People are complaining as housing costs rise. This teacher can’t afford to buy a home that she wants, but also complains that rent is too expensive, as rent costs nationwide are above $2,000 for the first time ever. But, hey, she doesn’t have to read mean Tweets, so she has that going for her.
“Rents are going up just as fast as home prices are,” says Fairweather. Yes, that is how economics works. People buy houses, then rent them out. If the cost to buy goes up, then so does rent. The same thing happens in restaurants, when the cost of food goes up, the prices at the restaurant go up. It isn’t rocket science. Take a look:
Beginning in February/March of 2021, rents began to skyrocket. Renting a home costs 15% more than it did a year ago. If only we could pinpoint an event that happened in January of 2021 that could be responsible for this rapid increase in housing costs.
Sheriff John Mina, Orange County, Florida Was a Republican, now a Democrat
Chief Rick Braziel (retired), Sacramento, Calif. He was one of the law enforcement officers who publicly lobbied for registering ammunition sales in California.
Deputy Chief Gene Deisinger (retired), Virginia Tech, Va. He has been covering for bad policing since at least 2013: While this may be true, Deisinger said he is frustrated by the widespread criticism of law enforcement without providing any real alternatives. “One of my criticisms of North American culture is that we are really good at criticizing what somebody else did or failed to do,” Deisinger said.
Director of Public Safety Frank Fernandez (retired), Coral Gables, Fla. He has been involved in the gun control movement for most of the last decade: “An 18-year-old with an AK-47 and an AR-15 is completely unreasonable,” said Frank Fernandez, director of public safety in Coral Gables, Florida, and the chairman of the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s firearms committee. “That is a weapon that is meant for destruction. It’s not a weapon that you can use to go hunting. That is a weapon … used in the theater of war.”
Albert Guarnieri, FBI Unit Chief. This is the only panelist I couldn’t find a thing on.
Major Mark Lomax (retired), Pennsylvania State Police, Pa. While campaigning for Sheriff of Bucks county as a Democrat, his position on guns was: While he supports the Second Amendment, he believes strongly in licensing and training and sees on need for assault weapons such as AR-15s.
April Naturale, Assistant Vice President, Vibrant Emotional Health This woman is everywhere. She claims to specialize in traumatic stress. She has responded to the war in Ukraine, she was involved with the Feds, the UN, and COVID-19 (pdf warning), the shootings in San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, Hurricane Katrina, and numerous other mass shooting events. It’s like she goes everywhere there is a tragedy that was exploited by the left.
In my post on “educating a leftie,“ I gave examples of just one year of leftist violence. In fact, other than the minor skirmishes of J6, the left has been the one to instigate all of the political violence in the past 6 years.
Unlike the J6 trespassers, he will be granted bail by the end of the month, while some present in the Capitol are facing 40 years in Federal prison. There are two justice systems in the US now.
I am not counting the attempted “abduction” of Governor Whitmer, since a court of law found that the entire plot was planned and fabricated by the FBI as a device to entrap the people involved.
Ignorance of the law, the judges and cops are fond of saying, is no excuse. In 1925, this is what a complete copy of all Federal laws looked like:
That one volume represents all of the laws that were passed by Congress in the first 150 years of this country’s existence. That Federal Law library has now expanded immensely.
What was one volume in 1925 expanded to become 22 volumes just 90 years later. Here is a picture of one of the 53 titles of the United States Code:
The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. About 600 crimes a year are added to the Federal Code, so we should be somewhere near 14,000 Federal crimes in the US Code by now.
A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves, which include things like rape, murder, or theft. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves, such as owning a machine gun made after 1986, when owning one made in 1985 is perfectly legal.
In 1982, the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. In a Wall Street Journal article about this project, “this effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Or as Mr. Gainer characterized this fruitless project: “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still not have an answer to this question. (There are 53 titles now.)
So you see, even the Justice Department of the US government is not sure of how many laws there are, yet each and every one of us is responsible for knowing every one of them, along with the court cases that modify and define them, upon penalty of prison: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
All of that pales in comparison to the regulations. Congress isn’t the only body that passes laws. There are also several dozen Federal bureaus, who have had the power to write laws since 1940. The laws that they write are called regulations, and they are found in the Code of Federal Regulations.
The laws passed by Congress are just the beginning. In 2018, the Code of Federal Regulations numbered over 250,000 pages. Only a fraction of those pages involved regulations based on something spelled out in legislation. If a regulatory agency comes after you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies themselves, much as if the police department could make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.
The result of all of this is that each and every one of us is responsible for reading, understanding and following over one million pages of laws, regulations, and court decisions- with complete understanding. If one were to begin studying these laws at age 12 by reading 50 pages per day, by age 67 you would have read all of them. The only problem is that, at the current rate, the government would have added another 500,000 pages of laws and 28 years of reading to your quest while you were busy reading.
There are nearly 1.7 million regulatory crimes that a person can commit in this country as of 2020.
Remember, though: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you are spraying insect killer on some ants using a bug spray that says spray from 6 inches away, but you spray from 8 inches, you are a Federal criminal. If you are buying a gun and you live in Florida, you had better use the abbreviation of FL as your address, because using the old abbreviation of FLA is a felony and can land you in prison.
Why is this happening? Ayn Rand gives us an insight into this:
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Truer words were never spoken. More laws equals more crimes, which equals more criminals, which equals more power for those enforcing the laws.
There is only one destination for the path we are on: tyranny, enslavement, and the complete control of everything. That will eventually lead to revolution. Whether or not that will happen in my productive lifetime is anyone’s guess.
I asked a couple of days ago why they were making such a big deal about the police not doing their jobs. I was wondering what the end game was, and I think I have it. They are following the Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” and the CIA insurgency manual. If you are unfamiliar with them, I did a three part series on them back in 2020. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three is here.
When an attempted overthrow of a government is in the works, one of the things that needs to happen is a loss of trust in the government’s ability to run things and provide needed services to its citizens. They do this by using violence and mayhem to both make the citizens feel unsafe, and to sabotage infrastructure so that people are crying out for basic services.
Once the people don’t trust the government to do that job any more, they turn to the revolutionaries to do it for them, and the revolutionaries step in and “fix” the problem that they themselves created. I think we are seeing a variation of that. The left already hates the local and state police. Now all they have to do is get the right on board.
American Greatness thinks that this is exactly what is happening to the police, and I can’t say that I disagree with them. That is no way means that I am going to support cops who stand around and arrest parents while children are being murdered, but I see what is happening.
The police have chosen sides. They want the left to be in control. I can no longer support the police. I know what many of you are saying: “I have a friend who is a cop, and he is a good guy.”
To that I ask you: “Imagine that you were the man who was walking down this sidewalk in front of a protest and were being harassed by these leftist idiots, just like in the video below. The cops came up to you and were plainly taking the side of the leftists. You tell those cops to get lost and one of them arrests you for stalking and assaulting the protesters. Your friend the cop then approaches. Whose side will he choose? Yours? Or his fellow officers?”
Watch this and see how the cop, who is following the guy and saw the entire incident, takes the side of the leftists. Then see how the other cops arrive and immediately defer to the first cop’s judgment. That is how it ALWAYS works.
I promise you that he will choose to support the other cops 100% of the time. He will protect his pension, his job, and support the blue wall over those who think that they are his friends. Cops do not go against other cops, mostly because they want to protect their jobs and pensions.
The only exception to this is if the aggrieved party is a part of the protected minority class, and there is a public lynching in progress by the left. (Ask Derek Chauvin how much he was supported by his “brothers in blue.”)
So I asked in a previous post, what are police good for? Today we ask why mass shootings have become such a problem? The root of the problem lies with a movement that started out west in California during 1955. I am referring to deinstitutionalization.
Deinstitutionalization began in 1955 with the widespread introduction of chlorpromazine, commonly known as Thorazine, the first effective antipsychotic medication, and received a major impetus 10 years later with the enactment of federal Medicaid and Medicare. Deinstitutionalization has two parts: the moving of the severely mentally ill out of the state institutions, and the closing of part or all of those institutions.
In 1975, the Supreme court ruled that people cannot be involuntarily committed to a mental institution unless it could be proven that they were a danger to themselves or others. That high bar caused many mental patients to be released from the country’s public mental hospitals. With no patients, those facilities ceased to exist.
The entire idea was to use medications to manage mental illness and make the mentally ill well enough to live amongst the rest of society. The problem with this theory is that many people with mental illness don’t take their medications, either because they can’t afford them, or they simply don’t take them. The medications, especially first generation antipsychotics like Thorazine, carry a huge number of serious side effects, so many of those who are supposed to take them wind up self medicating with street drugs, alcohol, or both. In fact, 80 percent of the most severely mentally ill are never able to manage their illness and slowly slide into an endless cycle of prison, psychiatric facilities, halfway houses, homelessness, then back to prison.
Psychotic people often can’t maintain a job, are addicted to drugs or alcohol, and find it impossible to maintain interpersonal relationships. So they fall out of society. They wind up homeless, they cycle in and out of prison, and there are no real answers that protect society or the mentally ill.
Then you add the war on drugs with their minimum prison sentences to the mix, and mentally unstable people get tossed out of jail to make room for drug offenders. Most of those who were deinstitutionalized from the nation’s public psychiatric hospitals were severely mentally ill. Between 50 and 60 percent of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Because of this, deinstitutionalization has helped create the mental illness crisis we are seeing now by discharging people from public psychiatric hospitals without ensuring that they received the medication and rehabilitation services necessary for them to live successfully in the community.
Deinstitutionalization further exacerbated the situation because, once the public psychiatric beds had been closed, they were not available for people who later became mentally ill, and this situation continues up to the present. Consequently, approximately 2.2 million severely mentally ill people do not receive any psychiatric treatment.
The connection between deinstitutionalization and incarceration is all too obvious. In 1978, the prison population was about 25,000. In 1980, that had grown to 501,886. In 1995, there were 1,587,791 people in US prisons, and 30 percent of the prison population were designated as needing mental health services.
In the last several years, California engaged in mental health deinstitutionalization 2.0. This time it was Gov. Brown who pushed for sweeping new laws. Measures approved by the Legislature and voters have drastically changed the legal landscape and reduced prison and jail populations. By the end of his tenure, prison population in California had fallen by almost a third.
As the jails and prisons emptied, homelessness jumped. Now, approximately a quarter of all people experiencing homelessness in this country reside in California. And while there are fewer inmates, the prevalence and severity of the mental illness among prisoners has increased. Astonishingly, in just four years, the number of people in California who were deemed incompetent to stand trial has increased by 60 percent, straining courts and state hospitals.
It’s a serious issue. Approximately 14.8 million people in the United States have severe mental illness. We emptied out the mental hospitals, and many of the former patients wound up in prison or in homeless camps. Now they are clearing out the prisons, so we can expect to see more and more attacks by people who are mentally ill. Since there are not enough mental health services, many people who would have been identified and institutionalized before they could hurt anyone now slip through the cracks, unnoticed.
America doesn’t have a gun problem. It has a mental health problem, and it is getting worse. America is sliding into madness, a phenomenon that Heinlein referred to as “the crazy years.”
Much of this post is the research I did for a paper that I wrote for a public health class I am taking for my BSN. It was interesting enough to me that I put some of the things that are inappropriate for school into a post, and the result is what you see here. This isn’t even a rough draft of the paper, just disjointed facts that are part of my process.
The police didn’t save lives in Uvalde, because that isn’t their job. For those of us who are part of the Second Amendment family, that comes as no surprise. Ever since the riots of 2020, the rest of the US has been learning to face that reality.
The “thin blue line” does not, as cops would have you believe, separate society from violent chaos. The US Supreme Court has made it clear that law enforcement agencies are not required to provide protection to the citizens who are forced to pay the police for their “services.”
Still, we are told there is a “social contract” between the government on one hand, and tax paying citizens on the other. By the very nature of being a contract, we are led to believe that this is a two-way street. The taxpayers are required to submit to a virtual government monopoly on force and pay taxes.
In return, we are told, government agents will provide services. In the case of police agencies, these services are summed up by the phrase “to protect and serve,” a motto that is printed on the sides of police vehicles.
But what happens when those police agencies don’t protect and serve? That is, what happens when one party in this alleged social contract doesn’t keep up its end of the bargain? The Supreme court says, “not a damned thing.”
In the cases DeShaney vs. Winnebago and Town of Castle Rock vs. Gonzales, the supreme court ruled that police agencies are not obligated to provide protection to citizens. In other words, police are well within their rights to pick and choose when to intervene to protect the lives and property of others, even when a threat is apparent. This reality does belie the often-made claim, however, that police agencies deserve the tax money and obedience of local citizens because the agencies “keep us safe.”
As the public is discovering, we are our own protection. In school shooting after school shooting, it has been illustrated that the police are not going to do shit when someone is slaughtering children. That isn’t why the police are there.
3 percent dealing with the public, providing assistance or information, and attending community meetings.
The police rarely solve crimes. Only 11% of crimes in the US result in an arrest, and only 1 in 4 arrests result in prosecution and conviction. It’s called clearance rate, and shows that most crimes go unpunished. (pdf alert)
As you can see, police do a good job solving murders, which results in an 81% arrest rate. They do a horrible job with all other crime.
They don’t prevent crime. They don’t solve many crimes. They don’t protect you when you are a victim. This is why I won’t give up my guns. Ever.
Here is a composite timeline of the Uvalde shooting. I am including a map for reference. I am sure that there are things that happened that aren’t on this timeline, but I tried only to include things I could confirm the time for. :
September 2021, the shooter asked his sister to help him buy a gun and she “flatly refused.”
February 28: The shooter was in a group chat on Instagram and there was a discussion of the suspect wanting to be a “school shooter.”
March 14,the shooter wrote in an Instagram post, “10 more days.” Another user replied, “‘are you going to shoot up a school or something?’ The shooter replied, ‘no and stop asking dumb questions and you’ll see.'”
May 17 the shooter legally purchased the first AR platform rifle at a local federal firearms licensee.
May 18 The shooter also purchased 375 rounds of ammunition
May 20,the shooter legally purchased the second AR platform rifle at a local federal firearms licensee.
May 24, the day of the shooting:
Sometime after 11 a.m. — Ramos shoots his grandmother in the face, according to Texas Public Safety Director Steve McCraw. Gilbert Gallegos, 82, who lives across the street from Ramos and his grandmother, heard a shot as he was in his yard. He runs to the front and sees Ramos speed away in a pickup truck
11:27 a.m. Authorities know from video that the exterior door, which the shooter later entered to get inside the school, was “propped open by a teacher.” The door was supposed to be locked and wasn’t supposed to be open.
11:28 a.m. The suspect vehicle crashed into a ditch. The teacher ran to room 132 to retrieve a phone. The same teacher walked back to the exit door, which remained open.
Two males at a nearby funeral home heard the crash and went to the crash scene. When they arrived at the crash scene, they saw a man with a gun exit the passenger side of the car with a backpack. They immediately began running.
Ramos began shooting at them but did not hit them. One of the males fell when he was running. Both males returned to the funeral home. Video showed a teacher reemerged from inside the school, panicked, and called 911.
11:30 a.m. A 911 call came in that there was a crash and a man with a gun.
11:31 a.m. The suspect reached the last row of vehicles in the school parking lot. He began shooting at the school while patrol vehicles got to the nearby funeral home. Multiple shots were fired outside the school. The patrol car accelerated and drove by the shooter and left the camera view.
11:32 a.m. Multiple shots were fired at the school.
11:33 a.m. The suspect entered the school at the door and began shooting into room 111 or 112. It was not possible to determine from the video angle which classroom he first fired into. He shot at least 100 rounds at that time, based on the audio evidence.
11:35 a.m. Three police officers with the Uvalde Police Department entered the same door as the suspect entered. They were later followed by another four-person team of Uvalde police officers and a deputy sheriff. Thus, there were at that point seven officers on the scene. The three initial police officers arrived and went to the door, but the door was closed. At least one officer received grazing wounds from the suspect.
11:37 a.m. There was more gunfire. Another 16 rounds were fired at 11:37, 11:38, 11:40, and 11:44.
11:43 a.m. The school posts on Facebook that the school is under lockdown, and then emails parents.
11:51 a.m. The police have been inside of the building for 15 minutes.
11:51 a.m. A police sergeant and state law enforcement agents start to arrive.
11:54 a.m. People are gathering outside the school. Tension is building between parents and police.
11:56 a.m. Parents are begging cops to do something. “Our kids, that’s what we’re worried about,” one mother can be heard saying on a livestreamed video. She adds, “Our kids are there, man! My son’s right there!”
11:58 a.m. A police officer pushes a man who is making a phone call outside the school, yelling at the people gathering to move across the street. “Six-year-old kids in there, they don’t know how to defend themselves from a shooter!” yells one person.
12:03 p.m. Officers continued to arrive in the hallway. There were as many as 19 officers in that hallway. At this time, a child in room 112 called 911 and spoke to a dispatcher for 1 minute and 23 seconds. She identified herself, but police have not released her name. The caller whispered that she was in room 112.
12:05 p.m. Some students and staff members who had been locked down in the cafeteria on the other side of the school are able to escape the school and flee. The police have been in the building for 30 minutes.
12:06 p.m. Some students in another classroom escape through a window.
12:09 p.m. A helicopter is now flying above the school, and people continue gathering on the streets in the area of the school.
12:10 p.m. The child from room 112 called back, and advised that multiple people in room 112 were dead.
12:11 p.m. A police officer with a megaphone announces to the crowd outside that “When the kids get moved, we’re going to move them to the back of the funeral home,” referring to Hillcrest Memorial Funeral Home across the street. “That’s where we want y’all waiting at,” he says.
12:13 p.m. There was third 911 call from the child inside the school.
12:15 p.m. Border Patrol Tactical team members arrive along with ballistic shields.
12:16 p.m. Another child called 911 and told a dispatcher that 8-9 students were alive inside classroom 112.
12:17 p.m. The school district posts on Facebook that there is an active shooter at the school and asks people to stay away.
12:19 p.m. Another person, this one in room 111, called 911. The person hung up when a student told her to hang up.
12:20 p.m. The police have been inside of the building for 45 minutes.
12:21 p.m. The suspect fired again, at least three shots. Dispatchers heard those shots over a 911 call that was in progress. Law enforcement moved down the hallway.
12:26 p.m. Many students are seen walking out of the school on the other side in a livestreamed video. The man recording recognizes one of the children. “Tell your mom hi. Tell her you’re OK,” he says.
12:30 p.m. The school district posts on Facebook that students who made it out of the school are being taken to an auditorium at the high school on the other side of town. The Border Patrol Tactical team has been on the scene for 15 minutes.
12:35 p.m. The police have been inside of the building for one hour.
12:36 p.m. Another 911 call came in that lasted 21 seconds. The caller, a student child, called back several seconds later. The child was told to stay on the line but be very quiet, and she said, ‘He shot the door.’
12:40 p.m. The school district edits its post on Facebook to say that the students are being taken to a civic center downtown instead of the high school to reunite with their guardians.
12:41 p.m. People continue to gather up and down the two roads that lead to school entrances.
12:42 p.m. An officer carrying a shield is seen running toward the building.
12:43 p.m. A child called 911 and asked dispatchers to ‘please send the police now.’
12:45 p.m. A man is filming the scene from outside of the school. “I’ve seen like 20 parents, maybe more, crying,” he says. “Wanting to know what’s happening to their kids. Because there’s still kids in there. And then, parents see that there’s ambulances taking the beds in.” The Border Patrol Tactical team has been on the scene for 30 minutes.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1529800986377723904
12:46 p.m. The caller said she could hear the police.
12:47 p.m. The child from 12:43 called again, begging for police to come rescue them.
12:50 p.m. Law enforcement officers breached the door using keys that they were able to get from the janitor. Both doors were locked when officers arrived. They enter the classroom and fire 27 times, killing the gunman. The sound of shots being fired could be heard over the phone. This happened 75 minutes after the police entered the building and 35 minutes after the Border Patrol SWAT team arrived.
12:51 p.m. The girl in room 112 is still on the phone with 911. Officers can be heard moving children out of the classroom, including her. When the call ends, she is outside.
As you look at this timeline, note that the police knew that there were children still alive in the classroom, because they were speaking with them on the telephone. The first seven officers were outside of the room where the shooter and the majority of the victims were located at 11:35. They were on the phone with some of those children from 12:03 throughout the rest of the incident, but cops still waited until 12:50 before entering the classroom. The first excuse was they were under fire. Then it became “we didn’t have the keys.” Once that excuse didn’t work, it became “we thought they were all dead.” It appears as though they will make the chief of the school district’s police department the scapegoat.
