(Last) Weekly Roundup: sed 's/krain/vald/g' current_thing.txt Edition
Fred Rogers once said that "There isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story." Similarly, there is rarely a situation that fails to make sense once you have all the information. Groupthink, conspiracy thinking, and misinformation are usually a product of inadequate information. The "Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot" seemed ludicrous on the face of it, but once you realize that it was planned, orchestrated, and moved forward at every junction by FBI agents and paid informants then it makes a lot more sense. The federal "justice" machine needs cases like the Whitmer kidnapping in order to justify its continual expansion. Does that mean that there are really "crisis actors" and "wind-up toys" out there? Maybe not -- but it certainly explains why nearly every public tragedy turns out to involve someone who was already known to federal law enforcement but who was permitted to keep doin' their thing regardless.
Let's not even get into the whole Stephen Paddock incident, the current "understanding" of which wouldn't pass muster as a Hollywood script due to all the plot holes, so to speak. (That being said, there is security footage of the man, contrary to what's often said around the Internet.)
Salvador Ramos, unlike the 9/11 hijackers or the Whitmer informants or the Buffalo shooter, wasn't known to law enforcement. Still, there are questions. This troubled young man, who was so poor that he is said to have shot his grandmother over a cellphone bill discrepancy, whose family was dirt poor, whose father was a low-wage worker who didn't have any contact with him -- this young man bought about six thousand dollars' worth of weapons on his 18th birthday. He'd worked at Wendy's for a while before losing his job, and was paid about ten dollars an hour before tax. So that's what? Eleven hundred hours of work, at a part-time job? Plus whatever it actually cost him to fuel his truck, pay his cellphone bill, and who knows what else? The "conspiracy theory" is that he was given money to buy the guns. Who knows. The shooting coincides perfectly with the Biden Administration's attempt to get the proverbial jackbooted thug into the head slot at the BATF. But without meaningless coincidences, no one would ever believe a horoscope.
Both halves of the Uniparty benefit by pushing the unlikely theories and half-baked stories. The "red" side furthers mistrust in the government by doing so. And the "blue" side? Why, they use the red focus on conspiracy theories to distract from the well-researched, legitimate, and perfectly plain concerns that don't fit the agenda. When it comes to the Uvalde shooting, however, the blue side has some work to do.
Texas Monthly has been doing some stellar work in the past week. This timeline of the exceptionally fluid official story regarding police response should be required reading for everyone who wants to discuss this subject in public. I'm more interested, however, in this story about Border Patrol activities in Uvalde. It's hard to read it and not immediately consider the USA a completely failed state.
Here's the tl;dr plus brief additional analysis: CBP (Customs and Border Protection) is allowed to serve in an official all-purpose police capacity within 100 miles of the Mexican border. Since Mr. Biden's ascension to the Presidency, policy changes by his Administration have allowed about three million (maybe more) undocumented/illegal/?? immigrants to cross the border. Thousands of them are then caught by CBP in the hundred-mile zone. "Caught" is a strong word, because in many cases they are literally given a smartphone (with limited capabilities) and told to come back for a trial. Compliance with this directive is about what you'd expect, by the way.
According to Texas Monthly, Uvalde is believed to contain significant numbers of undocumented migrants. Therefore, nearly every interaction with police has a potential immigration component. It does not help matters that the city is about eighty percent Hispanic on a border where illegal immigration is almost entirely Hispanic. Only one of the victims does not have a traditionally Hispanic name. Early reports from the shooting suggested that the "Bortac" team was prevented from going into the school because the Uvalde cops were more worried about mass deportation of children who would be temporarily detained afterwards than they were about the shooter. On the other hand, Texas Monthly notes that CBP has a deliberate internal policy not to perform border protection or immigration duties when they are serving as "regular police", which is the most bizarre fact I've learned since I first heard the word "Uvalde". It would be like a DEA agent responding to a school shooting, finding six tons of cocaine in the high school gym, and afterwards saying, "Oh, the hell with it, let that coke get out to the streets, that's not what we are here for." But that doublethink is official CBP policy.
We know that the Uniparty wants one billion Americans, and that in general it will always act to increase the number of immigrants from certain areas. The Blue Tribe says that it's an act of love; the Red Tribe thinks that the Blue Tribe is setting itself up to be the lily-white ruling class of 900,000 dirt-poor mixed-race people in a model stolen directly from modern Brazil. There are people on all sides, from the Dalai Lama to Patrick Buchanan, who have argued for the integrity of the current American state. But the Blue Tribe wants the votes and the Red Tribe is massively influenced by corporations who want the cheap labor and extra consumers.
I believe that when all is said and done, we will find that immigration plays a major role in the Uvalde shooting and the police response. As a father of a thirteen-year-old boy, I find the stories and photographs of the victims to be absolutely heartbreaking. The Uniparty has suggested a few Approved Targets For Grief And Anger: the gun maker, the NRA, the Republicans, white people in general. Many of my friends have taken those suggestions to heart and then some; even John Mayer suggested donations to "Everytown", the Bloomberg-funded gun confiscation organization that has vastly more money, and more lobbying power, than the NRA it was formed to defeat in court.
If the answers ever come, they will be vastly more complex and upsetting than "Daniel Defense did this" or "SSRIs did this" or "immigrants did this". And if we had all the information, it would all make sense, from the high-priced guns to the somnolent police response. But I don't think the answers will ever come. We have become a country of The Current Thing.
Every month or so the media trots out a new cause and explains the appropriate response. The "Ukraine crisis" was The Current Thing exactly as long as it took for Joe Biden to get $40 billion dollars for an undeclared proxy war with a nuclear-capable antagonist. Now it's Uvalde, which will probably last long enough for the new BATF director to be confirmed. It's not so much that The Current Things are generated by a Uniparty, but rather that the focus on them is directed by a Uniparty. The Current Thing changes so often that I was rather surprised to find out this morning that Roe v. Wade hasn't actually been reversed yet; the infamous "draft opinion" that galvanized opinion and has been used as a tactic to get people excited about the midterm votes reflects a court opinion that has yet to be actually released. In a sane world we wouldn't even know about the court's decision yet. Wouldn't even know it was coming.
Therefore, you can rest assured that if all the facts ever come out about Uvalde, you won't hear about it. It will no longer be The Current Thing. Maybe that is what makes me angriest about the whole situation. Children were murdered, and the only thing the System wants to do about it is use the incident to increase its power. Meanwhile, 276 children have been shot in Chicago since last year, but those kids are even less consequential to the System than are the victims of Uvalde. Because Chicago is already a place where the State has near-total power. The death of those kids in Chicago isn't a lever for additional governmental power. So those dead kids basically don't exist.
As for me, I made a decision a few years ago. I considered my personal experience over the course of ten years in schools both public and private. (Most kids go to school for thirteen years, but I skipped a bit.) I looked at what percentage of my son's time was spent learning in school rather than merely spending time in school. And I decided that there was no longer any reason for him to get on a bus. Nowadays he completes the whole state curriculum from home, in about sixty to ninety minutes a day. The rest of the time he can ride his bike, read a book, watch YouTube, play CounterStrike, or stare at the ceiling; any and all of these activities are more useful than sitting in a room full of 90-130-IQ kids who need to have everything explained to them more than once. So I'm not worried about him being harmed at school by some jumped-up headcase filled to the brim with psychotropic medication and Internet polarization. There's a war going on in American schools. Ideological, political, sometimes literal. It's not entirely clear who's fighting, or why, or what the purposes are. I don't really care. My son and I are officially dodging the draft for that war. That's my story. I don't know whether or not Mr. Rogers would find it to be lovable.
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For Hagerty, I wrote about how Benz wants to get its groove back.