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“Feds Prosecuting Tree-Trimmer for Unintentionally Bruising Herons”

First they came for the Hispanic tree trimmers

My guess?  This guy is a fully documented citizen.  Otherwise, instead of looking at jail time for unintentionally bruising some Heron as a subcontractor for the US Govt., he’d be whisked away to some welfare office, signed up for all sorts of freebies, then enrolled in some college at in-state tuition rates, with government fellowships paying the rest of his way.

Because these bureaucrats aren’t looking out for Herons. They’re looking for ways to dispirit workers and encourage welfare, all the better to crash the system that they seek to fundamentally transform.  We are at that point.  This is — and has been — a coup. And nothing makes that more obvious than the sneering of progressives and even many “pragmatic” GOP boosters who dismiss the very idea as the conspiratorial rantings of fringe racists wrapping themselves in the flag and tri-cornered hats when what they should be doing is wearing sheets and a Kleagle hood.

I remember being told, about the time of my unceremonious rejection from polite “conservative” company, that I used to be one of the smart and “thoughtful” conservative / libertarian (I prefer classical liberal or constitutional conservative) bloggers; but then I went and started getting all Visigothy and seeing in Obama’s past troubling signs that not only was he a hardcore movement radical, but that he’d been groomed for this particular job at this particular moment in time.  In fact, so important was his ascension that the progressives even turned on fellow-radical Hillary Clinton, who also had historicity on her side, but who carried a bit of baggage that was more widely known than that of Obama, himself a kind of empty slate onto which was mapped for public consumption a fictional creation, a manufactured candidate, an intellectual puppet of (at least partly) Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, Alinsky, Cloward-Piven, and the radical chic pan-Arab Muslim movement — in short,  a test of nearly 40-years of strategy re-adjustment by the New Left who had rejected outward socialist talking points and had taken over the Democratic Party by way of speaking in the parlance of capitalism and using the familiar buzzwords of equality and tolerance (having first inverted their meanings) in order to fool an electorate groomed to promote an ethnic minority as president.

All of which was, as an observation based on Obama’s history,  unhelpful — and was likely to turn off the very same dupes who’d voted for him having first been duped into doing so.  Educating them wasn’t the answer; pretending that they’d made a legitimate choice with whom we were eager to work, and whom we were eager to see succeed, was the early, and entirely wrongheaded, strategy.  So I went from slayer of progressives and an important voice on the right to a pariah, a pseudo-intellectual, violent, unprincipled danger to the sober rejection of garden-variety liberal Democrat policies.

Yet here we are, hundreds of executive orders later, in the midst of the most corrupt Administration in history, nearing the point where the center will not hold — and only now are some of the pragmatists beginning to figure out what’s going on.  The GOP establishment, whose club members saw in Obama’s victory the end to the era of Reagan, are seeking to cash in and then cash out.  Their power remains secure so long as they control the party apparatus, and whether they take control of the majority or not is largely about controlling committees and not about representing their party base or even their constituencies, to whom they lie and lie and lie to get re-elected.  This is why they fight constitutionalists far more vehemently than they do Democrats.

If we don’t find a way to galvanize into a powerful force, we risk dying the death of a thousand cuts.  Individual acts of persecution — like that of a heavyhanded government who won’t arrest Louis Lerner for an horrific abrogation of duty but will happily arrest a tree trimmer for an accident involving birds as a way to assert their reach and authority, and intimidate industry — create the climate of fear that renders many citizens timorous.

But we need to remember: this is OUR government.  Politicians serve at OUR pleasure.  And it’s long past time to force a reversal of course, lest we watch the entirety of the republic crumble.  As was the plan of the left all along.

Obama is a transnational progressive Marxist.  He despises the US and its Constitution.  And he’s surrounded himself by those suckled on that same poisonous academic teat that gave our “intellectuals” over to the ideas of Marcuse, Gramsci, Said, the gender feminists, the queer theorists, and every other grievance group whose purpose was to narrativize collectivity and delegitimate individual sovereignty, punishing heretics and shaming those it needed silenced with a PC culture that is so overwrought that deaf children have been asked to change their names if signing their names means making the finger shape of a gun.

We are lost.  Not individually but rather collectively.  And that’s because we’ve been made to feel that as individuals, we are easy targets, and so it’s easier to keep our heads down and go about our business than it is risk organizing and having the IRS, or EPA, or Justice Department, or NSA, molest us, or put us on some list somewhere.

What Reagan taught us is that we are the majority.  And when I first envisioned the outlaw movement, one of the arguments I made is that there are millions of old-school Democrats who still believe in free speech, capitalism, the Protestant work ethic, and individual freedom — and that the progressives offer them none of that.

Which is why promoting Romney turned out so poorly, and why promoting Bush or Christie is likely to end the same way.  People are desirous of a real choice.  And only once they have one — and realize that, should a constitutionalist candidate run and lose, they’ve been defeated by those who are voting themselves other people’s money and, by extension, other people’s liberty — will they begin to see more clearly the dire straits we face as a free republic and a free people.

At which point it may already be too late to save the country.  Meaning, we’ll simply have to rebuild it from the ash heap.

We are in the midst of a revolution.  It’s time we started acting like it.  Or at least, presenting the argument in such a way that “reasonable people” may interpret our predicament as such.

(h/t nr)

 

 

70 Replies to ““Feds Prosecuting Tree-Trimmer for Unintentionally Bruising Herons””

  1. happyfeet says:

    Andrew Joseph Stack the third was like a sheep who left the herd

    a rebel sheep with wings of steel

    the fascists brought him not to heel

    on wings of eagles this sheep he flew

    and struck a blow for me and you

    more of his kind this nation wants

    cronuts to rise from the croissants

  2. sdferr says:

    So far complete is the coup-d’regime that even our friends will admonish us when we seek to remind our fellow citizens that their own Constitutional system contains a direct remedy for the despotic acts and faithlessness to oath we witness committed by our Executive every single day of his misrule: Impeachment.

    “Oh no,” say they, “don’t speak that word. It’s too much.”

    It’s too much.

    Don’t speak. Don’t look. Don’t think. Wouldn’t be prudent.

  3. McGehee says:

    The Romans had a mechanism for dealing with tyrants who were too tyrannical. It’s how they got rid of Caligula and Nero.

  4. sdferr says:

    Yet no mechanism for restraining themselves prior to the loss of their republic to tyranny in the first instance. And we, like the Romans, have set insufficient guards against ourselves.

    The coup of which we speak, the loss of our republic, occurs not in the acts of a tyrant or many tyrants even, but in the failure of ourselves to keep our regime in mind, intact in its wholesomeness. We people have to shoulder the blame.

  5. Ernst Schreiber says:

    You forgot the link to that book about how you can’t get through your day without breaking three federal laws. Then somebody needs to quote that Atlas Shrugged passage where the guy tells the other guy that they don’t want people to be law abiding, because where’s the fun in that for the rulers?

  6. McGehee says:

    Your point leads to an argument over whether impeachment should be a necessary resort, were we vigilant enough to avoid electing scoundrels.

    My point was that if those entrusted with power under our Constitution don’t do their duty, they won’t like the measures that may be taken then, any better than what they’re expected to do now.

  7. Ernst Schreiber says:

    The Romans had a mechanism for dealing with tyrants who were too tyrannical. It’s how they got rid of Caligula and Nero.

    Actually, they didn’t in point of fact. Although that run of barracks emperors they had in the middle of the third century may make it seem as though they did.

  8. sdferr says:

    Fill me in McG? A necessary resort as though it need not be included in the delegated powers in the first instance, since the first instance seems to me to necessarily imply the possibility of fraud or simple mistake? In which case, there can’t be a “vigilant enough” at any time or under any possible circumstance.

    On the other hand, though I’m vague in my own recollection of the actual manner of the destruction of both Caligula and Nero, doesn’t each of those (manners) amount more or less to the Commonwealth of Virginia’s motto (and John Wilkes Booth’s murderous declaration ) sic semper tyrannis? Which motto I had thought the very idea of impeachment was designed to regularize, taking the decision out of the hands of a Booth, an Oswald or whomever may choose, be the choice true or false, just or malign?

  9. bgbear says:

    Obama and gang are taking advantage of two “flaws” in the system.
    First, that when it comes to following the constitution they are on the honor system and have no honor. Second, they know they will out of office by the time justice can catch up with them and by then the country will just want to move on.

  10. dicentra says:

    Black-Crowned Night Herons are about as endangered as Mallards and Canada Geese, which is to say, not at all, because they live damned near everywhere on the planet.

    Please Mr. Jesus send that meteor as soon as possible plzkthx.

  11. dicentra says:

    pretending that they’d made a legitimate choice with whom we were eager to work, and whom we were eager to see succeed, was the early, and entirely wrongheaded, strategy. So I went from slayer of progressives and an important voice on the right to a pariah, a pseudo-intellectual, violent, unprincipled danger

    Tip o’ the halo from Winston Churchill, I’m sure.

  12. Ernst Schreiber says:

    The GOP establishment, whose club members saw in Obama’s victory the end to the era of Reagan, are seeking to cash in and then cash out. Their power remains secure so long as they control the party apparatus, and whether they take control of the majority or not is largely about controlling committees and not about representing their party base or even their constituencies, to whom they lie and lie and lie to get re-elected. This is why they fight constitutionalists far more vehemently than they do Democrats.

    indeed

  13. Ernst Schreiber says:

    “If amnesty goes through, it can turn around a lot of the momentum that has been in our favor against us[.] We still need the base and the base needs to feel they’re getting something out of all this. To them it’s more than just having the majority. To them it’s the issues that are important.”

    Silly Hobbit

  14. Ernst Schreiber says:

    People are desirous of a real choice. And only once they have one — and realize that, should a constitutionalist candidate run and lose, they’ve been defeated by those who are voting themselves other people’s money and, by extension, other people’s liberty — will they begin to see more clearly the dire straits we face as a free republic and a free people.

    In Texas hope kindles?

  15. angstlee says:

    More evidence that we in the Evil oil/gas industry must take seriously the prarie chicken that was just listed as threatened by the US Fish/Wildlife. If one of our sites “distresses” the birds, then we’re subject to huge fines and possible jail time.

  16. angstlee says:

    Yes, Ernst, here in Texas, Dewhurst was toppled and Dan Branch was not elected, so yes, there is a dim hope………..

  17. McGehee says:

    If the constitutional option for sic semper tyrannis is blocked, its historical forebear remains. Simply that.

    When they treat the sovereign people like a mob, they cannot fail to learn firsthand that mobs have no master.

  18. Drumwaster says:

    Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. — John F. Kennedy

  19. McGehee says:

    And a revolution can be as little as a change of party in power. America has had a lot of little revolutions that used to leave the would-be despots at loose ends.

    Then they co-opted the institutions, and then the Democrats, and now the Republicans.

    It’s as if they’re bound and determined to provoke violent revolution, even if they have to be on the wrong side of it.

  20. newrouter says:

    er cloward

  21. McGehee says:

    They floated the scent of a bounty on the breeze and now they’re surprised that the locusts have come before the crop was even planted.

  22. cranky-d says:

    Ants find the sugar –
    Rick Locke

  23. Ernst Schreiber says:

    More evidence that we in the Evil oil/gas industry must take seriously the prarie chicken that was just listed as threatened by the US Fish/Wildlife. If one of our sites “distresses” the birds, then we’re subject to huge fines and possible jail time.

    No reason Interior shouldn’t get in on Justice’s fun now, right?.

    “Operation Choke Point, a credit card fraud task force run by the Justice Department, was created to ‘choke out’ businesses the Obama administration finds objectionable, according to a congressional committee report obtained by The Washington Times. The administration is knowingly targeting these businesses, despite the fact they are legitimate, says a staff report released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.”

    Where’s HUAC when you need it?

  24. sdferr says:

    If the constitutional option for sic semper tyrannis is blocked, its historical forebear remains. Simply that.

    When they treat the sovereign people like a mob, they cannot fail to learn firsthand that mobs have no master.

    With this I cannot disagree, and therefore wholly concur.

    I do reflect in addition however, that glancing back at Thomas Hobbes’ establishment of the first of the modern natural rights (life), and with it, the basis of equality among men as a ground for our political order, was his reflection that men have in common — possibly of all things most in common — an abiding fear of violent death (or as I mentioned way back awhiles, that anyone can be killed while they sleep, and even indifferently for any cause).

    I’m not certain the use of this reflection of mine, save to point out that at the very front of our theory of government, that danger — a danger that any ruler may falsely presume himself to uniquely discern — belongs to us all, and seems to play a greater role as a condition of human life as such, and in this respect a role like no other human condition in our politics that I can see. Greater, apparently, than friendship, greater than love of whatever sort.

  25. palaeomerus says:

    “Where’s HUAC when you need it?”

    To day’s HUAC would be in charge of organizing the House of Representative’s Un-American Activities and proposing funding increases for them.

  26. McGehee says:

    The fear of violent death was a topic of reflection by one John Wolf in one of my published stories:

    Laws and customs don’t change the fact that every human interaction includes some tiny amount of fear. Mostly these days it’s fear of humiliation, but even that carries an even tinier amount of fear of violence; we wise apes can still see among our less-wise cousins that loss of status often means vulnerability to attack. It’s hard-wired in us. No matter how civilized we pretend to be, every word, every gesture, every change of expression revealed to another person is part of a constant, mutually predatory dance. The more subtle the danger, the more complicated the steps.

    I like to keep things simple.

    I wouldn’t accuse Wolf of ever having read Hobbes — I haven’t, except in excerpts — but any sufficiently motivated observer of one’s fellow man should have no trouble reaching the conclusion that nearly everything we do is ultimately predicated on the drive to avoid the risk of violent death.

    Wolf, of course, specializes in exploiting — and if need be thwarting — that drive…

  27. palaeomerus says:

    “Caligula and Nero”

    Caligula “crazy head-ache + make the actors screw for real + make war with Neptune” guy was the first emperor to be assassinated (as opposed to de facto emperor). As with most history, wild stories about him may or may not true. Praetoian Household and Senate collaborated with aims to restore the republic. That restore the republic thing did not occur.

    Nero was the “actor/poet who fiddled as the slums and markets burned down in the night + Cristians make great garden party torches + killed his own mother + castrated and married a guy who kind of looked like his dead wife Sabina, who by the way he may have kicked to death before giving her a massive funeral and proclaiming her a goddess” guy ” He was considered to have over favored the eastern reaches of the empire over Rome herself and to have been too concerned with putting on spectacles for the commoners. Again, wild stories by be exaggerations or posthumous calumny and nonsense. He received word that the Senate had proclaimed him a public enemy and sent armed men to smash his head. He went to hide and heard hoof beats in the distance and in despair tried to commit suicide with a dagger but ended up begging his secretary to kill him when he lacked the nerve. He was found bleeding out by people loyal to him, and efforts were made to save his life but they proved futile. As he passed he is supposed to have said ” Oh what an artist dies here in me.” He was the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, and upon his death a small war and the chaos of the year of the four emperor’s commenced.

  28. palaeomerus says:

    “that nearly everything we do is ultimately predicated on the drive to avoid the risk of violent death”

    Or intense personal shame and isolation.

  29. McGehee says:

    Palaeo, did you read the whole excerpt?

  30. sdferr says:

    Some of this deep founding stance of ours would account for the utter unintelligibility of the behavior of WWII Empire Japanese to the Americans: some of those were frequently enough willing to die for honor or something like honor at their own hands, a completely baffling phenomenon to us. So too, other more ancient peoples, I guess, whose politics were founded on entirely different grounds. Thinking through those other grounds isn’t our business, in the main — but a damn shame unto us when we fail to think through our own.

  31. palaeomerus says:

    I don’t think an instance of humiliation is quite the same thing as intense personal shame though.

    Humiliation is a trauma of sorts but intense personal shame is a continuous wound which refuses to heal and leads people to stop eating or sleeping or seek some idiotic concept of redemption and throw them selves on the enemies’ spears in the hopes it will cleanse them. It is in and of itself a form of destruction leaving walking dead seeking the peace of the grave or a chance to re-fight whatever broke them whenever a “chance” arises.

  32. palaeomerus says:

    I could see humiliations being used as a tool or method to induce intense personal shame in someone eventually. But the shame I’m talking about is where you condemn yourself and see no sense in survival or trying to pursue prosperity. It’s sort of the romantic’s notion of nihilism only it’s a product of a broken mind.

  33. happyfeet says:

    steve ballmer is a sad piece of shit dilettante who has trouble making friends i think

  34. newrouter says:

    you got some spare cash, go beat eric cantor. more fun than the lottery.

    http://davebratforcongress.com/

  35. happyfeet says:

    eric cantor is a boehner-fellating young gun

    they’re all the rage in republican circles

  36. newrouter says:

    eric likes chamber of commerce bag of dicks. the special sauce i think.

  37. happyfeet says:

    chamber boys like their bag of dicks to be fair trade and cuban-sourced

  38. newrouter says:

    the chamber of communists like salsa these days. the children’s war:

    https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=53850#comment-1083996

  39. happyfeet says:

    obama

    what a fucking embarrassment

    he’s turned this piece of shit country into an urchin-magnet

  40. happyfeet says:

    maybe we can exploit them for cheap labor

  41. newrouter says:

    that’s ok the kids won’t eat white potatoes per mooch o!

  42. happyfeet says:

    The bottom line is this is not a country what values human freedom, as the heron anecdote ably attests.

    July 4th is gonna come around and you failshit Americans will wax patriotic and jack off all over your bullshit flag again.

    Fireworks and pie and Randy Travis, if he’s sober.

    But you and me, we’ll know the truth.

  43. cranky-d says:

    So, you’re not an American? Color me surprised.

  44. newrouter says:

    you go pickachu!!11!!

  45. newrouter says:

    #feetsbefunny

  46. newrouter says:

    @hashtag for the stupid

  47. Mike LaRoche says:

    Randy Travis is still alive?

  48. happyfeet says:

    Billy Madison has never tried my mole

    which is delectable i will have you know

  49. bh says:

    The post and subsequent discussion of our fear of violent death was well worth a read though.

  50. happyfeet says:

    violent death has its pros and cons

    the cranberries make a powerful argument when they ask, plaintively, “do you have to let it linger”

    I left some songs in this guitar.

    Sing em good my friend.

  51. bh says:

    It’s funny to hear people contemplating the political consequences of the near-universal fear of death being accused of a knee-jerk jingoism.

    So we learn once more that subtlety works. Adults can simply spell out the words while slow children work through their ever more labored tantrums.

  52. happyfeet says:

    Mr. bh the important thing is the lil birdies didn’t die and they were never in fear of their little bird lives

    i saw a night heron once on a louisiana swamp tour

    i didn’t try to take a picture sometimes you just have to be in the moment

    when it’s just you a guide and a night heron on a swamp boat in louisiana

  53. geoffb says:

    I like to keep things simple.

    I did read the whole excerpt and found myself seeing the character Lorne Malvo in the TV show “Fargo” played by Billy Bob Thornton in there too.

  54. geoffb says:

    No intense personal shame is possible, nor actual honor to be found here.

    More’s the pity and the shame is ours as a nation to find a way, a process of purification to allow this shameful time to be put to rest.

  55. happyfeet says:

    camora is a purification ritual ohio native Mr. stephen reeder donaldson wrote about in his fictions

    i think he made that word up though

    chiaroscuro is another word he likes a lot but he stole that from english

  56. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Re: Caligula and Nero

    Caligula was assassinated by his peronal bodyguard for reasons that aren’t known. Or maybe they are, and I don’t remember, not having read either Suetonius or Tacitus in about ten years. The Senate talked about restoring the Republic, and while they were talking, the Praetorians found Claudius, acclaimed him Emperor, and that was that.

    Nero fled Rome before the Senate declared him a public enemy. That’s probably what encouraged them to do so.

    The only time tyrannical emperors got the sword was when their more enthusiastically thuggish underlings realized that they were about to get axed, and so struck first. Caracalla comes to mind. With the Barracks Emperors, assassination was the price of military failure.

  57. palaeomerus says:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-isnt-supreme-court-keeps-editing.html?hp&_r=0

    “WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice. The revisions include “truly substantive changes in factual statements and legal reasoning,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and the author of a new study examining the phenomenon.”

  58. guinspen says:

    “With a hocus-pocus, you’re in focus.

    It’s your lucky day.

    Simile, you’re on Candid Camorra!”

  59. cranky-d says:

    When the only tool you have is knee-jerk jingoism, …

  60. geoffb says:

    Re: palaeomerus says May 30, 2014 at 2:52 am

    So it’s “rule of what-law” all the way down.

  61. JP Kalishek says:

    I know a guy from Jalisco who recently went home for a visit (he is here legally btw). His relatives were commenting on how so many folks are being deported by the 0bama administration … one thing all these folks had in common? They had greencards. the illegals? not so many of them being sent home.

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