Is this really just now occurring to our military leaders?
The fight in Afghanistan is at a stalemate, and the significant number of Afghan troop deaths in the war is not sustainable, the Marine officer nominated to command U.S. forces in the Middle East told lawmakers on Tuesday.
Marine Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie warned the Senate Armed Services Committee against an abrupt withdrawal of American forces or change in strategy despite frustration over the status of the 17-year conflict. He said he doesn’t know how long it will take to develop an Afghan force capable of defending its own country.
You don’t say? Just 17 years and we are precisely nowhere. Imagine where we’ll be after 34 or 100?
Rather than import further ruin to civilization, one may simply enjoy the manifest blessings of “diversity” where it belongs.
John Chau, 27, had taken a boat ride with local fishermen before venturing alone in a canoe to the remote North Sentinel Island where the indigenous people live cut off completely from the outside world.
As soon as he set foot on the island, Chau found himself facing a flurry of arrows, official sources told AFP.
Contact with several tribes on the islands, set deep in the Indian Ocean, is illegal in a bid to protect their indigenous way of life and shield them from diseases.
See. Even SJW’s must be happy with this – laws still being broken and all.
The gullible American people and their Chicken Little politicritters love a good epidemic. One woman gets Zika? Epidemic. Someone run over by a texting driver? Epidemic. Banksters and pols loot 99% of the value out of the Dollar while squashing civil liberties? Epid … oops, nevermind that one…
I just read about the next great epidemic – Benzos! Valium reminds some doctor a lot of the opioid crisis! Crisis. Epidemic. Same thing. We’ll need a new law and some more regs! Maybe the FDA can get around to that once they cure another great epidemic – pregnant women smoking cigars…
Come August 10th, retail cigars (to include individual units) must be accompanied by one of the following six warning labels: herein, my review:
WARNING: Cigar smoking can cause cancers of the mouth and throat, even if you do not inhale.
A lie. See explanation below.
WARNING: Cigar smoking can cause lung cancer and heart disease.
A lie. See immediately below.
WARNING: Cigars are not a safe alternative to cigarettes.
Part lie, part category error. Cigars are safe (FDA studies say so). However, they’re not an alternative to cigarettes, at all, with next to nothing in common except the burning aspect. Cigarettes are paper wrapped chemicals, tar, and, maybe, a little cheap tobacco. Cigars are pure, 100%, natural, organic, Earth-friendly, environmentally responsible tobacco from the best fields. Not just a lie, an eco-lie (very bad).
WARNING: Tobacco smoke increases the risk of lung cancer and heart disease, even in nonsmokers.
Yet another lie.
WARNING: Cigar use while pregnant can harm you and your baby. or SURGEON GENERAL WARNING: Tobacco Use Increases the Risk of Infertility, Stillbirth and Low Birth Weight.*
Now they involve the poor Surgeon General. This one is either a lie OR another false conflation. Again, it’s cigars, not cigarettes. And, women constitute something like 0.5% of all cigar smokers. Pregnant women are around, I’m guessing here, 0.000000%. Totally irrelevant and utterly stupid. I challenge the FDA to present one single case, ever, of any baby negatively affected by cigars. Scratch that. I challenge the FDA to pack up New Hampshire Avenue and just get the hell out of America and out our lives. I say they can’t do it. Let ’em prove me wrong!
WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.
Believe it, or not, this one is not a complete lie. Rather, it’s a false syllogism of sorts, in reverse, kind of. Like this:
Major premise: Nicotine is bad.
Minor premise: Cigars contain nicotine.
Conclusion: Warrants a warning.
Again, again, again … cigars differ in many ways from cigarettes. Premium cigar makers do not add additional nicotine (or anything else) to the wrappers, binders, or fillers that constitute that lovely leafy goodness. Said leaf by itself does, in fact, contain a little nicotine. But, so do: tea leaves, eggplants, potatoes, peppers, cauliflower, and tomatoes.
Do these eggplant-IQ’d busybodies go around warning mums to be about the dangers of real eggplants? Could be; it’s a big CFR… Yet another government, elsewhere – the Royal Society for Public Health – just determined that scary, addictive nicotine is “no more dangerous than the caffeine in a cup of coffee.”
I get it, I get it. Warning labels on coffee come next…
With all these warnings floating around, I thought I might add one that isn’t based on complete BS. This:
****
GOVERNMENT WARNING!
Government is the most dangerous non-natural thing in existence, possibly more destructive than a gamma-ray burst. Government is not a safe alternative to freedom.
It usually isn’t on display in the economic/business news. For instance, does anyone of any measurable intelligence really believe making every person on the planet a billionaire would change anything?
The world’s first trillionaire won’t come from cryptocurrency or some clever new app – he or she will become rich from asteroid mining.
That’s what bankers Goldman Sachs reckon, anyway – and several companies are now vying to be the first into space.
NASA estimates that the total value of asteroids out there could be up to $700 quintillion – equivalent to £75 billion each for us here on Earth.
That is the equivalent of saying a wolf told you that a fox was hungry and thus every chicken would be happier.
The asteroid mining idea is real and will happen – but not with every single body orbiting the Sun. Someone will likely become extremely wealthy as a result. If The Goldman Sachs has its way, then that someone will be in some way directly related to Goldman Sachs. (And why switch dollars to pounds in the same sentence?)
If the real obtainable value of the celestial rocks really is $700 quintillion, then expect Goldman, the Fed, and Mordor to arrange future loans in the septillion range, with derivatives betting on the order of decillions. Gresham’s Law dictates they would still find a way to kill positive growth with funny money.
The zeros behind the $ or the £ mean nothing. That’s why, even if one distributed the actual cash value of the space debris to each and every person on Earth, turning everyone into billionaires, nothing would change. Zimbabwe is replete with billionaires – who can’t afford lunch.
In his defense, Rob Waugh is an excellent jack-of-all-trades journalist; maybe economics just isn’t one of them. However, that should be (should be) a specialty over at Bloomberg, where they supposedly push business news.
Yet, they seem surprised we have inflation in America and that that cuts into wages.
U.S. inflation accelerated in May to the fastest pace in more than six years, reinforcing the Federal Reserve’s outlook for gradual interest-rate hikes while eroding wage gains that remain relatively tepid despite an 18-year low in unemployment.
The consumer price index rose 0.2 percent from the previous month and 2.8 percent from a year earlier, matching estimates, a Labor Department report showed Tuesday. The annual gain was the biggest since February 2012 and follows a 2.5 percent increase in April. Excluding food and energy, the core gauge was up 0.2 percent from the prior month and 2.2 percent from May 2017, also matching the median estimates of economists.
Fed. Fed. Fed. Fed. Rates. Rates. Rates. In Bloomberg’s defense, they are actually in the business of promoting certain interests, like those of Goldman.
The narrative works something like this: The economy is great, never stronger. Unemployment is low, officially. Wages are rising. Inflation is low. Oops, for completely unforeseen reasons, likely related to gas prices, it reared its ugly head. Time to raise rates on the flood of fiat. Sally School teacher in Iowa sees her recent raise evaporate. But that doesn’t matter; Goldman is mining the Moon or something.
They leave out: That all the money, almost all of it, is fake, based on debts that cannot be repaid. Everything in the economy depends on said fake money (it’s like mixing in helium for a dive – a little boosts depth range, too much kills). Wages are always one of the last things to “catch up” after a correction – only just in time for the next correction. Real wage buying power (how much the pay is really worth) only this year returned to levels last seen in 1973. 45 years of loss, and the new, temporary gains are now squashed by inflation.
It’s almost like we’ve entered into a terminal phase wherein the wages will not, cannot recover. Workers and earners see their purchasing power decline to ancient levels, their standards of living plunge toward serf-like proximity.
When this all hits the fan the next time around, it may hail the curtain call for the banksters. That would be the good news.
Maybe there’s a way to relocate the banksters and their political pets to the heavens? Metro/UK.
PC “Right think” is a low-quality cover for no think. Joe Bob Briggs writes, today, for Taki’s Mag (a “wrong think,” thus, not politically correct, thus, actually correct publication) on the failure to grasp humor by the outraged, unintellectual masses.
Satire is a machine gun on a swivel. You aim at a target, fire, move one foot to the right, fire, move again, aim and fire—you hit all the targets, without exception, and about one in ten targets will scream. When that happens, you hit that target twenty more times.
That’s how you identify the sacred cow, then exterminate the sacred cow.
The difference, in 2018, is that it’s not one in ten targets, it’s one in two. Everybody screams, like, all the time. Nobody ever says, “Oh, wow, you caught me, yeah, that’s pretty stupid.” And everybody assumes you have some kind of second agenda, usually political.
…
I stopped reading the Comments sections entirely, not because I couldn’t take the heat but because I often couldn’t even understand the context of the argument.
Unreasoned assumptions are bad enough; making an “ass out of u and me.” It’s much, much worse in an era and an area of rapidly declining intelligence. For instance, assuming (wow) that most could even read the above-selected Briggs’s quote, some might assume (again) that he’s promoting gun violence and nothing else.
He’s not communicating at the highest level but at one a good deal higher than the passing average. By strange coincidence, today’s Pearls Before Swine strip tackles the same subject from a slightly different, easier to comprehend angle:
Again, even here, a basic literacy is required, else the viewer merely sees three generic people and a rat holding a beer. But Pastis is saying the same thing as Briggs: mind your own business, brighten up, and lighten up!
The other day we lost the mighty Tom Wolfe. He made a mark offending the pretension, as Monica Showalter observes.
What a treasure he was. He wrote about the world as it is, telling our American story because he loved our American story. How sad that we don’t have him to write about the ongoing story of America. He wrote about the world as an outsider, and he examined the establishment as it needed to be examined, and naturally, that added up to making the left look stupid. There was no other way for a writer this honest, and we are the richer for it.
It’s true that I would love to step into Wolfe’s role, merely lacking the talent and those white suits…
Well, seems as if another Tomahawk Slinging Season is once again upon us (or upon those in Syria). Happy Tomahawk Slinging Season from one taxpayer to many others!
Tomahawk, Tomahawk,
Flying off a ship.
Let’s make a really good excuse,
And hope most of ’em hit.
*(Sung to the tune of Jingle Bells or something).
I still can’t find Syria anywhere on or near a map of the USA. Maybe it’s around Alaska? Or one of the little island protectorates? Yet I can easily divine incompetence most rank on the border between Virginia and Maryland.
Trump said he only signed the recent bloated (partial) budget to get funding for the military. Now he wants other parts rescinded. (Thing called a veto. V-E-T-O). The man also recently said it was time to leave Syria to the Syrians and anyone else foolish enough to there thread. It is. But, somewhere along the way, the pullout and the budget seem to have met. Must have been on the road to Damascus…
And, this being Tomahawk Slinging Season and all, maybe a little more expensive foreign meddling is in order before we mind our own business (if ever that is).
I detected some fuzzy math in the CNBC piece. If the 2016 GDP was $18.5 Trillion (it was), and the on books federal debt is now $21 Trillion (it is), then in the past year+ we must have increased the GDP enormously to be below 96% currently – so as to make the “dire” predictions for 2028 a plausible reality. My calculator may be acting up.
However the numbers settle, I’m still backing my prediction of $40 Trillion in debt by 2024. I see this as being back on track – to oblivion.
Could be worse. You could be in the bull’s eye this Season. Of course, could be better; you might own Raytheon stock.
I blame the National Axe and Car Association (or “NACA”) if there is such a thing. Today, further proof that we, as a civilized country-shaped place, must ban both assault axes and high-capacity vans:
One person has died after a driver reportedly swung an ax at a group of people and ran over them in San Francisco.
At least five people were struck in a vehicular hit-and-run in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, near the intersection of Illinois and 24th Street, according to San Francisco police.
The driver fled the scene but was later taken into custody near Alemany Boulevard and Cayuga Avenue, police said. Four of the five victims were in “life threatening condition,” according to SFPD, and one later died after being transported to a nearby hospital.
The incident occured around 10:25 a.m., police said.
One witness said a driver in a white GMC van had an argument with a man on the sidewalk and a few other people intervened. The witness said the driver got out of his vehicle and had an ax.
A second witness also said the driver had a small ax and that the people involved in the argument chased the driver back into the van. That’s when the driver drove into the people on the sidewalk.
Police said they don’t know the relationship between the injured and the suspect, and they do not believe there is a threat to the public at this time.
“No threat to the public” kind of sounds like “not terrorism,” which suggests strongly it might have been. That or a case of California feloniam fecerit sanctis.
Lord! What am I saying?! I certainly do not mean to impune the character of the actual suspect. You did this, axe and auto owners of America! One dead and four wounded. Happy now? #enoughisenough.
Here’s a little hysteria to get the youth marching:
An axe (aka “ax”) is, for those of you in Manhattan, a bladed weapon, one nominally used to fell trees (those large bushy things in Central Park you don’t like). Bladed weapons in America are used, in an average year, to murder several times as many people as are murdered with all types of rifles and shotguns combined. And, as bad as that number is, it is usually 20-25X behind the number of Americans killed annually with motor vehicles.
Where is the outrage? NACA, if it exists, could possibly pour tens, maybe even scores, of dollars into lobbying politicians to get what it wants. And what it wants is dead children. No word on the age of today’s fatality victim but he was, at some point, someone’s child.
Think of the children.
And then get them marching. And chanting. With signs. With agents, deals, and magazine covers.
Fly in some clueless celebrity trash.
Someone call George Soros. *Area Code in Gorgoroth has recently changed.*
At this moment Anderson Cooper could be asking Stormy Daniels if this attack qualifies as a school shooting™.
The Old Bow Tie may, just may, propose repealing another Amendment.
Only the police and military need…
You can’t hunt with…
You’re more likely to blah, blah…
More mindless platitudes…
Here’s a pictorial worthy of the Times’s Editorial Page:
Yeah. An axe has always been an axe. But the Founders drove buggies, not military style assault vans!
And, yes. I have previously called for banning both axes and motor vehicles, WMDs whose only purpose is killing innocent people. And highlighting gun control hypocrisy.
… one of the alarmed Mad Marxist Marchers asks, “If I can get an AR-15 what’s to stop me from getting a nuclear weapon?” Okay, I haven’t heard that one in a while. But I have heard it. I was asked the same thing about five years ago when I participated in a 2A panel at a college event.
The answers are several but, mostly simply, it’s: “price.” Price, you idiot. Nukes are too damned expensive for just about anyone this side of a nation-state to afford. My sources tell me that a single nuclear bomb, not including delivery system, prices out at around $200 Million. And that’s for an entity that already has a production system in place. A freelance warhead would range into the Billion$$.
I know these people are somewhat poor in the math skills department. So here’s the juxtaposition: AR-15: $500-$1,000-ish; Nuclear bomb: $200,000,000 – $5,000,000,000-ish. You see, if the Soros Fund or some similar riotous inciter pays you $15 per hour to show up for a protest, then after a few protests you could afford the AR. At that rate it would take over 13 million hours to buy the cheapest nuke. That’s over 6,000 working years, just a few more than most people can live to expect. Sorry that I couldn’t find a cartoon or pictorial or something.
And that price structure assumes a totally free market with no legal restrictions on WMDs. We kind of have the opposite of that. Given those who could potentially afford such weapons, that might actually be a good thing. All of this assumes one of extraordinary wealth could assemble a willing team of those experts required to build the bomb. It assumes one could locate the rather rare and pricey materials. It assumes a lot. Too much. It’s a non-starter.
Maybe, instead of chasing phantoms of utter ridiculous mania, these people could concentrate on the smaller and simpler aspects of life – like NOT trashing the areas where they protest. Their rights, not yours. Your responsibilities, not theirs.
Take out the trash! And those signs.
Back to the nukes and the precious, all-knowing, all-giving Nations, maybe they’re not the best owners of such devices themselves. Only two nuclear bombs have ever been used in open warfare. I can’t recall, just now, who that was dropping them. Anyway, they were used to unnecessarily kill a whole bunch of civilians. Who marched for those lives?
And for about 40 years the US, USSR, Britain, France, and China went test happy with those very expensive assault-style bombs. Some scientists suggest the corresponding increase in world cancer rates might not have been coincidental. Hmmm.
Maybe running to the government for solutions isn’t the best idea. Sometimes, and not just in the sky over Japan, the government is least worthy of trust. Frequently the state is in bed with the very criminals the grabbers should be blaming for terrorism and mass shootings. Two years ago, after Omar Mateen struck a blow for Jihad in Orlando, I suggested his family had a history of involvement in state terror schemes.
Researchers have discovered that when it comes to intelligence, you are what you watch.
While it is fair to say that certain shows are informative, there are plenty of trashy shows that do not offer any educational value. However, in addition to lacking substance, stupid television shows have also been proven to actually make people dumber.
Markus Appel, an Austrian psychologist and professor, tested a group of college students on various subjects. Before administering the test, half the students were given a story about a silly man making all sorts of bad decisions. After reading about the not-so-smart shenanigans of the character, those students performed worse on the tests than the students who had not read the story.
Appel blames the results on “media priming.” Media priming refers to the residual, often unintended, effects of being exposed to media. This can result in changes in behavior, opinions, or intelligence.
This means that watching a reality show with a dumb person on it might seem funny, but their stupidity is contagious.
Listverse.
The others mostly make sense too. Enough sense for a Sunday.
With the highest gun ownership per capita in the world – by far – the US is only number 111 (of around 200 nations) in per capita murders. The left’s assertion that over-armed America is the murder capital of the world is a ridiculous lie. And, dear God, let’s NOT get into the statistics of who commits the largest measurable percentage of murders in America (hint: it’s not the Amish).
Gun murders and deaths, including those related to rifles (including “assault-style” rifles) are but a near microscopic fraction of total “unnatural” or “preventable” deaths in the US. From 2014:
248 people killed with rifles (all types including … assault rifles);
435 people killed with baseball bats and hammers;
660 people killed with punches and kicks;
8,124 people killed with guns of all kinds (offset by 1,000,000+ lives saved by all guns);
14,249 murders of/by all weapons sources (and unarmed murders);
32,744 killed by automobiles;
Approximately 200,000 killed by doctors and medical professionals;
Approximately 365,000 killed by obesity and fat-related causes;
652,639 killed by “legal” abortions.
One, if one is blind, deluded, and perhaps mentally deficient, or possibly evil, can easily see the way to best save lives in America is to ban the scary AR-15. (Better raise taxes while we’re at it).
And no one ever uses an assault rifle to prevent crime or save lives … except that they do.
Yesterday I ran a rather incomplete, but illustrative, list of current and historic gun control proponents. Show me a tyrant, a dictator, a mass murderer, a genocidal maniac, or an active war-monger, and I’ll show you a loud and proud supporter of disarming the locals.
All of this figures largely into today’s Prepper News Weekly, which you should watch on a regular basis:
Perrin Lovett/FPTV/YouTube.
Yet and still, otherwise decent people, whether they be “average”or “ordinary” or powerful celebrities, continue to mindlessly (no thought, just emotions) clamor to be disarmed. To disarm you. It’s as infuriating as it is embarrassing.
The impressionable youth, students who will walk out of classes to support gun control, are almost understandable. Some (very few) of them are subject to being killed, in schools or without, by bad people armed with guns. Sure, they’re more likely to be killed by bees, lightning, and swimming pools, but those facts are … facts and not really governed by easily manipulated feelings. (Ever hear someone decry “assault-style” ionized plasmatic electricity from the sky?) No.
The kids are far more likely to be killed by incompetent doctors, sugary drinks and starchy carbs, and autos. And many millions of their cohorts never even made it to the schools thanks to Planned Parenthood (aka, Rehashed Nazi Eugenics, Inc.). On that last note, an interesting, telling political cartoon:
Andy Marlette, Pensacola News Journal (via the Tampa Bay Times).
That’s good and bad rhetoric all in one, Mr. Marlette. There’s a vague truth behind it: “conservative” Republicans types, like Rick “Make it 21!” Scott, will claim to be anti-abortion. They’re not. For all the claims, there’s been remarkably little (read: NO) action since 1973 to curtail abortions. The slight numerical decline is more attributable to contraception, lifestyle changes, and the antics of the … um … Junior Anti-Sex League.
The young cartoon lady is well-instructed that the well-dressed, well-fed elephant does not care about her in or out of the womb. His only concerns are: appeasing his corporate overlords, and; getting reelected. (Yes, these are most similar to the real desires of his goofy-looking jackass “opponent”). The rhetorical truth evaporates. Then, mathematically considering the 80:1 and 2,600:1 ratios from 2014, above, the real truth interrupts with force.
For the politicians, especially the currently-in-charge GOPers, there can be no understanding, no sympathy. “Mindless shits” comes descriptively to mind.
“The schools are terrible because the teachers are incompetent, but arm the teachers.”
“No, don’t arm the teachers. Raise the gun-buying age and put a SWAT team in every school. Metal detectors! More drugs!”
“Okay. Let’s ban bump stocks (unnecessary to bump fire anyway)”.
“Take the guns first, due process second.”
Gibber. Gibber. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Stupidity to make Democrats look sane by comparison. (One notices that, largely, the Dems are silently hanging back now, allowing the fat, stupid elephants, the kids, and the corporations to fight this one – a wise strategy).
The due process thing is really alarming. Not many of ye old Rights of Englishmen still exist in dying America. DP is kind of important. And it’s kind of under siege. And not just from The Trump. He says a lot of things, many of them unwise sounding:
President Trump on Wednesday voiced support for confiscating guns from certain individuals deemed to be dangerous, even if it violates due process rights.
“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump said at a meeting with lawmakers on school safety and gun violence.
“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.
Trump was responding to comments from Vice President Pence that families and local law enforcement should have more tools to report potentially dangerous individuals with weapons.
Giving the orange man the benefit of the doubt, which I tire of doing, I’m sure he means what he says in limited, emergency circumstances. There are actually times when a situation sort of dictates dispensing with the technicalities of formal due process.
For instance, if a police officer sees someone committing (or about to start committing) what the officer reasonably believes to be a crime or dangerous activity, then the officer is lawfully authorized to use force, up to and including lethal force, to stop said crime or activity. No need to trouble a judge up-front. It happens all the time. And it many times doesn’t even involve the police; see the linked example of the armed citizen of Illinois, above.
And there is, in such emergency situations, a built-in due process anyway: people know or should know not to commit or attempt to commit crimes! At least not where others might see them. And with the expectation that they might be resisted if they proceed. It’s as much common sense as it used to be common law.
You know, the common law with the due process specter floating around?
“No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law …” (5th Amend., U.S. Const., as amended, 1791)(See also: Amend. 14).
If there is to be formal legal action, then it needs to take place before any subsequent state taking action. Before, first, Donald, not second. And a gun would seem to fit the description of “property.” Of course, explaining this to a man who will use executive, administrative action, in defiance of Articles I and II, to ban superfluous rifle accessories, seems tenuous. Then again, the man says a lot of things; sometimes he rationally clarifies afterwards. Time will tell, time permitting.
It’s odd, given The Trump’s hasty pronouncements and the quasi-legal developments of the past 20 years, that he does not (yet) take a similar approach to the deep state, the treasonous lukers, the pizza-lovers, the banksters, and the Dreamers. Would not a delayed due process, say via Enemy Combatant proceedings, benefit the stabilization of whatever remains of this political mess? Dunno but, the fact that I, a anarcho-libertarian type, would even ask such a question speaks to where we really are in the here and now…
This article runs a little long but it is worth considering the whole of the fallen government and how it reacts to the law. Joe Bob Briggs considers the TeeVee-ification of the Third Branch:
The genius element of the English justice system is the invention in the Middle Ages of the state prosecutor, or, in its original incarnation, the king’s prosecutor. His purpose was to keep vengeance out of the courtroom. Before that you had the aggrieved-kinsman system. The suffering family brought charges against the alleged offender, so that if a Hatfield killed a McCoy, it was up to the McCoys to file charges, and if the Hatfield was found guilty, the McCoys were allowed to take vengeance in the form of executing the offender themselves. Eye for an eye, family member for family member, murder for murder, rape for rape. This is the system that, in various forms, still exists today in many Muslim cultures, and it’s the system that we supposedly got rid of 800 years ago after agreeing that eye-for-an-eye is not what we wanted. Henceforth the only person allowed to bring criminal charges was an unbiased public official representing the state and the people, and that person had to be emotionally uninvolved with either side of the case.
Then, as the court system developed in England and America, we became strict about excluding from trials anyone who had any kind of bias, even if he otherwise qualified as a witness. In fact, bias caused by friendship or blood relation is one of the principal ways that witnesses are impeached.
…
*Please read the whole original at Taki’s, via the above hyperlink.*
Our courts, judges, and prosecutors are every bit as out of control as their legislative and executive counterparts. It’s a very good article as are most that pass through that source. Still, I will note that there was a time and place for private prosecutions, ones involving really process and decorum. The Romans, for example, ran a system of private felony proceedings similar to those used in their major civil cases. The aggrieved party, usually of Patrician class, brought charges and prosecuted them before the whole Senate or before a large jury of the accused’s actual friends, his peers.
We don’t do that anymore … to our detriment. We still, to a degree, use the Roman system of magistrates to quickly resolve minor cases. But the felonies are now handled by self-serving government agents, before government judges, with government witnesses, all before a jury carefully selected so as to favor the government. In short: you are screwed.
Maybe the Romans, like the ancient English, were a little more civilized. More honest. More intelligent. “We” certainly tend to be none of those things.
Also, to partly answer Joe Bob, the changes (to due process, equal protection, etc.) may have started prior to the 1980’s. It might have come through the example of 1945-46 and the Nuremberg Trials, which essentially threw out hundreds, thousands even, of years of legal refinement. Threw them out for temporary expedience and feel-good-isms. And with ramifications for the future.
And so we are left with a system based on: ignoring facts, ignoring history, emotionally driven nonsense, collectivist actions, always geared towards taking the maximum amount of freedoms away from the maximum numbers of innocent or disconnected persons.
248 bad actors (calm down CNN, Google – not those actors) kill people with rifles, some of them surely “assault-ish,” while 100 Million good actors remain armed, responsible, peaceful, and vigilant. The solution is to disarm the many over the actions of the few?
That’s the “thought.” The thought of today’ do-good grabbers and of Hitler, Himmler, Mao, Stalin, Amin, Hussein, and Pot. A somewhat disconcerting truth and conundrum.
