The Heir heard on audio this morning that Trump says he considering pardoning Ed Snowden.  If he ends up doing so, that should be the moment that the progressives should dump Ed Snowden once and for all.  There's no reason why the progressives should pretend that Ed Snowden somehow never existed or is just a mere footnote in history.  In the Heir's eyes at least, Snowden would then be an equivalent to Roger Stone or Paul Manofort.  Ed Snowden would then be an official Trump associate.  The Heir believes such a pardon is inevitable, and is already planning on making Ed Snowden's life as miserable as possible, by pushing for a civil suit on behalf on those Intel families who've lost a member in the field because of Ed Snowden stealing operation information that by now the Heir is sure has been sold to bidders in China and Russia and North Korea, and possibly anti-American countries in South America.  He's also pushing for state charges on behalf of those states Ed Snowden's actions had an impact in, and that's pretty much all of them, even Idaho.  And then there needs to be anti-Snowden demonstrators at those venues Ed Snowden would be doing lectures in.

The Russians absolutely *do not* have a vaccine against the coronavirus.  This is the Bachelor position, not just the Heir's.  The reason we at the Bachelor have determined that is because Putin made two separate announcements.  The media is aware of only the second one where Putin claimed to have inoculated his daughter.  The first one was where he proclaimed this supposed vaccine a Sputnik, suggesting that Russia somehow beat America to the punch.  The media even gave into that one credulously, claiming there's a "vaccine race" of some sort.  Until they prove that one scientifically with a full peer review replication, there is no such race.  The Heir doesn't believe that even India has a vaccine.  Let's face it: America will be the first to have a real vaccine, because then it will have been fully approved.  The great Russian placebo will then be put out, and Russia will eventually overtake America for the highest infection rate.  If America has 5 million now, Russia will have 6 million.  And since germ experts don't believe that having and surviving the coronavirus once in any inoculates you the second time around, China will also reach 6 million in a reinfection.  We in America will have put this 5 million boondoggle in the past, and China and Russia will be a permanent collective coronavirus hotspot for the rest of their respective histories.  Maybe the protesters in East Russia will welcome interference in their elections so that Putin will lose, and be forced into hiding.

The Heir effectively *condemns* the life of the media executive he keeps calling Gordon Sumner, but I the Mentor keep reminding him that's the name of the rock star Sting.  He doesn't care, because he doesn't particularly sympathize with the dead executive.  He heard a brief bio of the guy on audio first thing this morning, and when he heard how he took his father's drive in theaters, and turned them into multiplex powerhouses, he was sarcastically clapping from his club chair.  This is a guy who's never struggled to make ends meet, was already born into economic advantage and has no idea what ordinary Americans go through.  Sounds like he didn't particularly care while he had a company to make a hostile takeover of.  So, no, this is where the Heir draws the line on sympathy for the deceased.  Looking at people like Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, it wouldn't surprise the Heir if this guy eventually posthumously comes out as a Me Too Male predator.  It's okay by the Heir if there's a war on billionaires to the point where in their case the presumption of innocence should not apply.  This is one area where he and AOC might agree.  But in any case, he holds the bio he heard as absolute proof that there's no such thing as a Self Made Man.

"If there was such a thing as a self-made man, we'd all be there."

 The Heir totally understands people getting mad at the utilities for not restoring their power properly, but he's observed that's partly because their access to the Internet also goes down with the power.  This strikes the Heir as a hallmark of a Type A Westernized society that's overly dependent on increasingly undependable things, and for which there's is no alternative.  You only have one choice, and if that choice goes wrong, well, sucks to be you, man.  That's the message the Heir's seeing coming from society in the aftermath of Isiasis, or whatever that storm's name is.  What is it, Isiaiaaisiaiaiasisisis?  It would also be nice for the weather service to not resort to storm names whose spelling is totally screwed up and doesn't follow standard English.  What's wrong with Joe, Jim or John?  So anyway, the Heir believes there should have been an affordable emergency provision for the commoners, rather than just for the Jeffrey Epstein Rich Person with tethering included on his $10,000 phone.  The Heir recently, even before the storm came about, thought about how online connections could be made more simple and more transparent.  People are advised to keep an emergency radio, which the Heir does, but no-one is advised on keeping an emergency Internet.  The Heir has pay-as-you-go on his phone, but he's receiving conflicting information as to whether that providor supports tethering or not.  He sees one person claiming that the providor *doesn't* support tethering, and then he finds an FAQ on the providor's site talking about how to enable tethering on a phone that supports it.  They need to say so themselves: either they support it or they don't.  But in any case, with the emergency radio, the Heir fantasizes the radio coming with Internet tethering support with the help of a dongle or a usb adapter that communicates with the nearest tower, and is automatically available with the phone you get from a pay-as-you-go company.  Or if they have to charge extra, like $15, maybe that extra is worth the purchase.  And if they feel they need to set aside a separate but reasonably priced charge category for x number of hours or minutes you accessed the service via their tethering dongle you'd place into your emergency radio, like on the side or on the back.  And then the Heir believes that all you need to do is just turn on your radio, and the dongle flashes 3 times and then goes consistently green to indicate readiness.  And then the dongle creates a wifi spot, and the dongle blinks when you use that wifi spot kind of like how your cable modem/router does.  The Heir just doesn't see why that needs to be complicated.  What are they afraid of?  That somehow online tethering via emergency radio will somehow *replace* mainstream broadband coming from a telco or a cable company?  The Heir doesn't believe it has to, because broadband on a flat fee would still be a better bargain than to use radio tethering full time.  The Heir thinks back to the crystal radio villagers in Papua New Guinea (somewhere in the rural provinces, between a small town and an actual indigenous village), and many of the rural peoples have radios, so that's the kind of radio that can support online tethering in some form.  The Heir has a billion ideas about a more mindful/simplistic/survivalistic approach, and what he got me the Mentor to write about above is just him thinking aloud.  He's not totally signed off on emergency radio online cellular tethering.  There may be a better way to do it.  Right now in our overly modern Westernized society, it's either a trillion mbps of broadband or just dead air.  That appears to be what Isiahahahsieieis revealed.

                                        

The Heir finally got around to watching the Mary Trump videos, but he still doesn't believe that based on Ms. Trump's plugs, the book is necessarily going to tell anyone anything they didn't already know.  We already have tell-all books about Donald Trump, going back to the first Michael Wolff back in 2017 or so, through to John Bolton, including James Clapper, Andrew McCabe and James Comey.  The one thing the Heir takes issue with in Ms. Trump's plugs is the promulgation that the country isn't good to holding people accountable.  That's not to say that the Heir disagrees, but that he seems to be the only citizen anywhere in the country who has an explanation as to why that is.  And that's because our culture doesn't believe in accountability to being with.  The Heir beseeches us to look at the 2010s with big tech and Ed Snowden, and forced obsolescence and personal corruption, and those things still continue to this very day.  So Mary Trump can only speak to her uncle in the context of her family, not in the context of society at large.  So with her and a number of people on visual, the Heir recommends that we take what they say with a grain of salt.  Because when you have both Mary Trump, and unfortunately Steve Schmidt making a doomsday conditional that the American Experiment could be over, no-one should believe that's inevitably the case because some people said that. The Heir remembers that in The Last Meaningful Election Ever in 2004 that people said the same thing.  That if Bush got reelected, the country was done for.  As it turns out it wasn't, because in Bush's second term it was the people who took matters into their own hands, rather than solely rely on the institutions they feel failed them.  The Heir thinks it's interesting how on the one hand we contend that democracy relies on institutions when criticizing dictatorships around the world, yet we knee-cap our own when we don't get the exact result we want.  The Heir also thinks it's biased and cynical for people as influenced by the progressive movement to overlook the fact that Bush failed to get a third term, and the Heir absolutely *does not* think that's only because of term limits.  The election of Obama was a referendum on Bush, but the progressives had this arbitrary deadline that said that such a referendum should have taken place in 2004, and that it was totally meaningless in 2008, and and a result the progressives retaliated against Obama by tearing down Obamacare, getting with Ed Snowden, forming the Anonymous hacking group, and playing down the Sony Hack as a real threat from North Korea.  Those are the sins the Heir remembers to bring up, and that's not even counting Lieberman-Lamont as depriving the Donkeys For The People a real chance in the Senate in 2006.  The Heir perceives that the progressives will want to downplay their own sins as the Heir somehow wallowing in the past.  But the Heir isn't "wallowing in the past."  Instead, the Heir is reflecting on history.

"Once Trump loses, we have to put an end to progressive gaslighting once and for all, and put in place a culture of National Principle to assure accountability on all citizens, whether well-connected or not.  That way no-one can cut you off on the road, and *not* get a traffic ticket in the mail that week as a result.  Let's think about 200% enforcement."

The Heir wants answers and he wants them now.  And as far as the Heir's concerned, *everyone* has to demand these answers as well, even if the Heir has to mount a Flaileef style guilt trip on the populace to get those answers.  And the specific answers the Heir's looking for is why there's now this big crime wave in New York City right now.  He wants these answers to be substantive and enjoy a scientific consensus.  That's because the NYPD and the PBA are insisting it's because the city disbanded the anti-crime unit that's been associated with excessive force in the past.  In the interest of social justice, the Heir is trying to be as impartial as is humanly possible, and not just automatically side with the PBA's theories on this one.  Right now as I the Mentor am writing this, Bill Diblasio is having a press conference at least on visual, but the Heir notes that the video title on the live stream makes no mention as to whether Diblasio intends to address the why's on the crime rate.  All the Heir has been seeing from him in the past couple weeks is him running around waving his hands in the air going, well *I* don't know why it's been happening.  He's also hearing a roaring silence from the media in their failures to get answers for us, effectively capitulating to Diblasio's stance of Well *I* Don't Know.  I guess this amounts to something called a wellidontknowism.  So the Heir's not inclined to go through a two hour press conference with a fine tooth comb, sifting through Diblasio saying, well last week's garbage has been adequately picked up, and this week's garbage is currently on track.  Last week's water usage is 7%, and this week it's gone up to 10%.  Yeah but Mr Mayor, the Heir asks, what about an explanation as to why the crime rates are up!?  And then the mayor will go, just be patient, I'm getting to that.  And then it'll be like having to watch an entire episode of the world's worst TV show just to get to the movie preview of the year, unsurprisingly stuck on the end.  Well guess what.  The killers the Heir sees as plotting their next move to shoot more innocent children while Diblasio blathers on in conference about corner curb maintenance and polishing.  So until the Heir finds out anything, stay tuned.

"Okay, so now he's up to the right way to make red and green lights more visible in the traffic lights, and he got past faster than expected with the ins and outs of proper signage ordinances.  Okay, wake me up if you think I missed anything."

The Heir, too, is outraged over the commutation of Roger Stone.  But unlike the others, he seeks an Incident At Uganda, a last minute declaration that says, not so fast.  He found one article along those lines at a time when all the others have all but given up, prematurely writing justice's death certificate.  You can find this online titled, "Roger Stone’s Ongoing Appeal Still Pits Him Against Justice Department." But even that article when the Heir showed it to me the Mentor doesn't get at *all* the possible ways in which Roger Stone will eventually reap what he sowed.  I suggested to him, well what if he got an overconfident big head about it, and ended up with a traffic ticket for double parking his car or something?  Would that then be the legal straw that breaks the camel's back?  He considered that possibility, but then pointed out his surmise that his girlfriend that we see him with on visual may largely be his chauffeur and/or his courier, because he himself may be now in such poor health that his license may been revoked in the state of Florida, a state he otherwise sees as the emerging personal corruption capital of the world.  By no means does the Heir take any pleasure or schadenfreude in this likelihood, but what he sees that it does mean is that even if you think you can somehow outrun the Long Arm Of Justice (which of course you can't), you can't outrun the karma of your own personal health.  It's no coincidence to the Heir that after Trump falsely claimed victory or exoneration with the Impeachment (because let's not forget the fact that he's still Impeached), that's when the coronavirus made landfall in America.  A justice procedure was immediately followed by an incident related to public health.  There may come a point in time when Roger Stone's girlfriend may privately tell someone that she ended up believing he's as guilty as sin, and that he should have gone to jail after all, and that person she told will go public with that admission.  That would be what the Heir sees as Roger Stone's ultimate worst fate coming up, and he will either in life or in death wish he did go to jail accordingly, and he will burn all his tee shirts claiming he did nothing wrong.  Oh who am I kidding, the Heir believes Roger Stone will end up saying, I did *lots* of things wrong.  There, you see?  He just admitted it.  And he might end up following that up with a sincere Make Amends Tour.  His gaslighting will finally be over, and he will finally know the righteous path.  And no one the Heir sees on visual as ever entertaining that possibility.  Our society's imagination is way too limited for that sort of thing.

The Heir estimates that the "AOC Primary" took place between a week and two weeks ago.  Already the media outlets have brushed past that primary, and never bothered to explore AOC's opponents in more detail.  The Heir believes that at least one of them is a distinctly anti-AOC candidate who appeals to the significant minority of voters who are not on the AOC bandwagon.  The Heir wants to know more about that candidate(s) and their voters.  He gets the impression that those particular voters represent an in-district rebellion that AOC has to reckon with, particularly if they make up anywhere from five people to 10% of the district residents.  These are likely NOTA types who are virulently anti- Bernie Snowden, and they will emerge after Trump loses the election, which the Heir believes there's a good chance of.  The main reason for the rise of AOC is as an anti- Trump voice.  She defeated Joseph Crawley two years ago as an anti-establishment candidate.  Now the Heir sees her *as* the establishment.  Whenever the Bernie Snowden types lose a primary, which seems to happen about 80-90% of the time, they always blame their defeat on the "machine".  But if they win a subsequent time, the Heir sees them as acting as if they're entitled to that victory.  Also the more votes they win by, the more entitled they feel, so they can't spin how there's a "machine" they're up against.  They *are* the machine, and their opponents and the significant minority that voted for them the Heir sees as truly for the people, and not for a political bandwagon.

The Heir's increasing Machiavellianism.  He does not regret standing by principle and the need for social discipline in the populace in the past four or five weeks people have been debating what the role of the cops should be, and in fact he's seen ample evidence that supports the notion that most people can't look after themselves.  For example, he was wondering how almost everyone in Bachelor Blue State could be practicing social distancing and wearing masks and staying at home the past three months, since the same exact people had engaged in personal corruption in the 2010s.  Now he has the answer.  The people didn't practice social distancing solely because they thought it was the right thing to do.  They did so out of compliance with demands from the strong leadership demonstrated during the Coronacrisis.  If that leadership didn't exist, Bachelor Blue State would be totally infested like Florida is now, and Texas and Arizona, and at least a dozen other states.  The governments in those states took an Ed Snowden Anything Goes stance, and the Heir sees most residents in those states celebrate that personally corrupt sentiment coming from those governments.  And now they're seeing those cases spike.  Bachelor Blue State, on the other hand, got back onto the righteous path, and got a return on its investment in the form of decreasing infection and transmission rates.  Bachelor Blue State was able to reopen safely, but the other states reopened *un-* safely.  The Heir really isn't into organized religion or anything, but there's no doubt that the lesson to be learned from comparing Bachelor Blue State's righteous path with the other states' personal corruption is that if you go against the grain, you'll get splinters.  That one guy who complained in April about not getting fertilizer, the Heir's hoping he didn't end up in the ICU as a result.  He wishes the best for those whose opinions he disagrees with.  So the Heir says, dude, forget the fertilizer.  This is your *life* we're talking about.  And now, here comes the Heir's takeaway:

"Death is permanent.  Fertilizer you can get next year."

 

So a couple of things on the Law And Justice front with the Heir, as we progress with reforming policing.  The Heir takes note of Andrew Cuomo in New York signing reforms into law for New York.  One of those includes a requirement for a rough total of 500 cities and towns to submit their plans by April of next year to reform their departments if they want to receive state funding.  The Heir's pretty sure there are far more than 500 cities and towns in New York in total, since Bachelor Blue State numbers its towns in the thousands.  So it looks as though this set of reforms in New York does make wise regards for sleepy hamlets along the Erie and Lake Ontario coasts with no more than 20 people or so, but it would be nice if there were more specific information for the the Heir to go on.  Sleepy hamlets of 20 people aren't likely to have more than 2 cops total in *their* department, so a set of reforms that work for bigger towns aren't necessarily going to apply for sleepy hamlets.  But the Heir feels more assured that we're still going to have cops in the foreseeable future, and the Ed Snowden types' plans to get rid of all cops everywhere have failed for the time being.  They had a temporary buoyancy in light of the tragedy in Atlanta, but that's faded now.

The Heir respects and supports New York City's decision to disband its anti-crime division for the sake of more fair and sensitive policing, but he disagrees with the City's assessment that such a division is "outdated."  If crime stats go back up again, the City will have to stand ready to reinstate the division at a moment's notice.  He sees the anti-crime divisions as being put in place during the 90s to deal with the crack epidemic of the 80s, and the bad old days of the 70s.  Most young people today have no living memory of how bad things really were in those days.  The Heir remembers a Western Studies course in college that questionably required its students to make a major foray into a major city, e.g., New York, to visit a museum and do a historical analysis on an artwork of significance to the course.  This was at the height of the crack epidemic, and the Heir remembers a classmate who said he took his car into New York, and came back from the museum to see a bunch of bullet holes in his car.  So the Heir welcomed when anti-crime measures were put in place during the 90s, because battle-hardened drug cartels in the cities weren't going to respond to fair and sensitive policing.  It was partly those measures that aided in urban revival in New York and surrounding cities to the point where people felt more safe to visit those cities, and aid in those cities' economic recoveries.  The Heir concedes that at this *specific* point in time that you may not need such measures, but that doesn't mean you won't need them in the future.

The Heir now gets to talk about the movie Death Wish, and its implications for today.  What the Heir understands about Death Wish comes from a parody by Mad Magazine back in the day.  Charles Bronson plays an ordinary Joe living in a city environment whose wife and daughter are viciously attacked by muggers.  His wife dies and his daughter lies in a vegetative state.  He believes that all this could have been prevented if there was a stronger police presence, but the police were virtually non-existent for a number of reasons, including their being outnumbered and out-equipped by the muggers.  He then takes it on himself to become a vigilante to both try to make his neighborhood safer and kind of exact revenge on the muggers who attacked his family.  Apparently, things get out of hand when he thinks, let's not stop with the muggers.  Let's go after *anyone* I suspect of committing crimes, possibly including scofflaws and jaywalkers.  The Heir believes the 2010s would consider the Bronson character to be proverbially autistic.  But anyway, there's increased worry that this vigilantism poses a greater threat than the muggers, and the Bronson character is brought to justice.  The cops are forced to admit that their failure to stop crime gave rise to this vigilantism, so the Bronson character enters into an agreement that he move out the city and never come back.  The Heir only saw previews of the movie itself, and they were pretty dark and hard to take.  But the Heir feels that the Mad Magazine parody was enough to illustrate the points the movie proper was trying to make.  So here's the Heir to sum it up below.

"For those of you who still want to abolish the cops, heed the movie Death Wish, and be careful what you Wish for."

So here are some further warnings the Heir has for people to be careful what they wish for if they *really* want to defund the cops.  It's *some* major cities that want to do it under pressure from *some* protesters (at least).  But what about your one-traffic-light-town in the Far West with only 500 people, and vastly different needs and culture from Minneapolis?  Do *they* have to give up their cops too (the Heir asks)?  Because the phrase Defund The Cops the Heir takes *not* to mean defund just some of the cops of some of their money.  No, it means defunding *all* cops of *all* their money, over the *entire* country regardless of whether they've had problems with excessive force or not.  Otherwise the Ed Snowden types who support the measure would never use it as a slogan on picket signs.  A more nuanced "defunding" is just not catchy enough.  The Heir also thinks about the 1970s movie Death Wish (he *thinks* it's the Seventies) in a world where the cops are all but absent, you take your life in your hands every time you step out of your house, and it's only vigilantes who are willing to help.  By extension the Heir also thinks about the Green Berets and whether they'll end up making a comeback in the aftermath of what's to come.  The Heir wants to ruminate on each on these in more detail in the next few days or so.

"I'm concerned."

So while the Heir joins in on calling for reforms, disbanding the cops is not the answer.  The Heir concedes that the Minneapolis city council's decision to disband the cops is not subject to opinions of people who live outside the city, he sees this as Guy Fawkes Mask Wearer victory.  They'll see that as a catapult to disbanding all cops everywhere, all over the globe.  These Ed Snowdens lie in wait, looking for the right moment to override the democratic process made by the people and for the people.  The Heir looks at the city of Three River Junction in the north of Bachelor Blue State, and they've made policing work.  The police leaders took a knee in their press conference, but the Heir's pretty sure the Ed Snowdens will want to disband even good departments, including the one at Three River Junction, over the objections of city residents.  He expects Marco's Grandmother to point out that police unions are still very powerful, but the Heir sees the anti-cop forces more powerful still.  He envisions a whole series of unintended consequences in any city that's abolished its police force, including a Wild West local culture, and going back to the bad ole days of 1970's New York.  Social workers are all fine and well, but if you're getting cut off by an aggressive driver tailgating you and passing you over a double yellow line, you're not going to have a social worker pull that person over and ask, "Tell me about your feelings."  The Heir doesn't think that's going to work.  #KeepTheCops

The Heir continues his outrage over what's been happening with Lafayette Park and Buffalo NY.  With Lafayette Park, we in the Bachelor call for criminal charges to be made against those violating the rights of the protesters.  The Heir is calling out Bill Barr, and that guy who punched that cameraman in the gut, and the pilots of the helicopters flying over the protesters, and the superior officers issuing the commands.  The Heir saw that a civil lawsuit was made, but he doesn't think it's enough.  You could also push for charges of impersonating a police officer for those guys dressed up in riot gear but without proper IDs.  The Heir's not confident that the progressives will push hard enough in this regard, since he sees himself more on the side of law and justice.  Trump had that one tweet saying Law And Order, but the Heir sees Lafayette Park and Buffalo as the opposite: Lawnessness And Official Disorder.  Of course it's the fault of both Ed Snowden and the personal corruption of the 2010s that we're still not over it in the 2020s.

The Heir wants to look into both civil lawsuits and state charges against Roger Stone and Michael Flynn that Bill Barr cannot touch.  If Biden wins in November, the Heir wants the Biden DOJ to go after Barr, as well as Stone and Flynn within the contours of due process.  He doesn't believe that a guarantee against double jeopardy should allow Flynn and Stone to walk free, and continue to engage in immorality as if nothing happened.

"And also, nail Trump while we're at it."