Norman, Correlate

Tam remarks on the Right-wing moonbattery of late.
We second the motion, with the affirmation that there's a whole lotta that going on now.

We have always seen and heard the moonbats on both sides of the political aisle, and made frequent sport of the most egregious examples on these very pages. We note for taxonomy and field recognition purposes that while both parties tend to relegate the most obnoxious mouth-breathers to anonymous internet postings, The Evil Party tends to elect them to jobs like Congress, governor, and mayor with a tedious predictability; while on the Stupid Party side, they are generally relegated to running talk shows and making YouTube videos.

When you hear people on the right making the same arguments as the left-wing moonbats, it isn't common sense that re-located off the bullseye and over to somewhere deep in left field.

Update your field guides accordingly.

Don't Be Those Guys

Kindly pay attention, folks.
Some stuff I know because I read...nearly everything. Always have.
Some stuff, because I've studied it intensely, either from necessity, or avid interest.
Some stuff I know because my analytical skills are pretty finely honed, and even more so doing it for a living.
And some stuff I know because I not only read about it, and practice analyzing it ever other day, but because I've been doing it for twenty-five-plus freaking years. M'kay?

You can't short-circuit that to get to the answer you want just because you, too, have a keyboard and an internet connection, no matter how much you wish it were otherwise.

I put out what I told people last week regarding corona virus.
And using the same informed judgement I did during two different Ebola outbreaks.
(Where, if I was doing random blind guessing, I had a 3/4ths of 1% chance - .0075 - of getting it exactly right, which I did.)
But the reaction of the Headless Chicken Posse in all three instances can best be summed up as follows:

"We sang a song and you didn't dance,
we played a dirge and you didn't mourn."

In short, some people are so deliberately contrary, owing to an inability to digest logic, that if they fell in a river and drowned, you should look for the body upstream.

So what?

Well, so this kind of happy horsesh*t:

 and any eleventy versions of it on the intarwebz. To Paraphrase Jayne Cobb's math:
"...bullsh*t, times bullsh*t, carry the bullshitsh*t...equals bullsh*t."
 

Two twats twittering about what they don't know they don't know, then forming opinions about things far beyond their paygrade is not the same things as wee little things like data, analysis, or reasoned conclusions. It's like getting your stock picks from two retarded kids based on how the windows of the respective companies taste when they're licking them.

So, once again, for the brighter lights out there:

1) All data from China is based on information received from one of the most managed and controlled infolie-formation sources on the planet.
The exact number of how many cases of corona virus, when and where they happened, and how many fatalities they have noted, from China, may be expressed with maximal accuracy as "a lot".

No further precision is possible.

Not by me. Not by you. Not by the CDC. Not by ABCNNBCBS, or the lesser minions of media fucktardation who are hard-pressed to discuss nuclear anything without pronouncing in "nuke-yuh-lar", let alone grasp the finer points of anything as scientific as freezing water to make an ice cube. You'd think you might have learned what utter morons most reporters and editors are by now (let's be serious, these are the kids who were too stupid to get into engineering, business, medicine, or legal graduate studies, which should have been a big clue). And sure as hell not by Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Dumber on sociopathic media. Fucktards gonna fucktard.

2) Blair Witch Project shaky-cam YouTube videos, with sensational build-ups, and breathless "I'm sitting here in my hotel room and I'm scared shitless" color commentary by Suzie Stupid whose visit to the Great Wall was interrupted this week tell you Jack and Shit about anything. It's noise and heat, but no light.

What you can say about this outbreak boils down to pretty much what I told you before:

1) There is an outbreak. It appears to be a corona virus.

2) The Chinese have known about it for at least a month-plus before they deigned to let anyone else in on the secret.

3) Anything they tell you about it now has been pre-digested, sanitized, altered, spun, folded, and mutilated beyond all recognition, and no one from the king to the village idiot can tell you the who, what, when, where, why, how, or how much, anywhere on the planet. You would get more information if they had released it via barks from Lassie, while you tried to interpret the statement from collie to English.

So srsly:  fuck off with telling or extrapolating anything from that steaming pile. You're trying to predict pony location and quantity based on a mound of horseshit.

4) The "quarantine" in China started after half the local population had self-evacuated. Unlike, say Liberia or the Congo, the number of Chinese who can afford international air fare is literally legion, as 30 countries and as many U.S. States can attest.

5) Pointing an IR FLIR at people's faces for 30 seconds, for a virus that can incubate for 2-14 days is like trying to stop a football team from scoring by putting all 11 defenders on the line of scrimmage, and then looking stupidly surprised when Team Virus lobs a 2 to 14 yard pass over their heads, and scores a touchdown every play.
This is the "genius" response of the CDC to the outbreak.
(cf.: Ebola 2014. Different presidents, same assholes in charge of the communicable disease chicken coop. SSDD.)

6) Yes, the Chinese admit to having bio-research facilities in Wuhan. Like cops and counterintelligence agencies, I'm not a big believer in coincidence, but beyond that, no one who says, knows, and no one who knows, is saying. So park the Speculation-Mobile in the Bat Cave (which is probably where this virus, like Ebola, came from originally too. But even that, nobody knows.)

7) If you get Ebola, somewhere between 6 out of 10 and 9 out of 10 times, you're going to die. That's only based on every outbreak of it since the 1970s.

7b) But, the experimental (because doing double-blind placebo testing is unethical to the same degree as Dr. Mengele's concentration camp science experiments) RSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine is 95+% effective against Ebola. Unlike ever before.

8) Corona virus, OTOH, will kill you between 3 and 5 times out of 100, not 10, by contrast.
That's bad - especially for the dead ones - but not planetary extinction bad, m'kay?
Now, look and find exactly nowhere where I said it's not a problem at all, then STFU.

8b) But there's no vaccine for it. Like always, and for most viruses.
(Hey, kids, good with chemistry, biology, and want to help mankind and make a great living? Medical school awaits!)

9) And, like influenza and other viruses (all of which are currently epidemic in the U.S., and will be until after Easter, when the sun comes out and people go outside instead of staying inside and coughing and slobbering their germs all over their entire families, co-workers, and fellow students), corona virus is much easier to catch than Ebola is.

10) Especially when it's had a two-month head start, and "control" measures best described as idiotic, bordering on moronic.

All of which means that since school started in September, you should have been washing your damned nasty hands frequently, particularly before you eat or drink anything, and should also stop touching your face. (The average person touches their face 250 times a day and touches surfaces and their cell phones 2000 to 5000 times a day). Gee, I wonder where the problem could be? And let's remember that youngsters don't just touch their faces, they go deep-mining for booger nuggets, sticking half their hands in their mouths, and their friends' mouths, and suck their thumbs.

What about handwashing? Take this as a reliable indicator: every touchscreen at 8 McDonald's locations in the UK tested postive for fecal bacteria (that would be sh*t, boys and girls). Which means people don't even wash their hands after they wipe their asses. Think about that when you grab a store or office door handle, shopping cart, or use an ATM.

Let me know when the penny drops.

And corona virus is smaller than fecal bacteria, and easier to transmit.

I repeat, yet again, wash your goddam filthy hands, you hairless baboons.
They don't beat this rule into doctors and nurses with a zeal usually reserved to Jesuit priests for nothing. It saves lives and prevents millions of infections every day.

Handwashing has saved more lives in hospitals than antibiotics and surgery, swear to God.
You could look it up.

Washing your hands, provided you have intact skin, obviates the need for gloves.
(Proper glove use requires handwashing before and after, in hospital protocols.)
But if you want to indulge your OCD, go for the gloves.
(And stop touching your face.)

An N95 mask in public situations, if the virus becomes a pandemic here, will be more than sufficient for most of the droplets you're worried about.

Now, for the half-informed Anonymous keyboard commandos in comments, in 3, 2...:

Yes, the N95 won't filter out viruses per se, which are far smaller in size than what it's intended to stop.
But, my little half-informed wingnuts, the virus isn't floating around free, it's contained in droplets from sneezes and coughs, and those vapor droplets are big enough to handily get trapped by the N95 filtration. If you're panicky, get an N100.

And you're free to wear goggles if you're an utter maroon, but unless you're standing toe-to-toe with someone sneezing and coughing, droplet to eye transmission among the general public is so low it can't be measured with existing instrumentation.

The CDC recommends eye pro for medical personnel, who routinely deal with hordes of the infectious all day long, and perform close proximity procedures, some of which generate even more aerosolized virus loads, whereas Joe Average does not. But no one's stopping you if you're hyper-spastic paranoid. At the end of the day, it's your ass, do as you like. And if you're caring for a sick relative with a suspicious infection, then, by all means, you have become "medical personnel", and the rules apply to you.

Corona virus is here. More of it is going to get here. It will kill between 3 and 5% of those infected.
Most will overwhelmingly be under 12, over 65, or immune-compromised (transplant patients, chemo patients, etc.).

And I remind you, yet again, that from 1/1/2019 through 12/31/2019, common garden variety influenza, just in the U.S., probably killed between 8000 and 20000 people, as it has annually since fucking ever, and no one lost their collective minds, nor did breathless around-the-clock live broadcasts of how many bodies hit the floor.

Learn a freaking lesson, would ya please? Breathless hyperventilating panic isn't going to help you, and it's pissing me off.

Now, you want to make sensible preparations, for any one of a dozen possible problems, in case this thing gets to full-blown pain-in-the-ass level?

Like having a few months' cash on hand in case you can't go to work for a month or three?
Like having food, water, and all -all!- the other necessities of life, to deal with three to six months of being self- (or mandatorily-) quarantined in your domicile?

YES!
Now you're talking.
Common sense.
Foresight.
Thoughtful planning.
Adapt-Improvise-Overcome.
And not being a headless chicken.
Which are only good for digestion, not cogitation.
ROWYBS

Nota bene, when Noah was charged to build an ark, he started collecting wood. AFAIK, he did not, for one example, make graphs to explain to his neighbors the dangers of a sudden flood.

None one gets out of here alive anyway.

And the CDC is right there, saying "More cowbell."

Proof that some unknown percentage of people will grasp none of what I said will follow along presently. I have every confidence that the 10% of those of you determined to be That Guy will demonstrate your lack of common sense in comments. Like always. More cowbell, geniuses.

For the Slow Learners

Bad idea in 1212 A.D. Bad idea now.

1. Stop. Playing. In. The. Street.

2. For the illiterate, or those too stupid to follow that advice, we link to a few salient blasts from the past hereabouts, as fodder for further thought.

Rules For Radicals
Lessons From The First Battle Of Show Asses Pt. I
Lessons From The First battle Of Show Asses Pt. II
Because Common Sense, Isn't

For those too stupid to pay attention to Option 1 or Option 2: Suture Self.

I'm open-minded, though.

I'm sure someone is sure this won't be Malheur, or Charlottesville, or worse.
Just from the law of averages, it has to work out one time, right?

So prove me wrong, and over-pessimistic:

A) Tell me what a public rally is intended to accomplish.
B) Explain why and how it's not just the only way to accomplish that, but also the best way.
C) Recite to the class all the times rallies have worked like that in recorded human history.

Attempt, but fail, to accomplish A-C, inclusive, in comments, and expect to cheerfully and rhetorically have the ever-loving shit kicked out of you, until I get tired of the exercise.
No, really.

"Stay away from crowds." - Ol' Remus
"When bad things happen, be somewhere else." - Commander Zero
"When you play in the toilet bowl, expect to be treated like a turd." - Aesop

Put The Bong Down, Man

Sweet Suffering Shiva.

"Yesterday, Mike Adams of Natural News alerted us to a directive signed four days ago on Oct. 3, 2019, by Marine Corps Brigadier General Daniel L. Shipley, ordering Marine Corps Reserve units to active duty “in support of” the United States’ civil authorities."

RTWT 

(FTR, 19th Ward is usually not a whackjob site, but someone got suckered on this one, bigtime. I yell because I care.)

DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE.
Say no to drugs, m'kay?

Pres. Trump signed an order authorizing calling up USMCR units for duty if requested by the state governor(s) involved, for duty in support of a declared disaster.

Y'know, like floods, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc.
The last time that happened, AFAIK, was during the Rodney King riots in L.A. in the 1990s.
As a rule, governors call up their Notional Guard units first and last, they don't call SecDef and ask for the Marines unless all hell has broken loose.

But, as anyone with an IQ higher than their shoe size, and/or 5 seconds' time in the actual military can tell by reading the order, no one has been called into active duty by it.

It's a m$#;%^f@;*%ing CONTINGENCY order, dumbass.

Anyone seriously peddling the twaddle that this is "to thwart a coup attempt", and that the entire Marine Corps Reserve has thereby been called into active duty, needs to untwist their tinfoil hat about 42 sizes, after they pull their head out of their fourth point of contact.

Which means Mike Adams (for Alex Jones, it already goes without saying) is an idiot, bucking for full jackass, as is anyone in the Headless Chicken Posse buying their bullshit, based on their recockulous misanalysis of a standard contingency order.

Oh, and I got a collect phone call from Heaven, at 8th and I St.:

Your move.
But for openers, I'd stop reading nonsense like that fairytale Natural News website and thinking it's hawking serious info.

Idiot Savants

It's long past time the idiot savants proposing more freedom restrictions, that have never worked, recalled from the education they blithely ignored, that the biggest school massacre (45 dead) in U.S. history wasn't accomplished with any sort of firearms, but rather with dynamite, nearly a hundred years ago, in Michigan, and at a time when it was completely legal to go down to the hardware store and purchase machine guns, cash, and carry out, in about two minutes. So much for easy access to guns being the problem, then or ever.

(Proof, if you desired such, that historical facts to Leftards are like kryptonite to Superman, as Larry Elder frequently notes.)

You'll never stop deranged lunatics from killing scads of people, because they can.
Especially not by banning one object in their arsenal. They'll poison people, with things they can pick by the side of the road; they'll set the buildings on fire ( Wait, geniusii, you thought you were going to ban fire...?!?! ), they'll run them over with trucks. Or whatever is to hand.
It's just what they do. Like rabid dogs, kill them where found. Recidivism drops to 0%, and you dissuade a legion of would-be copycats.

The two most recent shootings, about which there's an unwarranted fuss on absolute grounds, pale into utter insignificance beside the weekly and annual combined toll of death and destruction that is Chicongo, every day for years. With hardly a peep from anyone, let alone the Party Organ Media jackholes. And then there's the Baltimorons. Detroitistan. The District of Corruption. Atlanta. And on and on.

Overwhelmingly, the problem areas are run by totalitarian Democrats, from coast to coast, (and invariably, with the most draconian anti-gun laws they can pass, yet the worst crime in the nation, and they can't figure out the exact correlation), and we're still shoveling trainloads of tax money into the furnace for the idiotic LBJ boondoggles called "The Great Society" and "The War On Poverty".

They didn't work. They never could.
They just made things orders of magnitude worse.
Exactly as designed.

This is why Communism is a non-starter with a pragmatic people. And why they keep trying to import enough ignorant illiterate jackasses from Shitholias and Trashcanistans to overwhelm the common sense population demographically, and vote it into being.
Hot Tip, Leftards: We see the bunny up your sleeve.

It didn't make society great, poverty is still winning (because it's caused by stupid life choices, not lack of means, and to fix stupid, you need a bigger hammer, not a hammock), and crime in this country is >gasp!< a function of race, culture, and stupidity, not poverty.

Crime went down in the Depression. The real criminals had their heyday in the boom times of the Roaring Twenties, under Prohibition and easy virtue. The celebutard criminals of the Thirties were, then exactly as now, mainly oddballs and media creations to sell papers at flagging yellow-sheet rags.

Crime in this country amongst strictly whites is lower than it is in Belgium, and among non-Hispanic whites, it's lower than crime in Lichtenstein. (Common Core grads, look it up.) Barrios and ghetto 'hoods produce most of the crime in this country, most of the criminals, and most of the victims. Mass shooters in general, and criminal white people overall, are both as rare as hen's teeth in relative and absolute terms, and always have been.

The only thing "Diversity for its own sake" strengthens is that class, the prison industry, and the metastasized police state we all decry, from cop to judge, and everyone in between, including the indispensable instruments, the perps.

Look no farther than Europe to see who's doing all the criminaling, including making Stockholm the rape capital of Europe. That's not being done by Abba fans, but rather, by hordes of unnamed Worthy Oriental Gentlemen. You could look it up.

Nota bene: That is not, racist fucktards, saying that all black or brown people are therefore criminals.

It's saying until you address root causes in those communities of why they think crime is a winning idea, you won't fix it.
Poverty is not a root cause.
A culture of stupidity, lawlessness, and learned helplessness is.

A great start would be honesty about who and where the criminals really are, and making crime not pay off, primarily by making its pursuit, apprehension, and draconian punishment a greater priority than is subsidizing welfare queens and single mothers, and driving fathers out of the picture, exactly as the entire government was warned would happen when the topic came up, by an earnest young 1964 Democrat bureaucrat (before that condition involved ritual cerebral mutilation and lobotomization by the party and its apparatchiks) in the Department of Heath, Education, and Welfare named Daniel Patrick Moynihan (back when it wasn't considered knee-jerk Raaaacissssssss! to refer to them, even in print by Democrat leadership, as "negroes").

So much for income redistribution as a solution.

There is also no law, or group of laws you can pass to end crazy people.
But you can end the ones you catch, with a rope or bullet (or, if you're squeamish, a needle).
And you could start putting the violent ones and violence-prone back into lifelong institutionalized care, rather than roaming free-range crazy, while decent folks are forced to live behind barred windows and vault doors instead. If only for the novelty of the idea in the last two generations.
Letting them run free and loose hasn't worked for one minute either, and it's another failed Liberal Stupidity Policy (but I repeat myself) that needs to be abandoned, and with vigor.

And you can stop giving them fame beyond Ludicrous Levels, and stop analyzing and glorifying their last public act of insanity, under the guise of pushing more socialist totalitarianism down our throats, for our own good.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” - C.S. Lewis

And you could stop subsidizing fatherless welfare moms with seven children from six baby daddies tomorrow. Allow one set check amount for one child, and cut welfare to a fraction, where the amount is the same as number of out-of-wedlock births. I.e. someone with 2 fatherless bastards gets 1/2 that amount, someone with 3 gets 1/3rd, someone with 5 gets 1/5th, etc. In a generation, that number will be 2%, not 99%, of the target population.

Then, stop importing people here (legally and illegally) from Third World shitholes, and let Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of the capitalistic marketplace drive native employment and wages for actual, productive labor through the clouds. For those that will work, anyways; the rest are shiftless wastrels, for whom there should be a simple choice between unrelieved poverty, or chain gangs. But not so much as a dime of public largesse.

Income redistribution schemes are always corrosively idiotic, and lead to Somalia, Cuba, and Venezuela like gravity makes rocks fall off mountains. This is Econ 101 stuff.

Trying real Communism, Moar!, Harder!, Faster!, is going to get you gun violence like it's 1939. You don't want to open that ball, unless you have a death wish, on both a personal and a civilizational level.

And we have a Bill of Rights to warn the thoroughgoing morons in government (that would be ALL of them):

"You fucktards can't touch this!". Ever!

 

Democracy is a mob, always has been, and the Founders knew this in their bones.
We're a republic, not a democracy, and tinkering with the original blueprints has only fucked us harder and faster, and it gets worse every time they tinker with a successful original blueprint.

Persisting in the delusion that something needs monkeying with, by people 60-80 IQ points stupider than the original authors, gets you craptastic Hollywood movies, and the abomination that is our current Leviathan government.

But if you really want the guns, you're going to get them.


Bullets first.


Hand to God on that.

Call that toss in the air.
We'll be loading magazines.
MOLON LABE, bitchez.

Insane Clown Posse

 

 

So today, comes word from all over that because a bunch of douchenozzles have been popping up in 50 states, just like crop circles, dressed as evil clowns,

the Jackasses In Charge Of Everything (In Their Own Mind)

 have decided that Something Must Be Done.

Consequently school districts (usually monumental repositories of ninnies practicing  egregious assclownery in their own right), as well as some of the local law enforcement agencies, with a tenuous grasp of both the Constitution and their own state's penal code, have issued fatwas against people, particularly on any campus, from kindergarten to grad school, and dressed as clowns.

This has occasioned local students on college campuses, armed with numbers, flashlights, pepper spray, and the IQ of a mob, to set out on clown-hunting posses at the drop of so much as a whisper of someone with a large red nose in the same zip code.

This would be funny if it were a Hanna-Barbera cartoon production, and we were all still in grade school

but once we're talking about nominal (i.e. over the age of 18 years) adults, carrying weapons in public with a purpose, and on the prowl looking for people who have violated no criminal statutes, we have graduated past the stage of this being any kind of funny.

So, for the benefit of the legally-challenged, both in general, and in law enforcement, a few pointers:

IANAL, but
1) last I looked, there is nothing in either my state's penal code, local municipal ordinances, nor most schools' governing precepts, that prohibits dressing up like a clown in public.
2) You'd have to prove criminal intent, like trespassing or criminal mischief, to even have probable cause to apprehend any such.
3) The technical legal term in my state (CA) for carrying pepper spray and hunting for any such is assault.
Actually spraying a clown with it graduates to the more serious offense of battery.
Apprehending anyone for the offense of dressing like a clown in public is false imprisonment.
Moving them afterwards, so much as a whit, against their will, is kidnapping, and it is punishable as a federal criminal offense.
That's all before we get to such esoterica as vigilantism, and acting under false pretense or imaginary color of authority.

If someone, as a prank, is dressed as an evil clown, complete with plastic machete, you might, in some universe, be able to get as far as proving criminal mischief. If they're trespassing on private property, that would be actionable as well.

But some silly bastard is going to get beaten up, injured, or killed, by some group of self-appointed fucktards, or the local badged and sworn dimwits - to include the mall campus cops at Whattsamatta U., and then someone else is going to civil court, the hospital, the jail, and/or prison.

The definition of a prank (and this is a lifetime of class clownery talking here) is that
a) no one gets hurt, and
b) no actual damage is done.
So, yes, anyone dressing thusly at the moment is probably a jackass of the first order.
That being said, it's not a license to apprehend, harm, maim, or kill them for public stupidity.

What the current hysteria demonstrates says a lot more about people's mental deficiencies than it does about criminal conduct, and the last time I checked, the number of actual criminal acts committed by people dressed as clowns, was somewhere between zero, and single digits, throughout recorded history (excepting to the psyches of 4 year-olds at circuses).

If, OTOH, we're going to start pouncing on people acting like clowns, we'd have to haul off the entire government, from President to dog-catcher, 50% of law enforcement itself anytime since about 1980, and more than half of every campus, especially the nominal adult supervision of same, judging strictly by the evening news since Walter Cronkite was on it.

So cool your jets, folks. All you would-be clown hunters have fucked it up for everyone; everybody get out of the pool, now, before someone really gets hurt!

Hey, Monkeys! General Giap Sez "Hi!" - UPDATED

For the 0.01% (if that many) of the U.S. paying real attention to this, due to the utter ineptitude of the provocateurs to explain or elucidate any rationale for their actions, I note the following:

The arrest of the ringleader-monkeys at Malheur last week, and the death of one Mr. Finicum during same, seems to have the usual monkeys chattering and flinging poo in record-setting cacophony of rage.

Well, tough.

As the lone video has shown incontrovertibly, Finicum, at the wheel of the truck in question, fled a felony stop, presumably instigated by federal agents.
He did so at high speed, with no plan other than "Cheezit! The cops!" in the best manner of idiot perps in every episode of C.O.P.S., in every country they've visited.
It worked out for him about as you'd expect (the police catch something like 98.xxxx% of those who choose this brilliant ploy).
He came upon a blocking position set up by OSP. Who clearly knew their business, and had deployed their vehicles the real way (fishboned engine-forward) rather than the Hollywood-Smokey and the Bandit way (engines outward, empty trunks at the center pointed away).
The former stops a vehicle; the latter spins cars and makes a great cheeseball getaway for Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise every time. Tough luck for Finicum and Co.
He was either unable to come to a stop on the road, or thought, foolishly, he could plow through the snowbank on the left side, and go around the block. Almost nailing one guy at the roadblock, to within something between inches and a couple of feet, which always makes armed police officers with guns drawn a lot calmer - NOT.
Two or three feet of snow being what it is, this attempt failed as well.
He then, likely (at 10M:1 odds) absent any instructions to do so, elected to leap out of the truck, hands out, and start prancing around outside the vehicle.

To date, we don't know if he stumbled and tried to catch himself, reached for his jacket, or was clutching at the first (unjustified) gunshot. If it was the latter, we'll probably never know.
Based on the chain of unbridled stupidity for 20+ days by this bunch, I'm going with he made a foolish decision on his own. His actions that day alone, to this point, are those of a panicky foolish jacktard, at every opportunity.

For whatever reason, when you have a presumed felon, in flight from arrest, confronted by half a dozen armed officers, guns drawn, who makes a move towards heavy clothing and concealment, you get a hail of lead flying your way in a hurry.

Which he did, right in his carcass.

That the feds and state police did not, at that point, hose down the other occupants of the vehicle a la Bonnie and Clyde in their final moments alive disproves that this was intended to be an assassination. It was, as Hognose phrases it weekly at Weaponsman, simply a case of cops being cops, and crims being crims.

And group-effort Darwin Award, Second Class.

If, at any point at either Stop #1 or Stop #2, he had stopped, turned off the engine, tossed the keys out, and complied with instructions at that point, exactly like the other three folks in the truck, he'd be alive and eating creamed chipped beef on toast in the Portland federal lock-up now, and have a shot at freedom via jury nullification, rather than being on a slab looking forward to a soft padded coffin and a fine headstone.

If that reality crimps razor wire in your underpants, I humbly and sincerely urge you to get over it.

I'd be a sight happier if he was alive, as I suspect his family and friends would be, but some mistakes in life you only get to make one time.

Lessons that should be learned, in no particular rank or order:

1. Hanging around with jackholes who don't know what they're doing, and have no plan for doing it, and no intelligent way to get that message out to the greater public despite 20+ days of time to do so, will get you killed. Avoid those groups and situations, or update your estate planning.

2. When you instigate an armed takeover of nominally federal property, to cause a stink, don't act shocked and surprised when the clean-up crew arrives with both machineguns and handcuffs, and is happy to use either one of them on you, at their discretion, depending on how you behave when they tell you to surrender. This is how it works under Big Boy Rules, and if you really didn't know that, or expected anything else, you're far too stupid to be playing in this arena.

3. Occupying anything, unless you have a tactically sound position, and sufficient personnel and resources, is an Alamo, and you're Col Travis. The Malheur @$$clowns had neither the manpower, the resources, nor any sort of tactically defensible position. Go to Google Earth if you doubt me, and tell me how many men and what resources you'd need to position there to hold it against anything more ferocious than a troop of cub scouts with slingshots. (Frankly, putting a troop of cub scouts with slingshots there to hold it would have been much better guerrilla theatre for the occupiers, and made the feds look like true goons no matter what they did.)

4. Gallivanting around the countryside after the arrival of said feds is asininely stupid beyond words. There is NO excuse whatsoever for it which avails.

5. Having said that, if you're still that stupid, there's no excuse for putting all your command leadership in one vehicle, unaccompanied, and driving through what should be regarded as "enemy territory", without comms, route reconnaissance, a larger transport convoy, and a Quick Reaction Force. Yet again, having NONE of this in place (nor, evidently, even contemplated) shows this to be a bunch of amateur jackasses of the highest order, without any excuse whatsoever. There are only about 200,000 former PFCs and Spec4s with time in the sandbox over the last decade with more convoy common sense than that, some of them with no more education than a GED.

6. The lack of any forethought to what to do in this instance was also glaringly evident. No plan, no procedures, no escape and evasion thoughts, no nothing. WTF. Don't be those guys. Just a bunch of yahoos playing ding dong ditch with grizzly bears.

7. As a self-styled guerrilla, pissing off the entire surrounding community, to the point they boo and catcall you and tell you to GTFO, is probably not going to get you any longevity, no matter WHAT your nominal cause is. Since 40-80% of anyone just wants to be left alone to get on with their lives, you'll just turn up the heat on the kettle you're sitting in, and they'll start agitating for TPTB to take you out, or they'll do it themselves.

8. Having no control or way to vett those who join you is a great way to let the other side in on every level of your operations, introduce spies, agents provocateur, saboteurs, disinformationists, and so on. When they can tell outsiders that you've done something as stupid as #4 and #5 above pretty much insures you'll be needing #6, and ultimately, won't be around long to do much of anything. As the KKK found out when it turned out 2 out of 3 were federal CIs, and they were largely sued out of existence. Hint: There are no shortage of posers in the federal correctional system who'd sell their mothers to get out of prison, or on probation who want to never go back. They will be drawn to you like moths to a flame the minute you go active, and some of the brighter ones will find you far earlier.

9. So it's probably a better idea to a) vet your people before you do anything, and b) gain the support and trust of the or a community before you do anything. Trying to shortcut that leads to 20-50 years in prison, or dead, which is surprising to no one with an IQ above room temperature. Ask Che about that.
Jeebus crispies, the relevant texts and military doctrine for guerrilla warfare - and counter-guerrilla warfare - have been out for nearly a century; don't half-ass this.

10. If a mature appraisal of your chances in light of #1-9 leads you to determine that you can't take over an exposed, isolated, and utterly pointless cluster of Forest Service buildings in BFEgypt, maybe start looking at what you can accomplish.

11. Nota bene that doing things a la EarthFirst and fictional characters from Abbey's Monkeywrench Gang may be highly effective in some ways. They are (Duh!) also highly illegal, in a federal penitentiary sort of way, or a dead sort of way, just like they were for the SLA or the Weathermen. In the current environment, they will also get you on a terrorist hot sheet, and if you want to know how that works out, ask Osama bin Laden, or any 43 former AQ deputies who took a Hellfire up the ass. We (or They, if you prefer) have gotten pretty damned good at taking out the trash.

12. Looking at that, a mature appraisal might be that the thing to do now, while it's legal, is to organize, recruit, gather intelligence, train, build up logistics and infrastructure, while swaying more people to a more reasonable and far more constitutional viewpoint and material support of your outlook and efforts (wow, just like a military S-1/S-2/S-3/S-4/S-5 would! Who'd'a thunk??) and avoid direct confrontations until you're either too strong to stop, or desperate and have no other choices.
Option A looks like 1975 in Vietnam, Option B looks like Tet 1968. Choose wisely.

13. If you decide to go off half-assed and half-cocked anyways, despite the above,
"Have fun storming the castle!"

14. The rest of us will at least have the satisfaction of using you as object lessons, and for drawing out and observing the actions of Leviathan in response, because when you're serious and reasonably intelligent, that's what you do. Sorry if the laughter coming from the conference room hurts your pride and rubs salt into your wounds.

I expect one day there's going to be justified provocation, and the feds are going to bump into some serious people with some proficiency and a righteous case of Pissed Off. I'll bet they know that too.

But this wasn't that day.

I live in the Western U.S., and take it as an article of faith that the feds have glommed onto far too effing much of the lands hereabouts going back to statehood, in every state straddling or west of the Rockies. And I am no fan of large, overarching central government in any way, shape, or form. I don't even have much use for the statehouse or even city hall, most days.

That does not mean that every jackass who gives the finger to the feds is automatically my brother, or that I have to join every Children's Crusade of Retards who decides to go throw rocks at the federal bear, nor pledge to lay down my life for such fools.

Ponder that concept, and see if you can grasp it.

And when you ignore that, and the bear bites you or eats you, STFU, instead of BMWing about the injustice afterwards, as though everyone owes unquestioning allegiance to every dipshit with delusions of competence.

If and when I choose to sell my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor, it'll be on my terms, sold dear, and at a considerable profit. Not pissed away on some half-ass escapade manned by a chain of fools.

And BTW, if you want your entire side to all think exactly alike on this, what kind of individual liberty are you preaching?

Anyone, esp. the butthurt monkeys, may rage all you want in comments.
The brighter readers will probably be too busy applying #12, above, as will I.

UPDATE:
Apparently, the newest operative story is "Idiot! This was a peaceful non-violent protest!"
Really?

And these were a small representative sample, garnered in about 2 minutes on Google.

"Peaceful" protest? Oh please...
I've seen peaceful protests. So when some out there use those words, I'm here to tell you that they do not mean what they think they mean.

So mayhap, the next time someone sets out to do a "peaceful" unarmed protest, leave all the guns, and talk of using same, at home.
(Just from an optics point of view, leaving all the camo/tacticool/military garb wouldn't go amiss either. Try wearing day-glo bright colors, if you're really there all about the peaceful non-violent protesting.)

Protestors (and their apologists) can't have it both ways after this sh*t gets real.
You want a peaceful protest, leave the weaponry home. March around with signs. (Of course, doing it closer to a major media center than 300 miles away might be advisable at that point. Just saying.) And get ready for guys - and it'll be Federal mall cops, not the FBI -with pepper spray, tear gas, batons and handcuffs to come mop you up. Like they will. Like civil rights marchers getting firehosed in the '60s, you'll have made your point, (hopefully on camera where it might at least do some good) and suffered your lumps, and everyone gets to go home eventually.
You might hold the moral high ground, but at least the jail time won't include weapons enhancements at sentencing. And you'll at least have pointed out that such peaceful protests aren't listened to, effective, or worth the trouble. (One that worked on any level would be an object of some wonder.)
One gun comes along, and it's game on, for both sides.
It's a little late to call this a "peaceful" protest once guys toting long arms are walking patrol, and broadcast doing so on national news reports.

The Malheur crowd owns that, whether anyone else think they meant to or not. The medium is the message, and perception is reality.

If this is news anywhere, welcome to How It's Been since time beyond memory.

But congrats to the knuckleheads for enacting, in real time, the dopey sub-plot of country hicks going to war with Canada from an episode of The LeftWestWing. And living up to every expectation of half the country, beyond their wildest dreams, while making both the Feds in this case, and the Ferguson rioters of the recent past, look restrained and sensible, by contrast.

Two-fer.

The Dog That Does't Bark

For reference, it seems that a couple of ladies in the Alpine TX (Texas?! WTF?) area were recently roughed up by the minions of HopeyDopey and BigGov recently. And their neighbor noticed it.
And documented it.

So did another blog.
And the local TV news.
And the local newspaper.
And another newspaper has more here.

What was notable here was that as a condition of bail, the victim was required to recant all statements alleging federal agents' witnessed and documented misconduct. US. v. Lipsen bail conditions.

Which, as UCLA law professor and former SCOTUS clerk Eugene Volokh has noted in the WaPo, is not only blatantly unconstitutional knavery, it isn't even within artillery range of the boundaries of allowable bail conditions.

By all accounts, the DEA has raided the establishment in question some four times to date, and failed to find so much as one illegal seed of anything. When the neighbor was complaining, they raided and searched his house too. Then got a warrant for the search after they'd already done the raid.

A suspicious-minded person might be forgiven for wondering why the DEA and CBP keeps raiding a dry hole over and over, when narcotics traffic across the border in the Big Bend region is, by all accounts, wildly out of control. And for thinking that repeated attentions to someone who's obviously Not The Problem while ignoring the actual criminals, is a bit more than convenient coincidence. Or even for suspecting that perhaps some cartel payoffs and marketing expansion by certain feds might certainly be involved. But that would be unfair, because anecdotally, the CBP and DEA are at worst only 40-70% penetrated by bribe-taking thugs on cartel payrolls, so tarring all of them with that brush is just wrong. [/sarc]

They might even start researching what level of official black-robed assclownery it takes to impeach or simply remove a federal magistrate who would issue such unconstitutional bail requirements upon a presumably innocent person, and why anyone on the federal bench would issue after-the-fact CYA warrants to federal agents who obviously just violated the law to conduct an unwarranted raid in the first place. And they should.

But what you aren't getting is the sound from the dog that isn't barking:

Sean Hannity isn't outraged.
Sarah Palin has issued no comments.
And most important of all, The entire Headless Chicken Posse and the Greater Fucktard Bundy Army aren't marching to the sound of the guns, against actual documented clear-cut federal abuses of power.

Yup, incredible as it may seem, despite actual, verified, ongoing, egregious and repeated abuse of federal law enforcement powers, none of the brilliant band of ne'er-do-wells from Bonkerville  Bunkerville is saddling up to head to Alpine TX and speak any power to The Man.

The chairborne commandos of the Internet, the Imaginary "FreeFor" Army, can't seem to saddle up and toddle off to step in when there's a plethora of actual violations of federal law going on.
Maybe they're afraid that unlike the hapless BLM rodeo clowns, the DEA may, y'know, actually shoot them.
Maybe they got lost in Vegas on their way to the turnoff.
And maybe they're all hiding in the corner and soiling themselves.

The greater point being, if that mob of fat-assed loudmouth crazies are the band of "patriots" anyone is counting on to come to their assistance, well, if that's your plan, I have some magic beans you might try too, and the price is reasonable if you have a family cow to sell.
 
Craven Cliven Bundy had cows.
The Lipsens apparently have no cows.
So no Fucktard Army will come to rescue them.

So if you don't have cows, to purchase the dubious allegiance of hordes of village idiots, it probably helps to have the law actually on your side, and be ready to, as the saying goes out here in the West, "fork your own broncs", one way or the other.

Nota bene that the Lipsens, and their neighbor, didn't go on YouTube and call for a jihad to hang all federal agents.
They went to the newspaper, the TV station, and the Internet, and stated the documented facts of the case.
They didn't allege that the world is upside down, and the feds have no jurisdiction over sovereign citizens.
They documented their actual violations of black-letter written and settled Constitutional law.

Bundy continues as a laughingstock.
The Lipsens will probably prevail at trial, and walk away with punitive damages in their pocket to boot, eventually.

Amazing how not acting like a bunch of lunatics, or depending on same, gets such a better response all the way around, i'n'it?

Why The Monkeys Rage

Low Information Jackholes: case in point

Jim Klein said...

You're hopeless on the big issue until you offer a full retraction, but maybe you'll share with your readers a more accurate rendition of the legal aspects of the land.

Ever hear of the Statute of Frauds? It's more than 300 years old. Because of that, we KNOW that Bundy was not a tenant as you wrote. You cannot produce a clear document spelling out that tenancy; therefore according to Law, it does not exist.

With regard to the title of the physical land, it belongs to either the US or Nevada. I don't know and it doesn't matter. Bundy had an estate in the grazing rights superior to either. How do we know this? Because nobody had claimed those rights prior to his ancestors and nobody made a timely claim that those rights are anyone's but his.

This is what it MEANS to create an estate in something; it's what property IS. Absent a State statute to the contrary, an estate is created just like that...one takes something without value and creates something of value. The created value is the creator's property. The fact that there is no specific statute addressing estates in grazing rights, doesn't mean that they can't exist. That would be like saying computers don't exist because the government never explicitly granted their existence. And in the case at hand, no statute to the contrary exists.

So the grazing rights WERE his and his family's all along. Now that may render the charging of fees and so forth an illegal taking in the first place, but that's a rather separate issue.

In fairness, if the fed offered value as compensation for the SPECIFIC taking of those grazing rights, then at least they'd be in accordance with the Fifth Amendment, with the question of whether or not that compensation was "just," a matter for civil procedures. I don't know and I doubt you do either, and the compensation would have to CLEARLY note that the money was compensation for the exact property of the grazing rights in the land. Otherwise, the Statute of Frauds applies and the compensation was for something else.

And even if every single element of the Law were against him--which they're not, since they're for him--it still wouldn't justify strafing and napalming. I'll let you figure out why, and maybe that two minutes of thinking will motivate you to do the right thing, and fully retract.

April 27, 2014 at 12:21 PM

Sorry Jim, but the big issue IS the legal aspects of the land.

That is what makes Bundy a thief, in the same aspect the difference between teller and bank robber is which end of the gun you're standing on.

The land is where Bundy was never more than a tenant, having leased the land in question for grazing without a peep for decades himself, exactly as his father did beginning in 1954, long after that land first belonged to the U.S. government, up through 1992. One pays for that which is not his, and Bundy and his ancestors paid for federal leases on land they never purchased outright, because they never even lived there before 1948, and the BLM had jurisdiction over it since 1946. Whoops.

They did this under the auspices of the Bureau of Land Management in 1946, successor to the US Grazing Service in 1939, which arose out of the General Land Office going back to 1812, 36 years before the land in question was acquired by the United States Government. So clearly, the value of the land and the rights to graze on it were not valueless, and seen as having value by the US government some great number of decades before Bundy was in the picture, in fact before he was even born. Looking no farther than Wikipedia:

The Bundy family purchased their farm outside of Bunkerville in 1948; the farm would serve as headquarters and base property for their ranching operation, which began in 1954, on federal land. They had moved to the area from Bundyville, Arizona (near Mount Trumbull). Cliven Bundy's father, David Bundy, was born in Bundyville in 1922.^[90] David Bundy had married Margaret Bodel Jensen of Bunkerville, and after starting a family in Arizona, they purchased their property outside of Bunkerville in 1948.^[44]
 

Cliven had argued in court that his "Mormon ancestors began working the land in the 1880s".^[91][92] This argument has basis in Cliven's maternal grandmother's ancestral line, but not among his paternal or other maternal lines. Cliven's mother's father, John Jensen, was born in Utah, but her mother, Abigail Christina Abbott, was born in the Bunkerville/Mesquite area. Abigail Christina Abbott's parents, both born in Utah, were among early settlers of Bunkerville/Mesquite in the 1880s; this includes lines from the Leavitt and Abbott families. These early families moved in and out of the area on several occasions, and polygamous marriages meant some wives and their families were kept in different towns. As such, there is no continuous line of family births and habitation in Bunkerville/Mesquite from Cliven Bundy to the few ancestors who settled the area.^[44]

In 1993, he ceased paying to renew his grazing lease, but without removing his cattle, making him a trespasser. He continued to do so, and admitted all of this in sworn depositions, despite losing two cases in federal district court in Las Vegas, under the insane contention that somehow a non-existant Nevada had title to lands that belonged to the federal government in perpetuity since Mexico signed it over in the Treaty Of Hidalgo in 1848. The Territory of Utah was formed shortly afterwards, and the Territory of Nevada  was formed out of that some years later. QED.

Now, did you want to actually talk about the land's history of ownership or were you just making chitchat?

Since you admit to agnosticism on this point, perhaps you should spend the four seconds it would take to look it up, since repeating seventh grade social studies, this time with a passing grade, is probably too much to ask. It's all readily available facts in the public domain.

The thing about creating an estate is that you actually have to have the title to the property in question. Bundy has nothing but chutzpah; the feds repeatedly demonstrated his claims to be nothing but tinfoil-hattery, and lacking any substance or standing, he lost both cases in about as long as they took the clerk of the court to type them up.

Notably, he had no problem paying the money for leases until 1993, when the owners of the land, the federal government, changed the conditions under which they would allow him to use it. The nerve of the actual owners trying to tell lessees what they may and may not do on property they don't own, and never have! Because they didn't tell him what he could do on his ranch, they told what he couldn't do on their land, and that was when Bundy decided to stop renewing his lease. This isn't government expansion, it's mere stinginess on Bundy's part that they were squeezing off the government teat he and his family have sucked on since at least 1954. Boo frickin' hoo.

Had you the wit to have read the ruling, the second case further demonstrated that Bundy's herd had now grown and spread out over not only the lands he ceased to lease, but onto new trespass lands upon which he'd never grazed, because he'd never leased them, nor had his family, ever, period.

This is all public record, so you're either illiterate, lazy, or deliberately being stupid. I could give odds upon which is most likely...

As for all that, you're right, it wouldn't legally justify strafing and napalming him.
Fortunately, I never argued that it did.

I also didn't argue that the multiple criminal counts against him including taking up arms in opposition to court orders would justify it in law either.

But that's what makes dealing with people like you so much fun. You don't read, you spew.
I did type that "in my humble opinion" the feds would be so justified, but you can't discern a private opinion from force of law, as evidenced by your own ramblings against common sense contrary to the law, which correspond exactly to Bundy's.

But the reality is, the feds are neither going to strafe Bundy's herd nor napalm his home with him in it. More's the pity.

But what they are likely to do is thrown a net over him in the very near future, so that he can continue his lunatic cries from somewhere inside a deep dark federal hole, while they round up his cows and sell them for Big Macs. And if he decides the lemon is worth the squeeze, he'll get killed resisting. Just like Dillinger, or Bonnie and Clyde. If not, he'll die broke and in prison. And either way, they'll probably seize the small ranch and whatever other real and personal property he does actually own, and then credit his bill against a generous fair market price, removing him and his heirs from that land in perpetuity.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

And during Round Two, I hope they similarly apprehend anyone who shows up to help him obstruct justice, and if they offer resistance, I hope they kill them too - mainly to save court costs and time.
You and the Lunatic Fringe can't tell the difference between thieving lunatics, and people with actual grievances and a legal leg to stand on. So when one of the latter comes along, other people won't be able to tell the difference between principled resistance to actual government tyranny, and a mob. People like you are the reason John Adams defended the British troops involved in the Boston Massacre, and got them acquitted.

"Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." - John Adams, 1770 Boston Massacre trial 

You're arguing against reality. Good luck with that tack.

And as you aren't even putting your ass on the line in the desert, you aren't even willing to back up your lunatic assertions with any risk to your own skin.

THAT is why I wish the feds would napalm Bundy and strafe his herd, because cases like this give idiot anarchists an excuse to agitate for a war. And we need more of that like we need a dose of the clap. It's the lunacy of Timothy McVeigh, except without even the semblance of personal commitment.

Like most of your ilk, you're content to chivvy others onwards, in this case a senile old thief, and the Headless Chicken Posse, but without having the personal honor to back it up with anything but your own desire to foment a riot.

There's a word for people like that, it rhymes with "Howard".

Some people have feds pointing guns at them because they're just terminal fuckwits.
That's Bundy to a "t". One doesn't suck at the federal teat every day of their life, and then have a coincidental epiphany on Big Government when the feds change the deal. Bundy's just a crook upset at his slice of the loot.

Call back when you find someone who isn't a multi-decade thief from the taxpayers, to the tune of millions of dollars, before you prop another lunatic up as some imaginary folk hero of the would-be revolution. And recognize that not everything the government does is absolutely evil, and not everyone who opposes them is worthy of even moral support, let alone fifteen minutes of notoriety.

Until then, you should probably get back under your bridge, before the feds drop a house on you.
Or at least stay where your sophistry passes for brilliance.

But hey, thanks for helping make my point about people who spew without knowing what they're talking about.

I'm sure the administration minions are really broken up about getting the 147 active members of the Lunatard Army frothing to support a crook like Bundy, and marginalizing and parodying themselves, for anyone with a brain, and all the world to watch. You're doing their job for them too.

Maybe spend your Sunday catching up on old news, cupcake.
And have a nice day.