Category Archives: Crime

Updated: 'Take My Pound Of Flesh & Sleep Well'

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Individual Rights, Private Property, Taxation, Terrorism, The State

So wrote Joseph Stack, the pilot of a Piper Cherokee plane, before he crashed into an office building in Austin, Texas, that housed IRS offices.

What transpires when a government says to a desperate citizen, vaguely conscious of his natural rights, “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide”?

What transpires when times get particularly tough. And they just take and take and take what’s not theirs to take. So Joseph Stack said, “Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different …”

However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an “organized society” that does the same. In a just society, the moral rules that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft.

The founders intended for government to safeguard the natural rights of Americans. The 16th Amendment gave government a limitless lien on their property and, by extension, on their lives. Joseph Stack took his, in the hope of taking out some of them.

More here.

Update: Repetition is a theme on this blog. So I will cut-and-paste my last reply to the exact same moral equivalence the provocative, if repetitive, Myron has already advanced. How about coming at me with a new angle? I’m being made to go around in circles. Here goes from our last debate about anti-state violence:

MORAL/INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENCE. Conflating the causes for which McVeigh, for example, committed his cruel crime against agents and family of an oppressive government with the causes of the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin,” is akin to conflating MY causes with those of Myron’s taxonomy of the evil, again the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin.”

What sort of moral relativism is this? What kind of messy thinking is this? The causes and theories of the Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin were wrong on their logic and facts; McVeigh’s causes and motivation, if not his deeds, were right. What’s so hard about that?

Stack is justified in his anger against the shakedown agency and its agents who partake in pillaging their countrymen. He’s wrong to try and kill them. I feel so lame saying this, but it’s the safe thing to say. Incidentally, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was more sympathetic than Fox’s statists on steroids.

Updated: Dumb As They Come

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Democrats, Journalism, Law, Pop-Culture, Republicans

Among the many dumb things Republicans have given us (read “GOP and Man at Yale”) is a brand of tease “journalism” headed by Hannah Giles, a well-connected, monosyllabic, Town-Hall tartlet, who partook in an ACORN-exposing (tush-wagging) operation. Her partner (he played the pimp) was James O’Keefe, who, it transpires, is even dumber than Hannah.

A recent headline on Nola.com blares:

“ACORN ‘gotcha’ man arrested in attempt to tamper with Mary Landrieu’s office phones. James O’Keefe … a conservative activist who last year posed as a pimp to target the community-organizing group ACORN, is one of four people arrested by the FBI and accused of trying to interfere with phones at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in New Orleans.”

O’Keefe and his pals are “charged with entering federal property under false pretenses for the purposes of committing a felony.”

Phone tapping or something.

The little pischer O’Keefe had given “a speech to the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a libertarian group in New Orleans,” which seems to be standing by him.

While the ACORN fun lasted, Andrew Breitbart put O’Keefe up as some sort of editor on his Big This/Big That websites, and appeared with him and Hannah on all the Republican TV shows. Now Big Breitbart is distancing himself from his protege. I guess AB has some sense of how fascistic and fickle American law and culture can be (you can go to jail for a long time for non-offenses; and become the toast of the town for major offenses). Here’s the interview he hastened to give to Hugh Hewitt.

Update (Jan. 27): “A lawyer for one of the men said outside the courthouse that his clients may have the product of ‘poor judgment’ and that he didn’t intend to commit a crime; lawyers for other defendants could not immediately be reached for comment.”

This defense attorney is right, of course, but the American legal system, which Republicans (like this intrepid contingent of guerrilla journalists) are forever striving to make less constitutional, will fight to keep these idiots under its jurisdiction. It’s reflexive.

Support The Salahis

Barack Obama, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Fascism, Law, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

Tareq and Michaele Salahi, two reality TV “stars,’ crashed—or livened up—President Obama’s first White House state dinner. The two harmless interlopers, who dared to gaze upon their celestial leader,” are being subjected to an inquisition by the People’s posturing, sneering, fascistic “representatives.”

CNS: “Tareq and Michaele invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination Wednesday, refusing to answer a House committee’s questions about their uninvited appearance at a state dinner.”

Good for them. Apparently, the White House is open only to visits from inner-city kids.

“Crashing a Trashy House”: On the night of the offense, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue “was packed with nasty, noisome parasites. An extra pair would have made no difference. Quite the contrary: There’s something apropos about a couple of reality-show exhibitionists, who themselves ‘have left an extensive paper trail in federal bankruptcy and state court filings,’ brazenly elbowing their way into a party of ponces.”

Update III: Haiti’s Hurting, What’s New? (Rotting Roadblocks)

Crime, Democracy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Taxation, The West

Haiti is forever convulsed by political or natural disasters. The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where four out of five people live in poverty and more than half in abject poverty (NYT), was struck by a massive, magnitude-7.0 earthquake, on Tuesday afternoon.

The rescuers, spokespersons, geological surveyors and geophysicists; the missionaries, medicine- and military men and women; the aid-deliverers—most are Westerners. Western countries prop up their Third-World creations. That’s how it is.

In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the gravest danger was an epidemic; the greatest danger in the wake of the Haiti disaster is a crime wave worse than before.

The Big O is promising to devote—and divert—all the resources he has no right to toward the rescue effort in Haiti.

I say “YES TO US AID, NO TO USAID”:

Americans are the most generous people on earth. “The extent and the depth of charitable giving” in the US is such that “the average donation in the U.S. is three-and-a-half times more than in Canada.” As a percentage of their aggregate income, Americans give more to charity than citizens of any other country. BO will go ahead and “pledge” a puny few hundred million to Haiti on behalf of a people that gave $241 billion to charity in 2003.

American largess makes the United States Agency for International Development, and other the compassionate pickpockets, as unnecessary as it is unethical.

Update I (Jan. 14): Since Haitians are now refugees and candidates for Minute-Maid immigration, it takes an immigration hawk to highlight the following: Haitians, by and large, speak Creole. Their faith is more Black Magic than Roman Catholic. Thoroughly schooled in violence, Haitians are, at the same time, utterly uneducated, although not in the ways of the world – they’ve been ravaged by AIDS-HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Update II: “The liberal West honestly believes that bad leaders are what shackle backward peoples.” In this context, how often have you heard that Haiti is what it is because of bad leadership; a deficit in democracy, on and on? Lo: a veteran disaster relief specialist told CNN that the current “serious crime problem” was less of an issue under Papa Doc’s “nasty dictatorship,” when “lots of people were killed. But infrastructure and services worked better then than they do now.”

“It was safer to use public transport then than it was last year, certainly in terms of crime,” he said. “Over the last 10, 15, 20 years, the gangs and the drug culture have taken hold of Haiti …”

Is it possible that a dictatorship—preferably a benevolent one, but never-the-less an authoritarian regime—might work better in certain cultures than a tyranny of the majority? Perish the thought.

Update III: Barbarism. “ANGRY Haitians set up roadblocks with corpses in Port-au-Prince to protest at the delay in emergency aid reaching them after a devastating earthquake.” Shaul Schwarz, a photographer for TIME magazine, is understanding:

“It’s getting ugly out there, people are fed up with getting no help.” [news.com.au]