It Shouldn’t Matter

In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the US expanding our military presence in the Republic of China from vanishingly small to miniscule, there’s this meek remark from a “US official” regarding the training of RoC forces that that slightly larger presence would be carrying out:

One of the difficult things to determine is what really is objectionable to China. We don’t think at the levels that we’re engaged in and are likely to remain engaged in the near future that we are anywhere close to a tipping point for China….

Leaving aside the question of to which China this person is referring (the timidity of the Biden and so many predecessor administrations makes that transparent, anyway), it doesn’t matter what is objectionable to the People’s Republic of China regarding our presence in the RoC. The PRC has no legitimate interest in the goings-on with respect to the RoC.

Full stop.

Gun Control

Versus gun rights. And police.

Squatters keep occupying another’s property in Lynnwood, WA, and using it as a stolen vehicle trafficking facility and as a residence. A police SWAT team raided the property and made some arrests. The owner changed the locks on the building. Then the squatters returned and resumed operations and residence.

In response to the reoccupation, Lieutenant David Hayes of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office (Lynnwood’s county) told Fox News Digital that ensuring the squatters don’t return is “largely on the property owner.”

This is what the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party mouthpieces are trying, functionally if not (necessarily) deliberately to prevent: a property owner defending her own property. A disarmed population via those gun “controls,” though, will be helpless against criminals and unable to satisfy their right and their obligation to defend their own property. Instead, they’ll be rendered entirely dependent on Government to for them rather than government’s (sic) local, county, and State police forces acting in assistance of the property owner.

In parallel with this, seemingly contradictorily, exponentially potentiating the police’s inability to support private citizens’ efforts, is the Left’s and Party’s ongoing—still!—efforts to defund and to shrink those same local, county, and State police forces.

It’s no wonder that whenever anyone in Party mounts an effort to disarm us, however seemingly mildly, there’s an increase in gun and ammunition sales.

“Common Sense”

The Progressive-Democratic Party is attempting to use its Newspeak Dictionary to redefine “Nonsense” as “Common sense.” The latest example of this is President Joe Biden’s (D) latest call for “common sense” gun reforms. He made his latest demand in response to a series of murders with guns in Mississippi. In that series, the murderer used a shotgun and two handguns to murder six people across three locations in his single rampage. Biden’s demand:

That includes requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, fully closing the boyfriend loophole to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, requiring safe storage of guns, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets.

Because any of that, like banning mythical devices—assault weapons and weapons of war on our streets—would have kept shotguns or handguns away from this murderer, or any other. And surely “high capacity magazines,” of whatever definition that becomes convenient from time to time to an overreaching government, would have kept shotguns and handguns away from criminals.

Holding gun manufacturers liable for the abuses of their products by criminals will only limit the availability of firearms to us honest ­average Americans. Oh, wait: that’s the goal of Party. Party members know full well that laws are ignored by criminals; that’s at the core of what makes them criminals.

Nonsense is common sense to Party. And Party expects us meekly to accept that. Or else.

The FBI Needs to Go

The agency’s management, from Director Christopher Wray on down far too deeply into the organization, is showing its naked bias by relying so heavily—and so exclusively—on Left-wing “sources” for rationalizations for initiating investigations, investigations that pry into mostly average Americans because we stand up for our rights. The FBI also is showing its blatant incompetence even at being dishonest by failing so heavily in those pseudo-investigations:

A dossier alleging Russian collusion funded by a Democrat presidential candidate. A suggestion that school parents were domestic terrorists from a left-leaning school board group. A list suggesting old-fashioned Catholics were extremists from a liberal watchdog on hate speech.

Jason Foster, an ex-US Senate investigator and current Empower Oversight operative who represents FBI whistleblowers, is being generous:

They [the FBI] need to have an understanding that there are folks out there that are looking to manipulate them for political purposes, and every time they fall for it, they’re damaging the reputation of the FBI in a way that is fundamentally harmful to not only the FBI, but to the country[.]

No, there’s no misunderstanding here. The FBI selects very carefully, and FBI personnel are some of the smartest people in our nation. FBI personnel understand very clearly what they’re doing, and far from being manipulated by Left-wing personages, these personnel are active in their ally-ship of the Left-wing.

There is no capability to recover the FBI; it cannot be restored to what it never had in the first place. The agency was untrustworthy under J Edgar Hoover, it never fully recovered, and its performance today would embarrass Hoover.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the Federal Bureau of Investigation needs to be disbanded and the law creating it completely rescinded.

Relocate the agency’s databases, forensics labs, and associated personnel to a newly created independent and small agency whose sole purpose is to maintain law enforcement databases and to conduct the forensics investigations and analyses requested by State and local law enforcement departments. The new agency should be located, in its entirety, in the middle of the US—central Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, for instance.

Transfer the line FBI agents to the Secret Service or the US Marshals Service, or to the private sector—out of Federal government employ—if they choose not to accept reassignment. Transfer every other member of the FBI and civilian employee of the FBI to the private sector—out of Federal government employ—with no option for other transfer.

Consensus

US District Judge William Shubb blocked California’s Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated State house and Governor’s mansion law that sought to punish doctors accused of promulgating Covid “misinformation.” By “misinformation, those worthies meant anything that didn’t comport with California’s “medical consensus.” The block is, on the whole, good, but Shubb unfotunately centered his ruling on the difficulty in correctly defining “consensus” in this or that endeavor, or in correctly identifying the sources qualified to define the relevant consensus.

That’s merely a subset of the larger problem with consensus, though.

That larger problem is the idea that any consensus should govern. Consensus isn’t science, which changes over time and among…scientists…it’s only the majority vote of what that majority thinks—rightly or wrongly—is correct today. Adhering to even a correctly identified consensus inhibits, if it doesn’t prevent altogether, innovation and science evolution.