I tend to think of “secessionist movements” as collections of harmless old weirdos with too much time on their hands. The operative word being harmless. As we see in Europe, the West is well past violent insurrection. Instead, the pissed-off confine themselves to angry posts on Facebook, Twitter and the secession club meeting at the local Holiday, as long as there is a breakfast buffet.

We do, however, have a cop problem.

In a deliberate “show of force,” federal and local police forces raided a political meeting in Texas, fingerprinting and photographing all attendees as well as confiscating all cell phones and personal recording devices.

Members of the Republic of Texas, a secession movement dedicated to restoring Texas as an independent constitutional republic, had gathered Feb. 14 in a Bryan, Texas, meeting hall along with public onlookers. They were debating issues of currency, international relations and celebrating the birthday of one of their oldest members. The group, which describes itself as “congenial and unimposing,” maintains a small working government, including official currency, congress and courts.

According to MySanAntonio.com: “Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office, agents of the Texas district attorney, the Texas Rangers and the FBI.

“In the end, at least 20 officers corralled, searched and fingerprinted all 60 meeting attendees, before seizing all cellphones and recording equipment in a Valentine’s Day 2015 raid on the Texas separatist group.”

“We had no idea what was going on,” said John Jarnecke, president of the Republic of Texas. “We knew of nothing that would warrant such an action.”Information Liberation noted, “The pretext of the raid was that two individuals from the group had reportedly sent out ‘simulated court documents’ — summonses for a judge and a banker to appear before the Republic of Texas to discuss the matter of a foreclosure. These ‘simulated documents’ were rejected and the authorities decided to react with a ‘show of force’ – 20 officers and an extremely broad search warrant.”

Even allowing for the fact this is reported in World Nut Daily, there’s simply no excuse for this behavior from government officials. They are harassing people to get their jollies. It’s why dressing up mall cops in battle gear is a very bad idea. It takes low-IQ dimwits and sociopaths and tells them they have a free pass to push people around.

In the custodial state, however, the cops function as hyper-violent helicopter parents. If a citizen is doing something the authorities think is unsafe or uncooperative, the state sends in a swat team as a “show of force” or worse. There are over 50,000 SWAT raids a year in America. Most are for things like serving a summons or collecting non-violent parolees. The argument is the cops don’t know what they are getting into so for their safety they send in Seal Team Six.

This is the logic of the managerial class. Police departments have arrived at a bizarre sense of self-awareness where they no longer see themselves as part of the community. They stand apart from those they watch, like game keepers in a preserve. While their job is to keep the animals safe, their first priority is their own safety above all else, fueled by a deep distrust of those they supervise.

It’s not just the town clowns stocked up with surplus army gear paid for by the Feds. NASA has a SWAT team. They can no longer hurl a man into orbit, but they have a SWAT team. The Department of Education has a SWAT team. Again, a lot of this is due to the unlimited access to funding for status items that are popular with the managerial class. The streets of DC are jammed with armored SUV’s toting minor officials for the same reason. No matter the reason, it is no way to run a civilized nation.

The managerial class, which the cops are a part, although at the lowest rung, must always attack and undermine the institutions of traditional social life if its power and interests are to prevail. Freedom of associations, along with its subordinate right, freedom of expression, are always under suspicion. These are the breeding grounds for resistance to the managerial class

It’s why Europe has little sympathy for the Charlie Hebdo victims. The rulers make a show of it while the issue is in the press, but they immediately go back to suppressing speech and association. The European rulers don’t fear Islam or Islamic terror. France is not going to convert to Islam. They do fear their own citizens, deciding for themselves and amongst themselves that they may prefer different arrangements. That’s a real threat. As far as the managerial elite is concerned, the shooters did them a favor.

This will not end well.

I found this rather odd essay linked somewhere. At first blush it looks like the typical preaching to the choir you see from the broadsheets. Gaia is unhappy and must be appeased with the blood of the deniers! Well, they are not that entertaining, but you get the point. Instead, what we have here is a rare admission that what they are up to has nothing to do with science, but is a religious cause.

ACCORDING to a recent poll, a large majority of Americans, and roughly half of Republicans, say they support governmental action to address global warming. The poll, conducted by The New York Times, Stanford and the research organization Resources for the Future, stands in stark contrast to the vast partisan gulf in political efforts to address climate change. How could it be that so many Republicans view global warming as a problem, but so few on the right are pressuring the government to take action to address it?

A paper that Matthew Feinberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and I published in the journal Psychological Science in 2013 suggests one answer to this puzzle: While the number of Republicans who say global warming is a serious problem has reached high levels, there remains a very large gap in moral engagement with the issue. We found that conservatives were less likely than liberals to describe pro-environmental efforts in moral terms, or to pass moral judgment on someone who behaved in an environmentally unfriendly way, for example by not recycling. Where liberals view environmental issues as matters of right and wrong, conservatives generally do not.

It is rare to see the masked dropped like this. Usually, the Cult is waving around graphs and data that they don’t understand, but are sure proves their case, because you know, science! Here we have someone saying that it’s really a moral issue.

But why does this moral gap matter if most people now believe that global warming is a real threat? Other research has shown that people are generally reluctant to undertake costly political actions, even for a cause they think will be beneficial. After all, there are so many worthy causes competing for our time, effort and resources, and we can’t contribute to every one.

People think quite differently, however, when they are morally engaged with an issue. In such cases people are more likely to eschew a sober cost-benefit analysis, opting instead to take action because it is the right thing to do. Put simply, we’re more likely to contribute to a cause when we feel ethically compelled to.

Still, why do liberals moralize environmental issues, while conservatives do not? The answer is complex, owing in part to the specific history of the American environmental movement. A quick review of that history reveals that, while the environment has been politically polarizing since the 1960s, there is nothing inevitably liberal about environmental concern. After all, it was a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, who founded the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Here you see the hive mind at work. Utopians operate in a world of “us-versus-them.” After all, there’s only one destination, the promised land. Therefore, you are either heading forward to that promised land or you are an obstacle to the tides of history. Nixon was no one’s idea of a conservative. He proudly embraced liberal economics and social engineering. In many respects, he was a proto-liberal. But, he was a Republican so he is one of the undifferentiated other the Cult sees as the them.

To win over more of the public, environmentalists must look beyond the arguments that they themselves have found convincing. The next wave of moral arguments for environmental reform will need to look very different from the last, if they are to be maximally effective. Such efforts to understand others’ moral perspectives might not only bring both sides in line on this important issue, but also foster the sort of sincerity and respect necessary to sustain a large-scale collective effort.

The fascinating thing about utopians is they never seem to listen to their own words. They are just incantations that make them feel better, but make little sense to a non-believer. The writer claims big majorities are in favor of his preferred acts of piety to appease Gaia. What need is there to convince the holdouts? If a majority want what he wants, surely the elected officials, who all want what the author wants, will go along with it.

That’s because it is not a rational thing. At some level, the author and his coreligionists believe that the presence of even one non-believer keeps them from reaching the promised land. Just as ISIS is focused on purifying their lands by ridding it of every last infidel, the modern liberal obsesses over the dwindling number of non-believers in the West.

The other fascinating thing is that these utopians never take yes for an answer. That’s because they can’t. What animates their faith is the struggle. The promised land is always just over the next hill or around the next bend. Today they must valiantly struggle against the infidel so that tomorrow they can live in paradise. The fact that the Left has been triumphant for close to a century in America has brought them no closer to their goal. The promised land remains just out of reach, no matter how much ground they gain in the fight.

I used to be fond of asking these sorts of people a simple question. What would have to happen for you to feel like you won? They never have an answer. Instead, you get an answer to a question you did not ask. That’s because there are no conditions in which they will be satisfied and quit. It’s the struggle, not the victory. Environmentalism will be with us in some fashion forever simply because it is a religion, not a problem to be solved.

This is what’s coming.

It’s nearly 8 p.m., and inside a state office building two dozen computer experts design and troubleshoot a system that will take and process millions of unemployment claims each year.

It’s a $200 million Employment Development Department project, but with the exception of two managers, everyone inside the office is from outside of the U.S. They are employed by Deloitte, a major U.S. IT company hired by the state to create and manage its Unemployment Insurance Modernization project. The mostly Indian nationals are allowed to work here under a visa program called H-1B.

Tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, Google and Facebook say they need hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill jobs here because American colleges can’t crank out computer science grads fast enough. In 2013, the industry lobbied Congress on the issue to the tune of almost $14 million.

Those companies, who need workers with highly specialized knowledge like computer expertise, are awarded the visas through a lottery process. It’s allowed under the Immigration and Nationality Act and administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The visas can be valid as long as six years.

News10 reached out to several H-1B workers over the past three months, and they all declined to comment for this story.

“The program is going unfettered, unchecked, without bounds, and it’s all in the interest of profit,” Computer Database Administrator Chris Brown said. He said was displaced by one of the special visa workers in 1996, and he has been following the issue for the past 18 years.

Hewlett Packard laid off Brown from its Roseville plant during the height of the H-1B program, when as many as 300,000 of the workers were allowed to take jobs in the U.S. The cap for H-1B visas today is 85,000 after federal audits showed there were abuses in the program. There’s an effort on Capitol Hill to raise the ceiling again to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. And, during a recent presidential trip to India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked President Obama to help loosen the restrictions on the H-1B program. India’s tech outsourcing industry makes billions of dollars every year sending programmers and engineers overseas to work for U.S. companies.

Brown is watching those new developments with interest. When he lost his job in 1996, it was just two weeks before Christmas. He says he’s afraid more Americans will be replaced by foreign-born workers.

“I’m a single income, so on that particular day, as a direct result of this program, we were unable to provide Christmas presents and I kept telling my kids that day that Santa might not show up,” Brown said.

A spokesperson for Hewlett Packard said he would not comment on layoffs that happened 18 years and three CEOs ago, but he defended the visas as a needed resource for HP and the industry as a whole.

U.S. Department of Labor data shows more than 1,100 H-1B visas were certified for workers in the Sacramento area in 2014. The largest number was for Accenture, an IT company that is currently holding state contracts totaling more than $1 billion. It has 125 H-1B visa holders in Sacramento. Deloitte has another 28, and there are four dozen of them filling positions in state offices in the Capital City.

There’s no way to say exactly how many of the visa holders are doing work directly or indirectly with the state. Hundreds of the local H-1B visa holders were awarded to third-party contractors known as “body shops.” Body shops apply for the visas and then farm them out to larger IT companies looking to hire more foreign workers.

Accenture spokesman Mark Bonacci said while the company doesn’t disclose the number of employees it has by city, state or region within the U.S., “the vast majority of our people working in the U.S. are U.S. citizens and residents.”

“Only a very small percentage of Accenture’s employees in the U.S. are H-1B visa holders,” he said.

In an email, Deloitte spokesperson Courtney Flaherty said, “Our primary focus is hiring U.S. workers, including experienced California professionals and graduates.

“Our use of U.S. work permits is entirely consistent with the intent of the Federal Government’s immigration program to complement our domestic workforce with highly-skilled professionals,” she added.

Does anyone really believe there’s a shortage of willing workers in California to do this work? We’re not talking about gene-splicing or physics. California has a 12.3% unemployment rate. They are bringing in low-skilled IT people because they are cheaper than domestic versions. In most cases, they avoid paying health insurance for these people. They also get to work them like slaves. If they complain, the service that brings them over just sends them back and brings in someone who does not complain.

But, this is just the beginning. Once Jeb is installed in the White House, it is open season on Americans.

My pet theory about why societies decline is that their ruling classes lose the will or incentive to enforce the rules they created to govern themselves. It’s a take on the broken windows theory of law enforcement. Once you start letting the little violations go, the next level of crimes are then permitted. The rot creeps higher and higher until no rules are enforced or seen as a deterrent. Without Marius, there can be no Caesar.

It’s not linear or inevitable. New York City reformed itself. Giuliani sorted out the police force and prosecutors office, cracked down on petty crime and began a program of ethnic cleansing. The people running the city, the wealthy financial class, no longer saw any benefit to letting the lunatics run the place so they brought in a new man to address the problems. They had an incentive to do so, which was the need for safe, livable real estate for their servants.

The Romans, in contrast, never had an incentive to reform their system and return to a republic. The Senatorial class saw their interests in centralized authority and therefore went along with the drift toward empire. Given the choice between one of their own having dictatorial power and sharing power with the lower classes, they chose the former. That meant ignoring all of those rules and customs of the republic. When that was not practical, they invented clever ways around those rules and customs.

In modern America, you see much of the same at the top. The Obama administration looks at the law as a puzzle to solve so they can get around the limits. Congress routinely looks the other way as their own rules are broken. Boehner and McConnell see a benefit in letting the executive run wild. It spares them the risk of doing their job and lets them collect massive amounts of cash. There are a lot of rich men in Congress who came to Washington penniless.

The problem with rot at the top in a modern society is it tends to spread to the more mundane parts of the empire. This story from the backwaters of the America South is a good example.

The latest example of cellphone video vindicating someone from false charges is a doozy. It comes from Washington Parish, La., and WWL TV.

One of the worst days of Douglas Dendinger’s life began with him handing an envelope to a police officer.

In order to help out his family and earn a quick $50, Dendinger agreed to act as a process server, giving a brutality lawsuit filed by his nephew to Chad Cassard as the former Bogalusa police officer exited the Washington Parish Courthouse.

The handoff went smoothly, but Dendinger said the reaction from Cassard, and a group of officers and attorneys clustered around him, turned his life upside down.

“It was like sticking a stick in a bee’s nest.” Dendinger, 47, recalled. “They started cursing me. They threw the summons at me. Right at my face, but it fell short. Vulgarities. I just didn’t know what to think. I was a little shocked.”

Not knowing what to make of the blow-up, a puzzled Dendinger drove home. That’s where things went from bad to worse.

“Within about 20 minutes, there were these bright lights shining through my windows. It was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I mean I knew immediately, a police car.”

“And that’s when the nightmare started,” he said. “I was arrested.”

He was not only arrested, he was also charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor. A prior drug charge on his record meant he was potentially looking at decades in prison. Seven witnesses backed up the police account that Dendinger had assaulted Cassard.

But Dendinger had asked his wife and nephew to record him serving the papers. It was a last minute decision, but one that may have saved him his freedom.

From what can be seen on the clips, Dendinger never touches Cassard, who calmly takes the envelope and walks back into the courthouse, handing [prosecutor Leigh Anne] Wall the envelope.

“He’d still be in a world of trouble if he didn’t have that film,” said David Cressy, a friend of Dendinger who once served as a prosecutor under [former St. Tammany District Attorney Walter] Reed. “It was him against all of them. They took advantage of that and said all sorts of fictitious things happened. And it didn’t happen. It would still be going like that had they not had the film.”

Dendinger spent nearly a year waiting for trial, racking up attorney’s fees. As a disabled Army veteran on a fixed income, Dendinger said the case stretched him financially, but in his eyes, he was fighting for his life.

After nearly a year passed, his attorneys forced Reed to recuse his office. The case was referred to the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office, which promptly dropped the charges.

Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission and himself a former prosecutor, studied the videos. He did not hesitate in his assessment.

“I didn’t see a battery, certainly a battery committed that would warrant criminal charges,” Goyeneche said. “And more importantly, the attorney general’s office didn’t see a battery.”

That’s all well and good. And Dendinger has since filed a federal civil rights lawsuit. I hope he collects.

But here’s my question: Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.

If a group of regular citizens had pulled this on someone, they’d all likely be facing criminal conspiracy charges on top of the perjury and other charges. So why aren’t these cops and prosecutors?

I could be wrong, but my guess is that they’ll all be let off due to “professional courtesy” or some sort of exercise of prosecutorial discretion. And so the people who ought to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us will once again be held to a lower one.

This is something we see everywhere at the top. Jon Corzine stole billions from his clients, breaking many laws in the process. He is given a pass because he is a one of the beautiful people. The CIA gets caught spying on members of Congress and nothing happens. No one goes to jail for what used to be considered the highest crime imaginable in a republic.

This rot at the top filters down so that the local prosecutor gets away with what should result in prison time. Everyone in the ghetto, for example, knows better than to talk to a cop because cops get to lie and break the law. No good comes from dealing with the cops so no one talks to the cops. The orderly society is thrown into reverse.

Herbert Stein’s Law comes to mind, but probably does not apply. There’s no reason to think the decay of social order in America must stop or that people in charge will reform themselves. There are plenty of examples where societies went through periods of reform and renewal, but there are examples of ones that simply collapsed. The stories above suggest the rot is deep and far advanced. Reform may simply be impossible.

Here’s an interesting article on the fate of John Boehner. A few things come to mind reading this. One is just how awful at his job Boehner has been since the start. Being Speaker is a tough job and made tougher when you are a Republican. The press is always looking to undermine you and the opposing party will use that to cause mischief. A Democrat speaker has a loyal press corp and a pleading opposition.

Boehner has made his task more difficult by making war on the conservative wing of his caucus. It’s a strange and self-defeating strategy that has led to a number of embarrassing defeats. Tip O’Neil, the best speaker in my lifetime, always avoided these showdowns. Instead, he found the votes needed in advance. When his preferred choice was going to lose, he made a big show of “letting his members voter their conscience.”

In contrast, Boehner appears to be an idiot. He can’t count to 218.

The other thing I find fascinating is the casual revelation of the bait and switch the GOP runs on their voters.

Members of the recently formed “House Freedom Caucus” offered multiple proposals to leadership that they believe would have drawn enough Republican votes to keep DHS funded and not left Boehner dependent on Democrats. Boehner, though, chose not to support the plans.

One conservative member, who asked for anonymity to speak frankly, said the mood of his colleagues will depend on how Boehner handles himself over the next week. If he tries to put a “clean” DHS funding bill on the floor for a vote, or doesn’t make overtures to conservatives, anger could boil over, the Republican said.

We’re suppose to take from this that the 52 members of the Freedom Caucus are the conservatives in the party. That means 193 other Republican members are something other than conservative. Did the voters of Fred Upton’s district (MI-9) think they were getting a non-conservative when they elected him? Bob Goodlatte (VA-6)?

I’m thinking most GOP voters went to the polls thinking their guy was a good conservative. Maybe not on every issue, but at least 90% of the time. Yet, the leadership and Boehner operate as if the conservatives are mostly a nuisance and a trivial minority of their caucus. By extension, it means they think you, the guy voting for them, are an idiot.

My own view is the parties are just the two faces of the ruling class. They run a good cop-bad cop routine on the public and take turns occupying the big offices. Voting, therefore, is a waste of time. Still, I take some pleasure in seeing that old drunk get the business from the handful of politicians with anything resembling respect for their voters.

This post has already been linked to 1131 times!

The epidemic of rape hoaxes on college campi is driven, in part, by lunatics from the Cult of Modern Liberalism trying to prove the part of the narrative that says the Pale Penis People are the source of all evil. How’s that for an opening sentence?

The PPP serve a vital role in the Cult as they are the designated hobgoblin for everyone in the current liberal coalition. Like Big Foot researchers, the younger members of the Cult are sent out into the wild to prove various aspects of current theories regarding the PPP. The current theory is upper middle class white boys are not the soft Eloi we see, but really a bunch of rapacious Vikings raping the hell out of white co-eds.

It’s all lunacy of course, but if you’re a young woman on campus or living in proximity to young males, not being raped is probably a concern. After all, you’re told on a daily basis that every swinging dick in your life is ready to pounce on you as soon as you let down your guard. This new documentary detailing the rape hoax epidemic on campus is intended to scare the hell out of you raise awareness.

I’m an old man and I have seen a lot of the human animal. Here’s some advice I’ll pass on that I think will help you avoid being raped.

1) Don’t get blind drunk with a bunch of strange men. We have evidence of wine making going back 10,000 years. It is commonly assumed that humans figured out fermentation soon after settlement. I’ve read some arguments that booze making was a reason for human settlement. Making hooch takes time and planning. It’s best done in one spot. Regardless of the origins, humans have been making and consuming alcohol since the dawn of civilization.

At the same time, humans figured out it was not a great idea to leave women in the presence of drunken unrelated men. Similarly, it was a good idea for women to not drink. The reasons for both of these quaint notions is the result was always bad for the women. Drunken men are horny men. Drunken women make bad decisions. Put the two together and someone is waking up with her legs in the air.

Most of what is called rape on campus is just a drunken romp gone wrong. Suzy sobers up to find her underwear on her head and vague memories of that guy at the bar. The other cases are when drunk men take advantage of a women, who drank herself into an unconscious stupor.

Therefore ladies, a sure way to avoid this outcome is to not get drunk with strange men. Moderate your alcohol and stick with sober friends when at the bar. If that good looking guy offering to buy you a drink is really interested in more than wearing you as a hat, he’ll be around tomorrow.

2) Don’t get naked and alone with a man you are not sure you want to screw. This is one that gets placed at the feet of the weirdos and lunatics in the womyn’s studies department. Sex is the result of signalling. Boy shows girl he likes girl. Girl responds by showing boy she likes him too. This back and forth escalates until they end up in the sack.

By the time a man gets you naked, he is not thinking about anything other than sex. He is basing all of his decisions on what you are doing. If you are naked and in his bed, you could be chanting passages from the Koran in Arabic for all he cares. All he knows is you’re naked in his bed and that means he gets to have sex with you.

Therefore, one sure way to avoid the last minute second thoughts or the onset of sudden regret is to avoid getting naked with men you are not 100% sure you want to screw.

3) Don’t confuse yourself with a man. Amazingly, our colleges and universities continue to insist that biology is a social construct. They teach our boys and girls that the reason males appear bigger, stronger, faster and more prone to violence is the culture supported by the patriarchy. In a fully equal society, boys and girls will be the same, even physically.

If you’re a young woman, this is probably tempting to believe. It is not reality and if you act as if it is, it could get you killed. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll just get raped. Chimps weight between 55 and 100 pounds, but they 5 to 8 times stronger than a man. That wimpy looking man you think you can beat is most likely vastly stronger than you and much more comfortable using force than you.

That last part is an important thing to remember. Even if you are as strong as that guy, he’s biologically inclined to use force, particularly in matters involving sex. If you put yourself in a position where you have to physically defeat a male, you will most likely lose. It’s biology and immune from wishful thinking so don’t put yourself in a position where you have to fight a male off.

There you are. Three simple rules that will lower the chances of you getting raped to near zero.

This post has already been linked to 1188 times!

Anytime you write about drugs, you have to state your position on legalization and your views on drug taking. My position on legalization is I’m willing to let localities experiment with various forms of legalization. The costs-benefit of prohibition is not very good so looking at alternatives is sensible. I’m skeptical of the claims made by libertarians as they are always wrong about these things, but we’ll see. As far as drug taking, I have no opinion. In my youth I tried various drugs, but found alcohol to be my preferred intoxicant. Your tastes may be different so you should figure it out for yourself.

Anyway, I stopped reading Peter Hitchens regularly because he seems to have been driven mad by cannabis.

Can you put two and two together? Have a try. The authorities, and most of the media, cannot.

Did you know that the Copenhagen killer, Omar El-Hussein, had twice been arrested (and twice let off) for cannabis possession? Probably not.

It was reported in Denmark but not prominently mentioned amid the usual swirling speculation about ‘links’ between El-Hussein and ‘Islamic State’, for which there is no evidence at all.

El-Hussein, a promising school student, mysteriously became so violent and ill- tempered that his own gang of petty criminals, The Brothers, actually expelled him.

Something similar happened in the lives of Lee Rigby’s killers, who underwent violent personality changes in their teens after becoming cannabis users.

The recent Paris killers were also known users of cannabis. So were the chaotic drifters who killed soldiers in Canada last year. So is the chief suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings of April 2013.

I might add that though these are all Muslims, who for rather obvious reasons are to be found among the marginalised in Europe and North America, it is not confined to them.

Jared Loughner, who killed six people and severely injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in 2011, was also a confirmed heavy cannabis user. When I searched newspaper archives for instances of violent crimes in this country in which culprits were said to be cannabis users, I found many.

One notable example was the pointless killing of Sheffield church organist Alan Greaves, randomly beaten to death by two laughing youths on Christmas Eve 2012. Both were cannabis smokers.

By itself, the link is interesting. I wonder how many other violent criminals would turn out to be heavy cannabis users, if only anyone ever asked.

I wonder how many violent criminals drank milk as a child? Ate cookies? Were heavy beer drinkers? I could probably run through a few hundred items that are common to all violent criminals that have nothing to with making them violent. It’s the same nonsense drug warriors used to employ back in the old days. They would claim that marijuana was a gateway drug, leading to harder drugs. They would point out that heroin users all started with pot, as if all potheads are going to be chasing the dragon.

There is some evidence that chronic cannabis use leads to mental health trouble. In my youth, I knew a few guys who became stoners. They clearly got dumber and slovenly. The term “fried” has been applied to chronic pot smokers for forty years. It’s not called “chronic” by accident. Still, there’s a big difference between daily use and occasional use. There’s a world of difference between being a burnout and being a violent criminal. The available science suggest the link between cannabis and violence is non-existent.

The more probably issue is that regular pot smoking triggers severe mental illness in certain populations. Given the ubiquity of pot use, that population is tiny. Alcohol makes some men frighteningly violent, but that’s not a reason to ban alcohol. As I said at the start, I’m skeptical about the benefits of legalization, but these claims by Hitchens suggest he has been drive mad  by the demon weed.

This post has already been linked to 1324 times!

The Ides of March are coming so maybe…

It’s starting.

As promised, President Obama is using executive actions to impose gun control on the nation, targeting the top-selling rifle in the country, the AR-15 style semi-automatic, with a ban on one of the most-used AR bullets by sportsmen and target shooters.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives this month revealed that it is proposing to put the ban on 5.56 mm ammo on a fast track, immediately driving up the price of the bullets and prompting retailers, including the huge outdoors company Cabela’s, to urge sportsmen to urge Congress to stop the president.

Wednesday night, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, stepped in with a critical letter to the bureau demanding it explain the surprise and abrupt bullet ban. The letter is shown below.

The National Rifle Association, which is working with Goodlatte to gather co-signers, told Secrets that 30 House members have already co-signed the letter and Goodlatte and the NRA are hoping to get a total of 100 fast.

“The Obama administration was unable to ban America’s most popular sporting rifle through the legislative process, so now it’s trying to ban commonly owned and used ammunition through regulation,” said Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA-ILA, the group’s policy and lobby shop. “The NRA and our tens of millions of supporters across the country will fight to stop President Obama’s latest attack on our Second Amendment freedoms.”

At issue is so-called “armor-piercing” ammunition, an exemption for those bullets mostly used for sport by AR-15 owners, and the recent popularity of pistol-style ARs that use the ammo.

The inexpensive 5.56 M885 ammo, commonly called green tips, have been exempt for years, as have higher-caliber ammunition that also easily pierces the type of soft armor worn by police, because it’s mostly used by target shooters, not criminals. The agency proposes to reclassify it as armor-piercing and not exempt.

But now BATFE says that since the bullets can be used in semi-automatic handguns they pose a threat to police and must be banned from production, sale and use. But, as Goodlatte noted, the agency offered no proof. Federal agencies will still be allowed to buy the ammo.

“This round is amongst the most commonly used in the most popular rifle design in America, the AR-15. Millions upon millions of M855 rounds have been sold and used in the U.S., yet ATF has not even alleged — much less offered evidence — that even one such round has ever been fired from a handgun at a police officer,” said Goodlatte’s letter.

Even some police don’t buy the administration’s claim. “Criminals aren’t going to go out and buy a $1,000 AR pistol,” Brent Ball, owner of 417 Guns in Springfield, Mo., and a 17-year veteran police officer told the Springfield News-Leader. “As a police officer I’m not worried about AR pistols because you can see them. It’s the small gun in a guy’s hand you can’t see that kills you.”

Many see the bullet ban as an assault on the AR-15 and Obama’s back-door bid to end production and sale.

“We are concerned,” said Justin Anderson with Hyatt Gun Shop in Charlotte, N.C., one of the nation’s top sellers of AR-15 style rifles. “Frankly, we’re always concerned when the government uses back-door methods to impose quasi-gun control.”

Groups like the National Shooting Sports Foundation suggest that under BATFE’s new rule, other calibers like popular deer hunting .308 bullets could be banned because they also are used in AR-15s, some of which can be turned into pistol-style guns. “This will have a detrimental effect on hunting nationwide,” said the group.

This is another example of how the final Obama years will be just a revenge fantasy made real. The unwillingness of the GOP to push back on anything just encourages more of it. My bet is we see far more outlandish moves in the next 18 months. Just wait until it comes time to pardon people. Lois Lerner and her cohorts will get a blanket pardon, I bet.

It’s why this is what every politician should see on his way to the office.

This post has already been linked to 1814 times!

This post has already been linked to 827 times!

I was reading this story in the Post this morning and I could not help but ponder the great threat to multiculturalism posed by Islam. Our rulers are terribly vexed as to why so many Western born and raised Muslims are heading off to jihad. The story of Jihad Johnny is familiar.

The Kuwaiti-born Emwazi, in his mid-20s, appears to have left little trail on social media or elsewhere online. Those who knew him say he was polite and had a penchant for wearing stylish clothes while adhering to the tenets of his Islamic faith. He had a beard and was mindful of making eye contact with women, friends said.

He was raised in a middle-class neighborhood in London and on occasion prayed at a mosque in Greenwich.

The friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation, believe that Emwazi started to radicalize after a planned safari in Tanzania following his graduation from the University of Westminster.

The statistics say that probably less than 1% of Western Muslims decide to go on jihad. Polling says that about a quarter of Western Muslims think killing infidels is a great idea. Those poll results are typical of others done over the last two decades. Given the nature of polling, it is probably fair to say the real numbers are significantly higher. When asked, people tend not to admit to opinions the general public has deemed wrong. Even so, my guess is the majority of Muslims in the West just want to live quiet, prosperous lives.

But, a large minority don’t want to live quiet lives. Therein lies the problem facing the West. If we suddenly found that 25% of men with red hair would one day run amok and start murdering people for no reason, we would not let men with red hair walk free. No society could tolerate such a risk. Obviously, long before now we would have either euthanized all red haired babies at birth or maintained a place to exile for all red heads, like an isle of misfit toys. Ginger Island.

Obviously, the Muslim problem is both an old problem and a new problem. The old problem dates back to the 7th century and the Muslim conquests. The answer to that problem was discovered in the 8th century.

While Abd ar-Rahman was pursuing Odo, he decided to despoil Tours by destroying its palaces and burning its churches. There he confronted the consul of Austrasia by the name of Charles, a man who, having proved himself to be a warrior from his youth and an expert in things military, had been summoned by Odo. After each side had tormented the other with raids for almost seven days, they finally prepared their battle lines and fought fiercely. The northern peoples remained as immobile as a wall, holding together like a glacier in the cold regions. In the blink of an eye, they annihilated the Arabs with the sword.

-The Mozarabic Chronicle of 754

The old problem, in other words, was solved by coming up with this idea of separate countries for Muslims and non-Muslims. Islam is a religion of the sword, according to the people who created the religion. Their mythology claims there will be a great final conflagration and Islam will win the final battle at the end times. There’s no reasoning with that so it is best to keep them penned up in their own lands, which has been the policy of the the world for over a thousand years.

The new problem is not so much a Muslim problem as a Western problem. The new problem starts with the new religion of the West. The religion we call multiculturalism. This religion requires Western government to invite the people of the world to move to their lands and mingle with the locals, but not accepting the culture of the locals. They imagine the nicer parts of London as the ideal utopian future, with cultured restaurants full of young, educated hipsters.

Some portion of those swank young hipsters, however, will decide to strap on a dynamite vest and walk into that “Shoreditch bohemian” hangout. So far, the single thread running through every incident is Islam. It has either been a Muslim immigrant, a man raised in a Muslim home in the West or a convert to Islam. Multiculturalism has strict rules against noticing, but it is hard not to notice when a man yells “Allahu Akbar” and then blows himself up in a crowded restaurant or starts shooting patrons at a Jewish deli.

That’s the problem the West faces. If they notice that Muslims tend not to play well with others, that means diversity may have its limits. If there is some limit as to how much diversity a society can tolerate, then there has to be a debate about where that limit lies and why. In other words, noticing the Muslim problem puts the whole project up for debate. The only “rational” response is demand everyone not notice the exploding man yelling “Allahu Akbar.”

That’s also why the West seems obsessed with discovering what mysterious force causes good Muslims to go bad. Mr. Emwazi, the fellow at the start of this post, was provided with everything one can hope from life in the West. Yet, he is described as having been “radicalized” like some sort of rage zombie, infected by a virus. They allude to his having been discriminated against or, gasp!, profiled by authorities as being the cause. This hunt for a cause, presumably, is intended to find a cure. Perhaps a vaccine at birth that prevents Muslims from going bonkers as adults.

Like so much of the late Rousseau-ist project, the true believers are scrambling around to find a suitable solution other than the ones learned over generations of trial and error. Discarding the traditional institutions that serve as the storehouse of history means relearning all of those lessons painfully learned the first time. Our rulers better be quick studies. What was once a speck on the horizon is now a short boat ride away. This will not end well.

This post has already been linked to 1314 times!