The idea of a Jordan B. Peterson music video sounds like an idea that might be wall-to-wall cringe. But this is actually a pretty effective ditty that combines early Kate Bush with The Wall-era Pink Floyd.
“Wake Up: Dedicated, under the current unfortunate conditions, to the Prime Minister of Canada, the Right Honorable Justin Trudeau. “
Scott DeShields of Kentucky Ballistics managed to blow up a single-shot Serbu RN 50 again, but this time it was intentional.
Back in 2021, he was almost killed when a hot round blew up his gun. Serbu was kind enough to send him the same model to test to destruction, which he does with proper precautions.
He tests leftover SLAP rounds from the batch that caused the explosion, and there’s obviously something wrong with them, with punched primers and spent rounds that require herculean efforts to extract from the chamber. But they don’t blow it up.
So he gets out a round specially designed to produce 190,000 PSI of pressure, more than three times the usual 55,000 PSI for a normal .50 BMG round.
That does the trick.
Skip to 23 minutes in if you want to get right to the money shot. Spoiler: Not only does the 190,000 PSI round blow up the gun, it blows it up in exactly the same way.
Science!
Justin Trudeau’s storm troopers start arresting peaceful protesters, he wants to kidnap the children and dogs of free Canadian citizens who dared to bruise his fragile ego, Texas sends more lawsuits flying, and another case of Sudden Epstein Death Syndrome. It’s the Friday Saturday LinkSwarm!
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cancelled parliamentary debate today as federal police began arresting protesting truckers and confiscating vehicles. Trudeau did not want to face government while the operation to break the back of the freedom protestors begins.
Early this morning, federal police assembled a convoy of heavy tow trucks to begin the operation. The identities of the tow truck companies were masked by painting over the logos to avoid retaliation. RCMP and Ottawa police then brought in Armored Personnel Carriers (MRAP’s and APC’s) to support the operation.
Media were told to leave the enforcement zone to help hide the optics of heavily armed RCMP tactical units, and they began breaking the windows of the trucks and forcibly removing the truck drivers. For the same reason, popular social media YouTuber’s, who had been broadcasting livestreams, were arrested as the operation began.
It’s public health 101: if you want to protect people from a +99% survivable virus, you trample them with horses in front of their kids and euthanize their pets and freeze their bank accounts
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) February 19, 2022
The Chicago Teachers Union provides a real-world example of what happens when a government union has too much power.
CTU has gone on strike three times in three school years. In the latest work stoppage, over 330,000 schoolchildren missed five days of school. Parents were notified of the walkout after 11 p.m. on a school night, leaving them just hours to develop a back-up plan after the union decided not to show up.
This shut-down follows the 2020-2021 school year, when Chicago Public Schools was fully remote for most of the year, rolling out hybrid options starting in February 2021. All told, Chicago students had gone 17 months without fully in-person education by the time they started the current school year Aug. 30, 2021.
And students’ academic achievement suffered for it. One example: On the SATs, there was a 6.1 percentage point decrease in the number of Chicago students at least meeting standards in math – and a drop of 6.7 percentage points for the same category for low-income students – in 2021 compared to 2019.
But CTU’s political muscle – and their willingness to flex it – could become the blueprint for schools and government at all levels if Illinois’ powerful government-sector unions get what they’re asking for at the polls in November. They want an amendment to the Illinois Constitution that would give unelected government union bosses more power than state law or the people elected to represent residents’ best interests.
Snip.
Amendment 1 is billed as a right-to-work ban in a state that already doesn’t allow right to work, but it’s much more than that. It would give unions a “fundamental” right to organize and bargain over wages, hours, working conditions, economic welfare and safety at work – i.e., virtually anything – and explicitly prohibit lawmakers from ever interfering with or diminishing those rights.
Unions would be able to demand anything during negotiations and go on strike to get their demands met. Resulting contracts would carry the weight of the state constitution. Lawmakers wouldn’t be able to restrict what unions can negotiate or limit when they can go on strike without running afoul of the state constitution.
What’s more, lawmakers would never be able to repeal a little-known Illinois provision that allows many union contracts to override conflicting state and local laws and regulations.
Known in legal parlance as a “supercedence clause,” the practical effect is that a union will be able to rewrite laws it doesn’t like just by negotiating a contrary provision in its contract. If the employer doesn’t agree? The union goes on strike. And government officials’ hands will be tied.
That includes laws in place to protect children.
A provision requiring “background information” on employees of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services – the department charged with protecting children who are reported abused or neglected – could be contradicted in the union’s contract with the state.
So could the provision prohibiting employment of “sexually dangerous” persons.
This isn’t just the crest of a wave: if Republicans offer a positive, credible alternative, as @GlennYoungkin did in Virginia, it’s the making of a realignment. https://t.co/5lzpE6B7IL
— Steven Law (@LawAmericanX) February 15, 2022
CRT got blown away by a massive truth bomb dropped by North Carolina dad — and local GOP candidate — Brian Echevarria at his school board meeting on Monday.
“As a parent, I speak to other parents,” he told Cabarrus County School Board members, “And there’s a few things we don’t want.”
“I’m biracial, I’m multilingual, I’m multicultural. The fact is in America and North Carolina, I can do anything I want — and I teach that to my children. And the person who tells my little pecan-color kids that they’re somehow oppressed based on the color of their skin,” he justly insisted, “would be absolutely wrong and absolutely at war with me.”
What’s in it for those businesses that now realize that three hundred thousand dollars a month in office space “We don’t need it anymore.” What’s in it for those employees that figured out that they can have homes that are two or three times the size for half as much money and not have to deal with a commute every day? What’s in it for them?”
FLOCK DROP MYSTERY: A security camera in Chihuahua, Mexico, captured the moment hundreds of yellow-headed blackbirds suddenly fell from the sky — many nosediving to their death https://t.co/45WA052YZO pic.twitter.com/FsZkEorTc7
— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 17, 2022
Why are corgis like this? #corgi #dogs #funny #cute #love #puppy pic.twitter.com/d1iUiXw4QH
— AnimalMemeTV (@AnimalMemeTV) February 16, 2022
Been running around all day and I’m going to make a batch of salsa, so I’m gonna have to push another packed LinkSwarm to Saturday.
In the meantime, here’s Tucker Carlson’s tribute to P. J. O’Rourke.
Satyagraha, in addition to being my least favorite of Philip Glass’ early operas, is Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance to political repression. We’re seeing an excellent example of it being deployed up in Canada, as the trucker protest against Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates continues.
Here’s an example of the philosophy in action:
BREAKING – several RCMP vehicles attempt to block intersection at HWY 15 & 4 ave in Surrey B.C. to prevent traffic towards PAC HWY border crossing.
A group of protesters swarm police and sit down in front of police vehicles forcing them to back away. https://t.co/x3XzAmaWS5 pic.twitter.com/rJqC0545q2
— brevner.eth (@MattBrevner) February 13, 2022
Veterans have reportedly joined the protest, forming lines between police and truckers.
Canada: Veterans have formed a line between the police and the truckers at Ambassador Bridge. 💪🏻#United #AmbassadorBridgeBlockade pic.twitter.com/1ryH9ahNBi
— Not2nightjosephine (@Not2nightjosep1) February 13, 2022
Evidently the Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit and Windsor, Ontario has been cleared but access to the bridge is still blocked.
The primary roadblock to solving the crisis remains Justin Trudeau.
Instead of treating the truckers as fellow citizens who have a valid, or at least reasonable, complaint about a relatively unimportant policy that the government vacillated on prior to its implementation, the establishment and center-left in Canada have reacted to them with outrage and contempt.
They are agents of malign foreign influence or white nationalists. They must be fought on the beaches and the landing fields.
Snip.
Justin Trudeau speaks as if an enemy horde has descended that must be resisted in another Battle of Maldon. “I want to be very clear — we are not intimidated by those who hurl abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless,” he said. “We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags. We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans.”
In this, he engaged in classic nutpicking, focusing on a few instances of misbehavior to tar the entire group. It’d be hard to come up with a better expression of the high-handedness that has characterized pro-restriction officeholders and public-health experts during the pandemic than Trudeau’s sneering attitude toward the protestors.
Canada has been a relative monolith on Covid. Conservative officeholders have been broadly willing to go along with lockdowns and mandates. There has been no Ron DeSantis. Nor is there any conservative alternative media in Canada (with a few exceptions) to give a platform to dissenters from the Covid orthodoxy — the positive coverage of the truckers, for instance, has mostly been emanating from the United States.
Surely, this is why the truckers have taken on such an outsized significance.
In representing such a high-profile break from the Covid consensus, they have given conservative politicians permission — or affirmatively pressured them — to begin to back off restrictions. Already, the conservative leader who lost to Trudeau last year and is a relatively conciliatory figure has been dumped and will likely be replaced by a more combative alternative. Alberta and Saskatchewan have moved this week to lift various Covid restrictions.
The truckers are another sign of the class inversion in advanced Western countries. The Left continues to shed working-class voters and gain college-educated voters and the well-coiffed Trudeau, fully attuned to haut progressive sensibilities, is the perfect paladin for the upper-middle class. On the other hand, the right is doing the opposite and sees blue-collar virtue in the truckers to whom it once would have felt no natural connection.
One hopes that, on the ground, the whole episode doesn’t have an ugly end.
Trudeau should give the truckers their victory on the vaccination mandate. His government, which already backed off on it once only to re-embrace it, can easily back off again. It’s not as though this was a law passed by parliament. It’s a unilateral, arbitrary rule of the sort that proliferated throughout the pandemic. And no one can seriously believe Canada is going to suffer a renewed Covid surge based on roughly 10 percent of its truckers not being vaccinated.
The idea Trudeau should give in only works if you assume that he’s actually working for the best interests of Canada and Canadians. The stubborn resistance to a return to normalcy on the part of left-wing politicians across the globe suggest that another agenda is at work.
Liberal comedian Bill Maher, whose diet seems to incorporate ever-more redpills these days, says Trudeau is starting to sound like you-know-who:
Joined by entrepreneur @VivekGRamaswamy and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, @billmaher ripped Canada’s Justin Trudeau last night on his show for his recent comments about the Freedom Convoy pic.twitter.com/u47EIStOY0
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) February 12, 2022
Fact check: Trudeau was never a cool guy.
Will the Canadian political establishment force Trudeau to blink, or is he going to push the crisis to bloodshed to make truckers bend their knees to the state?
Just saw this pic.twitter.com/4FQuAeMQ4G
— JMQ (@jmquinn31419) February 11, 2022
Enjoy Joe Rogan and Dave Smith slamming CNN’s fundamental dishonesty:
@joerogan and @ComicDaveSmith Destroy #FakeNewsCNN and @brianstelter 😂😂😂😂😂
— Political Corruption Exposed – Illinois (@IllinoisExposed) February 11, 2022
Plus Russell Brand’s hilarious impersonation of Brian Stelter, and some takedowns of the Russiagate and Bountygate lies.
Ben Shapiro has thoughts on The Great Democratic Party pivot discussed yesterday.
All over the world, people are realizing that this is stupid and then it’s time to end it. The problem for Joe Biden is that he’s been stuck in “I will end COVID mode,” and he’s now created an entirely paranoid set of American citizens who believe the minute you take off a mask, you’ll be struck by the wrath of God.
When your worldview is completely off, you have two choices: One, shift your worldview and announce that you made a mistake or: Two, keep doubling down. And Joe Biden has to keep doubling down, because the minute he announces it was a mistake, guess who the hero of this story is? It is no longer Joe Biden, it is no longer Andrew Cuomo, it’s the evil, horrible, no-good, very-bad Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who took the exact opposite approach, and they can never allow that to happen.
I believe that Shapiro is right, in that there is a contingent of Democrats willing to mask and lockdown forever rather than admit Republicans were right. But I believe Shapiro overlooks the time honored gaslighting strategy, where the Biden Ministry of Truth solemnly announced that we’ve always been at war against mask mandates, and that a significant fraction of their mainstream media enablers will shamelessly parrot their new lie, just like Jen Paski shamelessly lied that it was Republicans that wanted to defund the police.
It won’t work for the vast majority of American voters, but they don’t really expect it to. It just gives them the delusional fig-leaf that they were never wrong, to be followed immediately followed by even more “shut up” and “you’re a racist,” then a nice foreign war or riots over a random dead black felon to help change the subject.
It’s the Democratic Party way.
Started working on a short post that became too long a post to finish today. So enjoy some video from Canada’s Trucker Revolution:
Instapundit also has an interesting article up: The workers of the world finally had an uprising and the left hates it.
So we’re finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if there’s no justice, there’s no peace.
Naturally, the left hates it.
For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.
A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police.
Worse yet, a huge part of the lefty self-image revolves around feeling superior to the working class and openly expressing disdain for it. One need spend only a few minutes tuning into left media like NPR, CNN or MSNBC to hear the disdain for working-class Americans, inhabitants of “flyover country,” people who live in the middle of nowhere.
So naturally, the idea that those people might be staging a revolution is intolerable.
The idea that the wrong kind of people might be demanding freedom is simply intolerable to the left.
Amazon is one of the great disruptive companies of the late 20th/early 21st century. Lots of technically savvy people in the early 1990s were wandering around thinking “The Internet is going to be huge, but how do you make money off it?” when Amazon (and eBay) went “Behold!” From selling books, then CDs, then everything, then locking in their customer base with not only a ginormous selection, but next day and/or free delivery, they not only out Walmarted Walmart, but also almost accidentally created the cloud computing boom with AWS, which for many years was their highest profit margin division.
But success is not without its discontents. Their search function has sucked forever, and sometimes it’s easier to find items via Google or DuckDuckGo. There’s tons of crap from China (tools and electronics) and India (soft goods) of uncertain quality.
And then there’s the problems covered in this video:
Today I got an email from Amazon (I bet many of you did too), stating “Try secure pickup when you order electronics.”
Reading between the lines, what I’m understanding here is that crime has gotten so bad in some areas (namely one-party Democrat-run locals with George Soros-baked DAs) that Amazon package theft is actually impacting their profitability. Remember all those train theft boxes scattered along California tracks?
Amazon is a modern wonder, but it relies on an affluent, law-abiding, high trust society to work properly. If law and order break down because thieves pay no price for stealing packages off your front porch, how does Amazon function? If no one charges and imprisons even the most brazen criminals, and (as in San Francisco and other Soros-DA infected locales) lawful violence to prevent theft is punished worse than theft, how long before those same thugs start prying and cutting open those new Amazon strong boxes?
Criminal disorder damages society at multiple levels, and under the Democratic Party’s current ideological direction, things are only going to get worse.