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Ocelot II

Ocelot II's Journal
Ocelot II's Journal
May 24, 2023

I have a theory about that letter, FWIW.

No lawyer, even one of TFG's sketchy mouthpieces, would write such a puerile, belligerent letter to the guy who's overseeing the prosecution of his client. What I suspect happened is something like this: TFG calls up the lawyer and says he wants a meeting with Garland. Lawyer says Garland probably won't do it because Jack Smith, the Special Counsel, is managing the case. TFG says he doesn't care, he wants the lawyer to send Garland a letter demanding a meeting, and he dictates the letter to the lawyer, insisting on the wording. And TFG wants a copy of the letter immediately, on the lawyer's letterhead. Lawyer rolls his eyes and has a secretary type it up as dictated and send a copy to TFG. Lawyer then either writes a polite, professional letter to Garland and/or Smith, requesting a conference to discuss the status of the case and does not send TFG a copy of this letter, or else he makes the request by phone so he can truthfully tell his client that he has contacted Garland. He suspects or knows that the letter TFG dictated will be posted on fake Twitter for the purpose of outraging and grifting the MAGAts but he's already sold his soul by agreeing to represent TFG in the first place, so he accepts the resulting humiliation as the cost of doing business. But the letter on TFG's fake Twitter was never sent to Garland at all.

So that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

May 7, 2023

Bingo. Whatever bad shit England got up to in its history,

which is also our history, was the work of many people and institutions. England had had a parliament for centuries; following the house arrest, trial and execution of Charles I by the Parliament in 1649 (obviously he wasn't really in control of things at that point), there was an interregnum during which England, led by Oliver Cromwell, declared itself a republic. During this period Cromwell brutally conquered Ireland and invaded Scotland, then returned to England and dissolved Parliament. A reconstituted Parliament then declared Cromwell "Lord Protector for life." Under Cromwell's rule Britain continued the expansion of its empire. After his death, and notwithstanding his objections to monarchy, Cromwell was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son Richard. Richard had no power base in Parliament or the Army and was forced to resign in May 1659, ending the Protectorate. Concluding that the republic thing hadn't worked out so well after all, Parliament invited Charles II back from exile and restored him to the throne in 1660. He was succeeded by his brother James II, who was basically chased off the throne after constant battles with Parliament in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and replaced by William of Orange and Mary. The Glorious Revolution established the primacy of parliamentary sovereignty.

English history consists of constant battles between forces of the monarchy, the church(es), and elected representatives. England hasn't had an absolute monarch since the early middle ages (if even then), as much as many of them wanted to be one, and to place all the evils of the empire on the shoulders of increasingly weak monarchs is to completely ignore or misunderstand this complex history. I am not advocating for monarchy; it's clearly an antiquated and unnecessary form of government that still survives only as a historical and symbolic relic. The monarchs of Britain and the other European countries that still have them are essentially powerless and ceremonial, serving only as titular heads of state, not heads of government. Any of those countries, all of which are also representative democracies, could abolish their monarchies through acts of their parliaments but so far they have chosen not to do so. It makes no more sense to heap hate on the soap-opera Windsor family that it does to hate the Kardashians.

May 7, 2023

That empire was *our* history. We *were* them until 1776.

The US didn't spring out of nothing; it was a bunch of disaffected Brits who didn't like George III's administration and taxation of the colony they were occupying (stolen from the people who already lived there, btw). Our legal system is based almost entirely on hundreds of years of English common law, and the philosophical underpinnings of the Constitution can be found in Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, in which he rejected the claims of absolute monarchy based on divine right and held that the inalienable rights of individuals form the basis of all rightful governments. The country we have now, good and bad, got its start in the British Empire. If it hadn't been for British colonialism we might not have ever come into existence in the first place, and certainly not as we are now.

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