Squirrel!
Safety first means nothing is safe.
It’s just days to the election, and by the way Americans did you vote yet? and I have decided to talk to you about a dead rodent.
Seven years ago Mark Longo found a baby squirrel orphaned when someone ran a car over its mother. Longo brought him into his home and named him Peanut. Peanut imprinted on Longo as his new mother; when Longo tried to release him back into the wild, the little guy had no idea how to survive in the wild, returned frightened and injured to the only home he knew, and thus their relationship became permanent.
Here, watch this, it will melt your heart.
Longo and Peanut went on a journey together. Over the next several years Longo turned Peanut into a social media star with a half-million Instagram followers. A year ago, Longo moved to rural New York to open the P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary, which currently houses 300 rescue animals.
Their bucolic coexistence was shattered when on October 30th Longo’s house was raided by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. Armed agents showed up with a warrant they’d obtained after receiving an anonymous complaint. They held Longo and his German wife outside for five hours. While their home was ransacked in a search for their illicit animals, his wife was interrogated about her immigration status, because everyone knows German women are a big illegal immigration problem, Germans being infamously bad at following rules and keeping their paperwork in order,
In the course of the search, Peanut reportedly bit one of the agents.
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? – Solzhenitsyn
The DEC agents invoked Peanut’s exercise of his castle doctrine rights as an excuse to euthanize him, dissect his tiny brain, and test for rabies, rabies being a known problem with house pets. They also kidnapped Fred the raccoon, who met the same dark fate.
The Longos were devastated, as you might imagine.
Allegedly, the tip came from a woman who lives all the way down in Texas, and who has since deleted all of her social media.
Update: it turns out that this was fake news, in recognition of which I’ve removed the woman’s name.
I don’t know if this Texan woman is really the snitch (Ed: it turns out, no). If she is (Ed: she isn't), it beggars belief that she could harbour any genuine concern about paperwork irregularities in a small town on the other side of the country. I’ve seen people speculate that this could be some kind of Internet beef, the animal control equivalent of SWATing, and this wouldn’t surprise me.
The director of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, under whose watch this farcical tyranny unfolded, is apparently named Karen, which is just a bit too on the nose.
Apparently Longo didn’t have a permit to have wild animals in his house. He claims that the paperwork was all in order, the documents all signed, and he was simply waiting on approval for some last-minute detail. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it sounds entirely plausible.
This isn’t the first time that the dead hand of the zombie state has murdered innocent animal friends for the crime of being cared for without a permit.
People have reacted with outrage, which has led to a bit of misinformation, for example this statement from President Trump, which I am sad to inform you doesn’t seem to be real (although it should be).
Or this fake Atlantic story
Which isn’t really fake news so much as a meme commenting on the Internet’s explosion of righteous fury over the untimely1 death of the cute little guy.
The obvious line to take on this is that the government can’t seem to prevent illegal migrants from pouring across our various borders (indeed, it subsidizes them), while it will go all hands on deck to assassinate an illegal squirrel and his raccoon friend, but this is just anarchotyranny for you. This story isn’t really about the prefix of that portmanteau. It’s about the suffix.
We live in a society in which a vengeful busybody on the other side of the country can anonymously harness the implacable machinery of the state to ruin the lives of people they’ve never met, who are generally powerless to do anything to obtain satisfaction from the faceless bullies hiding within the miasma of the permanent bureaucracy.
We live in this kind of society because we have allowed our natural liberties to be nibbled away at, a little bit here and a little bit there, until there is practically nothing left of them. Like Gulliver, we are held down by thousands of tiny threads, a net of laws and regulations, all of them enacted ‘for our safety’.
We have put Safety First, and if safety comes first, it necessarily follows that everything else comes after safety. There is no price too high for safety, and so we pay everything for it.
No one believes that Peanut’s death made the world any safer, including the anonymous stool pigeon that sicced the NYDEC on him, or the mouth-breathing toughs sent by the NYDEC.
Peanut’s death was about power. The state’s goons got to rip apart someone’s house and snuff out the lives of helpless cute animals, which made them feel powerful, and the snitch got to snicker from the sidelines, which made her feel powerful.
Safety is just the excuse. It is a very effective excuse, one that the managerial state and its cultists and clients in the general population adore, because it morally disarms all opposition to their tyranny. It gives them all the cover they need. “I’m doing this because I like ripping the wings off of butterflies” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “I’m doing this to keep you safe from the butterflies”. No one has ever been hurt by a butterfly, you say? Well, perhaps, but you never know. If it saves even one life!
This plague of safetyism infects everything.
The left has used the doctrine of ‘safe spaces’ to turn schools, universities, workplaces, and most of the Internet into one giant censorious Maoist playpen for gay race communism, screaming that it traumatizes gay race communists to hear hate facts that challenge gay race communism, that it makes them feel ‘unsafe’. Safety at any price. If it saves even one feel.
The carbon cult is safetyism writ large, on a planetary scale. To head off hypothetical dangers that might happen if anthropogenic global warming is real – the reality of AGW, the extent of the AGW, and the consequences of AGW all being the output of unreliable computer models, mind you, with uncertainty compounding on uncertainty until it expands into a cloud castle of vaporous what-ifs and maybes – in order to prevent this postulated apocalypse, no damage to the economy, limitation on technological progress, or fetter on human health and freedom, is too great. Each your plant-based diet and shiver in the dark, climate criminal. If it saves even one tenth of a degree!
The COVID debacle was safetyism on rampage mode. To keep us safe from the sneeze, we were locked inside for a year, swaddled in masks, children were prevented from socializing with their friends, the economy was nuked, and untested gene therapy juice was shoved into our bloodstreams to prevent the spread I mean prevent infection sorry uhh slightly reduce hospitalizations just take it or we’ll fire you.
Those migrants flooding into formerly civilized countries which the government can’t seem to do anything about (although it can kill a squirrel)? They can’t be remigrated because bad things might happen to them in their homelands – they might be oppressed by homophobic governments, endangered by violent crime, or prosecuted for their own violent crimes. Remigrating migrants is unsafe for the migrants; (the migrants’) safety comes first!
Note that none of these keep you, or anyone else, safe. They do not increase human life expectancy; they do not reduce the rate of injury; they do not improve quality of life; they do not clean the environment. To the contrary, they reliably make everything much, much worse.
The left’s rabid assault on discourse merely poisoned the social environment, destroying public trust in institutions, dissolving the natural bonds of affection between people, dividing society down the middle, and leaving everyone angrier, more afraid, more anxious, and more on edge than before.
The wind farms built by the carbon cult are butchering whales, bats, and birds in huge numbers.
The COVID lockdowns left children emotionally and socially stunted, while the jab crippled and killed so many people we still don’t know just how bad it was. Turbo-cancers, anyone?
As for the migrants, protecting their safety means that native populations are left defenceless against migrants trafficking small children and hard drugs (which they are happy to sell to small children), migrant gangs staging armed takeovers of apartment complexes, migrant gangs raping young women, and so on.
These are extreme examples, but there are myriad others. The mismanagerial class relentlessly shoves their greedy little fingers into every little detail of our lives, always seeking to increase the scope and granularity of their control, which is to say to increase their power power, and always in the name of ‘our’ ‘safety’. Individually their interventions are generally just irksome, silly little regulations coming out of anonymous committees buried in dull little bureaus you’ve never heard of – not quite annoying enough to kick up a stink over, and even if you wanted to, it’s impossible to find any one person to blame.
Here’s a simple example, one that I have found deeply annoying lo, these many years. Decades ago governments started requiring Bic to wrap a metallic safety band around the ignition wheel of their famous lighter.
The Bic lighter is a marvel of engineering. It is a simple, elegant design; it is cheap, durable, fuel-efficient, and lasts almost forever, which is why it has become practically ubiquitous. The sole purpose of the safety band is to make it slightly more difficult to turn the wheel and ignite the lighter. Ostensibly this is so the weak, clumsy thumbs of children will be unable to set the house on fire; how many firebugs have actually been thwarted by this measure is unknown, though I have my doubts as to the efficacy as kids tend to be highly persistent and motivated when it comes to recreational incineration. Nevertheless, the safety bands persist, because Safety First. The point is: the state intervened and deliberately made a design worse. Thereby making everyone’s lives just a little bit worse.
Most of the mismanagers’ myriad impositions are like the safety band on a Bic. They aren’t life-threatening, just little annoyances and frustrations, each of which makes life just that little bit more expensive, onerous, joyless, and ugly, but which compound together into a gargantuan burden of soft despotism that smothers the life out of life.
Economists like to point to the example of car seats, which prevent some very small number of child deaths per year – the number I’ve seen is under 100 – while preventing many thousands of children from being born at all, because when every child must have a bulky car seat, more than two children necessarily demands a larger and more expensive car.
Construction projects are endlessly delayed by overregulation. It took a mere five years to build the Hoover dam; by contrast, it is estimated that California’s light rail project, which has been underway for decades with essentially nothing to show for itself despite many billions of dollars being spent, will not be completed for decades to come (if it’s ever completed (it won’t be)). Talk to anyone in the business of actually building things and they’ll tell you that it’s always the same: interference from regulatory agencies over insurance concerns, environmental concerns, worker safety concerns, employment equity concerns, and the list goes on and interminably on. Those who do things are ruled by those who prevent people from doing things. The result is that nothing gets done, and that’s okay, because when safety comes first, the safe option is doing nothing.
A few months ago in Germany, the greens demolished the country’s last nuclear plant. They’ve been destroying them for years, actively deindustrializing the economy as they dismantle the country in the name of environmental safety.
Musk wants to go to Mars. A manned Mars shot will require thousands of Starship launches, necessitating an unprecedented launch cadence. That’s one of the reasons SpaceX has been so focused on developing a fully reusable launch platform with an inter-launch turnaround time on the order of days or even hours: it’s the only way to lift enough material into orbit on a short enough timescale to make a Martian colony a practical ambition. The technology is almost there. The holdup? Regulatory interference, of course. Federal agencies demanding environmental impact studies that take months between launches.
Each of these little regulations is an annoyance, more trouble to fight than its worth. They’re like mosquitoes. But there are so many of them now that we’re trapped in a malarial swamp, afflicted with such a profusion of the accursed bloodsuckers that the real economy has lost half of its bodyweight to their voracious parasitism while being left enervated to the point of incapacity by the blood parasites they’ve injected.
This has become intolerable. Beyond a certain point it’s time to go to war with it. Not with this or that pointless regulation or officious busybody or pernicious little tattletale, but with the entire rotten system. We need to drain the swamp, as it were. We need to do snap the safety band off of the ignition wheel, so we can light the fire of civilization again.
In life, Peanut the squirrel spread joy to millions. In death, he has become a martyr – the innocent victim of a blundering machine built of the inept, the useless, and the cruel, a clumsy blind killer robot that stomps out lives and dreams and hope and beauty and love as it seeks to perfect its control over a world that it is gradually crushing out of existence.
All while simpering that it’s keeping you safe.
Don’t listen to it.
Nothing is safe when safety comes first.
When you hear them say ‘safety first’, remember Peanut.
And bite the bastards.
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Squirrels tend to die after a year or two in the wild, so at seven years of age Peanut was already an elder statesman by squirrel standards, but in captivity they can apparently live up to 20 years, so Peanut almost certainly had many good years ahead of him.
Safety means nothing is safe - terrifying and brilliant. This was the Ruby Ridge and Waco of cute animals. AWFLs are euthanizing our society.
One of your best. I will also note that the Department of Environmental Conservation has zero jurisdiction over anything related to immigration. That part of it was just pure harassment. It reminded me of the claim that the ATF went to the Branch Dravidian complex to investigate alleged child abuse. The ATF doesn't do that.