Threats against the judiciary did not come suddenly. The slouch toward selective law enforcement and politicized violence has a history. //

The violent bear it away. That title of Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel still resonates. Some relentless atavism is at work in our culture, a monstrous irrationality that awakens what O’Connor called “the stuff of which madmen and fanatics are made.” Violence, no longer shunned, is now an accepted political tool.

The attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh—preceded by U.S Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to enforce federal law against protesters at justices’ homes—exposed the fragile divide between constituted order and willed anarchy. In effect, the attorney general’s inaction acquiesced to mob intimidation and signaled a willingness to risk further lawlessness.

The descent into Third World-like threats against the judiciary did not come suddenly. The slouch toward selective law enforcement and politicized violence has a history. By whatever name we call it—wokeism nowadays—adversary culture has been loosening essential restraints for some six decades. Like the lifecycle of a parasite, the passion for repudiating established order mutates and reappears in successive stages. Today’s recurrence of the New Left virus keeps the inherited infection alive in a new generation of hosts. //

In “Notes on Nationalism” (1945) George Orwell wrote that the key to political judgments—who is guilty? who is the victim?—is apt to lie in the identities of the parties involved instead of in the nature of the wrongdoing: “Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage … which does not change its moral when it is committed by ‘our side.’”

His comment was a counter ahead of time to Jean-Paul Sartre’s glorification of “Wretched of the Earth.” In his preface to Fanon’s text, Sartre spoke for the revolutionary side: “No gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them.” He made a romance of it: “irrepressible violence” against a perceived enemy is “man recreating himself.” //

Frederic Kremer
19 days ago
It is a necessary condition for the victims to sanction the supposed morality of their destroyer in order for a culture such as ours to be swept into the library of failed cultures. Guilt is a powerful dis-arming tool. The intellectuals have led the charge to impose guilt, destroy defense and lay open the field to violence by convincing those susceptible to guilt that their destroyer is more moral than they themselves are.

Unfortunately Ben Franklin’s warning, though taken seriously by those who wanted to change from a republic to an elitist pretense of limited democracy, was not taken seriously by those who wanted a republic of limited democracy. The mob is fueled by their righteousness as they swallowed it from the vomit of the intellectuals. The citizens who made possible the environment the mob operates in is without intellectual heroes and like Achilles, hobbled.

Our politicians, with rare exceptions, are most assuredly products of the culture and totally without capability to protect a limited democracy. Heck, they would not even understand the concept. They are the last persons to correct this slide into violence, they are encouraging it. They too will eventually be on the receiving end. So, my question is: why wait? Where is the decency in giving your executioner time and resources to prepare for your slaughter? As Bonnie Tyler put it: where have all the good men gone?

The committee wants those who stood by Donald Trump to face shame, disbarment, personal and professional harm, and potentially prison.

For starters, the logical and grammatical problem with the “denier” formulation is that nobody actually denies the existence of elections or climate. A “climate denier” is often a person who believes in economic tradeoffs and rejects eco-scaremongering. And an “election denier” is typically someone who believes that a political contest has been stolen, or corrupted, or unfairly implemented. This is the position of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Doug Mastriano and Stacey Abrams, and Dinesh D’Souza and Jonathan Chait. //

If these latter concerns make one a “denier,” then surely someone who believes that asking a citizen to show an ID before voting is tantamount to Jim Crow is also one. Because, if it’s not “dark money” stealing “democracy,” it’s confusing ballots, or “voter suppression,” or “gerrymandering,” or the Ruskies or the Supreme Court, or the Constitution. It has long been the case that Democrats do not accept the legitimacy of elections. //

Do Democrats believe Trump won 2016 squarely and fairly? Do they believe that Georgia or Texas run “fair and square” elections? Doubtful. Yet, it is only conservatives who are asked to treat every election law passed by Democrats as a sacrosanct pillar of “democracy” or risk being smeared as a traitor. //

It goes for Hillary Clinton, who repeatedly declared Trump an “illegitimate president,” and claimed that 2016 was “not on the level” and “stolen,” is by the definition Democrats embrace an “election denier.” As are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, John Kerry, Al Gore, the late John Lewis, the late Harry Reid, Paul Krugman, Jerrold Nadler, virtually the entire Washington Post editorial page, Time magazine, every other major media outlet, the White House Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, former DNC chairs, and scores of others.

The Nighthawk remains an odd duck. Designated a fighter, it has no air-to-air combat capabilities. It paved a path for other stealth aircraft, but its children did not resemble it in the most important particulars. Its most famous moment came at the hands of the Serbian air defense network, when an enterprising group of officers laid a trap and managed to down one of the aircraft. Nevertheless, the F-117 was one of the most consequential aircraft for the future of military aviation, demonstrating the essential viability of stealth aircraft under conditions that the United States could reliably replicate. Its absence might well have left a large hole in U.S. aerospace strategy for the twenty-first century.

G Suite Customer Takeout: Bulk Download using Terminal

here are exact steps I took (on a fedora system) to programatically download my gsuite takeout from the bucket:

Install gsutil standalone

wget https://storage.googleapis.com/pub/gsutil.tar.gz

# tar xvfz gsutil.tar.gz
# cd gsutil

Connect gsutil to G suite account

To create a read-only token, use the command below: visit the browser to get an API token, then paste the API token back into the terminal. Later it asks for a "project-id", which can be any string apparently.

# ./gsutil config -r

Actually download the backup

Go to G Suite Customer Takeout [https://admin.google.com/ac/customertakeout], click on "Access Archive" and find the bucket id. In my case, this ID has the form takeout-export-123456abcdef-123456abcedf

To download the entire bucket recursively with rsync:

# ./gsutil rsync -r gs://takeout-export-123456abcdef-123456abcedf /tmp/

The slippery slope is how the left imprints their agenda into our culture. They know many on the right have little stomach for a fight about the ridiculousness of separate marriage beds. They know once they get momentum you’ll one day have to explain to your six-year-old what “dominatrix” means.

The federal income tax was established in 1913. (The government has not always stolen a cut of your paycheck before you get it.) There were warnings then about where that kind of sticky-fingers governing would end. The rates were 1 percent. Today the rates are almost 40 percent. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt was pushing for Social Security and folks on the right were warning of socialism. Social Security was then intended to be a temporary relief program. Today it’s a permanent retirement program for many and it’s also 14 percent of our $21,000,000,000,000 debt. Yesterday conservatives were warning about the left’s takeover of public schools and where it would lead. Today students are taught the evil of Trump’s immigration policies and football coaches lose their jobs if they pray on the field with their teams.

Many on the left and the right gave a loud cheer last week when Alex Jones was banished from Facebook. Twitter later suspended him. While it is not surprising to see the jackals on the left cheer at the burning of books, one would hope folks on the right would look in the mirror and realize their time is coming soon. The leftists will not stop (and did not stop) at nutty Alex Jones, because they do not think you are much different from him. You rightly think your belief in immigration enforcement is much different than his disgusting conspiracy theory about Sandy Hook. But you must understand the left thinks you are both equally vile. They just knew Jones was the weak member of the herd. They could pick him off as a test run. Next they’re coming for you. //

“It’s only Alex Jones” is a comforting blanket. It’s the child who closes his eyes and covers his ears in the naïve hope that the monster disappears if you can’t see or hear him. But the monster does NOT disappear. And it is most definitely NOT just Jones. Yesterday it was Jones. Today, YouTube censored human vanilla Dennis Prager. Tomorrow, there may be a knock on YOUR door.

Freedom is not something you acquire by practicing it. You don’t one day wake up and decide you are free. Freedom is something tangible and it requires the cooperation of others. If others will not give you that cooperation, you have to take it from them. We need to stop whistling past the graveyard and realize the left is seeking total victory. They do not want to compete in a marketplace of ideas. Their goal is to silence dissenting voices.

If you are familiar with linux/unix then there is a simpler method using wget/curl.

Steps:

• Initiate download via takeout page in your browser
• Go to "Window->Downloads"
• Locate the download which is in-progress right now
• Right click + Copy link address
• From your terminal - wget '{url}'

wget is more stable. you can manually set timeouts.

Bonus: you can initiate this from a remote server. I have seen speeds upto 250 MBps from remote servers. Just be sure not to cancel the browser download before your wget finishes.

Thanks! As of 04/2022 this still works. :) I would recommend using screen if you are using wget on a remote server through ssh. – daco Apr 2 at 8:47

I would also add the use of wget this way wget -O customname "url" as wget, in my case, did not use the file name and just part of the url as the filename (which makes it hard to identify which file is which). – daco Apr 2 at 8:52