The Biden administration plans on issuing an executive order banning the use of nicotine in tobacco products. I’m sure that will be a real crowd pleaser. At least we stopped fascist dictator Donald Trump, eh?
Florida established a Guardian program, which was supposed to allow teachers to undergo training so that they could be armed on school campus, to prevent mass shootings in school. At this time, 45 of Florida’s 67 counties have complied with the program, mostly because there is a lot of grant money tied to participating in the program, but the devil is in the details.
Although they can legally take part in the Guardian Program, no one is permitted to take part without the approval of both the sheriff and the superintendent of schools in their county. Instead of arming teachers, school districts have gone in one of two directions: armed, uniformed security guards, or having administrators as the only ones permitted to take part in the program. Principals, superintendents, and some county level office staff, or armed, uniformed security guards will be the only ones permitted to be armed under this program. Anyone who is taking part will get a free gun, ammo, training, and a stipend for having the extra certification. It is more of a slush fund for handing out money and power than it is a real program. Let’s take a look at some Florida counties and how they are handling the program:
Broward county hires armed, uniformed guards. To be eligible, the guard must have two years’ law enforcement or military experience. The position pays minimum wage. The county has problems filling the positions, due to tight requirements and low pay. I am sure that we can trust minimum wage employees to risk their lives by running into an armed conflict to save our kids.
Hernando countyhas hired 5 armed, uniformed security guards. No teachers. They have a total of 5 guardians, 23 deputy SROs, and 3 supervising deputies covering the 31 schools in Hernando county.
Lake county has decided to arm administrators only, and had received 30 applications from principals, vice principals, and other administrative level staff. Twenty administrative staff members were certified under the program. None of them were classroom teachers.
Osceola county is saving money by contracting the Guardian program to a private security company for armed, uniformed security guards, and using these security guards to replace armed police officers. Since the guards make significantly less money than cops, the school district is likely profiting from the program.
These are the only counties that I could find articles for online that specified who was a guardian. So why the emphasis on security guards, instead of simply arming teachers? My theory is that there are teachers on the left, and teachers on the right side of the spectrum. The left wing teachers have been all over the news lately, teaching tranny and homosexuality issues to the kids. The teachers on the right are the ones most likely to volunteer to be guardians. The left can’t stand the thought of armed conservatives, so there is no way that teachers will ever be armed.
The US Army is changing the paint scheme for its vehicles from desert tan to woodland green. What is odd about this is that the woodland green is usually the primer for a camouflage paint scheme.
Instead of using it as a primer color like the US Army in Europe has done. In this case, it appears like the woodland green will simply be the final color. Why?
There has been reportedly been a deal reached on gun control, with 10 republicans signing on to support it. I will wait for more details since the text hasn’t been written yet, but it doesn’t look too bad. The overwhelming sense I get is that this is mostly a mental health bill. One thing that is concerning, however, is that this law will include a red flag law.
I would feel better if there were a legal mechanism in place that allows for the punishment of those who abuse these legal processes in the form of what has become known as “lawfare.”
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.
