Archive for the ‘News/opinion’ Category

by baldilocks

What to make of a year in which there has been a worldwide pandemic punctuated by American mass rioting-looting-killing?

It’s only the beginning of June.

A lot of people will have a list of people to blame for the calamities which seem to have engulfed us – and they will probably be mostly correct. But my view is that this is a spiritual issue. Law enforcement personnel, politicians, regular citizens, terrorists and their fund sources, and all the rest of humanity are prone to the spirits they allow to rule them, whether the spirit is good or evil.

And there is only one that is good.

I say repeatedly that mobs are demonic. Here’s how those demons operate: they plant their anger and malevolence into human beings and when such human beings gather together, those emotions feed on each other and rev up the gang into a frenzy of violence and, often, horrific bloodshed. Any target of such violence will be unrecognizable after the mob gets through and this applies to human beings and to property. All rationality is banished – if it ever existed in the first place.

Therefore, we see mobs do mindless things like burn down their own neighborhoods or murder the pillars of their own community or attempt to murder innocent passersby or shoot at houses or gang rapes.  Mobs do things as a corporate body that some individual members of the mob would never do by themselves. And later, after the horrific event is over, individuals will often have no memory of what they were thinking during the mayhem. It’s because something else took over.

I’ve already told you how individuals can protect themselves from the demonic. However, I have a hunch that these spirits know that they are already defeated and decided to have a nationwide party before they are conquered.

That, I contend, is what we are seeing now.

The other emotion which these entities feed on is fear and it’s understandable that many are afraid right now. Heck, we’ve been told since mid-January that leaving the house could result in our deaths. Well, guess what? That is true. But the key to defeating fear is to step out of the house in faith and in wisdom.

Ask me how I know.

This frenzy of demons will end, and we will look back at it and wonder if it was a mass nightmare we all had.

But we will wake up. That’s what I think.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

Follow Juliette on FacebookTwitterMeWePatreon and Social Quodverum.

Hit Da Tech Guy Blog’s Tip Jar!

Or hit Juliette’s!

By John Ruberry

One respite from the hectic way of life in Chicago and its suburbs are the 70,000 acres that comprise the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. I run on trails there that are near my home. I take nature photos there. Others walk, ride bicycles, or just sit and collect their thoughts. Some picnic in the preserves, whether it’s a family or a group of hundreds.

On there is a seamy side too. Some parking lots at the preserves are popular spots for romantic hookups, once in a while some of those large picnics turn violent, occasionally the bodies of murder victims are dumped there, and the Forest Preserve District has a reputation of hiring otherwise unemployable Democratic Party patronage workers. Charles “Cap” Sauer ran the preserves for years. He once confided to Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko about some of his workers, “They know that if they are going to receive a day’s pay, they must give me at least a half a day’s work.”

Despite little or no evidence that outdoor activities pose COVID-19 risks, the FPDCC is making using the preserves more difficult and less enjoyable for the owners of them, that is taxpayers, even though exercise is essential for maintaining good physical and mental health. 

Many forest preserve parking lots, which are often strewn with potholes, are closed on weekends and even daily in some cases because of alleged overcrowding. Oh, if a parking lot is full, drivers do what? They leave. Public washrooms are closed. Where are people supposed to relieve themselves? As a runner, I know how to, let’s say, improvise a short distance from a trail. Let’s say you’d like to sit down during a long walk and you don’t care to plop down on the grass. There’s a rare bench here and there but during normal times people find a picnic table. At most of the preserves near me the tables are now stacked. wrapped in police tape, and barricaded by snow fences. There are “snitch signs” placed all through the preserves asking those full-bladdered visitors to rat-out large groups. Even though for most people their forest preserve experience is a solitary one, as it is with me, or it’s done in twos-or-threes.

Story continues below the photograph.

Barricaded picnic shelter with stacked tables at St. Paul Woods Forest Preserve

Water fountains have not been turned back on after being shut off last year for the winter. Yes, today is the last day of May. Oh, there is no shortage of FPDCC workers–none have been laid off.

Those most revealing sign is one outside St. Paul Woods here in Morton Grove. “Keep it moving. No picnicking. No congregating.” Or as Dean Wormer famously phrased it in Animal House, “No more fun of any kind.”

How did it come to this situation? Yeah, I know, the coronavirus outbreak. Cook County has over 5 million residents. There have been 45,000 confirmed cases of it in Cook with about 2,100 confirmed deaths. And of course most of those fatalities consist of people who were already quite ill.

But we got here because Cook County voters elected a hardened leftist,  Chicago Democrat Toni Preckwinkle, as president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Part of that job is overseeing the Forest Preserve District. Leftists remind me of the smug titular character in the underrated Coen Brothers movie Barton Fink. He loves “the people” but Fink doesn’t like people. The same goes with Preckwinkle and other leftists in government. And their idea of government is that we are a government with a people, not the other way around. 

These are their woods, not ours.

Stay out of my parking lot! 

Stay away from other people! 

No water fountains for you!

Hold your bladders!

No more fun of any kind!

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

The Answer, they invariably take place in cities & areas where the leadership has a dim view of the 2nd amendment.

I have a sneaking suspension that neighborhoods and towns where citizens are well armed are not going to see the riots we have seen in some cities, and I further predict that business owners who are in front of their shops holding a shotgun will find their shops largely intact and protesters limiting their activist to actual protesting and marching.

https://datechguyblog.com/2020/05/27/the-late-steven-den-beste-on-trump-accidentally/Cue Den Beste:

By Jacksonian lights, no rule of law works without the threat of force, and if the threat of force is removed then lawbreakers will come out of the woodwork.

Local communities that are well armed and make it clear that those commuting violence are taking their lives in their hand will remain safe, communities that signal looting and rioting will be tolerated will get more of it.

It’s that simple.

Closing thought: I submit and suggest that the left has been hoping and praying for something like this for a long time and their real desire is to have some useful idiot get killed while threatening an armed citizen so they can use said idiot as a martyr. To the left, who will do all they can to get this outcome , this would be a feature not a bug because they believe it to be to their advantage politically and to some degree financially.

I predict this will continue until they conclude that it will cost them more votes than it will gain.

DaTechGuy of DaRadio livestraem podcast starts at a special time today 3 PM because of the surprise cancellation of work and my wife’s windshield repair. We’ll talk a bit about Trump the Jacksonian and about the riots going on in Minnesota.

You can watch the livestream here?

I hope you enjoy it.