Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Library porn & how to fight it

We have two Library Boards here in the small City of Coeur D'Alene, Idaho. The CdA Public Library and the Community Library Network. We also have a "Constitutional Sheriff", Bob Norris, and the usual assortment of Marxist trash seeking to control all aspects of education. The Marxists have less success here than most other places, one of the big reasons I settled here after Oregon went Full Commie.

One of the usual ways the Marxists establish their beach-head of force used to destroy American Values is via taking over Library Boards, and they have done that here. Americans gained back some ground last election when we removed two Marxists from the Community Library Network's Board, but that's only slowed down the Marxists, not defeated them utterly. At a Town Hall meeting, which the Sheriff holds quarterly, a citizen asked about children's access to books with inappropriate sexual context. Sheriff Norris said he'd look into that, and he did. He visited the Post Falls Community Library and found two inappropriate books there.

Enter the "Yellow" press, or cdapress.com to be exact. They publish this guy's guest op-ed. He outright accuses the Sheriff of theft. I have decided to reply and submitted this letter, not published yet:

Please accept my reply to My Turn writer Lockwood, who writes to accuse Sheriff Norris of theft as he took a pair of books from the library for the purposes of investigation.

 

Mr Lockwood, these books were accessible to children and their express purpose is to TEACH varied sexual practices. I suspect that you believe that expertise in carnal knowlege must be extended to children as soon as they can read.

 

Religion has nothing to do with it, Mr Lockwood. This is about a case which could easily cross the line into child pornography, and it is certainly the Duty of a Sheriff to conduct an investigation to determine if probable cause exists to prosecute for those charges.

 

Indeed, Sheriff Norris would be remiss in his duty by NOT making this investigation. As to you, sir, your zeal in promoting this possible child pornography is very, very telling.

 

Sheriff, wouldn't it be appropriate to issue the Library a Property Inventory Receipt in this case?

 

Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.

 

Military slang, and attempts to devalue it

On my Facebook sidebar, Sugar Mountain* wants me to open a story of how CRUDE slang used by WW2 military people was(no links to the enemy) Not going to the story, it's clickbait and social-credit fodder, but I WILL say this:

In WW2, soldiers, sailors and Marines were trusted to take the initiative, engage and kill their Axis enemies. In battle, and I've been there, when you HAVE time to speak, you use your time to communicate with your fellow troops. You develop a patois of acronyms, and the verbiage to support those. These words are not polite, they are short-cuts to another military person's experience. To apply today's TWISTED morality and political correctness to such battlefield slang is pointless, but it's also revealing:

It reveals the histrical ignorance of those who engage in this form of chicanery.

*Sugar Mountain = Mark Zuckerberg

Dire warning: How Criminals go free

Andrew Selsky, an ancient progressive journalist, now writing for AssPress, pens a column about an old black man who got out of prison, never admitting his guilt.

My warning is about the reasoning involved in the decision, and how easy it will be now for Soros-bought Prosecutors to cite this concept, revealed in the money-quote:

"Prosecutors asked the Marion County Circuit Court to dismiss the case, saying the state no longer believes it can prove guilt based on how much time has passed since the murder of Harriet Thompson."

All those polital DAs have to do now is say the testimony available is too weak or indistinct, then they don't have to prosecute. Victims get no day in court.

The way Justice worked before now was on TRUST. The citizenry TRUSTED that the testimony offered in a case was the best available, and when sentence was pronounced after the guilty verdict, the TRUST remained and the perp remained in prison.

Not any more. The Marion County DA's remark signals the death of Trust, and it will never be retrieved in Oregon.

 

 

Sunday sadness scribbling

I'm from an old and prolific Portland medical family, & I'm normally highly sympathetic with the medical profession.

 

I've turned, though. The obvious fact is that most doctors have chugged the commie Kool-Aid, and keep chugging it.

 

I profile a lot. I was taught how to do it in the various police academies I attended and in follow-on LEO training courses, plus profiling is just organizing common sense.

 

My main profiling these days is to classify and categorize the political opposition to our Constitutional Republic, but you already know that if you follow me on Facebook or on this Rivrdog Blog.

 

I will now profile the medical profession, and it isn't looking good for them. Here are my profile qualifiers:

1. Do you (choose one) a. Tolerate, b. Support or c. Actively Defend and advocate for Socialized Medicine? (record answer and move on)

2. In your entire office or suite of offices in a medical comples, is there a single US Flag on display? (record answer and move on)

3. If your work is for a health maintenance org claiming a religious afiliation, do you refer low-spirit cases to practitioners of the religion? (record answer and move on)

4. As to Covid-19, do you (choose one): a. Tolerate, b. Support or c. Actively Defend the suppression of alternate views on the USA's response to the disease vector? (record answer and calculate results):

 

Perfect (good) profile (rates Zero)

Item one should be a "no" on any of the three choices.

Item two should be a "yes"

Item three should be a "yes"

Item four should be a "no" on any of the three choices.

 

Here's the bad part: I have two offspring in the medical profession. One rates between 1 and 2, the other between 3 and 4, and they are nowhere as PROFESSIONALLY antagonistic towards the Republic as some other medical providers I've encountered in the past ten years or so.

 

In conclusion, I'm going to put it all together: the two most important professions in this USA are Information movers (newsies, computer gurus, etc) and Medical Providers. Both those professions are badly compromised as to maintaining the health and vibrancy of our Constitution and governance according to it.

 

Looking for what profession DOES unilaterally support our Constitution and governance according to it, I find only Veterans. A few months ago, I would have said Veterans and LEOs (I am retired from both professions), but the LEO profession has guzzled enough commie Kool Aid to remove themselves now as saviors of the American Way, following the Information movers right over the Marxist cliff.

 

Result? Of the 8.5 million Veterans, MAYBE 5 million are fit to fight for this Republic against the communist hordes.

 

Those aren't very good odds.

Re-open the USA NOW!

You won't see such analysis on the MSM, but all over the country, protests against the lockdowns are ramping up.

 

This might indeed, be out of frustration at President Trump, who has vacillated badly twice now on re-opening commerce.

 

It's this way, Mr. President. The WORLD now knows that this virus is not going to end life as we know it, as it was projected to do just 3 weeks ago. What we DO know is that the Democrats are trying to make their meager political position into a political juggernaut via the suspensions of personal liberty in the States which they control.

 

I don't see this issue in terms of the disease at all, even though I'm one of the "high-risk" folks myself, with 3 major risk factors, not just one.

 

I see this issue as a stark attempted subversion of the Constitution which I am FOREVER sworn to protect and defend.

 

If Covid-19 HAD been the killer virus it was hyped up to be by WHO and the Left, TEMPORARY suspensions of civil liberty would have been appropriate. Since those projections have all failed, and the disease is hardly a threat to healthy people, only a threat to the unhealthy, continued violations of our Constitutional guarantees of Liberty are intolerable.

 

Re-open the USA, Mr. Trump. Your continued refusal to do that begins to give the impression that you, too, have no particular passion for our Constitution.

 

Order some sort of re-opening plan, and prepare to use whatever force is necessary to overcome the objections of China's allies, the Democratic Party.

 

If your present waffling continues, Mr. President, I believe that today's gathering protest-storm will quickly devolve into Civil War, and that war will be raging before Independence Day.

 

Take charge, Mr. President. That's YOUR job. You have all the authority you need to re-open the USA.

 

Use it!

The Swamp is everywhere...

The "Swamp" is everywhere.

 

Scratch most "conservative" broadcasters, and you will find at least a little bit of Swamp.

 

Case in point, Fox-Business' Maria Bartiromo. She just finished a long, glowingly-fawning interview with a guy named Chandra, who is CEO of a new-ish company called Poshmark.

 

Poshmark is in the retail fashion business, and their Business Plan involves selling their customer's fashion lines for them. Consider the very name here: posh-MARK. Chandra sells stuff HE says are luxury goods, whether they are or are not. HE, Chandra, MARKS them as "posh". His plan is succeeding, and he has five MILLION fashion-line clients he is repping to fifty MILLION online customers.

 

Okay, the guy took an idea, made it work. Bully for him, right? If you say so, but Chandra knew that not all the goods he would market ACTUALLY were "posh" (a Brit slang term for luxurious). He markets just enough actually-posh lines to make all his end-users, middle-class women, BELIEVE that everything they buy from him is the very best quality and they are also getting a good deal on the price.

 

Bottom line on Poshmark is Buyer Beware. Back to Maria Bartiromo. She has a reputation for being Mizz Savvy Business Analyst. I did MY due dilligence researching Poshmark for this post, and guess what JUMPED off the page at ME?

 

Poshmark, currently privately held by Chandra, is planning an Initial Public Offering of stock this Fall. Maria Bartiromo never mentioned that, but asking the IPO question on googe brought me that answer.

 

Getting a little "insider" help from Chandra, are you, Maria Bartiromo? Remember what happened to Martha Stewart, in almost the same position as you are in?

 

The Commie Prosecutors in the Southern District of NY would LOVE to indict your pro-Trump tushie, Maria, and cover it with an orange jumpsuit.

 

My advice? Everyone, stay out of the Swamp. Yeah, you will get rich, but the money ain't worth it.

Pharisees of our time - House flippers

House flipping, and why we need to ban it. (Cross-posted on my Facebook page)

 

The whole process of  "flipping" is a tit on a boar. Useless. The idea starts with the usual scammer's dream: buy a house on the cheap because it's in terrible shape, then do cosmetic fix-up, resulting in the proverbial silk purse made from a sow's ear, sell it, get obscene profit. Do it enough times, and you get a TV program on the HGTV channel, THEN you can fly into a City, rent their basketball arena, conduct a half-day seminar on How To Flip for $500 each person, make even MORE obscene profit and fly back out of town...

 

Okay, take an attrractive city, put an army of house-flippers to work in it. What's the result? Housing which isn't technically improved all that much, and the improvements which ARE made are cosmetic, so in ten years, the house will be a crap-hole all over again (and it's usually in a crappy neighborhood anyway). But Wait! There's More! The flipper is going to SELL this house immediately, and make maybe 20% to 50% on their "investment dollar" doing so, then THEY leave, take that money with them, so your CITY makes almost nothing from the deal and life DOES NOT IMPROVE FOR YOU.

 

The result of this flip, multiplied by hundreds to thousands of them in your City, means a huge jump in the value of YOUR home, much higher taxes, and the loss of "affordability" in your housing market, which means YOU are now stuck with the crowds of yuppies who buy the flips. They come in to town, earn obscenely high salaries for doing something with bits and bytes, stay a couple of years, invariably vote Democratic, then leave.

 

I have a solution to all this malaise. We use the power of taxation to keep the flippers away. Here's how we do it: First, define property owners by how long they have LIVED IN their homes: over 30 years, they are "Pioneers". Over 10 years up to 30, they are "Sustainers". 5 to 10 years, they are "Locals" and under 5 years, they are "Transients". Real estate taxes are assessed on a sliding scale by these categories. Pioneers pay the smallest RATE, Transients the highest. Any tax rate higher than Local, the difference is used to LOWER the rate for Pioneers. Now for the flippers: their obscene profit is taxed at 50%, and that money is used SPECIFICALLY to lower the homeowner taxes, across the board, except for the Transient level. Secondary idea: use this tax money to fund a grant system for those who actually want to build NEW housing, because new houses are built with new materials to new codes, are more efficient, by far, than cosmetically-changed 40-70 year-old housing stock.

 

Make these changes, and the flipper-scammers will put your City in the rear-view mirror, and within 10 years, real estate values will start to return more towards normal, more towards what they were before the flipping-craze hit town.

 

Oh, by the way, those Pioneer home owners? They are amost invariably more fiscally responsible, are better neighbors than the yuppie hordes anyway.

 

Friday Frustrations

Bullet-point list:

• Typepad (the blogging company which puts up with me). They have an accounting program so D.U.M.B. that it can't tell a renewed credit card, ON THE SAME ACCOUNT from an expired one, so I get nasty-grams.
• The Media: their transgressions against the lawful body politic (President Trump) are so egregious, I am not sure I have faith in Freedom of the Press any more. In fact, comes the "Un-Do", then the "Re-Do", I am not sure that the Second Constitution will even HAVE press freedom. At least there MUST be penalties for political advocacy. Media, you are permitted to report all the facts you want, and you are even permitted to opine (but opinions need to be labeled as such and not be passed off as fact). You NEVER have permission under the 1A to lie and deliberately perpetrate falsehoods DESIGNED to make the work of Government difficult or even impossible. That's PROPAGANDA, and it is NOT protected by the 1A as the Founders installed it in the Bill of Rights. Spewing those lies will be HANGING offenses in the Second Republic.
• Lear Capital, Inc: I am tired of their lying advocacy about the value of precious metals. Silver has traded narrowly between $12-16 for years, and sales are so-so, so Lear attempts to pump them up with the wild claim that silver will rise to $200 in the near future. Where is Treasury on this, where is FCC? Outrageous lying claim to sell their wares. Anyone else would be hammered for this crap, why isn't Lear Capital? Is the FIX in? BTW, you don't have to MINE silver anymore. About 90% of world silver requirements are supplied by recycling, and the rest is easily obtained by an electrolytic extraction process using seawater. The silver salts are removed from the sea water. All you need is a pipe bringing you ocean water and a large electrical supply.
• Jeff Sessions: Sessions is the biggest albatross around Trump's neck now, and he should be fired. Of all of Trump's Drain the Swamp agenda, the only part of it Sessions is keen on is Immigration. He's bearish on illegals and Sanctuary cities, but hasn't actually changed much. On everything else, the PHONY "Russiagate" the Dems conjured up to hide their own treason to sell weapons-grade uranium-ore concentrate to Putin, the attempts to steal the 2016 election by the super-snake Hillary Clinton, the HUGE and OBVIOUS money-laundering processes of the Democratic Party via the Clinton Foundation, the Pay-for-Play, etc, etc, ad nauseam, Sessions "RECUSED" himself from all of that. The FBI, Sessions' primary investigatory tool, is as corrupt as the day is long, Sessions does nothing. Fire his Deep-State ass, Mr. Trump!
• The NFL: Despite a full month of the effective Boycott, the Deep State backs the culture-destroying thugs of the NFL and their thug-tolerant owners. Congress, don't wait for Tax Reform, the Deep State is going to Deep-Six it anyway, separate out that removal of tax subsidy from pro sports and pass it as a stand-alone bill. If you do that, SOME of you worthless wankers might actually get re-elected.

I could go on, and on, and on, but these ought to give you the message, and now I need a stress-relieving nap.

Feel free to contribute YOUR Frustrations in Comments, below.

The Devil in those Details - "Globalism"

After watching more UniParty spin on Fox news this bright, sunny morning in Stumptown, I felt compelled to point out something that I and a few other more astute political observers have known for a long time - there is a HUGE difference between those who favor the expansion of Global Trade from our shores and those who favor the expansion of Global Government, both here and overseas.

I will put this as simply as I can, because the One-World-Order types, the "Globalists", usually attempt to cloak their support of Global Government in the fog of international trade.

Today, I listened to a "Cloaker", Laura Ingraham, discuss "Global Strategy" with the Fox News Sunday guest anchor, James Rosen. The political subject at hand was the de-certification of Iran's compliance with the idiotarian deal that the then-appeaser-in-chief, Barack Obama, made with the Mad Mullahs. President Trump's world-view on this deal includes ALL the global perfidy of Islamist Iran, not just their bob-and-weave stance on nuclear inspection. The European Government has not changed THEIR world-view on Iran since they agreed with Obama's appeasement of the mullahs and they are horrified that Trump seems to be dismantling the Neville-Chamberlain-ish appeasement treaty right before their shit-in-their-own-messkit leaders' eyes. Europe threw Israel under their double-decker bus-wheels years ago, in fact, I was there when, in 1956, the Brits failed to defeat militant Egypt and the Suez Crisis resulted, a scant eight years into the life of the Jewish State's existence. Europe is afraid of Iran. Yes, a few Iranian missiles COULD reach Europe, but both France and England have nuclear missile subs and could easily destroy Iran five times over. Iran may or may not have nukes to tip those missiles yet, depends on who you listen to. I listen to Israel, and they don't seem to be too worried just yet. There really is NO basis for the present EU worry and defiance of Trump, they ought to be jumping aboard his de-certification bandwagon, but instead, they oppose it.

Hmmmm. It makes NO sense for Europe to oppose de-cert, so why are they doing it?

The only answer for the Europeans' Iran de-cert reticence which makes sense is Trump's opposition to Globalism, and his expansion of US Global Trade. The EU (Common Market), far from being the trading powerhouse it claimed it was going to build some forty years ago, is a paper tiger. EU goods are not competitive, for the most part, because of taxes the EU imposes to support their member-state's socialist money-hunger. The Chinese have beaten the Europeans in their own market, likewise the Japanese, the Thais, etc, etc. We don't do too badly over there, either (see Ford cars).

The lesson for today, then, is just this: whenever you see the word "Global" in front of anything, start parsing the words of the speaker, but first, think for a few seconds about their motives. Are they the One-World-Order type? If they are, a complete line of horse-puckey follows. If they talk Global Trade, but are really boosting globalISM, they are NOT, repeat, NOT a conservative. Write them out of your life.

Trump on TV Station Licenses

Big Brouhaha! Trump gives a typical Twitter-length statement, and now the leftoids are all over him like stink on donkey poop.

Even the best "TV Judge" out there, Andrew Napolitano, jumped on Trump's suggestion (story not on the website yet as of 1100 PDT, was on Fox News earlier in the ayem).

Trump made an error of omission, that's all. He seemed to suggest that his Administration could go after NBC's broadcast licenses. Judge Napolitano said no, bad idea, first amendment, etc, blah, blah, blah. The Judge was wrong, though, and had an affirmative duty (legal term, the Judge will know what that means) to point out that it WOULD be perfectly okay for President Trump to advocate that his citizen-supporters get involved in this process (removing licenses).

Here's how that removal is done:

1. Take the station's call sign, in my example, we will use KGW-TV, the NBC affiliate here in Stumptown. Go to your search engine and look it up. At the top or near it will be a Wiki.
2. In that Wiki, there will be links, in this case, to an FCC site.
3. Look up the FCC site and there will be a condensed-format paragraph. It will be tabbed. Go to the "Links and Maps" tab, and you will find the links you need to make a comment about the station's politics. This link was titled "Correspondence relating to application..." Unless the stations cheat somehow, your comment HAS to be considered with license renewal comes up. Note that your letter will have to be sent via land-mail, address given.

That's all there is to it. Have fun. Help out President Trump. If enough of us do this, it WILL get to the stations' honchos.

The quality factor in Investigations

In police work, "evidence" is any fact(s) which help the investigator prove that the alleged perpetrator did break the law. Some evidence is obvious: was the suspect at the scene of the crime or not? Other evidence is not as obvious: can unknown witnesses be discovered who can establish the suspect's presence at the crime scene? Finally, some evidence is obscure, such as who might know the suspect and be able to suggest if suspect might be the type to commit this crime? These three examples go to the quality of the evidence, and when the investigator turns the case in for prosecution, the legal quality of the evidence is the primary factor in deciding whether the case is prosecuted or not.

This primer on quality of evidence is taught in every police academy in the free world, because courts are required to consider the best evidence when deciding guilt or innocence, not just here in the USA, but in every Nation which has a liberty-based legal system. Note that the Best Evidence Rule covers the admission of documentary evidence, but the Court also considers the quality of other evidence, such as eyewitness testimony. You don't want to be tried for crimes in the other kind of nations where the Judge has sole discretion to use evidence or not, and how to evaluate evidence or not.

In my first Police Academy (I attended two because of a break in police service caused by being called back into the military: I was just over the five-year point when I went back to copping, and Oregon's DPSST (POST) rules say five years is the max, no waivers.), I was taught that evidence quality is determined by the concept of directness: the farther the evidence was from being totally direct (e.g.: suspect arrested at crime scene, loot in pockets), the lower it's quality, the more work had to be done to establish it for Court presentation. As a rookie, I made my first Armed Robbery case on one eyewitness account. The eyewitness had observed the suspect drive his 1963 Chevy Impala hardtop to the drive-up window of the burger joint, had observed as he presented his gun, got a bag of cash and drove away. The eyewitness wrote down the robbers description, wrote down the license plate, then as I arrived, that witness handed me his note, which I entered into evidence, along with all the other interview results. I sent my APB, attention to the hometown cops of the registered owner, and 90 minutes later, the local gendarmes there (next state over) had him in jail. I got a rare Detective Division attaboy for that one and the suspect plead guilty to Robbery First, getting ten years in prison. No plea bargain was acceptable to the DA for that case, built as it was on the highest quality of evidence.

Take the above basic lesson in criminal justice, and apply it (or, I should say try to apply it) to the case of Hillary Rodham Clinton and her illegal email server, now widely assumed to have been hacked by the Russians. Now read this article, R.T.W.T., and apply your quality of evidence evaluation to the work the FBI (under Director Comey, whose wife had just gotten an $8.5M defense contract) which Bureau then said, and has been saying ever sine, "oh, those evil Russians".

As I read the Net Right Daily article, I recognize that the FBI's claim of hacking evidence doesn't withstand the first layer of evaluation, let alone the three layers which the article's author applied to that bogus claim. You try my evaluation and see what you get.

Time to indict Hillary. Get it done, Mr. Sessions.