patrick.net

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/squirrel

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. ...

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.







Allegedly, the tip came from one Monica Keaser, who lives all the way down in Texas, and who has since deleted all of her social media.



I don’t know if Keaser is really the snitch. If she is, 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.









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 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? ...

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. ...

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.

https://www.malone.news/p/sunday-strip-first-they-came-for

The New York State police raided Mark’s home this week:

A total of 10 officers raided his house

He and his wife were not allowed to use bathroom alone

He was not allowed to feed his other rescue animals

They interrogated his wife about her immigration status

There were search warrants from 4 bureaucratic departments, including FISA.

This week, despite massive public outcry - both Peanut and Fred were murdered by the New York State Environmental police. Their crime was living in captivity.

To be clear:
"Based on the search results, it is extremely rare for squirrels to contract rabies. The data suggests that squirrels are not considered vectors of rabies and have never been known to transmit the disease to humans."

Type thoughts guys. This photo shit is getting annoying. I won't leave the site, but it gets really annoying. Write something worth reading. If you can't, don't post it.

DemocratsAreTotallyFucked says

I guess Shatner never had a dog? There's a difference of insane magnitude. Time doesn't matter. Dogs are bred to be pets. You can say their name and they respond. Do tricks and obey. Show me a squirrel or raccoon that can do that. I don't think anyone can.

This is an election ploy. I'm voting Trump but my overall point is this a stupid story and makes Trump voters seem dumb. These animals were not pets. My neighbor growing up had a squirrel and got his arm mauled and he ended up killing it. I was 5 and there when it happened. Don't need to be a zoo keeper to know this.

This one is weird: in one breath we demand all illegals to be deported and in another we cry about illegaly kept squirrel? "But it was adorable!" So what? It's like saying "deport all illegals except for cute chicks". We need to get back to being the country of laws. Don't like the law - change it using legal methods. The only exception should be for clearly unconstitutional stuff, but the right to keep and bear squirrels was not in the Constitution last time I checked.

RWSGFY says

This one is weird: in one breath we demand all illegals to be deported and in another we cry about illegaly kept squirrel? "But it was adorable!" So what? It's like saying "deport all illegals except for cute chicks". We need to get back to being the country of laws. Don't like the law - change it using legal methods. The only exception should be for clearly unconstitutional stuff, but the right to keep and bear squirrels was not in the Constitution last time I checked.

I don't want illegals. Come here respectfully and legally. I'm just not a fan of people putting wild animals in their home. Hell a zoo. I think it's bizarre. Just let the animals do their thing. I don't think zoo's should exist. As I've said I'm independent, but this topic is the leftie in me. Chickens, dogs, cats, cows, pigs, goats, etc. Animals bred to produce meat/eggs, be functional or a family pet.

Cats are only one or two generations from being feral. Experiments on wild foxes showed they too, with selection for low aggression, could be domesticated in three generations. Our terms of pet vs not are somewhat arbitrary.

This was a blatant case of government overreach. And anarcho-tyranny, where major crimes are overlooked (or abetted) by govt, while small infractions are hammered down. The outcome hinges on whether you’re in a favored group. This would be Harris’ DEI govt.

It’s like the dog that sees a “squirrel!!” and gets distracted. Don’t be that dog.

WookieMan says

This is an election ploy.

We know the woman who called the authorities, she's an artsy Kamala voter. She simply couldn't stand seeing a happy man with a pet; all leftists are killjoys.

The man tried to restore the squirrel to the woods several times but the squirrel refused to go back. There was also a raccoon.

Both squirrels and raccoons can be domesticated.

The same government that will invade your home to kill your pets will do that over other things.

BTW, squirrels have NEVER transmitted rabies to a human in medical history. Smaller rodents aren't generally vectors, which is why they generally don't give rabies protocol for small rodent bites anymore. The only smaller rodent that passes rabies to humans are the Golf Course Destroyers, Groundhogs, and Ferrets, but in the latter case it's vanishingly rare.

AmericanKulak says

Both squirrels and raccoons can be domesticated.

The same government that will invade your home to kill your pets will do that over other things.

Gotta read what I wrote. I'm not for government interference. I don't think people should have squirrels and raccoons in their home. That's level 10 retardation. Both sides of this are retarded. Government shouldn't be involved and a thinking person shouldn't have those animals in their house. This was a lose lose situation. I don't like those.

WookieMan says

This is an election ploy. I'm voting Trump but my overall point is this a stupid story and makes Trump voters seem dumb. These animals were not pets. My neighbor growing up had a squirrel and got his arm mauled and he ended up killing it.

On the one hand, yes, the murder of a squirrel is being used as political fodder right before the election.

On the other hand, the squirrel was legit raised from a pup and very tame, definitely not rabid, so murdering it is a perfect illustration of how Democrats don't care if ten million criminal aliens swarm over the border, but somehow do care if someone is defying the Democrat bureaucracy, even if just in a trivial way.