How to Humble the Kritarchy

In 2021, when Trump wins re-election and Republicans re-take the House, they need to bring the Federal judiciary to heel.

The Kritarchy has been grossly overreaching its authority for decades, but ever since Trump was elected, it has gone completely out of control. Neil Gorsuch has mildly criticized the practice of nationwide injunctions, but he did not go far enough. And as much as I would like to see these "Hawaiian" judges impeached, there is an even better way.

You see, there is a very basic problem, which is that sub-SCOTUS Federal judges are pretending to be co-equal with Congress and the Preisdent. They are not. It is an evil lie.

In the Federal judiciary, only the SCOTUS was created by the U.S. Constitution; the rest was created by Congressional statute, and what Congress has made, it can unmake. Even setting aside the possibility of impeachment, all non-SCOTUS Federal judges serve purely at the pleasure of Congress.

Therefore, they are beneath Congress. Therefore, they are also beneath the Executive, which is co-equal with Congress. They are logically at about the same level as Cabinet officials, whose appointments are also confirmed by the Senate.

Thus, there is a very simple way for us to start bring the out-of-control Kritarchy to heel. All we have to do is elect a President and Congress that have the wit and will to unmake a Federal judgeship whenever the holder of that post gets too big for his britches and steps out of bounds.

In 2021, Trump and a simple majority in the House and Senate can pass legislation that does a targeted elimination of all of the posts held by non-SCOTUS judges that have issued nationwide injuctions, then pass a new law creating even more posts (since it is commonly believed that they are overworked and we need more anyway).

This would, I believe, put an end to the evil practice for good.

When 75 Cents Was Worth a Dollar

This is a story from roughly a quarter of a century ago, back when I was in college and living in the dorms. The washers and driers were coin-operated, specifically three quarters apiece. Now I was there on academic scholarships, but surrounded by lots of scions of the UMC. So I was careful to save up my quarters, and they were not so much.

Eventually it became known that I always had quarters, and people started coming to me for them. This started to impact my ability to have enough quarters for myself, so -- having taken Intro to Economics -- I did the logical thing to discourage a behavior and started charging more for it; to be precise, I began charging a dollar per three quarters.

This went on for awhile until I was suckered by a sob story and sold a guy some quarters at face value. Then the next time he wanted to buy quarters, I naturally wasn't going to believe that he couldn't manage to scrape six quarters together in all that time. I wasn't going to fall for his con again.

But he wouldn't take no for an answer, He argued and argued and argued and ar- ar- ARRGH!! I finally blew my top and vowed no more quarters for anyone. And I made sure to let all of my disappointed regulars know exactly who to blame.

So that is my story about when 75 cents was worth a dollar, until eventually the aggravation of dealing with assholes made even a 33.3% surcharge not enough to make it worth my while. And all the people who had loudly declared that I was ripping them off? Yeah, they were mad as heck that I wouldn't do it anymore. Go figure.

What was the point of the Richmond 2A protest?

I keep saying that there is nothing interesting in politics lately, but then I consider that technically, there was a massive protest in the Virginia capitol yesterday. Thousands of people, many of them heavily armed. But what was the point?

They were appealing to an unamenable authority. From where I’m standing, it looked like a silly and pointless LARP. A cargo cult of the Civil Rights Movement. Boomers and Millenials all caught up in the theater and pageantry, without any understanding of how things actually work.

Am I wrong? Did they actually accomplish something beyond good feelz?

I Love a Good Hate-Review

There still isn’t really anything very interesting going on in politics. The most interesting thing is what didn’t happen, due to how the DNC has shut out all of their most interesting presidential candidates from the joint press conferences that they call “debates”. Active military chick, successful entrepreneur guy, devout New Age chick, and fiercely heterosexual guy are all out. But I find it hard to care about a counter-factual.

So! Let’s talk about hate-reviews. The apotheosis of the genre is, of course, Willamette Week’s 2012 review of “The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best.” Sample paragraph:

Through a series of serendipitous events, Alex finds himself on tour with Jim (Michael Weston), a songwriter with a fetish for toy instruments. On the car ride to its first gig, the duo hatches its sound, later described as "the Shins meet Sesame Street." The movie treats this as a novel creation, ignoring that half the indie-pop bands of the past few years could be described the same way. Nevertheless, wherever the group performs—a bar, a rooftop, a Revenge of the Nerds-style frat house—the crowds sway in approving unison. One woman, a pouty blonde named Cassidy (actress-model Arielle Kebbel, unconvincing as a Pennsylvania club promoter despite her totally rock-'n'-roll nose ring), is so impressed she joins them on the road. She and O'Nan eventually fuck, because everyone knows morose losers who can't get over their girlfriends are irresistible to Maxim pinups.

Seriously, read the whole thing. They gave it a D when they normalized all the ratings to an A-to-F scale, but as I recall it was originally something like 10 out of 100. It's really an F.

Please share your own favorite hate-reviews in the comments!

Nothing interesting in politics lately.

I has a sadz. As a politics news junkie, I've been going through serious withdrawal lately, as basically nothing has actually been happening. (A fake impeachment doesn't count.) But I will try and soldier through, taking this opportunity to reflect and see how we got here. Making the best of makework!

So if we look back at the Russia collusion investigation, the Deep State picked Robert Mueller, who was both dogged and dumb/incompetent. We can take from this that they expected his Speshul Counthel investigation to simply go on indefinitely, either to a trial or the 2020 election.

But it didn't. The timing of the ending implies -- and I don't know, it's just an intuition -- that when William Barr came in as AG, he basically told them: either wrap it up, or get investigated yourselves for obstruction of justice. And Mueller's team had carelessly left a shit-ton of evidence of their wrongdoing, so they were terrified of being investigated, and they wrapped it up.

So then Adam Schiff's lawless shampeachment comes out at just the right time to try and maintain the fake smell of scandal. But he's just another midwit druggie liar with delusions both paranoid and grandiose, same as every other D.C. hustler doing some form of speed or coke. I mean, if you just look at his eyes, there is clearly something that he is either taking too much or not enough of.

So is Schiff an unmedicated schizo or a druggie riding the dragon? I neither know nor care. Either way, he's disqualified as a moral authority, and his own side should be cringing at just how bad he's going to make them look.

Civil Disobedience: The How of Making Ourselves Ungovernable (3/3)

Our Fake Elites: The Why of Making Ourselves Ungovernable (1/3)

The Last Straw: The When of Making Ourselves Ungovernable (2/3)

There is a peculiar fantasy on the authoritarian left – such as the antifa, black bloc, and BAMN – that they are some kind of rebels. When really they are the street enforcers of the political orthodoxy, like Mussolini’s blackshirts.

So our civil disobedience will be much more difficult than theirs, because we won’t get a pass from amenable authorities. But each personal sacrifice will be another scalp taken in the moral level of war. We win not by overpowering, but by provoking overreaction, and demonstrating the moral illegitimacy of TPTB.

And that is a very hard pill to swallow. But we are not in the same position as our ancestors, who had a clear bill of complaints to make against the Crown. Our own hostile rulers are more clever and try to boil the frog slowly. So until we have our Lexington & Concord where they try to take away our arms, to take up arms would be to lose.

So the clearest and most peaceful way for us to win is by sheer volume. If every man willing to shoot and kill for his country were also willing to simply go to jail for his country, then there would be no jail beds left. Companies would have to relax their standards to remain well-staffed. Mass action would have mass effect.

So I'm talking about civil disobedience with the expectation of actual jail time for mere disobedience, unlike the blackshirts, who can get away with actual hospitalizing violence. Understand that the contrast in consequences is part of what will delegitimize TPTB and lead to their downfall; a serious and effective war with no shots fired on our side.

Socialism is all about sex, death, and power.

I honestly believe that our elites want to make the rest of us more vulnerable to crime in order to make themselves more special. And by then crystallizing the social structure, their mediocre offspring will have a reproductive advantage in perpetuity. So contra Scott Adams, it is quite rational for our ruling class and clerisy to want socialism.

Look at how they attempt to create dynasties carrying on their name, mostly failing. It is currently the closest that a man can get to immortality; but the brutal logic of statistical regression to the mean will consistently devastate a dynasty in just a generation or three.

So how can they give their descendants a permanent advantage? Only by permanently ending even a quantum of a fraction of a ghost of a sham of a meritocracy, making America like China, where the way to get rich is to be the worthless offspring of a well-connected insider.

Socialism is a scam. It’s a shell game, a three-card monte, a cheap street-corner con. It works great on illiterate peasants; and I hope and pray that my fellow unhyphenated Americans will see right through it, since the whole point is to subjugate us all forever.