crime

Free Speech and Justice

Mark Noonan22 Comments

It is still all about the lies – Kirk was killed by a man who submerged himself in Leftwing lies to the point where he perceived Kirk as a personal enemy who must be eliminated if the killer was to survive. Now, to be sure, this is a weak-minded person – but as I’ve noted again and again, if you spread hate filled lies in a population of 340 million, even if just one tenth of one percent fully believe the lies, that means 340,000 people primed to kill.

That’s a lot.

And, of course, it is probably closer to twenty five percent of our population fully infected with the lies that killed Kirk. So, 85 million or so people. This is shown by an ABC reporter who looked at the killer’s text messages to his partner and found them “touching”. Everyone is torching that reporter but keep in mind: to that reporter – as to tens of millions of others – the killer is the hero. I guarantee there are people right now writing scripts portraying the killer as the hero. You can almost see the Law and Order episode…a “Right Wing Fanatic” gets killed and after our dogged (Liberal) law enforcement officers investigate, they find it was the “Fanatic” who caused it to happen.

It is unshakable Liberal dogma that Kirk was an absolutely horrible person. They’ll literally quote you things Kirk never said (or that are so twisted out of context they work out to bald faced lies) as proof that he was lousy…with the subtext being that he got what was coming. These fools are incapable of turning that about – of thinking of a time when their opponents decide to dish it right back to them. They can’t imagine that because they are stunningly ignorant – they just assume they’ll never be called upon to pay the price they demand we pay. They don’t know how the world works – do not know how people behave when they feel their lives are at stake. They expect to get Kirk killed, get in our faces, yell at us…throw things at us…and we’ll never do anything. They’re wrong. There is a limit – and we’re just about there. The next phase is people on the Right shooting back.

That happens if Team Trump is not able to get a handle on the people responsible for the lies and make them pay for it. And that brings me to this: Bondi is getting a lot of flack for condemning hate speech. There is no such thing as hate speech – we all know that. And, so, her comment about it ignited an immediate fire storm on the Right. But you do need to pay close attention to what she said:

Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.

Under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), it is a federal crime to transmit “any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another.” Likewise, 18 U.S.C. § 876 and 18 U.S.C. § 115 make it a felony to threaten public officials, members of Congress, or their families.

You cannot call for someone’s murder. You cannot swat a Member of Congress. You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as “free speech.” These acts are punishable crimes, and every single threat will be met with the full force of the law.

Free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.

She is not saying that hate speech is a crime – but she is saying that hate speech will be a crime if it goes beyond a certain point. This is as close as she feels she can get to my position – that is, lies aren’t 1A protected. Honestly, I don’t know if that’s where she’s heading but if I were AG, this is where I’d start on my path to hauling the Left into court for their lies, as such. Can’t do that – just too much opposition would develop against it, including from the Right. Heck, we’ve seen just the use of “hate speech” set off a ruckus. But it is the way to go about it – it is kicking the Left in the shins. Their terminology is being turned against them…and she’s not promising to drop the hammer on “I hate Trump”…but she will drop it on “I think Trump should be taken out”. And so on through all the rest of the incitements the Left puts out and then pretends weren’t incitements when someone like Kirk gets killed.

Our test case is now the people who surrounded Kirk’s killer – the friends who talked him into believing the way he did. If any of them in any way encouraged violence, we might be able to indict them…and indict them in Utah – a Trump +31 State. We don’t know how this will shake out as its still very early, but the text messages released indicate that the killer had been brooding of this for some time and felt he had the opportunity to kill Kirk and get away with it. We’ll see what Bondi and Patel turn up in the investigation. We’ll see, that is, if we can make the Left pay for Kirk’s murder – because that is the only way to do this. If the killer is executed for the crime and it goes no further, then justice has not been done…it would almost work out to a miscarriage of justice. It would be hanging the concentration camp guard while letting the camp commandant off. The killer was wound up like a clock and set off on a schedule…and the greater guilt resides in those who lied this event into existence.

And our safety can only be secured if we punish the liars. You can see it: they feel no remorse and are not at all toning it down. They are already getting fired up and ready to brazenly lie some more. Why shouldn’t they? They got an effective opponent killed – they certainly hope to kill more and ever higher up the line. And they sit supremely confident that nothing will happen to them. “I didn’t kill anyone!”…no, but you said over and over again that Kirk wanted all trans people killed…that he was a Nazi…a fascist…an existential threat. But if you lie and lie and lie and those lies motivate a killer, then you are morally responsible for the death…now we’re going to find out if we can make such people criminally liable.

War: it Really is Kinda Hell

Mark Noonan15 Comments

There is a video out there showing a Ukrainian drone slamming into a Russian high rise – and it does evoke memories of 9/11…and everyone is jumping on the Ukrainians for doing it, whether deliberately or accidentally. I am very much “meh” about it. Russia started this war without any justifiable cause. And this incident has been tossed into the War Crimes pile…that is where everyone involved in a conflict accuses the other of being war criminals.

And that is why I have dispensed with the whole concept of war crimes: there is just no point in it.

To this day, there is still argument going on about what the Germans did in Belgium during World War One – both in the immediate invasion of August, 1914 and throughout the war. That Germans did rape, murder and loot from Day One on is not in dispute…but there are still people trying to argue that this or that particular incident didn’t happen or was itself justified. It is all such a drivel argument – the war crime, if such exists, was the German invasion. The Germans had no cause to attack Belgium – a small, weak and entirely inoffensive nation which would never have dreamed of challenging German power. If not a single Belgian had been killed, it still would have been a crime. So, people trying to twist themselves into knots saying, “well, when this village was burned and inhabitants massacred, it might well have been in response to a Belgian taking a pot-shot with the farm’s shotgun”. As if that mattered – there wasn’t supposed to be a German to take a pot-shot at.

This is why I’m only interested in who fires the first shot or who sets conditions upon which firing must commence. That is, who started it? After that, all wrong is the fault of the person who started it – nothing the aggressor does can possibly make it better or worse, and nothing the victim does in response is wrong. You open fire, you take your chances…and as far as I’m concerned, if you’re the aggressor and end up losing, count yourself lucky if every last one of you isn’t killed by the victor. What any nation should do in war – and especially my nation – is based entirely upon expediency…what will bring us victory the quickest and at least cost? This is moral because the faster you end a war the less costly it is going to be – and the force used to end a war is always morally proportionate to need, proof being that it ended the war (lots of theological people try to tie themselves in knots over this as part of the Just War Doctrine…mostly so they can hate on the USA for using atomic bombs…but the bottom line is that as long as the force is proportionate to needs, it is legitimate…and that means whatever force you can bring is legitimate).

Sure, I’d prefer a world where there were fully established rules for war and everyone tried to adhere to them. But it isn’t going to happen. It can’t happen when, in modern times, the combatants don’t even agree on what is right and wrong. That’s the real failure of all the peace and arms-control treaties…they have words on them and the contracting parties don’t even agree on the meanings of words. Back when it was two deeply Christian powers in conflict you could make rules…because both sides were working off the same ultimate rule book. But between, say, Catholic me and Communist enemy, where is there any meeting of mind? When I say “justice” is means just about the opposite of what the Communist means. I can’t make a deal with him – can’t have agreed upon rules of conflict. I can only, when pressed to it, fight him with every available means lest he kill me and all I hold dear.

Just my two cents on that particular modern debate. Fight if you want. You’d better win if you decide to fight. If you decide to fight and lose, I don’t care what happens to you.

The Death of Penalty

Mark Noonan25 Comments

There’s been a lot of comment about the morality of executing Kenneth Smith via nitrogen hypoxia; basically, a mask is put over the inmate’s face and he breaths in nitrogen…which is a harmless gas in itself (our atmosphere is mostly nitrogen) but without the oxygen you die. And so Kenneth Smith died. The comments revolve around execution via suffocation (which is what it works out to) and the apparent suffering Smith went through before the end. This sort of this is first off irritating in that an execution isn’t supposed to be a spa day; the purpose of the operation is to kill someone. But there’s more to it than that.

As you guys know, for the longest time I’ve been opposed to the death penalty. This is based upon two things:

  1. The moral desire to allow even the worst among us the chance to repent as well as concerns for what sort of people we become when we execute.
  2. A mistrust of government having the power to decide that a citizen should die.

But I have of late been rethinking this subject. I’ve mentioned this before but it really comes down to understanding that our ancestors were not insensate brutes in their chosen methods of punishment and that the veneer of civilization is thin. Razor thin.

Human beings are not of nature civilized. We come into this world having to learn everything we’re ever going to be. We can’t walk or talk or even feed ourselves when we come out. It takes years of parental care just to ensure we survive and have the barest skills to live from day to day. To make us into people who won’t knock our neighbor on the head and take his stuff is an even lengthier process and if it isn’t imparted starting very early it becomes increasingly difficult to impart it later. By the time a kid is, say, 12 if morality has not been transmitted then it is increasingly unlikely that it will be transmitted. It can only past that point be learned by coercion. Coercion by other people or by circumstances.

It doesn’t take centuries to lose civilization. In fact, it can be done in just one generation. All you have to do is not teach it and, bang, it is gone when the kids of today become the adults of 20 years later. That we haven’t entirely lost civilization is because of the un-even application of anti-civilization teaching and the fact that parents still retain some vestigial authority. But you can see that it is very threadbare when packs of well-fed people systemically loot stores while mobs of ignoramuses shout pro-Hamas slogans because their tribal elders tell them to.

And it all comes down to the death of penalty. We don’t punish. Heck, not only do we not punish, we actively reward wrongdoing. And this from highest to lowest…from the Hollywood star who writes a best-seller about what a crappy person they were to the bum on the street being given welfare when he could work. Whether or not you’ll be punished for any particular wrong act is entirely capricious. There is not a 1 for 1 thing here – do bad, get whacked. It is do bad and if the prosecutor wants to make a case and you don’t have a good lawyer and if your victim’s family actually cares and so on and on. Smith eventually got his, but it was 36 years later. Think about that.

The man was paid $1,000.00 to kill Elizabeth Sennett. The guy who hired him (Sennett’s husband) gave Smith money to buy a gun for the job, but Smith chose to blow that money on drugs and so he did the deed by beating and stabbing Sennett to death. And even the $1,000.00 is only about one wild weekend for a druggie. That’s the price of a life in Smith’s estimation; a weekend party. And think about the method – beating and stabbing someone to death is not the easiest thing in the world.

There’s a reason the ancient’s used swords. The gladius of Rome weighed more than two pounds and was more than two feet long. They had to make it that big and heavy because stabbing or slicing someone to death isn’t easy…so, they needed a hefty, large blade to get the job done. If you tried that even with a combat knife of modern times then unless you get lucky and stab right into the heart, what you’re probably going to do is hurt rather than kill. Maybe hurt badly, but not kill. Same thing with beating someone to death – unless you get the lucky blow on the head, you’re probably going to be at it for a while.

So, what Smith did was quite horrific. It took a lot of stabbing and beating to kill Sennett. And the horrific nature of the crime is why he was given the death penalty. Had he just shot her in the back of the head, probably wouldn’t have. But that’s as if the method of being killed matters. It doesn’t. What matters is being killed. Smith took a life. He took every last thing Sennett had and was going to have. She had kids and grandkids. She had a life and she was 45 years old at the time. She could very easily still be alive today, spending a few last years in the loving embrace of her family. Smith took that from her. For a grand. And he took it in the most brutal way possible. Think about her for a second: a suburban housewife who never harmed anyone in her life is suddenly, violently set upon by men inside her home. What a horror! What must have gone through her mind? So, that is why Smith died – because of the extreme nastiness of what he did.

Those who were or are trying to gin up sympathy for Smith are simply beneath contempt. Those who call executing him – by whatever method – barbaric 36 years after he took everything from Sennett are just disgusting in their immorality. I really can’t express how low and vile such people appear in my eyes. To even talk about Smith without prefacing it with what he did – and explaining the really horrible nature of what he did – is just wrong. It is to act like Smith is some sort of victim. He isn’t. Smith was 22 years old. A full grown man. He knew what he was doing was wrong by simple fact that he tried to prevent his own execution: and if he knew he didn’t want to die, then he knew that Sennett didn’t want to die. He had not the least mitigating circumstance in his action – his only hope once he did the deed was repentance and a plea for God’s mercy.

But, he’s dead, now; so, we’re square, right? No, not really.

First off there is the capricious nature of it all – plenty of people who have done vastly worse than Smith aren’t on death row. Dahmer murdered 17 in a manner that makes Smith look innocent and he got life imprisonment (though his murder in prison still seems to me to be a sort of backdoor execution). Smith gets death for 1 murder, Dahmer gets life for 17: does this make any sense at all? And do keep in mind that Dahmer should have been caught long before he got to 17 – but regular folks and law enforcement just let it all slide because, well, there’s no penalty these days. Be bizarre. Have the smell of rotting corpses emanating from your apartment: we won’t do anything about it! Who are we to judge, right?

You see, it isn’t just about the murders and other worst crimes. It is the general sense that nobody is responsible and that punishment is never really warranted. Certainly not for small stuff. But the small stuff rather leads to or hides the big stuff, doesn’t it? In Dahmer’s case it might have been rather small when a naked man fled from his apartment and the police treated it as such and turned the poor man back over to Dahmer. Who then killed and ate him. You’d think that the naked guy running down the street would raise an eyebrow or two but in our modern world without penalty…nothing doing.

The morass of social collapse we are enduring today is the result of 60 years of inflicting no penalty, or inflicting penalty entirely at random where one poor sucker gets it in the head while the other guy gets a book deal. To stop social collapse it will be necessary to reimpose penalty. And quite uniformly. Maybe we still shouldn’t execute people, but those who murder and rape need to be very severely punished in a uniform manner. Whipping and rock breaking seems best to me if we aren’t to kill…make it 100 lashes for each rape and each murder in addition to imprisoning them. It is fair. It is just. And it is a penalty. And there must be a penalty.

And I very much do mean for all transgressions. Each theft, each vandalism, each public disorder, each broken oath…each crime must have a set, severe punishment inflicted without fail upon those who are convicted. It must become painful and humiliating to break the rules. The ancients knew this; they weren’t trying to be cruel when they broke a man at the wheel…they were trying to be just and instructive. Just in making the transgressor pay and instructive in telling everyone else that rule breaking has a high price.

Because rule breaking must have a high price. Remember that if you really break God’s rules – if you really, knowingly, choose to reject God’s mercy then you will be cast into hell. God doesn’t want that to happen to you. God will give you every opportunity to not choose that. But if its what you choose then that is what you chose. Same thing, on a lower level, for human society. Each of us, unless actually insane (a very tiny percentage at any given time) has a choice to make. We must decide what we are going to do and we must live with the consequences of our choice. If a person chooses to steal, rape and rob well then that person had every opportunity to choose otherwise but went ahead. Now, caught and convicted, must come the price. And, yes, a high price.

For goodness sake, do people really think about what a rape or murder entails? Do any of us want that to happen? And what in heck makes a man think he has some right to do such things? No, no, no and no. He wanted to do evil and did it and if we catch him when he’d better feel the punishment on his back. He must on his body feel every ounce of pain and humiliation he inflicted and then some. The price has to be paid. So, too, with all other transgressions, great and small. Naturally, the lesser offense gets the lesser punishment…but each offense must be punished and punishment for each type of offense must be the same for everyone convicted of it. No more plea deals: did you do it? If so, then punishment is X. The end.

So it must be, if we want to restore and retain civilization. It might seem a paradox but only because these days we have decreed that violence is inherently barbaric. It isn’t. Barbarism can be and often is violent, but it is also indolent. The barbarian has to steal because he will not work. The civilized man keeps violence at his side to ensure the indolent and violent barbarian is kept at bay. It is just the way human society works and it will be thus until Christ returns. Deal with it.

And start acting like men and women who care.

If We Want to End Drug Addiction

Mark Noonan39 Comments

Over the past few days I’ve been rewatching the Narcos television series – I’ve mentioned it before and if you haven’t seen it, worth a watch. It covers the battle against the Columbian drug cartels, starting with the infamous Pablo Escobar. It is naturally dramatized but I did check it against reality and its a fairly good depiction of what happened. But it got me thinking that we’ve been going about it all wrong from the get-go.

One of our options is to just legalize all narcotics – let US drug makers produce cocaine, heroin or what have you and let people get high to their hearts content. As the Libertarians would say, this respects personal autonomy and we’d make good revenues from the legal trade as well as making sure the drugs have quality control so people wouldn’t be ingesting actual poison. There is much to be said for this line of thinking but I have considered it and rejected it.

One of the things Libertarians get wrong is how they define “victimless crime”. The Libertarian position is that taking drugs or, say, engaging in prostitution – as long as there’s no physical coercion – is victimless and so not really a crime. As such, we should let people freely engage in these activities and only intervene if someone is being directly harmed by another. But the reason I’m not Libertarian is because I recognize that you don’t have to directly attack someone to do them harm. The millions of addicts we have in the USA cause grave harm every day even if all they’re doing is lying in a pool of their own waste – it is the fact that they are high, filthy and polluting the streets that is the harm. Harms property values. Harms public health. The disorder they represent also attracts crime – not least people looking to rob or abuse the drug addicts, themselves. While our right to believe and say whatever we want is absolute, when you get into people doing things it isn’t nearly as absolute – and if done in the public square then it must in no way impede or harm everyone else who is in or may decide to use the public square at any time. Bottom line, the follow-on effects of having drug addicts are so large that we can’t afford, as a society , to carry the burden of millions of drug addicts. They must cease to be addicts – and as they’ve mostly shown themselves incapable of self control, they must be controlled; primarily in the form of cutting off their access to drugs.

Which we have tried to do, for decades, at enormous cost and zero success. I think this is because we went about it the wrong way.

Our battle has been against the “drug lords”. The cartel bosses; the big guys who are running the operations and making billions per year off it. In theory, going after them makes sense. But only if you don’t really think about it. You see, the problem isn’t people making money off drugs; the problem is the drugs, themselves. It is the drugs we want to get rid of. But we’ve gone after the money made off drugs, instead. But there is a problem with that: Money defends itself.

When you target the latest iteration of Pablo Escobar you’ll find that just like Escobar, the primary thing he has is money. Lots and lots of money. Buckets of money. So much money he doesn’t really know what to do with it all. Escobar had so much money he bought hippos – the descendants of which still live in Columbian rivers and lakes giving everyone who wants to look a hands-on class on species propagation. Escobar was able to operate as long as he did primarily because of bribes. Sure, he also used ruthless violence at need, but the main thing was the money. Anyone who could threaten his operation was first approached with a bribe offer – the killing thing only coming in if the bribes failed. And the killing was quite horrific for two purposes; to punish the particular guy who wouldn’t play ball, of course, but mostly to show everyone that if you didn’t take the bribe (or didn’t stay bought) then the consequences would be the horrible and painful death of (usually) you and your whole family. And Escobar’s successors throughout the entire narcotics trade have taken his lessons to heart – bribes combined with quite spectacular violence.

To get after such people – that is people who have no sense of decency – requires you to get down in the gutter with them. It is a dirty, nasty business staffed by the cruel and the corrupt. And as you work your plans to get the drug lords, you are surrounded by the offers of bribes and the threats of horrific death. To operate among such people you have to take on their coloration. Do you see where this leads? You become your enemy. First in ruthless cruelty against them and finally in going along with them. You take the bribe.

Think how easy that is. Don’t condemn anyone too harshly who took the money. Especially after they’ve been at it for a few years and they see for all their efforts – and maybe a few big targets taken down – the drugs continue to flow. The bribes continue to be paid. The violence associated with it on the lower levels continues unabated. So, maybe that fifth or sixth time the bribe is offered, you take it. The Narcos aren’t stupid; they’ll let you seize a small shipment every now an again. Let you arrest a few minor players (especially if those players have become an irritation). Life will go on; but now you’re not risking anything and that ten grand a month in an offshore account just grows and grows.

And, so, my point: taking down the drug lords is a pointless exercise. Even success is useless. Escobar got his chips cashed in back in 1993 and the drug trade never skipped a beat. Because the bribes continued to flow. The violence, too. And we’ve been at this so long that I’m very confident by this point that huge numbers of our people are on the take. The sheer volume of contraband crossing could not occur without active cooperation in official circles in the USA. And the propaganda machine which works non-stop to keep border control a joke is almost certainly Cartel funded at least to some major degree. We’re really getting the worst of it here; we use to have a drug problem, now we’ve got a drug and corruption problem.

Stopping the problem – drug addiction turned into massive corruption – has always been about keeping drugs out of the hands of addicts. It has been more logistic than anything else. Somewhere along the line, the logistic chain has to be broken. Can’t stop the production of the drugs – that is in South America. Can’t stop the shipment of drugs – most of that is outside the USA and while a complete sealing of our borders would stop it, that isn’t practical given the amount of trade we conduct day in and day out. So, the only place we can break the chain is internal distribution. that is, going after the small time hoods who transport and sell relatively small quantities of the drugs. The mules and the pushers: they have to go.

And by “go” I do mean in a quite literal sense. Gone. No longer around. Dead. Quickly and in large numbers. And at first glance what I’m suggesting might seem cruel. They’re just small fry, right? Not the big, bad drug lords. Sure. But it is the mules and pushers who actually hand out sufficient illegal drugs to cause 100,000 overdose deaths per year in the USA. In Latin and South America the number of people murdered by the drug trade is probably past a million by now. What I’m saying is that a few hundred – tops – dead mules and pushers and the supply of drugs on the streets dries up; and a vastly higher number of people don’t die next year.

It would work because the reason they’re in the business is that it is low risk/high reward. Drive that truck from San Diego to Chicaco. Easy. Sell those drugs in Chicago. Also easy. Probably won’t get caught. If you do, its a bit of jail time but because you’re smart, not too much; you didn’t keep sufficient drugs on your person to make your arrest a major rap. So, what I’m saying is that if we catch a guy selling an ounce of coke: kill him. You seriously would only have to do it a hundred times or so before people got out of the business.

The retail dealer can’t hide. He’s not like a drug lord in his guarded palace with an army of gunslingers and lawyers. He’s just a guy on a street corner (as it were) selling small amounts of narcotics. You can see it; seriously just drive into the more run down areas of any major city and no matter how innocent you are, in a short time you will figure out who the dealers are. He’s also in routine contact with drug addicts – people not well skilled in avoiding surveillance. We could, on any given day, arrest most of the drug dealers in any given city. And if we then placed them on trial the next day and shot them the day after that…week at the outside, nobody wants to move product on the streets any more.

Because that is the thing; it has to be death and it has to be swift. If it isn’t death and if it isn’t swift, just wasting your time. What you’re trying to do is instruct not very bright people. People who have a dim ability to see the future and very limited concern about other people. The only thing that can get their attention is violence. If you do want an alternative to execution you can try flogging. Fifty lashes with a bullwhip. But who shall apply the strokes? And that might not work; might become a macho game with these idiots to see who can put up with it the best. But death is death; these people very much want to stay alive. You put the word out that if we catch you with an ounce of coke then 48 hours later you’re dead, they’ll get the message.

All of this is only if you want to end the scourge of drugs. You don’t have to. It can turn your stomach and you can turn away. But if you want to end it – strictly speaking, make it such a small thing that it has no effect on overall society – then this is what you’ll have to do. They are killing 100,000 a year via OD. More via murder and mayhem. Are your sensitive feelings more important than the 250 or so who will die tomorrow because you didn’t shoot ten drug dealers today?

One day we will again be a serious society – a real country which identifies a problem and applies the appropriate solution even if its a hard thing to do. When that day comes, my ideas here – to one extent or another – will be applied. It is just a question of how long it takes for us to wake up.

We Must Restore Civilization

Mark Noonan8 Comments

There was a story I saw of a police call to deal with some squatters in an apartment and when the cops arrived they found several children in the home living in utter squalor and clearly suffering from malnutrition and abuse. Do keep in mind, that the filth – which must have caused a stench – and the neglected/abused children did not trigger police action. It was that there were squatters. The cops can come out for that, I guess – but for massive health hazards and abused human beings, not so much.

This happened just now – in an America which is awash in social programs for people who are poor. Heck, even people who aren’t all that poor can avail themselves of large amounts of government assistance. The USA spends a total of about $5 trillion per year in social spending. This does not include the massive amounts spent in private charity. This is federal, State and local government spending. That’s about $15,000 per year for every man, woman and child in the United States. It isn’t that we’re not spending money to help. The adults in charge of those children could easily have obtained lots of assistance for rent, utilities, food, education, health care and so forth. They did none of that – the kids were basically left to starve unless they could pick up some food that the adults left lying around when not high as kites.

This is barbarism – with a little worse as at least barbarians will make an attempt to look after the helpless. But, make no mistake about it, that wasn’t a priority. In barbarian tribes the men eat first and most, then comes the women, then the children and old people; with old people kicked to the curb in times of dearth. What we have done is created brand, new barbarians – and they didn’t even have to hammer down the gates; we made them out of our own people.

It took a thousand years of whippings and hangings to turn wolves into men and we’re undoing all that in far less than a century. Those videos you see of mobs of people engaging in street brawls are another part of it: barbarians easily take offense and view violence as a first resort. The decay of our cities. The decline of knowledge and enterprise (barbarians are also lazy – doing just enough to get by and always willing to steal in preference to work). If this trend persists for just another few decades, it is done – civilization will be gone.

We can still avoid such a fate – but we have to act now and with great force. You can’t reason with a stoned person living in filth while their children starve. You can’t reason with someone who loots the only store in their neighborhood where they can buy medicine. You can’t reason with thieves and street brawlers. No more than the builders of civilization could reason with their savage populations. You can only force people to be decent. There is no other way to do it. All of you who remain well mannered and adhere to standards of decency only do so because you were told to…and in the long run, the reason you were told was because an ancestor of yours saw a man drawn and quartered for being a barbarian. Civilized behavior is force reduced to habit and hiding its claws. It is time for the claws to come back out.

But as of this moment, I don’t enough people see the need. It isn’t so bad just yet. Sure, a neighbor had his car stolen from his driveway a couple blocks over and that is unusual in my suburban world, as is the sudden appearance of one or two abandoned shopping carts. But no need to worry, right? It’ll be fine. Just go with the flow. Don’t get upset! And the further you get out from the centers of decay, the less urgent it all seems.

But make no mistake about it – it is creeping day by day closer to you. Your completely stable, small community of like-minded citizens is under siege…and the barbarians, once they are done looting their own homes, will come for yours. As I said, a barbarian prefers to not work…stealing your stuff is easier, and fun (for them; not so for you). We must wake up now.

That is, we must take whip and noose in hand and simply start to deal with these people. They aren’t citizens. The only reason we don’t kill them all is because underneath their savage exterior is a human being – God’s creation. But outside of that, they are a menace to be controlled, not citizens to discuss matters with. We have to start beating the savages into submission. To make them obey the rules even though they very much don’t want to.

Or, we can drift along hoping it all blows over. You know, like the Romans in, say, 390 AD.

Waco and the Problem of the Police

Mark Noonan69 Comments

I watched the Netflix documentary on Waco last night and, first off, definitely worth watching. It doesn’t judge at all: it presents the sequence of events interspersed with interviews with participants on both sides. It lets you make up you own mind about what happened. It all pretty much confirmed the views I formed at the time.

Koresh was a religious lunatic leading a group of suckers. Dime a dozen as far as that goes. It did bring to mind why, once upon a time, the Catholic Church burned heretics…when one female Davidian was talking about how she had been chosen by Koresh to have sex with him it clearly showed that her burning desire for personal union with God – which is supposed to be provided to us in the Eucharist – was warped by Koresh into him getting sexual favors. People do yearn for God: mountebanks are clever at providing something which seems like it. The show did get into the accusations of sexual abuse by Koresh towards minors but, at the end of the day, there never emerged much evidence of it – there’s a chance that it happened, but we’ll never know for certain. The accusation of physical abuse (beatings and the like) was pretty much disproved.

It was the accusation of sexual abuse of minors which brought Koresh to the attention of the authorities. They investigated but couldn’t find enough to bring charges. But now Koresh and his Davidian’s were on the radar. The next thing looked into was the fact that they had lots of guns. Even by Texas standards lots of guns. Apparently, the local Sheriff notified ATF of reports of illegal guns in the Davidian’s compound. Whether or not this was a good idea by the Sheriff is a prudential judgement – you’ll just have to think on it and make up your own mind. But once the ATF got involved, that’s where everything went bad.

They inserted an informant into the compound and it was this informant who provided the affidavit which underpinned the warrant. From what I can tell, it had a lot of suppositions…they could have been doing this or that illegal thing with weapons. As per usual these days, getting a judge to sign off on a warrant is easy…and the cops know which judges are most willing to approve a warrant even on flimsy evidence. Be that as it may, they had their warrant: it was what they did with it that caused the problem. The ATF claims they opted for the massive raid because they had been told that Koresh rarely left the compound – which is a ridiculous assertion as their own informant must have seen that Koresh regularly left the compound. He could have been picked up at the next grocery run. Here’s the key which, to me, tells the tale: the media was tipped off on the impending raid. This shows that what the ATF wanted was a flashy raid…you know, the kind where they’d then line up all the seized guns for a photo op. The bad news was that the MSMers tipped off to be there got lost and asked a postman where the Davidian compound was: the postman was a Davidian. Now they were alerted before ATF arrived.

So, who fired first? Cops say Davidians. Davidians say cops. We’ll never know. Especially as the prime evidence of the first shot – one of the two front doors of the compound – came up missing. Huge shock on that. I mean, the compound was completely surrounded by cops and they were fully in control of the site after it was all over and the debris was being cleared away but the one piece of physical evidence which might have shown who pulled the first trigger comes up missing. The other door, which was part of the double door entrance, was intact (being made of metal), but door which was a key piece of evidence that every cop in the world knows needs to be preserved gets mislaid. Weird. Go figure, huh? I actually go with the story that the ATF started shooting the Davidian’s dogs and that got a Davidian to shoot in a panic, as untrained people are wont to do in a stress situation.

Be that as it may, it became a massive firefight with an untold number of shots fired, only coming to an end when the ATF ran out of bullets and had to withdraw. This kinda lets me know that the ATF, at least on that day, was a bunch of untrained clowns cosplaying as SWAT. They only hit six people with thousands of rounds fired. From video you’re mostly wondering what they’re shooting at. This does lead to the possibility that it was ATF being the untrained people panicking in a stress situation. But, no matter really: it happened. And now the ATF had a catastrophe on their hands instead of a sexy raid. What to do?

Gear up the propaganda machine!

You might recall how we were all told what a hideous person Koresh was. Every last story and rumor, even third hand, was spread about. In this, the MSM was just being the MSM: mindlessly repeating what they were told. But the key here is that the FBI cut the Davidian’s phone line – the only people the Davidian’s could talk to was the FBI. When you’re running a propaganda op it is very important to be in full control of the type and flow of information. And it is clear, especially in hindsight, that the primary goal of the FBI in their statements was to cover up the fact that the raid likely never should have taken place – we were to concentrate on the “brave men and women of law enforcement” and the (allegedly) suffering children…no questions about the warrant, the manner and timing of the raid and no second-guessing on who shot first. By and large, this worked: public opinion at the time was largely on the side of the cops.

And here we get to why I think it ended as it did. As the documentary makes clear, Koresh was still talking to the FBI and people were still dribbling out of the compound. There was every indication that Koresh would eventually come out. But the FBI clearly hated the fact that they had to wait on him to make up his mind. This is why they started doing things like crushing the Davidian’s cars with tanks, cutting off water and power, and doing psy-ops with sounds blared into the compound. This, as was reasonably pointed out by a Davidian in the documentary, was senseless. Allegedly, Koresh was a completely insane man and the FBI’s plan was…to drive him more insane via sleep deprivation? This was supposed to produce a good outcome?

What went wrong, and wrong from the start, is that law enforcement viewed Koresh and his people as perpetrators. Suspects. Bad guys. They never once went into the situation with the concept that Koresh and his people were, well, people. Citizens. Endowed with certain, unalienable rights. If you ever watched the Breaking Bad series there’s this part of it towards the climax where White’s brother-in-law, a DEA agent, is trying to take out White and his monumental contempt for White’s confederate, now willing to help, shines through. This, in the show, leads to a fatal error and the brother-in-law gets killed. Pure dramatic presentation, of course, but I do believe that the attitude of contempt rings true. That is, I think our law enforcement people, especially federal law enforcement, hold their targets in contempt. And who is the target? Anyone who comes up on the radar: if they notice you, then you must be lower than dirt. And so can and should be treated like dirt. That’s why Waco ended as it did – the FBI didn’t think of the Davidian’s as human beings and citizens the FBI was sworn to serve and protect (yes, the cops are supposed to serve and protect even the worst criminals as far as practical) but as sh** stains to be disposed of at the convenience of the FBI.

Keep in mind that the guy in charge of the FBI’s HRT at Waco was also involved in Ruby Ridge a short while before. Of all the people interviewed in the documentary, he’s the only one I came off entirely disliking and figuring to be a liar. He’d probably deny it to my face, but I’ll say he likes killing people. He gets a kick out of being the bad ass. And to him being a man means being ruthless. This does have its place in the world – but it is supposed to be confined to the battlefield…not a compound in Texas. Americans are not supposed to be treated as you would treat, say, a band of Taliban fighters.

What Waco showed us, had we been paying real attention, is that our law enforcement is out of whack. No longer consistent with a Republic. There is, as I’ve said, a certain point to the BLM assertion that the police are an occupying force. Leaving aside the lies and corruption of the BLM leadership, the fact of the matter is that the police all too often view the public as the problem. There is a disconnect between law enforcement and the citizens. There are lots of reasons for this, and some of them do involve the people being jerks – in some urban areas of the USA, the people are only barely civilized and are only partially capable of assessing risk/reward in actions. This does lead the police to dealing with people who are simply doing enormously stupid things which are lethal to the police if not swiftly controlled. And the police can’t tell if they’ve got a lunatic who will try to kill them even after, say, being shot or tased or someone who will understand that the game is up and its time to accept the cuffs and the ride to the station.

But even with that said, the internal attitude of too many police – and, as I’ve said, especially federal police – is contempt towards their targets. This must be brought to an end and it is a matter of training. This is something we can fix. We can train our law enforcement to be defenders rather than occupiers. People who’s first care is the rights of the citizens rather than the collaring of the “dirtbag”. This is not to say that criminals should get off easy: I’ve made it clear over the years that people who commit crimes – especially against lives – need to really feel it in their hearts and on their bodies. But even if we sentence a man to 20 years of hard labor and make him work 12 hours a day, six days a week…he’s still a citizen. He’s still a human being. God created him and we dare not ignore God. He’s still to be treated as well as we can consistent with total security…and never to be thought of in degrading terms. You start thinking of people like animals or lower, you’ll soon start treating them as animals or lower. Much better, in my view, that in terms of human dignity, that we treat people better than they deserve. After all, treat each man as he deserves, and who would ‘scape whipping?

We Wanted This Culture of Death

Mark Noonan15 Comments

In the aftermath of the latest school massacre, the Democrats have brought up what they always bring up – gun control. You know the usual: universal background checks, things like that. Nobody, as far as I can tell, has even asked whether the shooter would have passed the background check (my bet: he would have). It is all so patently ridiculous – performative theater, though Democrats are looking here to goose their base for November. Don’t know if it will work – they tried it with Roe but the bottom line is that people care far more about what it costs to fill the tank than a theoretical end to abortion.

But people were killed, does that make a difference? Perhaps, but probably not. I think that we’ve become rather numb to this, and that is sad in itself. But it is what we asked for.

Earlier today, I came across a Tweet which said that it may be that the cops didn’t charge into the building but instead isolated it before moving. I don’t know if that is 100% accurate but I think that would be in keeping with normal police procedure. You don’t know what’s out there and until you’ve got some intel, any move you make might make things worse. But the point of the Tweet was that the cops should have just charged in supreme disregard for their own lives. To which, you answer: yeah. But.

And the “but” is that by what standard should a cop selflessly sacrifice himself? I mean, I know the standard. John 15:13, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” But there’s a problem here – that’s a Christian standard. It is, to be sure, shared to some extent by other faiths, but the highest expression of it is Christian. To go to certain death for the benefit of others is something Christ did, and all Christians are supposed to follow the example of Christ as far as they are able. But this standard isn’t shared by people with no faith – and keep in mind that “no faith” runs from the most irritating atheist you’ve ever met all the way up to the weekly Church-goer who lives the other six days of the week as a practical pagan. The chances that any particular person – let alone any particular cop – will be a Christian hero are rather small these days. I’d guess that its about one in four Americans who actually take a stab at living a Christian life these days.

And as I said, this is what we wanted. Not like we specifically voted on it, but we passed in silence as it happened. I mean that as a people, of course: some of us objected vigorously and we were told to shut up. But a school shooting is a bum defecating on the street is a child being sex trafficked is a starlet being used as a sex toy is an activist getting rich off tragedy is a corporation turning a blind eye to his Chinese supplier’s slave laborers is a twelve year old being told he’s genderfluid by his teacher and so on. You get the picture. The shootings gather more notice because they are dramatic (and the Democrats hope to wring political advantage out of each corpse), but the rest of it is just going on right in front of us…and in the course of a year causes vastly more deaths than all the gun violence combined.

As I’ve said before, there is a cure for this. It is the same cure used the last time barbarians inundated the West: extreme violence. What we call cruelty these days because, not being Christian (or any sort of faith, really), we have lost sight of what real cruelty is. Civilization is not innate to humanity. The normal course of humanity is to grab whatever it can with no thought to others or the future. To be a person who cares about others and takes a thought for the morrow is a learned quality. We, as a people, learned it over a thousand year period and via the lash, the branding iron, the headsman’s axe and the gallows. We were forced, by those who wanted civilization, to knuckle under to required norms of behavior. And we became so used to this that we forgot that our custom of being decent was force reduced to routine and hiding it’s claws. We began to believe that decency was the norm and that we could release our instincts and everything would work out not just as well as we had it, but much better.

We believed this because people can be very, very stupid.

So, we’re now getting to the point where we’ll have to choose and I believe we will choose incorrectly. That is, we will refuse to apply the violence necessary to restore decent behavior. And because we make this choice, we’ll then find a small group of people who will make it for us and so we’ll get the same result. Civilization will not completely die – it can’t. People will want to eat in safety. Right now, they don’t see how large the threat is but a day will come when they do, and then those who threaten the safety will find things starting to go very badly for them.

But, meanwhile, we’ll just keep going on – stepping around the sh** on the sidewalk as we walk from one mass shooting to another.

Trump Demands

Mark Noonan67 Comments

Back around August of 2016, I was talking over the election with the Mrs and, at that time, was figuring that Trump had a real chance of winning. But I was also thinking that the Establishment would pull out all the stops to prevent this. Not, by the way, because of the policies Trump proposed, nor even because of their false claims that he was a racist or any such thing. No, they were afraid of him winning simply because he would be the first President we’ve ever had who owed nothing to the Establishment. That is the key to understanding the amazing level of hatred directed Trump’s way. He doesn’t care what happens to the Establishment.

And the Establishment is corrupt to the bone – and gets away with it simply because no one does anything about it. They can’t – either they are personally compromised, or fearful that their closest allies will be caught up in an anti-corruption sweep. So, everyone just pretends its all good…with only the odd, egregious violator sent up the river, and even then only if such an action won’t harm the Masters of the Establishment, the Democrats. Trump comes rolling in and, being on the right side of the law, himself, sees no reason to worry about investigations…regardless of where they lead.

I don’t know why, exactly, Trump has allowed the Mueller fiasco to continue as long as it has – I can only assume he’s got his own plan, on his own timeline, and has made the calculation that it isn’t the right time to shut Mueller down. But his demand over the weekend that the DOJ look into Obama Administration spying is clearly a shot across the bow. We don’t know what Trump knows – what he has been able to obtain on his authority as President detailing just what happened. We can count on it that many bureaucrats would do all they can to thwart Trump in getting information…but at least some percentage of them still hold to the old, non-partisan ethic of the bureaucracy and so will obey Presidential orders. Trump likely knows a lot about who was doing what and under who’s orders.

But he can’t act precipitously on such information. It is going to be a lot harder to get convictions than most suspect. First off, Justice is riddled with people who will do all they can to blow cases. Secondly, any trials in the DC area would have a juries packed full of anti-Trump people who could easily be lead to saying “not guilty” no matter what. Also, when it all comes out, it has to come in a way very easy for the broad mass of the American people to understand. The MSM will just flat lie about it, of course…but if it is very obvious, even the most blatant lies won’t keep people from understanding the truth.

Big things are about to happen, I think – and what I think they’ll amount to is a full attack on a corrupt Ruling Class. Stay tuned.

“Everyone predicted it,”

Cluster28 Comments

These were the words of a fellow student of Nikolas Cruz and a common theme that surrounds many of these mass shootings. Whether it be the Orlando nightclub, the San Bernardino Christmas party shooting, or Aurora, CO, it seems that many of these mass shooters are known by several people to be on the verge of such horrific actions, yet everyone stays quiet and these very disturbed people are given the space needed to act upon their demons. I even read one account where school officials were well aware of Mr. Cruz and his bizarre behavior and his penchant for fire arms, and if one account is correct, authorities were to be called if Mr. Cruz were to be seen on campus with a backpack. If these accounts are accurate, than there enough warning signs in my opinion to have prevented this.

I grew up in the 70’s in Montana and everyone owned guns, nearly everyone hunted, hunter safety was a school course, and it was a rite of passage to carry your rifles in the back of your pickup. AND THERE WAS NOT ONE SINGLE SHOOTING. I will easily wager a substantial bet that there were a lot more guns on my campus in the 70’s than there are at any campus today, yet not one person was shot in my four years of high school. Were the guns different? No. Is the culture different? Hell yes. One huge cultural difference in my opinion is the level of societal discipline towards children and the “first person shooter” games that so many kids are obsessed with. School officials, administrators, and teachers have abdicated their responsibilities and the inmates now run the asylums. Political correctness, and over emotional parents have handcuffed teachers who no longer can impose discipline and order in the classroom and I have seen this first hand. In my day, if you acted out in class and disobeyed school officials, there were real consequences, and the parents followed through. This level of discipline and order is missing from many kids lives these days and we see the negative societal impacts.

In a free country of 300+ million people and hundreds of millions of fire arms, confiscating and controlling fire arms is a non starter, but of course this is what you will hear every progressive across this nation crying about today. Guns are not, and never have been the problem. The cultural environment our kids are growing up in is the problem, and it needs to be addressed. Had there been some well trained officials on campus with fire arms, this may have been prevented. In fact in this day and age, why there aren’t armed guards on many of our school campuses is beyond me.

UPDATE, By Mark Noonan: Looks like the FBI missed it, too. And as usual for me, I bring up this song on these events. It’ll keep happening until we change.

Thoughts on the Shooting

Mark Noonan28 Comments

Yes, he was a nut – but he was a nut set off by the violent rhetoric of the left. All that talk of Trump not being the legitimate President; of he and his supporters being Nazis; of those opposing them being the “resistance”, as if they were French patriots under German occupation during World War Two. All that means something – and to some people, it means you have to fight. If you say that Trump and his people are an existential threat to all that is good and true in the world, some people will take you seriously, even if you don’t intend it that way. It doesn’t matter that your goal was just a cynical firing up of the base for next year’s mid term elections…it still works out that you incited violence.

Democrats do this sort of thing because it works. Time and time again they’ve used violent, over-the-top rhetoric to fire up their base…it is a very large reason why Obama was re-elected in 2012. People forget that he’s unique – the first President to be re-elected with fewer votes than he got the first time around. He should have lost – and likely would have lost save for a relentless campaign of hatred designed to keep just enough of his troops in line to make a difference…had Romney been just a bit more of a street fighter, Obama would have lost, in my view.

Democrats can end this in a moment, if they choose – all they have to do is get all their senior people to go out in public and say, “President Trump is the legitimate President of the United States”. Sure, that won’t convince the full-on fanatics, but it’d dial down the heat and the kooks would be isolated. But Democrats won’t do that – because they don’t want their side cooled down and they also don’t believe they’ll pay a price at the ballot box. I’m hoping that in 2018 they are disabused of this notion – and I think they may well be. You see, for all the firing up of the base on the left, I believe that the Trumpsters will troop to the mid term polls in record numbers, determined to record a vote of confidence in their man…and a vote of rejection to those who want to annul the 2016 result. We won’t know if I’m right until election day next year – and even if I am right, it won’t show up in polling, even if the polling is trying to be honest. But I do believe I’m right. I’m thinking that people have had enough of this – and in talking to regular folks who don’t think about politics all the time and don’t engage on social media, I see a line being drawn between the leftist rhetoric and the leftist violence: people are seeing that one causes the other.