Is there a single government – or a single federal elected official – who does not have blood on their hands? Male or female? Now in 2024 or in 1924 or in 1824?
We think the answer is no: they all have blood on their hands: they all have “blood guilt.” For various reasons, admittedly.
Continue reading“As for me and my house, we will serve…” No, not the State, but “YHWH: The LORD,” said Joshua ben Nun, the man who actually founded ancient Israel way back about 1400 BC. We know that at least some Israelites did so for the 1500 years that ancient Israel existed. Even though many – maybe most – lived up to the meaning of the name “Israel” – those who contend or struggle with God. After the three wars between the Jews and the Romans, from AD 67 to about AD 155, they were no longer a “nation” but remained a people. According to the Bible, their primary role in history had been fulfilled by that time, as a people of God. But they were still around. Their culture, their heritage, their identity survived. Unlike many ancient peoples: we have no one today claiming or providing evidence that they are ancient Etruscans, or Edomites, or Amelekites, or Hittites.
But we still have Hebrews, or Jews. And once again, many of those Hebrews have a nation. Located in their ancient homeland of Canaan.
Today there are many sincere people (and a very high number of insincere scam artists) who conflate ancient Israel with the modern 20th/21st Century State of Israel. In particular, for various reasons, many try to apply the promises and prophecies about the people of Israel to the nation-state created in 1948 and embattled since.
Continue readingThe Independent’s story about The Donald being banned from various and sundry countries seems almost gleeful to us here at TPOL. The list of 40 countries includes both Canada and the UK. The story writer seems convinced that the felony conviction will stand and will prevent Trump from carrying out his presidential duties. Felons can’t go there.
Now, TPOL has a number of problems with that. Hence our quote from George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Continue readingUncle Joe is reportedly fond of telling people that they don’t need their AR-16s and AK-47 for various reasons. Including the idea that if the FedGov turns tyrannical, those weapons are worthless against F-16 fighter jets and M-1 main battle tanks.
Well… dare we question Uncle Joe? The best friend Israel ever had in the White House? The man who single-handedly rescued us from the evil tyranny of The Donald? The man who sees and speaks to the dead?
Really? How much more sarcastic can we be? Rome had Nero and Caligula. We have Uncle Joe. Rome survived relatively intact in power and territory for almost 3 centuries after Little Boots went mad. How long can we survive? (Don’t hold your breath.) Anyway…
Western Journal recently reported that the very powerful, seemingly invincible M-1A1 Abrams main battle tank ain’t doing so hot in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Of the 30 sent to deal brother Zelenskyy, apparently five had (as of the end of April) been killed by Russian or Russophile insurrectionists in Ukraine.
Wow.
Continue reading
We are no great fans of The Donald here at TPOL. We haven’t shied away from saying that.
But we have even less respect and tolerance for Uncle Joe – We have been pretty clear about that, too.
And we have recently expressed our lack of any support for the degenerate libertarian just nominated by the LP.
We know nothing about Randall Terry, who is running on the Constitutional Party ticket – and most of us are not in States where they’ve made it to the ballot. It seems (as we write this) that their website has been hacked. We certainly cannot support the Greens, the Prohibition Party, or the Socialist Workers Party. (Virtually dead since the GOP and Dems alike have adopted Vlad’s platform – Vlad Lenin, not Vlad Putin.)
So NOTA (None of the Above) is going to be getting a few more votes this year.
Continue readingIt is obvious: there were some winners and losers at the Washington DC LP convention this week. The Party itself wasn’t a winner.
The Libertarian Party US’ latest convention shows the party not only continues to be an ever-increasing political joke: the active members and leaders are revelling in it. Their new standard bearer should have face-paint: he is heading up a clown-show.
Are we being demeaning and rude? Yes, we are – and we apologize for succumbing to the temptation to be so. But the events and results of last weekend’s election-year convention, as reported by many reputable people, is a strong provocation. The spectacle was sickening – as bad and worse than any in the last two decades or more.
Continue readingDue to an error on our part here at TPOL, the wrong version of Rob Morse’s guest editorial – which we called “Americans as lab rats” and he discussed the unhappy collision of States (and the Feds) ramming undesirable technology down our throats for political science reasons – and one State’s collapsing economy and justice system.
Please consider going back to yesterday evening’s posting, reading it, and sharing it: both Rob and we have some useful assessments to share.
And if you would, share this website with others!
A guest editorial by Rob Morse! Rob makes some very important observations and shows how new technology, new economic challenges, and a decline in morality creates major problems. A very serious and growing problem for people trying to keep up with the Joneses and willing to spend insanely for electric vehicles. An recent example comes from NBC News.
Government and big business (including the “health care” profession and academia) have 300 million Americans functioning as lab rats, in which the experiments are increasingly uncontrolled and bizarre.
The end of Public EV charging stations in blue States?
Thieves have disabled EV Charging Stations time after time. In red states, the police can prosecute the thieves. In blue states, they can’t. There are a vast network of relationships that allow society to work. Making changes to a well-integrated society is frighteningly dangerous. In short, there are a vast number of ways to make things worse, and only a few ways to make society better. Elections have consequences. One consequence is that we might not be able to have public charging stations for EVs.
Thieves have been stealing the heavy cables from EV charging stations. They take a few hundred dollars of copper each night. In some cities, that earns you a misdemeanor where the police hand out a ticket and the judge issues you a fine. Before you’re fined, you must first be identified, located, arrested, booked, charged, tried, and convicted. Most of the thieves are never caught and prosecuted. If they are arrested, most of the criminals have no cash or bank balance that can be seized to pay their fine. They don’t have property that can be levied or regular wages that can be garnished.
Ignoring “small” crimes is a new problem, a new experiment. We used to have laws against theft and vandalism. Blue State Democrats got rid of those laws in the name of reducing the fraction of young men who went to jail. Instead of making society safer, their soft on crime laws made it impossible to have any public infrastructure. Many businesses had to close.
Grocery and drug stores closed in Big Blue cities where shoplifting was tolerated. We can’t have public EV charging stations either. I’m reminded of the time I was hiking in the hills above Santa Cruz, California. I stumbled over a pot growing operation. We can’t even have clean open spaces when we don’t enforce the laws we have. Society is more precarious than we thought.
Imagine I gave you a hammer or wrench or a saw. Then I pointed you at a helicopter and told you to make the machine better. There are a thousand things you could do and almost none of them would make the helicopter more useful. Almost all of the changes would make the aircraft more dangerous. The good news is that few of us pretend to be experienced helicopter designers, machinists, or mechanics. Now consider that a helicopter is trivially simple when compared to the society in a small town. Boastful Democrat Politicians picked up a hammer and broke many of our major cities.
With the help of the press, these politicians broke a society they couldn’t create in the first place. They did it time after time and the news media cheered them on. The politicians issued a series of excuses packaged as a press release and the press reprinted it without question.
You don’t need to be an experienced political scientist to figure out why most new ideas fail. A single celled organism is one of the simplest forms of life that we know. Making random changes to the cell’s genetic code is almost always fatal. Those changes kill the cell or its offspring. It is vastly easier to introduce a fatal flaw than to create an improvement. You knew that if you read the textbook and listened in your high school biology class.
Somehow, we forget the obvious when a Democrat politician proposes another untested experiment wrapped up with a wonderful title. We assumed that these politicians were both thoughtful and that they cared about our society. We were wrong. They care deeply about getting reelected. They care about leaving a good impression and avoiding blame.
In blue states, fewer young men and women are able to start a family and buy a home. The things they buy cost more and the jobs they can get pay less. It is harder than ever to start a small company. Some of our public spaces are unusable due to crime and homelessness. Working citizens are fleeing our Democrat controlled cities. If all the EV charging cables are cut, they can’t even drive away in their electric cars.
Until the voters start paying attention, I don’t know if our society will survive these experiments.
Publisher’s Thoughts: Rob’s ideas are worth considering and we here at TPOL urge you to do so. But…
It is not just in so-called blue States. Or just in inner-urban areas.
It is NOT just the fault of voters or even of government.
And the solution is absolutely not something that human government can provide: it requires action on the part of parents – setting good examples as well as good teaching to their children. It requires action by businesses and landowners to reject the stupidity of politicians and bureaucrats. In other words, to reduce the foolish role of government trying to micromanage our every minute – and the intended and unintended consequences of those government actions.
Imagine if the governor of every State in the union were banned from entering more than a tenth of the State by local governments? Good or bad? Nice or not-so-nice?
You don’t have to: look at South Dakota and see it today. According to Indian Country Today, an AmerInd (private) newspaper, South Dakota’s ninth AmerInd nation, the Flandreau Sioux Tribe, has banned South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem from entering their reservation.
South Dakota has nine tribal nations: Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Flandreau, Lower Brule, Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Sisseton-Wahpeton, Standing Rock, and Yankton. All of them are members of the Seven Council Fires, usually known as the Great Sioux Nation. SD has more than 800,000 people: today only 8.5% are enrolled, but they have (as tribes) 12% of SD land. (Not counting any land they privately own.)
Why have they banned her? No, it isn’t because she killed a family dog. And it isn’t because she is (was) seeking to be The Donald’s running mate in November.
It is worse: she said the same thing that several Tribal Chairman in her State said about drug and crime problems on the various reservations: in particular Pine Ridge. (Home of the Oglala Lakota.) She said the various cartels (particularly the Mexican ones) had a presence in South Dakota and especially in the nine nations. And that crime – violent crime – was endemic on the homelands. Several of the Tribes have officially stated the same thing, and at least OST has sued the FedGov for failing to provide adequate police protection, which they claim is a treaty violation.
But because Noem is an “Anglo” and a “settler” (in Lakota, a wašíču: a non-AmerInd), she isn’t allowed to say that. So she must be humiliated: punished. Especially since she is a Republican, and therefore bears the blood guilt of all GOP types for Honest Abe Lincoln allowing 38 Dakota to be hanged in Minnesota for crimes in starting and waging the Minnesota or Dakota War or uprising. To listen to many, Honest Abe (in the middle of the War between the States) made a special trip to Mankato to pull the levers on the gallows himself. We suppose that is a good enough reason to hate Republicans as any. (We don’t hate Republicans – not even RINOs – here at TPOL: as with Democrats, we pity them, we sometimes fear their stupid actions, but especially we try to convert them to liberty.)
As may be, the mainstream media has enjoyed constantly trumpeting her ban or prohibition as tribe after tribe hopped on the bandwagon over the past few weeks. Of course, because she is (a) GOP, (b) favored by The Donald, (c) conservative (NOT libertarian), and (d) doesn’t play ball regarding such things as the Pandemic Panic and Open Borders.
Now, we have no idea (haven’t talked to her lately) whether (a) she is bothered by these bans, or (b) will abide by their wishes. And she certainly has her share of burdens right now: her book with the story of killing her family dog, the stories about playing favorites in various dealings, and other such things. We point out that as South Dakota governors go (Dem and GOP), she seems to be a bit more honest and clean than the average, if not as open.
Back in the heights of the Beer Flu and the Pandemic Panic (which she refused to go along with – thanks to listening to the legislators who warned her not to), several of the Lakota tribes actually banned people from even traveling through their reservations on state and federal highways. Bans to the extent of putting up roadblocks and checkpoints with armed guards to turn them around. Noem didn’t push it, but let the attorneys and common sense deal with the stupidity. (So stupid, a friend of ours here at TPOL, not an enrolled tribal member but married to one and with enrolled children, was told that if he left the reservation and went to any of the major cities in South Dakota, he wouldn’t be allowed back in unless he quarantined himself for a month in a motel (at his expense, of course. We smuggled supplies into him.)
This does remind us of the Occupy Movement and even the recent occupation of academic buildings on colleges to protest against Israel: but with a big difference. These tribal governments are (supposedly) elected democratically to represent their people: they are “legitimate” governments and not political groups.
So our question is, how likely is this to happen in other States – in the Fifty as a whole? If tribes in New Mexico suddenly decide they don’t like her Imperial Highness (Michelle Luhan Gresham), will they suddenly ban her? Keep her from going from Santa Fe to Albuquerque? (The only roads are through Pueblo reservations.) Or will black “homelands” in Mississippi or Alabama do the same to their States’ governors? Or will Muslims in the Detroit area do the same to that other tyrannical governor? Will this revive the “free zones” in Seattle or Portland?
As people attempt to and encourage factionalism, does this not seem likely?
We here at TPOL encourage rebellion against government – even under conditions like this. IF it is more than just a publicity stunt. And if there is not offensive action (and there does not seem to be in South Dakota’s case). We urge and support the efforts of all nine AmerInd nations in South Dakota to secede. Give up being dependents of the FedGov and skimming off the other taxpayers in SD for highways and unemployment and all the rest of the largesse of State government.
Even while we deplore the aggressive and even more ridiculous efforts of the LandBack movement, the bloodthirsty actions of the American Indian Movement, and the violent crime wave on reservations. There are ways to deal with those things, but the typical tactics of tribal councils and special interest groups are not the way to do so.
Same old, same old on the gun control front?
I suppose we should, as one of us here at TPOL often says, not be surprised. Some people never give up. In case their cause is worthy and desirable, that is great. When they are bent on doing wrong, and when they are mentally unstable and challenged, it gets old.
In a move that has already sparked intense debate, U.S. Representative Lucy McBath (D, GA-7 – suburbs of Atlanta) has introduced a bill (HR-8600) in the US House of Representatives aiming to ban all gas-operated semi-automatic firearms. This proposal, labeled the “Gas-Operated Semi-Automatic Firearms Exclusion” (GOSAFE) Act, was submitted on 3 June, ramping up discussions around gun control in the States.
Continue reading →