Category Archives: Crime

UPDATE II: The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector

Constitution, Crime, Debt, Democracy, Government, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Private Property, Taxation, The State

“The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“By now, Americans with a modicum of cerebral alacrity have a sense of the attitude among Washington State Democrats toward the immutable right of the people to keep their earnings. You all witnessed the despicable Jim McDermott’s intimidating verbal assaults, leveled at conservative property owners, during the House committee hearing on the den of iniquity and vice that is the Internal Revenue Service. For what is the seeking of ‘tax-exempt status’ if not a plea, directed at our overlords who art in D.C., to keep more of what is rightfully ours?

What Edmund Burke said about the House of Commons in his day applies in spades to a House packed with the likes of Rep. Jim McDermott D-Wash. ‘Designed as a control for the people,’ the House has become a control ‘upon the people.’

And the trend extends to local governments, gone from which are the old-fashioned county governors, once devoted to low taxes and careful spending.

Here goes.

While trying to be neighborly, I made the mistake of being less than reverential about my property taxes in ‘The Evergreen State,’ and in particular, the 51.4 percent appropriated for ‘State and Local Schools.’

I was informed in high decibels that my husband and I, hardworking both, ought to thank our lucky stars for this valuable index—thousands paid per year toward ‘State and Local Schools’—for without it we’d be clueless about … the value of our home. (If anything, taxes distort market prices. But more about the curious fallacy of the benevolent property tax, as a price signal in the housing market, in a follow-up column.)

Yes, siree. The bad tempered diatribe then swerved to the plight of local law enforcement, who, my interlocutor alleged, were powerless to police a squatter camp in the North Bend vicinity, for lack of resources. Some believe that twice did a man from this homeless encampment invade a homestead in the community.

We fork over thousands in property taxes per annum, yet, as was being asserted, the police were without the necessary funds to fulfill the State’s only constitutional duty: protecting the people. Naturally, where the State fails to carry out its sacred duty, as is almost always the case, The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution instantiates the individual’s natural right to do exactly what the heroic homeowners did to safeguard life and property: hastened the intruder’s descent into hell.

Commensurate with the value this Washington-State locality places on limited authority and republican virtues—none at all—law enforcement is not even itemized in the property-tax bill issued.

The truth is that the lion’s share of our property taxes goes toward …

Read the complete column. “The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector” is now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

• At the WND Comments Section. Scroll down and “Say it.”

• On my Facebook page.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” this week’s “Return To Reason” column

UPDATE I: The “wasteful monstrosity” discussed above was celebrated by the local newspaper’s intrepid reporters. It too is local in name only—for most “local newspapers” are corporately owned. In our case, the pabulum published weekly is by permission of The Seattle Times Co. When our local rag is not reporting on a theatre that will close, a cinema that is hiring, or a pizza place that’ll host “Raise the Dough for Seattle Children’s”—the newspaper simply parrots the partyline on everything. I know, because I line my parrot’s cage with its pages.

Join the conversation on my Facebook page.

UPDATE II (7/24): For more of an idea of the all-pervasive profligacy of the oink sector in my state, check out the “Seattle Parasite-To-Resident Ratio.”

UPDATED: Disarmed Brits Can Only Shoot Savage … With A Camera (British Press Serves It Straight Up)

Britain, Crime, GUNS, Individual Rights, Islam, The Zeitgeist

“Disarmed Brits Can Only Shoot Savage … With A Camera” is the current WND column. An excerpt:

A “frenzied machete attack.” “The most appalling crime.” “Sickening.” “Barbaric.” “A deluded, deranged act of violence.” “Gruesome and shocking.” These were press-cited descriptions of the butchering of a British soldier by a black man with a meat-cleaver, on a south-east London street.

By the sound of the killer’s common vernacular and accent, he, too, was British. The slaying occurred in Woolwich, just yards from the Royal Artillery Barracks.

Not content with carving up his countryman on the pavement, the savage also managed to carve out for himself a Speakers’ Corner, away from the famous, and once so civilized, corner in Hyde Park. …

… As my lead-in would suggest, the British surpass Americans in adjectival creativity. This time, however, the Queen’s English fell flat. Or, rather, the English language was perfectly up-to-the-task. It is the English-speaking people who are incapable of distilling in words the significance of the scene.

Jihadi chasers complicate the task; they are part of the problem, because they mask the salient issue here. Shouting about abstractions from the rooftops—”Jihad, Jihad”—serves only to conceal a concrete reality, and that is that Islam is but a catalyst.

Islam is muscular and murderous all right. It feeds those with compatible cravings. That these murderers mouth Muhammadan mantras is, however, incidental to the fact that they know they can act on their fantasies with impunity… they live among an emasculated, enfeebled people, lacking in core beliefs. (Invading Muslim countries does not constitute a respectable creed.) …

… The affinity for Islam these made-in-the-West murderers exhibit is secondary to their contempt for our helplessness. They are killers first, who prey on the kind of people who look to Big Brother to rescue them, dupe them; and tell them what’s what, i.e., manage the message …”

The complete column is “Disarmed Brits Can Only Shoot Savage … With A Camera.” Read it on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

• At the WND Comments Section. Scroll down and “Say it.”

• On my Facebook page.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” this week’s “Return To Reason” column

UPDATED (5/23): British Press Serves It Straight Up. These headlines would not appear in the American mainstream. (On WND, yes.) The headlines are from the Daily Mail:

* Betrayal of a hero father: How MI5 spent EIGHT YEARS watching violent ex-prisoner who preached outside Poundland just yards from murder scene only days before soldier was hacked to death

*MI5 had been monitoring two fanatics responsible for SE London killing
*One fanatic was photographed behind hate preacher Anjem Choudary
*Michael Adebolajo, 28, was also a member of a banned terrorist group
*He was said to have preached jihad in Woolwich just earlier this week
*Close to where married father Lee Rigby was beheaded on Wednesday
*Second suspect named last night in reports as Michael Adebowale, 22

Betrayal. Fanatics. Beheading.

The image of a couple of women milling about with the murderer is disturbing. It is a snapshot of the Zeitgeist.

UPDATE II: Cop Incompetence & The Cleveland Kidnapping (Community Policing)

Crime, Economy, Free Markets, Government, Law, Race

The left sees the world through the prism of faction; facts are expected to align themselves accordingly. Thus to Chris Hayes of MSNBC, the central issue in the kidnapping and accidental recovery of “Cleveland’s lost girls” is society’s endemic, institutionalized, violence against women. The state’s endemic, institutionalized, violence against and indifference to its citizens—that doesn’t feature.

True to type, CNN Erin Burnett didn’t push the bureaucrat she interviewed too hard, today, when he insisted conveniently that the perp, Ariel Castro, 52—who had kidnapped and raped Amanda Berry, 27, Gina DeJesus, 23 and Michelle Knight, 32, and imprisoned them for about a decade—ought to be the focus of ire, and not the police department.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

By the way, if Castro is on suicide watch for some strange reason, BBC News’ Tara McKelvey should be on loon watch. She is busy breaking down the amount of attention the victims got from authorities and media based on the color of their skin. (The truth: Michelle Knight, whom I believe is white—she vanished in 2002—got almost no attention.)

“Ignoring adult missing persons reports seems to have been a de facto departmental policy [in Cleveland] for many years,” reports Slate’s Justin Peters, who, like most liberals, blames budgetary cuts (no amount of taxpayer money is ever enough for these people), rather than the state’s inability to allocate resources efficiently, and with the aim of pleasing “clients,” as the private sector is forced to do.

Government outfits organize around the optimization of the political needs of union members and other sectional interests. It’s the nature of the bureaucratic beast. The needs of the communities they are supposed to serve come last.

Writes Mark Naymik, of The Plain Dealer:

…the hum of criticism on Seymour Avenue is about the subtle signs, such as the lowered shades or odd behavior of Castro and how he never entertained guests.
These are the kinds of signs that police officers who patrol a specific beat over time might notice or hear about from neighbors. But that kind of patrol disappeared when community policing ended.
On Tuesday, I talked with a couple of community activists with years of perspective on police response to the missing persons: Delores Walton and Ruth Standiford. They hound police and are frequent critics as members of the Task Force for Community Mobilization and Peace in the Hood.

UPDATED I: Michael Maier on Facebook: Yes. Community policing was the way it once was when I was a kid (you knew your local policeman). But as the communities cops must police have become more “diverse” and menacing, and less recognizable, police, understandably, prefer to stay way.

UPDATED II: On Police efforts Via PBS:

RAY SUAREZ: There was a steady drumbeat of stories coming out of that West Cleveland neighborhood talking about attempts to tell the police over the years, attempts to report Ariel Castro for various infractions.
Did the police handle that today in the press conference?
PETER KROUSE: I did not hear the entire press conference, but I believe they did say that they did everything they could.
In fact, yes, I know they did. They said that they investigated every lead that they knew of. And I know we have reported in The Plain Dealer a lot of the efforts that they went to, to try and find these girls. One of the officials said that, in hindsight, you know, they may discover that there was something that they missed, but that it would be hindsight. It was not — it wasn’t anything that they could pinpoint.
These cases — at least in the case of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, the two who were abducted as teenagers, those cases were pretty well publicized. And the efforts by the police to find some answers were pretty well publicized, too.

UPDATED: No Amanda-Knox Accolades For Jodi Arias (The Arias Appeal)

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Reason

Fortunately for justice, the jurors sitting in judgement of Jodi Arias, a morally solipsistic and self-adoring sociopath (who sang, did tantric yoga, giggled and chanted to herself sotto voce, alone in the interrogation room), were not required to grapple with circumstantial evidence, which demands a level of abstraction in thinking that jurors in the Age of the Idiot are incapable of.

Because there was never any question about Arias’ culpability, she was found guilty of first degree murder. Hers is, moreover, a foolproof case for the death penalty.

Arias’ jurors stood out for the hundreds of wordy and worthless questions they had posed to this defendant. For a while I even worried that the woman who butchered boyfriend Travis Alexander in his home would get off lightly with second-degree murder.

Anything seemed possible after Casey Anthony.

It took 12 idiots 11 hours to decide to exonerate the (ALLEGEDLY) filicidal Casey Anthony, who was found “not guilty of first-degree murder and the other most serious charges against her in the 2008 death of her 2-year-old daughter,” Caylee Marie Anthony. (CNN)

The evidence was overwhelming, if circumstantial (as in most murder cases). The prosecution presented the more intelligent, rational sequence of events, where motive, opportunity, and evidence all stacked-up against the sociopathic Casey Anthony.

In the Age of the Idiot, the average individual seldom reads; he knows only what he sees. If he can’t picture something, he certainly cannot think about it in the abstract. We all “know, “from watching, CSI, that if a crime doesn’t happen as depicted in such series—where ample samples of DNA and incriminating footage always materialize —you must acquit.

Even though there was no YouTube of Travis Alexander torture, it was impossible not to picture what the poor man endured before expiring in agony. RIP.

UPDATE (8/5): THE ARIAS APPEAL. You know me. Unlike the misleading Mouths you watch on TV, or listen to on radio, year-in; year-out—I am brutally honest. With myself too. Amanda Knox is of low moral character. She’s a histrionic phony, and it comes across clearly in her victory interviews. I know it in every fiber of my being.

Jodi Arias, on the other hand, has the absolute ability to fool me. She is a softly spoken, highly intelligent woman, who speaks grammatically—and most certainly not in the staccato, truncated tart tones of the average American woman. (Good use of adjectives too …) Arias thinks on her feet and comes across as a refined lady.

This is scary. When I listen to the interview she gave a Fox New affiliate, I can’t help … feeling for Jodi Arias.