Politico Just Doesn't Get It About David Gregory

"Those who argue that the investigation is ludicrous have a point: Showing an empty gun magazine on television, though illegal in Washington, D.C., was hardly going to harm anyone."

Well, you know what. The 30-round magazines sitting on my shelf aren't harming anyone either, but if they were outlawed, law enforcement would not give me a pass, because I am not a rich, powerful elite, liberal journalist.

Equality before the law, goddamnit. How hard is that to understand?

The reason conservatives are pressing to have Gregory prosecuted is that we love to hear liberals making the case that Gregory's possession of a 30-round magazine wasn't hurting anyone. They're exactly right. So there shouldn't be a law against their possession.

Why Don't We Want To Give Up Our Semiautomatic Rifles And Standard Capacity Magazines?

Because there are people like this guy, Donald Kaul, a columnist at the Des Moinse Register, out there, and some of those people are in powerful positions in the government.

Here, then, is my “madder-than-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore” program for ending gun violence in America:

• Repeal the Second Amendment, the part about guns anyway. It’s badly written, confusing and more trouble than it’s worth. It offers an absolute right to gun ownership, but it puts it in the context of the need for a “well-regulated militia.” We don’t make our militia bring their own guns to battles. And surely the Founders couldn’t have envisioned weapons like those used in the Newtown shooting when they guaranteed gun rights. Owning a gun should be a privilege, not a right.

• Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. (I would also raze the organization’s headquarters, clear the rubble and salt the earth, but that’s optional.) Make ownership of unlicensed assault rifles a felony. If some people refused to give up their guns, that “prying the guns from their cold, dead hands” thing works for me.

• Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

Really, when a mainstream liberal statist is advocating mass murder and a torture of people who disagree with the policies he'd impose on them -- "that 'prying the guns from their cold, dead hands' thing works for me" -- then you know that even in the U.S., statists will go to literally any lengths to impose their vision on the rest of us.

I've said it before: we are not different in kind from communist dictators in China, from genocidal tribesmen in the Sudan. We are all of the human species. The capacity to inflict massive, government-sponsored horror on our fellow citizens has not been magically removed from our genes.

The fact that we live in the most free prosperous society that has ever existed on the face of the earth is an accident of birth for each of us. We only retain that freedom as long as we keep raising our children to believe in it. No government or society lasts forever. When men like Kaul usher in their new vision, where people like him -- experts and media elites -- know what's best for the rest of us, they want us disarmed so the process is easier.

BTW, Kaul is factually wrong. It is perfectly legal to be a communist in the U.S. and the communist party is alive and well. That's as it should be. I'm not afraid of bad ideas, as long as nobody is preventing me from speaking out about them, and as long as I can defend myself if someone tries to force them on me. In the nations with the worst examples of mass murder in the name of communism, the victims were disarmed. Like he wants us to be.

His sophistry about communist deaths is interesting. He has to hedge his death numbers with the restriction "American Commies," because communists are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions world-wide, and directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of U.S. military in Korea and Vietnam. But I digress.

Funny Things Progressives Believe

They believe:

• Every adult person is smart enough to vote.

• Most adult people aren't smart enough to make their vote choice without having their betters regulate what information they receive (campaign finance and speech laws).

Tax Cuts for the Rich!

It's fairly rich (heh) that for more than a decade, Democrats have referred to the Bush tax cuts as "tax cuts for the rich," but now that they're due to expire, they're forced to admit that they were, in fact, tax cuts for everyone, and that letting them expire will increase taxes for everyone.

Aspirin And The Totalitarian Urge

I clicked on the link to an article in the New York Times, The 2,000-Year-Old Wonder Drug thinking I'd find an informational article on the benefits of aspirin.

Instead I found a political screed that justified government "regulating a person’s habits in the name of good health" as a "moral and social duty."

It's the same old story. Experts have decided what's best for you and they'll make you do it whether you like it or not.

C.S. Lewis said, "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipresent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with approval of their own conscience."

It's a fundamental tenet of libertarian thought that one may not subordinate another person for one's own ends. No matter how good the intent, taking from a man's daily wage to force him to pay so that the government can coerce him is a terrible evil.

There are no experts so wise that they deserve to have power over innocent peoples' bodies and lives. My "habits," good or bad, are my own business, so long as my habits don't directly harm others.

If we have so socialized our society that the cost of my health care is determined to be a harm to others, then the proper remedy is to not force people to pay for my health care, not to impose other people's opinions of proper behavior on me.

The only just government is a government instituted with the consent of the governed, to secure their rights -- not to infringe them.

All Of Our Accomplishments Are Minor

This is a lovely, lovely article.

Two quotations that caught my eye in particular:

Am I “cheerily generalizing” as Solomon says of other Down syndrome parents, “from a few accomplishments” of my child? Perhaps I am. But one thing I’ve learned these last four years that possibly Solomon has not: All of our accomplishments are few. All of our accomplishments are minor: my scribblings, his book, the best lines of the best living poets. We embroider away at our tiny tatters of insight as though the world hung on them, when it is chiefly we ourselves who hang on them.

 ...

“The happy ending of tragedies,” he notes, “have a dignity beyond the happy endings of comedies.” Warriors at heart, we cherish what we’ve gone to battle for far more than what’s been handed to us with a lifetime warranty and a lollipop.

This Judge Doesn't Understand What 'Choice' Means

Federal judge rules North Carolina's 'Choose Life' plate unconstitutional

The article says it's unconstitutional unless an opposing viewpoint is offered.

I wondered if that rule is applied consistently, so I went to NC's specialized license plate page.

Wow, funny, there seems to be no "Animal Hater's" plate to counter the "Animal Lover's" plate.

There's no "Screw the Arts" plate to counter the "Arts NC" plate.

 There's no "Blow off Breast Cancer" plate to counter the "Breast Cancer Awareness" plate.

There's no "Oppose Militarism" plate to counter even one of the many military plates.

There's no "Support Atheism" plate to counter the "In God We Trust" plate!

There's no "Kids Last" plate to counter "Kids First."

There's no "Brady Campaign" plate to counter the NRA plate!

There definitely needs to be a plate to counter the "Shag Dancing" plate. That just sounds immoral!

There's not even a "Sons of American Slaves" or "Sons of Union Veterans" plate to counter the "Sons of Confederate Veterans" plate!

In fact, not one of the specialized plates has an "opposing viewpoint" plate unless you count the different Collegiate plates that might include team rivals, or the NASCAR plates for competing drivers. It seems that opposing viewpoints are only required when the state doesn't like your viewpoint!

Also, what, exactly is an "opposing viewpoint" for "Choose Life?" The legislature considered and rejected suggestions such as “Trust Women. Respect Choice,” or simply “Respect Choice,"

And rightly so! Because, really, to us native speakers of English, there is nothing about those plates that is in opposition to "Choose Life!"

Do you "Trust Women?" Well, then you must them even if they "Choose Life."

Do you "Respect Choice?" Obviously then, you respect the choice to "Choose Life."

In fact, the only sentiment clearly in opposition to "Choose Life" would be, obviously, "Choose Death."

If they're going to go ahead with this opposing vewpoint requirement, then I expect that "Choose Death" will be at the head of a slew of newly issued specialized plates that oppose our military, the arts, animals, breast cancer awareness, NASCAR Racing, colleges, many civic organizations, and so on. The people of North Carolina will truly be able to speak their minds through their license plates!

That's what will happen, right? I think the "Sons of American Slaves" plate will be extremely popular in the North Carolina African-American community! I can't wait!

Think It Through

In an article on James Scott's new book Two Cheers for Anarchy, Lucy Steigerwald writes:

He points to the 101st Airborne's role in integrating Little Rock schools to refute the notion that a state can never be used to protect individuals.

In most of his discussions of the modern world, though, Scott sounds like an anarchist again. He detests public schooling, for example: not just in this post–No Child Left Behind, standardized test–heavy era (and not just in Jim Crow Little Rock), but in general. Public schools, he writes, were developed to create good, hard-working citizens "whose loyalty to the nation will trump regional and local identities of language, ethnicity, and religion."

That's a sweet, sweet juxtaposition. Why? Because if we could do away with public schools, as the Scott of the second paragraph would like, then the government in the first paragraph would never have had the legitimacy to force integration of the schools.

Understand Our Form of Government

In a recent article, Gene Healy discusses President Obama's use of recess appointments:

Obama isn't the first president to abuse the clause to appoint nominees that the Senate wouldn't confirm. He is, however, the first to invoke the power when the Senate was—according to its own rules—actually in session. The White House called the "pro forma" sessions adopted by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid "a procedural trick" aimed at unjustly stifling his ability to bypass Senate confirmation.

 What President Obama doesn't seem to understand or accept is that our three branches of government are designed to thwart each other at least as much as complement each other. Not only are powers distributed among them, but they are designed so A) each is supreme within its domain, and B) each can thwart the other branches.

If the Senate enacts rules to extend their session to thwart recess appointments, that's part of their balancing power, because they are supposed to confirm appointments and when a mechanism is being used specifically to avoid that, then they have a responsibility to stop it.

Under the Constitution, no branch of government, no official has the power to say when the Senate is in session but the Senate.

By clearly disregarding the Senates own statement of its status, the President was committing an impeachable offense.

Sadly nobody in the legislative branch seems to have the courage to draw up articles of impeachment.

If Obama wanted to approach the problem legitimately, he would have gone to the Supreme Court to see if the Senate's rules regarding their sessions were unconstitutional. Of course, the court would probably have declined to take such a case, as the Senates actions are so clearly constitutional. Obviously, Obama didn't want to hear that.

The only power we, as citizens have, is the ballot box. We've got to start electing Senators and Representatives who aren't afraid of Presidential power and who are willing to impeach when necessary.

Remember, impeachment isn't a finding of guilt, it's just a finding that something needs to be put to trial. It's the only power outside election that can thwart a President who refuses to adhere to the constitutional limits of his office.

Of course, Congress itself is no big fan of constitutional limits. Witness its egregious abuse of the commerce and general welfare clauses (abetted by the Supreme Court, who has made violating the constitution with the "presumption of constitutionality" precedent the standard way of doing business). That's why they won't act, they are afraid that if they start invoking constitutional limits on the President, someone might think of applying them to Congress.

Again, our only direct power (short of the ammo box) is the ballot box. We need to elect Representatives who understand the limitations of their branch, and adhere to it, and we need to vote out those that don't, even when their violations are favorable to us individually.

We need to elect Presidents who know their place, and who appoint judges that aren't slaves to unconstitutional precedents -- the idea that "we've been doing it wrong so long we're bound to keep doing it wrong because it's a precedent").

We need to return appointment of Senators to the state legislatures to keep the federal government from running roughshod over the states.

And, ideally, there'd be more requirements to vote than merely being a citizen over 18 and having a pulse.

Definitions

Greedy Capitalists: Want to keep what they've earned.

Selfless Socialists: Want to take what other people have earned.

The Military Genius Speaks

Obama warns the Israelis about the risks of a ground war in Gaza:

"If that can be accomplished without a ramping up of military activity in Gaza, that's preferable," Obama said. "It's not just preferable for the people of Gaza. It's also preferable for Israelis, because if Israeli troops are in Gaza, they're much more at risk of incurring fatalities or being wounded."

I think we can file that under "No shit, Sherlock." Troops are in danger in a war zone. Who woulda thought? Did he have to read Patton's book to figure that out? I'm sure the Israelis had no idea that troops are in more danger in a war zone than they are sitting at home.

Now that you've had this tremendous revelation, President Obama, maybe you could apply it to my son who was almost blown up last week.

At least there's a damn fine, simple reason the Israelis are fighting. They're being actively attacked by people that hate them and want to wipe them off the face of the earth. Can we say the same in Afghanistan? I don't think so.

Way too close for comfort

My son emailed me a few hours ago:

i got blown up yesterday.... we got lucky though, they missed the truck by foot, just peppered the truck with shrapnel, blew off some mirrors and some headlights. no injuries, no concusssions or nothin. little bit harder of hearing now, but me and my whole crew are fine.

Can someone please explain to me again why he's there?

I don't mind at all that he has an incredibly risky life. He's a career soldier and loves it. But I haven't heard anyone, in ages, explain exactly just what the hell he's risking his life for in this particular deployment. We're not making America any safer or Afghanistan any better. They're just letting my son and men like him drive around offering themselves up as targets for a bunch of ignorant savages who don't want us there anyway.

Also Classy, Michelle: The Knucklehead Vote

Just the other day, Obama was campaigning for the crazy vote, and today Michelle is out there urging people to get the "knuckleheads" to the polls.

“Talk to everyone you know — your friends, your neighbors, that cousin you haven’t seen in a while, that student sitting in your next class,” she told her husband’s supporters.

“You know he’s kind of a knucklehead — and may not be — you know the one.”

As the audience laughed, she told students to be nice to the knuckleheads.
“Don’t call him a knucklehead — not to his face,” she said. “You just want to encourage him to get to the polls.”

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." -- James Madison

Or, you know, never mind "knowledge" or "mental competence" and stuff that's, you know, like, hard to think about. Just go vote for the guy who promises the most free stuff.

Obama Stays Classy, Campaigns For The Crazy Aunt Vote

This morning in my in box from Obama for America:

Good news: The Buckeye State has extended early vote hours this weekend.

Do your friends and family know? Grandma and grandpa, friends from high school, coworkers, neighbors, and crazy Aunt Mildred -- make sure they know they can vote this weekend.

Crazy Aunt Mildred, huh? We don't care if she's incapable of making rational choices! Just drag her in there and make sure she votes for Obama!

Obama is fairly sure that he's got the crazy vote in the bag, if he can just get them to find the polling place and stop ranting long enough to mark a ballot.

Something Doesn't Add Up Here

I recently had cause to look up some articles on solar farms, and came across this one about a small-scale solar farm built by an apartment complex in Indianapolis. I noticed these paragraphs:

The electricity generated by the panels won't be used at the complex, but will be sold back to Indianapolis Power and Light instead.

"It's really an economic decision on their part," said John Haselden with IPL. "The 24 cents (they are selling the electricity for) is probably better than the than the eight or 10 cents that they are purchasing it for."

That doesn't add up at all. Why would IPL be willing to pay 24 cents for electricity when they're only selling it for eight or 10 cents? You simply can't pay more for your wholesale product than you sell it for retail without going out of busines. I bet if the reporter had dug just a teeny, tiny bit deeper he would have found out that IPL's purchase price for green energy is government-subsidized.

As was the cost of the solar farm itself.

The farm cost $345,000 and will generate expected revenues of $20k. That's a 17.25 year just to break even on the initial investment, which is pretty damn crappy in my book. And there's all sorts of things that can happen over the course of 17.25 years to extend that period: acts of god, vandalism, changes in the purchase rates to match market realities (If the subsidies or incentives or whatever's allowing that 24 cent price end, then the power company is surely going to want to pay less than the eight or 10 cents they're selling for -- which would bring in as little as 1/3 the expected revenue.

Of course, the apartment complex doesn't have to worry about the full ROI because it was built with government "stimulus" grants. In other words, they spent taxpayer money on a private project, and the taxpayers ain't ever seeing that money again.

Would you as a private citizen give money to someone to build something that's not going to see a profit for 17.25 years, if ever, and for which you'll never see a share (remember, it's a grant, not a loan)? No, of course you wouldn't. That's why they had to take the money from you whether you like it or not.

Even if everything goes as planned, after 17.5 years, the panels could last as little as another 13 years after that (they're estimated to last 30-50 years in the article). Is that 30-50 year estimate accurate? Not according to other articles I found:

"Solar photovoltaics slowly lose their generating capacity. Although some solar panels are still working satisfactorily 40 years after installation, the conventional view is that most will dip below 80% of their rated capacity within about 20 years. This will vary slightly between manufacturers and between different types of silicon"

"Typically, the warranty given by solar cell manufacturers covers just 80 percent of power output. All this means that it may make economic sense to substitute older panels with newer panels before they are 30 years old."

If true, then not long after the $345,000 investment starts to get paid off, the owner will have to start re-investing in replacement panels, thus reducing the long-term profit potential even further.

Journalists: Doing The Hard Work Of Being Plonkingly Stupid For You!

Fox News just published a sensationalist article linking Monster Energy Drink to five deaths.

The article lists the factoid that "Monster Energy Drink, which comes in 24-ounce cans and contains 240 milligrams of caffeine, or seven times the amount of the caffeine in a 12-ounce cola."

The parents of a California 14-year-old are suing Monster for the death of their daughter "who died after drinking two, 24-ounce Monster Energy Drinks in 24 hours."

According to the article:

An autopsy found that Anais Fournier died of cardiac arrhythmia due to caffeine toxicity that impeded her heart's ability to pump blood.

 Oh my gosh! That's terrible! Monster Energy Drink is poison! Oh, wait, no....

She suffered from an inherited disorder that can weaken blood vessels. But the child's parents claim Monster failed to warn about the risks of drinking its products.

So your child suffers from a life-threatening disorder and it's someone's resposibility other than you and her to keep her away from high-caffeine drinks?

Oh, yes, back to Monsters and its killer levels of caffeine. The article completely fails to put that 240 milligrams of caffeine into perspective. Exactly how negligently outrageous is that enormous amount of caffeine in a 24 ounce drink?

Well, according to a couple of informational websites, 8 oz. of a flavored coffee contains 100 mg. So a typical venti Mocha at Starbucks has about 300mg of caffeine. A typical 8 oz. cup of ordinary coffee from a drip coffee maker has 115-175 mg of caffeine (depending on how strong you make it).

So you could be consuming more than twice the caffeine of 24 ounces of Monster energy drink by drinking 24 ounces of coffee -- the large size coffee you'd pick up at your local gas station.In other words, Monster has less caffeine than one of the most ancient, commonly enjoyed, ubiquitous beverages known to man

Get a clue, journalists! Don't be led to be the propagandists for sensational claims by litigation-happy people trying to cash in on their daughter's tragedy!

Anyone who has a condition that could become life-threatening if they consume too much caffeine but who doesn't know that Monster is loaded with caffeine (That's how they advertise it! It's mentioned prominently on the can!), is like a diabetic who gorges themselves on Twinkies, goes into a diabetic coma and then pretends to have no idea that they were loaded with sugar. This is nobody's fault but the girl and her parents. Don't be a shill for them.

Sounds Legitimate

Looks like legitimate free WiFi to me. What do you think?

Is Being Nice A Requirement To Be A Good Teacher?

In an article in today's New York Times, Deborah Kenny writes

AS the founder of a charter school network in Harlem, I’ve seen firsthand the nuances inherent in teacher evaluation. A few years ago, for instance, we decided not to renew the contract of one of our teachers despite the fact that his students performed exceptionally well on the state exam.

We kept hearing directly from students and parents that he was mean and derided the children who needed the most help. The teacher also regularly complained about problems during faculty meetings without offering solutions. Three of our strongest teachers confided to the principal that they were reluctantly considering leaving because his negativity was making everyone miserable.

As a person of the curmudgeonly persuasion, I'm a little distressed by this paragraph. What I'm taking away from the parapgraph is that the teacher was fired because he wasn't nice. That his students performed well seems to be inarguable. But he was fired for reasons that had nothing to do with his teaching excellence and all about his demeanor.

So he "derided the students that needed the most help." Have we still not put the abomination of "self esteem über alles" out of its misery? Maybe those special flowers that needed the most help also needed a little derision. Teaching isn't about always making you  feel good.

As for the faculty members complaining about his negativity, "Suck it up, Buttercups." That sounds like staff room backstabbing to me. I really dislike the faux constructive attitude some people have that you're only allowed to complain about a probllem if you have a solution. Is it a problem, or isn't it? If you want to sweep his complaints under the rug only because he doesn't have a solution,. what you often mean is that you'd prefer to ignore a problem because it's hard to solve.

Teaching isn't a popularity contest, either for the students or the teachers. Ms. Kenny's school fires a teacher not because he was incompetent, but because he didn't know how to play the popularity game. He was a grump, a curmuedgeon, a son-of-a-bitch. Well, a lot of great things in history have been done by people who were real sons-of-bitches.

Ms. Kenny goes on to explain that the firing of this teacher is why she opposes government-mandated teacher evaluations. "If our schools had been required to use a state-run teacher evaluation system, the teacher we let go would have been rated at the top of the scale." Yes, that's because the state-run evaluation system would have been objective and performance based, instead of basing his employment on whether the teacher was able to assuage the delicate psyches of some liberal buttercup teachers and some whiny students who didn't like being told they sucked.

Ironically, though, I am opposed to state or federally-mandated teacher evaluations on principle. At the federal level, the government simply has no grant of power to become involved in education. If you don't like it, push for an amendment, but that's the way it is.

Farther down at the state level, I think local control of education is the most fair and beneficial for all involved. Local school districts are best suited to work directly with parents and students to meet the educational needs of the students. If you could remove unions from the picture and local boards of education were free to fire teachers at will, and judge performance however they chose -- from Ms. Kenny's more subjective standard or an objective performance-based standard -- then that maximizes the choice and freedom of all involved. Ms. Kenny's charter school network has a right to be a feel-good liberal enclave that values feelings and group tranquility over performance. And parents have the right to either not send their kids there or to voice their dissatisfaction and work for change.

Once you move control of the system up to the state and federal levels, you remove much of the ability for individual parents to effect change in their local school systems. At that point, getting anything done requires lobbyists and activists groups, not 20 upset parents at a school board meeting. Removing that immediacy of control is a bad thing.

At the local level, schools should be permitted to kick out the unions and run union-free. I've worked in at-will employment all my working life, more than 30 years, from my first teenage
 part-time jobs to the present. I've never had a union to "protect" me. My employes have always been free to fire me anytime they want. And I don't have a problem with that. If I was being subjected to harsh, unfair conditions, yeah, I'd consider a union to protect me, or maybe I'd just quit and look for a better job. But I don't live in a Dickens novel, and neither do teachers in the U.S. They're professionals, just like me, and they can seek employment on the same footing as me. The companies I've worked for have always treated and compensated me at least adequately for the work I do, and I've always been free to leave if I didn't like the situation. Teachers are no different.

There's no reason to have our schools held hostage to teachers unions that promote the interests of the teachers over the interests of our children.

Of course, my ultimate advice is to opt out of the current system: home school or private school. We have been home schooling my children for more than 20 years now -- two are out in good careers, one is in college, two are still being home schooled. I recommend it heartily. It's not easy, by any means, but I'm very proud of how they're turning out.

One of the things I like most about it is that the buck stops here. There's absolutely no one to blame for my children's educational failings but myself. That's quite a responsibility, but it's no more responsibility than any parent should be willing to take on for their child.

Welcome to California

I'm out in California on business this week. I stopped into a grocery to pick up some food for my hotel room refrigerator. Of course, I was greeted in the checkout line by this:

Yeah. And they charged me for a paper bag. Thanks Sunnyvale.The central valley is turning into Mad Max times, cities are declaring bankruptcy and entrenched public sector unions and environmentalists are quashing all growth in the state, but, thank goodness, Sunnyvale is plastic-free.

Another Year, Another Embarrassment for the Nobel Peace Prize

This year, the EU (yes, the whole thing!) won the Nobel Peace Prize. It's sort of a "lifetime achievement award" for "for promoting peace, democracy and human rights over six decades." Uh-huh. Yeah. Considering that the EU didn't exist as such until 1993, I am most impressed with how they packed six decades of promotion into less than 20 years. I know, I know, they're including predecessor organizations the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the European Economic Community (EEC), but I still think that's giving them way too much credit. Those organizations were a far different thing than the actual EU.

The EU has transformed most of Europe "from a continent of wars to a continent of peace," Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said in announcing the award in Oslo.
"The EU is currently undergoing grave economic difficulties and considerable social unrest. The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to focus on what it sees as the EU's most important result: the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights," he said.
Jaglund praised the EU for rebuilding Europe after World War Two and for its role in spreading stability after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Ah, yes, I'm sure they'll mention the Marshall plan and the U.S. garrison of Europe over the past 70 years any moment now. Searching the article ... funny. No mention. Must be an oversight. Probably because they already award the Nobel Peace prize to the entire U.S. -- oh, wait, they didn't actually do that. Weird. They probably forgot.

I imagine they'll have some explanation for the wars that ravaged central and eastern Europe in the 90s. Where was the EU then? Oh, failing to keep the peace:

After centuries of war on the continent the EU has been at peace within its borders, but its effort to stop war in former Yugoslavia -- hailed by one minister as "the hour of Europe" -- was a failure.

The Nobel Peace Prize has descended below self-parody.

Media Bias, Voter Registration and My Old Journalism Prof

'The number of "inactive" voters is staggering.'

That's a standalone, unattributed one-paragraph sentence in a supposed news story about inactive voters.

I say "supposed" because a paragraph like that has no business in a news story. My old journalism professor would jump down our throats about every adjective we put into a story. Staggering? I can hear him in my head thirty years later in his thick Australian accent, "Staggering? Says who? The people aren't paying to read what you think! They're paying you to report the facts! I don't recall being literally staggered when I read your story! If you're going to make a claim like that you have to attribute it! This isn't the editorial page!"

On to the merits of this "staggering" claim. The reporter gives the number of inactive voters in the U.S. at nearly 21 million according to the Census Bureau. The over-18 population of the U.S., according to the Census Bureau numbers for 2011, was 237,744,633. So, about 8.8% of the adult population is marked inactive on the voter rolls.

Color me not staggered. We have not had a voter turnout for a Presidential election that tops 60% of the voting-age population since the Nixon-McGovern election in 1968. If more than 40% of the voting-age population does not even turn out to vote, then eight percent being marked inactive seems precisely the opposite of "staggering" to me.

Marking voters who have not voted in many years as inactive is a very long-standing practice and I was unaware that it was in any way controversial. So what suddenly made this a controversy worth reporting on?

Ahh. You have to read between the lines. And I found the proper lines to read between are down between the 7th and 8th paragraphs:

Critics charge that the "inactive voter" lists across the country have led to the unfair removal of voters from the voting rolls. They have branded the process vote "purging."

"Inactive voter lists really place the onus on voters, to figure out what their voter registration status is," laments Ryan Haygood, director of political participation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Horror! Voters having to take responsibility for their own registration status? What's next, people having to provide for their own food and housing? What are we coming to?

I'd be willing to lay money that the reporter, named, um ... hey, there's not a byline! Odd. Oh, at the bottom it says "Fox News' Kathleen Foster contributed to this report." Really? You know when media outlets give a "contributed" credit instead of a full byline? They do it when not enough of the text is the reporters' own to qualify the story as her own work. So, as I was saying, this story is almost certainly a re-write of a press release from some activist organization attempting to turn an ordinary and long-standing facet of election law into a "controversy." Probably the NAACP in this case.

And that's how special interests hijack the news. Even though the reporter went to the trouble of getting opposing quotes, she (or the unattributed press release author) editorialized in the middle of the story and contributed to a biased atmosphere by actually allowing herself to be led by the nose to turn this into a story by some group's PR department. It doesn't matter to the group that originated the story that she included alternate viewpoints. The key thing is that they got a story in one of the nation's top news outlets.

Just by getting the story to print, they win by setting the public perception that there is an actual controversy. The reader thinks "Why would Fox print the story if there wasn't a controversy?" How did Fox know there was a controversy? Why, they were told so by the group trying to create a controversy!

Are there actual hordes of angry would-be voters complaining that they are unable to vote when they want to? No, that doesn't exist. There are only the imagined disenfranchised. Then number of lazy half-interested voters who don't bother to turn up to the polls in half a decade, don't bother to confirm their registration after that gap, and find out too late that they're no longer registered to vote, is miniscule, and they are precisely the opposite of the type to form a political activist organization to do something about it. They're more the "Oh, crap. Oh well, maybe next time." types. No, this "controversy" is generated by entirely more active and motivated types on behalf of those poor down-trodden who didn't bother to notice that they ought to be outraged.

We are awash in these "top-down" controversies. Things become "controversial" because a very small group of well-funded, committed activists say they are, and the reporters, desperate for easily-generated news copy, eat it up. Going out and doing the work of finding out how many people are actually turned away at the polls would have been hard. Rewriting a press release then calling up a few government officials for quotes was easy. Thanks, Ms. Foster, you've done your bit to further the demise of actual journalism. You can go home now.

The Kindergarten Morality of Nicholas Kristof

In today's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof asks the question "Why Let the Rich Hoard All the Toys?"

Kristof's columns are routinely reprehensibly dishonest and myopic, but this one is especially revealing in its analogy of choice:

Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys.

Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself. A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly — empty-handed.

The one greedy boy has hoarded more toys than all those 90 children put together!

“What’s going on?” you ask. “Let’s learn to share! One child shouldn’t hog everything for himself!”

 Kristof of course goes on from there to analogize the top 1 percent of wealth holders as the equivalent of that greedy kindergarten boy.

Well, let's make your analogy more accurate, Mr. Kristof, shall we?

Look again at where those boy's toys came from. Some were given to him by his parents. Some he received from a classroom system set up to reward those who worked hard in class. Some he bartered with other students who got a fair trade (candy, other toys, information, whatever) for the toy. None of the toys simply came from some communitarian pool of toys that he greedily hoarded.

After obtaining all his toys in such legitimate fashion, is it fair for the teacher to simply come and take them from him? Without compensation?

And here the analogy breaks down utterly because who the hell is this teacher?

Of course, we know the teacher is meant to represent the government. Kristof believes that citizens of this nation are to the government as a small child is to a teacher. To him we are not autonomous independent citizens of a republic. A classroom is not a republic. A classroom is a tyranny ruled by a dictator with awesome unilateral powers. That, apparently, is how Kristof wishes the U.S. was governed -- by a tyrannical federal government that believes all the wealth of the classroom -- erm, nation -- is really its to redistribute as it sees fit.

Of course, I know Kristof is a fan of democracy. But say all the other children voted to take that child's toys away. Yay! Democracy! It also sounds a lot like Lord of the Flies or the classic "two wolves and a sheep sitting around voting on what to have for dinner." Fortunately, thank God, we don't live in a democracy, we live in a constitutional republic.

Kristof's article and the analogy he bases it around is a nearly perfect distillation of the politics of greed. Kindergarteners are greedy, selfish, usually incapable of self-control, and prone to acts of cruelty and mass chaos. That's Kristof's America.

In the adult America, we have to look at issues with more than a Kindergartner's greedy perspective.

I take exception to Kristof's cherished inequality bugaboo. He lists some bullet points, starting off with "The six heirs of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, own as much wealth as the bottom 100 million Americans." (The article that Kristof links to for this point phrases it much differently, and more accurately, though ultimately, the article is as gross a mischaracterization of the situation as Kristof's:"In 2007, it was reported that the Walton family wealth was as large as the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or 30.5 percent of all American families.")

Well, who are those 100 million? They're overwhelmingly young families, just starting out. They have virtually no wealth, often negative wealth. (Update, to clarify: Negative wealth is when you have more debt than assets. If you're a bright, young neurosurgeon with a wife and child, just out of your internship, you may have a home mortgage, car payments, and tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. You are deep into negative wealth despite being a very prosperous and elite member of society. Simply having one more dollar in assets than debt is actually doing quite well in modern society were virtually nobody buys a home outright with cash. In fact, you can be a poor renter with nothing more valuable to your name than a 10-year-old Toyota and have more positive wealth than many people more affluent than you. Having a low or negative amount of wealth is by no means the terrible thing that Kristoff implies.).  Is there any way one can argue that these people are entitled to a completely unearned piece of someone else's wealth? How would one even redistribute it meaningfully? Would the poor benefit from tearing the Walmart empire apart and parceling it out to them? Hardly.

Taxing the rich wouldn't make those poor people less poor. Name me anyone who has amassed wealth due to being a recipient of tax money who isn't already a wealthy business owner, a politician or a bureaucrat. It's a ridiculous idea that the government is better at creating jobs than an actual business like Walmart that creates jobs for millions of people.

The classic argument -- and where Kristoff goes with this -- is that the money should be used to educate the poor. Right. When you've been engaged in a cycle of dramatically increasing spending on public education and public funding of private education for more than 60 years and your results are flat, what you naturally think to do is ... spend more money.

The glut of public money for college tuitions has encouraged colleges to raise their costs far beyond the inflation rate for decades, locking students into mountains of public debt for less and less return. A big chunk of those 100 million Americans or 35 percent of American families who have less wealth than the Walmart heirs are in that bracket because of student loan debt!

In our elementary and high schools, we spend more per pupil, adjusted for inflation, than we ever have and we're not seeing better results. Kristof's desire to steal more and more from "the rich" isn't tied to any particular evidence that the money can be well-used, no less a moral justification for taking it.

Let's take a look at the poor, downtrodden 90 percent, again. Those poor waifs who sit by while that greedy kid has all the toys. Most of those people live better not only than most of the people on the planet, but better than most of the people who have ever lived in the history of mankind. The high water of American prosperity has raised all the boats. Frankly, Americans live so well and so healthily now, even at the lowest economic levels, that you simply can't mandate meaningful improvement in the American lifestyle.

The fact that a few at the top of the wealth scale have amazing, unheard-of levels of wealth is not a sign of injustice.

Furthermore, if I was in dire straits and had to turn to some group to help lift me out of poverty, who should I turn to?

The government? The government will give me unemployment for a couple years that might be meaningful if I had a significant work history to deserve it. They'll provide foodstamps and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families to keep me and my family from starving, but they're not getting me out of poverty. To get out of poverty I need a ... a ... what do you call it ... a job!

Hmmm. Where can I get a job? Oh ... Walmart. Or Target, or Microsoft, or IBM, or AT&T or one of the many large and small oil and gas companies benefitting from the private industry explosion in fracking and oil exploration. Hey, wait, all these things are ... private corporations run by millionaire CEOs, board members and stockholders!

I used to work for a newspaper owned and published by a multi-millionaire heir of a multi-millionaire family. The guy wasn't exactly a "man of the people." He spent his time in his private office suite and tooled around in a classic Rolls Royce. I always told people that what was good for that guy was good for me. Indeed, as his fortunes and the fortunes of newspapers in general have fallen, it's been very hard for the employees of that newspaper. Every one of them should have been pulling for him to continue to be as wealthy and successful as he wanted to be, because he and his family were the enablers of their employees success. The government wasn't going to step in and give those people the sorts of pay and opportunity that private one-percenter was.

I'll throw in my lot with living off the "scraps" of the one-percenters over the government any day, because the one-percenters are the enablers of all real wealth-creation.

When government takes money, from you or from the one percent, it spends some of it on legitimate government functions -- roads, police and national defense -- but an enormous chunk is simply squandered on enriching the power brokers in Washington and giving pork and favoritism to cronies of the elected officials and bureaucrats. The government power-broker class is the real "elite" of which we need to be wary.

The biggest chunk goes to entitlement programs. Government has succeeded in conning generations of citizens into believing that they're not competent to make arrangements for their own retirement and health care in order to build a giant, rickety ponzi scheme that sucks up a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth. But that's an article in itself.

Kristof's kindergarten analogy is an insult to adult U.S. citizens and has approximately the same moral weight as a kindergartener screaming because he's not getting to play with the toy he wants.

Remember This Next Time You're Tempted To Respond To A Troll

In a Los Angeles Times article, Senate panel criticizes anti-terror data-sharing centers, the Times reports that "the scores of 'fusion centers' across the country threaten civil liberties while doing little to counter terrorism, a two-year study by a Senate subcommittee finds."

The article does a fair job of indicting the wasteful and unconstitutional actvities of the centers, but the real eye-opener is a user comment: 

chanteuse at 1:34 AM October 03, 2012
I spent 2 years at the Fusion Center in Austin, TX and spent most my time on social media. Using my native language skills my job was to "create sparks" (as my manager liked to say) by deliberately infuriating other users on facebook, comments sections (like this one), etc. in an effort to manipulate users and gain intelligence information. We used an automated system that created fake profiles on thousands of social media outlets and, based on scripts I wrote, generated comments, videos, etc. to provoke people. If someone took the bait, we'd use a system that obtains their real identity (from the Internet Service Provider) and then put them on a watch list. This watch list (when I left) had hundreds of thousands of names on it.

Remember that. I have little doubt that this is a true account. This is not the sort of activity the government of the U.S. should be doing.

Forgetting the Alamo

It's disgraceful that the mother of the mayor of San Antonio would say a thing like this:

Maria del Rosario Castro, the mother of San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, said in 2010 that she grew up being told the battle was “glorious,” only to learn the so-called heroes were really “a bunch of drunks and crooks and slaveholding imperialists who conquered land that didn’t belong to them.”

“But as a little girl I got the message -- we were losers,” she told The New York Times Magazine. “I can truly say that I hate that place and everything it stands for.”

So sad that the defenders of the Alamo stood so bravely, only to have their city handed over to the son of a nasty reconquista who bashes their memory. But, ironically what really chaps me is this "informative" paragraph later in the Fox News Story about her statement:

The Alamo, then a sprawling mission for missionaries and American Indian converts, was attacked in February 1836 by Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Though historical accounts vary, Texans, including famous frontiersman Davy Crockett, fought back for 13 days only to surrender, on March 6.

"Only to surrender" Surrender? Yeah, sure, if by "surrender" you mean "fought to virtually the last man." What the hell are they teaching in school these days?

Quote of the Day

“Offended” is what you are when someone uses the wrong dinner fork; “stark raving mad” is what you are when you storm an embassy over an amateurish video. -- Rich Lowry, Susan Rice's Dodge, NRO

Government Should Defend Our Principles

I would love to read or hear one person in authority say, with regard to Nakoula Basseley Nakoula's Innocence of Muslims video, "It is not the policy of the U.S. government to either endorse or condemn the private speech of its citizens. The protection of freedom of speech is a fundamental responsibility of the U.S. government and a founding principle of our nation. The speech most in need of such protection is often the most controversial."

Schmoozin' With the Stars

 I got an email the other day from Beyoncé Knowles. Yes. That Beyoncé. Because that's the kind of guy I am, that's why.

It opens:

[Cloudbuster]-- (We're on a first name basis!. Name changed to protect something or other.)

I usually don't email you (That's the kind of considerate girl she is. She knows that I am so swamped by email from rich, famous, beautiful singers and starlets that I might not have noticed that she and I haven't recently communicated. Apology accepted, sweetie!)
-- but I have an amazing invitation I have to share. (And she immediately thought of me!)

Jay and I will be meeting up with President Obama for an evening in NYC sometime soon. And we want you to be there! (Of course you do, baby. Of course you do. Hanging with Beyoncé, Jay and the Prez. That's my scene!)

The rest is just the details. I won't bore you with it. She closes:

Can't wait to meet you! (Likewise, darlin'!)

Love, (!!)

Beyoncé

I don't think you have to be a mind-reader to see what she's getting at. Beyoncé , dearest, if you're reading this, you know my feelings for you are strong, but I'm not that kind of guy. I have to know that it's over for you and Jay-Z before I give "us" a chance. Jay, don't hate me. This isn't my fault -- you can't restrain my kind of charisma. I'd never come between you and your girl. But if she's lookin' my way, you know you have to do better at keeping her happy!

Beyoncé, I'll be there for you and the Big O-Face, as his buddies call him. You just let me know when you've made up your mind.

Rights vs. Subsidies

"If the right to arms does not entail a right to gun subsidies, why would a right to abortion entail a right to abortion subsidies?" -- The Democrats Fake Freedoms, Jacob Sullum.

Talk Is Cheap

Right now we're in the middle of the Republican National Convention. Several of my favorite political blogs seem to be doing little but reportnig, analyzing and opining on the various speeches. I expect when the DNC rolls around, the same will be true for the more left-leaning blogs and sites.

I find the whole phenomenon tedious and pointless. They are politicians. Saying stuff people like to hear is what they do. Talk is cheap. We all know that, don't we?

Talk. Is. Cheap.

We are so far beyond the point of talk it's not funny. We're piling on mountains of debt, increasing the size and reach of the federal government at an alarming rate, we're gutting Constitutional restrictions on government power. Both sides of the aisle are equally complicit.

So shut up, OK? I've been listening to politicians say appealing things most of my life.

Talk. Is. Cheap.

Shut up and do something.

The Math of Obama's Amnesty

I've already pointed out that the Obama administration is frankly encouraging illegals to game Obama's amnesty by doing no verification whatsoever. But what if the administration tried to make a good-faith effort to verify applicants' eligibility?

The applicant comes in, say with a high school transcript, showing that he is of the proper age, has been here long enough and attended high school in the U.S. The processor has to make a phone call or fax request to the high school verifying that the transcript is authentic.

Assume that each application takes only 5 minutes to conclusively verify the supporting documentation. Latest estimates are about 1.7 million illegals taking advantage of the amnesty and rising.

At five minutes each, that's 17,708 8-hour man days of verification, with no lunch or coffee breaks or inefficiencies, just processing through verifications at an average rate of 5 minutes per verification.

That's 73.75 man years of labor (at 48 40-hour weeks per year). Of course, the federal government can throw a few hundred people at this task and get it done in less than a year, but will it? Also, 5 minutes per verification is comically generous. I've tried to check around for a job applicant's references and had it take hours, end to end, with references not answering, not returning calls, requests for clarification, etc. Someone doing nothing else can get started on other verifications while waiting for calls/faxes on earlier ones, but at some point, it becomes ghastly to manage:

"You're calling back about who? Jose' Garcia? Um, do you have the case number I left you? No? Crap. El Paso school district? Um, I have 490 Jose' Garcias who said they went to high school in El Paso. What? You've had 680 Jose' Garcia's in the past 20 years? Geez. Let's just call him verified. Which one? All of them."

Shot A Coyote Yesterday

Two of my four dogs were outside and I heard them barking with extra enthusiasm, so I looked out the window to see what they were barking at.

She was a beautiful female coyote, on the hillock in the pasture beyond the yard, probably no more than 20-30 yards from the woven wire fence. She seemed fascinated by the dogs and was mostly just sitting sunning herself, occasionally making little dashing dances in the dogs' direction as if she wanted to play.

It was really a shame to have to shoot her, just because I appreciate the good that predators can do in the wild, and she seemed very full of life and joy. But, by being so comfortable in broad daylight so close to the house, so close to two agitated dogs, she was demonstrating that she considered the territory her own and had no fear of the dogs.

I have horses, cattle, goats, dogs and cats. Cats are a popular prey for coyotes as are goat kids and calves. If she'll venture right under two very large dogs' noses for the fun of it, she'll do it to kill one of my cats, goats or calves.

I can coexist with the coyotes, but they have to maintain proper fear and respect of human areas. In 20 years on the ranch, I've been fortunate that they've always stayed respectfully shy of the dogs. The woven wire around the yard is new this year, though. For many years, there was no fence at all, and then after that just two strands of barbed wire. I think the coyotes figured that wouldn't stop the dogs if they decided to take after them. But they're smart, and I think they realize that the woven wire is a more formidable barrier. I couldn't reward her learning.

It was a fair shot -- a bit over 100 yards with a scoped .22 magnum, rested on the windowsill. It went higher than I wanted and severed her spine instead of hitting  her heart, but at least she didn't run off bleeding. I finished her off with a shot to the head.

It was interesting. The cattle had been staying away from her, but when she was down, they all came over and gathered round her, either curiosity seekers or giving her a respectful send-off, maybe.

This is the wrong time of year for coyote pelts, I'm told. Apparently they're only worth anything in the winter, when they have their winter coats.

Is Being Anti-Government A Mental Disorder?

Outcry after military veteran detained for anti-government Facebook posts

Raub's supporters characterized the detention as an arrest, complaining he was handcuffed and whisked away in a police cruiser without being served a warrant or read his rights. But authorities say it wasn't an arrest because Raub doesn't face criminal charges.

Col. Thierry Dupuis, the county police chief, said Raub was taken into custody upon the recommendation of mental health crisis intervention workers. He said the action was taken under the state's emergency custody statute, which allows a magistrate to order the civil detention and psychiatric evaluation of a person who is considered potentially dangerous.

He said Raub was handcuffed because he resisted officers' attempts to take him into custody.

A while back a relative of mine -- a very sane, normal relative -- was detained under my state's equivalent of this statute. Most states have a very similar statute.

On the one hand, it is certainly necessary to have a way to detain seriously mentally ill people. On the other hand, these statutes are ripe for abuse. In my state, for example, a magistrate's order isn't even required (although I'm not sure that affords meaningful protection), any law enforcement officer, social worker, or mental health professional can order the detention, if they believe the person is a danger to themselves or others.

No probable cause is required, no evidence of imminent action, and as the above paragraphs indicate, the person is not being "arrested" or "charged" with a "crime" -- although to the person in question, it's a distinction without a difference, because the person is being hauled off against his will and held without bail or charges.

The person's final disposition depends on a hearing that typically takes about a week to occur. In the meantime, the person has been wrenched from his life, his job under incredibly stigmatizing conditions. The person is held in a psychiatric institution where every move is monitored and noted, and any "abnormal" behavior is recorded. If the person is angry, depressed and uncooperative about being held against his will, by coincidence these are also symptoms of many common mental disorders with which the psychiatrists are perfectly eager to label him. If he maintains that he is mentally healthy, a note goes into the record that says he has "poor self-awareness." Even teenagers are routinely given anti-depressants and anti-psychotics like Prozac that are known to increase suicidal thoughts and feelings. And, what do you know? Suicidal thoughts and feelings are grounds for involuntary incarceration. If he refuses to take these involuntarily-prescribed meds, he is "resistant to treatment."

Though the law technically allows patients to refuse any particular treatment, you have to keep in mind that the person's freedom is not dependent on any objective evidential standard, but entirely on the subjective evaluations of the psychiatrists. Refuse to cooperate with the psychiatrists, and you don't get good evaluations. So, any freedom the patient technically possesses is illusory.

At the hearing, the determination of whether the person is a danger to himself or others is entirely based on the psychiatrist's evaluations. There is no jury of his peers. There is no criminal charge. The person need not have every committed an illegal act in his life. Yet, at stake is the person's entire autonomy as a person. If involuntarily committed, the person loses his freedom, is deeply publicly stigmatized -- locked out of many career options (health care, law enforcement, any career requiring sensitive clearances, and many more). He gives up substantial civil rights (rights to freedom of movement, freedom to keep and bear arms, right to be secure in his person and property, because he may be subject to drug tests and/or other medical and psychiatric tests against his will.) Of course, they will say none of this is against the patient's will. He always has the choice to refuse to cooperate with the treatment plan -- and remain incarcerated in some hell-hole of a mental institution the rest of his life.

Yes, the treatment plan. The involuntarily committed patient is now subject to a "treatment plan." This plan is a gargantuan stick to wield against the patient. He can be released or re-incarcerated at any time without his consent. His own thoughts are not his own, because relentless therapy is used to get him to think the way his case workers and psychiatrists think he should think about whatever they want. Anything that displeases them is, subjectively, an indication of failure to cooperate with the treatment plan. Judgment of the progress and success of the treatment plan is measured by the same mental health bureaucracy that put him there in the first place and who supervise his treatment plan. Yes, in theory, there are "independent" psychiatric evaluations, but these are almost always carried out by other psychiatrists who are deeply embedded in the system and share the same training, philosophies of treatment, and faith in the system as the patient's caseworkers, and the magistrates themselves, not being mental health "experts" defer to the judgments of the psychiatrists.

In effect, the patient will be judged healthy when, and only when, he has pleased your case worker and psychiatrist to their satisfaction. His own decisions about his person are virtually meaningless, because with the involuntarily commitment, he has ceased to be, in the eyes of the law and society, a competent person capable of making his own decisions. Again, this may be a person who up until whatever unfortunate incident precipitated the chain of events, led a productive life and has never done nor been accused of anything criminal, ever.

The system is ultimately dehumanizing and incestuous -- the mental health facilities, the social workers, the psychiatrists, all have no incentive to deem people mentally healthy. They make money off mentally ill people. Furthermore, there are few consequences for erring on the side of mental illness. They are not held personally or financially accountable for destroying the life of a mentally healthy person and holding him against his will for years. But if they release a mentally ill person, and that person does something wrong, then the public and the press are only too eager to second-guess them, "How could you have let this person roam the streets? Wasn't it obvious?"

It's a terrifying nightmare of a system. People get swallowed up by it. Bright, normal people who were maybe having a bad day or month can get swallowed up by it and ground up, and they aren't cured until they have been badgered and brainwashed into being, and believing they are mentally ill; because of course, once you have been involuntarily committed, you are, by definition mentally ill and your continued protests to the contrary are just symptoms of your mental illness. They can't cure you until they've convinced you you're sick. Hey, but it's all for your own good, the lost years, the broken dreams. What? You're depressed about all that? Depression is a mental illness, friend.

These laws fall under civil law, not criminal law, and are this handled by the civil courts. The laws are often very arcane, and implemented in very counter-intuitive means -- any lawyer who doesn't actually specialize in this type of case law is quickly out of his depth. Your family attorney is likely to be of no use. The lawyers who are familiar with the law and how it is implemented in your state are the ones who do this almost exclusively, and they are part of the informal "system" -- they're probably on a first-name basis with the psychiatrist, magistrate, prosecutor and social worker on the case. Your own lawyer may not be your friend in this instance, especially if court-appointed (and he might as well be, because the expert lawyer you'd hire privately is just another guy in the pool that you'd get assigned as a court-appointed lawyer). If you press the lawyer, you can probably get the lawyer to admit that acting "in your best interests" means that if he thinks you're crazy, he's not going to fight your involuntary commission. And because he's golf buddies with the psychiatrist, who's he going to trust, you and your family, or the "expert?"

It's funny that the lawyers are so deeply wrapped up in the system that they can't even see the bigger picture. In the case of my family member, I asked the lawyer on the date of his hearing, if my relative were involuntarily committed, when and under what circumstances could all of his civil rights be restored? The lawyer looked at me as if I had a third eye in the middle of my forehead. "This isn't a civil rights matter," he said. "It's a mental health matter." Hmm. You lose your physical freedom, your right to keep and bear arms, and most of your fourth amendment rights, and it's not a civil rights matter? Really?

So, remember when they come to lock you up and take away your guns because you're "dangerous," because you were ranting against the government, it's not a civil rights matter. They're from the government and they just want to help you.

The Greatest Political Sleight-of-Hand Trick Ever

I was reading a comment on The Other McCain today:

I’m almost 70 years old. I marched against the Viet Nam War in the 60′s. I considered myself part of the “new left” but now understand the failed ideology of that time – and I am repentant. My parents objected to my positions but they didn’t understand those positions then – but they would approve of my present positions, even if they did not understand the evolution.
Obama is the most dangerous politician in my lifetime!! Previously, I believed it was LBJ, but I was young and naive then. -- Nomadic100

That moment in history never ceases to fascinate me.

All those young people, rioting against civil rights abuses, an "unjust" foreign war, the draft, "speaking truth to power," fighting "the man," etc. were rioting at a time when Democrats had controlled all three branches of the federal government for the entire decade (up to Nixon's inauguration in Jan. 1969 -- pretty late in the game by any fair measure). U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was entirely a product of the policies of Kennedy and Johnson. The Democrats had for many decades -- a century, really -- been the party of the Klan and southern racists and segregationists. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, while bi-partisan, was more strongly-supported by Republicans than Democrats.

And yet ... nearly all those protestors somehow turned into Democrats, and Nixon, who ended the war and brought an end to domestic civil rights unrest, who was a vigorous proponent of most of the progressive policies these young idealists (to use a very charitable description) supported, became the bogey man. Yes, the quote above mentions antipathy for LBJ, but for some reason, decades later, the name LBJ does not, like Nixon, fire up hate in the hearts of most of the generation who protested in the 60s. Perhaps because, while he was responsible for Vietnam, he was also responsible for the even more destructive Great Society, which is, along with the New Deal, part of the foundation of modern liberalism/progressivism.

It just boggles the mind.

To this day it's not uncommon to hear someone lionize John F. Kennedy as nearly a saint in one breath and then condemn Vietnam in the most vehement of terms in the next. As if the two are unconnected.

It would be as if all the membership of Code Pink and MoveOn and everyone else against the Iraq War had, in the same breath they were condemning Bush-Cheney and the "War for Oil," joined the Republican party en mass.

Brother's Keeper

Read these two articles:

Dreams From My Father, Calls From My Brother

Story that reveals something of Mitt Romney's character

Now, tell me, who would you trust? For anything?

The Frustration Of Trying to Discuss Anything Controversial On The Internet

I had an interesting exchange on a usually-non-political blog I frequent. Going to paste snippets, but not link to or identify the blog, because I really don't think they'd welcome a bunch of incoming political commentary (Hee, hee! I'm pretending people read and are influenced by my blog! I love playing make-believe!).

I was the initial offender, going on what I hoped was a pretty inoffensive political tangent, in response to another post:

I work for a large private company, but with government in some very sensitive capacities, and my experience has taught me to not be too trusting of government in any of its flavors.

At the risk of getting too political, private people who just want to go about their lives are responsible for only very tiny pieces of the world’s misery. To create truly horrific pain and suffering takes a government, and some people who want to “make things better” that are willing to use it.

In the immortal words of noted political philosopher Malcolm Reynolds:

“So now I’m asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this — they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people … better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.”

And another philosopher from the same school, River Tam:

“People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.”

Damn that was a great movie.

 It wasn't that long before someone made the following comment in reply.

Yeah, I was just thinking earlier today of the miseries inflicted by the big mean boogerheads of government with those clean water acts, and prohibitions on child labor, and limiting the number of rat droppings in my ice cream, and putting roads in the way of anywhere I am to anywhere I want to go, and keeping inspirational pioneers from creating stuff like useful airplanes or microchips or the Internet by going off and funding it themselves, and requiring cars that don’t roll over when you take a turn at more than 15 miles per hour, and making kids learn to read, and prosecuting fraudulent merchants. Not one single bit of this in any way makes the lives of one single person better and yet government goes after it day after day, year after year, as though it were at all possible for people to make society a little less savage.

I replied in turn:

Chill. I didn’t say there were no benefits to government, or that we were better in a state of anarchy. You’re reading a lot into what I said that’s simply not there. George Washington* Cloudbuster said, quoting vague sources, “Government, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a terrible master.” Also, like fire, that doesn’t mean government isn’t necessary and useful. I was simply pointing out that, like fire, government must be treated with extreme caution.

The world isn’t full of black and whites. It’s not “government is great” or “government is terrible.” Not all governments are equal. We are blessed with an exceptionally good one in the U.S., for all its faults. But governments are made up of people, with all their typical flaws. You have to be ever vigilant. No government is immune from abuse and degeneration.

I can’t speak in specifics about my job, but as I type this, I am aware of some very, very disturbing things being done by our own government, usually with the best of intentions (and this isn’t a liberal/conservative thing. This is just a “this is how governments do business” thing). That was what I meant about people wanting to “make things better.” In real life, almost nobody thinks they are the villain. But it’s really not too many steps from “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” to the horrors of the Stalinist purges or the Great Leap Forward. A lot of well-intentioned people did a lot of terrible things. It’s human nature. The only way to make sure “it can’t happen here” is to keep, every day, making sure it’s not happening here.

 I hope that's taken as a civil response, but, damn, comments like that person's reply really get to me. Not because he's wrong -- I agree with him that government is an invaluable institution that can be a powerful force for good. What really ticks me off is how he takes what I said and completely twists it around to make it seem as if I was saying all government is terrible and does nothing good for anyone.

I don't see how any honest reading of my words can be interpreted that way. It's almost a banality to say that governments are responsible for much of the world's misery. I don't even see how that's controversial. Most of the world does not currently enjoy our form of Constitutional representative republic. Most of the world, even today, suffers under tyranny, oppression and corruption. Caused by their governments.

He's creating an argument by imputing to me beliefs I don't even hold. How can you have a discussion when someone does that to you? It's communicating in bad faith.

It strikes me as supremely naive to respond to a statement that "governments are responsible for much of the world's misery" with a sarcastic "Oh, yeah, right, government never did anything good for anyone!" I imagine this kind of response can only come from someone who lives in a well-governed country.

To me, it smacks of hubris. When you look at the disparities between well-governed nations and poorly-governed nations, between free nations and tyrannies, you have to ask yourself why. Why do we in the U.S. (or Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland, pick your free western nation) have a generally orderly, prosperous society, while people in Somalia and Sudan are hacking their neighbors apart with machetes?

Anything less than a very complex answer risks doing an offense to people in either location. If you believe in the essential equality of man, if you believe that Somalians are not in some way essentially inferior to Swedes or Aussies, then the one conclusion you cannot draw is "It can't happen here." If you took a Swedish baby and raised him by Sudanese in the heart of contested territory, do you believe he would grow up fighting along side the people he grew up with? And if you raise a baby from the Sudan by Swiss in the heart of Zurich, do you believe he'd grow up as intelligent and civilized as any of his neighbors?

If you believe so, then whatever a man can be driven to in the Sudan, he can be driven to in Delaware, if things in Delaware were allowed to degenerate enough. What I am saying here is not that the U.S. is in incipient danger of collapse, but that the impulses that drive us all are the same. The corrupt, murderous warlords in the Sudan are not a different species of people than accountants in Baltimore.

The tendency toward greed, corruption, envy, tribal and familial allegience, they're all right here in the U.S. suburbs. We hold them at bay with our culture, our upbringing, the institutions of civil society. But civil society can be weakened. It can succumb to baser impulses if bad people get the reins of power.

But freedom can also be undone by higher aspirations, when an ideal is deemed so important that any means is acceptable to achieve it. That's the barbarism of the educated. The Marxists of the 20th century had the best of intentions -- the ideals of Marxism are admirable, if wrong-headed -- but time after time, in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, they committed horrors in the name of those ideals and created nightmare states, some of which persist to this day as blights on the face of the world. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Guevera, Pol Pot, these were not stupid or uneducated men. They were brilliant, idealistic leaders who believed so fiercely in their collectivist ideology that they were willing to commit countless horrors against the individual.

We keep the same thing from happening in western nations only so long as we recognize that the state is the servant of the citizen, not his master, that the individual is supreme over the state, not vice versa, that the state exists to protect individuals, to allow them to pursue their own interests, and that individuals should not be squelched in the pursuit of the state's interests.

* An alert reader pointed out that this is one of the apocryphal quotations that apparently cannot be reliably traced back to George Washington.

Shocking News! Athletic Women Are Sexy! NBC Notices!

Article at Jezebel.com:

Someone at NBC Apparently Approved This Creepy, Porny Video of Female Olympians

They're so offended by the video that they link to it. Go view it for yourself. Sexy, sexy olympic girls. This is bad, why? I know, I guess I'm just too much of a Neanderthal to understand why healthy sexuality is a bad thing. Wait, I'm the conservative -- I thought I was the one that was supposed to be a prude. I'm so confused.

So when Miranda Kerr poses nude for Harper's Bazaar is it OK to find that sexy? What are the rules? Men are only allowed to find women sexy in clearly defined "sexy zones?"

Media Bias: There's No Doubt About This Publication's Opinions

A recent CNET article appeared in its "news" section, which you might think is different than the "Op-Ed" section, but not as far as I can tell. They throw all sorts of opinion blogs like Technically Incorrect, the source of this article, into their news section.

Man orders flat screen on Amazon, gets assault rifle

Subhead: Customer who ordered a fine high-definition TV on Amazon opens the box to discover that the third-party merchant has sent him a highly defined murder weapon.

Well, we're not past the headlines before we've got multiple distortions and misrepresentations.

1. "Assault rifle" It's not an assault rifle. It's a semi-automatic rifle, just like any other. It would have to be capable of fully automatic fire to be an assault rifle. It's scary and black, though, so apparently that excuses them from using correct terminology.
2. "Highly defined?" What does that even mean? I think it means that it's a very high-end expensive rifle, which it is. Exactly the type of weapon that is almost never used by criminals. You don't need a rifle that costs more than $1700 to just kill people. This type of rifle attracts competition shooters, hunters and collectors. Not gang-bangers and psychos.
3. "Murder weapon." By this definition, all my guns are murder weapons, I guess, because they leave out the fact that for a weapon to be a "murder weapon" it has to be involved in a, you know, "murder."

The misrepresentations and editorial opinions continue in the body of the article.

"I cannot imagine who might be doing the choosing when ordering one of these things. I can only hope it would be someone with the appropriate qualifications and mental equilibrium."

How can I read that as anything other than liberal panty-wetting? Please, guy, grow a pair of balls. I hereby revoke your man-card for being unable to think of firearms ownership without getting the vapors. I certainly hope that last time the author bought a car -- more than a ton of steel that can barrel down a street killing everything in its path -- that the authorities made sure he had the appropriate "mental equilibrium." What? They let even felons and former mental patients drive in this country? Oh my God! Whatever shall we do?

"Some might imagine that this is one more example of how this gun thing seems far too easy in the U.S."

Again, we take the boundary between news and commentary and piss all over it. Throw in a complete lack of attention to the relevant facts, for good measure.

The use of "some" is particularly sweet. Columnists use "some" when they mean, "I" and maybe one or two of their friends. Sad, sad, metrosexual, pussy friends, in this case.

Given that it's already illegal to ship a firearm to someone who does not possess a federal firearms dealer license, and given that D.C. already has perhaps the most repressive, restrictive firearms ownership policies in the nation, what exactly is the author suggesting be done? The company that shipped the rifle is probably already liable for some serious charges. If a law exists, and people break it (even unintentionally, as this obviously was), is that a reason for more laws? Hey, we have laws against murder, but people still murder. Let's make a new double-plus bad murder law! We'll make it illegal to even think about murder! That'll stop'em!

It wasn't always this way. Until the mid-60s you could get firearms shipped directly to your home from sources as homey as the Sears Catalog. Nobody has ever presented any credible (or incredible?) evidence that forbidding that caused any reduction at all in the crime rate. In fact, crime rates rose steeply in the late sixties and seventies. I won't assert there's a causation there, though -- that would be the kind of sloppy thinking that they seem to like at CNET.

Springsteen

There's an article in The New Republic about Springsteen. The main thrust is what a tired, fake old poser Springsteen has become.

I wanted to reply on the site, but you have to subscribe to TNR, and I'm not enthusiastic about sending them my money. So I'll satisfy myself here.

Springsteen was always a poser.

I was born in Trenton NJ and lived in NJ from 5th grade through high school (and breaks though college). I lived and hung out in the neighborhoods Springsteen writes about in his best songs. I was in high school in central Jersey from 78-82. Freehold High School, where he went, was in the same district as me. We played football against them. I hung out on the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Long Branch -- home of the Stone Pony. I lived not far from Highway 9 and I suppose I must have been "Sprung from cages out on highway 9" more times than I can count. For a loose enough definition of "cages."

Far from being "a death trap, a suicide rap," central Jersey was a pretty awesome place to be a teenager. There was so much that was fun and interesting to do. Beyond the boardwalks and other local amusements (even a cursory listing would soon get out of hand), you're sandwiched between two of the most interesting cities in the U.S: NYC and Philly. C'mon, if you couldn't find opportunities for yourself, you weren't trying. Springsteen sure managed to get filthy rich despite the soul-killing horror of central Jersey!

There was always something more than a little pretentious, more than a little fake about Springsteen to my ears then, and to my friends. He was at the height of his fame, living in a mansion, driving fancy cars, and pretending he had it so hard. It was all utter bullshit. Living there, it was fun to get all pumped up on "Born to Run" or "Badlands" but nobody with a drop of self-awareness could claim life as a teenager in central New Jersey was really some sort of ruthless purgatory of broken hopes and dreams that we needed to escape.

Sure, yeah, there are broken dreams and hard stories everywhere, but it they weren't the default, and Bruce sure wasn't living them. He was a fake then, and a fake now. He sings about the tribulations of soldiers and working men, but when he was up before the draft board he acted crazy and uncooperative enough -- refusing to take the tests, playing up an old concussion he'd had -- to get a 4F. Way to be the tough guy, Bruce.

One of the comments on the article asserts that "Death to My Hometown" is "the best protest song that's been written maybe in 40 years." Seriously?

Oscar Wilde once said: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

To paraphrase him, you'd have to be a fool to listen to Springsteen warbling about how "the robber barons ...  ate the flesh of everything they’ve found" without laughing. What overwrought, intellectually infantile tripe.

For The Record: Italian Judge Maurizio Fumo Has No Balls

'No Balls' Now Illegal To Say To A Man In Italy, Court Rules

It's pretty certain the judge who made the ruling and the plaintiff both have no balls. Because if you're a man with any balls, almost by definition, you don't go running to the government to whine that someone told you that you have no balls.

Pointing Out Just How Far Left Obama Has Gone

Today in Bloomberg, Josh Barro writes Why ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Resonates


There's a passage that demonstrates just how far to the left Obama is moving. The West Wing was a doggedly liberal show that idolized a fictional Democratic President. But in a season two episode:

The president’s speech calls to mind a second-season West Wing episode, in which speechwriter Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) explains to the staff of some liberal house members why he won’t insert a line in President Bartlet’s upcoming speech. They want the president to attack Republican tax cut proposals as financing “private jets and swimming pools” for the wealthy. As Seaborn argues:

Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump and said, "It's time for the rich to pay their fair share," I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year, which means I paid twenty-seven times the national average in income tax. I paid my fair share, and the fair share of twenty-six other people. And I'm happy to 'cause that's the only way it's gonna work, and it's in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads, but I don't get twenty-seven votes on Election Day. The fire department doesn't come to my house twenty-seven times faster and the water doesn't come out of my faucet twenty-seven times hotter. The top one percent of wage earners in this country pay for twenty-two percent of this country. Let's not call them names while they're doing it, is all I'm saying.

When Barack Obama has made an argument for progressive taxation that even Aaron Sorkin finds distasteful, he has erred.

"Private jets and swimming pools" are literally the Obama administration's talking points! Obama's mocking of peoples' achievements and his unswerving collectivism show his true colors. He must go.