Category: Law and Judiciary
A glimmer of hope

A glimmer of hope

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Tomorrow’s inauguration encourages many, myself included, to hope that the abuses and degradation of the past four years can be undone and things moved in a more promising direction. But there will be tremendous opposition, already begun, from the side that doesn’t realize it lost, and many things will take Congressional action, never an easy thing.

I have no doubt the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump will, in fact, be the dictator . . . ON DAY ONE, for the more simple minded among my beloved readers . . . he promised to be. He will close the border and open drilling leaseholds, both by executive order, and fix and undo many of the other biggest mistakes put in place by his predecessor’s own dictatorial actions on his Day One and the 1,460 days that followed it.

Just as Joe Biden set things in the wrong direction for the past four years, Trump will set a new and positive course beginning Monday afternoon. But after that kickoff to the new administration, things will get more challenging. Consider Monday a beginning. Or, more, the beginning of a beginning. But it is not anywhere near the end. Which, in reality, does not exist.

A top priority

Among a field of many priorities, a top priority has to be paring down the gargantuan and wasteful and inefficient megalith the U.S. government has mutated into. It is no wonder that many of us wonder why we continue to pay taxes just to see them pissed away to stupid, counterproductive, and corrupt purposes and programs. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are perhaps the perfect two individuals who have the best chance at succeeding at this seemingly hopeless task. There are powerful vested forces who will fight them every step of the way. But if we have any chance at getting government to fulfill its true purposes and to divest it of the rest, this is it.

The list of agencies that need fixing, reform, reduction, or reorientation encompasses virtually every arm of the government. I have put in my own bid to help fix our very broken non-immigrant visa system, the sole job that could get me to go back to Washington and the State Department. I’m not terribly hopeful I’ll be selected for the position, but we all need to do our part, no matter how small that part, if things are to be fixed. And to keep up the pressure on Washington that they be fixed.

A new wind blowing

It’s a new wind blowing in the land, and the incredible fireworks display staged as part of the pre-inaugural events Saturday night in Sterling, Virginia, is symbolic of that new and refreshing wind. Of all the fireworks displays I have seen over the years, including the amazing ones I witnessed — even from literally underneath them — while posted to Brazil, none come close, not even by a fraction, to that display. Accompanied by operatic singing, and ending with a dramatic presentation of America the Beautiful, the display symbolically blew away the timidity and senility and sclerosis and deceit of the past four years.

The fireworks display, which had to run into the millions of dollars to put on, are part of inauguration events that might cost up to $200 million — a new record — funds raised from private donors, not public sources.

Many, many of us — encapsulated in the 312 electoral votes and 76.6 million votes won by Trump in the 2024 election — have been awaiting with less than saintly patience for this change of the national guard. As Biden made himself more of a non-entity almost by the hour since the Nov. 5 election in which his vice president went down in flames, Trump has emerged as a true leader, more of a president as a president-elect than the actual president is or could ever be.

The subject line of a friend’s email to me today says it well: “Last day!! A brighter future tomorrow”

As the old wind continues to wheeze

It falls somewhere between highly entertaining to seriously pathetic to watch, since election day, those on the left melting down, in many cases quite spectacularly, over the defeat of their less than beloved Kamala. You can’t find a better example of intolerance, outright hatred, and propagation of bogus ideas they bought into fiercely — and many still do — as if they were true.

It turned out the American electorate bought the doughnut and not the hole. That shouldn’t be a mystery, but the Harris campaign never seemed to grasp that was what most people wanted. And many in the corrupt and misguided media still haven’t gotten the memo.

The lack of logic defies description. If you’ve seen claims, as I have, that Elon Musk bought the election for Trump for the $250 million he contributed to his campaign, do these people not question how Kamala couldn’t buy the election for $1.5 billion, six times as much? Even with the most heavily bankrolled campaign in U.S. history, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t pull Kamala and her empty vision across the finish line.

What the anti-Trump crazies completely miss in their blindness is that it takes more than money to win elections. It takes actual ideas, good policies, a candidate with whom people can resonate and not one simply installed by the party oligarchs, and a sense that change is needed. The map below, showing the 2024 vote by county — red for Trump, blue for Kamala, Alaska still counting votes but it went red, too, in the end — illustrates the breadth and depth of the dissatisfaction voters had with the existing order.

It’s a tall order that Trump and his team have been handed to fill. Given the tight margins in the Senate and especially the House, it’s going to be a struggle every step of the way. If we see results, those tight margins could go against historical precedence and increase in 2026. If we don’t, the Dems could reestablish control in the Congress, which would be nothing short of a catastrophe. The rapidity and sense of urgency with which Trump has approached the task ahead gives hope that he has learned the lessons of his first term and won’t be taking any prisoners in his quest to put in place his program and — to use his favorite phrase — Make America Great Again.

America, and the rest of the world, is watching.

Featured image, TravelScape, Lake Sunrise, Freepik, used with permission.

Donald and Melania Watch Spectacular Fireworks, Alex Brandon, pool, Associated Press, used under Fair Use.

Disappointed Kamala Voters, Howard University on Election Night, Daniel Cole, Reuters, used under Fair Use.

Electoral Map by County, 2024, Karina Zaiets, USA TODAY, used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.
Who is really in charge in the White House?

Who is really in charge in the White House?

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The question of who is really in charge in the White House has been a lingering one throughout the three and a half years of the current administration. Anyone with reasonably functioning eyes and ears and who isn’t sold out either to what can safely be called the state media or is so ideologically impaired that they can’t see the truth knows it can’t possibly be Joe Biden. His mental impairment, already visible even prior to his election in 2020, grows more evident by the day, almost by the minute (though his handlers are sure that his exposure to public view is limited to just minutes a week, not a day).

Speculation has focused on Joe’s former boss, Barrack Obama, and clearly many of the same incompetents who were part of Obama’s administration, such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, haunt the current White House. Biden’s time in office has been called Obama’s Third Term, many of the similarities are so striking. Other speculation has focused on the power-hungry First Lady, Doctah Jill Biden, who has been so willing to engage in elder abuse of her own husband for the sake of power. And of course there is the cadre of faceless handlers who prop up Biden, write his speeches which he still manages to garble up, get him to wear shoes less likely to cause him to trip and fall, and surround him on walks out to Marine One so his stilted gait is less visible to the White House Press Corps.

Any of these explanations are plausible enough, but I think there is something larger and more sinister in play. I think there is a kind of ideological force, what I would term a kind of hive mind, that pervades the administration and has spread like a plague across the country. It has occupied college campuses for many years and increasingly has filtered down to the K-12 level, and it has found its way into the so-called justice system, into the military, into sports, and even into corporate board rooms.  It is this hive mind that thinks men can be women, women can be men, that the citizenry is too simple-minded to make its own decisions on everything from whether to own a gas-powered or electric vehicle, what kind of bulbs to screw into their lamps, to what kind of stove or dishwasher they put in their kitchen.

It is this same hive mind that believes open borders, allowing a dozen million unvetted aliens into the country and turning them lose on society, is a positive thing, and which will only further the objectives of the hive mind (the last part undoubtedly true). It is the hive mind that leads the administration to favor our natural enemies, such as Iran. And it is this hive mind that says criminals have more rights than law-abiding citizens and need to be treated with deference to undo centuries of supposed injustice, regardless the cost and injury to the rest of us.

Like bees in a hive, the hive mind governs everything these people think, do, and impose on the rest of us. It is a kind of mental affliction that puts its governing ideology above all else, which would accept having a doddering old fool who scares us domestically whenever he appears and who embarrasses us on the international stage, as Biden did recently at the G-7 gathering in Italy, and which would destroy our democracy on the false premise that it is saving it. It counts on the lack of awareness and good information, fostered by a corrupt media and the deaf-and-drunk show that is social media, to fend off questions about its premises. And we’re told to believe the fictions the bees weave and not our lying eyes.

As has been evident, and as I’ve said for a long time, the systematic destruction of the country and society cannot be explained by mere incompetence. It is clear that it is deliberate, and the seemingly benign phrase “to transform the country” embodies this hive mind’s intent to turn everything upside down and inside out. A more correct reading of that phrase would be “to destroy the country,” and that is embedded in the basic belief system behind the hive mind. Essentially stemming from a Marxist/leftist ideology, its intents and methodology mirror cultural and political revolutions from Russia to Cambodia, and stretching back to the French Revolution. We see it on the streets, in the courtrooms, on college campuses, and in the White House.

It is the blind ideology of the hive mind, further afflicted with the mental illness known as Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), that prevents the bees in the hive from seeing, much less understanding, why so many ordinary people want no part of the bogus honey it produces and does its utmost to peddle.

Saddled with a Chief Executive you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus, much less fly your airliner, I keep returning to the point I’ve been at for some years now: We are soooo fucked. We really are. We have one chance and one chance only to turn this ship around before it grounds hopelessly on the rocks this hive mind has set its course for, and that is the election coming up in less than five months (and actually, due to the perversion known as early voting many states have adopted, in as little as three months). If we don’t make a firm statement that the goals of this hive mind are simply unacceptable for the country, the society, and our future, I see little hope. I think we all need to do what little or much as we can to grab hold of the wheel and change course. This is my small contribution to that effort.

Featured Image: Bee Hive, Mostafa Eissa, Pexels, used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.

 

 

 

 
Covering up the cover-up

Covering up the cover-up

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That’s a photo of Attorney General Merrick Garland. If he looks like a rabid weasel, that’s because he is exactly that. Ever embittered for being denied a place on the High Court in the dying days of the Obama administration, Merrick Garland now takes out his resentment on all the country not aligned with this ever-more-unpopular regime and the Democratic Party more generally. Any thought of maintaining a modicum of equal justice by the DOJ he heads has been long jettisoned, despite the AG’s high-sounding rhetoric. This was never more in evidence then when Garland made his bogus appointment Friday of David Weiss as a “special counsel” in investigating Hunter Biden’s various crimes.

If there is a more clear case of the fox — or in this case, the weasel’s minion — guarding the hen house, one would be hard-pressed to think of it. Here are the simple facts that illustrate the relationship:

  • Weiss is the same federal prosecutor who has been dragging his heels in his supposed “investigation” of Hunter Biden for nearly four years, ever since Hunter’s now infamous laptop came into the FBI’s possession in December 2019.
  • Weiss is the same federal prosecutor who allowed the statute of limitations to run on Biden’s failure to file taxes from 2014-2016 and then let him skate for years of not filing timely returns on millions of dollars of income by turning all that into two misdemeanor charges (try that stunt yourself and see what happens to you).
  • Weiss, again, turned a gun charge against Hunter — a charge that, in virtually 100% of other cases, results in jail time — into an agreement to let him go into a diversion program and exactly zero days behind bars. So much for this administration’s bleating about guns.
  • In an unprecedented move, Weiss also was willing to forego prosecution on other criminal matters still under investigation, such as Hunter’s violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Besides the obvious conflicts of interest, the first provision of the Special Counsel law states that the special counsel shall — not should, not could, not be preferred to, but shall — come from outside the government. Someone who supposedly doesn’t have any vested interest in the outcome of an investigation. Instead, Weasel Garland dug deep into the very guts of the beast he heads and pulled out Weiss. Weiss, who Garland — previously, under oath, and quite untruthfully — asserted already had the same powers as a special counsel.

But wait! you shout. The nation’s top law enforcement officer can’t be allowed to get away with violating the statute! Well, dear naive reader, the statute ends by stating there is no mechanism for remedying a violation. Don’t you just love how those in power write statutes that benefit them and no one else?

By the way, don’t be led astray by those who claim Weiss was a Trump appointee. Yes, technically speaking, he was. But he was put forth into nomination by Delaware’s two Democratic senators and its Democratic Party structure, all part of the First State’s political snake pit of which Joe Biden has been a leading member since God was a boy, and Trump simply rubber-stamped the appointment. Not his finest act.

Unraveling the sweetheart deal

That’s not a weasel in the photo above. It’s U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika who was expected to approve — but didn’t — the DOJ’s sweetheart deal with Hunter Biden. And that explains why now, after all this time, after making the sweetest of sweetheart deals in the history of sweetheart deals, with the President’s son, Merrick sees the need to officially give Weiss special counsel powers.

We need just go back a couple of weeks to when Noreika, also in Delaware, saw through all the holes in the deal offered Biden by the DOJ and sent it back to the drawing board. Judge Noreika was expected to just pass her blessing on the deal, as would be expected of one of the Delaware political morass dwellers. But much to everyone’s surprise and both sides’ dismay, the judge — to quote Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacre — “wasn’t going to look at the eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was,” and it was an (un)typical case of “American Blind Justice.” Noreika actually read the text of the deal and she picked out a paragraph in it giving Biden immunity from prosecution forever and ever. Aren’t there some things still under investigation, she had the utter temerity to ask? Wouldn’t this be unprecedented? Uh, yeah, well, yes, your honor, the government lawyers had to admit. So, of course, there’d be no immunity for them.

Biden’s and his attorneys didn’t like that idea, which they said they hadn’t agreed to, so they pulled out of the deal right there in the courtroom — even though they effectively were on the same side as the government on it — and Biden pleaded not guilty to the implied crimes alleged in the deal. The DOJ would have to take the charges to trial and Hunter would have a chance to defend himself against them. But you see, dear naive reader, that’s about the last thing the government, doing the bidding of Hunter’s daddy in the White House, wants. So now what was called for was covering up the cover-up represented by the sweetheart deal, and that is where Garland’s appointment of Weiss as special counsel comes in.

Covering up the cover-up

The photo above portrays two other weasels. They may look like Joe and Hunter Biden, but they’re weasels through and through. So, if you want to know the real objective of any of this chicanery, it’s to keep all the blow back of Hunter’s misdeeds from reaching his daddy, the “Big Guy” mentioned in Hunter’s own emails that were found on his laptop. The Big Guy, who increasingly can be, has to be, seen as the real head of the Biden crime family. So to understand how Garland and the administration think this will work, consider that:

  • There have been no indictments nor any charges filed against Hunter. The most critical violations expire with the statute of limitations in October, just two months off. If there are no indictments, no charges, Hunter is off the hook for them and he can walk away unscathed.
  • Weiss can take his case anywhere in the country, which means he can judge shop to have venue changed away from Delaware and from Judge Noreika and get a judge more amenable to the whole corrupt plan and who will approve a new but equally sweet sweetheart deal.
  • By avoiding a trial, the administration also avoids the discovery and testimony that can definitively tie Joe to Hunter’s illicit overseas business deals. Again, keep in mind that this concerns Hunter only to a trivial amount. The real objective is protecting the Big Guy, his father, the President.

Of course, in a country with a fair and unbiased media none of this would fly. It would be considered the biggest political scandal of half a century, if not forever. But those in power know we don’t have that kind of fair and unbiased media, and the official state media — compliant to the wishes of the Democratic Party — are doing their utmost to cover the whole affair up. In fact, some readers may be seeing some of this for the first time if the likes of NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, or the Washington Post, and some other reliably biased outlets, are the sources for what passes for their news. A democracy starved of truthful coverage of its alleged leaders cannot function nor survive. And that’s where we are at today.

But even as the state media does their best to bury this story, there are things underway in the (barely) Republican-controlled House of Representatives. This latest move by Garland, combined with the evidence being uncovered through banking records showing tens of millions of dollars funneled from overseas sources to the entire Biden family through a maze of 20 shell companies, as well as the revelations made by Hunter business associate Devon Archer to Congress that directly tie Joe to Hunter’s deals, are pushing things closer and closer to Speaker McCarthy declaring an impeachment inquiry against the President. And with that comes subpoena and discovery power that will bring the whole sordid matter into the limelight. Even the state media will find that hard to ignore.

Note: No weasels were harmed in the writing of this piece. Also, no insult was intended to the actual animals. It’s the human weasels we’re referring to derogatorily.

Featured Image: Omniverous, FotoEmotions, via Pixabay. Used with permission.

Judge Maryellen Noreika, U.S. District Courts. Public domain.

Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden. Photo by Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

 

 

 

 

 
Nothing to see here, folks

Nothing to see here, folks

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That’s become the not-so-hidden message coming from what is supposed to be our government: Move along, folks, go on home, nothing to see here.

The most recent example of this is how the discovery of a baggie of cocaine in the White House has been handled (or mishandled) and information related to it squelched. Never mind that the White House is supposed to be “the People’s House.” You’re just expected to pay your taxes and shut up. You have no right to know whose coke it was, why supposedly no culprit has been found, and likely won’t be, or even where it was found. Right from the beginning we were told no fingerprints or DNA swabs were taken of the baggie — which, if that is true, is nothing short of investigatory malpractice — and then that part of the story quietly disappeared from the news.

First, we were told it was found in the White House Library. No, it was near the West Wing Lobby. No, no, it was found near the  Situation Room (described as “the most sensitive single location in the US government”). Wait, stop the presses! It was found near the West Wing Executive Entrance, an area described by the evil elf, Karine Jean-Pierre, who pretends to be the President’s Press Secretary, as “a heavily traveled area” (translation: Gee, it could be anyone. Maybe a little old lady from Wichita. Who knows?) We also were told, as if we’re a bunch of rubes who believe the world is flat, that there are no cameras in that area that might have captured the act of placing the coke baggie, wherever it was found.

The Secret Service, charged with guarding the safety of the President and the White House and once a highly regarding organization, is leading what passes for an investigation. And in true “nothing to see here, folks” style, the Service has announced it will wrap up its investigation this week. When you don’t want to find something, you don’t find it.

Now I’m not going to say that the coke belongs to Hunter Biden, the President’s once crack-addicted son supposedly now in recovery. That’s supposed to be the point of an investigation, to find evidence of who the guilty party is. But applying Occam’s Razor, which says the most obvious explanation usually is the correct one, that might make him at minimum a prime suspect. Fingerprints, DNA, security cameras could easily either rule him in or rule him out. But if it is him, there goes that sweetheart deal he negotiated with his father’s Justice Department, and it be prison, not diversion, in his future. So, nothing to see here.

Nothing to see at the Justice Department either

It’s not just in the White House where we’re told there is nothing to see. The FBI, another once respected organization, has been in possession of Hunter’s now famous, or infamous, laptop since 2019, a year before we were supposed to believe that it “had all the signs of Russian disinformation,” and it confirmed the laptop’s authenticity in very short order. Hunter documented his own crimes — cocaine usage, influence peddling for his dad, lying about his drug usage on a gun application, possession of child pornography — and his many non-chargeable sexual peccadillos on the laptop.

Further, the IRS uncovered evidence of his tax evasion on income of multiple millions of dollars going back as far as 2014, and his gun was found in a trash bin across from a school after his former sister-in-law, his deceased brother’s widow, whom Hunter had been boffing, along with her sister, disposed of it there.

Let’s face it. It doesn’t take more than three years to investigate crimes when the evidence is right in front of you. That is, if your last name isn’t Biden. But if it is Biden, it’s another case of move along, nothing to see here, folks, and offenses that would have landed (and routinely do) mere mortals, lowly citizens, many years behind bars, resulted in a couple of misdemeanor charges and a divergence program that will result in no jail time at all for Hunter. Well, unless of course the coke in the White House belongs to the first son, which would be a violation of the terms of the agreement before it is even accepted by the court. So is it any wonder, given the depth of corruption of this administration, that the Secret Service investigation is likely to come up empty-handed?

Keep in mind — when the beast wants to find someone, it does. Consider, in contrast, how the FBI and DOJ have gone after every single person who pranced through the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, rooting them out nationwide. And the kinds of judicial abuse, pretrial detention, and excessive sentencing imposed on those people. And then we have pro-life activists raided and bullied and arrested by the FBI when the lame Attorney General, Merrick Garland, claims the people who have firebombed and vandalized pro-life care centers can’t be found since, gee whizz, they did those things at night and it was dark. I wonder if it was “dark” in the White House, too, when that coke was left.

Nothing to see at the Supreme Court

This “nothing to see thing” is getting to be a habit. More than a year ago the Dobbs decision, which overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, was leaked from the Supreme Court weeks before its planned release. Something like that had never happened before, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among High Court watchers and pundits. Chief Justice John Roberts vowed the guilty party would be found and and he launched an investigation. Unlike the two-week wonder of the Secret Service’s investigation, that one is supposed to still be under way. And what is the result of that investigation? If you guessed nada de nada, go to the head of your class.

A tradition of nothing to see

As discouraging as all these recent “nothing to see here” situations are, this is not the first time our government pulled this kind of gaslighting. For instance, for 60 years we’ve been waiting to find out the facts behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For 60 years the real truth has been kept classified and hidden from the American public, even though all the facts were supposed to be released, but weren’t, by 2017. Many of us suspected all along that the CIA was behind the assassination, which explains why the facts have been kept secret so long, by administrations of both parties. And earlier this year someone who knows what those documents say told then-Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson that it was, indeed, the CIA who masterminded the assassination. According to Carlson’s source, when asked if the CIA was involved with the assassination, replied, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”

Then, a year after the Kennedy assassination, we had the Tonkin Gulf incident which was used as a pretext for amping up our involvement in Vietnam. And when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told the country how the North Vietnamese had attacked our naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, he knew the story was bogus. As did President Lyndon Johnson when he announced new troops to be sent to Vietnam and a bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

We wouldn’t know the truth about the Tonkin Gulf incident or the many other lies we were told during the Vietnam War were it not for the Pentagon Papers, leaked by now deceased former Marine and military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. And we wouldn’t know what those papers — 7,000 pages, photocopied page-by-page by Ellsberg on an old-style copy machine — had The New York Times and Washington Post and close to two-dozen other newspapers not defied the government’s attempt to squelch the information they contained and published the papers. And that is the essence of the dilemma we are facing today.

The real problem

Instead of calling truth to power and defying the power structure, most of today’s mainstream media and Big Tech are doing what they can to protect this administration, this corrupt president, and are blindsiding the American public about these stories that, in more normal times, would be considered major scandals. It’s bad that the government and politicians try to deceive the citizenry. But worse, is when the news media covers up official misdeeds and doesn’t call the government out on them. And that is where we are today. What we have is a government-media complex — akin to the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned the country about and arguably even more dangerous — that functions largely as a state media. And with that democracy simply cannot survive.

Featured image, cocaine and a rolled hundred, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Hunter Biden in the bath, from Hunter Biden’s laptop, via Daily Mail. Used under Fair Use.

U.S. Supreme Court, David Dibert, from Pexels. Used with permission.

JFK shot, one-sixth of a second after, Mary Ann Moorman/Wikimedia Commons. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Share the piece and subscribe, here and there.
Nothing Matters Anymore

Nothing Matters Anymore

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Now we know, as if we had any doubts before: Nothing matters anymore. That might be an odd conclusion to come to for me, who has a Substack called Issues That Matter. But it’s consistent, actually. That nothing matters anymore is an issue that matters. Or should. Unfortunately, there is bloody little anyone can do about it except grin and bear it and suffer the consequences, or look for a way out of the madhouse that the United States has turned into. That’s the option I’m once more looking at.

So Jell-O Joe Biden, the Grifter in Chief, unilaterally has “forgiven” big chunks of student loan debt. Never mind that he has no legal power to do so. Even the Queen of Grift, Nancy Pelosi says so. But who needs laws any more? Laws are for the pissants, not for the Big Guy. Certainly not for the ruling elites (provided they’re of the right party). Whether it’s allowing people out of their contractual obligations to pay their debts or allowing now more than 2 million — heading toward 4 million — illegal aliens and border crashers to enter with impunity into the country, or using his official offices to further his family’s corrupt enrichment, law and the Constitution are irrelevant. If you haven’t noticed that, you haven’t been paying attention.

If you had student loans that you struggled to pay off, if you saved and scrimped so you didn’t need student loans, or maybe you never got to go to college, why would you mind paying off some rich kid’s loan? Are you really that selfish? Maybe you went in the military and risked, or even gave, your life or your limbs. Maybe you were counting on the GI Bill to pay for your education. You don’t think this was a fair deal, what Biden did? You self-serving bastard!

You pay your taxes and are distraught about our record $30 trillion-something national debt, and now you’ll be asked to contribute your share — estimated at $2,000 per taxpayer — to pay off the $300 billion (which is just a guess, no one can say how much this lawless act really will cost because no one has a clue how many people will be affected) this give-away will cost. You must not understand your role as a taxpayer, which is to support without question every mindless and insane thing your government does. Add the increase to inflation all this extra money going into the economy will bring, and the costs are likely to be even more. Who’s problem is that? Why, yours, of course!

And if recent history is any indication, fraud will take a big part of that money. Like the $100 billion-plus in pandemic relief funds that were stolen by fraudsters, only a very small percentage of which has been recovered or prosecuted. But that’s “official” fraud. Most of the funds will go to the “unofficial” fraud that lies at the basis of this whole thing. Biden’s “generosity” (at your expense) is aimed as a payoff to young voters to vote for Dems in the upcoming midterms, and an even bigger payoff to the colleges and universities that profit off the student loan program.

See those huge tuitions? $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year, for at best a spotty education? When the student loan program was taken over by the federal government, it was just an incentive for college administrators to really jack up tuitions, which have risen at rates far in excess of the general inflation rate. Given the huge endowments most of these institutions have — not just measured in the billions of dollars, but in the several tens of billions of dollars — why should they not be forced to bear the costs of this largesse? Because this is really a payoff for all their contributions to the Democratic Party, to which 90 percent of university contributions go. When I lived in Key West 40-some years ago, it cost a six-pack of beer to buy a vote. The stakes have gotten a whole lot higher in the current game of political corruption and vote buying.

Nothing Else Matters, Either

Beat, rape, rob, or car jack someone in some of our biggest cities and at most you might face a misdemeanor charge, if that. You’re likely going to be back on the street the same day or the next one, all set to commit your next crime. Defend yourself against this kind of rampant criminality, and you might be the one who faces real criminal charges. This is not just speculation, but has become a daily occurrence in cities ranging from New York to L.A,. Chicago to Seattle, Philadelphia to San Francisco, and many in between. Is it any wonder that crime rates are rising at the fastest rates since the 1960s, or are reaching record rates in many places? If you’re a law-abiding citizen, just STFU and pay your taxes and take it. You don’t count. You don’t matter. You’re just some freaking racist if you complain about this kind of treatment. You’re getting in the way of remaking America, so move aside or get crushed.

Remember when Trump said there was a plan to do away with single-family zoning and moving urban problems right into your neighborhood? Well, guess what. That’s exactly what is happening. Not far from where I live, the city council of the city where I went to graduate school, Gainesville, Florida — home of the University of Florida and a city mostly of single-family homes — voted to do away with single-family zoning. The future is coming to a place near you, and it’s coming fast. Don’t like the idea? Tough. You don’t matter.

I’ve already opined and lamented what has clearly become a dual standard of justice in this country, and you can read about that here and here and in lots of others of my postings. This is no longer a collection of isolated incidents but has become what is called a pattern and practice. Combined with pervasive corruption, this might be the biggest threat facing our democracy, aside from the repression of any dissenting views and the near-total silence and even complicity on the part of the nation’s mainstream media.

When Nothing Matters Anymore, It Becomes Pervasive in the Society

If you have the stomach to watch the news, you’ll often see images of people being beaten, shot, and otherwise attacked on the streets while onlookers capture the scene on their phones, hoping for their 15 seconds of fame, while doing nothing to intervene or try to protect the victim. We’ve become a nation of voyeurs and cowards.

In the 1960s we had the famous case of Kitty Genovese, a young woman raped, robbed, and murdered on the street in Queens, New York, while onlookers observed from their apartment windows and did nothing. The incident shocked the conscious of the nation at the time. Today, we can’t even muster shock when these things occur. The onlookers that don’t scurry away watch and video the events.

This tendency was brought home to me yesterday. A young man doing some work for me related how he was driving down a busy street in the next town, and there was this little 4- or 5-year-old girl skipping down the center line of the street. Cars just drove by, paying her no heed as if she wasn’t a vulnerable little human but rather some curiosity or maybe even a nuisance to speed by. To his lasting credit, this guy stopped, turned his truck sideways across the road to stop traffic, began to try to get the girl off the road, and to find what careless adults had let her slip out from their attention. Down the road were a couple of guys looking at their boat on a trailer. He shouted at them, and they suddenly “noticed” that the little girl, who belonged to one of them, had gone missing. The damned boat was more important to him then the presence and safety of the little girl. The pair hadn’t even noticed she was missing.

It’s entirely possible this young guy saved the little girl’s life. But this is what we’ve come to. People can’t take a few minutes to stop and try to save a little girl skipping down the middle of a busy street. A boat takes precedence to a life. We see kids left to die in hot cars and people are advised to put their phones or their purses in the back seat so as not to forget their kid, as if a phone or purse is more important to them than the kid. People watch and look on as criminals attack innocent people, and they and the courts and the law look the other way. You struggle to pay your debts and your bills and your money is stolen and given to those who don’t.

The Romans at least confined their barbarity, their bread and circuses intended to placate and buy off the populace, to the arena. In modern-day America, the entire country is the arena.

When nothing matters anymore, nothing matters anymore.

Featured Image, Factory, Peter Hermann/Pixabay. Used with permission.

Wires, Cottonbro/Pexels. Used with permission.

Scrap Metal, Tom Fisk/Pexels. Used with permission.

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