History is enlightening. As much as we want to portray ourselves better than those who came before us,  the sad truth is by far, very little has changed in the human heart, be it goodness or depravity.  History also teaches us that there are consequences for stupid actions and you as elected official and chief law enforcement of a state, should not abuse your power.

In 1892 the State of South Carolina instituted the Dispensary system for liquor under pressure of Governor Benjamin Tillman. It was simply a monopoly on the sale of booze by the state and sold as a compromise between those who wanted absolute Prohibition (Ban all the alcohols! Does it sound familiar) and the People who just wanted to have his hooch at home, bought where it was the cheapest and  unimpeded by government.

As a good government monopoly, it was not fond of the idea that the good citizens of the State would ignore the law and it created a liquor constabulary which was in charge of enforcing the law and what eventually led to a wee bit of problem: Make sure people had only the authorized booze at home and do what needs to be done in those cases.   Soon enough they were no longer constables but renamed Spies and on the month of April 1894, the people of Darlington had enough of that crap, bad blood finally came to the surface, shots were fired, citizens died  and they chased the Spies at gunpoint out of their town and into the woods.

The bottom part of the picture is telling: Governor Tillman called the State Militia (This is before the Dick Act so not yet National Guard as we know today) and the State Militia refused. Not only refused, but they disbanded and threatened to leave the doors of their armories open so people come and take the guns.

Eventually calm returned, the dispensary system remained but it was not effective and it also became (what a surprise) a den of corruption.  In 1907 the system closed at state level but counties were given the choice to keep it.  In 1915 a state referendum voted for Prohibition and we know the rest of that story.

I m guessing history of the 19th Century can give us a light idea how to solve those little problems we still face in our advanced 21st Century

Here is a PDF of the newspaper page of that screen capture. It has more details of the event if you wish to read it.

Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least 11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.

An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis

Ignoring or rebranding the problem never helps and this is one that is now flooding and destroying cities.

The addicted homeless is nothing new. You can safely go back to the 80s when the problem began to get bad and see the reaction from the Liberal side and which has been the script ever since: The homeless are by far poor families thrown out in the streets by the economic policies of the Republicans and Capitalism  with a smattering of Vietnam Vets dealing with problems. Junkies? Never mentioned. We even had a full fledged “Hollywood Cares!” virtual signaling in the form of HBO’s Comic Relief, fund-raiser shows with comedians donating time and jokes to provide a family of NY Okies a place to live so they wouldn’t have to keep living in their Model T in rest area of the New Jersey Turnpike.

And then there was the strange issue of what I call the Disappearing Homeless: The moment a Democrat was elected President, the homeless problems in America seemed to disappear from the Media. You could not find but a very few local articles in the printed press and probably because the state or local administrations were not Blue. But the moment a Republican won the White House? Dear God! Homeless all over the place! How is it that this people do not care? And I am not kidding about the timing, George W. Bush was barely sworn in as President and within hours there was at least article berating him about the homeless.

We know the great maxim from Scarface: “Don’t get high on your own supply.” Unfortunately the Liberal Intelligentsia does not comprehend this and since they branded the Addict Problem as a Homeless Problem, the solution then is to provide them with a place to shoot up sleep. If they have a “home” they are no longer homeless and the problem will disappear, right?

Welcome to abandoned RVs and Tent Cities.

Let me reiterate the “Don’t get high on your own supply” part of Liberal Intelligentsia: that last photo comes from a news item from radio station  KUOW of Seattle where the recommendation from Homeless Task Force about Tent Cities like this is to create more Tent Cities.

The packaging of the addicts into tarps, nylon and abandoned vehicles has not solved the problem of rampant drug abuse. They are not addicts because they do not have a home, they do not have a home or families or any kind of worthwhile belongings because they are untreated addicts.

This is literally government pouring rainbow sprinkles over a turd so it can pass the “WE CARE AND DID SOMETHING” test so they can feel good about themselves and get more taxpayer’s money.

Hat Tip Steven T.

And no, apparently it is not a troll account.

“But we were promised being victims of concentration camps and Gay electroshocks. How dare Trump not do it! IMPEACH!”

This is about one of the scariest headlines I have read in a while:

It’s Time for Sweden to Admit Explosions Are a National Emergency

Wait, what?  Just how many explosions are happening in Sweden.

The bomb exploded shortly after 9 a.m. Friday in a blast that ripped through two apartment buildings and could be heard for miles. Twenty-five people suffered cuts and bruises and 250 apartments were damaged. A nearby kindergarten was evacuated. Hospitals jumped into disaster mode. Photos from the scene show rows of demolished balconies and shattered windows. It was ”absolutely incredible” that no one was severely injured, a police spokesperson said.

Holy shit, this just happened?  How come we haven’t heard anything about it?

How are people so casual about the idea that the front was blown off an apartment building in a nation that I keep being told by Democrats is paradise on earth.

It is the kind of news we usually associate with war zones, but this bombing took place in Linköping, a peaceful university town in southern Sweden. Remarkably, it was not the only explosion in the country that day; another, seemingly unrelated, blast was reported in a parking lot in the city of Gothenburg earlier in the morning. Three explosions have been reported in Malmö since Tuesday morning. As of this writing, no arrests have been made.

Holy fuck!  If five explosions happened in the US, we’d be at war and cops would be doing door to door across every urban center in America.

Sweden has experienced a sharp rise in explosions in recent years, predominantly related to conflicts between warring criminal gangs. The use of explosives in the Nordic country is now at a level that is unique in the world for a state not at war, according to police. In response, the government issued a first-ever ”amnesty for explosives” in the fall of 2018, allowing people in possession of such weapons to hand them over to police with immunity. But this didn’t stem the tide: some 50 explosions were reported in the first three months of 2019 alone—an average of more than one every other day and an increase over the same period in 2018, a year that saw a record number of more than three blasts per week.

I am at a total loss here.  This doesn’t sound like the Sweden I keep hearing about.  The nation where gender relations are perfect, where democratic socialism functions exactly the way we are told it should, where social justice has allowed personkind to reach its zenith of equality.

This sounds more like the news from Iraq or Somolia.

While explosives have become a weapon of choice among the country’s gangs, the effects of such violence are hardly confined to criminals. In the past four years, fatalities include a 63-year-old man who unknowingly picked up a hand grenade lying in the street; an 8-year-old boy who was asleep when a hand grenade was thrown into the apartment where he was staying; and a 4-year-old girl killed in a car bombing.

Do the Swedes have some version of the NRA that I am not aware of that makes hand grenade ownership legal in that country?

Where are all these grenades coming from?  Even in the US, we don’t have drive by hand grenades

There has been a corresponding marked escalation in gang-related shootings, which increasingly take place in broad daylight. Sweden had 45 deadly shootings in what police refer to as ”criminal environments” last year, which is an increase by a factor of 10 in one generation. In contrast, neighbouring Norway has less than three.

Damn Swedish NRA!

This can’t be right, Sweden has very strict gun laws.  So much so that a Fudd who wrote for Vox said that “Sweden may have the answer to America’s gun problem.”

So I’m still unsure how all these “responsible hunters” who don’t go around talking about gun rights, living in a country with strict gun control, can cause so many gang shootings and explosions.

Deadly shootings per capita in Sweden are now considerably higher than the European average. And systematic witness intimidation, paired with a code of silence in the country’s socio-economically weak immigrant areas, has made this type of crime difficult for the Swedish legal system to tackle.

That is interesting…

The rise in gang violence and other types of crime—including sexual offenses and a wave of robberies against children—has had far-reaching implications for Swedish society. In a country which boasts ”the world’s first feminist government,” a third of young women now report feeling unsafe going out at night.  A recent survey in the country’s three largest cities showed that safety is now the main priority for Swedes who are looking to buy homes. Crime emerged as a top priority among voters ahead of the election to the European Parliament in May.

I wonder what happened to those Swedish men that caused such a rapid rise in crimes against women and children?

According to the prevailing ideology of the Swedish political establishment, this wave of violence, which is baffling to many European neighbours, should not be happening. A longstanding cornerstone of the country’s political conversation dictates that crime must be understood in socio-economic terms, and that welfare provisions are a cure-all against violence and social unrest. Yet Sweden is one of Europe’s most generous welfare states.

So crime isn’t directly related to poverty, and simply giving people free government money doesn’t make them better.

Instead of seeking refuge in ideological wishful thinking, the Swedish government should focus on reforming a criminal justice system that was built for a more peaceful society. To name but one issue: young criminals receive remarkably soft sentences. For example, a 16-year-old convicted of an execution-style killing at a Stockholm pizza restaurant in 2018 was sentenced to three years in institutional care for young people. The country also has one of the smallest police forces per capita in the EU.

So a soft-on-crime, sympathetic-to-vicious-criminals, feminist government has lost control of its country.  I guess “go woke, go broke” applies to nations as well.

Before any specific issues can be addressed the Swedish government must acknowledge the severity of the matter. In the past few years, the rise in violent crime in Sweden has attracted growing attention from international media. How has the Swedish government responded? By launching an elaborate PR campaign for foreign audiences that plays down the challenges—especially those in the country’s immigrant areas. Nothing will change if the government continues to respond to the reality in the streets with cynical rhetorical spin.

So what have we learned here?

Well, reading between the lines a predominately Muslim immigrant community, mainly from Africa and the Middle East is responsible for the majority of shootings and (probably all) the bombings in the country, as well as the vast majority of rapes and crimes against children.

The Swedish government has gone with the typical Progressive idea that this violence and criminality is the effect of poverty.  That these people are an oppressed underclass and if they are just taken care of from cradle to grave at taxpayer expense, they will live peacefully.

Not just is that not working out, they are throwing grenades at each other and shooting each other with automatic weapons, also slaughtering the sacred cow that strict gun control will make a people less likely to kill each other.

Maybe Vox is right and Sweden may have the answer to America’s gun problem, but not in the way that they think.

Perhaps the lesson is that a minority (in the strictest sense of the word, meaning a small percentage) of the population is responsible for the majority of the crimes.

Furthermore, this minority criminality isn’t driven (predominately) by poverty, but a cultural attitude that encourages feuding, addressing interpersonal grievances with violence, and preying upon the weak.  Including throwing grenades at people and bombing apartment buildings.

Lastly, passing strict gun – or in the case of the UK, knife, gardening tool, hammer, scissors, and drain cleaner – control does not affect the ability of this group to engage in bloody violence.

Maybe the right way to address violent crime isn’t to address the guns (or knives, or drain cleaner) but to address these minority populations and the cultural proclivities for violent feuding.

Also, Sweden, get your shit under control.  There haven’t been this many grenades going off in a Western European nation since the end of WWII.

Bernie Sanders released a four-minute long video on his official Twitter feed talking about an economic bill of rights.

I could go into how these are investable, and the ideas of high taxes and government economic micromanagement are the opposite of the type of liberal freedoms out Founding Fathers wanted.

For instance, he says:

“Are you truly free if you are a small business or family farmer who is driven out by the monopolistic practices of big business?”

Of course, the fix for this is to break up the big business monopoly and expand economic freedom, not crush everybody under the monopolistic practices of big government.

Those are all important points, but there was one part of the video that stood out as beyond evil and wrong.

It's time for a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights because there is no freedom without economic freedom. pic.twitter.com/EYAg0Z2eby

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 15, 2019

Did you catch it?

It is when Bernie is talking about veterans.  His voiceover says:

“Are you truly free if you are a veteran who has put his or her life on the line to defend this country and tonight will be sleeping out on the streets.”

This is the image that is shown:

I don’t know how this escaped review by the countless people who made and edited this video before final approval by the Sanders’ campaign, but none of those are American Military medals.

I can identify at least the Order of the Patriotic War, Medal for the Capture of Berlin, Jubilee medal For Valiant Labour in Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary since the Birth of Vladimir Il’ich Lenin.

So this is a man who clearly served in the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front in WWII.

Explain to me how this guy “put his or her life on the line to defend this country” as a patriotic Soviet?

Couldn’t they find one decorated veteran of Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan to tug at our heartstrings?

No, they found a man representing a country we were at a continuous state of Cold War with for nearly five decades.

When an American Presidential candidate seems to care more about Soviet veterans than Americans, that is a real indication of a problem.

This video was released yesterday, let’s see how many media organizations point this out.

For a generation, (my generation)Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach will always be associated with Rollerball. It has been my favorite classical piece and I had the enormous luck of hearing it played in an honest pipe organ by a good performer and it rocked my sorry musically untrained ass. The only other musical experience that surpassed it was Queen in concert and only by a little bit.

And the remake of the movie was a POS.

Since our local variety of Gun Rights Activists cannot do anything but go tactical fishing and refuse to do anything unless they can carry a rifle, I figure we can ask Bass Pro Shop to install one of their humongous aquariums inside the Florida State Capitol so there is no more excuse for them not to actually do something for the Gun Rights they presume to love.

Bloomberg is spending a bunch of money and PR talent on getting the Assault Weapons Ballot Amendment passed and you will not hear a peep about what our local gun rights organizations are doing, you know the ones that would do anything better than the NRA? Yes, those people.

If you have not paid attention, the NRA internal problems have pretty much but disappeared from the News Media cycle. But if you are still seeing NRA-Bashing pop in your Social Media, it is more than likely attached to Chest-Thumpers©’ messages    And still, I keep asking those  who want to see the National Rifle Association disappear, what are they doing or will do to take over the lobby duties and I keep hearing either excuses or crickets. I find it funny that the same individuals that were quoting me chapter and verse on information provided by Bloomberg’s The Trace would suddenly develop a convenient need to change the subject when asked what will be done specifically to counter the Gun Control Carpetbaggers.

And the other thing I find rather ironic is that Chest-Thumpers© love to banter about the word “treason.” I wonder what we would have to use on them when the Florida Legislature is forced to pass an Assault Weapons Bill and other anti-gun goodies because they were too busy posing with an AR 15 in the local fishing pier.