Author: CS Admin

Resist Criminal Attacks

Are you ever too old to stop a mugger? Not if your mobility scooter is ready to go.

This conclusion is informed by the example of 92-year-old Eileen Mason, who was with her 75-year-old friend, Margaret Seabrook, when a mugger tried to make off with the contents of a scooter basket.

The two British great-grandmothers were returning from a lunch club in Wiltshire as the thief approached and targeted the older of the two.

When he grabbed Eileen Mason’s arm and reached for the bag, she shouted “Oh no you don’t” — at her maximum volume.

“I put my scooter into accelerate and turned really fast,” she told the UK Telegraph. “The next thing I know he was on the floor. I thought ‘my gosh.’ Something in me just told me to turn so I squeezed the accelerator and turned and he went flying. He was so evil looking.”

If you like this story, don’t miss the ones about the grandma who used a handbag to stop a jewel-store robbery, or the grandma who trapped a burglar in a shed.

Margaret Seabrook says they want their experience to teach people “not [to] leave things on display in their baskets.…”

That’s one lesson — don’t make yourself an unnecessarily tempting target. But the other thing is be prepared … to defend and evade.

If somebody is gearing up to rob you, be ready to stop him. At least, if you can do so without too much risk to life, limb, or liberty.

Thanks, ladies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags crime, defense, law, responsibility

folly free trade & free markets nannyism

A New, Freer Sector

Current trends in public policy and law seem to be pointing not to consistent principles, but contradictory ones.

Wyoming just made it legal for farmers to sell directly to local customers, in such venues as farmers’ markets — without government inspection and conformity to the usual, clunky set of regulations that apply when selling to other businesses for resale.

The bill, recently signed into law by the governor, also allows neighbors to sell homemade foods to one another informally and at special community events like bake sales.

An obvious win for freedom. Who can argue against a free market in foodstuffs at the community level, where normal transactions tend to be customary and casual, and also obviously subject to regulation by reputation?

But government regulations still apply maximally to farmers and supermarkets and grocery chains. And yet, many of the arguments for local free markets apply equally to these currently controlled ones. Free competition would likely lead to the re-introduction of reputation economies into big agribiz markets. Could very well be transformative.

For our health.

After all, it’s not as if government has really helped us in this realm. We are right now working our way out of a government-sponsored health and diet paradigm that we are learning was exactly wrong.

The official “anti-fat” hysteria made us fat.

A more competitive approach, allowing for different philosophies to operate — as they can at the community level, with old recipes co-existing with the new-agey ones, as well as with non-pasteurized milk and organic farms and local cheese and everything else — would encourage new ways of meeting old food fears as well as accommodating new food fads.

Extend freedom. (Not waistlines.)

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags FDA, food, regulations, rules

folly nannyism property rights too much government

Fishy Schemes Against Human Beings

Post author By CS Admin
Post date April 22, 2015
2 Comments on Fishy Schemes Against Human Beings

Arbitrary governmental pricing of water — as opposed to free-market pricing — provides one major reason why it’s so hard for Californians and others to deal with drought.

I’ve talked about it before. And, as before — indeed, as is so often the case when government constricts our freedom to “solve” problems — the do-badders are pursuing more than one line of attack.

Under-pricing plus edicts about how we may use water are bad enough, sure. But that kind of central planning is just one method of making it harder to quench thirst and water lawns and crops. Another method? Diverting massive amounts of water from the service of human needs in order to “help” a few expendable fish.

In his Reason article “California Drought a Shortage of Water or Common Sense?,” Steven Greenhut laments fishy schemes to lower reservoir levels and drain a lake near the Sierra foothills “to help coax a handful of steelhead trout to swim to the ocean.” Handful? Maybe not quite. Nine fish. A mere nine.

The Lake Tulloch Alliance estimated that up to $2 million in water value would have to be expended to save each individual fish.

Thanks to coverage like Greenhut’s and Stephen Moore’s, and the resultant public outcry — plus the eventual resistance of local water district officials to the environmental demands of state and federal agencies — this particular attempt by radical environmentalists to elevate fish life above human life has been deflected. At least for now.

But there are more battles to come.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags California, conservation, drought, pricing, water

ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Finished Business

The civil war is over!

I mean Nebraska’s civil war, a 23-year schism between its unicameral legislature and what’s known as the state’s “second house” — that is, the people, acting through the initiative and referendum process, often checking the power of the first house.

Hero of the day? State Senator Mike Groene of North Platte, who championed Legislative Bill 367. Kudos also to the 42 – 0 vote of the Nebraska Legislature that enacted the measure, as well as to Governor Pete Ricketts for signing it into law.

Groene, who has been politically active for years with the Western Nebraska Taxpayers Association, got into office as a result of term limits. His LB 367 reverses the state’s seven-year ban on paying petition circulators according to the number of signatures they gather. He convincingly argued that the ban had “really broken the back of people trying to take part in their government through the petition process.”

“It’s time for this body to call a truce,” Groene told fellow lawmakers, declaring that since term limits were first passed, citizens and their representatives had been locked in a “civil war.”

During that war, State Sen. Diane Schimek, a 20-year legislator about to be term-limited, successfully pushed legislation to restrict citizen petitions. Part of her measure was struck down as unconstitutional in Citizens in Charge v. Gale. Now the rest has been unanimously repealed by the state legislature.

Sen. Paul Schumacher of Columbus favored Groene’s bill, saying that legislators could use a more viable initiative check on their power. The unicameral’s attacks on citizen petitions were, he said, “reflective of a government that was afraid of its people.”

Now it’s peacetime in Nebraska.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags activism, ballot access, Initiative Rights, initiatives

crime and punishment folly general freedom too much government

Police State Blues

No reason anymore to even feign surprise at today’s police state insanities.

At Townhall yesterday, I bemoaned the six-hour kidnapping of a 10-year-old Maryland boy and his 6‑year-old sister for the terrible crime of peacefully walking home from a public park. The children were grabbed just a couple blocks from their home …

… by police, who held them for over two hours before handing them to Montgomery County Child Protective Services.

It was hours before anyone contacted the panicked parents.

There’s no law prohibiting kids from walking down a public street, but bureaucrats are threatening this poor family over just that.

So, I guess we shouldn’t be shocked that when an 11-year-old boy disagrees with what he’s being taught in school about marijuana, and explains that his mother has used cannabis oil to treat her Crohn’s disease and his mother is not a criminal, (a) he’s going to be detained and grilled by authorities and (b) his mother may soon become a criminal.

A raid on Shonda Banda’s home indeed turned up two ounces of cannabis oil. Ms. Banda could be facing felony drug charges in Kansas, where she now lives, but she used to live in Colorado, where her use of cannabis oil would be legal.

The Washington Post’s Radley Balko identifies the absurdity: “a woman could lose her custody of her child for therapeutically using a drug that’s legal for recreational use an hour to the west.”

Today she has a custody hearing over her son.

The state “protection” being afforded the children in both of these cases isn’t protecting them. It’s terrorizing them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags children, freedom, police, police abuse

general freedom ideological culture media and media people Second Amendment rights

Times Misfires

Time to revise the Times’s motto? Should “all the news that’s fit to print” read “misprint” instead?

Maybe, after the New York Times’s latest editorial snafu, charging the NRA with hypocrisy for banning arms-bearing at its April convention.

According to the editorial, “none of” the attendees were allowed to “come armed with guns that can actually shoot. After all the N.R.A. propaganda about how ‘good guys with guns’ are needed to be on guard across American life … the weekend’s gathering of disarmed conventioneers seems the ultimate in hypocrisy.… So far, there has been none of the familiar complaint about infringing supposedly sacrosanct Second Amendment.…”

But after first hitting print, the text has changed. It was too quickly and conspicuously confirmed that “anyone with a permit valid in Tennessee can ‘come armed [to the convention] with guns that actually shoot,” that “the NRA had no problem with gun owners with the proper gun permits bringing their weapons inside.”

So the Times editorial was edited after initial publication, nixing the reference to “the ultimate in hypocrisy.” The revised online editorial now merely professes dismay that guns won’t be allowed in one of the convention venues … but doesn’t mention that this is because of the policy of that particular venue, not the NRA’s.

The editorial still complains that nobody is complaining about alleged Second Amendment infringement no longer attributable to the NRA. Whose alleged hypocrisy was the Times’s original point.

It’s like somebody’s shooting at random and just hoping to hit something.

This is Common Sense. (I mean this, not the Times editorial, is Common Sense.) I’m Paul Jacob.

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