Guns, Grandstanding Media, And The Goon Du Jour

Britain, Crime, GUNS, Individual Rights, Media

Let us speak of “goon violence,” not gun violence, I urged earlier this month in “Gun Violence’? No! Goon Violence” (9/4/2015).

So the goon du jure is Chris Harper Mercer, 26 (no relation).
He shot up a college, in Roseburg, Oregon, killing 10 people and wounding seven.

Initially, the moron media made a song-and dance of not reporting the culprit’s name. Grandiosely, The Kelly File announced its policy of keeping viewers in the dark for their own good, I suppose. They forget that as news media, their mandate is to report the news, not babysit the public or grandstand. That’s the only news I have for you. Otherwise, everything is as it always is:

Obama cried foul about the 2nd Amendment. The BBC bellyached about your right to defend yourself, because in their crap country, Britain, you go to jail if you fail to offer a cuppa to your assailant.

If you don’t believe me as to how backward the home of the Magna Carta has become, here’s The New American:

British citizens seeking advice on what’s legal to use for self-defense found some answers at www.askthe.police.uk, a website sponsored and operated by the government’s Police National Legal Database.

Question 589: Are there any legal self-defence products that I can buy?

Answer: The only fully legal self-defence product … is a rape alarm.

There may be other products, according to the website, but they haven’t been fully tested and “if you purchase one you must be aware … there is always the possibility that you will arrested and detained until the product, its contents and legality, can be verified.”

Who’re the Brits calling primitive atavists!!!!

Your moment of zen:

“Guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is part of the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. Evil is here to stay. Bad people do bad things. Deal, as they say in the hood.”—Excerpted from “Gun Violence’? No! Goon Violence” (9/4/2015).

About Pope Francis, The Lady Di of The Papacy

Celebrity, Christianity, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Government, Islam, Reason, Religion

“About Pope Francis” is the current column, now on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

In the wake of America’s week-long, Pope Francis bacchanalia, a few column titles suggest themselves:

“Benedict, What Have You Wrought?”

“The Global Village Idiot.”

“Lady Di of The Papacy.”

The last hints at the trendy, pop-philosophies that animate Pope Francis’ Lady Di-like belief system. The intellectual equivalent of these papal shopworn shibboleths you’ll find in a Chinese, fortune-cookie wrapper.

Ultimately, the editor will decide which of these unflattering headings best describes the man whom one devout Catholic—libertarian jurist Andrew Napolitano—called a false prophet for overturning Catholic canon law without consulting his Bishops. Yet another reason Pope Francis is drawn to an authoritarian president who rules by presidential veto.

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors.

With his 1998 encyclical, the Polish pope—how the Polish people suffered under the communists whose creed Pope Francis is inadvertently dignifying—sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness.

Who other than Pope John Paul spoke with such unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Jorge Bergolio, who is too simple to consider such abstractions.

The anti-intellectualism evinced in the Holy See’s 2015 environmental encyclical made this pope’s “close advisers,” in all their “ill-tempered diction,” the butt of ridicule over the pages of the Catholic Crisis magazine:

From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in “Brideshead Revisited,” that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

In the same badly written potboiler, the pope took a swipe at the richest nations, blaming them for despoiling the earth. In truth, however, the developed world has advanced the technologies (and attendant ethics) that are helping to clean up the atmosphere, the waterways, the oceans and many a landmass. It is the developing and underdeveloped nations—China and India, for one—that despoil the earth and devastate its creatures. So polluted are the waterways in former communist countries that rivers are known to catch fire. Watch. …

… Read the rest.“About Pope Francis” is now on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

No Wonder Assad Needs A Sugar Daddy

Foreign Policy, Islam, John McCain, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Russia

Crazy neoconservative John McCain has repeated his crazy talk to the effect that Bashar Assad is the father of ISIS. The guy doesn’t know Shia from Shinola. As an Alawite, Al-Assad belongs to the opposing, Shia strand of Islam.

Like the Iranians, Assad is enemy of ISIS. (Another forgetful folk are the Israelis, who’ve forgotten that Assad’s grandfather, a wise man, was a Zionist.)

The neocons destabilized the Middle East all by their lonesome. Now American mainstream think tanks are framing strongman Assad for what they wrought and have trained their sights on him. The neocon ghouls are just waiting for a clueless clown like Marco Rubio to oblige them with a war on Syria.

Assad knows he and his family are at the mercy of loons like McMussolini; that his wife and kids will live and die by the say-so of the fools. Any wonder Assad has wisely sought out the Russians to help him stay alive?

McCain’s vacation pictures to Syria, in 2013, were snapped by his then ISIS pals. Don’t believe me? Read on.

UPDATED: It takes A Special Kind Of Stupid To Lose Moral High-Ground To Planned Parenthood

Conservatism, Federalism, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Morality, Republicans, Uncategorized

Progressives are evil, immoral; as clueless as the pope in their arrogant ignorance of the American political system and the role of government in the American federal scheme.

But one has to be a special kind of stupid to lose the moral high ground to the 500,000 dollars-a-year babe (Cecile Richards) and her congressional harpies, who plump for public funding for Planned Parenthood.

THAT Republicans certainly are. (I say this as a libertarian who doesn’t see how, in a free world, one can agitate for the arrest of a woman for what she does with her property: her body and all that’s in it. I do, however, see a clear and logical way to argue the outlaw of late-term abortion. The reasoning I’ll share in a new book.)

Progressives are gloating: “The GOP still has nothing to show for its anti-Planned Parenthood campaign.”

UPDATE: What I mean by outlawing” late-term abortion is arguing convincingly—well, almost convincingly, since it’s pretty hard—against the practice of late-term abortion based on libertarian reasoning. Libertarian law turns on private property rights and the non-aggression axiom. You cannot initiate aggression against a non-aggressor. To aggress against a woman for what she does to her body, however much you abhor the practice, flies in the face of libertarianism.

So the challenge is arguing for that aggression in the case of a late-term child. It’s almost impossible logically, but I think it can be done. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I’m interested in hearing from religious libertarians how they’d argue for outlawing abortion. Ron Paul is anti-abortion. Not sure it works in libertarian law. But please share. Don’t bother specifying that abortion should not be funded by the state. We all agree. In fact, this is the central silliness of the Repubs; they can’t explain to silly bimbos that to defund abortion is not to ban abortion.