A Farrago of Fail

by

It was hard enough to wrap the mind around the shortage of infant formula, and how a recall and recall-caused shortage which began months ago, only blew up in our National Establishment Media, and by extension, the current administration in the last week or so. I suppose that if you aren’t living in a household with a baby present, it was easy enough to miss out on the whole tense business of – will there be formula on the shelves – how many cans can we get – and what on earth do we do if we run out? It didn’t help that sanctimonious cows like Bette Midler and divers others began smugly suggesting that mothers breast-feed, once the matter bubbled to the surface of the national conscience. Why thank you for that heaping helping of the screamingly obvious – it had somehow managed to escape our notice. Now that the National Establishment Media is belatedly interested in the matter, we discover that the contamination in question which kicked off closure of the manufacturing location likely originated elsewhere than the factory. We also discover that the FDA dragged their feet on approval to re-open. Huh. Imagine that. A low priority for the inspectors, or a deliberate attempt to add just that much more of a ration of misery to our lives, now that gas is over $4 a gallon in Texas where it comes straight from the cow, and higher yet in other less fortunate localities.

A friend of Sarah Hoyt’s was of the opinion that things like the formula shortage and the high gas prices (which down the road will affect the costs of everything that has to be transported) were deliberately generated to just nudge the public a little, make us uncomfortable and agreeable to whatever those administrative geniuses had planned – you know, smaller houses, electric vehicles, not owning anything and existing as happy little serf-proles obedient to our betters. But the administrative geniuses mis-calculated. They are just coming to the horrified realization that all their planned little nudges are spinning wildly out of control. They can’t even begin to figure out how to reel it all back in, or how we will react to the catastrophe they have generated. Where will this all be by next year, when we have burned through last years’ harvest and gas is $10 a gallon or more? They don’t know, and likely that scares them out of their minds.

Speaking of a farrago of fail, the Uvalde school shooting … I can’t quite decide what is more awful; the posturing over the bodies of dead fourth-grade kids by vile opportunists like Beto O’Rourke (better known now as Beta O’Dorke) or the carelessness on the part of civil and ISD authorities which let it all happen in the first place. With the caveat that Uvalde is not a town which I know as well as Fredericksburg, Goliad, Gonzalez, Giddings or New Braunfels – I know for darned certain that after other school shootings, and the bloody massacre at the church in Sutherland Springs several years ago – there was absolutely no basis for believing that a school shooting couldn’t possibly happen in a small town, like Uvalde. We’ve done school events in Giddings several times; and yes, we had to sign in with picture ID, shown to school administrators sitting behind a Plexiglas panel, and escorted through a secure door into the corridor leading to the classroom where we were to do a talk about creative writing. That a teenage nut-case with serious anger issues and excessively expensive weaponry could waltz into an elementary school through an unlocked back door, and then do his worst while the local PD sat around outside … At the very least, the Uvalde PD officers are not going to be very popular with their neighbors for the foreseeable future.
Also – I believe that it will come out that the Uvalde killer was a well-known problem child, and that he likely had an extensive juvenile record as a hell-raiser. So, when are we going to do something about common-sense nut-case control? Or here’s a thought … since the death toll of innocents in Uvalde was on par with a normal AKA violent weekend in a place like Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit or Baltimore … let’s talk about confiscating the weaponry from the inner-city gang-bang element. Or is that just politically unspeakable?
Discuss as you wish.

(Edited as of 5-28 to add the picture below, of a memorial table for the Uvalde victims set up in the entryway to a local HEB)

85 thoughts on “A Farrago of Fail”

  1. I’m not sure that the current administration could plan such spectacular failures. I mean, wow. But hey, time to blame every single little thing on “Biden” and the Democrats. That’s what they did with the last President to turnabout is fair game. Hopefully they will get wiped out in November and we can get back to some good old fashioned healthy gridlock in DC.

    Where is Mayor Pete on the gas crisis? You would think that the Sec of Transportation would be able to speak to the gas problem. I know.

  2. Point the first… You don’t get to this level of “FUBAR” accidentally, or by simple misadventure. There’s a systemic set of issues behind it all, beginning with the people put in charge of the administrative state by our “elected” officials.

    Examples abound; anyone noticed what happened with the EPA dumbasses that effectively killed the Colorado River for a couple of hundred miles…? Oh, yeah–They got promoted and given bonuses. Way to incentivize competency in government, folks. Ya wonder why the FDA didn’t give a flying f*ck about the Abbott situation? Why should they? It’s not their problem; they’re not in any danger of losing their jobs or even a paycheck. Lay you long odds that if you go looking in a few months, you’ll find that the responsible parties got bonuses for their performance.

    Same-same with everything else; yeah, they could be working to plan, but that would mean they were competent at something, and that they could turn it around. Which ain’t the case, I’m afraid. This is more incompetence than anything else, because if they were competent at any of this, they’d be able to fine-tune the immiseration to the degree that it’s just bad enough to be effective in gaining their desires.

    Instead, they’ve set the conditions to crash the entire system. I’m not even sure this could be walked back, at this point. Getting oil production back up would necessitate not only opening up leases and all that, but convincing investors that you’re not going to pull the carpet out from under them again. Which was the most damaging thing about Keystone’s cancellation, which made it clear that the assholes in office could destroy your investments at whim without recompense. That’s the thing that prolonged the Great Depression, more than anything else: Nobody had a clue what the brain trust behind FDR was going to do next, and they weren’t about to risk their investments. You create uncertainty in the markets, you’ll be decades getting that level of trust back.

    I doubt that there’s some single individual or group planning this BS, behind the scenes. What this reeks of is more a situation where a whole bunch of competing special interests are all getting what they want, as opposed to the machinations of some conspiracy. There’s no “there” there, in other words. The cabal behind BidenCo. is simply that easily influenced, flitting from special interest to special interest without any real program in mind. Which is almost more dangerous, TBH. This is not “government by criminal conspiracy” so much as it’s “government by ADHD senility”. Joe Biden himself ain’t likely in charge; it’s the people behind him, like Jill that are drawing things to his attention and then stage-managing it all. While the permanent bureaucracy just keeps ticking over, in the background, writing their own checks and doing what they please.

  3. Word is now circulating that the shooter was in fact arrested 4 years prior for threats to shoot up a school. There are media reports from 2018 of two teens (13 and 14 years old) being arrested for a plot to shoot up a school in Uvalde – obviously being minors at the time their names are not included. But the UK Daily Mail is apparently running a story that states the shooter was one of those arrested at that time.

    If true, this goes beyond just being a problem child.

  5. Has it been walked back, in the sense of it’s not true, or is it just unconfirmed, because those involved were minors, with sealed records? It looks like the latter to me. It seems awfully strange. Also strange that I saw that story being posted a couple nights ago on twitter from some rando accounts, which made me wonder who exactly was behind it. Strange times we’re living in…

  6. not to beat a dead horse into tasajo, but the wef seems to be focused on all these projects, by some of their suggestions, they seem to be on a population reduction kick worthy of a bond villain,

    the beats in the story seem to be very much like the parkland where the bureau was silent, they were focused on other things, and the doe was pushing the promis fast track of emotionally defiicent students like the shooter, sel pushed by the ford and carnegie foundations are part of this as well,

  7. Regulation seems to be the major problem with the formula.

    Ive worked with one of the 4 major maker of formula (not Abbott) it is not a difficult product to make. No more than any other dairy product. We should have 100 plants making it in the us. I would not be surprised if there were not 1000 plants in the us that could make it. That is, they have the facilities and equipment to do so.

    The major reason we only have 4 (or6? I’ve seen both numbers) making it is that formula is not regulated as a food but as a drug/medical device.

    If I had a plant making powdered milk, I could make formula tomorrow assuming I could get materials.

    Except that I would need to go through a drug approval process that would several years and cost 10$ of million$

    As a wise man once said “Get out of the way!”

  8. From Parkinson’s Law: Chapter 8

    “The central administration gradually fills up with people stupider than the chairman, director, or manager. If the head of the organization is second-rate, he will see to it that his immediate staff are all third-rate; and they will, in turn, see to it that their subordinates are fourth-rate. There will soon be an actual competition in stupidity, people pretending to be even more brainless than they are.”

  9. I think the FDA and all other similar governmental regulatory agencies demonstrate a really poor model of how to operate with regards to marketplace regulation/certification. There’s too much unfettered power inherent in making these functions purely “government”.

    I would submit that the UL model is better; private certifications by industry- and consumer-supported certification authority. Such authorities are not the only place you can go; should UL become corrupt and dysfunctional, the consumer can chose to accept CE ratings from European countries in lieu of the UL ones. The FDA needs to be shut down, and its functionality replaced. While it has done some good things (thalidomide springs to mind…) there’s a lot more that its held back, and when you consider the bureaucratic capture that’s taken place, well… I’m not sure it’s a net gain.

    Similarly, government monopoly power on law enforcement hasn’t worked out all that well, either. I think we’d be a lot better off if that functionality were not sole-sourced or capturable by political interests.

    It’s fairly obvious at this point that the police response in Uvalde was entirely dysfunctional. I can’t comprehend the mindset of the participating officers, who deferred to the dumbasses in charge, rather than acting. This is the American equivalent of that mob of jobsworthies in the UK a few years ago that let a man drown, rather than risk getting their feet wet before the right equipment showed up. In any event, they’ve all demonstrated they have the precise wrong mindset, and they need to find other work after being stripped of their pensions and benefits for life. I’d go back a few generations and strip the assholes who recruited, trained, and then promoted these worthies to their positions, as well. There’s really no other way to get accountability out of these institutions–You hire, train, and promote someone like Comey? LOL… You lose your retirement, and we’re coming after you for the damages, to boot. Right now, cops and FBI agents look the other way with the cretinous assholes infesting those agencies, ‘cos it doesn’t cost them a thing to look away. So, they do, and we get these events and all the other malfeasancies of the FBI.

  10. Constitutionally, the President of the United States is an *executive*, not a legislator or a judge or a chief empathizer. An executive is a person who runs things. Yet Biden, as far as I know, has never run anything at all, and the executive experience of his cabinet members is also pretty unimpressive.

    There is neither interest nor ability on their part in fixing things, building things, etc.

  11. John Henry,
    Thank you for the information about the baby formula. Another thing that I have heard that is affecting this, is that the European formula that they are importing with such self-congratulatory publicity is still subject to import tariffs and taxes. That is like charging taxes on emergency food distribution in the middle of say a hurricane. I cannot confirm that for sure, and if anybody has more information please post it.

    Subotai Bahadur

  12. Unintended consequences appear to be a Lib specialty. It now seems like we are reaching a perfect storm of unintended consequences.
    Saw a variation of a more famous quote somewhere, maybe some here know the source: “Any advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”

  13. Frank…I am not so sure that the consequences are unintended. I think they are intentional and deliberate. The extent to which they are failing is unintended.

  14. Frankly, I want to know where an 18 yr old unemployed trannie in Uvalde got the $3500 it would take to buy those two rifles.

  15. Joe,
    So would we all. On the other hand, this is a side issue. As if he couldn’t have done it with only one cheaper gun. It gets into the “If only we could have kept him from getting a gun.” gun control argument. In Sandy Hook, he stole them. There is no plausible scenario where someone sufficiently intent will not have access to guns or other lethal weapons.

    The real problem is to somehow identify these individuals and do something to prevent them from carrying out an attack. If we assert for the moment that all these individuals (and lets be realistic here, we’re only talking about males) are mentally ill. How, among the millions that meet that criteria, do we find the tiny proportion that would do something like this? Bear in mind that late adolescence-early adulthood is the most common time for serious mental illnesses to manifest themselves. Mental health professionals are already obligated by both professional ethics and law to report anything they deem to be a threat to others by one of their clients to authorities. There’s a lot of wiggle room for all involved but even when one of these individuals triggers this sort of intervention, it’s mostly limited to some sort of short psychiatric confinement that teaches the patient not to bring up the subject again rather than any meaningful change. What, short of physical confinement, would insure the safety of the community? Who decides and just how do they decide which of us are to be confined indefinitely for something that hasn’t actually happened? History shows that these sorts of powers are always abused for political and material purposes, usually at the expense of those most in need. And, it does nothing about newly emergent derangements that haven’t come to the attention of professionals.

  16. Instead, they’ve set the conditions to crash the entire system. I’m not even sure this could be walked back, at this point. Getting oil production back up would necessitate not only opening up leases and all that, but convincing investors that you’re not going to pull the carpet out from under them again. Which was the most damaging thing about Keystone’s cancellation, which made it clear that the assholes in office could destroy your investments at whim without recompense. That’s the thing that prolonged the Great Depression, more than anything else: Nobody had a clue what the brain trust behind FDR was going to do next, and they weren’t about to risk their investments. You create uncertainty in the markets, you’ll be decades getting that level of trust back.

    This is a key point and is why we are in for a serious crisis. The incompetents running things now have no experience at running or building things. They are a bunch of grad students with theories that have not been tested. By 2024, the situation may be out of control. This bunch shows no sign of learning from the disastrous results of their policies. They seem to be in a “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” stage of delusion. Maybe electing Trump in 2024 again would restore confidence but the example of what can happen if Democrats get elected will last a long time. I don’t know what could bring that party back to sanity. I have a couple of kids (in their 50s) who are lefties (and lawyers). I can’t talk to them.

  17. MartyKing – they have their plan, which appears to be tearing down society so they can recreate it in their imagined utopia, which appears to be them being the Lords of the Manors and everyone else being the serfs. However, they also appear to exist inside their carefully crafted mental constructs and allow no thoughts/ideas that could rock the boat. It’s been said that Putin was taken by surprise by the poor state of the military – the downside of the strongman ruler is that accurate, but bad, information never gets sent upwards.
    That unintended consequences appear to spoil the carefully crafted schemes seems to be something the wannabe rulers do not take into account, or denigrate. Those doing their bidding, in turn – everything they’ll think, do, and say is in the meme they took today, to borrow a line from a song. When things spin out of control is the unintended consequence, and it’s almost surprising that they are taken by surprise each time it happens.
    You could say that mental myopia is no way to run a planet.

  18. except the failures go in one direction, why did they basically ignore putin in 2014, and make him the worst thing evarr in 2022, the shut down of oil production refining and transport, the collapse of the supply chain spot shortages like baby formula, add provoked events like buffalo, a retired bureau agent was in contact, and uvalde, another slightly less known wolf, in a site which has been buffeted by the reconquista or the al hijra (spanish and arabic words for invasion by immigration) they had been locked down 48 times before this,

  20. “In Sandy Hook, he stole them”
    Shot his mom and then took them, I think? I’m still so confused why we’ve only seen like one picture ever of that guy, and where’s the “true crime” stories about him? These things get memory holed in such bizarre ways.
    Like the El Paso shooter–there’s literally witnesses on tape saying they saw multiple shooters, and he’s just gone into some black hole somewhere.
    To say nothing of Las Vegas and Nashville, so weird how we just shrug and move on and accept They aren’t going to tell us anything, and we’ll just accept it like good little sheep.
    Say, what was Ghislaine convicted of anyway? Trafficking a few girls to nobody, apparently…

  21. well he was useful enough to go after remington arms, for reasons, and alex jones, for being lazy and stupid, lazy because the mechanisms behind this event were much more sinister than ‘crisis actors’ don’t think real dealogically motivated terrorists aren’t studying up on the pathetic responses to buffalo and uvalde as well as the synagogue siege at the beginning of the year,

  22. I have yet to see anyone anywhere point to what almost certainly helped the Uvalde killer buy his gun: laws that expunge juvenile records when a criminal turns 18. He bought the guns on his 18th birthday. He’s almost certainly (50-1, I’d estimate) one of the two Uvalde middle-school buys arrested in 2018 for having a detailed plan to murder their classmates and teachers four years later when they would be seniors, i.e. 2022. It looks like one of the two lost interest or moved away and the other decided to go for the elementary school as a softer target for a single shooter. (Or maybe he realized that going back to a middle school to kill your enemies would only work for the teachers: classmates would all be in high school by then, just like him.) If he’s one of those two, he had a really gruesome juvenile criminal record. If he passed the background check to buy guns on his 18th birthday, that must mean that his juvenile record was expunged when he turned 18.

    I’m all in favor of expunging juvenile records for most juvenile crimes. Kids who (e.g.) shoplift candy bars, or bully other students for lunch money, or drive mom’s car without permission when they’re too young to do so legally will mostly grow out of such behavior, or at least knock it off at 18, when they know it’s going to go on their ‘permanent record’ and stay there forever, hindering their chances of success in life.

    However, juvenile records for homicidal psychos should not be expunged. Such people should not be able to buy a gun just because they turned 18. (The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for underage joyriders who run over and kill people, by the way: they should never be able to get a driver’s license.)

  23. he apparently wasn’t one of the shooters from that instance, then again in the fog of war, who can tell exactly, maybe rep gonzalez read the wrong file, that’s possible, certainly he like the buffalo shooter were sending off flags, like a carrier flight crew, he apparently had been planning this since march,

  24. is there any “official” statement that he wasn’t one of the two kids from several years ago? I haven’t seen it, just a walkback that he definitely was, which isn’t the same thing at all…

  25. Frank. That could have been me. I posted this somewhere, could have been here. I have never seen this idea elsewhere.
    Napoleon: never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
    Arthur Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
    Newbury’s corollaries: 1) Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice; and
    2) Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.
    (I’m Newbury BTW) .
    The first describes what we think about the DMV. The second could be the subterfuge the radical left hides behind. They arrange things to look like a fustercluck but that is a cover to deflect blame.
    To the left there may be no Unintended Consequences except of course when they (will) get what they deserve.

  28. “is there any “official” statement that he wasn’t one of the two kids from several years ago? I haven’t seen it, just a walkback that he definitely was, which isn’t the same thing at all…”

    I’m thinking that the signs are extremely suspicious with regards to that, and that it would be entirely in consonance with how the local cops behaved during the event were it true that he was. Indications are that he should have been popping up on someone’s radar, given his online behavior. Supposedly, one of the services he used reported him after someone spotted weapons on his bed during a livestream.

    But, this is totally in keeping with the theory that they’re implementing anarcho-tyranny as a game plan: Parents get arrested for “interfering with law enforcement” while said law enforcement was literally doing nothing to deal with the situation.

    All you have to do is ignore these warning signs, which most of these idiots give off like crazy, and then stand back while they wreak havoc. Rinse, repeat… Pretty soon, you’ve got just what you want: A terrified public willing to hand you all the power and authority you ever dreamed of. Meanwhile, you disable all the effective law enforcement personnel by either prosecuting them or firing them for silly crap. One wonders about two questions, the first of which would be “What would a cop like Derrick Chauvin have done, in this situation…?” and the second of which would be what those brave men that shot the man crawling towards them on the floor of that hotel would have done, confronted with a Uvalde-like situation?

    You get the sort of policing you deserve, I’m afraid. You cannot simply pay someone else to die for you, unless they’re really stupid, exceedingly brave and stupid, or inhumanly altruistic. In order for someone to step in front of that muzzle and get shot on your behalf, they have to have solid faith that they’ll be taken care of should they be shot, and that their families will, too. As things are today, the average cop has good reason to believe that if he takes that bullet, he’s likely to be screwed over. Note the outcry over Chauvin, for example–I can guarantee you that he was doing exactly what he was trained and required to do by the Democrat-led Minneapolis Police Department. The fact that they hung his ass out to dry is a telling one, and it’s at least one reason why cops stand around and wait, instead of acting. When guys like Chauvin do things totally in keeping with department policies and training, and still get screwed? Guess what? Ain’t nobody sticking their necks out.

    I’ve been over the pertinent documentation. Chauvin was doing precisely what he was trained to do by MPD. Like it or not, that is a fact–And, about every cop out there knows that. And, they know that if they find themselves in a similar situation, they’re going to suffer the same fate. So, they don’t go out of their way to get into those situations. Big ‘effin surprise.

    You get the policing you deserve, just like everything else in government.

  29. Seems to me that policing is kinda like health care, when it’s easy it’s not even needed and when it’s hard it’s impossible…

  30. Kirk, I agree with you about Chauvin. The Rodney King cops saved his life. I sent money to Stacy Koon’s wife while he was in prison. You have an excellent point about the Uvalde cops, although I wonder if any of them had kids in that school? Apparently not as the Border Patrol guys did.

  31. Dr Weevil, I also agree with you. As far as “expunged”, my son, who was an alcoholic from age 16 to 26, was arrested for DUI when he was 16 or 17. He was later in college and was arrested for DUI again at age 25. It was a head on collision that broke his clavicle. The other driver was drunk too but was not charged. (He was black). That “expunged” juvenile record was “unexpunged” and used to add to his charges. Fortunately, we were able to get him diverted to a terrific rehab program and he has been sober for 30 years. He has been a lawyer for 25 of those years,

  32. I don’t have a problem with situations like Mike’s as far as sealing juvenile records. Most of us were young and stupid to one extent or another. It seems to me there should be some sort of limit on the number of strikes. True sociopaths won’t be able to hide behind one or two incidents.

    We’re still in the period where rumor overwhelms facts. Time is the only thing that will let the facts develop. The Texas Rangers have a good track record policing Texas law enforcement. They work directly for the Attorney General and the Governor that don’t have an obvious interest in suppressing the truth. Looking at the broad outline, explaining that hour, or near enough, will be enlightening and pretty hard to spin.

    Trent, whom I hope hasn’t been permanently lost to the bright lights of Twitter stardom, posted a thread that gives some insight to what the response should have looked like if the current play book was followed.
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1529671544309530624.html

  34. I find so sad and horrifying the little fact that’s been reported that the killer’s father had recently cut off contact, with the excuse that he had to take care of his own elderly mother and, well you know covid is just too risky…even if your kid’s “difficult”, even if you think he’s dangerous, you can’t do that, that’s a worse dereliction of duty than the cops who just stood around doing nothing…

  35. “I find so sad and horrifying the little fact that’s been reported that the killer’s father had recently cut off contact, with the excuse that he had to take care of his own elderly mother and, well you know covid is just too risky…even if your kid’s “difficult”, even if you think he’s dangerous, you can’t do that, that’s a worse dereliction of duty than the cops who just stood around doing nothing…”

    Brian, I’d like for you to reconsider that “dereliction of duty” idea, being as we just don’t know the details. The father could well have been a victim of the current prevalent mentality in today’s “family courts” wherein the father is deemed a mere source of financial benefit to the wife and kid. The details of this case aren’t known, as of yet, but… Lemme tell you this much: From what I’ve observed watching how these things play out, it is entirely possible that the father in this case was merely recognizing reality and moving on.

    Most people have no earthly idea about the levels of dysfunction within some families, or the manner in which the courts can exacerbate those problems. Friend of the family had a one-night stand with a woman who told him she used “protection”, only for her to turn up pregnant and demanding child support a few weeks later. He did the right thing, married the woman, and then spent a few years living in hell with her. The kid, which looked nothing like him, was as crazy as the mother was. Eventually, after she cost him his career due to her acting out at his places of employment, he divorced her. At some point, medical necessity required genetic testing for the kid, and lo and behold, it wasn’t his. He’s still on the hook until hell freezes over, because said kid is never going to be capable of independent life. No matter which way this poor bastard turns, he’s still screwed by the courts, who keep upping child support and denying his “parental rights” to get the kid into rational treatment, even though the mother has been diagnosed by the same child welfare authorities as having Munchausen-by-proxy behaviors, on top of the kid’s issues.

    Watching this situation from the outside, I honestly can’t blame him for not having a thing to do with either the mother or the kid, at this point–He can’t do a damn thing to influence anything at all, the courts having taken over and usurped his role as a father.

    So, yeah… I’m gonna suggest that blaming the father in the Uvalde case might just be more than a little unfair, and that it might be more productive to ask WTF role the various courts had in this situation.

    Personally, I’m growing to believe that the state has no business involved in these issues, not because of a lack of need to “do something”, but because there’s no earthly way you can expect a court to actually do any good in a lot of these cases, and that when the courts fail to “fix” ‘effed up family situations, then that delegitimizes everything else they do. In other words, you can’t “fix” stupid, so it’s a waste of time to put the effort in at all. People are wanting other people to demonstrate God-like omniscience and consideration when the raw fact is, the courts are just other people who’re equally flawed and equally prey to vice and malfeasance. Relying on them to “fix” things like the Uvalde killer’s family life is just an entirely delusional line of thought; final analysis is that it’s the individual family situation that needs to “fix” itself, because there ain’t nobody else, short of the divine, who actually can. It’s nuts to think that a few hours worth of work in a courtroom is going to actually influence these situations, which are years in the making and arise out of the individuals involved and their flawed human natures.

    Hell, for all we know? That father you’re excoriating may have tried his damnedest to be a good father. Maybe. I’m inclined to look at the mother, with her “He had his reasons…” justifications after the fact, and suggest that she and her drug use with a much older boyfriend might have had more proximate relation to what happened than the father. I don’t see how anyone remotely sane could say something like that, after their kid went and killed twenty-odd children at a grade school…

  36. Mom sounds like a hot mess, but sorry you don’t get to say, see ya kid, have a nice life. The story I saw that mentioned it says the kid was pretty upset and angry that Dad cut him off.
    Life is short, life is hard, you stick it in crazy you gotta pay the consequences, sorry not sorry.

  37. Mom sounds like a hot mess, but sorry you don’t get to say, see ya kid, have a nice life.

    This kid was actually 18. That is, an adult.

    What do you expect the adult’s father to do about him?

    This is yet another example of the endless and obscene incompetence of the American government. From what I’ve read, this 18 year old was viscous and nasty, prone to making violent threats, and certainly was or should have been known to law enforcement, even if he wasn’t one of the two juveniles arrested in 2018 for promising to shoot up the school.

    But nothing was done. I’m reminded of the Parkland massacre, when it turned out the police had been called to the shooter’s home dozens of times without doing anything.

    Time was, these sort of ****bags would get the choice between prison or the military, where there would get sense pounded into them whether they liked it or not. Now, they are allowed to wander around loose until they do something so awful that it can’t be ignored.

    Decades ago, the ability of juveniles to essentially get away crimes and have it all go away once they turned 18 was a political issue, at least for a while. Back then, I read that what happened was that one senator- Birch Bayh- was displeased at how young criminals were treated and somehow managed to get the system changed for the entire country.

    Today, because the government is incapable of reforming itself or solving problems, we have tragedies like this.

    Sad, but I have no faith that the idiots misruling the country are capable of doing any better, on this or any other issue.

  38. I just noticed that I should have used “vicious” and not “viscous” in that last comment.

    Oops.

  39. he was slippery like an eel. of course we’ve had so many of this nazguls, from jonesboro to parkland, that wretched creatures like him, seek inspiration, the system seems to be designed to enable them, and prevent innocents from being killed, and more power accrues to those at the apex of the pyramid, and average citizens are cut out of the picture,

  40. I gotta agree with Xennady. The so-called “juvenile justice” system is a huge part of the problem.

    The real issue with a lot of the things “going wrong” across our society stem from the same sort of specious reasoning behind a lot of the problems we have with the so-called “juvenile justice” system. It doesn’t matter one whit whether or not you “knew you were doing wrong” when you did the crime; you did the crime, period. And, you need to be held accountable for it, and dealt with accordingly. You commit an act of violence, that fact needs to be taken into account for the rest of your damn life, so that others may be warned and know you’re a potential threat. There should be no “expungement” because you suddenly learned how to better mask your behavioral issues.

    I’ve known a couple of sociopathic/psychopathic bastards who did things as children. They didn’t magically change into decent human beings at age 21; about all they managed was to learn how to be better at concealing their mental health issues from strangers. I’m sure they were very convincing to their social workers and the mental health “professionals” who dealt with them, or they’d have never been let back into society, but the raw fact is, they were essentially unchanged in terms of “threat” as adults. If anything, their stint in “corrective custody” merely taught them to be better at concealing their true nature than it accomplished anything else.

    I remain dubious of the notion that someone that can commit criminal murder at thirteen for the “thrill” of it is someone that is capable of being “reformed”, and I’d love to know why the hell we ought to bother, once someone has demonstrated their capacity to do something like that. How many innocents have died precisely because society in general was unable to do the hard thing, and put one of these creatures down when they first self-identified as monsters?

    I would submit that a lot of our problems trace right back to the same basic lack of an ability to deal with these people and situations pragmatically and without sentiment. I don’t care about the excuses, I care about the effects. So what if Joe Blow had a terrible childhood, rife with abuse and horror? Does that unfortunate fact grant him license to perpetrate horrors on others? Should he be “forgiven”, when he does commit horrors?

    That whole “forgiveness” thing just drives me nuts. It is not your place to grant someone “forgiveness”, and then pat them on the head for killing your family member. You can set that crap aside, and not do anything yourself, but forgiveness? WTF is that, anyway? “Oh, it’s OK you killed my daughter… You were having a bad day…”.

    That fundamentally insane mentality is what drives a lot of our problems in general: “Well, the job was difficult, so we’re OK that your essential incompetence killed several hundred miles of river… Here, have a bonus and a promotion…”

    Dude, you ‘eff up, you pay the price. Period. Learning won’t occur so long as we keep short-circuiting between “cause” and “effect”. I may be a primitive asshole, but I think that if the Uvalde killer had been filmed for broadcast as he was dragged out of that school and torn to shreds by family members of his victims, then set on fire while still living…?

    I kinda suspect that the next asshole in line would find another way to act out.

    The way we’re doing this stuff is almost begging for more of it to happen. The deranged mentalities watching all the news see what happened in Uvalde, observe the histrionics and all the notoriety he gained in death, and instead of saying to themselves “That’s a bad idea…”, they will later remember this and decide they want some ‘o dat for themselves.

    The Columbine killers are a perfect example of this in action. They should be remembered a lot differently than they are, and they should have served as object lessons in why doing these things result in really bad results. Instead, they’re iconified and turned into anti-heroes by a certain similarly sick segment of our society, and we wonder why we get more and more of the same from those people. It might not have been entirely just or fair, but if they’d have been dragged out of that school by their scrotal sacks and then suffered horrifically before being slaughtered like the vermin they demonstrated that they were, well… Yeah. Highly unlikely that they’d have a fan club of people wanting to do the same thing.

    We’re playing these situations exactly wrong, and then wondering why we get more and more of them. Which is fairly nuts, from where I’m sitting…

  41. “This kid was actually 18”
    Just turned like a week or two ago, no? So Dad cut off his messed up high school senior kid months ago, and let’s be honest with ourselves, odds are Dad basically cut him off years ago.
    I thought it was kind of a tenet of conservatism that dads and intact families are kind of important for social functioning, but I guess not…

  42. Brian, your focus on the father is at odds with the way society currently views paternal rights/responsibilities. And, in this case? Absent knowing what the hell was in the case records with the involved courts, it is premature to say he could have had any real effective influence on the course of things.

    The general skew of the family courts is towards the mother, right or wrong. You would not believe how hard it can be for any father to even have input, let alone custody, no matter how screwed up the mother is. I’ve witnessed this fact of modern life innumerable times, over the years, and I find it very difficult to immediately go all knee-jerk with a “blame daddy” narrative.

    It gets pretty ridiculous, TBH. Friend of mine in the service was guilty of “sticking it in the crazy”, and wound up with a daughter from that relationship. Which ended very badly, in an extremely ugly divorce wherein he was accused of molesting his own kid, a toddler at the time. His entire relationship to that child was reduced to sending a check every month, and in a highly ironic bit of nastiness, said daughter was later actually molested by the mother’s meth-dealing live-in boyfriend. She was also later victimized by foster caretakers, again sexually. Father was denied any rights, whatsoever, based on the proven-baseless allegations about molestation. And, as an added fillip of joy to the whole thing, when he eventually did manage to contact his adult daughter, she was very emphatic that she saw him as being to blame for the entire situation: “He should have done better as a father…”

    I watched this whole fiasco take place from the periphery, and it was a mess. The courts should have put that poor kid as far from the mother as possible, but they instead took her side. About all my friend got out of it was a life-changing amount of money taken out of his paycheck every month, and a metric ton of guilt and angst over something he couldn’t do a damn thing about. What was the most messed-up part of the whole thing was that he was actually a pretty good father, when he was allowed to be, doting and caring. I know for a fact that the molestation charges were virtually impossible for the same reason that CID exonerated him–When he supposedly committed the acts, he wasn’t even on the continent where they supposedly happened, being deployed to Korea with me unexpectedly.

    Before I’d go “daddy’s fault”, I want to see court records and the details. My knee-jerkism is diametrically opposed, given what I’ve seen of how these things actually go, when the courts and “child services” agencies are involved.

  43. Leaving aside the whole Uvalde farrago of fail – I wonder if the grandmother was about the only semi-competent and responsible person involved. The grandfather seems like a flaming idiot in singing unceasingly to the press, and as for the sister in the Navy – poor kid. She got out, and now they are dragging her back in. I was friends with a very nice couple on one of my assignments (they were neighbors of mine), and the wife confessed to me that her brother-in-law had featured in a horrendously shocking murder and subsequent trial which got all kinds of bad and invasive press. It was a horrific embarrassment to them all, because their name was rather distinctive.
    Anyway, a comment on Insty got me thinking – about institutional failure. What happens when the competent, hard-working, and ethical are driven out of an institution for whatever reason? (Mostly for being white, competent, and unwilling to knuckle under to current intellectual fashion, it would seem.) What happens to an institution like a police force, a corporation, an industry, or a university, when the be-all-and-end-all is a mediocre, go-with-it-to-get along and relatively incompetent entity … how long can it go on as a dead institution walking? I guess we are about to see in real time.

  44. jfc Kirk, I’m not “focused” on the father, I said it was a side fact that caught my attention, but you do seem like the kind of guy who would gladly cut off his own progeny so I guess I’m not surprised it should bother you so much.

  45. @Sgt. Mom,

    I’ve seen the same thing, many times. The truly weird thing is, just how much you discover seems to be “nature” rather than “nurture”. There’s a biological component to behavior that seems to trump any input from the environment, and I’ve seen it run both ways.

    I had a young guy working for me once upon a time, who you would think to look at him came straight out of the fictional Huxtable family. I presumed he had, and never once did I notice him demonstrating the slightest hint of anything other than “straight-up upper middle class” in his background. Kept thinking that, right up until I had to deliver the Red Cross message to him about one of his sibling’s being killed on the streets of Las Vegas… In a gang-proximate shooting. At which point, I came to discover that my presumed young scion of some well-off middle-class black family was the son of a single mother drug-addict prostitute who’d contributed several other children to the ranks of Las Vegas criminal element, and that he’d already lost about half of them to violent death, while the rest were in prison or on probation. He was the only one who’d escaped that. He wasn’t even too sure who his father had been, other than that his mom thought he was a “nice guy” who’d treated her right while hiring her services.

    It’d be interesting to know how much of that was genetic, and whose genes made him the man he was, if that was actually why he didn’t fall into that life. I am still embarrassed for how badly I misjudged him and his background; he’d always come off as this Theo Huxtable type, and we all used to rib him about his background based on that assumption. He never said a word about the reality of it, and once I found out, I kept my mouth shut.

    In response to your thoughts about institutional failure, I’d submit to you that the things you point out are not the proximate causes of that failure, but are the inevitable result of an earlier failure to properly select, train, and develop the people running the institution. Which is why I think there ought to be a bit of flesh kept in the game for all concerned. I mean, if you have institutional drift such that men like Comey are gaining high rank, that only happens because people on his left and right were not policing him as he rose through the ranks. And, the majority won’t do that policing these days because they see it as someone else’s problem, in years to come. You don’t fix that attitude easily, but I’d damn sure make a stab at it with a policy that requires you to put your name on your product, and then suffer the consequences when that product goes as far off the rails as Comey and others did. “Oh, you were this cretin’s trainer? His first boss? And, this is what came from your tutelage and mentorship…? Hmm. Seems like you didn’t take your responsibilities seriously, so here’s what we’re gonna do: First of all, kiss goodbye to your pension (for the really egregious cases, of course…) and all your assets are now going to pay the damages to your protege’s victims… The state ain’t picking up the tab, either…”

    I really think that the system ought to be set up such that pension benefits are paid into a fund, one that gets tapped to pay back victims of institutional malfeasance. You trained, supervised, and promoted someone like those two assclowns in Mesa, Arizona? Fine; your pension and assets are what go first to pay the victim’s families, ‘cos you clearly demonstrated a lack of due care and diligence in your duties.

    Right now, a lot of institutional “fail” is happening simply because the parties involved in enabling have no “skin in the game”. I say, put their skin in it at least as much as everyone else has.

    And, to be brutally honest about it all? If I’d had a thing to do with that assclown 82nd Airborne general who off-loaded those Afghans in order to get his illegal war trophy home, I’d be perfectly up for losing some of my pension to pay for the damages to the victims. Because, I should have done something to prevent that POS from ever attaining the rank he did…

  46. Sgt. Momn: “What happens to an institution like a police force, a corporation, an industry, or a university, when the be-all-and-end-all is a mediocre, go-with-it-to-get along and relatively incompetent entity …”

    Part of the issue may be the rise of the Administrative Class, who govern through “protocols”. Heaven help the poor guy who uses his initiative instead of following the appropriate protocol from the thick book of rules … to the letter!

    We keep hearing stories about this from England, such as the one about police & other emergency services standing around looking at a body floating in a duck pond for ages, waiting for the guy to show up who had the appropriate “water hazard” certification to wade into knee-deep water. But that is their protocol.

    A firefighter with the County told me about a fire in a building in the city on the highway that divides City from County. Because of the location, both City & County Fire Departments were dispatched, and reached the scene at about the same time. However, the protocol for the City firefighters stated that they could not enter the fire until given appropriate direction by their officer. Because of his rank, the officer travelled to the fire in his Command vehicle, and had got held up somewhere. The County firefighters laughed and put out the fire before the City officer showed up.

    The universal protocol ought to be — Deal with the Problem, Right Now! But then there would not be enough for the Administrators to do, adding to & rewriting that massive tome of protocols and beating anyone who fails to follow their holy protocol. If we scratched the surface of this school shooting, I bet we would find something similar impacting the police.

  47. Joe Wooten @ May 28, 2022 at 8:00 am:
    Frankly, I want to know where an 18 yr old unemployed…
    He worked 30 hrs/wk at Wendy’s.
    …trannie…
    Once had a picture taken of himself wearing eyeliner (which he posted). Nothing else. No cross-dressing, no pronouns, no renaming.

    Kirk @ May 29, 2022 at 7:32 pm:
    “You trained, supervised, and promoted someone like those two assclowns in Mesa, Arizona?”

    This reminds me of my thoughts on the Justine Damond case. She was a 40-year-old Australian immigrant in Minneapolis who was shot dead (in her pajamas) by one of the police responding to a 911 call she’d made. The officer was a Somali “refugee”. After a public outcry, he was eventually convicted of murder.

    Which IMO was a miscarriage of justice, because he clearly acted in momentary panic, and should have been charged with manslaughter. Meanwhile, the higher-ups in the PD who recruited him, shepherded him through training, and gave him a badge and a gun should all have been convicted of negligent homicide. But AFAIK, they all skated.

  48. The somali had his sentence cut by 2/3, with chauvin it was the reverse.

    There was no justification for what the former did.

  49. There was a sort of scandal several years ago in Irving Texas involving the fire department. Someone decided that response time could be lowered by manning fire trucks with three man crews. This allowed more trucks in service with fewer men and they were bragging about good response times. Eventually, it came out that the response times they quoted were for the truck on scene. What they left out was that the short manned engine crews were having to wait to actually attack the fire until a forth managed to show up as four was the minimum number that would allow anyone to enter the building. Got a new Fire Chief out of it.

  50. “… four was the minimum number that would allow anyone to enter the building.”

    Story goes that in the Good Old Days (pre-9/11), when the New York City Fire Department responded to a fire call, first thing that happened when the fire truck arrived at the scene was that the youngest & healthiest fire fighter grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran up the stairs to the apartment. Often, he could contain the fire & limit the damage with just that extinguisher before the rest of the crew reached the apartment with hoses etc.

    Timing is critical in emergency situations. Protocols which slow the effective response increase the danger & destruction — as the incident in Texas shows.

  51. At which point, I came to discover that my presumed young scion of some well-off middle-class black family was the son of a single mother drug-addict prostitute who’d contributed several other children to the ranks of Las Vegas criminal element, and that he’d already lost about half of them to violent death, while the rest were in prison or on probation. He was the only one who’d escaped that. He wasn’t even too sure who his father had been, other than that his mom thought he was a “nice guy” who’d treated her right while hiring her services.

    When I was interviewing and examining military recruits, I met this nice looking black kid who was joining up. He told me he had 17 half siblings and he did not want to see any of them. Once in a while one escapes.

  52. Gavin,
    The rest of the story was that he was then free to rifle through the apartment for anything valuable and portable before anyone else showed up that might want a share. There are a lot of stories about the NYFD, not all of them uplifting.

    This is mostly from memory and I would wish Subotai to correct anything I get wrong. The whole SWAT thing started in L.A. after a string of incidents where some criminals found themselves surrounded either while committing or during the get-away from some crime. The LAPD was once an effective if not altogether wholesome organization. Whereupon, they would take hostages and typically demand a get-away airplane to somewhere and lots of cash. Straight forward frontal attacks had yielded bloody results for hostages and police as well as the miscreants. The SWAT premise was to exploit the obvious desire of the hostage takers to survive by drawing out the process of negotiation until the hostage takers gave up from exhaustion, the dawn of reason or some exploitable opening occurred. The initial outings proved fairly promising with, usually, no casualties.

    As with everything else, it’s the details that matter. In this case it’s the difference between somebody that wants to stay out of jail and somebody that just wants to kill as many people as possible before sacrificing himself on his alter of choice.

    It seems the scene commander was the Chief of the school district police. This is a position where I would expect to find someone supplementing his retirement from some other law enforcement career dealing with a little pot smoking and the occasional disappearance of school property. Unfortunately, here it was also his job to get this first assessment right. This job had to fall to somebody, and it’s not likely that anyone within a hundred miles had any more actual experience with this sort of incident. I don’t expect to ever really learn why he decided to treat this as a barricaded suspect instead of what was plain from the very beginning.

  53. There’s a Somerset Maugham story about a British colonial official who is in charge when word comes of a worker rebellion on a remote plantation. Instead of responding immediately with the resources at hand, the official spends days organizing a massive military expedition. By the time the expedition gets to the plantation the rebellion is long since over due to the plantation owner’s decisive early action. The British official is disgraced. This seems to be a timeless story.

  54. This is yet another example of how hierarchy and organization simply don’t work well, the way we do both of them today.

    Both concepts are powerful tools, but as the quote often attributed to George Washington about government goes, they’re good servants and terrible masters.

    Up until the late 19th Century, there were no “organized police forces” across much of the United States. In those days, something like Uvalde would have been dealt with “informally”, as the James Gang raid on Northfield Minnesota was dealt with: People would have armed themselves, and then taken action on their own behalf. Nobody had the mindset that it was “someone else’s job” to protect their bank deposits; when the James outfit showed up, the hardware store manager handed out his stock, and an impromptu militia organized itself to defend their savings in the bank, resulting in the James Gang being driven off in ignominy.

    That’s “hierarchy and organization” of a different sort than we have today. Today, we have the spectacle of standing hierarchies and organizations, ones which have usurped people’s own self-organizing impulse and even their initiative to do for themselves. The standing hierarchies and organizations have also been gradually taken over by the same sort of time-serving hacks that parasitize so much of our society in general, everywhere you look.

    In “ye olde dayes”, the Uvalde shooter would have been dealt with by those same parents who gathered around the school, who’d have taken action because they knew nobody else was going to do it; there’d have been zero deference to “authority” as represented by those time-serving hacks running the Uvalde police department. They’d have just gone in, and the situation might have been resolved with a lot more casualties, or a lot fewer. My guess is that it would have been fewer, but you really can’t know.

    Contrast what happened in Uvalde with another well-known school shooting from decades ago: The so-called Texas Tower Shooting at the University of Texas. There, once people figured out that Whitman was shooting people from the tower, citizens and police worked together to deal with him entirely on their own and without the real intervention of a “command team”. It was a citizen and a pair of patrolmen moving on Whitman in the tower, absent any of the “command structure” we’d identify as being “essential” today.

    In 1966, cops and citizens acted in concert to deal with the nutjob as expediently as possible. In 2022, the jobsworthies have taken over, and everyone is afraid to act on their own. You saw the same thing at Beslan, where the Russian security forces refused to act until the parents went in on their own. It’s sad commentary on the state of America today that we’re emulating the dysfunction of post-Soviet Russia…

    Hierarchy and organization are good things, necessary things. Where we go wrong is in enshrining these two necessities into permanent static reef structures of power and prestige, there ripe for the takeover of the posturing incompetents who only seek power for the privilege that we grant along with it. Unaccountable privilege, I might point out; the asshole in charge at Parkland has now been hired again, as chief of police, by yet another Florida community that apparently suffers from amnesia. I would submit that he should probably be banned from ever working again in any law enforcement capacity, along with anyone he hired and trained.

    Some behaviors can only be dealt with via the signal benefits of extinction. Learning opportunities ought to exist, and a zero-defect mentality is to be decried, but for the love of God, some other things just need to be stomped on with caulk boots until they’re blended in with the soil…

  55. Went down a rabbit hole with that Texas Tower thing… It is striking how “popular culture” turned Whitman into an anti-hero, popularizing what he did in song and story. Sickening, really.

    Similarly, there’s more of that inane “forgiveness” thing going on, with the families of his victims. Some said they “felt sorry for him” just months after the bastard tried killing them, and killed immediate family members in their presence.

    To me, this is just plain wrong. If you’re writing a song or some other form of artwork glorifying a madman’s mass-murder, you’re not only aping their disregard for human life, but actually continuing his work by desecrating the memory of his victims. It’s really odd to recognize that we’ve iconified a lot of these assholes as heroes and anti-heroes alike, while their victims just blend into the background as props in the little morality plays we make of these things.

    I’d challenge anyone reading this to remember the names of any of the victims in these mass shootings. Then, ask yourself why it is you remember the names of the shooters, in their place. Question that, please: Because I believe that the mental gyrations our culture goes through to enable that plays a huge role in just why we have so many of these things happening, again and again.

    Same-same with the violent assholes of yore; why do we remember and enshrine the James Gang, and yet nobody knows the names of the Northfield posse members that took them down? You go looking for the details of that story, and what do you find? They’re cast mostly as a bunch of straight-laced killjoys who prevented the noble James Gang from taking their rightful deserts there in Northfield. How many of the Old West myths turn the outlaws into heroes, the mass killers into the ones who were “in the right”?

    You want to grasp at the sickness at the core of our civilization? I think you’d begin to understand it, could you possibly wrap your head around this one depraved thread.

    Same question is probably intimately intertwined with why so many women are fatally attracted to mass-murdering scum doing time in prison, while walking right past that boring guy with the 9-to-5 job that just doesn’t make their heart sing. Pure irrational mental illness, I suspect…

  56. This job had to fall to somebody, and it’s not likely that anyone within a hundred miles had any more actual experience with this sort of incident. I don’t expect to ever really learn why he decided to treat this as a barricaded suspect instead of what was plain from the very beginning.

    This seems to be a systemic problem. In Broward County the “school resource officer” hid until it was over.

    Broward Sheriff’s deputy school resource officer Scot Peterson, who was assigned to the school that day, would later be accused of retreating during the shooting while victims were still under attack. Peterson was arrested in June 2019 and faced charges of neglect of a child, culpable negligence and perjury.

    At least that attack only lasted 5 minutes. No excuses in Uvalde.

  57. A factor in all this is the perception these jobsworthies have that they’ll never, ever be called upon to do the thing they’re supposed to do, fill that function they’ve weaseled their way into.

    You have failure of nerve in a lot of situations. The ones I’m most familiar with are in the context of the military, where there are two general classes of this syndrome. On the one hand, you have the guy who joins the service for the pretty uniform or the college money, who when faced with the reality of what he signed up for in terms of personal suffering and discomfort (or, risking life itself…), demurs, saying “I didn’t sign up for this…”. Yes. Yes, you did, dumbass. You just didn’t think it’d apply to your sorry ass. Ever. You thought you were signing up for the “peacetime Army”, the one that never gets shot at and gets to run around having fun, playing at war.

    The other sort of failure of nerve is a bit harder to criticize; it’s the one that occurs with a guy who’s been there, done that, and who suddenly realizes in the breach that he simply can’t “do” yet again. I have little to criticize with these cases, because I fully acknowledge that the will to go forward against fire is a fragile thing; you do it once, even with the best of will, and it’s entirely possible it may not be something you can ever bring yourself to do again. Things happen to a man’s (or, woman’s…) willpower and ability to cope, once one has had the experience of near-death. You did it once? Good enough for me… So long as you don’t keep talking trash about it, and how brave you were.

    The guys in Uvalde strike me as being of the first sort, the men who never expected to ever be faced with giving their all, their last full measure, in the course of things. When faced with that, they did not measure up, and they’ll have to live with that for the rest of their lives.

    There are things a lot of us don’t want to know about ourselves, I’m afraid. You like to go through life thinking well of yourself, that of course you’d be the hero, and sacrifice yourself to save others in situations like that in Uvalde. The reality is, you really don’t know, for sure, until faced with that choice in real life. And, you can’t really say for sure that you’d do it every day, under every circumstance, either. Today, you might have just had an argument with your wife, and you’re sufficiently irritated and angry enough that you simply don’t care about whether you live or die. Tomorrow, life might seem sweet, and you won’t want to give it up so easily…

    These are things that the cops at Uvalde now know about themselves, and I do not envy them the knowledge. It’s a harsh thing, to realize and be forced to recognize that you’re a self-interested craven coward. Worse yet, for the world around you to know that, as well…

    To add levity to the discussion, that bit about the “argument with wife” is taken from real life. Buddy of mine did something extraordinarily brave and incredibly stupid under fire in Iraq. Everyone was agog, saying what a brave man he was, and how he’d shown such heroism under fire…

    I got to talking to him months later, back in the US, and he made the confession that the only reason he’d done what he had done was that he’d spent the night before the mission in the internet cafe, arguing with his wife over her spending and other family issues. In the course of things, she’d pissed him off so badly that he decided then and there to divorce her and move on. During the following day’s mission, there was a complex IED attack, which turned the lead vehicle in front of him into so much confetti while the convoy got shot up. He remembers very little about the thought process he had, but he will freely acknowledge that he simply no longer gave a f*ck, about anything, and he walked upright through the fire coming in up to the wrecked vehicle, picked up the one wounded guy he could get to (gunner, blown out of the hatch) and then proceeded to coolly walk back to his vehicle while firing at the enemy. He’d been so pissed-off at his wife that being blown up and shot at was just a minor irritant, and it was days before the emotional reaction hit him. He told me that he didn’t think he could have done that without that anger, and that if he was ever in that position again, he was probably going to curl up into a fetal ball and hide somewhere.

    Some days, the bear eats you. Other days, you eat the bear…

  59. Like I said somewhere at the beginning of all this… I’ve no doubt that there were plenty of red flags strewn about, just like with all the other mass murdering scum.

    What I want to know is how/where he got the funding and the knowledge to pick up those rifles he used. That represents about $5,000-6,000.00 in weaponry, and it was all top of the line stuff. Not the sort of generic thing some knucklehead would chose off the rack down at the gun shop.

    Like the shooter in New York, I have to wonder if there was someone coaching him online… It’d make sense, given what we know. I strongly suspect gaslighting, setup, and false-flag operations.

    I mean, what the hell…? The school was on lock-down, and a teacher goes outside, props the door open, and leaves it????

    Nothing about any of this smells right. At. All.

  61. Kirk, I’ve been wondering the same thing. Where did the money come from?

    Did the Fbi give it to him figuring they would stop him on the way into the school and get big headlines.

    There’s a dozen or more times I know about where they have set some poor schlub up then stopped a major terror attack.

    The Whitmire case is only one of the more recent.

    I also wonder why there is so little info about him on line. Some sources say he was born I. Uvalde. Others say North Dakota. Seems like that would be pretty basic info.

  62. It is a mystery.

    The thing that I have the most problem with is that the rifles he bought were not the sort of thing that a tyro buying their first rifle would purchase. Typically, I think the path would be “buy whatever is cheapest”, and go from there.

    The other thing is this: Where the hell did he get the training/practice time in to be able to do what he did? You do not just watch a couple of tutorial videos on YouTube with this crap and then become Joe Lethal through magical osmosis. Even if you spend a lot of time gaming, there’s still the issue of muscle memory and learning how to manipulate the weapons. I’ve got thousands of hours spent practicing that crap with the M16 family of weapons, and I know how long it took me to learn how to do all that until it was muscle memory. If this assclown was so proficient that he was driving off cops who had some level of training…? Where the hell did he get his training and experience? That doesn’t come out of nowhere…

    Not to mention, there’s the whole “Yeah, Imma gonna drive to a school and start shooting…”. He was either the luckiest guy ever, or he’d done some reconnaissance. The unlocked, propped-open door was something that clearly enabled him, but he knew enough about the layout of that school to make use of it.

    There’s so much about this incident that needs answering. It’s like many of the other major “mass killings” we’ve known. I still have unanswered questions about just exactly went on with regards to the OKC blast, because even as a guy with a career working with explosives, I find it difficult to believe that two untrained, inexperienced tyros like McVeigh and Nichols managed to prepare and detonate what was a very effective improvised truck bomb. In all honesty, even though I’ve used ANFO extensively in training, I would be hard-pressed to pull off what they did on their first real try with as much success as they had. Everything I’ve seen points to more questions, like “Who the hell was the technical adviser on that…?”, because the truck bomb they built was a lot more sophisticated and obviously successful than a couple of guys with their backgrounds should have been able to pull off. There was also the resemblance to the sort of bombs built in the Middle East by the likes of Hezbollah, which were informed by East German Stasi and GRU operatives assisting them with technical guidance. So, yeah… I do wonder about the “rest of the story” we haven’t been getting in a lot of these cases.

    Note well how that story about the Buffalo shooter’s online “coach” is disappearing into the woodwork, just like his left-wing background and rampant COVID paranoia are.

    I honestly don’t know whether a lot of this that’s going on is due to the idiot class infesting our news media, who don’t even know enough about anything to be able to identify when they’re being fed a line of BS by the authorities, or if it’s all active conspiracy actually going on. Whatever it is, the truth isn’t “getting out”, at all. If you know enough to be able to tell what you’re looking at, the information made public and then publicized on the news only raise more and more questions that aren’t being asked.

  65. FBI tells conservatives they’re needed to go after child predators and terrorists and tells libs they’re needed to go after conservatives, and of course the libs actually hold them to it, and conservatives are too stupid to see what’s going on. The fact that there’s a huge building named after J Edgar Hoover right in the middle of DC is just a big Eff You to the country and a demonstration of who is really in charge.

  66. Here’s a Uvalde conspiracy theory scenario for ya–idiot cop runs into classroom, shoots the teacher by mistake, runs back out, everyone spends an hour wondering how the heck they’re going to get out of this one, border tactical guy finally shows up and goes in himself, because none of the locals are willing to do anything because their local supervisor / union chief is ordering them to do nothing.

  67. I myself would like to know – as a simple question which could be easily found out, if we had a “news media” actually dedicated to, you know, digging into records and nosing out the facts, instead of one which is satisfied to function as a stenographer/loudspeaker for the Dem party — where, exactly was the Uvalde shooter born? In Uvalde, or some other state? Immigration status of his mother?
    The fact that we aren’t getting any straight answers to that simple question allows a thousand flowers of speculation to bloom.

  68. The teacher’s husband’s death is gonna bloom into a thousand conspiracy theories as well…
    Come on Texas Rangers, show that there’s some functioning institutions left in the country…everyone there who’s “not cooperating” (if that’s even true, everything else we’ve heard is a lie) needs to be arrested like yesterday…

  69. I think the former is unsurprising, you lose the mother of your four children, your high school sweetheart, and you may lose your will to live, it took a while for the whole parkland fiasco to unravel, that’s why they are striking while the iron is hot

  70. this is just the first week, like the time of the town hall when anderson vanderbilt tried to ambush dana loesch and the nra, the whole promis part the pipeline that enabled the shooter to move from school to school, because condescending attitude toward minority candidates,

  73. You know, if we had a genuine opposition party the gop leadership would be loudly and publicly pointing out that the left has absolutely no incentive to stop these mass casualty events because otherwise there would be no impulse at all for gun confiscation.

    But because we don’t, we have silence, along with the gop establishment openly scheming with the left about how to disarm potential opponents.

    At this point, I figure every massacre is an op from one of the endless three letter agencies maintained by the regime. That can only sound crazy but I have a hard time believing that a government which records every phone call, every tweet, every facebook comment, and everything that happens on the internet somehow fails to stop mass shootings conducted by scum who have long histories of posting their murderous insanity on the internet.

    I think everyone living in America has long been used to the endless incompetence of the government yet that excuse can only go so far.

    Something else is going on, in my opinion.

  74. Yep, “domestic terrorism” has been a major justification for the FBI for decades now. The majority of “KKK/militia members” are FBI employees and/or informants. One might propose eliminating the FBI would be the single most effective thing we could do to reduce that issue. I say let’s try it and find out…

  75. The FBI was formed under false pretenses in the first place, back when. It promptly got (more than willingly…) suborned into politics, and the raw fact that Herbert Hoover managed to get himself put in charge of it and then ran it until he died…? I mean, seriously: Find me another example, anywhere in US governmental history, that something similar happened. And, nobody ever questioned it, through any administration of any ilk whatsoever. Hoover achieved a level of penetration into government that Beria could only dream of. You really have to wonder how the hell he pulled it off, TBH. It’s like he just existed on a separate plane from everything else in government, with no checks or balances. Look at the dates, alone, and wonder: May 10, 1924 through to May 2, 1972. What. The. F*ck? 48 years in office, when most other equivalent government positions are lucky to reach 48 months with the same incumbent?

    I think Fauci may be the only example of someone in a similar government position. Which only argues that these jobs ought to be temporary things, not life-long sinecures.

    What’s worse is that Hoover could well be argued to have been key and essential to the chicanery surrounding the very founding of the place he ran, back when it was put together while Congress was out of session. End run, don’t you know… They’d already tried getting it through, only to fail, under previous Congresses.

  76. Hoover was a clerk who was good at gathering data anarchists and communists were trying what was happening in germany what succeeded briefly in hungary one may quibble if he should have gotten more proactive against organized crime ask how anslinger is regarded he did have great longevity

  78. When you get down to it, neither Hoover nor anyone else in American government was at all serious about dealing with the Communists.

    Look how easily and thoroughly they penetrated the entirety of the US military, diplomatic, and intelligence efforts during WWII. Stalin had reports on the Manhattan Project almost as soon as FDR did, and the idiots running Lend/Lease were constantly granting the Soviets more and better stuff than even our own forces were getting.

    Objectively, Hoover was a fraud. His supposed “anti-Communist” actions were mostly about getting power and keeping it. The KGB and GRU ran rings around the US counter-intelligence efforts, and the civilian leadership was so thoroughly penetrated by Communist sympathizers that it wasn’t even funny. What success we had against them happened mostly by accident, and because a few brave men turned on the Communists.

    Hoover talked great game about his efforts against “organized crime”, and “Communist espionage”, but the objective observable reality is that everything he did was more in line with self-aggrandizement and the accrual of personal power, which led to even more egregious acts in order to preserve it.

    Any agency with the PR that the FBI so carefully stage-managed should be held suspect, just on general principle. I’ve never liked or trusted the bastards, based on what I’ve heard of their practices from actual police officers I know.

    One highly indicative thing is that, unlike, say, the Texas Rangers? The FBI doesn’t recruit agents from the “lower” levels of law enforcement; they bring their agents in laterally, from civilian life. The infamous massacre of FBI agents in Miami back in 1986 got hoots of utter disbelieving laughter from the actual cops I knew who were familiar with how to deal with violent and dangerous criminals. Several just shook their heads and said “Only the FBI would try that, and be surprised at the results…”

    There are reasons that the Federal law enforcement agencies are so thoroughly disliked by line cops out in the hinterlands. The only exceptions to this that I know of are the US Marshals, who’re pretty universally respected.

  79. right go with that. blame general groves, or his security chief peer de silva, who would end up station chief in saigon, look at the last 50 years and compare with how contaminated the entire political cultural academic establishment is, I take a long lens on things, webster wasn’t terrible, but as we’ve seen he was out of his depth, compare bill casey with john brennan,

  81. The newest development out of Uvalde is that the local police are refusing to cooperate with the State investigation. I predict that they will find this an untenable position. The next step will be the convening of a Grand Jury. Individually, they can not be compelled to forego their 5th amendment rights but I believe any peace officer doing so will find that their credential as a peace officer has been suspended. They will be out of a job.

    Institutionally, the police department has no such rights and individuals face the prospect of complying with requests for evidence or facing being charged with obstruction or contempt of court in the case of a Grand Jury. The organization as a whole can be suspended and it’s duties assumed by the state and or county. There is precedent for this.

  83. Objectively, Hoover was a fraud. His supposed “anti-Communist” actions were mostly about getting power and keeping it. The KGB and GRU ran rings around the US counter-intelligence efforts, and the civilian leadership was so thoroughly penetrated by Communist sympathizers that it wasn’t even funny. What success we had against them happened mostly by accident, and because a few brave men turned on the Communists.

    I read an interesting book review yesterday. The book, “Stalin’s War, a new history of WWII”

    I’ve ordered it and it sounds interesting. The premise is that WWII was directed by Stalin and communists, like Harry Dexter White, mislead Roosevelt and we armed the Soviets as allies when they were planning world conquest.

    Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary.

    I’ll report on it when I am finished.

  84. this is what suvorov fmr spetznaz who was dessault (paratrooper) in prague discovered in Icebreaker, stalin was less subtle than lenin in some ways, he shut down the trust and executed almost all of the operators there, but he saw the long game, in germany largely, marx’s home, the labor unions were strongly marxist so he waged a campaign against the social democrats, I refer to Albert Krug, aka Jan Valtin,who was in the ground floor in the Hamburg ports, once the social democrats collapsed, and the Catholic Center was done in by the Depression, he thought the Nazis would be easy pickings, in the short run that was a tragic miscalculation for the Word, but in the long run, the War ended with his getting his buffer zone, in the Eastern Zone, half of Germany, he failed to a degree in France in 47 and Italy in 48, in part because the Church and the Mob, were aided by the Company, breaking from the system was not easy as Germany ’53, proved, ‘where Brecht got his dissolve the people and elect another’ notion, a parallel to what Gramsci had set up, and the Frankfurt School, some of whose leading figures Marcuse Halperin made it into the OSS analytical section, and later Academia, the grand figures in the West, like Monnet thought European unity, a goal championed since Charlemagne, was the key, but they left the details to others, besides the skeleton of the Common Market, that subsumed England in 75, for Aldo Spinnelli, a Communist MP, was the watchmaker there, and much of the details which dominate the system was his design,

    Hoover like many security bureaucrats of the interwar era, were blunt instruments, he turned away Dusko Popov, the Yugoslav triple agent (and inspiration for Bond) who tipped us off about an attack like Pearl Harbor, he was against the internment of Japanese Americans, in ways that many of FDR’s men succombed, because he saw it as impractical

    on the Continent, some of his counterparts were outright fascists, the Cambridge 5 were able to make it into the highest ranks of the Service, because of their pedigree, their clubbability, as it were, some suggest that sidney reilly, the dark prince of Russian operations gave the Soviets tips on how to recruit these premature SJW’s I tend to doubt it,

  85. Mike K: “I read an interesting book review yesterday. The book, “Stalin’s War, a new history of WWII”

    Sean McMeekin’s book is well worth reading. It could equally well have been titled “FDR’s War to Make the World Safe for Communism”.

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