Sexual harassment is very, very serious

Except, of course, when women do it:

A California state lawmaker at the forefront of the #MeToo movement faces a growing number of sexual misconduct allegations herself. Four former employees filed a formal complaint against Democratic Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia. Another says he was fired after protesting when she suggested playing “spin the bottle.”

Garcia has authored numerous bills about sexual assault and consent. She was even recently featured in Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” issue recognizing the #MeToo movement’s “silence breakers.” But now she is on voluntary leave, as investigators look into claims she groped two men.

Daniel Fierro was working in the California State Capitol when he said Garcia cornered him at a staff softball game.

“I remember feeling a little confused about what happened,” Fierro said.

“She touched you sexually?” Villarreal asked.

“Yea, she — her hand dropped down. She touched – she grabbed my butt. And I spun to turn around … and as I turned, she tried to reach for my crotch and she did,” Fierro said.

When Villarreal asked Garcia whether Fierro’s claims happened, Garcia said, “No.”

“What do you remember happening that day?” Villarreal asked.

“I was at the game at the end of the game… And I left with some staff and with some members, and so I have faith that the investigation will make sure and have the facts around it and clear my name,” Garcia said.

 A second unnamed accuser also claims Garcia made a graphic sexual proposal before groping him, something she denies.

The four former state employees that have filed the formal complaint allege Garcia talked openly about “sexual activities with other elected officials,” claimed to have sex in “assembly offices” and said “having sex… was a good way of getting information.”

“That’s definitely not anything that happened. Not only did I not have those conversations, but I’m also not engaging in sex for information or for votes,” Garcia said.

As a #MeToo activist, she’s called on those accused of harassment to resign immediately – but she does not plan to do so herself.

I notice that the adulterous female mayor isn’t resigning either. These hypocrites are so narcissistic that they don’t even care about the damage they are doing to their own movement.

EXCERPT: QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted

An excerpt from QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted. Issue #1 of the comic will be available in print soon.

City homicides this year will total slightly more than 700, marking the third year in succession of a declining murder rate, Lord Mayor Mondereth Platen said today. Trans Paradis had 702 killings as of this morning, according to Nikal Vorgna, a city spokesman for the Lord Mayor’s office. The continued reduction in crime was attributed to the new data analysis augments acquired by the Trans Paradis Police Department two years ago. The record low was 571 in 3385; the record high was 18,477 in 3299, according to police statistics.
—from “Homicides fall for third year in a row,” the Trans Paradis Times, 3403.380

They hurtled through the official airlines of the city with sirens blaring, lights flaring, and Baby’s emergency override sending bureaucrats and private citizens sufficiently well-connected to acquire public transponders spilling left, right, and downward out of their way. Tower was driving on manual, listening as Baby and Hildy took turns sharing information that was being divulged from the civilian and military nerve centers. According to the red light that kept blinking on his controls, his speed was “dangerously excessive” but Baby had overridden the override.

“The fatality is the assassin. I repeat, the fatality is the assassin,” Hildy said as if she was simply repeating whatever Victor was telling her. “ID indicates Xeno—”

“ID X3042ML018493061,” Baby interrupted. “Male Valatestan citizen by the name of Giuseppe Andrea Milazzo. Ex-military. Eight years in the Valatestan Deep Space Marines. Unmarried, no children. Two years on-planet serving as bodyguard to various visiting dignitaries. Employment nominally private, in reality front corporation owned in full by the Valatestan Embassy in Rhysalan.”

“Looks like you get your case back, Tower.” Hildy frowned and wrinkled her lip.

“What case? The targets nailed the hitter and I have no doubt the sponsoring embassy will very convincingly deny all knowledge of his actions and disavow any responsibility for them. If we lean on them hard enough, maybe they’ll send a junior deputy undersecretary to the ambassador’s chief food taster home and blame him after the fact, all the while vowing to never again do what they swear they didn’t. A few weeks later, rinse and repeat with a new hitter, a new embassy, and a new target.”

“Sounds like you know the drill.”

“Not my first xeno,” Tower said, a little bitterly. “You know what they say, embassy is just another way to spell invasion beachhead.”

“Sounds frustrating.” Hildy commented, looking slightly mollified. She wasn’t the only one feeling disappointed. Sooner than he’d wanted or expected, he would have to fish or cut bait. It felt too soon to ask her out on a genuine date, and yet, Tower knew that if he didn’t do it before the case came to a complete close, he would probably never find the courage.

The creaky old building in which the Morchardese embassy was installed came within sight. Tower slowed and began angling the car down toward the ground. The traffic parted, as before, and he eased the var onto the ground gracefully enough to merit a nod from Hildy. The vehicle had barely stopped before he and the detector were leaping out of cockpit and rushing toward the group of people, mostly Morchardese judging by their military stances, openly displayed weaponry, and similar attire, standing around the scene of the near-crime. He didn’t see any sign of Prince Janos or the queen; if they’d been the targets, no doubt they’d already been hustled back inside to a secure location.

Paramedics were working on one man who was sitting up, looking rather dazed, amidst a pile of shattered glass and placrete that appeared to have come from the gaping hole in the building above them. That would have been the disruptor shot, Tower observed as he realized the man, whose arm was being bound, had been struck by the debris and was likely no more than an unlucky passerby. The dead Valatestan was about sixty meters away, to his right, lying in a sprawled heap on his side, the body warded by a pair of skittering quarpods who beeped and whirred and meaningfully focused their camera eyes on anyone who stepped too close to them. There was a scorch mark on the building behind the dead man about 150 centimeters off the ground, as well as two tell-tale bore holes of a charged particle beam.

“That was some nice shooting,” Tower mused aloud as he mentally calculated the distance between the body and the entrance to the embassy building.

“What’s that?” Hildy had been mumbling to herself, or rather, to Victor.

“Seven shots fired, six by the good guys, right? The assassin has just enough time to get one shot off and it didn’t come within 30 meters of anyone in the Morchardese party. They fire six shots back, from at least fifty meters away, and get three hits. That’s not bad.”

“Two hits, Tower. The third shot explains why the Valatestan only fired once. He couldn’t shoot again. Look at the disruptor.”

His right contact zoomed abruptly and focused on the area between the trigger guard and the charge pack. The disruptor, which he now saw was a Mosin-Nyarla Upsilon 32, a mid-tech military model known more for its rugged construction and heavy power suck than its accuracy, was ruined. It was very nearly blown in two. A section of the chunky, oversized bullpup design was simply missing, as if the designer had made a strange decision to narrow the section between the guard and the action on an otherwise solid weapon.

Laser or PPG?

“PPG. The edges are smooth, but they’re cut, not melted.”

Do they never learn?

Trump falls for the media blitz… or at least appears to do so:

President Donald Trump took action on Tuesday to outlaw bump stocks like the one used in the Las Vegas shooting last fall.

‘I signed a memorandum directing the Attorney General to propose regulations to ban all devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns,’ Trump said in the wake of a Florida massacre in which the killer did not use such a device.

Trump’s directive, which he pointedly brought up at a White House Medal of Valor ceremony, followed his press secretary’s announcement minutes before that the president had ordered his administration to look at ways it could unilaterally deter mass shootings like the one in Parkland.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders also said that Trump had not closed the door on new gun controls, including an assault weapons ban that is unpopular with the president’s base.

The only thing the President should have said in response to the expected calls for gun control is this: “All federal gun laws are clearly unconstitutional. I am ordering a review of them and will put a proposal before Congress to legalize all firearms in accordance with the Second Amendment to the Constitution.”

What is the point of this sort of useless do-nothing gesture? It’s wrong, it’s senseless, it’s not going to accomplish anything positive, and it’s going to weaken Trump’s position. One of the most difficult skills to develop is the ability to do absolutely nothing when everyone else is losing their heads and demanding that SOMEBODY do SOMETHING!

That being said, I expect Trump will care more about the genuine outrage of his base than about the fake outrage of the media. Remember, the man makes mistakes, but he learns quickly from them.

Mailvox: Convergence and the Church

Megamerc relates the difference between the message of the Gospel and the message preached by the converged Churchians:

There was an Englishman called Arthur Oakman who joined a certain church here in the United States. He became a minister and one of the leaders of that church, and in 1966 he preached a sermon to a large group of his fellow ministers. Below is a quote from the transcript of it that reminded me of your take on several things, including race and the idea that Satan rules the world.

Here is the quote:

Some of the difficulty with our talk about race today. You don’t just tell people they’re brothers when they’re not. God isn’t the Father of all men, He’s the Creator of all men. He loves all men, it is true. But He only becomes their Father when they are obedient to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And it’s only in Christ that there is no Jew nor Gentile, there’s no bond nor free. And in Christ, even in sex, there is no male nor female. And all the distinctions between all the races of the world are banished in Christ, but gentlemen, the world isn’t in Christ. That’s the difficulty. To impose by force an ideal situation on people is utterly impossible, hence we must preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in every place, that His Spirit might motivate men so that they may come to know Him.
 – Arthur Oakman

Oakman died in 1975, and barely nine years later the church, that in many ways he helped lead, began to ordain women to their priesthood. There was a huge falling out because of the decision, many people left immediately, and ever since that church has gradually lost more and more of its membership. They watered down their fundamental teachings, embraced diversity and social justice, adopted churchian teachings, and are for the most part morally bankrupt, not to mention nearly financially bankrupt.

If I was more economically savvy and had greater familiarity with their financial state, I would make a guess on the exact time of their eventual collapse. But even without that knowledge and expertise, it’s only been 34 years since the initial influx of female clergy and they’re more or less dead already.

Christian civilization is a battle that must be fought and refought by each and every generation if it is to survive. The two generations before us lost. Let us do better. Deus vult!

But win or lose, do not despair. Remember, where there are two, there are always three.

DC will never be the same

“What we did today is going to change DC Comics forever. Forever. There’s no going back anymore.”
– John Cunningham, Senior Vice-President of Sales, Vice-President of Content Strategy, and Vice-President of Marketing at DC Comics/Warner Bros.

Music to my ears, though long-suffering DC Comics fans will probably disagree. This is why:

  1. Before he was Batman, he was Bruce Wayne. A reckless boy willing to break the rules for a girl who may be his worst enemy.
  2. DC announced Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed by the Speak and Chains writer Laurie Halse Anderson. With a 15-year-old Wonder Woman on Paradise Island who sees drowning refugees and disobeys her mother Hippolyta to rescue them. She becomes caught up in their struggle, becoming a refugee herself. Washing up on a foreign shore, she is met by two UN workers — one called Steve and another called Trevor.
  3. Melissa de la Cruz’s Gotham High: a Multicultural Love Triangle Between Batman, Catwoman, and Joker. A Bruce Wayne high school graphic novel with a 17-year-old part-Chinese Bruce Wayne and DC villains as high school teenagers.
  4. Mariko Tamaki and Steve Pugh’s Harley Quinn is an Intersectional Activist Comic About Drag Queens
  5. Beautiful Creatures’ Kami Garcia Starts Line of Teen Titans Graphic Novels, Before They Were Superheroes. She will explore the Teen Titans lives before they realise they have powers, as a series of coming-of-age graphic novels.
  6. Minh Lê introduced us to the youngest Green Lantern, the 13-year-old Tai. Tai  discovers that his grandmother was a secret Green Lantern, and he inherits her jade ring. Tai then goes on to uncover his grandmother’s life’s secrets as well as grapple with the new powers he has. Lê he has drawn on his own life in an immigrant family and his own grandmother and her life story, and it has become a very personal story to him.
  7. His Super Sons story out in April next year, featuring Jonathan Kent and Damian Wayne, the sons of Superman and Batman, will be about climate disruption. With Lower Metropolis under twelve feet of water, with super storms cycling around the world destroying farmland and with what Ridley described as “a coastal ambush” of refugees heading to Denver and Lincoln, Nebraska as the coastline get flooded.
  8. DC Comics gave some more details of the Superman Smashes the Klan graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, and how it ties directly into the Superman vs The Klan radio serial from the forties. Because that is why the comic is set in 1946: it tells the story of an American Chinese girl who moves to Metropolis to find herself and her family’s ethnicity targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. Through her experience with Superman and the radio serial, she learns to overcome some of the trials and understand what it means to be American.

Perhaps DC should consider changing its motto from whatever it is to “comics by transgender immigrants with an unhealthy interest in high school teenagers for transgender immigrants with an unhealthy interest in high school teenagers.”

Now, perhaps DC is attempting to safely wall off its SJW insanity in a series of low-budget comics intended to distract the media and divert the focus of its internal SJWs. But the fact that some of these writers are established names in YA fiction combined with the fact that it brought in Marvel’s lead SJW and handed him its most important properties tends to indicate that DC is simply doing what converged companies do and doubling down on social justice.

I agree with Mr. Cunningham. What they have done will change DC Comics forever. Forever. But what they have also done is to ensure that Arkhaven will become at least the #2 publisher in the comics industry. At least. This panel from the forthcoming Chuck Dixon’s Avalon #1 should serve as an accurate metaphor of the eventual outcome.

An alternative to suicide

AfD passes the Social Democrats in the German polls:

Germany’s main center-left party, the Social Democrats, saw its rating fall below that of the right-wing Alternative for Germany for the first time in an opinion poll published Monday, piling fresh ignominy on the country’s disintegrating center-left.

The news came on the day German Chancellor Angela Merkel appointed a new secretary general at her Christian Democratic Union, the country’s other big mainstream party, in a move widely interpreted as a first step toward engineering her succession and silencing ever louder critics within her own camp.

While unrelated, the two developments cast light on the crisis that engulfed Germany’s political center when the two parties that had dominated government here since the end of World War II both scored their worst election results in more than half-a-century late last year, leaving the country without a clear ruling majority.

The center-left SPD, the country’s oldest party, has suffered the most. It saw its rating drop to 15.5{220a6e635a8cea8828f626b668a05008bdf2fa6127b3db612f604ff4a9b5f0bd} in an INSA Consulere poll for the popular Bild daily published on Monday, the first time it had dropped behind the anti-establishment AfD, which rose one point to 16{220a6e635a8cea8828f626b668a05008bdf2fa6127b3db612f604ff4a9b5f0bd} in a week.

The phenomenon isn’t confined to Germany—the moderate left has suffered deep setbacks in France, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands in recent years—but it has left pollsters scratching their heads.

“The SPD is currently falling apart,” said INSA’s Hermann Binkert. “The AfD is currently the only party that’s decisively against everything that people upset about the political establishment.”

The pollsters are either playing disingenuous or they are stupid. The reason the moderate left is being abandoned in Europe is the same reason that Republicans are on the rise in the USA despite the demographics being increasingly against them. Most people of European descent on the Left want to live in a progressive white country and despite their past enthusiasm for foreigners, minorities, and refugees, they have belatedly discovered that they don’t actually want their children to be a minority dominated by a variety of foreign interest groups with different cultures, traditions, and civilizational standards.

Not only that, but they are seeing their parties align with their decades-old political opponents as both globalized parties unite in a futile attempt to stop the rising nationalists.

Of course, in the SPD’s case, it doesn’t do much for their appeal that until one week ago, the party was being led by an EU apparatchik who has openly stated,  “For me, the new Germany exists only in order to ensure the existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.”

EXCERPT: The Lords of Creation

An excerpt from John C. Wright’s masterpiece of pulp madness, SUPERLUMINARY: The Lords of Creation.

Aeneas Tell of House of Tell, the youngest of the Lords of Creation, was twenty-one when he was assassinated for the first time.

His secondary brain came awake while his primary brain was still foggy with strange dreams. Alert to danger, the secondary brain stopped the nerve pulses from the primary brain which otherwise would have let him groan and open his eyes, which would have precipitated the nervous killer’s attack.

But his primary brain had been in the delta brainwave stage of sleep, a deep and dreamless slumber. There was no sound, no light, no disturbance. What had broken his sleep? A memory, like an echo, of terrible multiple toothaches left a metallic taste in his mouth.

He had been dreaming about his insane grandfather, the Emperor. The old man had been telling him about the secrets of the universe… then a stinging pain in his teeth had jarred him awake. But how could Aeneas remember a dream when he had not been in the desynchronous brainwave state in which dreaming was possible?

Aeneas, eyes still closed, not daring to move, increased the firing rate of his auditory nerves. He was laying on the nongravity cushion of his opulent four-poster bed. The neverending whisper of the high-altitude winds of Mount Everest beyond the bubble of weather-controlled air was now loud to him.

On these upper peaks his family had erected the proud imperial palace-city of Ultrapolis, whose towers and domes were impregnable behind concentric force-shells and thought-screens. None of the artificial or bio-modified races of the nine worlds, fifty worldlets, and one hundred eighty moons of the Solar System could bring any realistic threat to bear on these defenses, not while the twelve ranking members of the House of Tell, the so-called Lords of Creation, retained control of the stratonic supertechnology known only to them.

But betrayal from within was another matter.

The quiet hiss of the protective screen that the bedposts projected around the bed was gone. He could not hear the heartbeats of his two bodyguards posted in the anteroom of his apartments. Instead he heard the heartbeat, louder and faster than was possible for an unmodified human being, of the assassin.

As the youngest member of the Family, Aeneas had been stuffed into the oldest wing of the oldest palace, and no other guards were within shouting distance.

There was no sound of footsteps on the nightingale wood floor of his bedchamber, and so for a moment Aeneas had a false sense of hope. But the sound of the racing heart was close at hand.

The killer was in the chamber with him.

Then he felt a waft of intense cold radiating from the cells of the man’s body. The assassin was near the bed, coming closer, bending over him.

Aeneas reflexively focused a thought to his signet ring, asking alarms silently to ring and the armaments hidden in the walls to slay the intruder. But there was no response. The electrotelepathic circuit was blocked.

The nanoscopic thought-broadcast cells his mother had implanted in the bones of his skull likewise were blocked when he tried to send needle-thin neuropsionic signals to receivers hidden in the ceiling.

A sharp, stabbing pain reappeared in his lower left molar, and then vanished. And then an upper incisor throbbed with a pain that vanished, and then a bicuspid. It was an basic proprioception code. It read: Intruder in dis-inertia armor… negative-vitality field integument… contortion node detected…

Of course. The killer was wearing armor that contorted the fabric of space a few inches in each direction around himself and lowered his inertia. It would prevent ordinary weapons, bullets or monomolecular blades, from imparting kinetic energy to him to do damage. Hence he could glide across the floor without imparting any pressure to the special floorboards biogineered to sound off when they felt an unfamiliar footstep.

The contortion node was a teleportation path for the assassin’s escape.

Modified electroneural ganglia beneath the killer’s skin—impossible for normal antiweapon sensors to detect—had erected a life-energy absorption cocoon. Hence the killer had silently drained Aeneas’ two bodyguards of their life and added it to his own, increasing his neural speed and muscle pressure. It was a vampire field, a modification illegal to all but the highest ranking and most trusted servants of the Lords. And a normal man would be killed at a touch.

Aeneas was no normal man. From hidden retaining cells in his bone marrow he released stored life-energy charges into his body, increasing his nerve-muscle potential beyond what a vampire energized with only two men’s vitality could match.

Faster than a striking snake and stronger than a rhino, Aeneas flung up the bedsheet and drove his fist into the man’s chest.

SUPERLUMINARY: The Lords of Creation

Being assassinated once may be an accident. Being assassinated twice is enemy action.

Aeneas Tell of the House of Tell is one of the youngest Lords of Creation. His family rules the Nine Worlds through its control of the ultra-advanced technology that has permitted the colonization of the entire solar System. More gods than men, the Lords of Creation have cheated Death itself.

But even a quasi-immortal god will take exception to being assassinated. Twice. Especially when the assassin turns out to be a someone he thought was a friend.

SUPERLUMINARY is the latest and most outrageous creation of science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright, the Dragon-award winning author of THE UNWITHERING REALM, THE GOLDEN AGE, MOTH & COBWEB, and AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND. THE LORDS OF CREATION is the first book in the series.

Book Club subscribers, don’t go looking for your missing email. I’m waiting for something else to happen before I send out it out to you, most likely tomorrow. But go ahead and pick up THE LORDS OF CREATION today, you’ll still be eligible for the free book. It’s vintage John C. Wright, one part THE GOLDEN AGE, one part CITY BEYOND TIME, and one part science lecture delivered by a bio-physicist on acid.

Flynn to withdraw guilty plea

At least, we are told that something of the sort appears to be in the works:

On Friday, Judge Emmet Sullivan issued an order in United States v. Flynn that, while widely unnoticed, reveals something fascinating: A motion by Michael Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea based on government misconduct is likely in the works.

Just a week ago, and thus before Sullivan quietly directed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team to provide Flynn’s attorneys “any exculpatory evidence,” Washington Examiner columnist Byron York detailed the oddities of Flynn’s case. The next day, former assistant U.S. attorney and National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy connected more of the questionable dots. York added even more details a couple of days later. Together these articles provide the backdrop necessary to understand the significance of Sullivan’s order on Friday….

In his plea agreement, Flynn agreed to “forego the right to any further discovery or disclosures of information not already provided at the time of the entry of Flynn’s guilty plea.” On Wednesday, however, the attorneys in the Flynn case presented the court an agreed-upon protective order governing the use of the material — including sensitive material — the special counsel’s office provides Flynn. This indicates Mueller’s team will not fight Sullivan’s standing order based on the terms of Flynn’s plea agreement.

Why Bombshells Are Likely Ahead

With a protective order in place, Flynn’s attorneys should start receiving the required disclosures from the special counsel’s office. There is reason to believe these will include some bombshells.

First, we know from the recently released GOP House Intelligence Committee memo and the Grassley-Graham criminal referral of Christopher Steele, the FBI and DOJ withheld significant (and material, in my view) information in seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to conduct surveillance on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page. There is cause to believe the FISA court was connected to the criminal charge filed against Flynn because Contreras, who recused less than a week after accepting Flynn’s guilty plea, “is one of just three FISA court judges who sits in the District of Columbia, where it is likely the Trump-Russia FISA warrants were sought.”

Looks like things are about to heat up again on the Drain the Swamp front. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: This may be one of those bombshells.

Investigative journalist Mike Cernovich dropped a hot story on Sunday night. According to Mike, former Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Andrew McCabe altered far left FBI investigator Peter Strzok’s notes on his interview with General Michael Flynn. And then McCabe destroyed the evidence.

Fast and Furious II

The Anonymous Conservative suspects that school shootings are directly related to the Deep State’s increasingly desperate attempts to disarm the American public.

If Q is correct, and these school shootings only started once sending kids to therapy became fashionable because the shooters are being programmed while in therapy, there is no end to the disturbing implications. First is obviously the nature of the people in power who would think nothing of programming an innocent kid to murder, and ruin his entire life, while killing scores of other innocent children. These are astonishingly evil people, in full control of the nation from behind the scenes, if this is true.

Second is the idea that this is being done to further gun control. That means the gun control is only the initial objective. What is step two, once they have enacted the gun control? What are they planning which requires our population be rendered entirely incapable of resisting? What do they want to do, which they know is so horrific it would make everyone so enraged they would rebel openly if they tried it? Think how evil these people would be if this is true. Nothing is impossible. Demanding mandatory euthanasia at age 70? Mandatory abortions of all children after number two? Child sacrifices to Molloch for the benefit of the elites? Governmental kidnappings and forced organ transplants for the elites?

It sounds crazy, of course. But then, if we have learned anything over the last 10 years, it is that the conspiracy theorists are usually more or less right. Remember when you had to be a tin foil hat-wearer to believe that the government was electronically spying on everyone? Remember when the idea that government agencies were laundering money, running drugs, and walking illegal guns was totally beyond the realm of credibility?

Let’s face it, any government that has been caught planning to commit domestic terrorism against its own citizens in order to justify a war against Cuba is capable of anything.

Fortunately, given the ongoing progress of the God-Emperor in his campaign against the corrupt bureaucrats, we should find out the truth regarding these sociopathic operations in the reasonably near future. I suspect this sort of thing only scratches the surface of what Q and others warn is literally beyond imagination.

The thing is, whatever psychopath came up with the inspiration for these programs completely failed to understand basic American psychology. No American with even a modicum of an instinct for self-preservation is going to a) disarm himself and b) trust the government to protect him and his family when c) the government has permitted 130 million aliens to move in next door and d) the police have no legal obligation to protect or defend anyone.

If there are more school shootings, then Americans will give up their schools, not their guns. All the media drum-beating is pointless, as it has been for the last 30 years, because any politician who comes out and endorses more gun control will be punished brutally at the polls.

It is worth noting that both the FBI and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office were strangely reluctant to do anything that might impede Cruz shooting up the school, even though they had both been alerted to his intentions by Cruz and others.

As was reported on Friday, the FBI had been alerted that a particular pasty-faced virgin down in Florida was probably going to shoot up his old school. He had put up social-media posts to that effect, cleverly shielding his identity from the steely-eyed G-men by signing his legal name to those public threats. The epigones of J. Edgar Hoover may not be Sherlock Holmes, but presumably they can read, and some public-minded citizen took some screen shots and sent them to the FBI.

The FBI of course did what the relevant authorities did in the case of Omar Mateen, the case of Nidal Hasan, the case of Adam Lanza: nothing.

We could replace these guys with trained monkeys, if we could train monkeys to be self-important.

The FBI has ‘protocols’ for handling specific credible threats of that sort, ‘protocol’ here being a way of saying, ‘Pick up the phone and call the local field office or, if we really want to get wild, the local police.’

The Friday press conference on that little oversight was a masterpiece of modern bureaucracy. The FBI has “protocols” for handling specific credible threats of that sort, “protocol” here being a way of saying, “Pick up the phone and call the local field office or, if we really want to get wild, the local police.” “The protocol was not followed,” the FBI bureaucrats explained. Well, no kidding. Why not? No answer — the question wasn’t even asked aloud. Did law enforcement’s ball-dropping mean that a preventable massacre went unprevented because of bureaucratic failure? “I don’t think anybody could say that,” says Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, who is leading the investigation. His department had over the years received no fewer than 20 calls related to the shooter. What about that? “Make no mistake about it, America, the only one to blame for this incident is the killer himself,” which is exactly the sort of thing a sanctimonious schmuck says when he doesn’t want to consider the institutional failures right in front of his taxpayer-subsidized nose and the culpable negligence — to say nothing of the sand-pounding stupidity — of his own agency.

The FBI has a budget of $3.5 billion, almost all of which goes to salaries, benefits, and other personnel costs. Do you know how many employees the FBI field office in South Florida has? It has more than 1,000. Do you know how many employees the FBI has in total? It has 35,158 employees. It has 13,084 agents and 3,100 intelligence analysts.

And not one of them could pick up the phone to forward vital intelligence gathered by the grueling investigative work of picking up the phone and taking a tip from a tipster. Would the sheriff have taken that call more seriously than his department took the 20 other calls relating to the killer?

Occam’s Razor suggests that the reason the FBI did nothing to interfere with Cruz, Mateen, Hasan, or Lanza is because they did not wish to dissuade them from their actions. When both the logic and the evidence contradicts your assumptions, it is wise to question them.