The Mediocrity Of Our "Elites"

So, I am an old man, but not so old that I do not remember how it was, back when.  So it is that the piece by Kurt Schlichter today resonates with me.  Kurt Schlichter writes that All the People who Think They Are Better Than You Are Much, Much Worse.

Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.

We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.

...snip...

We know what America achieved under the old ruling class. It beat the Nazis – the real Nazis, not the fake bugaboo “Nazis” that the left labels everyone to the right of Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit. It fought through the Depression. It trashed the Democrat’s Jim Crow regime. It designed the ’65 Mustang, created the Big Mac and put a man on the moon. It crushed the dirty commies in the Cold War.

The old elite was not perfect, but at least you can point to some tics in the “WIN” column. Not so with the coterie of half-wits running our institutions today. It’s all check marks under “LOSS.” Iraq. The Wall Street Meltdown. Obamacare. Obama himself.

Oh, and then there’s Jeffrey Epstein.

I know there have always been scandals, but truly the record of achievements of the cast of clowns that pretend to know better than I how to live my life and spend my money is appallingly small.

The first small scale circuits were designed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I remember seeing people walking around with the earliest transistor radios.  (Indeed, I got one for Christmas one year, and it was a cherished item for many years after.  For those too young to remember, the transistor replaced the older vacuum tubes that had powered electronics for a generation. I can remember the television repair man coming to our house to replace worn out tubes in our black and white television set.)

Thus were born the first solid state electronics. Then came the early integrated circuits, when I was in college. I acquired, at considerable expense to me at the time, an early example of the new integrated circuitry in the form of a Hewlett Packard 45 calculator. It cost some $400 back in 1974. That was a lot of money for a college student to spend. I used the new calculator to study civil and structural engineering, things that are now not even spoken of as "technology," though of course without that technology, the so called "tech" stuff would not be possible. Imagine if you didn't have clean running water in your home, or paved roads, or if your home was a yurt built from sticks and animal skins. Amazon would be useless because there would be no trucks to deliver goods.  Yes, truck trailers are designed to carry the loads they do by engineers.  And we in turn stand on the shoulders of giants as well.

Young people today have little sense of history, or science and technology building upon itself.  As late as the early 1990s Mrs. PolyKahr and I ran around all over the place with no way to communicate with the other.  We didn't have cell phones, though mobile phones had been available for at least a decade by then.  What would the modern child do without a cell phone?

What the cast of clowns trying to run our lives do not realize is that the average man and woman doing things like plumbing, heavy equipment operating, working in a factory building goods for sale, and more have more in the way of useful accomplishments than Filonia Van Pantsuit or Pocahontas.   All they have really done is lie and cheat their way to wealth and power.  But an excessive desire for wealth and power is not a good look.  For better to have actually earned your wealth and power by...you know...serving real people with things they really want. 

Florida Man Denied Second Amendment Rights By Red Flag Law

Beth Baumann has a piece over at Townhall.com entitled Florida Man Lost His 2A Rights, Thanks To Red Flag Laws And Mistaken Identity. Baumann in turn refers to an Ammoland article which can be found here. Please read both articles.

Baumann's point in writing her piece is that here is the exact thing many of us feared, and have warned about.  A law abiding Concealed Carry permit holder has been disarmed because a court made a mistake.  Now he must prove to the courts satisfaction that he is not the guy they are looking to disarm.  And of course, disarming a person who has gone to the trouble of going though all of the hoops to obtain a Concealed Carry permit, and probably obeys all the places where one can not legally carry (thus requiring constant taking off and putting back on the gun, and risking an accidental discharge each time), is much easier than taking away a drug dealer's guns.  That drug dealer might well shoot back.

Meanwhile, nobody except Carpenter, of course, seemed shocked that in the United States his due process rights could be so easily violated.  Carpenter will have to prove his innocence after the fact.  I wonder if the complainant will show up in court?  And how much will it cost to go to court with competent counsel?  No requirement apparently for the State to pay even though they had a description of both the drug dealer and this Carpenter, and they could have seen immediately that the individual they were targeting was not the correct individual.

But then, this is the plan.  The Democrats don't plan to disarm us all at once, sending people into neighborhoods to collect all the guns.  No, instead they intend to take  them one by one, under color of law.  And apparently our Congress is unconcerned that all of this is entirely Unconstitutional.  It is as if they are saying "Constitution?  We don't need no stinking Constitution!"  And they will depend on the average gun owner not making a fuss because the few reports they hear about will be couched in the language of this person or that was a danger to himself or others.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, and I didn't even stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I seem to remember that there is a crime with which people can be charged for violating rights. Perhaps Mr. Carpenter could swear out a warrant against the people who denied him his rights? Or does a Federal prosecutor have to decide to take up the matter. I know where that would be heading.

How to Nullify the Second Amendment

David Codrea at the blog The War On Guns pointed me to a piece at Conservative Review entitled The same people who pushed for early release of gun felons now want to take guns without due process by Daniel Horowitz.

For every person who fits the profile of the El Paso shooter, there are likely thousands who fit the profile of Maurice Hill, the man arrested for shooting six cops in north Philadelphia yesterday. Based on a quick look at court documents from Philadelphia and Delaware Counties, Hill has a rap sheet dating back to 2001 that includes charges for illegal gun possession, drugs, driving offenses, assault, burglary, theft, robbery, kidnapping, and attempted murder. However, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, he was only “convicted six times on charges that involved illegal possession of guns, drug dealing, and aggravated assault.”

...snip...

Nope. Instead, they very people who have created the drive in the criminal justice system to let these people out of jail are pushing a war on guns for law-abiding people. Meanwhile, the criminals who illegally get guns every day in places like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago are never punished!

Most Americans understand that bad criminals do the most harm to public safety, not any single weapon or object. Yet the very people pushing a war on guns are the ones who support letting out dangerous criminal from prison. That begins with Lindsey Graham, who, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is now teaming up with Richard Blumenthal to push a “red flag” bill stripping guns from people without due process, without addressing the issue of locking up the actual dangerous people with criminal records. This is the “lock up the guns and let the criminals out” approach.

As Codrea rightly notes in the title to this posting, So It Can't Be About Crime Control... No, it can't. Which begs the question, what is it about?

Lindsay Grahamnesty may have been the hero of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, but just as a leopard can not change his spots, Graham has not changed his either. He has always been a Democrat disguised as a Republican doing the Democrats bidding. In other words, a RINO.  While Senator McCain was alive, of course, he palled around with John McCain because these two shared much in common. But neither would miss a chance to stab conservatives in the back if the opportunity presented itself. Now he wants to release gun felons while making as many normal Americans felons as possible. What a guy.

But then, you ask, what is it the Democrats want?  They want to create as much hate, discontent, and chaos as possible.  When society is at peace, and peaceful, nobody is seeking someone to "do something."  The Democrats want to create the conditions to have a majority of people crying for someone, anyone, to "do something," anything.  And of course here come the Democrats with their gun control bills, their Universal background checks, their Red Flag laws, their Ammunition restrictions, and every other thing they have dreamed up to limit the Second Amendment.

And why is that so important to Democrats?  In case you haven't notice, most Democrats, and I am sorry to say a lot of Republicans, hold a dim view of you and me.  They feel sure they know better how to live our lives than we do, and they are prepared to shove their ideas down our throats if they can just get us to give up our guns.

NFA 1934: A Massive Infringement Of Our Rights

William Sullivan explains How The Federal Government Nullified The Second Amendment To 'Ban' Automatic Firearms. Remember that the Second Amendment says that “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” What the Federal Government did was to use a subterfuge, a ruse that they were only taxing automatic weapons, not really banning them. In 1934, to attempt an outright ban might have roused the natives with pitch forks tar and feathers. Now, why the supreme court didn't squawk can perhaps be chalked up to the same type of events that seems to have upheld Obamacare.

Both Daniel Webster, and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall said that "The power to tax is the power to destroy."  Most of the legislators who passed the law, the President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the Justices of the Supreme Court would have been very aware of the truth of the quote.

This is the progressives’ magic trick, and some Americans fall for it due to a simple deficiency in human nature. For example, Chris Cuomo of CNN recently tweeted that “[t]here was no individual right” in the Second Amendment even “contemplated” until Antonin Scalia inferred the “individual right” in the Heller v. District of Columbia decision.

...snip...

This was a roundabout infringement upon Second Amendment rights that is somehow still championed by conservatives looking to score sensibility points with the left, and aligning with Cuomo’s position.

“Machine guns were outlawed because there was no need that justified the risk. Was that wrong, too?” Cuomo asks.

The short answer is, yes, that was wrong, too -- if the Second Amendment is the measure. And to be clear, the Second Amendment is the only sentence in the Constitution where an individual right to firearms is addressed.

I have made the point before that any time the government does not trust us, we should not trust the government. It means the government is doing something that will, as cited above, cause the natives to break out the pitchforks, tar and feathers.  I can not see how any intelligent person could not see through that ruse, and I suspect that the NRA at the time could see it too.  But the NRA actually thought that machine guns were too much for the average gun owner too.  The NRA had come a long way from its founding by Northern Civil War officers concerned about the lack of marksmanship by Americans.  But that is the state of the NRA:  they often compromise our rights because they lack the guts to stand up for them.

I believe the National Firearms Act of 1934 is a massive infringement of our right to bear arms, and should have been challenged at the time.  One of the things that make it difficult to challenge today is the fact that it has been on the books so long.  This will end up affecting the thinking of the Supremes.  And then there is the John Roberts factor to consider.  Roberts has become the new "swing" voter on the court, rendering Trump's picks for the court somewhat moot.

Now, I don't "need" a Thompson submachine gun, nor do I "need" a fully automatic M16.  Both would be relatively expensive weapons for which I would have little use.  But I should be able to legally purchase either if I wanted to.  Remember, it is called the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Needs.  Anyone who starts of with "Nobody needs a ______ (you name whatever weapon of part) ,,, is setting you up for a utilitarian argument.  Don't go there.  Stick to discussion of your rights.

The Arrogance of Socialism; Same as the Gnostics Of Old

Yet more on so called "Red Flag" laws today.  The first comes from retired Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, Jr.  Clarke has special reasons for not wanting gun control.  As a black American, whose ancestors were held as slaves in this country, Clarke does not want to be enslaved again in modern times by people who would take away his God given rights to weapons of self defense.  Clarke writes at  Townhall.com in an article entitled Raising A Black Flag Against Red Flag Laws.

Clarke is pretty clear that he doesn't trust the gun grabbers as far as he can spit:

That brings me to the latest emotion-based idea to stop mass shootings: Red Flag Laws. Let's strip away the good intentions part of this right away. This law would allow the government to violate our Fourteenth Amendment due process rights along with Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights to the Constitution and confiscate our property (guns) on an unsubstantiated citizen complaint about something a person might do. That is a lower standard than the reasonable suspicion standard we allow police to use. That is an “anything is possible” standard.

Red Flag Laws will not stop the next mass shooting just like banning the Confederate Flag after Charleston did not nor did banning bump stocks after the Las Vegas massacre. Red Flag Laws are an assault on our Second Amendment rights. Period. Anything proposed by the left regarding firearms is a ruse. It's like the left attacking the First Amendment to supposedly curb hate speech. You always have to look for the hidden agenda within their “good intentions.” They do everything stealthily to conceal their real objectives. They are exploiting El Paso and Dayton like they exploit any horrific incident to catch a nation in shock to hopefully give away their liberty.

Of course, Sheriff Clarke is more concerned than many about liberty, having had a more recent family history of not being allowed liberty. But I stand with Sheriff Clarke. My people came from Northern Europe, where we were serfs and peasants. A serf is just a different kind of slave.

Which brings us to Michael Smith's piece over at the American Thinker today entitled Mass Shootings, Politics, and The Law. Smith takes as a point of departure the famous James Madison quote "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." It has been a while, but I have pointed out many times, to those who insist that the police will protect us, so that we don't need guns ourselves, that the police are drawn from the same population as the rest of us. They are not angels, nor even any better or worse than the average citizen.

Regulations are never simply for the criminal, like the law of gravity, they are equally applicable to all. Therefore, any across-the-board restriction of access to firearms to reduce gun crime also necessarily restricts protective use by law-abiding gun owners. In all honesty, gun owners are suspicious of the motives of those who push for increased legislation while ignoring the failures of the current legal regime without honestly considering the statistical facts of gun use, in suicides, in homicides and in defensive usage. The greatest of these facts is new restrictions will impact not only criminals but the 99.997% of gun owners who have never committed a crime.

In point of fact, the proposed regulations will not impact criminals at all. They already can not buy guns legally. How they acquire them is by different illegal means. And while some may be outed by those living close to them, the majority will likely not be impacted by red flag laws because those who know them fear the criminal, with good reason.  But it is the law abiding who are the real targets of such laws. 

Many note the right to life is the first right identified in the Declaration of Independence -- and that positioning must mean it is a “supreme” right, one rising above all others -- but if one truly believes in such a supreme right, one must also accept the defense of that right must also be supreme, that it must be defended at all costs and with any means necessary. To do otherwise puts the lie to the idea the right to live is supreme and renders the phrase “right to life” into trite political sloganeering.

In 1850, the noted French economist and philosopher Frédéric Bastiat wrote, “If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”

And here, Bastiat has hit on the problem with Socialism, which was all the rage in France at the time and still is). The Socialist believes, like the Gnostics of old, that he has the secret knowledge. These self appointed elites believe they know better than you how you should live your life. They believe they know better how to spend your money, how and what you should eat, where and what kind of work you should do, and when your economical usefulness has been used up, when you should die. They know all this because they have been granted to secret knowledge that you are too stupid, or too blinded to see.

It is an arrogance of breath taking proportions.  But it is an arrogance that has always existed in the human heart.  It is an arrogance that allows people to think it is fine to enslave others, and to take as their own what others have done.  It is an arrogance that allows people to think that the police can protect everyone, when the Supreme Court has said that the police have no duty to protect anyone.

I fear that liberty and freedom are too scary for too many of our citizens.  The notion that one lives by one's wits can not be tolerated.  They need to have a government safety net to guarantee against hard times and bad decisions.  But life is made up of just such occasions, when unexpected things happen.  Everyone pays their money and takes their chances.  The government can not guarantee against these things, any more than they can guarantee against the next shooter.  You must be ready yourself to be your own first responder.

Update:  Listen to Armed Lutheran Radio Number 181.

The Mistake of the Left

According to Kurt Schichter at Townhall.com today Trump Is Unlikely To Commit Political Suicide By Betraying Us On Guns. From Schlichter's mouth to Trumps ear, as they say. Nonetheless, even if no federal legislation is forthcoming, there is still the potential for State governments to enact the heinous "Red Flag" laws.

As has been noted by many, red flag laws violate 2nd, 4th, and 6th Amendment by taking Constitutionally protected rights from individuals on the basis of hearsay evidence, and not affording the individual due process.  Surely some of these analyses have been read.  Surely legislators who have been proposing such laws understand that what they are proposing violates their oath of office.  One can only presume that therefore they just do not care.  Why?

Which brings us to an interesting discussion, conducted by Alexander Nussbaum over at the American Thinker today entitled The Link Between Today's Leftists and Yesterday's Nazis.

Nussbaum provides a discussion of the current state of Socialism before getting to the specifics of Karl Pearson's influence on the Socialist movement, the eugenics movement, and Communism.  Karl Pearson, born Carl Pearson in 1857, was a genius who was one of the fathers the mathematics of statistics.  He also:

...invented the formula for correlation still used today, as well as inventing chi-square and p-values, all not only still used and taught in every undergraduate statistics course, but central to empirical research.

But Pearson was also a social Darwinist, who believed that society must limit the reproduction of what he believed were inferior races.

Pearson was a social Darwinist, dedicated to proving that Darwinism supported communism. Pearson's ideal collectivist state was, in his words, "an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for trade routes and for the sources of raw material and food supply."

Pearson's writings sought to put the inferiority of Jews (the "parasitic race," as he called them) on a sound scientific basis, and this was not overlooked by Nazi Germany. In 1932, after Hitler's takeover, Pearson was presented Germany's prestigious Rudolf Virchow medal from the Berlin Anthropological Society by Erwin Baur and Eugen Fischer, co-authors of the book that outlined the racial theories of Hitler.

As a Christian, such thoughts are anathema to me. Man is a creature under God, as all other creatures are. It is God who gives us life, and our lives are His. We are not to interfere with Him and His plan.

Eugenicists made one tremendous mistake, a mistake of such magnitude that it rightly relegates them to the status of pariahs. This is a mistake that is the very basis of socialist thought: the horrendous notion that the state owns the individual — that the state has a right to determine who breeds, how people live, what should be their priorities, that the state should have its dirty, stealing hands anywhere near the economic system.

No one, of course, "owns" another. God owns all of us, we are His children. Yes, the Socialists have made a tremendous mistake, one that we all hope will not require bloodshed to correct.

So, the answer to the "why" question above is that these legislators have drunk the Koolaid, and believe that the State owns us.  They must not be elected to serve because they are no longer serving the people, but an ideology that is anathema to the United States Constitution.

A Newer Idea on Red Flag laws

Finally, a new idea to replace the stupid one currently circulating among gun grabbers.  Instead of "red flag" laws, that are Unconstitutional, and would ultimately do nothing to stop criminals, but would potentially burden the law abiding, Lynne Lechter, over at American Thinker proposes instead to Extend the Dram Shop Acts. The idea here is to allow civil suits of third parties who knew, or had reason to know, that someone was a time bomb ready to blow:

Instead of creating another political quagmire, we can utilize a tested, far less-controversial solution by expanding existing Dram Shop laws.

Dram Shop laws currently exist in 43 of the 50 United States. To varying degrees, the individual state laws allow for civil liability to attach to certain third parties for drunk driver-caused vehicular accidents. Moreover they complement rather than impinge on existing criminal laws for the underlying criminal act.

Essentially, these laws allow for a victim, and/or their relatives, to sue third parties to the accident: bartenders who serve alcohol to a visibility intoxicated customer; a parent who permits underage drinking at a house party; and, others who knowingly allow an inebriated driver to drive.

The aftermath to the recent spate of domestic mass massacres, as well as to previous attacks, all followed a dreary script. Multiple accounts of known aberrant behavior, frequent social media-posted threats, aggressive personal relations, botched dates, previous encounters with law enforcement, high school grapevines, open boasting of future crimes and parental a priori reporting of unheeded appeals for help were repetitively and mindlessly recounted , as we helpless, mournfully shaken bystanders collectively pondered the inanity of the seemingly preventable tragedies

Of course, the solution doesn't let politicians grand stand about getting more guns of the streets or whatever, and does place the burden on families of the victims to actually sue, but I am sure some enterprising lawyer will manage to get up a class action suit to bring these accessories to a crime to justice.

Thank you Lynne Lechter.

Meanwhile, let's engage in some "whataboutism," shall we?  From Wayne Allyn Root, over at Townhall.com today in a post entitled My Confession About Gunswe learn that

The 2018 Annual Report and Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics reports noncitizens (primarily illegal aliens) makeup 7% of America's population but commit 42% of federal crimes.

The 2018 Annual Report and Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics reports noncitizens (primarily illegal aliens) makeup 7% of America's population but commit 42% of federal crimes.

...snip...

In the days leading up to the terrible mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, there were 60 shootings in Chicago. It was so bad Mt. Sinai Hospital had to stop accepting patients on Sunday because it hit maximum capacity in the trauma center. Sixty shot? How did that escape the media's glare?

A year ago, on the same weekend in Chicago, 74 people were shot, 12 of them killed -- yet, no blame for Democrats.

Chicago already has the nation's strictest gun control laws. They are a failure.

And yet, politicians want to put more laws on the book; laws the criminals will ignore and prosecutors won't prosecute. All in the name of looking like they are "doing something." And not just Democrats. It is looking like Republicans are lining up with Democrats to do their "something."

The fact is that Republicans have been less than helpful to President Trump's agenda.  They are, therefore, more vulnerable if gun owners decide to sit out the election.  Were I they, I would take a word to the wise, and reconsider Red Flag laws.  Instead, maybe they would be better doing something like extending the Dram Shop Acts, or just making some of the people who knew about these mass shooters but didn't take action accessories to the crime.