Nom de plume: Rivrdog

We're at THAT point, yes

Here's how close to War we are in this Nation:

1. The elected President can't get a thing done, the bureaucracy and Legislative and Judicial branches, most from the past President, actively oppose Trump's Administration, even to the point of calling their oppositon "The Resistance", a term of WAR.

2. The GOP, the President's Party, mostly opposes the President. The GOP "majority" in the Senate is a joke, because at least 6 Senators would rather vote with the opposition Party 90% of the time.

3. The borders are porous and open, all manner of undesireable aliens sneak in and the bureaucracy lets them stay, believing that at some point, resolve will break down and they will be offered Amnesty and become opposition-party voters.

4. The "Resistance" has the nerve to invade a restaurant and chase out a CABINET SECRETARY dining there.

5. The Military is forced to take morale-destroying trans-gender people in as combat troops.

6. Social Media DESTROYS Freedom of Speech, actively censoring conservative viewpoints and banning conservative writers by callously referring to their writings as "Hate Speech".

7. The opposition is going all-out to destroy the Second Amendment, trying to declare that this militia-authorizing Amendment doesn't allow Militia weaponry!

8. The premier Federal Law Enforcement Agency (FBI) is co-opted and CORRUPTED by the opposition party, and has ACTIVELY become the militant wing of the "Resistance".

9 A cabal of ultra-rich Marxists (the New World Order), is throwing BILLIONS of dollars at the "Resistance" to enable their mayhem.

10. Those same Marxists have funded a Black Revolutionary Movement which has the DECLARED RACIST objective of DESTROYING all previous American Custom and Tradition, claiming it is "too white".

11. The entire US Higher Educational establishment has turned TOTALLY Marxist, and supports, then covers for all the projected Marxist revolutionary activity.

12. The Women's Movement, born fifty years ago to try to right employment and related wrongs in our social structure, has also become a total tool of Marxist Revolution.

 

We have nothing to do now but wait for the bullets to fly, then start sending ours back at the Marxists. We've LOST the run-up to this war, now we will have to actually FIGHT this War.

Cross-Post on Antifa

From my Facebook page:

The mustachioed FB Alarm-Clock avatar says to Rise and Shine, and I have done so, and so has my Linux Ubuntu. My first waking thought:

 

I read yesterday, courtesy of my Friend Anita, that the Chinese Communist Party has just elevated President Xi to the same status in the Party previously held only by Chairman Mao Zedong. Xi's very THOUGHTS become sacred Communist doctrine now. Best of luck to Xi, he has a big country to run, and it has a big Capitalist sector in the Three Provinces which are allowed that anti-Communist doctrine, Mao didn't have that dichotomy to work around.

 

Of course, we have our own Communists right here in our US of A, and they have a Militant Wing, calling itself the "Antifa". This gang of commie militants intends to put on a YUGE nation-wide militant display Saturday after next, and they say that their effort is aimed at ENDING the Trump/Pence Administration. In MY military counter-insurgency training, that would be called a Marxist Revolution, but I'm not Commander-in-Chief, President Trump is. Were I in charge, I would have gone before the UN Security Council by now, declared my Nation in a state of Armed Revolt, declared Article Fifty-One in effect, and then suppressed Antifa with great force and prejudice, using NorthCom troops. Trump won't do that, so We The Peeps will have to defend ourselves against this violent horde.

 

There IS one other possible way to handle Antifa, though. Suppose Trump appealed to President Xi, who is without doubt the strongest Communist leader right now (eat your heart out, Vladimir Putin!). Perhaps Xi could issue a command to Antifa that they act ONLY under the direct command of the Chinese Communist Party, and that the ChiCom Party would take it very badly if they refused to do that, perhaps badly enough to use Chinese PLA resources against Antifa. Perhaps those could start with terminating the Antifa command of George Soros, with great prejudice...

 

Maybe, just maybe, there might be some good available in ORGANIZED Communism....(satire/off).

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. 

Payday

Payday. The bills are paid and thanks to the Socialable Seguridad I EARNED (but my erstwhile "conservative" buds want to rip off from me), I have some shekels and talents to spare. Not buying guns these days, I have to budget for roof maintenance, exterior trim painting, some interior work to make my house more accessible ( likely a stair-climbing system so Da Wiff can access the upper floor). All that should be doable for Fifteen Large, of which I have about Five Large in hand.

More economies are necessary, it would seem.

Public money DIRECTLY spent for a gun grab

Cross-posted from Straight_Case gunblog, your Straight Spine bulletin board.

Interesting case, all the more so because it all happened within 5 miles of my residence.

Fact set: Crazy kid defeats lock on older brother's gun safe (a sheet-metal type, it sounds like), takes an AR-15, a vest and plenty of ammo then goes to shoot up the local High School (biggest high school in the State). He kills one, wounds another, but when the pressure is applied by the good guys, he kills himself (standard MO of these cowards).

Of course, that's when the gun-grabbing drama-llamas took over, and as a result, you have probably heard of the Reynolds High School shooting of last year.

Continuing. At the time, there was quite some speculation that the liberal Multnomah County District Attorney would charge the shooter's older bro (gun owner) with some crime, but in the end, no one could prove that the safe was left unlocked (and Oregon lacks "safe storage" laws anyway), and older bro said he had locked it. So, no crime was charged, but the authorities kept the AR and associated equipment. The older bro SUED THE CITY OF TROUTDALE, because Oregon law is quite clear that when no charges are preferred, evidence seized MUST be returned to lawful owners within a time certain.

Enter: the Troutdale City Attorney. It seems that he disagrees with his superior prosecutor, the DA, and wanted charges on older bro, but lacks jurisdiction to file them (in Oregon, only minor crimes may be charged by a City, most crimes have to be charged by the District Attorney), so he dithered and kept the gun, which was in the custody of the Troutdale Police Property Room. A State Judge heard the lawsuit, and ruled in favor of the plaintiff (older bro) that the gun and equipment must be returned. The City Attorney stalled, but apparently figured out a way to keep the plaintiff's gun: give him Fair Market Value for it. The lawsuit was soon settled.

According to this article, the City Council buried the payment to older bro on a lengthy and boring agenda of City Council administrative business, and snuck it through, except for the reporters on the City Beats. Oregonian Reporter Steve Duin, a gun-grabber himself by many previous writings, noticed and wrote the story up. Okay, at least said reporter is a digger, is willing to take on government hanky-panky, right?

Nazzofast, Guido. Read the whole article.

About fifty words in, Reporter Duin writes a paragraph listing the property involved in the lawsuit:

"One Daniel Defense Armament DDM4 carbine rifle, one of the bullies in the AR-15 family (emphasis added). Eight 30-round Magpul magazines. A “plate carrier” vest, a United State Army standard-issue laundry bag and “several hundred rounds” of ammunition."

It appears that TWO people have now personified the rifle (illogically made an inanimate object into a person), not only the City Attorney, who could not bear the idea of the gun being returned to it's rightful and blameless owner, AND Reporter Duin, who has declared that the most popular rifle in the USA is a "bully".

I was taught that there is no higher authority on the etymology of the English Language than the Oxford English Dictionary, so I went there and looked up "bully":

"(pl. bullies) a person who uses their strength or power to frighten or hurt weaker people"  (my emphasis).

O.E.D. very specifically refers to a "bully" as a PERSON (twice, once directly and one indirectly).

So sorry, Steve Duin, old sport, your anti-gun predjudice is STILL showing in your public writing. Don't bother apologizing or issuing a correction though, it would compound your anti-liberty personality defect by adding insincerity to it.

"Farfromtruthen"

So, Volkswagen, who builds decent cars overall, and outstanding cars in some lines, got caught cheating on EPA emissions tests for their line of "clean diesels".

Pardon me, but why am I not insulted? The EPA's rules ARE the Law of the Land, are they not? A failure to obey them should bring sanctions, should it not? Wake up, George, your country has been INSULTED here by a foreign manufacturer, hasn't it?

Pardon me again while I yawn.

Will someone please tell me which people been hurt here (EPA Gauleiters are NOT "people")? Where are the millions of victims, where is the genocide? Hasn't Volkswagen done the "planet's health" a big solid by putting out millions of high-efficiency DIESEL engines replacing millions of GASOLINE-fueled engines? You do realize that diesel is a more efficient fuel to burn, don't you? You do realize that diesel fuel takes less emissions-damaging processing to refine from crude oil, don't you? You do realize that the entire idea of diesel-fueled cars should have been promoted far more vigorously starting about 40 years ago, don't you?

As I understand it, what VW did was create an engine-control chip that mis-reported what the emissions levels of the engines were, so the EPA gave their "blessing" when they otherwise might not have.

My experiences are more direct. A close friend has a VW compact wagon with the TDI engine, and cruising to Phoenix, AZ and back from Fairview, OR, he averaged over 45 MPG. I was a diesel "early adopter". I bought a new 1976 diesel Peugeot 504D sedan 38 years ago. It was the most fuel-efficient vehicle I have ever owned. This 40+ year-old design of diesel engine could crank out 35 MPG on long highway trips, and it got 28 MPG in the city.

I ask again, just who has Volkswagen victimized here with the #farfromtruthen scandal?

Further time-bomb to watch for: VW-designed diesels are in use in several AMERICAN car lines: the Chevy Cruz, the Dodge Ram half-ton pickups and the Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV, IIRC. What will the Emissions Nazis do about THOSE vehicles? Could it be time to re-examine the actual RESULTS of EPA emissions standards?

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WTF, enviros?

From the Coyote Kid, who notes that these environazis may be long on enthusiasm, but they are woefully short on smarts.

Environazi attack planning:

1. Pick the next four people in the cell seeking placement in the Environazi Hall of Fame.

2. Gather equipment: bicycle u-locks and chain to chain the protestors to the target, also some glue to create further mischief.

3. Transport selves to target, an eeevilll Fracking Energy Company gas station.

4. While proprietor is distracted, chain selves to the gas pumps, deploy the glue to further damage the equipment.

5. Smile for the cameras of the sympatico news media, read the official and obligatory statement condemming fracking and other non-socialist activities.

6. Wait for the constabulary, who had to spend a lot of time delicately cutting locks and chains off of protesters.

7. Declare a victory in the name of Gaia.

According to this report, the op plan was flawlessly executed, save for one thing: the gas station these environazis attacked didn't belong to the eeevilll targeted Fracking Energy Company anymore, it belonged to an individual private person, one Mr. Patel.

DOH!

In one swell foop, these e-nazis have not only made laughingstocks of themselves and their cause, they attacked the property of a friendly foreign-born person. These Indian immigrants have sufficient numbers and cohesiveness in England to cause grave political consequences for any who attack them. They are the equivalent of our Latin voting bloc.

Sic semper tyrannis.

Wednesday WTF

...more accurately, several of them.

WTF One: Why TF is the Anthropogenic Global Warming movement still around? Read this article, where an apparently heavily-financed expedition tried to follow the Northwest Passage in August, only to find it closed early by ice. They have reported failure. Their failure is that of all people who ignore scientific reality, and must, in the course of time, be overtaken by it. BTW, taken together with record ice formation in the Antarctic, it's safe to say that Global Warming is not affecting the planet in the slightest at the present time. Actually, Global Warming hasn't affected the planet for 15 years, except in the fevered thinking of the socio-political climate "scientists", whose main objective seems to be to kill off capitalist expansion around the globe, and taking that money, divert it to the have-not classes. Man-caused (anthropogenic) global warming is an idea, not a theory even, and it's not happening. There is far MORE evidence that the planet is moving into a cooling period. There is overwhelming evidence that this "carbon trail" leads back to our old enemy, socialism, and not to planetary physics.

WTF Two: Who TF do we have for military leaders anymore? We're supposedly getting ready to attack the Syrian leadership, and I can find the most intimate details about the dispositions of our military forces all over the Internet. Either this is all an elaborate ruse, or someone is leaking these military dispositions rather badly. If we're going to war, let's USE the principles of war, the main one of which says that you don't tell your enemy in advance what you are going to do. For example, we seem to have somehow let the Russians know that we won't bomb the Syrian port of Tartus, since they just moved a guided missile cruiser into the port. We have repeated over and over that the main type of attack will be a barrage of cruise missiles. Why have we done this? We needed to have told the Russians to get out of Tartus, it will be a legitimate target, and we needed to have told no one about our air attack strategy. BTW, it's likely that Russia will direct the defense effort against our attack, so for the sake of a VERY limited military objective, we are about to give Russia a look at our best naval-strike capabilities. All our potential enemies will then have any weaknesses Russia finds in our tactics within the next few days, making our job against other possible targets of MAJOR importance, such as Iran, much harder to accomplish.

WTF Three: The lead-up to this war matches the lead-up to the Iraq war so closely that it might have been Bush/Cheney planning it. Why TF has this fact escaped the MSM? The reason is simple: admitting that both wars are personal whims of the two Presidents would quash that oh-so-handy, but over-used "it's all Bush's fault" excuse that the Democrats use for everything. Bush 43 went to war with Iraq because he could, and because Saddam Hussein pissed him off by supposedly putting out a contract on his dad, Bush 41. Obama 44 is going to war because he can, and because his reputation is in tatters right now, and he will do anything to improve it. The history books are full of terrible Presidents who had their reputations "saved" by going to war, and Obama wants to join that list of saved Presidents.

WTF Four: Which TF Mullah died and left John McCain in charge of interpreting Islam? Did this befuddled old fool just give every terrorist who ever committed atrocities against civilization in the name of Allah a free pass? Looks that way. Why TF is this idiot still taken seriously by the Republican Party?

WTF Five: Why TF hasn't this gifting of Hillary by oil potentates been more widely reported? You can bet that if Senator Rand Paul took so much as a  $29.95 Timex Camper wristwatch from anyone over in the oil patch, it would be front-page news. Now that the little Hillary-swag secret is (barely) out, let's do a follow-up, people, and find out where all that swag REALLY wound up.

Skip Bayless, STFU

I just watched the most disgusting sports presentation I ever saw on ESPN.

The matter under discussionby the commentator, Skip Bayless, was the suspension, then return of Philadelphia wide receiver Riley Cooper, who used a racial perjorative last week while attending a country music festival.

We've been though all this angst before, and the Eagles management did the right thing by hiring a specific teacher/counselor for Cooper, and having him sit down, one-on-one, for two days, to drive home the fine points of civility involved with being a Football star (as opposed, one presumes, to being a Rap Music star). Convincing a person that a single word is insensitive to use is not something that takes more than two days.

So, Skip Bayless (a white guy), gets on his high horse and rants for ten minutes on why the Eagles are racist for not doing worse to their star wide receiver than counseling him intensely for two days.

Coupla things. First, as Skip Bayless should, but may NOT know because he is an idiot, there is NOT universal condemnation of people for uttering the "N"-word. It has become somewhat a badge of honor for a certain class of blacks, who consider being referred to by that word as meaning they are "players", or in older terms, they are "with it", they "get it".

The black race and their white supporters can't have it both ways. Either the word IS so horrible, in ALL it's uses, that EVERYONE using it deserves instant condemnation and shunning, or, given the fact that so many people are using it to further their entertainment careers, or gain stature among their people, that the use of the word means nothing more that any other garden-variety perjorative.

Worst of all are the people who fail to realize the racial dichotomy here, and STILL scream out that they've been insulted like no one has ever been insulted before.

Political correctness is not only illogical, it has NO place in sports. None.

Skip Bayless, you owe sports fans an apology. Your rant seems to indicate that you favor apologies, so how about YOU apologizing for your totally off-base remarks about the Eagles' management. YOU are the one who needs to go to counseling, if there are any counselors who might straighten YOU out. I'm not optimistic that there are.

A better idea. Fire this sonofabitch, ESPN. And for those easily offended readers: it IS, by God, okay to "shoot the messenger" when the messenger carries a deliberately false message.

Wednesday whoppers - L.O.T.Ds

Yep, we've become a prevaricating society. How else do you explain getting up in the ayem, awoken by the usual Wednesday fleet of garbage/recycling trucks at 0530, climbing into some clothes, going downstairs and outside to put away the empty carts, and picking up the fishwrap, only to be insulted by the FIRST lie of the day, in the main headline on Page One:

"Owl ethics: 1 dies; 1 survives:

The folks that killed the Oregon economy thirty years ago with the Spotted Owl fiasco are at it again, only now they are killing another species of owl, the Barred Owl, because it uses the same habitat as the Western Spotted Owl and might chase the spotted owls out. Poor spotted owls! So here we are, constantly told by the Animal Rights Community that we must respect ALL species, killing off a superior species of owl to preserve an inferior one, mainly because to NOT do that would be an admission that they got the whole Spotted Owl thing wrong in the first place (gotta protect those envirowhacko egos, they can do NOTHING wrong, ever). For decades, we've been "protecting" (read: shutting down) the Oregon, Washington and Northern California forests from logging to save an owl that Ma Nature has now shown us to be an inferior species, and Gaia's own obvious plan is to replace that inferior owl with the superior Barred Owl? The fishwrap then lies with it's headline: this is NOT "Owl Ethics", it is HUMAN ethics, and the ethics do not prove out, Ma Nature has shown us the correct way.

The SECOND Lie Of The Day is brought to us courtesy of CBS News, which showed this video from SloDivers.com, an outfit which runs a dive boat off Morro Bay, CA. Watch the video. It comes out that far from the "divers were surprised by the whales", it appears that the divers set up the whole thing by finding or attracting a "Bait Ball", a dense school of small fish such as sardines, that the whales feed on, then they waited in the water by or in the bait ball for the whales. Next, note the loud chuckling by the deck crew on the dive boat. Those are NOT the remarks of people who were surprised/horrified by the whale encounter, those are the remarks of people who were happy that a plan worked the way it's supposed to. Why get interested in this little lie, you ask? Well, for one, it is illegal to harass whales like this, and second, the CBS crew had to know that, went along with the dive-crew's little conspiracy, and the video went viral. But hey, it's CBS, what more can we say?

The THIRD L.O.T.D. simply HAS to be Anthony Weiner, the New York "Peter Tweeter" whose sexting forced him to resign his NY Congressional seat 25 months ago. Now, it turns out, that Weiner is still sexting to gullible young women, or, at the least, failed to tell the world the extent of his past peckerdillos when he gave us the tearful "apology". We can't know because he refuses to clear up the matter of this sordid practice by presenting a diary of the transgressions, which any therapist would consider the FIRST step in recovery. This means that the voters in NYC, where Weiner is the front-runner in the Democratic Primary race for Mayor, have no idea whether they are getting ready to vote for an active or a reformed sex fiend. There is one way to find out though. Weiner will tell us that he has no record of his sexting, but since the question of whether he has halted the practice or not is vital for voters, we know someone who COULD provide that answer - the National Security Agency, which has a record of every text message that Weiner ever sent. How about it, President Obama: could you help out a fellow Democrat here and whistle up that sexting list from the NSA? Weiner is trying hard to get everyone to believe that he is reformed, and that all of these instances of the bad practice are in the past. I'm sure that with his permission, this could all be cleared up quickly. If Weiner HAS actually overcome his fondness for broadcasting his manliness to strange women, it's a sign of a healthy recovery from that affliction, and, under current Democratic Party ethical standards, he should remain a candidate. OTOH, if the NSA list were to show he's still doing it, he's a very dangerous man to elect to high office, since he would be not only a sex fiend but a liar to boot.