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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people nannyism national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Anti-Gun Barrage

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America’s would-be gun-grabbers, chiefly in the media and “on the left,” don’t know much about guns.

But they know what they hate.

After the horrific terrorist shooting spree in San Bernardino, MSNBC and CNN went on a shooting-their-mouths-off spree, relentlessly pushing the need for stricter gun control. President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats echoed the theme.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks went full accelerando, unleashing a foul rant about how “we” are the terrorists and “we” are letting “us” get away with mass murder “every week,” ignoring the statistics that murder rates have gone down, are still going down, and that the rest of the world is being hit with mass shootings too, mainly from Muslim radicals.

When the news came out that the perps were, indeed, Muslim, the barrage of anti-gun talk didn’t stop, though their intellectual ammunition had fizzled.

The president went further off his rocker, calling the guns he wanted to ban “powerful” — though they are of lower caliber than many handguns — while Hillary Clinton talked about the need to ban “assault rifles.”

As has been noted by others, “assault rifle” only means what anti-gun folks say it means, and what they designate as assault weapons are not (contrary to their constant implications) the equivalent of machine guns (which have been illegal for citizen ownership for a long, long time).

Being scared of scary-looking guns is no excuse not to be able to define them. While it would be good to reduce incentives for folks to “go postal” or to commit terroristic acts, we aren’t going to prevent mass shootings by a simple prohibitionary or mere regulatory regime.

That’s for scare-mongers to push. And us to resist.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture nannyism too much government

A Handle on Global Warming?

Global Warming, Vancouver, gas, sticker, climate change, common sense

Folks in government are prone to overstepping their bounds.

Take, for example, the North Vancouver, British Columbia, City Council, which has instituted a mandatory sticker program for gas pumps. Starting in 2016, public service announcements will appear on North Vancouver gas pump nozzle handles.

What for?

To warn us of the danger of global warming.

Though the city government hasn’t accepted any particular message, Autoblog reports that the policy is clear: “The idea behind the warnings isn’t to shame people for filling up an internal combustion engine but instead to suggest that there could be more eco-friendly alternatives.”

Autoblog calls this new move a “small step to help fight the planet’s rising temperatures,” and that North Vancouver “will likely be the first city in the world” to enact such a mandate.

I am sure city pols are proud of themselves.

The ordinance was pushed by a not-for-profit Canadian group called Our Horizon. The goal? Make a “positive impact on the environment” with this “relatively low cost but highly visible strategy.”

The official estimate on costs? Between C$3,000 and C$5,000. Costs to businesses? “Gas station owners must display [the stickers] as a condition of their business license.”

Meanwhile, the unsettled science of climate change teeters ahead, as The Rebel Media reports: increased carbon dioxide may not cause extra warming (chlorofluorocarbons do that), but does induce greening, helping plant life to flourish.

When the truth finally emerges, out of the fog blown over the issues by groupthink, the findings of legitimate science probably won’t fit on a sticker.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights folly general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies privacy U.S. Constitution

Our Masters’ Malign Agenda

Constitution, Bill of Rights, Politics, Terrorism, populism, Common Sense

Reacting to terrorism, President Obama’s first thought? Scratch out the Second Amendment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of “due process” from the Bill of Rights. Why? To advance his mania for gun control.

Now comes Republican front-runner Donald Trump, one-upping the president. He wants to block any Muslim from entering the U.S. — whether immigrant, refugee or even tourist.

That’s after advocating a government database for tracking American citizens who are Muslim.

Terrorism is winning.

Ignore the Constitution? Disregard individual rights? Demonize an entire religion? Thus our leaders play into ISIS’s hands, encouraging Muslims worldwide to see the U. S. as their enemy.

Cooler heads must prevail. Or else. A Republican friend posted on Facebook that he “would gleefully vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump.” I just cannot muster any glee.

In fact, I’m beginning (again) to wonder if John Fund wasn’t on to something last June, when he wrote in National Review that “just maybe Trump is a double agent for the Left.”

Think “Manchurian Candidate.”

“It’s all very un-American,” my friend Suhail Khan, an American Muslim and conservative activist, told the Washington Post. “Our country was based on religious freedom.”

No more?

Surely, our experiment in limited government has not ended.

But we need to get serious.

We must demand a real commitment from any candidate seeking the country’s highest office. To be entrusted to execute our union’s laws, he or she must actually demonstrate allegiance to the rule of law.

That is, a willingness to fit one’s ego within the confines of the Constitution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies property rights responsibility

Climate Changelings

Paris, climate change, global warming, natural gas, fracking, Common Sense, illustration

Worried that the world is going to sacrifice progress for the mess of pottage that is “global climate change”?

Don’t. Years ago, economists specializing in game theory recognized that the governments of the world would be extremely unlikely to agree to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The incentives are all wrong for that.

Last month, the great debunker of junk climate science, Patrick Michaels, reporting on the recent Paris talks, concurred. The international agreement going forward is so worded as to be “free to be meaningless.” Countries can claim to be “doing something,” but effectively accomplish nothing. Which allows “the world’s largest emitter (China) and the third-largest one (India)” to balk.

But the ole USA? It is doing something . . .

and it’s going to cost. Here’s one reason: Under Obama’s Clean Power Plan, substitution of natural gas for coal in electrical generation isn’t going to increase, even though it produces only half the carbon dioxide per kilowatt of electricity as coal. Instead, his EPA says power companies have to substitute unreliable, expensive “renewables,” mainly solar energy and wind. These are mighty expensive compared with new natural-gas power. And even the Clean Power Plan won’t meet our Paris target.

Obviously, what we have to worry about are our martyrdom-prone environmental zealots and their power-hungry (political power-hungry) friends ensconced in government.

They just can’t leave well enough alone, for, as Michaels notes, even CO2 emissions improve with industrial progress — when markets are free and property rights established.

But anti-capitalists in and out of government don’t want improvements to come naturally. Apparently, they would rather make things worse even by their own standards than let markets work.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture nannyism national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Enumerated Wrongs

Bill of Rights, Ten Amendments, Freedom of Speech, Bear Arms, Common Sense

Will the government soon quarter troops in your home?

The Third Amendment prohibits that, sure — but if prominent and powerful Democrats are so anxious to toss out the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution, who’s to say they wouldn’t jettison the Third?

Last year, every Democratic U.S. Senator voted to repeal the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and replace it with new, broad powers for them to regulate campaign spending, thereby speech.

Luckily, those 54 senators lacked the two-thirds margin needed for their amendment.

Now, in the face of “gun violence” and (pssst) terrorism, President Obama, presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton, and true-blue MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, want to scrap the Second Amendment. How? By first scrapping the Fifth, which guarantees that “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” They demand that Americans on the so-called “terrorist no-fly list” be denied the Second Amendment right to a firearm, despite the fact that the bureaucratically created no-fly list offers not a scintilla of due process: no charge, jury, trial.

Would this new regulation have prevented the San Bernardino murderers from getting guns? No — they had recently flown across the world.

The frequent-flying Boston Marathon bombers didn’t make the list, either.

But the list did label an 18-month-old girl a terrorist, snatching her rights like taking candy from a . . . toddler.

“Just what will it take for Congress to overcome the intimidation of the gun lobby and do something as sensible as making sure people on the terrorist watch list can’t buy weapons?” Mrs. Clinton asked rhetorically at a campaign event.

Answer: an illegal abrogation of the most fundamental and cherished rights in human history.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom national politics & policies

The Sanders/Obama/Nye Conjecture

climate change, global warming, drought, terrorism, Common Sense

When some of America’s most illustrious public figures — Senator Bernie Sanders, President Barack Obama, and Bill Nye the Science Guy — proclaim global climate change as the “obvious” cause of the rise of ISIS (and recent rounds of terrorism), it’s time to consider:

Is it climate change that is responsible for the recent rash of mass shootings in the U.S., most recently in San Bernardino?

There is a drought in California — a water shortage, anyway.

But that is caused more by overuse and underpricing of water resources — itself the result of public, not private, water resource management — than climate change.

Isn’t it more likely that people on the margin of stability — call them “crazy” or just evil — take cues from other shooters in the news, draw inspiration and then draw guns?

And fire.

America’s non-Muslim, home-grown mass murderers don’t seem to be making a clear point. Syrian refugee and European ISIS-sympathizing Muslim radicals do seem to be making a point — but one quite tangential to Bill Nye’s nifty causal chain: man-made global warming leads to droughts; farmers leave the country for the city; over-strapped cities lack water and jobs; frustrated male (and female) refugees go postal.

Hey Bill, don’t war and drone strikes, not to mention tyranny, also cause instability?

But then, so would cutting back on fossil fuels: the whole mid-east region runs on fuel sold to the West. If we fight ISIS by combatting CO2 emissions, and if the Sanders/Obama/Nye Theory is correct, we’ll just get more ISIS.

Copy-cattery and ideology explain this evil better. Not climate change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

In-Nate Problem

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My brother, Tim Jacob, blames me for sucking him into politics. And I have reason to feel guilt, for politics is filled with — ugh — politicians.

Back in 1992, I urged Tim to join Steve Munn and Lance Curtis, who were launching a petition drive to put term limits before voters. Along with other do-it-yourself citizens, they gathered (all volunteer) 100,000 signatures. Then, against a special-interest-funded TV barrage, term limits prevailed with the largest YES vote of any initiative in state history.

In 2004, Tim was called back into service when legislators proposed a constitutional amendment to weaken term limits, using ballot language claiming it would “establish” limits. Voters saw through it, crushing the scam 70 to 30 percent.

But last year, legislators got even trickier. Their Issue 3 ballot language told voters the measure would ban gifts from lobbyists to legislators, create an “Independent Citizen Commission” to set salaries and “establish” term limits. Enough voters were fooled: Issue 3 passed 52 to 48 percent. Now, lobbyists are buying legislators even more meals, the “independent” commissioners awarded the very legislators who appointed them a 150 percent pay raise, and term limits were doubled to a ridiculous 16 years.

My brother co-chaired the unsuccessful effort to alert voters, noting that legislators “pursued a campaign of silence . . . letting the deceptive ballot title do their work.”

Today, he and a band of resilient volunteers have filed — and are gathering petition signatures for — a new initiative to give Arkansans an honest choice on restoring the stricter limits.

Yet, Monday morning, Rep. Nate Bell, who voted for Issue 3 and then hid throughout the campaign, tweeted, “I am publicly challenging Tim Jacobs [sic] of Arkansas Term Limits to a public debate on subject. Are there any #arpx news orgs that would host?”

Rep. Bell’s follow-up tweet announced, “Jacobs [sic] has declined to debate me on proposed term limits amndmnt. ‘Well I’m busy overcoming your fraud now, so you’ll have to wait’ #arleg.”

My brother, being wiser than I (due undoubtedly to his being older), didn’t take the bait. There’ll be plenty of time for debate once the initiative has enough signatures to be placed on the ballot.

In the meantime, Mr. Bell can huddle with career politicians, perhaps New York’s former Speaker Sheldon Silver. But hurry, before Silver goes to prison for corruption.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment general freedom government transparency judiciary moral hazard national politics & policies property rights too much government

Government Burglars

civil asset forfeiture, police, abuse, robbery, Common Sense

If you try to compare those police who take people’s money and property through civil asset forfeiture laws to burglars, who rob folks in more traditional ways, you are just not being fair.

To the burglars.

The Institute for Justice recently released an updated Policing for Profit report showing that federal asset forfeiture topped $5 billion in 2014. The FBI disclosed that in that same year $3.5 billion of value was lost in burglaries.

Then, folks did the math.

Steven Greenhut’s piece at reason.com was headlined, “Cops Now Take More Than Robbers.”

At The Washington Post Wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham explained there was an especially big haul in seized assets in 2014, including $1.7 billion from Bernie Madoff. Moreover, the dollar figure for burglary doesn’t include larceny, motor vehicle theft, etc. All such theft combined totaled more than $12 billion that year.

So, law enforcement isn’t stealing quite as much from citizens as the criminals they are supposed to be protecting us from are. Sort of a backhanded compliment, though.

Recent polling finds more than 70 percent of Americans opposed to seizing assets without a criminal conviction, i.e. innocent until proven guilty, but taking cash and cars and stuff from folks never charged with or convicted of a crime has become a big business for “our” government.

When legislation to mildly reform civil forfeiture failed recently in California, Mr. Greenhut called legislators’ votes “about money, not justice.” Ferocious lobbying by the California District Attorneys Association and the California Police Chiefs warned money-grubbing legislators that budgets would take an $80 to $100 million hit.

Theft is apparently quite lucrative. Who knew?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling folly ideological culture

Doing Anti-Racism Wrong

yoga, racism, political correctness, racism, colonialism, Common Sense

The number of crazies out there may be fewer than they seem.

This weekend, at Townhall, I wrote about the University of Ottawa’s suspension of a free yoga class. What was deemed “problematic” was the class’s “cultural appropriation” of an ancient discipline.

But why was yoga a problem, -atic or otherwise?

Well, in the words of the “fainting heart” who made the decision to nix the program, because yoga hails from cultures that “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy. . . .”

Robby Soave, at the Daily Beast, pushed a bit deeper than I did: “Cultural appropriation first became a talking point in sociology circles in the 1970s and ’80s. Explicitly racist and exploitative incidents from the past — like 19th and early 20th century blackface — were deemed wrong, not merely because they were horribly insulting to black people, but because they stole from black culture.”

On this ground, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is intolerably racist.

Idiotic. Let me repeat what I wrote this weekend:

  1. Cultural appropriation is a good thing; that’s how we progress. We emulate the good in other cultures. We discard practices that do not suit us. That is what good people do.
  2. Those people who, afflicted by the mind-virus of today’s neo-progressivism, think that “cultural appropriation” is racist are themselves racist.

How are they racist? By judging a cultural matter as racial.

Racists make too much of race. So does this new breed of self-defined anti-racists.

But remember, it was just one complaint that led to the yoga class being nixed. Had the person who addressed the complaint dared snort in derision, the whole absurdity might have stopped before it started.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

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Photo credit (endorsement of this message is not implied): Steven Depolo on Flickr

 

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free trade & free markets general freedom individual achievement property rights responsibility too much government

Roman Rockets?

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Is Big Government necessary to accomplish Big Things?

Big government built the pyramids. Big government erected the Great Wall of China. Big government put Man on the Moon.

But humanity could have reached Luna over a thousand years ago, had Roman civilization not gone into a death spiral.

Bill Whittle made this point in some recent talks on Afterburner and guesting on Stefan Molyneux’s philosophy show. He blames the fall of past civilizations on “sexual strategies”: the sociobiology of r/K. (The “r” strategy organisms make lots of babies, invest little in them, accept widespread predation; the “K” strategy makes fewer babies, invests heavily in each, and suppresses predators and parasites.) Civilizations start K-style and decline with r.

It’s a theory.

Whatever the biology, Big Government was integral to Rome’s decline, with its exploitative systems and corruption, monetary inflation and “handouts.”

Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day. There were delays and cost-overruns, like any government job.

But Whittle’s right about progress. Humanity would be a lot further along if it didn’t get caught in government/conflict/exploitation traps. Private companies might be on the Moon today were it not for Big governments that destroyed promising civilization in the past.

But hey: private enterprise is catching up.

“In an historic first,” Popular Science informs us, “the private company founded by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos has become the first to land a re-useable rocket that’s traveled to and from space.” The rocket lands as envisioned in old science fiction flicks, vertically — though with the aid of “drag brakes” (parachutes).

Let’s hope our civilization doesn’t once again collapse before we witness (and contribute to) further progress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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