March 31, 2009
Immune from Race-baiting?
By Larrey Anderson
A funny thing happened to me a few weeks ago. I discovered that I seem to have at least a limited degree of immunity from the routine charges of racism regularly aimed at conservatives. It was readers who informed me of this miraculous healing.
Several readers asked me to comment further after the appearance of my article “Racism, Eric Holder, my Son and Me” in the February 23, 2009 edition of American Thinker.
One of these readers is a friend and a well-known screen writer. I asked him why in the world he thought I should write more on the issue and what he thought I had left out of the first piece. Here was his response:
Keep punching -- you can tear down the schlockmeisters; you're immune from the "Scarlet Letter" -- R for racist -- if you play it right; meaning, don't let anger get the better of you; obviously, you are a good and loving person, and to be tarred, even obliquely, must be infuriating.
You ARE "allowed" to speak -- you've put your blood and soul into this, and how dare any racial prohibitionists say otherwise?
My initial thought when I read his admonition to keep writing on this subject was, “Why am I allowed to speak on race?” I am, after all, just another middle-aged conservative white male who hails from a rural state. Pretty much the textbook definition of a racist by the liberal left in America.
Yet that initial piece received mostly positive responses -- even by those on the left who posted in our comments section -- and the piece was widely distributed on the Internet.
Were my opinions tolerated simply because I was fortunate and blessed enough to have adopted and raised a black baby? What if my son had been Korean? Or Hispanic? Would the arguments in the article have been treated with the same deference?
My friend said I am “immune from the ’Scarlet Letter’” -- R for racist.”1 I wondered, “What sense does that make?” Who gave me immunity? Does every other white male in America (who hasn’t adopted a black child) have to keep his mouth shut when he thinks about speaking his mind on racism?
This is America, for heaven’s sake, who even has the right to “allow” me to speak about racism (without raising holy hell and calling me a member of the KKK)? And who has the right to stop anyone else from speaking? (Dittos on the KKK accusations.) In short why can’t we just talk, in a civil manner, about racism?
I believe that I am starting to figure out some answers. I wanted to share those thoughts with American Thinker’s readers in this follow-up article.
No one really knows what racism is or means in this country anymore. A remarkable documentary “A Conversation about Race” proves this point. First time filmmaker, Craig Bodeker, interviews 25 Americans in his documentary. More than half are minority Americans -- almost half are black Americans.
The film delves deeply into racism in America and is well worth viewing. I was particularly interested in three questions posed by Bodeker to the interviewees:
1) Do you see racism in your daily life?
2) What is racism?
3) Can you share with the viewers some personal experience of racism?
The answer to the first question was a unanimous “Yes!” All of the respondents saw racism every day. It was all around them.
The answer to the second question was, or should be, a national embarrassment. Not one of the respondents could give a coherent answer (although there are some entertaining psychobabble attempts at a definition). People in America have no idea how to define “racism.” The word flits about like an evil spirit in our national vocabulary -- but none of us knows exactly what it means.
The responses to the third question, relating a real life example of racism, were even more discomforting. The interviewees had to dig deep. Most could not think of a single personal incident -- although they swore they saw racism every day in America.
One black man in the film replied, “I get stares from white guys.” As if such stares only happen to African Americans. Another said, “People are overly friendly.” As if trying to be nice equals racism.
One white middle-aged male (clearly chock-full of white guilt) relived his personal encounter with racism: Some forty years prior to the interview, as a child, he had to choose to drink at a public water fountain right after a black person had used it. The white man wore, like a medal of honor, his decision to take a sip.
“A Conversation about Race” is a fascinating look at the state of confusion about race in America. I highly recommend it.2
This state of confusion led me to this question: if racism is not rampant in this country, and if no one really knows what it is to begin with, then why do we hear constant accusations of racism? Especially against white people?
The arguments accusing a person of racism (like most arguments accusing one of homophobia) are what Ayn Rand called “arguments of intimidation”:
The essential characteristic of the Argument from Intimidation is its appeal to moral self-doubt and its reliance on the fear, guilt or ignorance of the victim. It is used in the form of an ultimatum demanding that the victim renounce a given idea without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy. The pattern is always: “Only those who are evil (dishonest, heartless, insensitive, ignorant, etc.) can hold such an idea.”
Here is an example from my own writing. I sometimes write about marriage and the family. Because I support traditional marriage I am accused of being homophobic.
Since I am white and a heterosexual, I wear the “Scarlet Letter ‘H’” for “homophobe.” If I were a homosexual I would be immune from these arguments. (Unfortunately, I have not adopted any of my friends who are homosexual.)
In short, most charges of racism (or in some instances of homophobia) are not arguments at all. They are ad hominem attacks on the writer or speaker to silence them by guilt or with fear.
We live in a culture where only certain classes are allowed to criticize certain other classes. Craig Bodeker sums up his documentary with this stinging and frightening précis:
The only positions made available [in American culture] to white people on the subject of our own race are indifference or supremacy.
Apparently, I am immune from the argument of intimidation that is almost always the basis for the accusation of racism. (I can’t be “evil, dishonest, heartless, insensitive, or ignorant” about race because I have raised a black son.) Perhaps that is why there were so very few outright criticisms of my initial piece on racism.
I caught two objections to my last article on racism: (1) I had not discussed “institutional racism;” and (2) someone wrote on a liberal website something like this: “I’ll bet his son has a different story to tell.”
My answer to the first criticism is, of course, that there is some residual institutional racism in America. For example, somewhere is America I am sure there are a few white cops who still harbor racist feelings.
But the real institutional racism in this country is against white people … not minorities. Everyone knows that there is institutionalized preference to choose specific minorities over other races. It is written into law. It is standard operating procedure at most colleges and businesses in this country.
So those on the left who try to use the “institutional racism” argument at least need to open their eyes and see which way that institutional racism is directed and who directs it.
As for my son’s personal experiences … I called him up and read the criticism to him. He started laughing. “It’s just like you wrote pops,” he said. “My wife and I never see racism. At least, I never see it. No one has called me a ‘nigger’ since the 6th grade. And no one as ever turned me down for a job.”
“I know that son,” I replied. “But I need to be able to tell my readers why.”
He thought for a while before answering. “Well, I was raised in a white family. So I speak … I don’t know what you would call it … American English. I don’t talk like I am from the hood. I am polite. And I dress reasonably enough.”
(We argued about his dress code for a few minutes. His informal, not work, attire looks “hip hop” to me. But I am a middle-aged white doting father -- so what do I know?)
“I think I don’t walk around with a chip on my shoulder,” he continued. “You know what I mean? I was taught to respect everybody when I was a kid. You taught me that. It works. I don’t have any problems. Sometimes I talk to my students on the phone and when they finally meet me they are like, ‘Hey man, I didn’t know you were black!’3
“You always taught us that skin color doesn’t matter,” he concluded. “I guess I just believed you.”
But skin color still does matter, way too much, in this country. It will continue to matter until we openly and honestly talk about it and actually see that it doesn’t. What this country needs is a conversation about race … that tells the truth.
Larrey Anderson is a writer, a philosopher, and submissions editor for American Thinker. His latest award-winning novel is The Order of the Beloved . His memoir, Underground: Life and Survival in the Russian Black Market, has just been released.
1. The reference to “Scarlet Letter” comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel by that name. The heroine in the book, Hester Prynne, is forced to wear the scarlet letter “A” for “adulteress” after giving birth to an illegitimate child.
2. Also of interest the documentary, “A Man Named Pearl.”
3. My son works as a recruiter and a counselor at a major university.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Victor Davis Hanson on The Ugly...
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March 28, 2009
The Ugly — Part Two
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
After outlining some “bad” trends — the conservative abandonment of budgetary restraint, the new liberal-Wall-Street nexus, the rise of therapeutic excuse-making for substandard behavior — I now offer three “ugly” trends. These are not merely bad, but sort of creepy as well. Don’t despair — I’ll end with some good developments on the next posting.
I) The Corruption of the Press. We have no media — at least as we once knew it. Somewhere in late 2007, it disappeared entirely, and became something akin to the old Pravda, or the livelier Baghdad Bob’s broadcasts, or the rants of Lord Haw-Haw. (We got everything from Judith Warner about the dreams of women having sex with Obama to “I felt this thrill going up my leg” Chris Matthews).
For the short-term thrill of ensuring the coronation of Barack Obama, it gave up all hard-won standards of journalistic objectivity — so much so that it is hard to adjudicate whether the rise of the Internet alone, or the clear bias of the print media, has nearly destroyed the newspaper industry.
Few any longer connect with a Newsweek editorial, a Time essay, a riff from NPR, or commentary on PBS. The front pages of the New York Times or Washington Post are op-eds in thin disguise. The faculty of the Columbia School of Journalism is not objective. We live in an age of affluent, rather inbred ironists who punch in at the Ministry of Truth, and the result is that about half of the population still wakes up every morning and sighs when they turn on the television, listen to the radio news, or read the newspaper, “He’s lying” or “She’s biased”. The utopian ends of social egalitarianism for the new media lords justified the tawdry means of distorting reality.
Now we have those in Congress talking about saving the newspapers by making them “non-profit,” tax-free entities that will drop political endorsements! That rather insane notion would have three deleterious effects:
1) The papers would become even harder one-sided and Left, once market forces were eliminated and the now soon to be unemployed could find federal media tenure doing, at best, what NPR does, and, at worst, having a sinecure at something public, but analogous to Air America. Oh yes, crede mihi, tax-free newspapers will be very biased.
2) A quasi-public print media will become even more incompetent. Think a very big DMV newsletter. Or perhaps a sort of tax-free sinecure for high-paid federal employees who make more at less stress than their private counterparts. Imagine a tax-exempt, quasi-public New York Times, running telethons, praising their public service investigatory work, begging for donations as they sell cups, plates, hats, etc., with scads of G-15 employees manning the phone banks on money-raising day, a Bill Moyers or senior journalist like Marvin Kalb extolling the courage of the new Times.
3) More fossilization of the economy. Not all the harness-fabricators morphed into tractor producers, but in our new wisdom all newspapers will become — what? I simply don’t know. We are trying to ossify American society at about 1965 in the age of LBJ, as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid prove to be the most reactionary politicians in a half-century.
In the meantime, we are beginning to see that the media is about to add humiliation to its moral failure, as it grasps that once you worship a Messiah, you cannot leave the cult. Mr. Obama tolerates no dissent among the believers. The recent Obama press conference showed what happens to the shunned New York Times or Washington Post once you even consider climbing over the fence of the compound. What were these sycophants thinking as they watched Obama produce all sorts of bogus figures in assuring that tripling the deficit, then halving it will translate into lessening the present red-ink? Again, imagine a sequel to the Wizard of Oz, where everyone goes on thinking that the floating image on the screen with the smoke really is Oz, despite seeing the tiny man behind the curtain with his hands busy with the levers. The media knows what they’ve become, and already have seen the flip side of their one-eye Jack — and is now trapped in culthood.
II) Universities. Uglier still is what is going on in universities. Higher education in the humanities has devolved into a sort of indoctrination/reeducation camp, on the following apologia: the corporation, the family, the church, the military, the government are illiberal. So in our precious, rare chance to have the nation’s youth for a brief four years, we the professoriate have to offset, balance, offer an antithesis to these dominant conservative cultures. So, presto, we cannot be biased since we the anointed are the corrective to the bias.
Science and math hold out (it’s hard to suggest a postmodern Pythagorean theory would pass muster, or houses could rest on ideological constructs of phallocentric power machinations), and still ensure America’s universities are world-class as the partisan, ossified humanities departments piggy-bank on the reputation established by others.
We sadly assume that the higher one’s office in the university — full professor to dean to provost to president — the more likely one has mastered doublespeak. There are no longer real contentious issues, there is only one correct all-encompassing ideology — America’s history is largely race/class/gender exploitation; gay marriage and abortion on demand are civil rights issues of our times; diversity and affirmative action trump disinterested examination of merit; greedy capitalists have smoked the planet for their limos and private jets; improving student “profile,” not demonstration of character and competence, ensures promotion.
The odd thing is that those who excel at all this don’t even seem happy about it. They are empty suits, proverbial ‘hollow men’ without belief who have about as much self-respect for their habitual falsity as the Wall Street guy at AIG who assures his investors his company’s liability is manageable. After all, you cannot make $100,000 a year for 9 months work, with lifelong ensured employment, full benefits, and no daily audit — and seriously believe that you are perennially manning the barricades at the tip of the revolutionary spear.
What might yet restore the university? Transparency would be a small start. Release the test scores, grades, etc. of those who are admitted (we can do that without the individual names). Suggest, in this new age of AIG-accountability, that those institutions that take public funds release full budgetary figures, not percentages, but real detailed expenditures. Cut public funding off for students after four years. Replace tenure with five-year renewable contracts. Have exit exams for graduating seniors (half might well flunk basic benchmarks for math and fundamental English).
As it is now, most colleges expect alumni to give blindly — assuming that they are to remain unaware of the nature of the faculty profile, the content of the curriculum, or the activities of the universities — on the premise that any would-be donor, had he known what his alma mater was up to, would not like to subsidize classes like “The poetics of the low-rider,” or faculty like Ward Churchill (most colleges have a few), or $50,000 and up paid out for a 45-minute “I hate Bush” rant by Michael Moore at the student union, or 139-5 faculty senate votes (like Saddam’s plebiscites) on extraneous issues like gay marriage. Yes, there is humor in higher education. Nothing is weirder to see a provost head-nod among a wacked-out faculty meeting, then put on a suit and rush off to a five-star restaurant to reassure an aging capitalist that the university is a steward of American values. It reminds me of Petronius’s description of Croton.
III) Europeanization. I don’t know quite what the allure of Europe is for the American Left. But it seems to be that more of us will soon all be working for the government, habitually striking, hunting out that rare capitalist in hiding for a shake-down, and bitching over our weary 35 hr. work week.
Yet without hardship, challenge, and hope, the individual dies daily. Once the government ensures that all your needs will be taken care of, from your teeth and joints to job and retirement, ennui sets in, and with it the cargo we see in Europe — pacifism, cynicism, the loss of transcendence marked by atheism and childlessness, and worry about what others have rather than what you aspire to.
A Dutch friend once asked me why we Americans work 2-3 jobs. I replied to leave something better for our children than what we inherited. He answered, “But why? They will be taken care of by the state.” But if one does not have a vision of building something big, a thing that will last, endure, or at least appreciating such audacity in others, then we will be sentenced to live crummy, little lives of punching in at the government clock, perennially worried that someone else has something marginally better in our view than what we were allotted. It’s like running a race in which the goal is that all the runners cross the finish line at the same time, corner-eyes fixed on each other, scared to death that some trouble-maker might bolt out ahead.
So strange (or not so strange, after all?) that the liberal impulse in postwar Europe led to millions living in nearly identical houses and apartments, driving the same sort of cars, thinking about the same (their parties are like the feuds and squabbles among the Democratic Party here at home), and exuding the identical teen-age petulance when events belie the gospel.
We can see what Europeanization leads to: you worship at the altar of the goddess Pax, but hate the United States for still having a military that saves postmodern you from premodern others. You praise diversity, but are terrified of unassimilated Middle East Muslims thriving in your midst, who unlike you, really do believe in something and it’s not Western liberalism. You praise openness and tolerance, but demonize anyone who questions orthodoxy, whether it be global warming or the efficacy of state redistribution. You rant about class and privilege, but live private lives of secret values predicated on status, aristocratic pedigree, and rank.
Europeanization is so at odds with human nature that it bifurcates it — a false public face, a cynical private one. (I used to love living in Greece, going to the beach in the summer as a student and seeing all these socialist public power, phone, water, bank, etc., vans parked as their left-wing employees “got away” for some downtime around 2 PM — or being told I could hire a public worker after hours for cash for a phone installation rather than wait 9 months on “the list”.) Marxist at the day-job, conniving entrepreneur in the night hours.
It seems that in just 60 days we are heading that way — fast. These gargantuan deficits will require the most insidious taxes (on everything, as in the age of Augustus) we have yet witnessed, to make up the soon to be $20 trillion national debt. Universal health care, college for everyone, government jobs will mean a vast array of technocrati and less-skilled overseers and guardians. Less defense, higher taxes, more social spending, bigger government will expand the public sector to such a degree that to dismantle it will result in the sort of European mass protests and strikes we see daily in Greece or France when a poor fool like Sarkozy thinks it could be 1950 again, and wants to head-off pension insolvency, or bring back a 40 hour work week to the subway drivers.
The one positive? Have any of you met a disenchanted European who emigrated to the States, or lives a life of near isolation in Europe? They are almost hyper-American in their free market and democratic zeal. So full of anger at what their nation under the E.U. has become, they appear nearly fanatical in their allegiance to the free market, merit, free-thinking, liberty, and Western traditions. I have met dozens and they are the most remarkably competent individuals that I have come across in my lifetime — sort of the last few with unsnatched bodies dodging the zombies of Europe. I only wish we would offer instant citizenship status for these highly educated, highly trained, highly motivated but disconnected Europeans. We could lure 20 million in one fell swoop if we offered fast-track legal American citizenship — and reap the technological and entrepreneurial dividends for a half century to come.
Next posting. The good — and there are lots of good developments. So don’t despair.
©2009 Victor Davis Hanson
March 28, 2009
The Ugly — Part Two
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
After outlining some “bad” trends — the conservative abandonment of budgetary restraint, the new liberal-Wall-Street nexus, the rise of therapeutic excuse-making for substandard behavior — I now offer three “ugly” trends. These are not merely bad, but sort of creepy as well. Don’t despair — I’ll end with some good developments on the next posting.
I) The Corruption of the Press. We have no media — at least as we once knew it. Somewhere in late 2007, it disappeared entirely, and became something akin to the old Pravda, or the livelier Baghdad Bob’s broadcasts, or the rants of Lord Haw-Haw. (We got everything from Judith Warner about the dreams of women having sex with Obama to “I felt this thrill going up my leg” Chris Matthews).
For the short-term thrill of ensuring the coronation of Barack Obama, it gave up all hard-won standards of journalistic objectivity — so much so that it is hard to adjudicate whether the rise of the Internet alone, or the clear bias of the print media, has nearly destroyed the newspaper industry.
Few any longer connect with a Newsweek editorial, a Time essay, a riff from NPR, or commentary on PBS. The front pages of the New York Times or Washington Post are op-eds in thin disguise. The faculty of the Columbia School of Journalism is not objective. We live in an age of affluent, rather inbred ironists who punch in at the Ministry of Truth, and the result is that about half of the population still wakes up every morning and sighs when they turn on the television, listen to the radio news, or read the newspaper, “He’s lying” or “She’s biased”. The utopian ends of social egalitarianism for the new media lords justified the tawdry means of distorting reality.
Now we have those in Congress talking about saving the newspapers by making them “non-profit,” tax-free entities that will drop political endorsements! That rather insane notion would have three deleterious effects:
1) The papers would become even harder one-sided and Left, once market forces were eliminated and the now soon to be unemployed could find federal media tenure doing, at best, what NPR does, and, at worst, having a sinecure at something public, but analogous to Air America. Oh yes, crede mihi, tax-free newspapers will be very biased.
2) A quasi-public print media will become even more incompetent. Think a very big DMV newsletter. Or perhaps a sort of tax-free sinecure for high-paid federal employees who make more at less stress than their private counterparts. Imagine a tax-exempt, quasi-public New York Times, running telethons, praising their public service investigatory work, begging for donations as they sell cups, plates, hats, etc., with scads of G-15 employees manning the phone banks on money-raising day, a Bill Moyers or senior journalist like Marvin Kalb extolling the courage of the new Times.
3) More fossilization of the economy. Not all the harness-fabricators morphed into tractor producers, but in our new wisdom all newspapers will become — what? I simply don’t know. We are trying to ossify American society at about 1965 in the age of LBJ, as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid prove to be the most reactionary politicians in a half-century.
In the meantime, we are beginning to see that the media is about to add humiliation to its moral failure, as it grasps that once you worship a Messiah, you cannot leave the cult. Mr. Obama tolerates no dissent among the believers. The recent Obama press conference showed what happens to the shunned New York Times or Washington Post once you even consider climbing over the fence of the compound. What were these sycophants thinking as they watched Obama produce all sorts of bogus figures in assuring that tripling the deficit, then halving it will translate into lessening the present red-ink? Again, imagine a sequel to the Wizard of Oz, where everyone goes on thinking that the floating image on the screen with the smoke really is Oz, despite seeing the tiny man behind the curtain with his hands busy with the levers. The media knows what they’ve become, and already have seen the flip side of their one-eye Jack — and is now trapped in culthood.
II) Universities. Uglier still is what is going on in universities. Higher education in the humanities has devolved into a sort of indoctrination/reeducation camp, on the following apologia: the corporation, the family, the church, the military, the government are illiberal. So in our precious, rare chance to have the nation’s youth for a brief four years, we the professoriate have to offset, balance, offer an antithesis to these dominant conservative cultures. So, presto, we cannot be biased since we the anointed are the corrective to the bias.
Science and math hold out (it’s hard to suggest a postmodern Pythagorean theory would pass muster, or houses could rest on ideological constructs of phallocentric power machinations), and still ensure America’s universities are world-class as the partisan, ossified humanities departments piggy-bank on the reputation established by others.
We sadly assume that the higher one’s office in the university — full professor to dean to provost to president — the more likely one has mastered doublespeak. There are no longer real contentious issues, there is only one correct all-encompassing ideology — America’s history is largely race/class/gender exploitation; gay marriage and abortion on demand are civil rights issues of our times; diversity and affirmative action trump disinterested examination of merit; greedy capitalists have smoked the planet for their limos and private jets; improving student “profile,” not demonstration of character and competence, ensures promotion.
The odd thing is that those who excel at all this don’t even seem happy about it. They are empty suits, proverbial ‘hollow men’ without belief who have about as much self-respect for their habitual falsity as the Wall Street guy at AIG who assures his investors his company’s liability is manageable. After all, you cannot make $100,000 a year for 9 months work, with lifelong ensured employment, full benefits, and no daily audit — and seriously believe that you are perennially manning the barricades at the tip of the revolutionary spear.
What might yet restore the university? Transparency would be a small start. Release the test scores, grades, etc. of those who are admitted (we can do that without the individual names). Suggest, in this new age of AIG-accountability, that those institutions that take public funds release full budgetary figures, not percentages, but real detailed expenditures. Cut public funding off for students after four years. Replace tenure with five-year renewable contracts. Have exit exams for graduating seniors (half might well flunk basic benchmarks for math and fundamental English).
As it is now, most colleges expect alumni to give blindly — assuming that they are to remain unaware of the nature of the faculty profile, the content of the curriculum, or the activities of the universities — on the premise that any would-be donor, had he known what his alma mater was up to, would not like to subsidize classes like “The poetics of the low-rider,” or faculty like Ward Churchill (most colleges have a few), or $50,000 and up paid out for a 45-minute “I hate Bush” rant by Michael Moore at the student union, or 139-5 faculty senate votes (like Saddam’s plebiscites) on extraneous issues like gay marriage. Yes, there is humor in higher education. Nothing is weirder to see a provost head-nod among a wacked-out faculty meeting, then put on a suit and rush off to a five-star restaurant to reassure an aging capitalist that the university is a steward of American values. It reminds me of Petronius’s description of Croton.
III) Europeanization. I don’t know quite what the allure of Europe is for the American Left. But it seems to be that more of us will soon all be working for the government, habitually striking, hunting out that rare capitalist in hiding for a shake-down, and bitching over our weary 35 hr. work week.
Yet without hardship, challenge, and hope, the individual dies daily. Once the government ensures that all your needs will be taken care of, from your teeth and joints to job and retirement, ennui sets in, and with it the cargo we see in Europe — pacifism, cynicism, the loss of transcendence marked by atheism and childlessness, and worry about what others have rather than what you aspire to.
A Dutch friend once asked me why we Americans work 2-3 jobs. I replied to leave something better for our children than what we inherited. He answered, “But why? They will be taken care of by the state.” But if one does not have a vision of building something big, a thing that will last, endure, or at least appreciating such audacity in others, then we will be sentenced to live crummy, little lives of punching in at the government clock, perennially worried that someone else has something marginally better in our view than what we were allotted. It’s like running a race in which the goal is that all the runners cross the finish line at the same time, corner-eyes fixed on each other, scared to death that some trouble-maker might bolt out ahead.
So strange (or not so strange, after all?) that the liberal impulse in postwar Europe led to millions living in nearly identical houses and apartments, driving the same sort of cars, thinking about the same (their parties are like the feuds and squabbles among the Democratic Party here at home), and exuding the identical teen-age petulance when events belie the gospel.
We can see what Europeanization leads to: you worship at the altar of the goddess Pax, but hate the United States for still having a military that saves postmodern you from premodern others. You praise diversity, but are terrified of unassimilated Middle East Muslims thriving in your midst, who unlike you, really do believe in something and it’s not Western liberalism. You praise openness and tolerance, but demonize anyone who questions orthodoxy, whether it be global warming or the efficacy of state redistribution. You rant about class and privilege, but live private lives of secret values predicated on status, aristocratic pedigree, and rank.
Europeanization is so at odds with human nature that it bifurcates it — a false public face, a cynical private one. (I used to love living in Greece, going to the beach in the summer as a student and seeing all these socialist public power, phone, water, bank, etc., vans parked as their left-wing employees “got away” for some downtime around 2 PM — or being told I could hire a public worker after hours for cash for a phone installation rather than wait 9 months on “the list”.) Marxist at the day-job, conniving entrepreneur in the night hours.
It seems that in just 60 days we are heading that way — fast. These gargantuan deficits will require the most insidious taxes (on everything, as in the age of Augustus) we have yet witnessed, to make up the soon to be $20 trillion national debt. Universal health care, college for everyone, government jobs will mean a vast array of technocrati and less-skilled overseers and guardians. Less defense, higher taxes, more social spending, bigger government will expand the public sector to such a degree that to dismantle it will result in the sort of European mass protests and strikes we see daily in Greece or France when a poor fool like Sarkozy thinks it could be 1950 again, and wants to head-off pension insolvency, or bring back a 40 hour work week to the subway drivers.
The one positive? Have any of you met a disenchanted European who emigrated to the States, or lives a life of near isolation in Europe? They are almost hyper-American in their free market and democratic zeal. So full of anger at what their nation under the E.U. has become, they appear nearly fanatical in their allegiance to the free market, merit, free-thinking, liberty, and Western traditions. I have met dozens and they are the most remarkably competent individuals that I have come across in my lifetime — sort of the last few with unsnatched bodies dodging the zombies of Europe. I only wish we would offer instant citizenship status for these highly educated, highly trained, highly motivated but disconnected Europeans. We could lure 20 million in one fell swoop if we offered fast-track legal American citizenship — and reap the technological and entrepreneurial dividends for a half century to come.
Next posting. The good — and there are lots of good developments. So don’t despair.
©2009 Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, March 30, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Money, the root of all Good.....
"Francisco's Money Speech"
by Ayn Rand (August 30, 2002)
The following is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand. It is reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ayn Rand.
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'
"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.
"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.
"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.
"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.
"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.
"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."
The above is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand. It is reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ayn Rand.
Russian born American novelist Ayn Rand is author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and is originator of the philosophy of Objectivism. You can learn more about her life and philosophy at the website of the Ayn Rand Institute.
by Ayn Rand (August 30, 2002)
The following is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand. It is reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ayn Rand.
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'
"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.
"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.
"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.
"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.
"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.
"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."
The above is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand. It is reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ayn Rand.
Russian born American novelist Ayn Rand is author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and is originator of the philosophy of Objectivism. You can learn more about her life and philosophy at the website of the Ayn Rand Institute.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Victor Davis Hanson is the Man...and tell us about the Bad...
March 25, 2009
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — Part One
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
In the spirit of optimism, let’s review some good, some bad, and some downright ugly things about this present age. I’ll give three examples of each. For today, here’s the “bad.” Later this week, I’ll post the “ugly,” and then on the weekend the “good.”
First, THE BAD
(remember picking three examples is by needs arbitrary).
1) The end of fiscal sobriety. One of the strangest developments has been the embrace, reluctant or not, by conservatives of large government and deficits. Anytime we hear a conservative or a Republican talk of the deficit in terms of percentages of GDP rather than x-amount of real dollars in red ink, we infer that he has no plans to balance the budget. But do we appreciate the psychological, ethical implication of a voter waking up each morning, satisfied that his government is running a surplus? Even with good incomes and some cash in the bank, do we feel better that we have $5,000 on our Visa cards or $O?
For all the talk of smaller government, it grew enormously during the Bush administration, and, to a lesser extent, during both the Reagan and Bush I terms. The problem with growing government to fund idealistic programs like No Child Left Behind or Prescription Drug or augments to Medicare is not just the unfunded cost, not just the misguided trust in yet more government bureaucracies that spawn ever larger constituencies of dependants, but the discrediting of the conservative critique of an ongoing DMV-ing of America. Who will now police the fiscal police?
Despite his stalwart efforts to keep us safe for seven years after 9/11 (and we will in time come to appreciate the magnitude of his Trumanesque achievement), had Bush left something akin to a balanced budget, it would have been far easier now to have convinced the public of the pernicious legacies of the far larger Obama deficits (remember the new Orwellian subtext, “We must borrow and spend in order to save and cut”). What are conservatives to say of Obama’s $1.7 trillion annual deficit? “My God in Heaven, that rascal trumped our $500 billion shortfall three-times over!”
The odd thing is that despite 9/11, Katrina, Iraq, and the tax cuts, had Bush just kept discretionary domestic spending at the rate of inflation, we would have been near budget surpluses by 2005. By January 2007 when Bush had lost the Congress and wished to repent and reform, the game was lost and there was no chance of financial sobriety. Now, our best and brightest suggest that taxing and spending, and printing and borrowing money will lead to financial stability, as if it has in the past in prewar Germany, present -day Zimbabwe or 20th-century Argentina — or 1979 America.
2) Wall Street and the Democrats. By all accounts, liberals and Democrats receive far more Wall Street money than do conservatives — and it has left us baffled about the old role of big money and big government. So here we are: liberals are favoring crony capitalism — crony capitalism is favoring liberals advocating equality of result.
We are reduced to a Chris Dodd on the barricades railing against financial greed, or populist Charles Rangel limoing over to AIG to jawbone funding for his “Rangel Center,” or Bill Gates figuring once more how to connive a Microsoft monopoly, in order to, Carneige-like, fund his noble causes, or George Soros, in between trying to wreck the Bank of England, funneling his hard-won cash to liberal attack-dog centers.
For all the leftwing Gordon Gecko talk of big greed, the liberal Soros, Buffet, Turner, Gates, etc. are all Democratic boosters, and Barack Obama — cf. the trough at AIG, Fannie, Citicorp — was more adept at garnering Wall Street money than was a John McCain, hence perhaps the former’s decision to be the first presidential candidate in the general election to renounce public campaign financing (not all the money raised was from the wee people, but often bundled from the wealthy). Imagine a little honesty in January 2008: “I, Barack Obama, swear my allegiance to the free market before Wall Street, that I will be the first candidate in history to decline that awful bureaucratic public campaign financing, and instead pledge my fealty to you, masters of the universe, to help me raise enough cash in order to help the little people.”
How surreal that liberals continue to rail about capitalist grasping, when a Robert Rubin and his associates were past masters of Wall Street buccaneering. So questions arise: why did the masters of the universe, in their strong preferences for Obama, grow to favor quasi-socialism? (The range of answers runs from they had enough capital accumulated that they could pay psychological penance by electing someone who would make them feel good, but whose redistributive plans would hurt the hardware store owner more than themselves — to the idea that getting government involved as guarantors of your risk/my profit was, well, far safer than being a capitalist leopard proud of his risk-taking spots.)
Bottom line: Once liberal egalitarians got into the mess of big money, they lost any credibility about championing the old blue-collar ethos; once Wall Street ceased being capitalist, we began to lose capitalism.
3) The Therapeutic impulse or “Don’t fault but empathize.” We now contextualize, situationalize, explain away almost every possible human pathology. Take the worst: The Oakland police murder was scarcely reported out here before we heard that the miscreant murderer “was looking for a job”, “was wary about returning to prison” and “was not a monster”, as the carnage was a “tragedy” for all involved. (I confess I like the more honest 1930s headline that would have said, “Deadbeat thug conned his way out of the joint and killed good cops.”)
So the tragic voice screams back, “No, he was evil, an enemy of civilization, and, yes, surely monstrous in all that he did and the creed that he embraced.” By global standards of poverty and deprivation (think the slums of Nigeria or Mumbai, or rural Peru or Bolivia), the killer was hardly impoverished, but perhaps cognizant that in present-day society, incarceration often means parole even for violent offences, and that recriminations about the absence of prison (fill in the blanks: health care, job training, counseling.) win victim status.
Somewhere in the Berkeley hills reside the retired grandees who thought up all this utopian mindset, while below in the Oakland flatlands the cops died who had to suffer its consequences.
Lost in the therapeutic view is any notion that we should never lower standards, or disguise reality with euphemism, but rather insist and get involved in preparing the traditionally unprepared for the rather high standards of society. Instead, in matters of education, the law, and public discourse, we too often immediately issue race/class/gender inspired qualifiers when rules, norms, protocols prove too difficult for the non-traditional.
A liberal professor seems to prefer to get on his soapbox about diversity at the faculty senate before driving his Camry back home to the tree-lined faculty ghetto, than drive downtown to tutor the ghetto youngster in Latin to ensure he has the tools to succeed in the university. And he gets to justify not spending that difficult hour with the cheap qualifier, “I would not dare try to impose my cultural norms onto the ‘other.’”
Somewhere some lazy selfish academic dreamed up multiculturalism and is still smiling, “Now I can do whatever I want — drop the hurt in giving F’s, skip out on tutoring the rather difficult to tutor, stop insisting on acrimonious standards at tenure hearings — as long as I mouth these platitudes.” The faculty has become bloated Soviet-era apparatchiks on the May-Day grandstands, saluting the passing missiles, mouthing “comrade” and the “revolution” before lumbering off to the dachas on the Black Sea. Trace the evolution of our therapeutic notions of criminology, of government, of child-raising even, and it inevitably leads you back to the university.
The result in the modern Western world is the end of the old standards: no one any longer thinks that admission to the Ivy League or Stanford is based entirely on merit, or, its corollary, that completion of a blue-chip degree means that the recipient is really educated. I don’t necessarily associate excellence in ethics with a Nobel Peace Prize, journalistic excellence with a Pulitzer Prize, or academic excellence with an endowed professorship at Princeton.
How odd that the World Series or the Super bowl is a far more honest arbiter of excellence than the current academic and intellectual industries.
When the NBA begins to demand diversity — one Asian center per team, 30% so-called “white” guys on the team, 20% Latino coaches — or the Tour de France demands 10% African-American participation — shudder (or is all that already happening?). Why then do pure merit-based considerations seem to count in things like (the more trivial) sports or (vital) brain surgery and aircraft piloting, but not in the manner in which we train our youth, write our news, or conduct our intellectual life?
We could be even more reductionist about the therapeutic mind — and think that our penal system would improve should we build prisons next to universities (easier for professors to rehabilitate prisoners, better to have an informed nearby community to nurture parolees.) Think of the possibilities of matching word with deed: the Obamas’ children go to the D.C. public schools; the Harvard humanities Dean is put in charge of hiring for all the nuclear power plants of New England; Chris Dodd and Barney Frank submit their expense budgets instantly to thumbs up/down, on-line public approval; Nancy Pelosi flies commercial…
©2009 Victor Davis Hanson
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — Part One
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
In the spirit of optimism, let’s review some good, some bad, and some downright ugly things about this present age. I’ll give three examples of each. For today, here’s the “bad.” Later this week, I’ll post the “ugly,” and then on the weekend the “good.”
First, THE BAD
(remember picking three examples is by needs arbitrary).
1) The end of fiscal sobriety. One of the strangest developments has been the embrace, reluctant or not, by conservatives of large government and deficits. Anytime we hear a conservative or a Republican talk of the deficit in terms of percentages of GDP rather than x-amount of real dollars in red ink, we infer that he has no plans to balance the budget. But do we appreciate the psychological, ethical implication of a voter waking up each morning, satisfied that his government is running a surplus? Even with good incomes and some cash in the bank, do we feel better that we have $5,000 on our Visa cards or $O?
For all the talk of smaller government, it grew enormously during the Bush administration, and, to a lesser extent, during both the Reagan and Bush I terms. The problem with growing government to fund idealistic programs like No Child Left Behind or Prescription Drug or augments to Medicare is not just the unfunded cost, not just the misguided trust in yet more government bureaucracies that spawn ever larger constituencies of dependants, but the discrediting of the conservative critique of an ongoing DMV-ing of America. Who will now police the fiscal police?
Despite his stalwart efforts to keep us safe for seven years after 9/11 (and we will in time come to appreciate the magnitude of his Trumanesque achievement), had Bush left something akin to a balanced budget, it would have been far easier now to have convinced the public of the pernicious legacies of the far larger Obama deficits (remember the new Orwellian subtext, “We must borrow and spend in order to save and cut”). What are conservatives to say of Obama’s $1.7 trillion annual deficit? “My God in Heaven, that rascal trumped our $500 billion shortfall three-times over!”
The odd thing is that despite 9/11, Katrina, Iraq, and the tax cuts, had Bush just kept discretionary domestic spending at the rate of inflation, we would have been near budget surpluses by 2005. By January 2007 when Bush had lost the Congress and wished to repent and reform, the game was lost and there was no chance of financial sobriety. Now, our best and brightest suggest that taxing and spending, and printing and borrowing money will lead to financial stability, as if it has in the past in prewar Germany, present -day Zimbabwe or 20th-century Argentina — or 1979 America.
2) Wall Street and the Democrats. By all accounts, liberals and Democrats receive far more Wall Street money than do conservatives — and it has left us baffled about the old role of big money and big government. So here we are: liberals are favoring crony capitalism — crony capitalism is favoring liberals advocating equality of result.
We are reduced to a Chris Dodd on the barricades railing against financial greed, or populist Charles Rangel limoing over to AIG to jawbone funding for his “Rangel Center,” or Bill Gates figuring once more how to connive a Microsoft monopoly, in order to, Carneige-like, fund his noble causes, or George Soros, in between trying to wreck the Bank of England, funneling his hard-won cash to liberal attack-dog centers.
For all the leftwing Gordon Gecko talk of big greed, the liberal Soros, Buffet, Turner, Gates, etc. are all Democratic boosters, and Barack Obama — cf. the trough at AIG, Fannie, Citicorp — was more adept at garnering Wall Street money than was a John McCain, hence perhaps the former’s decision to be the first presidential candidate in the general election to renounce public campaign financing (not all the money raised was from the wee people, but often bundled from the wealthy). Imagine a little honesty in January 2008: “I, Barack Obama, swear my allegiance to the free market before Wall Street, that I will be the first candidate in history to decline that awful bureaucratic public campaign financing, and instead pledge my fealty to you, masters of the universe, to help me raise enough cash in order to help the little people.”
How surreal that liberals continue to rail about capitalist grasping, when a Robert Rubin and his associates were past masters of Wall Street buccaneering. So questions arise: why did the masters of the universe, in their strong preferences for Obama, grow to favor quasi-socialism? (The range of answers runs from they had enough capital accumulated that they could pay psychological penance by electing someone who would make them feel good, but whose redistributive plans would hurt the hardware store owner more than themselves — to the idea that getting government involved as guarantors of your risk/my profit was, well, far safer than being a capitalist leopard proud of his risk-taking spots.)
Bottom line: Once liberal egalitarians got into the mess of big money, they lost any credibility about championing the old blue-collar ethos; once Wall Street ceased being capitalist, we began to lose capitalism.
3) The Therapeutic impulse or “Don’t fault but empathize.” We now contextualize, situationalize, explain away almost every possible human pathology. Take the worst: The Oakland police murder was scarcely reported out here before we heard that the miscreant murderer “was looking for a job”, “was wary about returning to prison” and “was not a monster”, as the carnage was a “tragedy” for all involved. (I confess I like the more honest 1930s headline that would have said, “Deadbeat thug conned his way out of the joint and killed good cops.”)
So the tragic voice screams back, “No, he was evil, an enemy of civilization, and, yes, surely monstrous in all that he did and the creed that he embraced.” By global standards of poverty and deprivation (think the slums of Nigeria or Mumbai, or rural Peru or Bolivia), the killer was hardly impoverished, but perhaps cognizant that in present-day society, incarceration often means parole even for violent offences, and that recriminations about the absence of prison (fill in the blanks: health care, job training, counseling.) win victim status.
Somewhere in the Berkeley hills reside the retired grandees who thought up all this utopian mindset, while below in the Oakland flatlands the cops died who had to suffer its consequences.
Lost in the therapeutic view is any notion that we should never lower standards, or disguise reality with euphemism, but rather insist and get involved in preparing the traditionally unprepared for the rather high standards of society. Instead, in matters of education, the law, and public discourse, we too often immediately issue race/class/gender inspired qualifiers when rules, norms, protocols prove too difficult for the non-traditional.
A liberal professor seems to prefer to get on his soapbox about diversity at the faculty senate before driving his Camry back home to the tree-lined faculty ghetto, than drive downtown to tutor the ghetto youngster in Latin to ensure he has the tools to succeed in the university. And he gets to justify not spending that difficult hour with the cheap qualifier, “I would not dare try to impose my cultural norms onto the ‘other.’”
Somewhere some lazy selfish academic dreamed up multiculturalism and is still smiling, “Now I can do whatever I want — drop the hurt in giving F’s, skip out on tutoring the rather difficult to tutor, stop insisting on acrimonious standards at tenure hearings — as long as I mouth these platitudes.” The faculty has become bloated Soviet-era apparatchiks on the May-Day grandstands, saluting the passing missiles, mouthing “comrade” and the “revolution” before lumbering off to the dachas on the Black Sea. Trace the evolution of our therapeutic notions of criminology, of government, of child-raising even, and it inevitably leads you back to the university.
The result in the modern Western world is the end of the old standards: no one any longer thinks that admission to the Ivy League or Stanford is based entirely on merit, or, its corollary, that completion of a blue-chip degree means that the recipient is really educated. I don’t necessarily associate excellence in ethics with a Nobel Peace Prize, journalistic excellence with a Pulitzer Prize, or academic excellence with an endowed professorship at Princeton.
How odd that the World Series or the Super bowl is a far more honest arbiter of excellence than the current academic and intellectual industries.
When the NBA begins to demand diversity — one Asian center per team, 30% so-called “white” guys on the team, 20% Latino coaches — or the Tour de France demands 10% African-American participation — shudder (or is all that already happening?). Why then do pure merit-based considerations seem to count in things like (the more trivial) sports or (vital) brain surgery and aircraft piloting, but not in the manner in which we train our youth, write our news, or conduct our intellectual life?
We could be even more reductionist about the therapeutic mind — and think that our penal system would improve should we build prisons next to universities (easier for professors to rehabilitate prisoners, better to have an informed nearby community to nurture parolees.) Think of the possibilities of matching word with deed: the Obamas’ children go to the D.C. public schools; the Harvard humanities Dean is put in charge of hiring for all the nuclear power plants of New England; Chris Dodd and Barney Frank submit their expense budgets instantly to thumbs up/down, on-line public approval; Nancy Pelosi flies commercial…
©2009 Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, March 26, 2009
People React to O'Reilly's Audiobook
Fake Ass Conservative Bill O'Reilly's "romantic novel". What a faker.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
John Robb at globalguerillas.typepad.com tell it like it is...
HOLLOW STATES vs. FAILED STATES
A considerable number of analysts contend that Mexico and other countries suffering assaults by open source insurgencies/crime aren't in danger of becoming failed states. They are right given the limitations of their modeling. A failed state is a complete breakdown in the delivery of political goods (security, law, health, education, infrastructure, etc.), the dissolution of most arms of the government (often what's left is in absentia), and widespread chaos. Think Somalia.
In contrast, these states are well on the road to becoming hollow states. A hollow state is different from a failed state in that it continues to exist on the international stage. It has all the standard edifices of governance although most are heavily corrupted and in thrall to global corporate/monied elites. It continues to deliver political goods (albeit to a vastly diminished group, usually around the capital) and maintains a military. Further, in sections of the country, there is an appearance of normal life.
However, despite this facade, the hollow state has abdicated (either explicitly as in Lebanon's case or de facto as in Mexico's) vast sections of its territory to networked tribes (global guerrillas). Often, these groups maintain a semblance of order, as in rules of Sao Paulo's militias or the Taliban's application of sharia. Despite the fact that these group control/manipulate explicit economic activity and dominate the use/application of violence at the local level, these groups often grow the local economy. How? By directly connecting it to global supply chains of illegal goods -- from people smuggling to drugs to arms to copytheft to money laundering.
The longer this state of affairs persists, the more difficult it is to eradicate. The slate of alternative political goods delivered by these non-state groups, in contrast to the ineffectiveness of the central government, sets the stage for a shift in legitimacy. Loyalties shift. Either explicitly through membership in tribal networks, or acknowledgement of the primacy of these networks over daily life.
So, if the question is whether Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc are in danger of becoming hollow states, the answer is yes. In fact, I suggest that they are already there. Are we headed in the same direction?
A considerable number of analysts contend that Mexico and other countries suffering assaults by open source insurgencies/crime aren't in danger of becoming failed states. They are right given the limitations of their modeling. A failed state is a complete breakdown in the delivery of political goods (security, law, health, education, infrastructure, etc.), the dissolution of most arms of the government (often what's left is in absentia), and widespread chaos. Think Somalia.
In contrast, these states are well on the road to becoming hollow states. A hollow state is different from a failed state in that it continues to exist on the international stage. It has all the standard edifices of governance although most are heavily corrupted and in thrall to global corporate/monied elites. It continues to deliver political goods (albeit to a vastly diminished group, usually around the capital) and maintains a military. Further, in sections of the country, there is an appearance of normal life.
However, despite this facade, the hollow state has abdicated (either explicitly as in Lebanon's case or de facto as in Mexico's) vast sections of its territory to networked tribes (global guerrillas). Often, these groups maintain a semblance of order, as in rules of Sao Paulo's militias or the Taliban's application of sharia. Despite the fact that these group control/manipulate explicit economic activity and dominate the use/application of violence at the local level, these groups often grow the local economy. How? By directly connecting it to global supply chains of illegal goods -- from people smuggling to drugs to arms to copytheft to money laundering.
The longer this state of affairs persists, the more difficult it is to eradicate. The slate of alternative political goods delivered by these non-state groups, in contrast to the ineffectiveness of the central government, sets the stage for a shift in legitimacy. Loyalties shift. Either explicitly through membership in tribal networks, or acknowledgement of the primacy of these networks over daily life.
So, if the question is whether Mexico, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc are in danger of becoming hollow states, the answer is yes. In fact, I suggest that they are already there. Are we headed in the same direction?
Where are the Magnificent 7?
Rural Mexican villages dig moats to repel gangsters
Ditches don’t always deter raids, but federal troops can’t be spared
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
March 22, 2009, 3:43PM
1 2
Julian Cardona For the Chronicle
Ruben Solis, a farmers’ leader, says these moats that villagers dug around Cuauhtémoc were “a means of preservation” for the town. The sentinels at the checkpoints to the village, however, have been removed.
Share Print Email Del.icio.usDiggTechnoratiYahoo! BuzzFacebookCUAUHTEMOC, Mexico — Little town, big hell.
That proverb about turmoil in small communities has never seemed truer than in this gangster-besieged village and a neighboring one in the bean fields and desert scrub a long day’s drive south of the Rio Grande.
Since right before Christmas, armed raiders repeatedly have swept into both villages to carry away local men. Government help arrived too late, or not at all.
Terrified villagers — at the urging of army officers who couldn’t be there around the clock — have clawed moats across every access road but one into their communities, hoping to repel the raids.
“This was a means of preservation,” said Ruben Solis, 47, a farmers’ leader in Cuauhtemoc, a collection of adobe and concrete houses called home by 3,700 people. “It’s better to struggle this way than to face the consequences.”
But shortly after midnight last Sunday, villagers said, as many as 15 SUVs loaded with pistoleros attacked nearby San Angel, population 250, and kidnapped five people. Four victims were returned unharmed a few days later. The fifth hostage, a teenage boy, was held to exchange for the intended target the raiders missed, villagers said.
“We have support of the federal forces,” said an official of the dirt-street village. “Security is what we’re lacking.”
After the earthworks were dug in both villages, volunteers manned checkpoints at the remaining open entrances. Those sentinels, however, were removed when it was decided they couldn’t stop a serious attack, anyhow .
“We aren’t able to confront this sort of thing,” Solis said. “We have a few shotguns, some .22 rifles, a few pistols — nothing compared to what they have.”
President Felipe Calderon’s war on Mexico’s drug gangsters has met with mixed success since he began deploying about 45,000 soldiers and federal police after assuming office in December 2006. The federal forces have been able to defeat the gunmen in open combat but unable, so far, to extinguish the bloodshed or the crime.
Narcotics-related violence killed at least 6,000 people last year and looks likely to match that toll again by Christmas. Kidnappings, extortions and bank robberies are on the rise in many cities and even in rural flyspecks like Cuauhtemoc and San Angel.
Though still far less serious, the troubles faintly echo those of a century ago when Cuencame township, which includes Cuauhtemoc and San Angel, suffered massacres and guerrilla attacks in the lead-up to the Mexican Revolution.
Most of Mexico’s violence these days isn’t politically inspired, but the gangsters’ hit-and-run tactics often mirror those of an insurgency. Government forces frequently find themselves without adequate manpower to be everywhere at once.
“This is really the job of the federal government,” Solis said of his town’s efforts at self-defense. “But they don’t have enough men to keep up. There is delinquency wherever you go.”
Fear of the Zetas
Like others across central and western Mexico, many in and around these villages assume their tormentors are the Zetas, gunmen aligned with the Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros and other cities bordering South Texas.
Government officials blame much of Mexico’s violence on wars between gangs like the Zetas, whose founders were army deserters, for control of smuggling corridors, local drug sales and other rackets.
Solis said he and other townspeople suspect those who raided Cuauhtémoc in early February, kidnapping the 23-year-old son of a bean-and-grain trader, are simply “bad characters from the area who have just taken the Zeta name.”
Fear of the Zetas borders on hysteria in this corner of Durango state, residents and officials agreed. Village boys playing with toy trucks have taken to shouting “here come the Zetas” when staging chases, Solis said.
When a rumor started March 10 in a town nearby that scores of Zetas were planning to attack, stores in the area closed, classes were canceled and people fled.
“A psychosis prevails across the whole region,” said Isidro Aguilar, the police chief of Guadalupe Victoria, a market town 25 miles from Cuauhtemoc, who otherwise denied that the area faces a crime plague. “There are people who are taking advantage of it.”
Still, people’s paranoia doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get them.
Gangsters have staged platoon-strength raids on towns in Chihuahua and other nearby states. Kidnappings have increased, as well as cold-call extortion attempts to even poor residents of the area.
A number of merchants, as well as two members of the city council, have been kidnapped in Guadalupe Victoria since late December, residents said. Ransoms, they said, have reached several hundred thousand dollars.
“No one knows who took them. No one knows anything,” said Gilberto Cabello, the head of the town’s merchants association. “Everyone is left wondering who is next.”
Defense left to the town
Not surprisingly, villagers in Cuauhtemoc and San Angel remain on edge, sharply eyeing strangers, careful not to say too much to outsiders.
“The less said about this, the better,” said a city hall official in Cuencame, the township seat. “It can be dangerous to say too much.”
Soldiers and federal police took up the defense of Cuauhtemoc and San Angel last week after the towns’ plight played on the front page of a Mexico City newspaper. But the patrols evaporated after a few days, leaving nothing but the ditches in the villagers’ defense.
“That’s the way it is,” said a sun-weathered Roberto Fuentes, who was helping build a sidewalk a block from one of Cuauhtemoc’s earthworks. “If the government doesn’t do it, we have to.
“Here, the people are defending the town.”
Ditches don’t always deter raids, but federal troops can’t be spared
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
March 22, 2009, 3:43PM
1 2
Julian Cardona For the Chronicle
Ruben Solis, a farmers’ leader, says these moats that villagers dug around Cuauhtémoc were “a means of preservation” for the town. The sentinels at the checkpoints to the village, however, have been removed.
Share Print Email Del.icio.usDiggTechnoratiYahoo! BuzzFacebookCUAUHTEMOC, Mexico — Little town, big hell.
That proverb about turmoil in small communities has never seemed truer than in this gangster-besieged village and a neighboring one in the bean fields and desert scrub a long day’s drive south of the Rio Grande.
Since right before Christmas, armed raiders repeatedly have swept into both villages to carry away local men. Government help arrived too late, or not at all.
Terrified villagers — at the urging of army officers who couldn’t be there around the clock — have clawed moats across every access road but one into their communities, hoping to repel the raids.
“This was a means of preservation,” said Ruben Solis, 47, a farmers’ leader in Cuauhtemoc, a collection of adobe and concrete houses called home by 3,700 people. “It’s better to struggle this way than to face the consequences.”
But shortly after midnight last Sunday, villagers said, as many as 15 SUVs loaded with pistoleros attacked nearby San Angel, population 250, and kidnapped five people. Four victims were returned unharmed a few days later. The fifth hostage, a teenage boy, was held to exchange for the intended target the raiders missed, villagers said.
“We have support of the federal forces,” said an official of the dirt-street village. “Security is what we’re lacking.”
After the earthworks were dug in both villages, volunteers manned checkpoints at the remaining open entrances. Those sentinels, however, were removed when it was decided they couldn’t stop a serious attack, anyhow .
“We aren’t able to confront this sort of thing,” Solis said. “We have a few shotguns, some .22 rifles, a few pistols — nothing compared to what they have.”
President Felipe Calderon’s war on Mexico’s drug gangsters has met with mixed success since he began deploying about 45,000 soldiers and federal police after assuming office in December 2006. The federal forces have been able to defeat the gunmen in open combat but unable, so far, to extinguish the bloodshed or the crime.
Narcotics-related violence killed at least 6,000 people last year and looks likely to match that toll again by Christmas. Kidnappings, extortions and bank robberies are on the rise in many cities and even in rural flyspecks like Cuauhtemoc and San Angel.
Though still far less serious, the troubles faintly echo those of a century ago when Cuencame township, which includes Cuauhtemoc and San Angel, suffered massacres and guerrilla attacks in the lead-up to the Mexican Revolution.
Most of Mexico’s violence these days isn’t politically inspired, but the gangsters’ hit-and-run tactics often mirror those of an insurgency. Government forces frequently find themselves without adequate manpower to be everywhere at once.
“This is really the job of the federal government,” Solis said of his town’s efforts at self-defense. “But they don’t have enough men to keep up. There is delinquency wherever you go.”
Fear of the Zetas
Like others across central and western Mexico, many in and around these villages assume their tormentors are the Zetas, gunmen aligned with the Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros and other cities bordering South Texas.
Government officials blame much of Mexico’s violence on wars between gangs like the Zetas, whose founders were army deserters, for control of smuggling corridors, local drug sales and other rackets.
Solis said he and other townspeople suspect those who raided Cuauhtémoc in early February, kidnapping the 23-year-old son of a bean-and-grain trader, are simply “bad characters from the area who have just taken the Zeta name.”
Fear of the Zetas borders on hysteria in this corner of Durango state, residents and officials agreed. Village boys playing with toy trucks have taken to shouting “here come the Zetas” when staging chases, Solis said.
When a rumor started March 10 in a town nearby that scores of Zetas were planning to attack, stores in the area closed, classes were canceled and people fled.
“A psychosis prevails across the whole region,” said Isidro Aguilar, the police chief of Guadalupe Victoria, a market town 25 miles from Cuauhtemoc, who otherwise denied that the area faces a crime plague. “There are people who are taking advantage of it.”
Still, people’s paranoia doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get them.
Gangsters have staged platoon-strength raids on towns in Chihuahua and other nearby states. Kidnappings have increased, as well as cold-call extortion attempts to even poor residents of the area.
A number of merchants, as well as two members of the city council, have been kidnapped in Guadalupe Victoria since late December, residents said. Ransoms, they said, have reached several hundred thousand dollars.
“No one knows who took them. No one knows anything,” said Gilberto Cabello, the head of the town’s merchants association. “Everyone is left wondering who is next.”
Defense left to the town
Not surprisingly, villagers in Cuauhtemoc and San Angel remain on edge, sharply eyeing strangers, careful not to say too much to outsiders.
“The less said about this, the better,” said a city hall official in Cuencame, the township seat. “It can be dangerous to say too much.”
Soldiers and federal police took up the defense of Cuauhtemoc and San Angel last week after the towns’ plight played on the front page of a Mexico City newspaper. But the patrols evaporated after a few days, leaving nothing but the ditches in the villagers’ defense.
“That’s the way it is,” said a sun-weathered Roberto Fuentes, who was helping build a sidewalk a block from one of Cuauhtemoc’s earthworks. “If the government doesn’t do it, we have to.
“Here, the people are defending the town.”
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Keyes: Stop Obama or U.S. will cease to exist
Don't you wish this man was President instead of TelePrompter Jesus?
Victor Davis Hanson tells it like it is...again.
Can’t We All Agree?
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
What hope and change would all of us, conservatives and liberals alike, welcome from President Obama? Here are some suggestions, surreal and serious, trivial and quite important.
1) The U.N. Recently the U.N. Secretary-General termed the U.S. a “deadbeat” donor, despite our long record of more than generous donations. Cannot we hope and change this organization out of New York? There is no need to withdraw from the organization, but rather we need a liberal solution of asking the aggrieved body to relocate closer to the center of present-day global problems. Conservatives would like the U.N. gone from our shores; liberals could agree that multilateral solutions need to be closer to the problems — the suffering, the starvation, and the killing? Possible new host cities? Beirut? Cairo? Moscow? Tripoli? A U.N. headquarters in Nairobi or Lagos would save millions in transportation costs, and allow U.N. employees a feel for problems in a way New York does not. So many birds killed with so few stones: a) no more autocratic functionaries living it up in New York restaurants and limo-ing around the city as they trash the United States during their day jobs; b) no more media attention to U.N. antics, as the soap-box speeches no longer go down a few blocks from CBS and ABC, but thousands of miles away; c) the world’s reps live the life in the concrete that they advocate in the abstract;
2) The Meltdown Commission. We had a 9/11 Commission; we formed the Baker-Hamilton Commission on Iraq (never mind the utility of the conclusions). So let us try a bipartisan investigatory commission on the autumn financial meltdown. Thus far the mainstream media narrative is a reductive “Bush did it.” But let us examine past bundling of subprime mortgages, and derivatives, and who introduced more regulation of banks, who opposed it; who tried to restrain Freddie and Fannie, who fought that tooth and nail, what the SEC did and did not do — and why. Let us collate all the campaign contributions from the failed banks, Madoff, the entire open sewer of politics and high finance, and then let those of the commission, both Democrat and Republican, issue a white paper on when, why, and how it all went down.
3) Farm subsidies. From 2002-8 prices for most subsidized commodities, from corn and wheat to cotton and dairy, were quite profitable. Yet the five-year $307 billion farm bill contains billions in direct subsidies to corporate and large farmers who are already making a profit in the open market. The bill itself is full of pork, and there is no real reason to continue any of the direct cash support elements of the legislation. I’m not sure of the exact correlation, but if one were to graph the history of farm subsidies and the decline of small family farms the later line would go upward as the latter went down. We were once promised in the 1996 “Freedom to Farm” act that it would all end. It didn’t. Then right after 9/11 we rushed a renewed “farm security” bill, using the fear of terrorism as another false rationale. When that fear faded, we advanced the notion of stimuli and pump-priming. I never understood why a plum or grape grower got nothing and survived, and much wealthier cotton growers got lots, thrived, and said they would go broke without federal largess. The bill never explained why a few farmers got a lot, and most got nothing; or why the dole continued even when prices climbed.
4) Our Ambassadors. Can we stop appointing the wealthy and well-connected to ambassadorships? Count the ways in which this practice is a disaster: a) the choice jobs always go to wealthy donors, not the top State Department experts. Morale would be enhanced if career officers knew they might at the zenith of their careers make Ambassador (imagine majors and colonels never making generals, who were instead appointed on the basis of campaign contributions); b) we could have some real expertise in time of crises. Now when the Middle East flares up, the former Soviet republics are under siege, or there is tension in the sea of Japan, we send in special envoys, experts, generals — but don’t really in extremis rely on our ambassadors on the scene for sources of regional and cultural expertise; c) and then there is the obvious that it is a very bad idea to tie big money with official representation of the United States, a relic of the 19th-century practice of buying government patronage.
5) Eponymous Heroes. When will the public simply ridicule the practice of naming buildings, highways, bridges, schools (cf. the Rangel this and the Murtha that) after living representatives and senators? If we must name infrastructure after our congressional grandees, cannot we at least wait until they are dead, when time and reflection adjudicate the exact worth and accomplishments of our politicos? Under the present system, we have the embarrassing situation that congress people simply earmark millions for their districts and then carve their names, like eponymous Roman prefects, on any public structure higher than a couple of inches. But it was our money, not theirs, that built these public facilities in the first place.
6) Do not harm. Yes, do nothing for a few months. Over a half-trillion dollars in energy stimuli are occurring naturally due to crashed oil prices. The collapse of interest on U.S. debt bonds has given us billions in near interest free money. Millions have walked away from debt and are unburdened from mortgage and credit card bills. Last year’s budget had a $500 billion stimulus deficit in it. In short, as we speak, the economy is being stimulated. So why not relax for 100 days, let the markets correct — and quit borrowing in the fashion that got us into this mess?
The above suggestions have no chance of being enacted, but they would do far more for the country at almost no cost than running up the present 1.6 trillion dollar deficit.
©2009 Victor Davis Hanson
H/T victorhanson.com
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
What hope and change would all of us, conservatives and liberals alike, welcome from President Obama? Here are some suggestions, surreal and serious, trivial and quite important.
1) The U.N. Recently the U.N. Secretary-General termed the U.S. a “deadbeat” donor, despite our long record of more than generous donations. Cannot we hope and change this organization out of New York? There is no need to withdraw from the organization, but rather we need a liberal solution of asking the aggrieved body to relocate closer to the center of present-day global problems. Conservatives would like the U.N. gone from our shores; liberals could agree that multilateral solutions need to be closer to the problems — the suffering, the starvation, and the killing? Possible new host cities? Beirut? Cairo? Moscow? Tripoli? A U.N. headquarters in Nairobi or Lagos would save millions in transportation costs, and allow U.N. employees a feel for problems in a way New York does not. So many birds killed with so few stones: a) no more autocratic functionaries living it up in New York restaurants and limo-ing around the city as they trash the United States during their day jobs; b) no more media attention to U.N. antics, as the soap-box speeches no longer go down a few blocks from CBS and ABC, but thousands of miles away; c) the world’s reps live the life in the concrete that they advocate in the abstract;
2) The Meltdown Commission. We had a 9/11 Commission; we formed the Baker-Hamilton Commission on Iraq (never mind the utility of the conclusions). So let us try a bipartisan investigatory commission on the autumn financial meltdown. Thus far the mainstream media narrative is a reductive “Bush did it.” But let us examine past bundling of subprime mortgages, and derivatives, and who introduced more regulation of banks, who opposed it; who tried to restrain Freddie and Fannie, who fought that tooth and nail, what the SEC did and did not do — and why. Let us collate all the campaign contributions from the failed banks, Madoff, the entire open sewer of politics and high finance, and then let those of the commission, both Democrat and Republican, issue a white paper on when, why, and how it all went down.
3) Farm subsidies. From 2002-8 prices for most subsidized commodities, from corn and wheat to cotton and dairy, were quite profitable. Yet the five-year $307 billion farm bill contains billions in direct subsidies to corporate and large farmers who are already making a profit in the open market. The bill itself is full of pork, and there is no real reason to continue any of the direct cash support elements of the legislation. I’m not sure of the exact correlation, but if one were to graph the history of farm subsidies and the decline of small family farms the later line would go upward as the latter went down. We were once promised in the 1996 “Freedom to Farm” act that it would all end. It didn’t. Then right after 9/11 we rushed a renewed “farm security” bill, using the fear of terrorism as another false rationale. When that fear faded, we advanced the notion of stimuli and pump-priming. I never understood why a plum or grape grower got nothing and survived, and much wealthier cotton growers got lots, thrived, and said they would go broke without federal largess. The bill never explained why a few farmers got a lot, and most got nothing; or why the dole continued even when prices climbed.
4) Our Ambassadors. Can we stop appointing the wealthy and well-connected to ambassadorships? Count the ways in which this practice is a disaster: a) the choice jobs always go to wealthy donors, not the top State Department experts. Morale would be enhanced if career officers knew they might at the zenith of their careers make Ambassador (imagine majors and colonels never making generals, who were instead appointed on the basis of campaign contributions); b) we could have some real expertise in time of crises. Now when the Middle East flares up, the former Soviet republics are under siege, or there is tension in the sea of Japan, we send in special envoys, experts, generals — but don’t really in extremis rely on our ambassadors on the scene for sources of regional and cultural expertise; c) and then there is the obvious that it is a very bad idea to tie big money with official representation of the United States, a relic of the 19th-century practice of buying government patronage.
5) Eponymous Heroes. When will the public simply ridicule the practice of naming buildings, highways, bridges, schools (cf. the Rangel this and the Murtha that) after living representatives and senators? If we must name infrastructure after our congressional grandees, cannot we at least wait until they are dead, when time and reflection adjudicate the exact worth and accomplishments of our politicos? Under the present system, we have the embarrassing situation that congress people simply earmark millions for their districts and then carve their names, like eponymous Roman prefects, on any public structure higher than a couple of inches. But it was our money, not theirs, that built these public facilities in the first place.
6) Do not harm. Yes, do nothing for a few months. Over a half-trillion dollars in energy stimuli are occurring naturally due to crashed oil prices. The collapse of interest on U.S. debt bonds has given us billions in near interest free money. Millions have walked away from debt and are unburdened from mortgage and credit card bills. Last year’s budget had a $500 billion stimulus deficit in it. In short, as we speak, the economy is being stimulated. So why not relax for 100 days, let the markets correct — and quit borrowing in the fashion that got us into this mess?
The above suggestions have no chance of being enacted, but they would do far more for the country at almost no cost than running up the present 1.6 trillion dollar deficit.
©2009 Victor Davis Hanson
H/T victorhanson.com
On Conservative "Messaging"...
"Conservatives believe that Americans understand that freedom is the foundation of this country. Too many in America started down the wrong path in the last election. But we can't hold these people in contempt, and we can't discount how they will hear the message we preach. Americans are fundamentally reasonable people. And ultimately, our message will win them over -- if we preach it in a proud, confident, and positive way."
-- Patterico
This, as he says on the Tweet deck, is what he means to be "the final word" in his long-running dispute with Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom over Rush Limbaugh and the whole question of conservative "messaging" in general.
My opinion? I'm not sure that the entire Socratic dialogue, amounting to however many tens of thousands of words over the past two weeks, is as important as any 15-minute segment of the Limbaugh show.
What makes Rush different from any other conservative spokesman is that Rush has an independent platform from which he reaches something like 20 million people weekly. There is no network CEO or programming director who can influence Limbaugh. He can't be fired or threatened by some little pencil-necked geek: "Don't say that again, or we'll put you on 90-day probation -- and you know you're coming up on your annual evaluation . . ." blah, blah, blah.
To quote Wally Onakoya, "He is a man, you know."
By virtue of his "talent on loan from God," Limbaugh has utter independence. No radio station that carries him is going to pull him off the air because of a single ill-phrased comment. Having Rush means carrying the No. 1 radio program in America. To pull Rush out of your program lineup means automatically to surrender the lead in your local market.
Therefore, what is remarkable about Limbaugh is not that he occasionally says something like, "I want [Obama] to fail," which can be taken out of context and portrayed as something unseemly. Rather, what is remarkable is that, in 15 hours of live programming weekly over the span of 20 years, Limbaugh has never uttered that one career-destroying gaffe. This suggests to me that Rush is a thoughtful person who fully understands the enormous responsibility that weighs on his shoulders, and who is determined to make his spectacular success a force for good in America.
There is an entire mini-industry of Limbaugh monitors, vile little left-wing worms who spend three hours a day recording and transcribing his broadcasts in hope of catching that one "gotcha" quote. (Pathetic, isn't it?) These nests of vermin specialize in the Ransom-Note Method of partial quotation, claiming to be "fact-checking" Limbaugh's monologues when in fact they're just partisan smearmongers. And then there is the standing offer of a handsome fee for a Newsweek cover story offered to any Republican who will denounce Rush. So the man is always a target, always the object of the withering gaze of critical scrutiny.
Do I agree with everything Rush Limbaugh has ever said? What kind of question is that? The point is that Rush "is a man, you know," as the driver of Fairway Cab No. 1 so succinctly put it at CPAC. Whatever Limbaugh's faults, he has that one redeeming value: Courage to speak out, even when speaking out makes him the target of vicious personal smears.
One of the basic principles of military strategy is to reinforce success. If you see a man who fights and wins, give him reinforcements, and bid others to emulate his success. It's like the time when Abraham Lincoln was urged to relieve U.S. Grant of command because Grant was accused of having been drunk on duty. Lincoln answered bluntly: "I can't spare this man. He fights." It's also like the time when Robert E. Lee, confronted at Richmond with George McClellan's much larger Union force, decided to send a division of his little army to the Shenandoah Valley to reinforce Stonewall Jackson. Lee said, "We must aid a gallant man if we perish."
That's why when I see somebody like Kathy Shaidle -- who is to Canada what the Tasmanian devil is to Tasmania -- my instinct is to yell, "Hell, yeah! Give it to 'em, girl! Hit 'em where it hurts and force the cowardly bastards to defend themselves!" Reinforce success.
Tell you what: You find yourself a thousand David Brookses and a thousand Kathleen Parkers, and you give me one Rush Limbaugh and one Kathy Shaidle and, buddy, we'll whup your ass before sundown.
The other day on the phone. I was telling Cynthia Yockey about my admiration for George S. Patton. He was a proud, profane and hot-tempered man. His faults were many, but Patton had two saving graces: Faith in God and a determination to fight.
He believed himself destined for victory, and when he was sidelined after slapping a soldier he considered a malingering coward, Patton felt unfairly cheated of command in the Normandy invasion. He was in a low place, that dark valley that David spoke of in the Psalms, but he was steadfast in his faith.
When the Allies finally broke out of the beachhead at St. Lo, it was Patton who spearheaded the assault. He pushed all the way through to liberate the Brittany peninsula, then turned around and raced southward to crush the German forces around Paris -- a campaign that ranks among the greatest achievements in the history of American arms.
What happened next? Over Patton's vehement objections, Eisenhower reinforced failure, diverting resources for Montgomery's ill-conceived and ill-executed Operation Market Garden, which sacrificed gallant men for minor gains (a tragedy captured in Cornelius Ryan's classic A Bridge Too Far, the film of which I highly recommend.) As a result of this blunder, Hitler was able to regroup and launch the final desperate winter assault that became famous as the Battle of the Bulge. And when the 101st Airborne was besieged at Bastogne, who was it that punched through the encircling enemy to rescue them? Patton, of course.
Constitutional liberty and a free economy, the true principles that conservatives should always aim to defend, are in deep peril. We are in that dark valley. Talk to veteran Republican operatives, and you will find them profoundly concerned about the apparent disorganization at RNC-HQ. If the conservatives are going to prevail in this crisis, it will be up to the grassroots troops in the field.
A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi -- a precipice in front, wolves behind. Yet we see the wheels falling off the wobbly bandwagon of Hope, and we are certain of one thing about Obamanomics: It Won't Work. If truth can get a fair hearing, there is still hope against Hope.
What we need most in this crisis is courage for the fight. We must not take counsel of our fears (click that link to read what is probably my best effort at an in-depth analysis of the current situation). If we heed the voices of defeatism and despair, if we allow ourselves to be distracted by carping criticisms from The Dogs Who Bark While the Caravan Moves On, if we start endlessly second-guessing our gut instincts because we're afraid of offending the sensibilities of the editors at Newsweek -- well, that way lies disaster.
Patterico speaks of the American people as "fundamentally reasonable," and I believe this to be true. When I refer to The Ordinary American, it is this basic decency and the common sense of common people I mean to praise, in contrast to the viciousness and folly of the Establishment elite. (David Brooks being the most salient example of how elitism is a bipartisan problem.) The people may sometimes be mislead or deceived, but they cannot be deceived forever.
As the incompetence and corruption of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid regime becomes increasingly evident, the Ordinary American seeks an alternative. The task of conservatives in this time of peril is to raise a banner around which the good and true will rally. We need a fighting creed, and courageous hearts with strong voices to shout it: WOLVERINES!
H/T theothermccain.blogspot.com
-- Patterico
This, as he says on the Tweet deck, is what he means to be "the final word" in his long-running dispute with Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom over Rush Limbaugh and the whole question of conservative "messaging" in general.
My opinion? I'm not sure that the entire Socratic dialogue, amounting to however many tens of thousands of words over the past two weeks, is as important as any 15-minute segment of the Limbaugh show.
What makes Rush different from any other conservative spokesman is that Rush has an independent platform from which he reaches something like 20 million people weekly. There is no network CEO or programming director who can influence Limbaugh. He can't be fired or threatened by some little pencil-necked geek: "Don't say that again, or we'll put you on 90-day probation -- and you know you're coming up on your annual evaluation . . ." blah, blah, blah.
To quote Wally Onakoya, "He is a man, you know."
By virtue of his "talent on loan from God," Limbaugh has utter independence. No radio station that carries him is going to pull him off the air because of a single ill-phrased comment. Having Rush means carrying the No. 1 radio program in America. To pull Rush out of your program lineup means automatically to surrender the lead in your local market.
Therefore, what is remarkable about Limbaugh is not that he occasionally says something like, "I want [Obama] to fail," which can be taken out of context and portrayed as something unseemly. Rather, what is remarkable is that, in 15 hours of live programming weekly over the span of 20 years, Limbaugh has never uttered that one career-destroying gaffe. This suggests to me that Rush is a thoughtful person who fully understands the enormous responsibility that weighs on his shoulders, and who is determined to make his spectacular success a force for good in America.
There is an entire mini-industry of Limbaugh monitors, vile little left-wing worms who spend three hours a day recording and transcribing his broadcasts in hope of catching that one "gotcha" quote. (Pathetic, isn't it?) These nests of vermin specialize in the Ransom-Note Method of partial quotation, claiming to be "fact-checking" Limbaugh's monologues when in fact they're just partisan smearmongers. And then there is the standing offer of a handsome fee for a Newsweek cover story offered to any Republican who will denounce Rush. So the man is always a target, always the object of the withering gaze of critical scrutiny.
Do I agree with everything Rush Limbaugh has ever said? What kind of question is that? The point is that Rush "is a man, you know," as the driver of Fairway Cab No. 1 so succinctly put it at CPAC. Whatever Limbaugh's faults, he has that one redeeming value: Courage to speak out, even when speaking out makes him the target of vicious personal smears.
One of the basic principles of military strategy is to reinforce success. If you see a man who fights and wins, give him reinforcements, and bid others to emulate his success. It's like the time when Abraham Lincoln was urged to relieve U.S. Grant of command because Grant was accused of having been drunk on duty. Lincoln answered bluntly: "I can't spare this man. He fights." It's also like the time when Robert E. Lee, confronted at Richmond with George McClellan's much larger Union force, decided to send a division of his little army to the Shenandoah Valley to reinforce Stonewall Jackson. Lee said, "We must aid a gallant man if we perish."
That's why when I see somebody like Kathy Shaidle -- who is to Canada what the Tasmanian devil is to Tasmania -- my instinct is to yell, "Hell, yeah! Give it to 'em, girl! Hit 'em where it hurts and force the cowardly bastards to defend themselves!" Reinforce success.
Tell you what: You find yourself a thousand David Brookses and a thousand Kathleen Parkers, and you give me one Rush Limbaugh and one Kathy Shaidle and, buddy, we'll whup your ass before sundown.
The other day on the phone. I was telling Cynthia Yockey about my admiration for George S. Patton. He was a proud, profane and hot-tempered man. His faults were many, but Patton had two saving graces: Faith in God and a determination to fight.
He believed himself destined for victory, and when he was sidelined after slapping a soldier he considered a malingering coward, Patton felt unfairly cheated of command in the Normandy invasion. He was in a low place, that dark valley that David spoke of in the Psalms, but he was steadfast in his faith.
When the Allies finally broke out of the beachhead at St. Lo, it was Patton who spearheaded the assault. He pushed all the way through to liberate the Brittany peninsula, then turned around and raced southward to crush the German forces around Paris -- a campaign that ranks among the greatest achievements in the history of American arms.
What happened next? Over Patton's vehement objections, Eisenhower reinforced failure, diverting resources for Montgomery's ill-conceived and ill-executed Operation Market Garden, which sacrificed gallant men for minor gains (a tragedy captured in Cornelius Ryan's classic A Bridge Too Far, the film of which I highly recommend.) As a result of this blunder, Hitler was able to regroup and launch the final desperate winter assault that became famous as the Battle of the Bulge. And when the 101st Airborne was besieged at Bastogne, who was it that punched through the encircling enemy to rescue them? Patton, of course.
Constitutional liberty and a free economy, the true principles that conservatives should always aim to defend, are in deep peril. We are in that dark valley. Talk to veteran Republican operatives, and you will find them profoundly concerned about the apparent disorganization at RNC-HQ. If the conservatives are going to prevail in this crisis, it will be up to the grassroots troops in the field.
A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi -- a precipice in front, wolves behind. Yet we see the wheels falling off the wobbly bandwagon of Hope, and we are certain of one thing about Obamanomics: It Won't Work. If truth can get a fair hearing, there is still hope against Hope.
What we need most in this crisis is courage for the fight. We must not take counsel of our fears (click that link to read what is probably my best effort at an in-depth analysis of the current situation). If we heed the voices of defeatism and despair, if we allow ourselves to be distracted by carping criticisms from The Dogs Who Bark While the Caravan Moves On, if we start endlessly second-guessing our gut instincts because we're afraid of offending the sensibilities of the editors at Newsweek -- well, that way lies disaster.
Patterico speaks of the American people as "fundamentally reasonable," and I believe this to be true. When I refer to The Ordinary American, it is this basic decency and the common sense of common people I mean to praise, in contrast to the viciousness and folly of the Establishment elite. (David Brooks being the most salient example of how elitism is a bipartisan problem.) The people may sometimes be mislead or deceived, but they cannot be deceived forever.
As the incompetence and corruption of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid regime becomes increasingly evident, the Ordinary American seeks an alternative. The task of conservatives in this time of peril is to raise a banner around which the good and true will rally. We need a fighting creed, and courageous hearts with strong voices to shout it: WOLVERINES!
H/T theothermccain.blogspot.com
Friday, March 20, 2009
We have been Punk'D
CRISIS! WHAT CRISIS? HA! AMERICA: YOU'VE BEEN PUNK'D!
By Dave Weinbaum
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Like most teens these days, my 17 year old daughter possesses a cell phone. The first time I called her she answered, "Hello." I started talking then heard her respond, "Who is this?" I said, "I'm the guy who's providing you food, shelter and cell phones!" She retorted, "Ha, you've been punk'd! Leave a message after the beep."
After falling for this con five times, I'm now on to her little scam.
As President Obama's popularity results lower and his negative numbers climb, it's apparent that America is a little quicker on the uptake than I was.
"When you rush budgets that are a foot high�and nobody has read them�people (feel) intimidated by the administration" -- Barack H. Obama 11/22/04
Obama abused the words "crisis" and "catastrophe" more than 30 times to shock Americans into urging congress to pass bills they hadn't read. After their vote and signing, we find the new laws don't stimulate as much as destroy the structure of democracy. Obama lied about the transparency and deliberateness he promised.
Last week Barack said the crisis was overstated and the economy was "sound," the same message he castigated citizen McCain for during the campaign. The Dow was about 4000 points higher and we were $3 trillion richer back then. Those days, BB (before Barack) may be known in the future as the good 'ole days.
How does he get away with it?
Barack bombarded us with so many straw dogs; we can feed cattle with their spare hay.
Each week's demon has its own shelf life
Limbaugh was good for a couple laughs when he wished the president failure on his socialism quest. But all that did was get Rush new young listeners.
Then it was the evil bankers foreclosing on forlorn poor who signed on to mortgages by having their arms twisted into little knots.
Now the fiends are those evil AIG executives who accepted retention bonuses via legal contracts. Usually sane Republican Senator Charles Grassley told the AIGers to resign or commit suicide. This false indignation has caused piano wire strangulation threats to AIG employees, their children and spouses. Barney Frank is demanding their names and addresses so murderers can find them. Who says congress isn't there to help?
If you stop making hay, it could be the last straw
That the AIG bonus payments were contracted a year ago with full knowledge of everyone in government and put into the tarp bills by Senator Chris Dodd with the knowledge and approval of Tim Geithner, tax cheat in charge of the IRS, and President Obama, it begs the question: Why worry about the previously contracted $165 million when AIG had transferred $100 Billion of our taxes to foreign banks all over the world?
As congress votes on stealing through taxation perfectly legal payments, let us take note on the precedent this establishes. If the government can intercede on these legal and binding agreements, it can break any contract for any reason. That's what socialists, communists, and fascists do folks.
If President Obama didn't know what was in his bills while ramming them down our throats, then he's incompetent. If he knew, then he's a liar. Either way it's blight on America and the Presidency.
We elected a president and got a stand-up comic
The president, unable to govern, has taken the Animal House solution. He's off on a coast-to-coast air trip to appear on with Jay Leno. Then what, a gig on Comedy Central?
Here's the latest joke on America. The Felons at ACORN, including child rapists and admitted voter registration frauds, have been hired by Obama as census takers.
Time for America to vote out this vile congress in 2010 and curtail President Obama's lease on the White House to four instead of eight years.
We can't afford to talk ourselves silly when no one else is on the other line
By Dave Weinbaum
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Like most teens these days, my 17 year old daughter possesses a cell phone. The first time I called her she answered, "Hello." I started talking then heard her respond, "Who is this?" I said, "I'm the guy who's providing you food, shelter and cell phones!" She retorted, "Ha, you've been punk'd! Leave a message after the beep."
After falling for this con five times, I'm now on to her little scam.
As President Obama's popularity results lower and his negative numbers climb, it's apparent that America is a little quicker on the uptake than I was.
"When you rush budgets that are a foot high�and nobody has read them�people (feel) intimidated by the administration" -- Barack H. Obama 11/22/04
Obama abused the words "crisis" and "catastrophe" more than 30 times to shock Americans into urging congress to pass bills they hadn't read. After their vote and signing, we find the new laws don't stimulate as much as destroy the structure of democracy. Obama lied about the transparency and deliberateness he promised.
Last week Barack said the crisis was overstated and the economy was "sound," the same message he castigated citizen McCain for during the campaign. The Dow was about 4000 points higher and we were $3 trillion richer back then. Those days, BB (before Barack) may be known in the future as the good 'ole days.
How does he get away with it?
Barack bombarded us with so many straw dogs; we can feed cattle with their spare hay.
Each week's demon has its own shelf life
Limbaugh was good for a couple laughs when he wished the president failure on his socialism quest. But all that did was get Rush new young listeners.
Then it was the evil bankers foreclosing on forlorn poor who signed on to mortgages by having their arms twisted into little knots.
Now the fiends are those evil AIG executives who accepted retention bonuses via legal contracts. Usually sane Republican Senator Charles Grassley told the AIGers to resign or commit suicide. This false indignation has caused piano wire strangulation threats to AIG employees, their children and spouses. Barney Frank is demanding their names and addresses so murderers can find them. Who says congress isn't there to help?
If you stop making hay, it could be the last straw
That the AIG bonus payments were contracted a year ago with full knowledge of everyone in government and put into the tarp bills by Senator Chris Dodd with the knowledge and approval of Tim Geithner, tax cheat in charge of the IRS, and President Obama, it begs the question: Why worry about the previously contracted $165 million when AIG had transferred $100 Billion of our taxes to foreign banks all over the world?
As congress votes on stealing through taxation perfectly legal payments, let us take note on the precedent this establishes. If the government can intercede on these legal and binding agreements, it can break any contract for any reason. That's what socialists, communists, and fascists do folks.
If President Obama didn't know what was in his bills while ramming them down our throats, then he's incompetent. If he knew, then he's a liar. Either way it's blight on America and the Presidency.
We elected a president and got a stand-up comic
The president, unable to govern, has taken the Animal House solution. He's off on a coast-to-coast air trip to appear on with Jay Leno. Then what, a gig on Comedy Central?
Here's the latest joke on America. The Felons at ACORN, including child rapists and admitted voter registration frauds, have been hired by Obama as census takers.
Time for America to vote out this vile congress in 2010 and curtail President Obama's lease on the White House to four instead of eight years.
We can't afford to talk ourselves silly when no one else is on the other line
the future unfolds darkly...
JOURNAL: Targeting Banksters?
Viral violence incoming. As this NYTimes article points out, the public is actively targeting AIG execs. Death threats have resulted in armed guards posted at the company's offices and at executive mansions.
The ugly collapse (it won't be coming back anytime soon, despite the expensive charade to the contrary) of financial capitalism will make banks, hedge funds, and other financial institutions targets of violence in the near term. At the individual level, the motivation to "postal" violence is likely to grow since these institutions are actively creating a vicious financial undertow that is sinking formerly "middle class" families (through usurious credit card rates, foreclosures, a Dickensonian bankruptcy process due to recent "reforms", etc.). The motivation for small group violence will be based to the idea that financial companies will be depicted as the "betrayers" behind the rapid diminishment of "America." Actual, rather than threatened, violence will likely become commonplace as the depth and scale of the crisis becomes apparent in 2010.
H/T globalguerillas.typepad.com
Viral violence incoming. As this NYTimes article points out, the public is actively targeting AIG execs. Death threats have resulted in armed guards posted at the company's offices and at executive mansions.
The ugly collapse (it won't be coming back anytime soon, despite the expensive charade to the contrary) of financial capitalism will make banks, hedge funds, and other financial institutions targets of violence in the near term. At the individual level, the motivation to "postal" violence is likely to grow since these institutions are actively creating a vicious financial undertow that is sinking formerly "middle class" families (through usurious credit card rates, foreclosures, a Dickensonian bankruptcy process due to recent "reforms", etc.). The motivation for small group violence will be based to the idea that financial companies will be depicted as the "betrayers" behind the rapid diminishment of "America." Actual, rather than threatened, violence will likely become commonplace as the depth and scale of the crisis becomes apparent in 2010.
H/T globalguerillas.typepad.com
Why the U.S. supplying Guns to Arm Mexican cartels meme is Bogus...
Lies, damn lies and the ATF: A funny thing happened on the way to the foregone conclusion.
Yesterday, a column by George Will appeared in my local paper. It began like this:
Mexico's drug war has Arizona in cross hairs
By George Will
PHOENIX — X-Caliber, a gun store in a nondescript neighborhood in this city's northern section, has become embroiled in Mexico's turmoil. The chaos in Mexico is the result of its government's decision to wage war against rampant drug cartels that are fighting mostly against each other but also against the portions of Mexican law enforcement they have not corrupted. Operating in that nation's north, they are serving this nation's appetite for illegal narcotics and illegal immigrants.
The gun shop's proprietor, the name of whose shop might indicate familiarity with Arthurian legend, is on trial here, accused of selling at least 650 weapons, including AK-47 rifles, in small lots to "straw buyers" — persons who illegally pass on the weapons to the cartels, thereby fueling the violence that killed more than 6,000 Mexicans last year. That was more than 2,000 above the 2007 toll and fewer than will die if the rate of killing so far this year continues. (U.S. military fatalities in Iraq in six years number 4,249.) Fortunately, most of the dead are members of the warring cartels.
The prosecution of the proprietor is part of the U.S. attempt to stop the southward flow of weapons and bulk currency while Mexico combats the northward flow of drugs and of human beings brought by "coyotes." Although almost all the cartels' weapons come from the United States, the cartels are generating upward of $15 billion annually from drugs, human trafficking and extortion. So they will find ways to get guns — and grenades and other military weapons — for their internecine disputes about control over routes for smuggling drugs and people.
Ah, yes, the "American gun dealers/gun shows/nefarious private gun owners of ill repute are arming the Mexican cartels" meme. This has been trumpeted as the reason for all manner of new restrictions on honest folks such as you and me.
The principal advocate of this theme is Eric Holder, our new Attorney General whose appointment the NRA found it inconvenient to resist. That a nominal conservative like George Will bought into the lie is disconcerting but not startling.
One problem, though. (And I wonder if George will be issuing a retraction.) Something happened on the way to foregone conclusion. X-Caliber's owner was just set free by the federal judge in the case.
Reuters reports it this way.
Arizona judge dismisses charges in gunrunning case
By Tim Gaynor
PHOENIX (Reuters) - An Arizona judge threw out criminal charges Wednesday against a gun dealer accused of knowingly selling weapons to smugglers shopping for Mexican drug cartels, after he ruled the prosecutor's evidence was flawed.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Robert Gottsfield issued a directed verdict of not guilty in the trial of George Iknadosian, 47, the owner of X-Caliber guns in Phoenix.
Prosecutors alleged Iknadosian sold hundreds of AK-47 assault rifles and other guns to third-party buyers for the cartels in Mexico, where 6,000 people were killed in drug violence last year.
Curbing spiraling drug cartel violence is a top concern for authorities in the United States and Mexico, where nine out of 10 guns recovered from crime scenes are traced back to U.S. gun dealers.
The case was the most significant to date brought by U.S. prosecutors seeking to curb the illegal flow of arms south of the border.
Gottsfield dismissed the case on the grounds that the prosecutors had not proven the third-party buyers, or "straw purchasers," had misrepresented their identities when buying the guns.
"There is no proof whatsoever that any prohibited possessor ended up with the firearms," he said in a ruling.
Since 2006, Mexico has sent tens of thousands of troops to fight powerful cocaine cartels locked in a bloody war for control of lucrative cross-border smuggling routes to the United States.
U.S. Senate lawmakers are to hold hearings in coming weeks to assess the ability of U.S. security forces to handle the rise in crime on the U.S. side of the border related to Mexican traffickers.
Mexican authorities have ordered thousands of additional troops to restore order in Ciudad Juarez -- just south of El Paso, Texas -- where more than 2,000 people have been killed since the start of last year.
And here is David Hardy's take on it:
Charges against X-Caliber Guns dismissed
Posted by David Hardy · 19 March 2009 09:13 AM
This is a strange case. The Arizona Attorney General (not ATF) brought State charges against a Phoenix-area gun dealer, claiming he'd supplied over 700 guns to Mexican drug cartels.
And the AG loses on a directed verdict -- meaning the judge finds that the evidence is nonexistent: no rational juror could find for the prosecution.
And then the AG's office says it will appeal. ???? Ever hear of double jeopardy? He was on trial, jeopardy clearly attached by any standard (I forget the AZ rule, but jeopardy usually attaches when the jury is empanelled or when the first witness begins testimony, and a motion for DV is made when the prosecution finishes its case, much later), and he can't be retried.
UPDATE: here's the ruling, in pdf. The State charges were under the "scheme or artifice" statute, and the court says that materiality is a requirement there (in the typical case, that it was something where if the person knew the truth they'd not buy, or otherwise would act differently), and the court notes that the prosecution was unable to prove a single gun wound up in the hands of someone who couldn't legally possess it. Sounds like a pretty big gap between press reports and the evidence.
"Strange case" indeed. But maybe not so strange. Agencies need headlines, so members of an agency provide them. I suppose we should be grateful that they didn't burn down his house, church and family while they were about it.
This has been the principal case anti-gunners use as proof their narrative about Mexican drug violence is correct. Except now it is not.
So, when can we expect the retraction, Mr. Holder? George? Brady Bunch? VPC? Any of you blood dancers want to weigh in here?
H/T sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com
Yesterday, a column by George Will appeared in my local paper. It began like this:
Mexico's drug war has Arizona in cross hairs
By George Will
PHOENIX — X-Caliber, a gun store in a nondescript neighborhood in this city's northern section, has become embroiled in Mexico's turmoil. The chaos in Mexico is the result of its government's decision to wage war against rampant drug cartels that are fighting mostly against each other but also against the portions of Mexican law enforcement they have not corrupted. Operating in that nation's north, they are serving this nation's appetite for illegal narcotics and illegal immigrants.
The gun shop's proprietor, the name of whose shop might indicate familiarity with Arthurian legend, is on trial here, accused of selling at least 650 weapons, including AK-47 rifles, in small lots to "straw buyers" — persons who illegally pass on the weapons to the cartels, thereby fueling the violence that killed more than 6,000 Mexicans last year. That was more than 2,000 above the 2007 toll and fewer than will die if the rate of killing so far this year continues. (U.S. military fatalities in Iraq in six years number 4,249.) Fortunately, most of the dead are members of the warring cartels.
The prosecution of the proprietor is part of the U.S. attempt to stop the southward flow of weapons and bulk currency while Mexico combats the northward flow of drugs and of human beings brought by "coyotes." Although almost all the cartels' weapons come from the United States, the cartels are generating upward of $15 billion annually from drugs, human trafficking and extortion. So they will find ways to get guns — and grenades and other military weapons — for their internecine disputes about control over routes for smuggling drugs and people.
Ah, yes, the "American gun dealers/gun shows/nefarious private gun owners of ill repute are arming the Mexican cartels" meme. This has been trumpeted as the reason for all manner of new restrictions on honest folks such as you and me.
The principal advocate of this theme is Eric Holder, our new Attorney General whose appointment the NRA found it inconvenient to resist. That a nominal conservative like George Will bought into the lie is disconcerting but not startling.
One problem, though. (And I wonder if George will be issuing a retraction.) Something happened on the way to foregone conclusion. X-Caliber's owner was just set free by the federal judge in the case.
Reuters reports it this way.
Arizona judge dismisses charges in gunrunning case
By Tim Gaynor
PHOENIX (Reuters) - An Arizona judge threw out criminal charges Wednesday against a gun dealer accused of knowingly selling weapons to smugglers shopping for Mexican drug cartels, after he ruled the prosecutor's evidence was flawed.
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Robert Gottsfield issued a directed verdict of not guilty in the trial of George Iknadosian, 47, the owner of X-Caliber guns in Phoenix.
Prosecutors alleged Iknadosian sold hundreds of AK-47 assault rifles and other guns to third-party buyers for the cartels in Mexico, where 6,000 people were killed in drug violence last year.
Curbing spiraling drug cartel violence is a top concern for authorities in the United States and Mexico, where nine out of 10 guns recovered from crime scenes are traced back to U.S. gun dealers.
The case was the most significant to date brought by U.S. prosecutors seeking to curb the illegal flow of arms south of the border.
Gottsfield dismissed the case on the grounds that the prosecutors had not proven the third-party buyers, or "straw purchasers," had misrepresented their identities when buying the guns.
"There is no proof whatsoever that any prohibited possessor ended up with the firearms," he said in a ruling.
Since 2006, Mexico has sent tens of thousands of troops to fight powerful cocaine cartels locked in a bloody war for control of lucrative cross-border smuggling routes to the United States.
U.S. Senate lawmakers are to hold hearings in coming weeks to assess the ability of U.S. security forces to handle the rise in crime on the U.S. side of the border related to Mexican traffickers.
Mexican authorities have ordered thousands of additional troops to restore order in Ciudad Juarez -- just south of El Paso, Texas -- where more than 2,000 people have been killed since the start of last year.
And here is David Hardy's take on it:
Charges against X-Caliber Guns dismissed
Posted by David Hardy · 19 March 2009 09:13 AM
This is a strange case. The Arizona Attorney General (not ATF) brought State charges against a Phoenix-area gun dealer, claiming he'd supplied over 700 guns to Mexican drug cartels.
And the AG loses on a directed verdict -- meaning the judge finds that the evidence is nonexistent: no rational juror could find for the prosecution.
And then the AG's office says it will appeal. ???? Ever hear of double jeopardy? He was on trial, jeopardy clearly attached by any standard (I forget the AZ rule, but jeopardy usually attaches when the jury is empanelled or when the first witness begins testimony, and a motion for DV is made when the prosecution finishes its case, much later), and he can't be retried.
UPDATE: here's the ruling, in pdf. The State charges were under the "scheme or artifice" statute, and the court says that materiality is a requirement there (in the typical case, that it was something where if the person knew the truth they'd not buy, or otherwise would act differently), and the court notes that the prosecution was unable to prove a single gun wound up in the hands of someone who couldn't legally possess it. Sounds like a pretty big gap between press reports and the evidence.
"Strange case" indeed. But maybe not so strange. Agencies need headlines, so members of an agency provide them. I suppose we should be grateful that they didn't burn down his house, church and family while they were about it.
This has been the principal case anti-gunners use as proof their narrative about Mexican drug violence is correct. Except now it is not.
So, when can we expect the retraction, Mr. Holder? George? Brady Bunch? VPC? Any of you blood dancers want to weigh in here?
H/T sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com
the Posse Comitatus Act and the recent killing spree
What Happened in Samson
Earlier this month, a crazed man went on a murderous rampage in southern Alabama. Along a 20-mile route across two counties, 28-year-old Michael McClendon killed eleven people, including members of his family and strangers. The crime spree finally came to an end when McClendon took his own life, after an exchange of gunfire with local police.
Investigating seven separate crime scenes along McClendon's route, area police and sheriff's departments were quickly overwhelmed. Desperate for extra manpower to handle "ordinary" law enforcement duties, Geneva County Sheriff Greg Ward reached out to his military counterparts at nearby Fort Rucker.
He knew that earlier in the day, a Lieutenant Colonel from the post left an offer of assistance with a local 9-1-1 dispatcher. "We're here if you need us," said the officer, who has not been identified. Military Times reports the Army official offered generators, lights and other equipment--if needed by local authorities.
After Sheriff Ward made his call, Fort Rucker responded by dispatching a force of 24 military policemen, led by the provost marshal, the installation's senior law enforcement officer. Over the hours that followed, the MPs handled functions like traffic control, allowing civilian police to focus on the killing spree.
While their effort was commendable, it was almost certainly illegal, and could result in the prosecution of senior MPs who participated in the operation. The Posse Comitatus Act largely bans active duty military and Title 10 National Guard units from providing law enforcement functions in the United States, except when it is expressly authorized by the Constitution and Congress.
The approval chain goes something like this: local officials ask for military support through their governor, who forwards the request to the White House. With the commander-in-chief's approval, the Pentagon then provides forces to the local area.
But the support provided in Samson was never approved through the chain-of-command. A spokesman for Alabama Governor Bob Riley says the state never received a request for assistance. Ditto for the White House and the Pentagon. The MP deployment from Fort Rucker was (apparently) coordinated at the local level, raising serious legal questions.
In fact, the issues are so sensitive that the Commander of the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) has ordered an investigation. General Martin Dempsey wants to determine how the offer for equipment support became a request for military police--a request that was quickly filled, without notification of the proper authorities. TRADOC is the parent command for Fort Rucker, the home of Army aviation training.
Sheriff Ward's admission fills in one important piece of the investigative puzzle. But we still don't know who approved his request at Fort Rucker, and sent those MPs on their mission. Someone at the post needs to stand up and take responsibility, and help bring this matter to a close.
While some view this incident in conspiratorial terms, it appears to be nothing more than a local sheriff who requested help from a military base--and MPs who tried to provide the assistance, without considering the over-arching legal considerations.
But that doesn't excuse the mistake. There are reasons the military's role in "civilian" law enforcement is limited, and those divisions should be preserved. Apparently, there is also a need for refresher training on how the approval process works, on both sides of the equation.
And finally, perhaps someone ought to devise a "flattened" or streamlined process for requesting (and approving) military assistance. The murder spree in south Alabama unfolded quickly, and with only a handful of deputies, Sheriff Ward and the local police chiefs had more than they could handle. A refined approval process could have delivered needed support more quickly--and without the legal concerns that prompted General Dempsey's investigation.
H/T Spook 86 formerspook.blogspot.com
Earlier this month, a crazed man went on a murderous rampage in southern Alabama. Along a 20-mile route across two counties, 28-year-old Michael McClendon killed eleven people, including members of his family and strangers. The crime spree finally came to an end when McClendon took his own life, after an exchange of gunfire with local police.
Investigating seven separate crime scenes along McClendon's route, area police and sheriff's departments were quickly overwhelmed. Desperate for extra manpower to handle "ordinary" law enforcement duties, Geneva County Sheriff Greg Ward reached out to his military counterparts at nearby Fort Rucker.
He knew that earlier in the day, a Lieutenant Colonel from the post left an offer of assistance with a local 9-1-1 dispatcher. "We're here if you need us," said the officer, who has not been identified. Military Times reports the Army official offered generators, lights and other equipment--if needed by local authorities.
After Sheriff Ward made his call, Fort Rucker responded by dispatching a force of 24 military policemen, led by the provost marshal, the installation's senior law enforcement officer. Over the hours that followed, the MPs handled functions like traffic control, allowing civilian police to focus on the killing spree.
While their effort was commendable, it was almost certainly illegal, and could result in the prosecution of senior MPs who participated in the operation. The Posse Comitatus Act largely bans active duty military and Title 10 National Guard units from providing law enforcement functions in the United States, except when it is expressly authorized by the Constitution and Congress.
The approval chain goes something like this: local officials ask for military support through their governor, who forwards the request to the White House. With the commander-in-chief's approval, the Pentagon then provides forces to the local area.
But the support provided in Samson was never approved through the chain-of-command. A spokesman for Alabama Governor Bob Riley says the state never received a request for assistance. Ditto for the White House and the Pentagon. The MP deployment from Fort Rucker was (apparently) coordinated at the local level, raising serious legal questions.
In fact, the issues are so sensitive that the Commander of the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) has ordered an investigation. General Martin Dempsey wants to determine how the offer for equipment support became a request for military police--a request that was quickly filled, without notification of the proper authorities. TRADOC is the parent command for Fort Rucker, the home of Army aviation training.
Sheriff Ward's admission fills in one important piece of the investigative puzzle. But we still don't know who approved his request at Fort Rucker, and sent those MPs on their mission. Someone at the post needs to stand up and take responsibility, and help bring this matter to a close.
While some view this incident in conspiratorial terms, it appears to be nothing more than a local sheriff who requested help from a military base--and MPs who tried to provide the assistance, without considering the over-arching legal considerations.
But that doesn't excuse the mistake. There are reasons the military's role in "civilian" law enforcement is limited, and those divisions should be preserved. Apparently, there is also a need for refresher training on how the approval process works, on both sides of the equation.
And finally, perhaps someone ought to devise a "flattened" or streamlined process for requesting (and approving) military assistance. The murder spree in south Alabama unfolded quickly, and with only a handful of deputies, Sheriff Ward and the local police chiefs had more than they could handle. A refined approval process could have delivered needed support more quickly--and without the legal concerns that prompted General Dempsey's investigation.
H/T Spook 86 formerspook.blogspot.com
What we Saw and What the Iranians Saw.
http://www.lindasog.com/archives/2009/03/we_saw_they_saw.html
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Is the Govt Responsible for your Protection? Part 2
Part Two of great post from thesmallestminority.blogspot.com
Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection, Part IIIn Part 1 I used the transcript of the Warren v. District of Columbia decision to illustrate that the courts have uniformly held that the State (municipal, county, State or Federal) has no obligation to protect individuals, just the community at large.Were you shocked? (Well, if you're a gun nut like me, probably not. But John and Jane Q. Public probably would be.)"Why," you might ask "would the state not be liable for failure to protect?" The answer might be uncomfortable, John & Jane. First, it's logistically impossible for the police to be everywhere. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics there were about 650,000 police officers nationwide in municipal, county, and state forces in 1996. Of these, approximately 64% are "responding officers". Divide that by three shifts, and it means that there are about 140,000 police natiowide available to respond to a call at any time. And things haven't changed that much in the intervening years. The U.S. population is about 280,000,000. That's one cop on the beat for every 2,000 of us. Not good odds.And because the state can't afford to be. If the State was liable for not protecting every individual from crime, the lawsuits would bankrupt the State in no time. But this brings up a really ugly reality - one that is well illustrated in the dissenting opinion in Riss v. New York, which I will quote in whole from:
"Linda Riss, an attractive young woman, was for more than six months terrorized by a rejected suitor well known to the courts of this State, one Burton Pugach. This miscreant, masquerading as a respectable attorney, repeatedly threatened to have Linda killed or maimed if she did not yield to him: "If I can't have you, no one else will have you, and when I get through with you, no one else will want you". In fear for her life, she went to those charged by law with the duty of preserving and safeguarding the lives of the citizens and residents of this State. Linda's repeated and almost pathetic pleas for aid were received with little more than indifference. Whatever help she was given was not commensurate with the identifiable danger. On June 14, 1959 Linda became engaged to another man. At a party held to celebrate the event, she received a phone call warning her that it was her "last chance". Completely distraught, she called the police, begging for help, but was refused. The next day Pugach carried out his dire threats in the very manner he had foretold by having a hired thug throw lye in Linda's face. Linda was blinded in one eye, lost a good portion of her vision in the other, and her face was permanently scarred. After the assault the authorities concluded that there was some basis for Linda's fears, and for the next three and one-half years, she was given around-the-clock protection." (My emphasis)A lot of good that did her.
"Linda has turned to the courts of this State for redress, asking that the city be held liable in damages for its negligent failure to protect her from harm. With compelling logic, she can point out that, if a stranger, who had absolutely no obligation to aid her, had offered her assistance, and thereafter Burton Pugach was able to injure her as a result of the negligence of the volunteer, the courts would certainly require him to pay damages. (Restatement, 2d, Torts, § 323.) Why then should the city, whose duties are imposed by law and include the prevention of crime (New York City Charter, § 435) and, consequently, extend far beyond that of the Good Samaritan, not be responsible? If a private detective acts carelessly, no one would deny that a jury could find such conduct unacceptable. Why then is the city not required to live up to at least the same minimal standards of professional competence which would be demanded of a private detective?""Yeah! Why not!?"Because as I pointed out, the City couldn't afford to pay for all those lawsuits. They have a hard enough time making the budget as it is."So why," you might ask yourself, "didn't Linda do something to defend herself?" And here's the answer, from that same decision:
Linda's reasoning seems so eminently sensible that surely it must come as a shock to her and to every citizen to hear the city argue and to learn that this court decides that the city has no duty to provide police protection to any given individual. What makes the city's position particularly difficult to understand is that, in conformity to the dictates of the law, Linda did not carry any weapon for self-defense (former Penal Law, § 1897). Thus, by a rather bitter irony she was required to rely for protection on the City of New York which now denies all responsibility to her." (My emphasis)She was denied the means to defend herself, by a City that had no legal responsibility to defend her.And that, boys and girls, is what the practical result of "gun control" is. Denial of the means to defend yourself, while not providing any other layer of real protection.St. George Tucker in his 1803 book Blackstone's Commentaries - a review of American law - said this about the Second Amendment:
This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. . . . The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty." (My emphasis)St. George Tucker called the right of self-defense "the first law of nature," and he was not alone. Yet the State (in all its forms, not just the one we live under) has always worked to ensure that the general public has as little ability to defend itself as possible, rendering the populace supplicant to the State for protection that it may or may not bestow at its whim.The Second Amendment isn't about hunting, or target shooting, or even primarily about self-defense against the average criminal. It's about self-defense against government tyranny. But so long as it exists, the others follow logically.YOU are responsible for your protection. No one else can be made to be.So what am I advocating? That the government make a public announcement that they aren't capable of protecting people, and besides, it isn't their job anyway, and that everybody would be well-advised to start carrying guns in a big hurry? (I was asked that question, verbatim, once.)No.Let's take a few minutes and discuss "the proper role of government."In all my reading, at one time I found this link having to do with that very question. It’s an essay on the subject by Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture. He has a lot to say on the matter, some with which I concur, some I don’t, but thought-provoking nonetheless:
"It is generally agreed that the most important single function of government is to secure the rights and freedoms of individual citizens. But, what are those right? And what is their source?"There are only two possible sources. Rights are either God-given as part of the Divine Plan, or they are granted by government as part of the political plan. Reason, necessity, tradition and religious convictions all lead me to accept the divine origin of these rights. If we accept the premise that human rights are granted by government, then we must be willing to accept the corollary that they can be denied by government."…Frederick Bastiat, phrased it so succinctly," 'Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.' "Well, not being a “believer”, I disagree with God being the source of individual rights, but I certainly reject the premise that rights are “granted” by government. As to accepting the corollary that rights can be denied by government – certainly they can – so long as the People allow it. And I’ve said elsewhere, a “right” is what the overwhelming majority of a society believes it is. Taft continues:
"In a primitive state, there is no doubt that each man would be justified in using force, if necessary, to defend himself against physical harm, against theft of the fruits of his labor, and against enslavement of another."Indeed, the early pioneers found that a great deal of their time and energy was being spent doing all three – defending themselves, their property and their liberty – in what properly was called the “Lawless West.” In order for man to prosper, he cannot afford to spend his time constantly guarding his family, his fields, and his property against attack and theft, so he joins together with his neighbors and hires a sheriff. At this precise moment, government is born. The individual citizens delegate to the sheriff their unquestionable right to protect themselves. The sheriff now does for them only what they had a right to do for themselves – nothing more."But the sheriff's not responsible for doing that job for everybody all the time. The law says so. Even if he were held legally responsible, logistically it is impossible to accomplish everywhere, all the time. He can only do the best he humanly can, because even though he represents the power of government, he’s a human being just like the rest of us with all attendant flaws.However, Benson’s phrasing here is illustrative:
"The individual citizens delegate to the sheriff their unquestionable right to protect themselves. The sheriff now does for them only what they had a right to do for themselves – nothing more."I would not have used "delegate" in that sentence, nor would I have expressed it as "what they had a right to do for themselves." "Delegate" implies a surrender of the right, and "had" reinforces that implication.Instead, I think we extend to law-enforcement the power necessary to protect us (as best they can), while still retaining that right for ourselves. It isn’t a matter of yeilding a right to a governmental authority, it’s a matter of employing government to enhance our safety above what we are able to do for ourselves alone. All-in-all a "proper role of government".So no, I don’t want the government to come out and proclaim that they cannot protect us, because by and large that’s not the case. What I do want is for the populace to understand the government's limitations in that capacity. That fact has a large bearing on the right to arms, and a much larger bearing on the responsibilities of citizens. If they are not aware of the facts, then they cannot make reasonable decisions. In programming terms: GIGO. And there’s a lot of "garbage in".Regardless of why people commit crime, active resistance to it is the only way to stop them during the commission. Relying solely on the police for that active resistance makes the job of the criminal easier and safer, as the residents of England have come to discover. Robert A. Heinlein wrote in Starship Troopers (and if you don't think it's a book on philosophy, you need to go read it):
"What is 'moral sense'? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it."But the instinct to survive…can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. …’moral instinct' was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children, when you have them. Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale."There’s an essay (and now a book) by a man named Jeff Snyder entitled A Nation of Cowards. It’s not surprisingly received little attention – even among gun nuts – because what of Snyder declares. Snyder declares that that the crime problem cannot be addressed without confronting the moral responsibility of the intended victim. He states that taking responsibility for one's life, family and community requires fighting back when threatened with violence.A friend of mine once said:
"The vast majority of people are good, decent "herbivores" who just wander around, harming nobody. Unfortunately, there are a small number of carnivores out there, who would prey upon the herbivores. The fact that some of the herbivores have the ability to defend themselves and others makes ALL herbivores safer, and only makes life appreciably more dangerous to the carnivores. I don't think there is a huge amount of violence out there....but there is SOME."I don't carry guns so that I can shoot people, I carry a gun so that if somebody tries to do something violent or bad, I can put a stop to the violence. The idea is actually one of being able to bring to bear overwhelming force in the face of force, so that the first person doesn't try to use force in the first place." Snyder insists that responsible citizens must be armed and must resist when confronted with crime. I don’t think that’s the case, myself. That’s your "Dodge City" scenario with a six-shooter on every hip.I think Snyder, Heinlein, and my friend all have legitimate points, though. The base instinct of all creatures is self-preservation. If confronted with crime, the natural base reaction is "cover your ass." However, we’re part of society, and ultimately a nation. If, as Heinlein put it, our 'moral sense' is educated to the point where we value something higher than ourselves, then "avoiding trouble" when it comes to you is immoral. It is your duty to resist, in defense of the rest of society.However, duty requires protecting yourself (self-preservation) and your society (which is, admittedly, a higher order of duty not everyone accepts), but duty does not require that you risk your life to do so. Duty includes serving on juries, and serving as witness in court, too, if that's what is required.My friend's example of the “good, decent herbivores” represents the majority of the population, and this majority is largely unaware that they are the ones responsible for their own safety. They depend on the police almost exclusively for their safety and protection from crime. In their fear of violence, they fear the other "herbivores" with guns, too. They do so because some gun owners are idiots, but mostly because they’re told that guns are the cause of crime, and they don’t know any better. They don’t accept that general citizens who are willing to resist crime are an asset, not a liability to society.So what am I advocating? I am advocating educating the citizens of our society as to their rights and attendant duties. That way they can make educated decisions as to their own protection, and that of their fellow citizens. Then if they decide that, for them, actively opposing crime is not an option, they won’t be so eager to deny the means to those who decide it’s the moral thing to do.In other words, I trust my fellow-man to make the right decision if given all the information.
Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection, Part IIIn Part 1 I used the transcript of the Warren v. District of Columbia decision to illustrate that the courts have uniformly held that the State (municipal, county, State or Federal) has no obligation to protect individuals, just the community at large.Were you shocked? (Well, if you're a gun nut like me, probably not. But John and Jane Q. Public probably would be.)"Why," you might ask "would the state not be liable for failure to protect?" The answer might be uncomfortable, John & Jane. First, it's logistically impossible for the police to be everywhere. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics there were about 650,000 police officers nationwide in municipal, county, and state forces in 1996. Of these, approximately 64% are "responding officers". Divide that by three shifts, and it means that there are about 140,000 police natiowide available to respond to a call at any time. And things haven't changed that much in the intervening years. The U.S. population is about 280,000,000. That's one cop on the beat for every 2,000 of us. Not good odds.And because the state can't afford to be. If the State was liable for not protecting every individual from crime, the lawsuits would bankrupt the State in no time. But this brings up a really ugly reality - one that is well illustrated in the dissenting opinion in Riss v. New York, which I will quote in whole from:
"Linda Riss, an attractive young woman, was for more than six months terrorized by a rejected suitor well known to the courts of this State, one Burton Pugach. This miscreant, masquerading as a respectable attorney, repeatedly threatened to have Linda killed or maimed if she did not yield to him: "If I can't have you, no one else will have you, and when I get through with you, no one else will want you". In fear for her life, she went to those charged by law with the duty of preserving and safeguarding the lives of the citizens and residents of this State. Linda's repeated and almost pathetic pleas for aid were received with little more than indifference. Whatever help she was given was not commensurate with the identifiable danger. On June 14, 1959 Linda became engaged to another man. At a party held to celebrate the event, she received a phone call warning her that it was her "last chance". Completely distraught, she called the police, begging for help, but was refused. The next day Pugach carried out his dire threats in the very manner he had foretold by having a hired thug throw lye in Linda's face. Linda was blinded in one eye, lost a good portion of her vision in the other, and her face was permanently scarred. After the assault the authorities concluded that there was some basis for Linda's fears, and for the next three and one-half years, she was given around-the-clock protection." (My emphasis)A lot of good that did her.
"Linda has turned to the courts of this State for redress, asking that the city be held liable in damages for its negligent failure to protect her from harm. With compelling logic, she can point out that, if a stranger, who had absolutely no obligation to aid her, had offered her assistance, and thereafter Burton Pugach was able to injure her as a result of the negligence of the volunteer, the courts would certainly require him to pay damages. (Restatement, 2d, Torts, § 323.) Why then should the city, whose duties are imposed by law and include the prevention of crime (New York City Charter, § 435) and, consequently, extend far beyond that of the Good Samaritan, not be responsible? If a private detective acts carelessly, no one would deny that a jury could find such conduct unacceptable. Why then is the city not required to live up to at least the same minimal standards of professional competence which would be demanded of a private detective?""Yeah! Why not!?"Because as I pointed out, the City couldn't afford to pay for all those lawsuits. They have a hard enough time making the budget as it is."So why," you might ask yourself, "didn't Linda do something to defend herself?" And here's the answer, from that same decision:
Linda's reasoning seems so eminently sensible that surely it must come as a shock to her and to every citizen to hear the city argue and to learn that this court decides that the city has no duty to provide police protection to any given individual. What makes the city's position particularly difficult to understand is that, in conformity to the dictates of the law, Linda did not carry any weapon for self-defense (former Penal Law, § 1897). Thus, by a rather bitter irony she was required to rely for protection on the City of New York which now denies all responsibility to her." (My emphasis)She was denied the means to defend herself, by a City that had no legal responsibility to defend her.And that, boys and girls, is what the practical result of "gun control" is. Denial of the means to defend yourself, while not providing any other layer of real protection.St. George Tucker in his 1803 book Blackstone's Commentaries - a review of American law - said this about the Second Amendment:
This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. . . . The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty." (My emphasis)St. George Tucker called the right of self-defense "the first law of nature," and he was not alone. Yet the State (in all its forms, not just the one we live under) has always worked to ensure that the general public has as little ability to defend itself as possible, rendering the populace supplicant to the State for protection that it may or may not bestow at its whim.The Second Amendment isn't about hunting, or target shooting, or even primarily about self-defense against the average criminal. It's about self-defense against government tyranny. But so long as it exists, the others follow logically.YOU are responsible for your protection. No one else can be made to be.So what am I advocating? That the government make a public announcement that they aren't capable of protecting people, and besides, it isn't their job anyway, and that everybody would be well-advised to start carrying guns in a big hurry? (I was asked that question, verbatim, once.)No.Let's take a few minutes and discuss "the proper role of government."In all my reading, at one time I found this link having to do with that very question. It’s an essay on the subject by Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture. He has a lot to say on the matter, some with which I concur, some I don’t, but thought-provoking nonetheless:
"It is generally agreed that the most important single function of government is to secure the rights and freedoms of individual citizens. But, what are those right? And what is their source?"There are only two possible sources. Rights are either God-given as part of the Divine Plan, or they are granted by government as part of the political plan. Reason, necessity, tradition and religious convictions all lead me to accept the divine origin of these rights. If we accept the premise that human rights are granted by government, then we must be willing to accept the corollary that they can be denied by government."…Frederick Bastiat, phrased it so succinctly," 'Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.' "Well, not being a “believer”, I disagree with God being the source of individual rights, but I certainly reject the premise that rights are “granted” by government. As to accepting the corollary that rights can be denied by government – certainly they can – so long as the People allow it. And I’ve said elsewhere, a “right” is what the overwhelming majority of a society believes it is. Taft continues:
"In a primitive state, there is no doubt that each man would be justified in using force, if necessary, to defend himself against physical harm, against theft of the fruits of his labor, and against enslavement of another."Indeed, the early pioneers found that a great deal of their time and energy was being spent doing all three – defending themselves, their property and their liberty – in what properly was called the “Lawless West.” In order for man to prosper, he cannot afford to spend his time constantly guarding his family, his fields, and his property against attack and theft, so he joins together with his neighbors and hires a sheriff. At this precise moment, government is born. The individual citizens delegate to the sheriff their unquestionable right to protect themselves. The sheriff now does for them only what they had a right to do for themselves – nothing more."But the sheriff's not responsible for doing that job for everybody all the time. The law says so. Even if he were held legally responsible, logistically it is impossible to accomplish everywhere, all the time. He can only do the best he humanly can, because even though he represents the power of government, he’s a human being just like the rest of us with all attendant flaws.However, Benson’s phrasing here is illustrative:
"The individual citizens delegate to the sheriff their unquestionable right to protect themselves. The sheriff now does for them only what they had a right to do for themselves – nothing more."I would not have used "delegate" in that sentence, nor would I have expressed it as "what they had a right to do for themselves." "Delegate" implies a surrender of the right, and "had" reinforces that implication.Instead, I think we extend to law-enforcement the power necessary to protect us (as best they can), while still retaining that right for ourselves. It isn’t a matter of yeilding a right to a governmental authority, it’s a matter of employing government to enhance our safety above what we are able to do for ourselves alone. All-in-all a "proper role of government".So no, I don’t want the government to come out and proclaim that they cannot protect us, because by and large that’s not the case. What I do want is for the populace to understand the government's limitations in that capacity. That fact has a large bearing on the right to arms, and a much larger bearing on the responsibilities of citizens. If they are not aware of the facts, then they cannot make reasonable decisions. In programming terms: GIGO. And there’s a lot of "garbage in".Regardless of why people commit crime, active resistance to it is the only way to stop them during the commission. Relying solely on the police for that active resistance makes the job of the criminal easier and safer, as the residents of England have come to discover. Robert A. Heinlein wrote in Starship Troopers (and if you don't think it's a book on philosophy, you need to go read it):
"What is 'moral sense'? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it."But the instinct to survive…can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. …’moral instinct' was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children, when you have them. Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale."There’s an essay (and now a book) by a man named Jeff Snyder entitled A Nation of Cowards. It’s not surprisingly received little attention – even among gun nuts – because what of Snyder declares. Snyder declares that that the crime problem cannot be addressed without confronting the moral responsibility of the intended victim. He states that taking responsibility for one's life, family and community requires fighting back when threatened with violence.A friend of mine once said:
"The vast majority of people are good, decent "herbivores" who just wander around, harming nobody. Unfortunately, there are a small number of carnivores out there, who would prey upon the herbivores. The fact that some of the herbivores have the ability to defend themselves and others makes ALL herbivores safer, and only makes life appreciably more dangerous to the carnivores. I don't think there is a huge amount of violence out there....but there is SOME."I don't carry guns so that I can shoot people, I carry a gun so that if somebody tries to do something violent or bad, I can put a stop to the violence. The idea is actually one of being able to bring to bear overwhelming force in the face of force, so that the first person doesn't try to use force in the first place." Snyder insists that responsible citizens must be armed and must resist when confronted with crime. I don’t think that’s the case, myself. That’s your "Dodge City" scenario with a six-shooter on every hip.I think Snyder, Heinlein, and my friend all have legitimate points, though. The base instinct of all creatures is self-preservation. If confronted with crime, the natural base reaction is "cover your ass." However, we’re part of society, and ultimately a nation. If, as Heinlein put it, our 'moral sense' is educated to the point where we value something higher than ourselves, then "avoiding trouble" when it comes to you is immoral. It is your duty to resist, in defense of the rest of society.However, duty requires protecting yourself (self-preservation) and your society (which is, admittedly, a higher order of duty not everyone accepts), but duty does not require that you risk your life to do so. Duty includes serving on juries, and serving as witness in court, too, if that's what is required.My friend's example of the “good, decent herbivores” represents the majority of the population, and this majority is largely unaware that they are the ones responsible for their own safety. They depend on the police almost exclusively for their safety and protection from crime. In their fear of violence, they fear the other "herbivores" with guns, too. They do so because some gun owners are idiots, but mostly because they’re told that guns are the cause of crime, and they don’t know any better. They don’t accept that general citizens who are willing to resist crime are an asset, not a liability to society.So what am I advocating? I am advocating educating the citizens of our society as to their rights and attendant duties. That way they can make educated decisions as to their own protection, and that of their fellow citizens. Then if they decide that, for them, actively opposing crime is not an option, they won’t be so eager to deny the means to those who decide it’s the moral thing to do.In other words, I trust my fellow-man to make the right decision if given all the information.
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