1500 dogs rescued from Wisconsin puppy mill

Wolfgang would welcome the outcome, but would want to bite the old owners.

The breeder lost his license but likely won't go to jail.

Animal rescues in Minnesota are welcoming dozens of beagles into their care this week from a biomedical research breeding facility in Wisconsin.

Late last month, Big Dog Ranch Rescue and The Center for a Humane Economy announced they bought the beagles for an undisclosed sum from Ridglan Farms near Madison.

The purchase followed a settlement with Wisconsin state regulators where Ridglan agreed to give up its breeder’s license in exchange for avoiding criminal charges.

"Researchers" - we all know what that means, don't we Dr. Fauci?  Odd isn't it that cruelty to animals often precedes cruelty to humans ...

And this part is infuriating: 

But [Special ProsecutorGruenke did find that Ridglan allowed non-veterinarians to perform eye operations on some animals without general anesthesia in violation of Wisconsin’s animal mistreatment law.

 

Wolfgang would definitely want to bite that SOB.

 

 

Interestingly, this is the first post tagged Blinded By Science where actual blinding by scientists was involved.

Earth Day

I would have something to say about this nonsense but The Silicon Graybeard has it pretty much covered.

Miguel, too. 

A message to commenter "DTWND" (and people who think like him

I recently posted The Lamps Are Going Out All Over America.  For the two of you (likely including DTWND), the reference was to the beginning of World War I, when the politicians realized that the New World that they had created was basically everyone standing is a room filled with gasoline waving lit matches around.  We know how that turned out.

My post was not inflammatory; it was sad. Nonetheless, reader DTWND left the following comment:

Those of you on the right are really, REALY [sic] hoping that something in the shooter’s background will tie him to the leftist, liberal side of politics. Meanwhile, you’ll continue to deny and obfuscate the truth that this was one of your own. Just like the group that planned to kidnap Michigan’s governor Whitmer; the guy that shot and killed the two Minnesota legislators: the folks that marched in Charlottesville: the shootings at the LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando: the ‘peaceful demonstators’ [sic] at the Capitol on January 6th; etc.

I find it telling that all the former presidents, Democrats and Republican, issued messages of condolence, condemnation of the event, and calls to end political violence, while the current president condemned the violence but also expressed the point that those of the left persuasion need to under scrutiny and should not be trusted.

As Mr Kirk had stated, “Prove me wrong.”

Here is the pertinent part of my original post, and my replied to Mr. DTWND:

Who would have figured 24 years ago that society would be destroyed from within?

[Memes deleted]

If you don't know the people who don't understand that sentence, then they are the ones who you need to not know. 

Not particularly well said, but perfectly understandable.  And so you clearly failed on multiple levels: 

1. It sure as shootin' looks like the shooter was a leftist freak.  The 72 hour rule applies here, which you either ignored, didn't know, or skated past because you were angry.
2. It "wasn't one of our own", it was exactly what you'd expect from a rabid Left baying for the blood of conservatives.  See #1, above.  Nicely done, getting two own goals from the same ball, though.
3. The group that was going to kidnap Governor Crazy Eyes was led by a FBI asset.  Sorry you're so behind on this, but not really surprised.
4. The rest is IQ-90 level Leftist boilerplate.  Ashley Babbit would reply but could not be reached for comment, as she was shot in the back by a Capitor Hill police officer on January 6.  Some of us are aware on the rules for the use of Deadly Force; you clearly are not, but thought this was a winning argument for "conservative violence".  Dumbass. 
5. Former Presidents call for the end of political violence?  Gosh, why might this be hard to believe?
    
   
6. Most significantly, you (a) did not reply to the content of my original post and (b) chose to try to insult me and hijack my site for your absurd political dogma.

Fine, then - let it be so.  DTWND, go away and don't come back.  We don't need your thoughts polluting this site. You're banned.  Go hang out with your leftie assassins.

Baseball and the steriod boys

Gerry leave a comment to ASM826's post about Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson becoming eligible for the Hall Of Fame:

So when will the Steroid boyz be allowed in?

Good question.  It brought to mind A-Rod, and a comment from Chris Lynch back in the day:

Every time A-Rod comes up to bat in Fenway, they should play Huey Lewis and the News "I want a new drug" ...

Well, okay then.  I dunno when he's be eligible, but if they induct him, this should be their bumper music.

Ring doorbell company fined millions of dollars for privacy violations

Well knock me over with a feather:

The FTC today announced it would be sending refunds totaling $5.6 million to Ring customers, paid from the Amazon subsidiary's coffers.

The windfall stems from allegations made by the US watchdog that folks could have been, and were, spied upon by cybercriminals and rogue Ring workers via their Ring home security cameras.

The regulator last year accused Ring of sloppy privacy protections that allowed the aforementioned spying to occur or potentially occur.

...
 

In the most egregious case, one employee went out of his way to view "thousands of video recordings belonging to at least 81 unique female users," according to the FTC. A coworker reported this behavior to her supervisor, who it's alleged initially said this snooping wasn't that strange until he realized the rogue employee was only reviewing videos of "pretty girls."

The fines work out to $50 per effected Ring customer.  Don't spend it all in one place.

Law Enforcement takes down major ransomware site

This operation is pretty impressive:

Notorious ransomware gang LockBit's website has been taken over by law enforcement authorities, who claim they have disrupted the group's operations and will soon reveal the extent of an operation against the group.

...

But Europol has reportedly taken credit for shutting down LockBit, so perhaps Operation Cronos really has disrupted the gang’s operations.

If that's the case, this action will be welcome. LockBit is prolific and vicious: we've reported it attacking a children's hospital, Infosys, sandwich chain Subway, and many other attacks.

Reportedly there have been multiple arrests, data has been found that is expected to lead to more arrests, and multiple crypto currency accounts have been seized.  Eleven countries worked together on this which is also impressive.

We will see how much impact this has but Lockbit is one of the biggest ransomware schemes out there.  

And this isn't the only one of these takedowns in the last couple of months.  Well done.

 

President's Day - Best and Worst Presidents

It's not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off, so sorry Abe and George, but we're taking it today.  But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let me offer up Borepatch's annual bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.

Top Five:

#5: Calvin Coolidge

Nothing To Report is a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.

#4. Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase).  He repealed Adam's noxious Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.

#3. Grover Cleveland. 

He didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the payoffs so common then and now.  He continually vetoed pork spending (including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later.  This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so high), on vetoing a farm relief bill: "Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character."

#2. Ronald Reagan

He at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above).  He would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash.  It also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which was (and hopefully still remains) sane.

#1. George Washington

Could have been King.  Wasn't.  Q.E.D.

Bottom Five:

#5. John Adams.

There's no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a blatant violation of the First Amendment.  It's a sad statement that the first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2.

#4. Woodrow Wilson.

Not only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque Sedition Act of 1918.  He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to foreign policy.  The fact that Progressives love him (and hate George W. Bush) says all you need to know about them.

#3 Lyndon Johnson.

An able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White House, and that says a lot.

#2. Franklin Roosevelt.

America's Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices, packing the Supreme Court, and transforming the country into a bunch of takers who would sell their votes for a trifle.  At least Mussolini met an honorable end.


#1. Abraham Lincoln.

There's no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to.  Lincoln saw to it that 10% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the Republic's history.  Along the way, he suspended Habeas Corpus, instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political opponents as he saw fit.  Needless to say, Progressives adore him.

So happy President's Day.  Thankfully, the recent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue haven't gotten this bad.  Yet.

When the White Hats are actually Black Hats

Not cool, dude:

An Atlanta tech company's former COO has pleaded guilty to a 2018 incident in which he deliberately launched online attacks on two hospitals, later citing the incidents in sales pitches.

Under a plea deal he signed last week, Vikas Singla, a former business leader at network security vendor Securolytics – a provider to healthcare institutions, among others – admitted that in September 2018 he rendered the Ascom phone system of Gwinnett Medical Center inoperable.

...

After all of the events had transpired, Securolytics began emailing potential clients regarding new business opportunities, citing the publicized attacks.

 Quis custodiet ipsoes custodes, indeed.

 

DoD Education Chief of Staff arrested for human trafficing

Well this isn't good:

The chief of staff for Department of Defense Education Activity schools in the U.S. was arrested last week during a two-day human trafficking operation in Coweta County, Georgia, according to local authorities.

Stephen Hovanic, 64, of Sharpsburg, Georgia, was arrested Nov. 15 in a sting that netted 25 additional suspects on charges related to prostitution as well as drugs, weapons and warrants, according to the Coweta County Sheriff’s Office and its Police to Citizen Portal website.

Ugh.

Our institutions are being run by the insane

The Catholic Church has more compassion for suicide victims than Science Fiction fandom does.  Guess why this is. 

Really, there is Church doctrine that backs this up.  The Asperger's types running modern intellectual organizations have yet to progress to this same level of enlightenment.

And it didn't use to be this way.  The Left was a powerful force in intellectual circles; so powerful, in fact, that they would kick intellectual sand in the faces of today's intellectual left.

You have to wonder how these people became so emotionally impoverished to do this.  You also have to wonder if they are proud of what they did.  Clearly, they do not listen to the great, old time Country Music. 

Go read both of the top links.  We are being ruled by intellectual and moral midgets.

A message to commeter Birdchaser

You will remember the header at the cop of the comment box: Remember your manners when you post.

You didn't.  Boy, howdy.

Your comment didn't make it through moderation because of your very disrespectful and profane attack on me.  This is my place, not yours.  I don't care that you feel really really strongly about Donald Trump.  Cathedra mea, regulae meae.

I've only banned one person in the 15 year run of this blog (my abusive ex-wife).  Congratulations - you're number two.

Go away and don't come back.  All comments from you will be nuked without being read.

Unplug your Ring cameras

And maybe your Alexa as well:

America's Federal Trade Commission has made Amazon a case study for every cautionary tale about how sloppily designed internet-of-things devices and associated services represent a risk to privacy – and made the cost of those actions, as alleged, a mere $30.8 million.

The regulator on Wednesday charged, via the US Dept of Justice, two Amazon outfits with various privacy snafus.

The e-tail giant’s Ring home security cam subsidiary was accused of “compromising its customers’ privacy by allowing any employee or contractor to access consumers’ private videos and by failing to implement basic privacy and security protections, enabling hackers to take control of consumers’ accounts, cameras, and videos.”

This report is absolutely damning.  Ring employees accessed thousands of videos - the report goes into detail about one employee looking at "Master Bedroom" camera videos of dozens of "pretty girls".

If you have any hesitation at all about unplugging (especially) internal house cameras, read the whole link.  You'll want to take a shower afterwards.

And Ring cameras in your bedroom?

[blink] [blink] [blink]

The report discusses how Amazon employees listened in on customers' children and retained the recordings in violation of the law.  Good grief.

My recommendation is to ditch all this spyware ASAP.  Ugh.

On the Internet nobody can tell if you're a dog

Politeness is a sign of dignity, not of subservience.

- Theodore Roosevelt 

But everybody can tell if you're an asshole.

Divemedic posted his stance on the vaccine: get it if you think it's right for you, don't get it if you don't think it's right for you.  A more sensible position is hard to imagine.

And then The Internet appeared in his comments section, with SumD00d telling him he was wrong (well, I think that's what he said because the comment was fairly incomprehensible; hey, it's The Internet, amirite?).

And while the comment was moderately incoherent, the attitude of the commenter was anything but.  Commenter "Hedge" is an asshole.  He may (or may not) be a dog with a keyboard but he is unmistakably an asshole with one.

Sigh.

I am very grateful indeed that the commenters here are almost always respectful and intelligent - and the commenters on the Dad Jokes are funny as hell.  I almost never need to step in to tell folks to settle down and mind their manners - maybe only 2 or 3 times in the 13 years I've been here.

People think wrong when they think that the Internet gives them anonymity.  It doesn't.  It gives pseudonymity, which is not at all the same thing.  If you post under a pseudonym (like Hedge and I both do), you still develop a reputation.  Quite frankly, you can't comment anonymously here, so anything you say in the comments here will add to (or in rare cases detract from) your reputation.

Divemedic certainly doesn't need me to fight his fights, that's not the point of this post.  I love  comments and the two way (or multiple way) discussions we have here.  But I'm not going to tolerate Internet Assholes like Hedge here.  Cathedra mea, regula meae - my place, my rules..  If you don't like it, don't stop by.  This really isn't very hard.

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy. 

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom Of Life 

The Ghosts of Waco look down and smile

White House to withdraw Chipman nomination to lead ATF. 

There will be all sorts of compost once the Powers That Be go Green

Over at Miguel's place (I think it was J.Kb - hey guys, can you get a tag to show who posted what there?) we get a link to ravings at the UK Guardian about a Climate Change Final Solution:

The insane people at The Guardian published an article that sets up the historical precedent for that.

Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet
Laying waste to land scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

His empire lasted a century and a half and eventually covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s surface. His murderous Mongol armies were responsible for the massacre of as many as 40 million people. Even today, his name remains a byword for brutality and terror. But boy, was Genghis green.

Genghis Khan, in fact, may have been not just the greatest warrior but the greatest eco-warrior of all time, according to a study by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Energy. It has concluded that the 13th-century Mongol leader’s bloody advance, laying waste to vast swaths of territory and wiping out entire civilisations en route, may have scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere – roughly the quantity of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption – by allowing previously populated and cultivated land to return to carbon-absorbing forest.

Killing 40 Million people for the planet.

This fiendishly clever plan of theres will indeed lead to a lower population because people like me will put .45 caliber holes in the foreheads of genocidal eco-fascists like the Guardian writers.  Think of all the compost!

Sheesh, it's like these people don't ever listen to what they say.  If they did, they might think something like "Hmm, am I sounding like a deranged, genocidal fascist?  Maybe we should focus on something incremental, like bike paths."  Instead, they'll talk themselves into my proposal, above.

And these morons probably think they're the smartest kids on the block.

And to show that this isn't a one-off, a "Black Swan", an oddball proposal - but rather a recurrent theme from the Genocidal Eco Left, here are some other genocidal Save The Planet sooper smaht plans that we've mocked here, dredged from the Borepatch archives:

Save The Planet - Starve The Children

Kill The Children For Mother Gaia

Friday Follies: KillThe Children For Mother Gaia Edition

Kill The Dog for Mother Gaia

Cut Health Care To Save Mother Gaia

Global Warming Causes Totalitarianism

Oh, and that last one is a hoot - the link there goes to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  This sort of genocidal eco fascism is entirely mainstream in western medical establishments.  It seems that there must be some sort of education plan in action, to make all this easy to get along with.  Maybe something like this ...

UPDATE 18 April 2021 11:19: Very good reply posted over at The Silicon Graybeard.

Mitt Romney is a jerk

He says he'll vote to convict Trump.  What a small, petty man.

Of course, we've known he's like that for a long, long time.

Update from ASM826: I had to go back to my old blog to find it, but here's what I thought of Mittens in October of 2012.

If Romney Needs My Vote, He’s Screwed

I got slammed in the comments, told I couldn't be reasoned with. I still like this post, still think we were better off without him.

Miami-Dade police body armor

There's a new design being issued, it seems.

pic.twitter.com/mguvDh70lZ

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) December 9, 2019

It looks like Gallagher's case isn't the only one that the Navy JAGs screwed up

Remember how the JAGs screwed up the Gallagher case?  Remember how testimony was dorked up, how the prosecution's "star" witness admitted that he was the one who did whatever "crime" was committed?  Remember the prosecution's misconduct?  Remember how they all gave themselves medals for what a bang-up job they did?  Remember how President Trump revoked all the medals and pardoned Gallagher for the single chickens**t charge they got to stick?

Well guess how their prosecution of the U.S.S Fitzgerald's CO went:

The trial would be allowed to go forward, but the judge admonished Richardson and his deputy, Moran, for violating a sacred tenet of military criminal justice: to not poison the system by making their opinions clear. By doing so, any potential jurors would know exactly what the top brass wanted.

A month later in January, the judge handed the Navy a final blow: The admiral in charge of the criminal proceedings was disqualified for improperly using his position to help the prosecution gather evidence against Benson.

The Navy’s case had collapsed, but more than three months dragged by before it finally dropped the remaining charges against Benson.

[blink] [blink]

And it gets worse, with the post clusterf**k ass covering from the Navy brass:

(The day the charges were dropped, ProPublica had informed the Navy it would be publishing a story detailing the extensive, troubling mistakes made by the Navy’s leadership in Benson’s case.)

The next day, the Navy took one more swipe at Benson, this time with a public letter of censure. The secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, wrote an admonishment that repeatedly used the same words and phrases, such as “failure” and “unworthy of trust,” basically restating the charges the Navy was unable to bring to court, without an avenue for appeal. In an email, Spencer’s spokeswoman declined to provide details about why he wrote the letter.

One last potshot from the E-ring on the way out the door.  And while I don't know if this is true or not, it sure has the ring of truth to it:

One officer said in an interview that he’d decided that he’d opt to retire before commanding a ship again.

“We all realize we’re completely going at this alone,” another officer said, “and are expendable in the eyes of those who only crave rank authority and shirk responsibility.”

Commanders still talk about how [then Chief of Naval Operations] Richardson was publicly saying safety first while privately urging commanders to be more daring and take more risks. One skipper boldly asked Richardson at a luncheon how his position squared with prosecuting commanding officers “when something goes wrong.” Richardson, said some in attendance, sidestepped the question.

Sullivan, captain of the USS Whidbey Island, said all captains accept that they are responsible for what happens aboard their ships — even if they are asleep. But, she said, it “was very shocking” to see Navy leadership decide to hold the commanders criminally accountable. “I’m willing to sacrifice my life; that’s my job. But it’s hard to do that when you don’t think the organization has your back.”

In all, Sullivan said, “The herd is spooked.”

While I can see Sullivan wanting to put this on a dysfunctional Navy bureaucracy, what we see is a dysfunctional Navy bureaucracy.  Second verse: same as the first.

Richardson is no longer CNO which looks like a very good thing.  The SecNAV is gone, too - also a good thing.  But the JAG corps needs to be nuked from orbit, and the Navy brass needs to get purged of the ass-coverers.  Holy cow, it looks like Barack Obama was successful in fundamentally changing America's Navy.

Thirty years after the Berlin Wall

The Usual Suspects® are ignoring the anniversary, but that's to be expected.  After all, pas d'enemies a gauche, n'est-ce pas?  But the cold reality of that monster regime is ever green, with explicitly socialist presidential candidates and large numbers of this Republic's youth thinking that socialism - and even communism - is the bee's knees.

I wrote this ten years ago on the 20th anniversary of the fall, hard on the heels of the Newsweek Cover story "We're all socialists now".  The Useful Idiots® are still idiots today.  They're also useful, to some.

Originally posted November 10, 2019.

The Line

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

- Cicero

I used to be a leftist, proudly "progressive."  No more. I no longer have the stomach to sleep with evil, even evil in the name of the greater good. In all of the retrospectives about the fall of the Berlin Wall this score of years ago, something is missing. Recognition of tyranny is there (mostly). Recognition of how (mostly) the once unfree populations have embraced freedom is there, too (mostly).

What's missing is any description of the depth of evil that was our enemy. Col. Jeff Cooper saw it, and wrote of it in To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak The Truth:

Starting at its western edge, The Line is composed of several strata. First comes the actual linear boundary, surveyed and marked to the centimeter. There is no fence here. Free people can walk right up to it - but they do not step across it. Death looms. Some ten paces beyond the marked boundary, to the eastward, is the outside fence. It is a single barrier some ten feet high, electrified and sown with directional mines set to fire along its inside surface. Beyond the outside fence is a band of dead ground some 100 meters in width, cleared of life and planted at random with pressure-release anti-personnel fragmentation mines. When the snow melts in winter thaws these go off erratically in the sunshine - "Lenin's serenade."

At the inner edge of the dead ground are the dogs - German shepherds chained to an overhead trolley that allows them to run parallel to the inner fence but not back into it (electrocution) nor forward away from it (explosion). ...

At intervals watchtowers loom fifty feet into the air, manned and equipped with enhanced-vision devices, cameras, weapons, and release controls for packs of killer dogs which can be set free at command behind the inner fence. ...

Behind the inner fence lies a belt of Zombie-land five kilometers deep. No one moves here except those whose duties demand it. The fields produce. Roads and roofs are mended. There is an occasional dilapidated vehicle in motion. At first glance it seems a viable countryside. On closer inspection, however, it is death-in-life. There are perhaps two lighted windows where there should be scores. Such villages in which there are lights are inside electric fences. The sickening effect grows as the sun sets. ...

With exquisite cruelty the very existence of The Line is concealed from those it contains. The east border of the 5 km Zombie zone is marked - from the east - simply as the border. Good slaves do not cross it, not because it is fearful to behold, but because they are good slaves. Bad slaves sometimes do cross it, but because they do not know what they face they usually die.

My staff sergeant guide on this occasion told me of a case he witnessed. A young woman, apparently driven to desperation, dared to cross the eastern 5 km line and lead her small child west towards liberty. As she approached the inner fence, the orcs in the watchtower loosed the dogs.

"I stood there with a rifle in my hands, but I was not allowed to shoot." He said, "I hear those screams every day. The mother's were louder than the child's. They were long and very high. They drowned out the growling of the dogs.

"For a while."

The worker's paradise was not above selling its slaves to the west:

Between 1964 and 1989, 33,755 political prisoners were ransomed. A further 2,087 prisoners were released to the West under an amnesty in 1972. Another 215,000 people, including 2,000 children cut off from their parents, were allowed to leave East Germany to rejoin their families. In exchange, West Germany paid over 3.4 billion DM – nearly $2.3 billion at 1990 prices – in goods and hard currency.^[117] Those ransomed were valued on a sliding scale, ranging from around 1,875 DM for a worker to around 11,250 DM for a doctor. The justification, according to East Germany, was that this was compensation for the money invested by the state in the prisoner's training. For a while, payments were made in kind using goods that were in short supply in East Germany, such as oranges, bananas, coffee and medical drugs. The average prisoner was worth around 4,000 DM worth of goods.^[118] The scheme was highly controversial in the West. Freikauf was denounced by many as human trafficking but was defended by others as an "act of pure humanitarianism";^[119] the West German government budgeted money for Freikauf under the euphemistic heading of "support of special aid measures of an all-German character.

I'm thankfully not the only one to notice this strange amnesia, and judge. And to find today's leftist intellectuals to be wanting:

The first person shot dead at the Berlin Wall was 24 year old Gunter Litfin, as he tried to swim across the Spree River on August 24, 1961. A year later, East German guards shot 17 year old Peter Fechter as he tried to scale the wall, and left him to bleed to death in that barren and desolate area of open land east of the Wall.
The last person known to be killed at the Wall was 20 year old bartender Chris Gueffroy, shot ten times for good measure on February 5, 1989. 
...
I find it obscene that [New Zealand] National Radio broadcasters Geoff Robinson and Lloyd Scott this morning recalled the Berlin Wall, its twenty-eight years of bloodshed and the 1200 slaughtered East Germans, with wistful nostalgia. They even appeared to excuse the East German secret police, the Stasi, as people just doing their jobs.

Not just judged to be morally void, but intellectually as well:

In 1922 Ludwig Von Mises explained that socialism would eat itself and the people whom it enslaved – that it couldn’t plan, it couldn’t produce, that it couldn’t calculate -- that it was and always would be both morally depraved and economically unsustainable. Sixty-seven years later he was proven emphatically correct when the illusion that was socialist Eastern Europe collapsed, and the symbol of its totalitarian state was torn down.

The barest minimum qualification for an intellectual is to examine and test your first premises. To reject them, if they do not model the world effectively. Philosophers all the way back to Plato would hold today's left in contempt, with their hope that some how, this time it will be different.


Here's a different way of saying the same thing:



Such a strange forgetfulness by the Moral Titans of the left: chattel slavery, Schießbefehl ("Order to fire" - shoot to kill), thousands of dead, the souls of millions crushed. For their own good, of course. The People must be protected from the people.

So strange that the left cannot take this moment to reflect on actual evil, and to condemn it without mistakes were made and for a noble cause excuses, without clinging to that most slippery word "but". They believe - and I generally concur - that they are good people, motivated to do good. But they flinch from examining the actual truth. They are behind their own mental Iron Curtain, trapped by an unexamined world view. Behind their own, intellectually-imposed Line. 

The east border of the 5 km Zombie zone is marked - from the east - simply as the border. Good slaves do not cross it, not because it is fearful to behold, but because they are good slaves.

Tear it down.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

27 years ago at Ruby Ridge

Alex emails to point us to an excellent retrospective on the anniversary of Ruby Ridge.  There's a lot there that I hadn't known - the Fed.Gov paid out almost $4M to the survivors of the siege, that "Cadillac" Deval Patrick found no government wrongdoing (this was before he was Governor of Massachusetts), and that the Agents involved in the shootings all got commendations.

[spit]

And Lon Horiuchi's whereabouts is currently unknown, although he seems to no longer be the marketing face of H-S Precision firearms.  The ghost of Vicki Weaver whispers to us that we should not forget her, or Horiuchi, or H-S Precision.  In that spirit, allow me to roll this out from many years back:

No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.

- Dr. Sam Johnston 

Mr. Horiuchi is well advised to get used to it.

If you've never heard this story, go read Alex's post and check out the Resistance Library they have there which has much food for thought.  Also think about the Deep State, and how long it's been around.  Remember, Ruby Ridge happened under the Presidency of George H.W. Bush.  Of course, we've known for a while that he's a dirty commie, and the Deep State runs deeper than anyone talks about.