It’s Not Going to Get Better by Waiting
Welcome back to the Washington home, the bathrooms got done, we’re still working on the rock wall that some drunk took out. Never having had a major insurance claim for damage, I had no idea how slow and painful a process this is. Anyway, there is a lot of other work we need to do, stuff that we’ve been living with on a “I’ll get around to it” basis, that needs fixed before we put it on the market. That and packing keeps us very busy.
Sigh.
Booze is in the usual place, beer is out in the mudroom, and dinner will be something with linguiça, don’t know what yet... The tip jar is at the link. Thanks, as always to everyone who has chipped in.
Now, the first thing I want to talk about today, is something that came across my desk just this morning. Some gal named Sasha Elizabeth McVeigh, I guess she’s some sort of musician, IDK never heard of her… Well, she wrote a big screed about how messed up the immigration system is in our country, and how painful it was to become a citizen; how impossible to immigrate it is if you “simply want a better life, and better opportunities” and how “Deporting thousands upon thousands of people” won’t fix it. Well, I felt the need to reply, to this screed, and to share it here.
She's right, the immigration system IS unfathomably broken, and she's right that deporting hundreds of thousands of individuals is NOT going to fix it. The trouble is that she's comingling two problems, as if they were one, with one solution.
-Problem one, we have a broken immigration system. We have vast inefficiencies, we have graft and corruption, and we have seriously unworkable laws.
If I were in charge, I would probably attack two of those three first, corruption and unworkable laws.
The laws would have to be addressed by congress, and for the "administrative rules having the force of law" by executive order, and the Secretaries of the various cabinet positions. Yes, it’s a big task. Eat the elephant, bitches. ONE BITE AT A TIME. This is something that needs to be done throughout the government, both state and federal. We have a vast number of conflicting laws and regulations. Deconflicting them and removing the unnecessary ones is a twenty-year job. It will be a twenty-five-year job in a couple of years, and so on. The best time to start fixing this was in 1946 or so… The second-best time is right now; it’s not going to get better by waiting.
The corruption? That needs to be addressed as well. I would use something in that; in the navy we called a Zulu Five Oscar. It's a sting.
The Z5O was a guy, grabbed by Squadron or Group, given a fake ID and sent to try and get onboard a Sub. If he succeeded, he went to the CO of the boat, with his papers designating him as a Z5O, and reported. Gods help you if you were the guy that let him on.
In this case, I would have guys either that worked for State in some other area, but were from the nation in question, or burned spooks that could no longer work in the field because they had been made. Either way, they would try and get an immigration visa at the local embassy and offer a bribe during the process.
If the US employee took the bribe, they would be immediately fired, arrested, tried, and imprisoned under 18 USC 201 for fifteen years, and fined into pauper status. Oh, and publish the SHIT out of it. Make it painfully obvious to everyone after the first couple busts, that there are stings going down, and getting caught in one will be a life-ending choice.
-The Second, and entirely different problem, is that we have a vast number of illegal aliens, some if not most of which are/or could be, enemies of our nation. If poor little Juanita, who's been here for three decades, and hasn't tried to become a citizen, or at least a legal alien working towards citizenhood, gets swept up in the nets we cast to catch those illegals and enemies, well, she's what the fishing industry calls "bycatch,” something that you weren't fishing for but caught anyway.
If you lived here 30 years, on a green card, and never tried to be a citizen, you don't really want to live here. Out you go!
If you were brought here as a child, you either knew that you weren't actually legal, and were hiding it, in which case out you go; or your parents lied to you, and I'm sorry about that, you get to try and convince a judge to allow you to stay. Here's the thing though, Juanita: That's a you problem, not an US problem.
The government of a country is supposed to work for, and protect, the citizens of that country, not the "citizens of the world."
Now let’s talk about the divisiveness we’re seeing in our country today. I’m not going to get into all the hype and say that “Trump is the most unfairly treated president by the press in history,” or that “Trump is the worst, most evil man ever to be elected.” Truth is, he’s neither. Those that think Trump has had worse press than anyone ever just isn’t old enough to remember Nixon, or Ford, or even Reagan.
The “let’s get the President” game probably really started with JFK, or LBJ, but I’m too young to remember either of those with first person experience. I was born almost exactly thirteen months before JFK was assassinated, so I know nothing firsthand about him, and remember very little about LBJ’s term, although My folks had some comedy LPs that I remember listening to, that yanked his chain really thoroughly.
In those days though, there was a significant number of news sources on either side of the divide. Even then the “slow march through the ranks” to take over the press was in process though; and then came Nixon.
I remember Nixon firsthand. Oh, my GODS the press hated him, almost universally. And when they got to nail his scalp to the barn door, it was the ultimate empowering event. Suddenly every cub reporter wanted to be Burnstein or Woodward.
They had achieved the pinnacle of activist reporting, taking down a sitting president. Now if Nixon hadn’t been such an arrogant dickhead, they wouldn’t have succeeded, but there we are.
It’s never the crime that really gets you, if you’re big, it’s the coverup. Nixon could have come out, early (like before his “I am not a crook” speech) and said “yes, some of this was true. It was done without my knowledge, but it’s true. As a result, I am firing the following individuals: and I’m turning the DOJ loose on those guys.” He had enough loyal troops that they would have taken the hit and moved on. That, and his arrogance in taping everything that happened in the oval office, and THEN having his secretary erase some of the tape, is what really took him down. It was a strictly self inflicted wound.
If you don’t think he could have weathered the storm, I present as evidence: Iran Contra. See the press tried to nail Reagan the same way they got Nixon. But on an arms to freedom fighters, to get funding to provide arms to revolutionaries, all without congressional permission, game.
I knew Lieutenant Colonel North at a single remove, (I was best friends with a dude that worked with him for a decade.) according to my buddy’s reports, North was so squared away his skivvies were creased. My guy said, “North is so patriotic he’s probably got an American flag tattooed on his dick, so he can ‘go for old glory’ at any time.”
No way an O-5 who’s that gung-ho decides on his own volition to make international policy decisions without blessing from above. It is, however, quite believable that someone could sell such a man on “Look, the President is in the shits, I need you to take the heat for this.”
End result, Ollie North got sentenced to some time, suspended, and the convictions were reversed on appeal. He was allowed to retire and went on to be elected to congress. By taking the heat, Reagan was able to deflect the attacks, and went on to go down in history, rightfully, as one of the best presidents of the 20th century.
But the big piece here, is that by the time of Reagan, the “Long march” was completed. The press was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic party, or worse. And there it would have stayed, except for the creation of the Blogosphere.
The Blogosphere is something that the hard left, and the people behind them never expected. They really should have though. The US citizenry are the ultimate lose cannon when it comes to “Direction from Above.” We don’t do “control” worth a shit, and work our way over, under, and around, anything that smacks of puppeteering, we’re contrarians by nature. The Blogosphere took the place of the former opposition press. It’s where over half of America now gets it’s news and opinion, and it refuses to sing the company anthem.
You create a system where only one side of a thing is doable, discussable, or legal, we will promptly throw a wrench in your gears. It’s in our country’s DNA from birth; after all, the revolution was just such a thing, and then not two years after our current government came to be, we rebelled against that! (the Whiskey Rebellion, GW’s biggest mistake.) It’s almost a requirement to be American. See also: Everything from the “Underground Railroad” to Prohibition, to the current “war on drugs.”
Well since the blogosphere thew the plans of whoever is pulling the strings into a cocked hat, said “who” has moved on to more direct action. Tom Knighton gives several examples at: inside-the-mind-of-the-politically-violent, go take a look, it’s worth the read.
Along with that, we have the ever-increasing insertion of bullshit into our data stream. It’s not just slightly erroneous data, or even data with a spin, but out and out lies, in the form of statistics, reported quotes, and other things that can be checked, and immediately shown to be false. We’re at the point now where most people I know don’t believe anything they haven’t seen with their own eyes, and some of that is questioned.
Now, before I go any further, let me say that I do not own a tinfoil hat, I don’t believe in contrails, mind control drugs in the water, or that the CIA killed JFK.
That said, one of the ways to destroy a country, if you’re an enemy nation, is to make the people so unhappy that they break out into civil war. Part of the way to do that, is to make them no longer trust their government and their institutions. This is a trick that the original Bolsheviks used very successfully.
Complete destruction of the populace faith in the systems of society causes a breakdown in that society and a drive toward a more ‘tribal’ mindset, of “I trust my people, and no others.” The Mainstream media seems to be either an active participant, or at least a “useful idiot” in this endeavor. I’m not completely sure that this is an enemy action, but if it’s not, what would look different in an actual attack?
We see things like fake answers to questions on Social Security, VA benefits, and other various government programs that are so convincing I even have to look twice, and the only reason I look twice is because I have a highly evolved bullshit filter that detects things I don’t notice consciously. For the average citizen, it’s an easy trap to fall into.
We have exaggerations in how tariffs are affecting the supply chain, and a complete gloss over (unless you go to a non-US reporting source) of the pain that the PRC was feeling. Out and out lies about the status of the economy, that are then walked back on page 8 of a subsequent issue. (Of course, all of this got blown out of the water when China suddenly wanted to make a deal.) Seemingly the only economists you can read about, even in the Blogosphere, are the ones that say tariffs are a disaster, and Trump is an idiot to even consider them. The ones that say “uh, tariffs are a tool of diplomacy, as much as they are a tool of economy.” Are shouted down or ignored.
Truths stated to be fictional for months before quietly being admitted as true, once fraud is too plain to cover any longer. (By this time, the damage is done.) Active promotion of violence against the government by academics, and members of the press. (Everything from “how long before we have to kill them?” articles by tenured professors, to “We only have to get lucky once” by reporters.)
Judges pulling everything from “I’m a district federal judge, so I get to tell the Commander In Chief of the Armed Forces what he can and cannot do to the military.” To this little piece of shit: supporters argue judge is intentionally delaying. If you don’t feel like going to the link, I’ll summarize:
Judge Sandra Widlan decided to strike down a Washington State initiative as being overly broad. The initiative in question overruled a law passed by the last governor of the state that would basically illegalize natural gas appliances in the state. This effects every homeowner or landlord in the state that has access to natural gas, because gas is much cheaper here in WA than electrical power.
Now it’s perfectly within her right to make this decision. But here’s the thing: After she makes the decision, she has to enter the order in order for it to take effect, and in order for it to be appealed. In the meantime, the law is in limbo. Normally this takes a couple of days. In this particular case, it’s at 48 days and counting. Again, you can’t appeal a decision until it’s officially a decision, which means it’s ‘entered.’ She’s already dragged it out so long that they’ve missed the filing date for an appeal on the Spring Docket of the State Supreme Court. There is no summer docket, they take the summer off every year (I know, nice job if you can get it, right?) If she continues to drag it out for a couple more weeks, they’ll miss the fall docket. The longer it’s dragged out, the more the pain and expense, the greater the distrust.
When questioned about the delay, Judge Widlan refuses to respond.
We have games being played at the state level with the meaning of words. Games that mean you can get an extra ten years tacked on to your sentence. Now, look, I’m not a fan of Hate Crime statutes in the first place. I think they’re ridiculous. You don’t beat the shit out of someone, shoot them, rob them, or otherwise attack them because you LIKE THEM. The old meaning of the laws in WA are that “a criminal act, coupled with biased motivation, constitutes a hate crime.” But the new law, as modified and just signed into law would “enable prosecutors to pursue hate crime charges for individuals who carry out actions for more than just prejudice. Under existing state law, a person commits a hate crime when they cause physical or property damage based on a person’s perceived identity.”
In short, any crime is a hate crime, with additional sentencing, if the prosecutor decides to charge it.
Alongside this we have the Milwaukee judge Hannah Dugan, who was charged with federal charges of Obstruction by the grand jury a couple days ago, because she chose to let a person with a prima facia felony flee out a private entrance so that he wouldn’t be arrested by ICE…
She’s trying to get this dismissed based on Trump V United States, that says anything a President does in an official capacity, he has absolute immunity for. See, she’s interpreting this as anything an official does, in their work (IE for a judge, anything that the judge does in their courtroom) they have absolute judicial immunity for. It’s a ‘novel’ interpretation of the law, as far as I can see, and would effectively say that “in the court room, the judge IS THE LAW, and anything they do is legal. ANYTHING.
I can see a case being made that any decision they make on laws that they have jurisdiction over, is legal and they can’t be sued over it… But she has no jurisdiction over federal crimes, and the release of a suspect to avoid arrest on federal charges??? That’s too much for anyone with even a vague grasp of the law to wave away.
All of this seems targeted at reducing everyone’s faith in the system. I’m going to ask again, if this isn’t enemy action, how would enemy action differ? This all needs to be fixed, and “It’s not going to get any better by waiting.”
There is one bright piece to talk about: There’s a new Executive Order that states: “It is the policy of the United States that…criminal enforcement of criminal regulatory offenses is disfavored,” while adding, “Agencies promulgating regulations potentially subject to criminal enforcement should explicitly describe the conduct subject to criminal enforcement, the authorizing statutes, and the mens rea standard applicable to those offenses.”
This is brand new territory, and its great stuff. Heretofore, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” was the mantra recited by petty bureaucrats, as they arrested you, and charged you with violating some obscure CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) on the height of your HAM radio tower, or the depth of your farm pond, while they were hauling you off to the jail. It’s estimated that every American citizen violates at least three CFR laws a day.
But this EO says that you must have known and willingly chose to violate the regulation, before you can be charged with a criminal act for doing so. Mens rea is a much higher hurtle to get over, when charging a crime. Isn’t it funny that this is getting no appreciable press?
Final piece, go take a look at /the-us-navy-is-sleepwalking-into-defeat Sal calls out the Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon, on their failure to lead, their failure to fix the problems they admit they have, and their fall back to “well, we can’t really do much about that until we have another five year study.” A take away is this quote: “ We no longer have the luxury of such self-serving obfuscation, unclear speaking, and inability to be blunt with the American people and their elected representatives as to what is needed to get the nation’s Navy ready for the challenge that is there in clear sight.”
He follows this up with /the-maritime-industrial-base-wont-rebuild-itself another indictment of the failures of our leadership to get our shipbuilding infrastructure where it needs to be, if we are ever again to be a naval power. Folks, this is vital shit, we must fix this or we will lose the Pacific.
OK that’s more than enough for one post.
QOTD: "When I left office, we had created more jobs than any president in the history of the United States in one term. Our economy was roaring. We were moving in a direction where the stock market was way up. We were in a situation where we were expanding our influence around the world." —President Joe Biden
news article: https://www.msn.com/revised-data-exposes-overstated-job-creation-claims-by-harris-biden-admin-revealing-818000-nonexistent-jobs note, this is MSN!
Yours in Service,
William Lehman