a multitude of different Indian tribes, and yet interacting directly and honestly with one another across their differences.
In the 1400s, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, and Dutch explorers sailed their ships across the planet to meet, communicate, and trade with other cultures with different skin colors and languages. In the 1600s, different European tribes (primarily Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Franks, and Celts) who migrated into the Americas all joined together and amalgamated across their cultural and linguistic boundaries to form a singular national and several regional identities.
All of these humans from the beginning of modern humanity crossed physical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries to exchange ideas and items with one another, often joining together, sometimes disagreeing, but always communicating. No artificial boundaries were allowed. If a boundary or difference between them was unnecessary or served no healthy purpose, then that boundary and difference was discarded. Albeit sometimes by force of arms, but discarded nonetheless.
So, knowing these demonstrable, measurable, definable facts about humans historically communicating with one another, let us ask this important question: What realistic, healthy purpose is served by the unnatural gag order and discriminatory bar on honest conversations about the sexual ideology movement and its resulting trans-sexual assault on women’s rights?
Why can’t the majority of Americans, Canadians, or Europeans presently ask questions and talk fully about this non-sensical, destructive, censorious movement that has taken over academia, medicine, law, and much of government services?
To not only stop Americans from having a conversation about “Trans” athletes destroying women’s sports, but for the pro-Trans movement to then also utterly destroy the personal and professional lives of those people who merely try to have these important conversations demonstrates that this is not a natural human experience we are having right now. Knowing that humans have historically crossed every sort of boundary to reach one another, how can it be said that this aggressive censorship and brutal blocking of communication about the subject is natural and thus healthy?
The simple and honest answer here is that the pro-censorship side is made up of evil, intolerant, discriminatory authoritarians relying on 100% subjective and unprovable nonsense (that has a lot of scientifically proven data contradicting it). People who cannot have an honest debate or discussion, and who try to destroy anyone who even questions much less challenges their orthodoxy, are by definition really bad people. Sure, they try to cloak themselves in righteousness, and they claim that honest discussions cause “harm” to some tiny fraction of humans somewhere. But they are the ones committing the greatest and most widespread harm to the greatest number of people.
These inhuman censorship people must be confronted, shamed, and stopped. As they have pulled out all of the stops to destroy us, so should we pull out all of the stops to fight back. They started this fight; they purposefully undermined every First Amendment right we citizens have enjoyed for 240 years, and so we have every right to fight fire with fire. We are waging a just war back against injustices imposed on us by violent authoritarians. I see our situation as eerily similar to World War Two, where the side representing human freedom and good waged a just war against evil Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and Japan.
If you have a Woke university asking you for money, decline to contribute and instead support university board candidates who believe in the classical liberal idea of free speech. If you have a Woke township official making bizarre, un-American decisions about your property rights, or demanding that you accept their anti-English language pronouns while they reject your correct pronouns, then mount a strong effort to have them voted out or removed from office. If your kid has a Woke sports coach at school who makes scientifically indefensible decisions about sports competitions and shared locker rooms, then mount an aggressive effort to remove that coach (and similarly defend sports coaches who adhere to scientifically sound decisions). Same for school board members – Woke = bad = run for their seats.
Isn’t it ironic that the one crucial thing that the “Trans” movement does not tolerate is the full communication among all of us and across our different boundaries about the crushing slavery that the Trans movement truly represents and means for the vast majority of us? Even the gay and possibly Trans people in my own family, each of whom I love completely and welcome in my life absolutely and always, cannot tolerate an honest discussion about this subject. Such is the stuff of rigid religious ideologies!
This Trans movement – as it is currently structured and represented – is not a human thing. It is not an innately healthy or honest human experience. Rather, it is an anti-human artificial contrivance operating far outside historic human norms and much more aligned with Nazis, Fascists, and Stalinists.
Because the current Trans movement is an existential threat to you and your essential humanity, it is normal and justified for you to fear it and be phobic of it. It is just one more gruesome face of evil fascism that must be confronted and defeated to save our freedom of choice, freedom of conscience, and physical freedom.
What happened to Earth Day?
Earth Day began decades ago, in 1970, when I was a kid. I remember it as a distinct point in time where the people around me spoke about raw sewage and chemicals being dumped and piped directly into American waterways. Up until that point, Americans had kind of unhappily or grudgingly accepted environmental degradation and pollution as an unfortunate necessity of economic and technological progress.
But fish kills in what older people then clearly remembered as pristine trout streams, and obvious losses of waterways with once- major fishing and waterfowl hunting to untreated, unfiltered, unmitigated chemical and physical waste dumping bothered most Americans. A great deal of this pollution was out in the open, unsightly, and an obvious reflection on Americans as a people. Then the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because of all the dangerous pollution in it, and that image galvanized Americans to clean up our act.
What was happening then was public waterways and air that were shared publicly were being used as a cheap dumping ground by production facilities of all sorts. The American public was bearing the burden of environmental waste, while the same processes that generated that waste also generated income that was privatized. I am 100% for private income, but I strenuously object to using shared waters and air as a cheap garbage disposal, and so did people of all backgrounds in 1970.
Thus was Earth Day born. Fair enough, understandable enough. And the environmental cleanup and protection movement followed closely on its heels. The US Environmental Protection Agency, where I began my professional career, was created soon after Earth Day to address the obvious problems resulting from carelessness with our shared environment.
But now, after decades of increasingly crushing environmental laws and regulations that ridiculously “protect” us down to parts per trillion of chemicals that already naturally occur at those levels in the natural environment….Earth Day represents something totally different than it did in 1970. Today, Earth Day is a celebration of an all-out assault on Western Civilization by people pursuing a ridiculously impossibly unattainable “Net Zero” goal. Meaning that humans should have zero impact on the planet. None. Which naturally necessitates a complete (and unreasonable, undemocratic, authoritarian) overhaul of our way of life, freedoms, choices, food, etc.
Earth Day is now marked and promoted by people who supposedly “know better” what is right for us. And in fact almost 100% of the environmental and even land conservation organizations are politically partisan and politically extreme, embracing all kinds of cultural and economic Marxism while rejecting American capitalism and individual freedom. This shift away from cleanup to directing us on what to eat and when and where is patently bad, unfair, wrong, and in fact is so egregiously foolish it is hurting the credibility of the environmental quality movement.
When environmental groups like Penn Future and Sierra Club always protect one political party and always attack one political party, they are shown to be about partisan politics and not about environmental quality. They are political shells. And when a local land conservancy embraces evil “Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity” policies that are actually against the founding principles of said conservancy, such as private land ownership and capitalism, then we know that even the once- wonderful land trust movement has been hijacked and turned against America.
So in 2023, Earth Day represented authoritarianism, out of control Big Government, cruel assaults on and corresponding losses of individual personal freedoms and choice, and a whole bunch of other bad stuff. The fact that Earth Day is now openly un-American and anti-America tells us that Earth Day’s promoters are not trying to protect us from pollution, they are trying to take control of our lives and destroy what had been the most free nation on Planet Earth.
Supposedly in the name of saving us from ourselves. To which I and a lot of other Americans say No Thanks.
Today’s “I know what is best for you better than you do” mindset of the environmental movement is what drove me out of working at the USEPA. It is unreasonable, unproven, and every day it is shown to be wrong and wronger.
Instead of all the anti-science climate hysteria sky-is-falling nonsense, Americans should be celebrating the incredible environmental cleanup and success we have had in the past 53 years since Earth Day was first established. Tilting at environmental windmills makes some people feel like they have meaning in their lives, and if they themselves want to take on the burdens they propose for the rest of us, then they can make that choice. But they have no right to try to take away my right of choice, your right of choice. And if there is one clear indication that the loudest voices promoting Earth Day are not serious and do not deserve to be treated seriously, it is the fact that absolutely none of these people do what they say the rest of us must do “to save the planet.”
Potent symbol of freedom: A gas kitchen stove
Only in the purposefully chaotic and bizarre power politics of 2021 to 2023 do Americans discover themselves clinging not just to their Bible and their guns, but to the gas stove in their kitchen. Yeah, Ol’ Smoky is now a symbol of your personal freedom.
Why in God’s green earth is the federal government (and several state governments including New York and Washington) trying from several different angles (consumer protection regulation, legislation, and straight-up executive branch political fatwa confiscation) to eliminate stoves that burn natural gas?
Because of control! Of you! By the bureaucrats and the lawless control freaks in government!
They want you hooked up to the electrical grid matrix and completely dependent upon whoever controls that electrical grid. One false move by you, and -POW! – your power goes out and it won’t be restored until you delete that mean “right wing” tweet and stop attending that church down the street.
This debacle of bad governance and really bad government overreach is all because a gas stove provides Americans with independence from the electric grid. While the electric grid can be controlled with the flip of a switch or two, as can the power meters on our individual homes, a gas stove operates either from a huge natural gas main pipeline that takes a lot of effort to turn off, which effects multiple city neighborhoods, or from a large propane tank in the back yard.
Propane tanks for residences run from 100 gallons to 3,000 gallons in size, providing the careful homeowner with potentially several years of cooking and heating independence until a fill-up is needed. Hooked up to a non-stop 24/7 gas main, a home can heat and cook with a gas stove 24/7. And in fact, I have personally seen an elderly woman in my neighborhood huddled up in front of her gas stove to stay warm in the winter, while the electric power was down and unavailable. This ability to run your own kitchen and home disconnected from the electric grid is serious independence from control and monitoring!
And the control freaks hate it hate it hate it!
There is a good reason Barack Hussein Obama recently installed a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury vacation beach front mansion on flood-proof Martha’s Vineyard Island. When you have a large propane tank and the power goes out, you can always run a powerful electrical generator off of that propane, as well as heat and cook with your gas stove. Some people even have the old fashioned style natural gas lights in their homes, and they work great! It is like whatever happens with the power grid doesn’t really apply to people with natural gas stoves. You are completely OK and independent.
Turns out, Obama did at least this one thing right in his life, although he won’t admit that he is a hypocrite about it, because the guy is constantly hectoring us about the evils of the propane gas in his tank. I say, if a serial liar Marxist Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama can have a gas stove and the huge propane tank out back to keep the stove fired up and cooking 24/7 off-grid, then an honest-to-goodness genuine red-blooded American like you can have one, too. Just on principle, no questions asked.
What is truly interesting about this subject is the bogus and openly fake “study” supposedly done by the Rocky Mountain Institute that the gas banners and book burners supposedly relied on for their screams of horror and outrage about “the dangers of gas stoves“. Click the link above and see for yourself. This is not a study, nor does it rely on real studies. It is a political brochure with pictures. The concerns that RMI lists are based on the improbability/impossibility of people sitting inside a gas-fired oven while it is on fire, and do not take into account ambient air dilution, stove top hoods and exhaust fans, or the risks from alternatives to gas stoves.
It is as if the only thing that RMI cares about are the potential risks (none of which are proven with actual long term study data showing a strong correlation between gas stoves and related health problems); they don’t even talk about the benefits of gas stoves. Not the least of which is that clean burning natural gas emits far fewer and less pollutants than coal-fired power from the usual electrical power plants where we get most of our electricity.
This gas stove banning business is all about bureaucrats directly controlling your home life, which means your personal freedom. They used a fake “study” by a 100% partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called Rocky Mountain Institute to “inform” their chums in the partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called the mainstream media, who in turn created the (fake) astroturf political target for partisan and ideologically driven politicians who don’t give a fig for the actual scientific truth or for you or for freedom.
Whenever we see so-called “science” claims like this gas stove ban hype that cannot be challenged or debated with its proponents, then we know it is not science, it is propaganda.
Cling to your gas stove for dear life. Do not let go of it, do not give it up, and vote out of office any elected official who supports banning gas stoves. These are bad people, controlling people, who believe they know best how you must live your life. Even the life you live in your own kitchen, frying up chicken and plantains and sauteeing vegetables, all of which really do throw up a whole bunch of oily particles in the air that can get into your lungs. And believe it or not, this is a subject I know a lot about, because after finishing graduate school I took several courses on this subject at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and got “A” grades.
Take it from me, the RMI “study” is BS, the supposed health issue about gas stoves is BS, and I’m not even a doctor. Keep your gas stove, and toss out the RMI study and its claim that your gas stove is dangerous. Live free, my friends. Breathe that free American air and rejoice.
Obama installs a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury beach front mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, and so should you
Just so we are all on the same page about what a racist disgrace Obama is, here he is happily posing with racist disgrace Louis Farrakhan. Don’t listen to anything Obama says, he is a racist dirt bag.
Biden’s Police State
The Police State Is Here and “Governed” by Joe Biden
Posted on April 4, 2023 at Natural Gas Now by Tom Shepstone
Joe Biden, the compromised plagiarist who Obama said could muck up anything, is now in titular charge of a police state once known as the land of the free and brave.
Western Civilization is collapsing at an ever increasing rate. The United States, the only remaining culture and force with the potential to reverse the decline, has now become a police state, with Joe Biden supposedly the chief. This chief of police really isn’t, though, as anyone above the age of five can see with their own eyes. He’s being tragically manipulated by the worst sorts of leftists and radicals, who couldn’t care less about him but need to use him to knock the U.S. down as many pegs as they can, while they can. Exactly who they are we can only speculate, but we know China and the deep state are in the mix and we know we are their enemy. They have created a police state over the last decade and we’re living in it, whether we realize it or not. Is there hope of reversing things?
The evidence we are living in a third-world police state is everywhere today. We are living in an Orwellian or Fahrenheit 451 world where offending someone in government or favored by government has now become a crime against the state. Consider the following:
Douglas Mackey a/k/a Ricky Vaughn was just convicted of a Federal crime for Tweeting a perfectly obvious joke regarding Hillary Clinton where, with a MAGA hat displayed on his profile picture, he suggested Hillary voters could vote by text in 2016. There is no evidence anyone at all took it seriously, but humor is the worst of sins for leftists. The photo on the left below is Mackey’s Tweet and the photo on the right is by a Leftist telling Trump voters the same thing. Mackey was arrested and the one on the right has been ignored by the Biden Feds. This is brownshirt police state stuff:
Senators from both parties have introduced a bill by the astoundingly Orwellian name of the RESTRICT Act, which is superficially about chasing TikTok out off the country but is really about empowering the Federal government by bureaucratic edict to shut any and all social media that doesn’t comport with the views of the state. It would further empower the outrageous deep state control of the media revealed in the Twitter files. Those files are only the tiniest bit of the wide-spread infestation of Big Tech by a deep state that is arm in arm with it as a result of the Section 230 protections Federal law gives to Big Tech companies.
Thomas Jefferson said “No government ought to be without censors, and, where the press is free, no one ever will,” [meaning that the only censors should be the citizens holding accountable their government] but today the press and Big Tech are no longer the challengers of government, as should always be, but, rather, the censors for government when it is in Democrat hands. During Biden times, we’ve seen the press and Big Tech join hands with government to squelch supposed “disinformation” on COVID, vaccines and anything else connected with the Wu-Flu. These police state censor tactics extended not only to different opinions, but also to acknowledged truths the government simply didn’t want out there because they went against the police state’s agenda.
The same censorship is increasingly evident with respect to the climate grifting scam. Government has not only merged with Big Pharma, but also Big Green, using edicts from the SEC, for example, to force us all into deals with the grifters through imposition of ESG investing policies. And, throw out documented hard-core facts about the climate, as Greg Wrightstone and the CO2 Coalition have done and you’ll be thrown off LinkedIn, as they were, and unable to advertise on Facebook. Only the official narrative of the power grabbers and grifters is now permitted if you’re big enough to attract attention. Meanwhile, John Kerry, celebrities and BlackRock executives fly into Davos on private jets for meetings that could be done on Zoom, but that wouldn’t demonstrate how they are elites well above the law and so the rest of us are left to pointlessly complain of hypocrisy that was deliberate.
We are seeing the Biden Administration, Kathy Hochul and and others, at the prodding of tax-exempt ultra-wealthy NGOs, impose gas stove bans, EV mandates and other measures to strangle oil and gas are everywhere. All is wrapped in “energy transition” and “save the planet” lies that are without foundation. Instead, we are instructed that phony models and targets are the reasons for transferring every more wealth and power to elites. Farmers in the Netherlands are told they can no longer farm as politically favored Big Tech moves in to take the land, and that is but one example of the corporatism —merger of business and government—at work throughout Western Civilization.
And, so it goes. There are hundreds of other examples, but they all come to one thing; Western Civilization has lost its virtue. Life is now a “free for all” struggle for power and riches and the virtuous aren’t even in the struggle, they are cowered into corners by purveyors of political correctness. The police state is here because we have become afraid to speak out and our cowardice has empowered government to take drastic steps to squelch all speech with which it doesn’t agree, knowing our resistance is weak. And, they’re largely correct. Our legislatures and courts are too corrupted themselves to do anything about this. Oh, we’ll win battles here and there, but the trajectory is still downward and mostly has been for over a century.
Notwithstanding this heavy dose of cynicism and foreboding, there is hope to replace the police state with a return to virtue if common men and women rise to their feet. The COVID debacle awakened many. I now find myself in agreement with multiple people I could not have imagining admiring a few years ago. Virtuous individuals may yet be found, and in strange places. There are many, many people of all political persuasions who recognize the COVID lockdowns were pure police state, did enormous damage and serve as a warning that Western Civilization can be vaporized in a matter of days. More to the point, we now know the enemy ardently desires this and won’t be beaten with law, constitutions or sill taunts about the hypocrisy of elites who where it like a badge of honor.
No, we are in a spiritual war. It is a war against lies and, as I’ve noted here several times we cannot live by lies. That was the message in every one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s books. Most of his life was a spiritual contest with communism in its many forms and he waged it by telling truths in every imaginable way he could. He suffered through imprisonment and exile by the Soviets and, later, much rejection from the West as a weak President Ford refused to even meet with him out of fear of communist backlash. Solzhenitsyn arguably prevailed when the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight but, today, we’re dealing with even worse atrocities and threats vis-a vis Communist China, proving the battle for virtue is an endless one.
There will always be collectivists, grifters and power seekers for whom the virtue of the individual is forever an obstacle to their own quests. Indeed, the virtuous individual is the one thing that stands in the way for the triumph of lies. And, where does virtue come from? Man cannot create it. Only the Creator can, although man forever attempts to do so. This why a return to Judeo-Christian principles is the one hope on which the future of Western Civilization rests and has always rested. Can it happen? Yes. Will it happen? Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but the hour is getting very late. We are already living in a police state.
(the original essay can be accessed at https://naturalgasnow.org/the-police-state-is-here-and-governed-by-joe-biden/)
Passover & Easter messages of Freedom
Freedom has been the goal of human beings forever.
Freedom to be your own unique self as God created you, freedom to think your own thoughts, freedom to travel where you wish, freedom to worship God in your own way, freedom to speak your mind without fear of reprisal or punishment, freedom to pursue the work you like, freedom to read the books you want and etc.
And yet, despite all of the deepest yearnings humans have had for individual and communal freedom for tens of thousands of years, freedom has nonetheless been really tough to achieve or gain for any meaningful amount of time. Here in America, the concept of freedom as Americans know it today was achieved on the frontier, where European settlers, run-away and freed blacks, and American Indians lived in a sometimes mostly peaceful communal free-for-all, and most of the time in an ebb-and-flow of painful tumult and settlement. It was on the American frontier that Europeans finally broke the chains of feudal serfdom, because they were finally out of the reach of feudal overlords.
They lived as they wanted to live.
Along the American east coast British and Dutch militaries enforced iron laws that funneled money, goods, and loyalty to far distant monarchs in Europe. But within the American interior, what we call the frontier, a new kind of human was developing. European ideals of hard work and self sacrifice blended with American Indian ideas of self-reliance and communal reliance, free of overbearing overlords imposing their own selfish demands. And what resulted was pure freedom, now enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
While early in our nation’s history the American Indians were still largely nomadic, or at least seasonal travelers across wide landscapes, the European Americans brought a focus on permanent settlement. They also brought values and hopes from the Torah (Old Testament) and the Gospel (New Testament), what today we accurately describe as a uniquely synthesized Judeo-Christian ethic for daily life and expectations from our government.
Both Judaism and Christianity celebrate freedom, and in this week of Passover (tonight) and Easter (coming Sunday), and in this American time of great peril for individual freedom, it is important to note how both these faiths mark freedom and value it as the highest form of human expression.
Why is American freedom in great peril? Because bad people who crave control and dominion over everyone and everything have seized control of the American government. Like the early Americans did in their battle with Britain, we must think of these bad people as the Pharoahs in the story of Exodus, and think of the American citizen – you and me – as the ancient Israelites, escaping harsh bondage.
These bad people constantly demand that We, The People behave one way, while they conspicuously behave the opposite. They wear their double standard hypocrisy like a badge of honor. To them, it demonstrates their authoritarian power over everyone else, their ability to behave contrary to the way they demand everyone else behave. Behaving publicly in a hypocritical manner is a demonstration of their power over everyone else. I know this is sick and anti-democratic, but the Left is completely drunk on power and is anti-democratic. They think they know what is best for everyone, and that we must all live according to their supposedly brilliant ideas (that have already failed in so many other places like the Soviet Union, China, Venezuela, Cuba etc), so no freedom for us regular “little people.”
With the holiday of Passover, Judaism teaches about the centrality of physical freedom. Freedom from slavery, freedom from political overlords who control everything we eat, think, say, and do. While Jews always celebrate Passover, there are many Christians who also observe a “Last Supper” tonight among friends and family.
With the holiday of Easter, Christians celebrate the concept of spiritual freedom; freedom from earthly limits and earthly/ physical chains. One of the first steps any authoritarian government does is to break the link between humans and one another and between humans and God. The state must become God for the state to become all-powerful, and so spiritual freedom is a powerful antidote to evil people running government badly.
Both of these separate celebrations this week, Passover and Easter, are critical to Americans and to any human being anywhere who wants to remain free or attain freedom. America has a unique blend of individual freedom and individual opportunity that no other country has. It is why everyone in the world wants to move to America.
But if we Americans are going to hold onto the Constitutional Republic that so many men have died to create and hold onto, then we must make public our celebration of freedom and our demand for freedom. We must embolden one another and embrace one another and stand side by side with one another, because right now We, The People are facing a truly tyrannical and evil government that seeks to take away the freedom that we all have. All of it. Forever.
Only standing all together can we withstand their attack on us.
Freedom. Celebrate it, mark it, identify it, value it, cherish it, and never ever relinquish it. Whatever freedom the government people can take away from you they will never ever give back to you.
Happy Passover and Happy Easter freedom to all of my fellow Americans. Celebrate freedom as you will, but celebrate it by God and never ever stand down.
