The problem is a common one. People instinctively think about achieving new levels of safety but seldom worry about losing old levels of freedom. And the result is not necessarily greater safety, but greater levels of tyranny. I call this the New Red Light Syndrome. This is because it's much as when a locality identifies the most dangerous intersection in town. The traffic planners, realizing that something must be done immediately lest a person who means so much to those around him meet an untimely end (as opposed, I guess, to someone whose demise is desired by all and sundry), erect a new traffic light as remedy. This does seem to make sense and is hard to argue against. It saves lives, right? The problem is that even if it does, now some other spot is "the most dangerous intersection in town." Thus, there can always be justification for another red light.
Of course, we do need a few red lights at both literal and metaphorical intersections. And if we want but a few, we must realize that old levels of freedom require old levels of virtue. But our nanny-staters are content to destroy virtue and make the whole nation a red-light district, a place defined not just by licentiousness, but also by license to do little but indulge it. Their government will change the signal to green if and when you can go. And you will be happy...and controlled.
Henry Ford's mass production methods cut in half the cost of producing the famous Model T Ford in just five years. People who had once lived their entire lives within a narrow radius of a relatively few miles could now go see places they never knew about before. The automobile expanded their horizons.Today what we hear is a constant drum beat of how these evil rich people exploited the poor, ravaged the land, calling up images of viking raiders raping and pillaging. Yes, I suppose there was some of that, but I suspect there was a lot less of this behavior than you might think. Some of it too was born of ignorance, as people didn't always know the damage they were doing to the land in strip mining for instance. In any case, we should be grateful to these men who have made our lives better. We should also be grateful to God who sent such men, with these ambitions and talents, to make life better for all of us. Instead, we have a bunch of pampered children who have never had to live with hardship moaning and groaning about what their fathers did.
People today who complain about the automobile's pollution have no idea how much more pollution there was before the automobile came along. In New York City, for example, the 40,000 horses that were the backbone of the city's transportation, before the automobile, produced 400 tons of manure per working day, along with 20,000 gallons of urine.
Such avenues of "thought" (if this bilge can be called thinking -- imagine the gall it takes to write: "assuming writing exits") have a dark side. According to Derrida writing is a sign that signifies "difference" or a "trace." (He became famous for his supposedly subtle uses of the terms "différance" and "trace.") This led Derrida to conclude, "writing is parricide"[v] because writing "opens up the series of oppositions dominated by ‘inside/outside'" (the powerful versus the powerless).[vi]
...the fact that universal thought , in all its domains...should be receiving a formidable impulse from an anxiety about language...is a strangely concerted development.... Whatever the poverty of our knowledge in this respect, it is certain that the question of the sign is itself more or less, or in any event something other than, a sign of the times. To dream of reducing it to a sign of the times is to dream of violence.[vii]Derrida's philosophy, seen as a sign of the times, is a dream of violence. As he states in one of his most influential works, De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology published in 1967): "...writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true." A sign of all signs is surely a sign of the times. Thus, Derrida calls, at least implicitly, for his readers to fulfill a "dream of violence." Elsewhere he urges his readers to "go there where you cannot go, to the impossible, it is indeed the only way of coming or going."
More importantly, although these figures may be interesting for certain analyses, they don't tell us much about societal violence. Incredibly, Blow never addresses the obvious relevant figure: the overall homicide rate. He is able to claim that the U.S. is in "a league of its own," with a country sphere at the top of the chart, only by basing his analysis on an irrelevant statistic -- "percent of homicides by firearms." A homicide is a homicide, whether it's done with a Glock or a garden hose. In the U.S., sharp instruments -- e.g., knives -- are the second-most popular murder weapon. They have dropped from around 20% to 12% of the total. For comparison, in Canada, guns and knives both account for around 34% of the total murders. In England and Wales, where guns are strictly controlled, 28% of homicides are committed with a knife and only 6% with a firearm. British gun murders in some years rank below death by blunt object, kicking, and strangulation. But so what? During the Rwandan genocide, the gun homicide rate was extremely low, given the preference of Hutus for death by machete. Is the percentage of homicides by kicking any less indicative of violence? Homicidal people seem to find the means necessary, and if nothing else is available, strangulation with one's bare hands is quite effective.
A second statistic presented in the New York Times chart repeats this same distortion. The circles representing countries are "sized relative to firearm homicides per capita" rather than overall homicide rates. Thus, the country sphere for the U.S., with an overall homicide rate of 5.0 per 100,000, is much larger than Mexico's, which has 15.0 homicides per 100,000, or triple that of the U.S. The country sphere for Turkey is miniscule despite Turkey's homicide rate of 6.9, 28% higher than that of the U.S. Turks and Mexicans apparently find ways to kill each other without using guns. In the case of the Mexican drug gangs, beheadings are trending upward.
Bottom line: Islam is not simply a benign and morally equivalent alternative to the Judeo-Christian tradition. As Sennels points out, the first and biggest victims of Islam are Muslims. Simple Christian compassion for Muslims and a common-sense desire to protect Western civilization from the ravages of Islam dictate a vigorous opposition to the spread of this dark and dangerous religion. These stark realities must be taken into account when we establish public policies dealing with immigration from Muslim countries and the building of mosques in the U.S.
As I pondered the direction our Government had taken over the previous year, I looked at the definition of socialism by typing "define: socialism" into Google. The first definition presented was from Princeton's wordnet and read as follows; "a political theory advocating state ownership of industry." The definition feels woefully lacking.Mr. Gee calls this style of government "Regulationism." I think it fits the pattern of classic Fascism. Fascism has two distinguishing characteristics. Unlike Communism, which styles itself as an international movement of the workers rising up against their capitalist exploiters, Fascism is a national movement. Fascists often create, or manipulate local myths to strengthen their own ties to the people, and distract people from the fact of their slavery. Hitler, for example, created the myth of the Aryan people, and borrowed heavily from the old Norse mythology to support it. Mussolini, on the other hand, pointed to ancient Rome, and fed the Italians a steady diet of what they had once been. The other distinguishing characteristic is that whereas Communists actually own the means of production, and therefore the responsibility for the failure to perform, the Fascists have found a way out of that predicament. Instead of owning outright the industrial capacity of the country, they just control it, and take the profits. But if there is a failure, they can always point back to those evil capitalists.
Ownership denotes control, and the state is certainly getting into the business of controlling industry. Over the last year our government has exerted more control over enterprise via legislative fiat than at any other time since FDR's power grab during the Great Depression. From the thousands of pages of ObamaCare, to the thousands of pages of the Dodd-Frank "financial reform" bill, government power is firmly entrenched in business and expanding. The more regulations the state adds the more control it exerts.
Once a company has cleared all of the hurdles of getting the oil out of the ground and turning it into a product for market, the tax man comes. For every gallon of gasoline the government collects between 30 to 50 cents in taxes (18 to the feds, and on average 22 to the states and quite often 2-5 cents to a local municipality). In 2007 Exxon made $40 billion dollars in profit, but it paid $100 billion in taxes and royalties. In other words government made 2.5 times more from Exxon's oil production than Exxon and its shareholders did.
The goals of regulationism and socialism are the same, control over a company or business. The end result of regulationism and socialism is also the same, a lifeless economy filled with uncompetitive businesses. November's election wasn't just a rejection of a political party, or a fight over personal taxes; it was also the rejection of regulationism.And here you have more of the same. By saying that the fight is between business and the government, the writer encourages you to yawn and go back to sleep. After all, you are not a businessman. But in reality, the fight is yours and mine. Taxes and regulations put huge burdens of excess cost on every product we have to purchase, reducing our discretionary cash and our choices, and our liberty.
All of which is rather beside the point, since rifles as a category, from Granddad’s deerslayer to Uncle Nasty’s assault rifle, are used only rarely in crimes. Even for a gangster in sagging jeans, it’s hard to walk around casually with Elmer Fudd’s blunderbuss in your shenanigans, and those .50-caliber competition-grade rifles they’re soiling themselves over in California go for about 15 grand, putting them out of the financial range of Joe Crackhead. Rifles just aren’t where the action usually is, crime-wise.Williamson goes on then for two more pages detailing the evidence.
Which is not beside the point. What Traver and those philosophically aligned with him are engaged in is the opposite of law enforcement. We might call their business anti-policing, inasmuch as they seek to restrict the actions of law-abiding citizens — lawful gun owners, licensed firearms dealers — while largely leaving actual criminals untouched. If that sounds like I am overstating my case, consider the evidence.
The truth is that law enforcement is fundamentally unserious about prosecuting straw purchasers, and about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals broadly speaking. Doing so is, to put it bluntly, too much work for a unionized American government work force, whose idea of a good anti-gun program is the buyback: offering up taxpayers’ dollars in the hopes that criminals will bring the guns to them. (Way to work that shoe-leather, Joe Friday.) From the police’s point of view, criminals are an inconsiderate bunch: no fixed address, very little record keeping, no scheduled hours of operation, etc. Criminals do not keep appointments or offer even minimal cooperation. It is a lot of work keeping tabs on a Carail Weeks, or on an Eric DeShawn Floyd, a felon with at least 17 priors on his rap sheet who was involved in the fatal shooting of Philadelphia police sergeant Stephen Liczbinski during a botched bank robbery. (I wrote about the case here.) It’s a real challenge. Some cops are heroes; 100 percent of them are government employees.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.The 111th Congress rejected passing Cap and Trade legislation, despite having a majority of Democrats in both Houses, and a Democratic Administration who is committed to Cap and Trade. Most Administrations would take this as a strong indication that there may be problems with the notion of Cap and Trade, and go back to the drawing board. But this Regime decided to have its EPA illegally write the Cap portion of the regulations, and proceed to impose them. Now, this isn't the only issue that Texas has with the US, but it may be seen as the final straw.
