Yay For White Privilege!

The Baltimore Sun publishes a piece by a woman whose judgment is... remarkable.

I'm less afraid of the criminals wielding guns in Baltimore, I declared as we discussed the issue, than I am by those permitted gun owners. I know how to stay out of the line of Baltimore's illegal gunfire; I have the luxury of being white and middle class in a largely segregated city that reserves most of its shootings for poor, black neighborhoods overtaken by "the game."

So... segregation is a good thing now, from the white liberal perspective? 'You know, I'm not endorsing it, but it does keep me safe...'

Also, by the way since her framing story happens in Florida: those permitted gun owners in Florida are extremely well-behaved.

“Since 1987, the state of Florida has issued 2.5 million concealed-carry permits,” Raso says in his latest opinion piece for the NRA News network. “Of those, only 168 people have committed firearms crimes. That’s .00672 percent of the total amount issued.”*

It's not a bad idea to discuss gun safety with the parents of your children's friends, of course. You can make an informed judgment about whether you want your kids playing with them based on the outcomes of those conversations. What she wants instead is universal gun registration worked into a "searchable database" that would identify gun owners for her convenience -- or that of criminals who want to steal guns, or government officials who want to round them up. That's a much less reasonable proposal.

Marjah Update

Former SEAL Congressman demands answers on how our forces got trapped in Marjah for hours without relief.

Happy Birthday

NYT Writers on Property and the West

First of all, you don't really own anything, so get that out of your heads.

An idea common among conservatives — and surely an assumption of the protesters in Oregon — is that the past fully explains private property. For example, perhaps you paid for your phone or were given it as a gift. That’s why you are entitled to it. So in general we might say that if you paid for something or were given something, then you are entitled to it.

But is that true? Suppose I steal your car and sell it to my friend Dugald. Is Dugald entitled to the car because he paid for it? You probably want to say “no.” Buying something doesn’t give you entitlement unless the seller was entitled to the thing first. So a transfer of property from one person to another is rendered illegitimate if the seller got the property through unjust means.

But now think back to your smartphone. What are the chances that the money you used to buy your phone can be traced backward through your employer, your employer’s customers, and so on back through history without passing through the hands of a serious injustice? Slim to none. The same can be said for the seller’s side of the transaction. Chances are excellent that your phone arrived in your hand only after the exploitation of workers, abuse of the environment, theft, fraud, human trafficking, or any number of deal-breaking injustices....

So despite its appeal to conservatives, the idea that history alone explains private property is hard to make good on. On this theory, the mere fact that we were given things or paid for things won’t determine whether we are entitled to those things. At worst the historical theory implies that no one is entitled to any private property. And if our property isn’t legitimately private, it’s hard to see how it’s unjust for the government or anyone else to take it from us.

Got that? It's hard to see how it's unjust for "the government or anyone else" to take your property.

So, should the government own all the land out West? Absolutely -- unless we give it back to the Native Americans.

Righteousness

AVI notices a change in the language.

I wonder what the shift portends. At one point it was helpful to degrade the very idea of righteousness as a means of advancing behaviors that were considered anti-social by society. Yet now they find that they need it, as a means of shaming a public that strongly disagrees with them on the issue they're currently devoted to advancing.

Being Stalked By A Predator

Want to rob a 65 year old woman?

The 65-year-old woman who was Bontaites’ alleged intended victim, told police she had stopped at Mobil on the Run, 1050 South Willow St., around 11:30 p.m. after leaving work. She got back on South Willow Street and stopped at a traffic light when she noticed a dark-colored sedan behind her. She told police she had “heightened concern” as the vehicle followed her into her apartment complex parking lot at 640 South Porter St.

The woman entered her apartment complex and noticed multiple vacant parking spots, so she parked as close to her building as possible hoping the other vehicle would vacate the area. Instead, the sedan parked close to her. She exited her vehicle and walked toward her apartment building. She immediately heard a vehicle door close and the sound of a person quickly walking up behind her.

How do you think this story turns out?

Illegal Guns in Chicago

From the city where there were nearly 470 murders last year, a story about the (already completely illegal) guns favored by the city's gangsters.

From that hierarchy, a few patterns emerge. The city’s criminals, for instance, prefer semiautomatic pistols to revolvers and generally seek out cheap junk guns. What’s also notable is the type of gun that doesn’t appear among the top models seized. In 2014, Chicago police recovered only three assault weapons associated with criminal incidents. “Often there’s a misimpression about the importance of assault guns and assault weapons, and it’s important to point out how rare that is,” says Phillip Cook, an economist at Duke University who studies underground gun markets. “The guns being used in Chicago for crime and murder are by and large very ordinary pistols.”

Indeed, they're not even especially powerful pistols, if you take a look at the chart. Aside from the one .357 Magnum, none of these firearms are capable of defeating even lightweight IIA body armor. The .357 can be stopped by full scale Type II armor. Glancing at a popular police body armor online store, it appears that they chiefly sell the even stronger IIIA and III armors.

So we have the tools we need to deal with this particular threat. Neither new laws nor new tools are necessary. As the NRA recently pointed out, the Federal government even has the laws it needs to send these drug gangsters away for as much as a decade each if they are caught with a gun.



This should be a solvable problem with existing laws. If anything, Chicago should move to make it easier for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves rather than looking for new restrictions on guns. They have the tools and the laws they need. We just need the President to do his actual job, rather than scheming for new restrictions on the rights of honest Americans.

Viking Stuff

Lars Walker is surrounded.

Woah

Headline: "Pentagon may upgrade hundreds of troops to possible Medals of Honor."

Lower standards across the board.

'A Depressing Election We Need'

The Washington Examiner hosts a comment on the current election:

For instance, the candidates leading the polls in either party — Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, Donald Trump for the Republicans — are not just viewed unfavorably by voters overall; they are the most unfavorably viewed by Americans out of all of the candidates running.

To put this in context, during the entire slog of the 2012 election, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney sustained a brand as unfavorable as Clinton or Trump. John McCain, John Kerry and George W. Bush all enjoyed "favorables" of over 50 percent during their presidential campaigns, even though two out of the three were ultimately never elected president. Today, only one out of four Americans think the country is on the right track. Americans continue to express deep economic anxiety, and the president's job approval remains low, with particular disapproval for handling of foreign policy....

The depression of voters seems like nothing to celebrate, and a Clinton vs. Trump election is not one I'd savor. Disgust and disdain at Washington may manifest itself in a whole host of ways, for good or for ill. But like many illnesses, those unpleasant symptoms are often part and parcel of the process of being cured.

What a depressing campaign this has been. But it also just may lead to the election we need.

What's the cure, then? An election between Clinton and Trump would suggest what therapy? I think I know, but it isn't one any candidate is proposing.

Heavy Metal

A fellow I know is behind this campaign. He's not the one named in the article, but the one who suggested it to him.

A Liverpool professor has backed a campaign to rename a “super-heavy” periodic element in memory of Motorhead frontman Lemmy.

A petition is calling for one of four newly-discovered elements to be named “Lemmium” in tribute to the rock superstar, who died earlier this month.

More than 28,000 people have backed the campaign since it started two days ago.

You can sign the petition here.

When good sons go . . . military

Bookworm Room, who lives in Marin County surrounded by progressives, reports an odd development:  some of her hyper-progressive neighbors have sons who are choosing to join the military.  The parents are starting to change their attitudes.

The End of Christmas

The Last Day of Christmas is upon us. January 6th ordinarily is taken to mark the day that the Wise Men located Jesus, which is thus the point in the Christmas story that the world abroad first celebrated the lordship of the king of kings. This year today is officially 'the Wednesday after Epiphany Sunday,' but the date of 6 January remains an important anchor for that feast.

There are of course some differences among the several Christian traditions. It is not my wish to dwell upon those, but to wish everyone a Merry Christmas one last time. Until next year, I hope you have had a joyous feast and a moment for faith.

"What’s the Difference Between a Socialist and a Democrat"?

Chris Matthews asks Hillary Clinton, who can't answer. Apparently Matthews had already asked her puppet, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and received the same non-answer.

The question isn't hard to answer, so it's interesting that these figures are dancing around the answer.

A Socialist believes that, to the greatest possible degree, the means of economic production should be owned by the Public and not by individuals or corporations. Practically this means that the government should own the means of production as much as is practicable.

A Democrat believes that, to the greatest possible degree, power should be invested in the citizenry broadly considered, rather than in some elite. It is opposed to monarchy, aristocracy, but also technocratic systems in which judicial or lawyerly or scientific elites rule over us as our betters.

There is thus no necessary connection between the ideologies. One can be a non-democratic Socialist, as the Communists often were. One can be a Democratic Socialist, as European parties sometimes claim to be. And one can be a non-socialist Democrat, as in fact most American Democrats have historically been.

The connection between the two is nevertheless not accidental, even if it is not necessary. Aristotle explains in the Politics that democracy is government by the many (rather than the few or the one), and that the poor are always more numerous than the rich. One of the thing the poor tend to want from government, even in ancient Greece, is for it to redistribute wealth to them from those who have it currently.

Aristotle warns against this tendency strongly. It will destabilize the state, he says, for the rich to be deprived of both power and their property. They will respond by hiring mercenaries to overthrow the democracy, which will lead to the harms of political instability or war. On the other hand, in a system that is governed by an elite (an aristocracy, for example), redistribution of wealth is an important point of public policy. The poor must be made physically secure from starvation and the harms of poverty in order to support a state that denies them political power. They can cause an insurrection too if their interests are completely ignored by the powerful.

Thus, Socialism should be regarded as the sickness of Democrats. It is an illness to which they are particularly prone. That does not mean that Democrats are wrong to favor government by the many. It just means that the position entails certain risks which have to be guarded against faithfully. Other positions entail other risks, so it is not a unique failing of Democrats that such a risk exists. This one just happens to be the one to which they are especially likely to fall prey.

As, apparently, they are currently doing.

Stand Down Orders in Benghazi

Was there an order to 'stand down' in Benghazi? As we all know, it has been repeatedly denied by the government, which claims that no forces were available to respond and there were no stand down orders given.

The guys who were actually on the ground say it absolutely happened. (Advance to 7:10.)



Their opinion is that 13 Hours is unusually accurate for a war film. It certainly has the potential to be explosive. American Sniper proved to me that there's an appetite for this kind of movie. Let's hope it does well.

As Seen on Facebook

Marjah

More than a dozen U.S. Army special operations soldiers are trapped in Marjah, Afghanistan, taking cover in a compound surrounded by enemy fire and hostile Taliban fighters after a U.S. special operations solider was killed earlier in the day, senior U.S. defense officials told the media late Tuesday....

The joint U.S. and Afghan special operations team was sent to Marjah to clear the area of Taliban fighters, who have retaken most of the town since November.

There were nine airstrikes on Tuesday in support of a clearing operation.

I trust you know what to do.

"Scores of Women" Attacked in Germany

Just one of those things you have to accept in order to ensure the benefits of increasing diversity, I suppose.

“The government’s loss of control is not only taking place on the borders,” wrote Alexander Marguier, deputy editor in chief of the monthly political magazine Cicero, in its digital edition. “For whoever gives up control of who enters the country no longer has control over the consequences of this action.”

Indeed.

UPDATE: In Missouri, a woman has a different experience.

UPDATE: Germany will have much to reflect on this week.

UPDATE: So far, reflection is going predictably wrong.

On The Underlying Tensions in Oregon

A good piece on how Federal environmental policies are destroying traditional Western ways of life, such as ranching and mining. That's true in West Virginia, too, but out West the Federal government actually owns most of the land -- and it would like to own more.

The federal government owns more than half the land in the state, as it does across much of the West. It used to be routine for ranchers to get permits to graze cattle or cut timber or work mines — a way to make a living from the land.

Then came increasing environmental regulations, and the federal land became more for owls and sage grouse than for local people trying to feed their families, said Soper, 39, who lives 100 miles up the road in Bend.

We all agree that natural beauty is important, and the environment represents a kind of national treasure. But the culture of the West is also a kind of national treasure. The people might be self-sufficient, as once they were when they could own the land they worked.

To me this is a story much like the Yazoo land scandal, except that instead of selling the land to a corporation the government is refusing to sell to anyone. That policy ends up making citizens less free than they would be if they could own their own means of production, including the land on which they graze. While some national parks and refuges are a great idea, the West is vast -- vast enough that the government could do everything we'd want them to do without owning half or more of the land in these states.

The effect of government ownership of most of the land in your state is to reduce a large part of the citizenry from free landholders to tenet farmers subject to the whim of their landlords. It is to reduce the scope of human liberty substantially. Property ownership is one of the rights the Revolution was fought to protect -- indeed, for the many Founders who were politically aligned with John Locke, it was first among those rights. These policies put the liberty that comes with ownership out of reach, and along the way are crushing out of existence a traditional American culture of great nobility.

Should Conservatives Support "Industrial Scale" Clemency?

The American Conservative suggests that it would be both moral and practical to release many, many more prisoners than we do.

Why is it moral? For one reason, because we put too much faith in the law qua law.

In the United States, our civic religion is the Rule of Law—we have no monarchy, and we are less tribalist than more ethnically and religiously homogeneous nation-states. Instead the highest symbol of our nation is a legal document, with its own legalistic cult and rituals. To be sure, the rule of law is in many ways an ideal of rational order and equality without favoritism. But a spillover effect is the tendency to treat all legal codes as if they were handed down from Mount Sinai, no matter how unreasonable or cruel they may be.

Devotion to the Rule of Law has an ugly side in resentment of executive acts of mercy, at the level of practice and high theory. Immanuel Kant, often thought of as a Birkenstock-wearing human-rights guy, was one of the most vicious retributivists in the history of moral philosophy, an implacable opponent of royal clemency. In 1764, Milanese philosophe Cesare Beccaria argued that the same crimes must carry the same punishment regardless of the perpetrator’s rank or station, no exceptions—a radical proposition for its time. This sounds unobjectionable, but this Enlightenment universalism has had harsh ramifications in the American context where, combined with Puritan moral panics and the authoritarian heritage of slavery and Jim Crow, it has frequently made for a justice system with a tendency to degrade and “level down” to an egalitarian level of misery....

At the founding of the country, executive power was seen not as a violation of our self-image as a “nation of laws not men” but as a necessary and healthily legitimate part of any popular government. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 74: “the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered.” Without pardon power, “justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.” Justice John Marshall also upheld clemency as “an act of grace, proceeding from the power entrusted with the execution of the laws.”

Why is it practical? I'll cite just one argument here, though you can read the rest if you like:

Our incarcerated population is also aging rapidly, and though older prisoners have far lower recidivism rates, few states are availing themselves of geriatric release. For instance, Virginia in 2012 granted geriatric release to less than 1 percent of about 800 prisoners eligible, according to the state parole board. Meanwhile, as the Virginian Pilot reported, “during the same period, 84 inmates died in state prisons.” Running high-security nursing homes is neither compassionate nor fiscally sound—another reason to restore and expand clemency.

That seems like a reasonable case to me. Some prisoners ought to die in prison simply because of the magnitude of their crimes -- Charles Manson, perhaps. Others really shouldn't be in prison, even if they were pretty hard-core thugs as young men, because they pose no threat that would justify paying for both guarding them and caring for them in their age.

What's being asked for here is not pardons by and large, but clemency. They would remain under the disabilities associated with being a convicted felon. We just wouldn't be responsible for them.

Good idea?