‘Meet the Rapex’

Crime, Democracy, Gender, GUNS, Political Correctness, Private Property, Racism, Sex, South-Africa

The Rapex is a female condom, “The hollow inside of which is lined with rows of razor-sharp hooks. These are designed to latch on to a rapist’s penis during penetration. They can only be removed by a doctor.” The context? A last-ditch, desperate defense against endemic rape, the kind that occurs every 26 seconds in South Africa.

(Or “Jackrolling,” as young African men in South Africa jocularly refer to this group, recreational “activity.” See pages 15 to 16 of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, for story and citations.)

Army veteran and gun-rights activist Nicki Fellenzer reviews Into the Cannibal’s Pot. Nicki is our First Lady reviewer, and what a gal she is.

Those Darn Differences

Affirmative Action, Debt, Economy, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Political Correctness, Regulation

“Parity in prosperity and performance can be achieved only playing socialist leveler” (Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, p. page 127). And even then, leveling legislation, such as compulsory preferential hiring or money lending, will eventually fail. Reports the Wall Street Journal:

The wealth gap between whites and each of the nation’s two largest minorities—Hispanics and blacks—has widened to unprecedented levels amid the housing crisis and the recession, according to new research.
The median net worth of white households is 20 times greater than that of black households and 18 times greater than that of Hispanic households, according to an analysis of newly available 2009 government data by the Pew Research Center, an independent think tank.
The disparities are the greatest since the government began tracking such data a quarter-century ago, with the gulf separating whites from other groups twice as wide as it was in the two decades prior to the recession and 2008 financial crisis, according to the study.

UPDATED: Thought Experiment in Statism (Economic Apocalypse?)

Debt, Economy, Government, Political Economy, Private Property, Taxation, The State

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told FoxNews anchor Chris Wallace repeatedly that to avoid the debt precipice, “tax reform that would generate revenue” [“now there’s a nice word for taxes”] must be considered. The “revenue we’re going to get through tax reform”: that’s how Geithner put it second time around, during the Sunday interview.

Let us assume, for a moment (as Secretary Geithner expects us to), that the solution to the debt is paying the people who incurred the debt more money; that the solution to the debt is seizing private property (through taxes) and placing it in communal ownership (state bureaucracies), where resources are never allocated efficiently and are always squandered.

Assuming all the above, do you have any guarantees that the money stuffed down the maw of the Federal Frankenstein will actually go to pay down the debt? Of course you don’t. Of course it won’t.

Money extracted from us by the Feds is fungible. Any additional revenues the Feds receive via taxes they will use to plunge private property owners deeper into debt.

UPDATE (July 25): The notion that not raising the debt-ceiling must necessarily result in the US defaulting on its debt is nonsensical. In so asserting, Tiny Tim is talking tripe. The US Treasury takes in enough loot to pay down the interest on the debt as well as a portion of the principal.

Meanwhile Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was upbeat about the US’s economic prospects. In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, Clinton framed “the political wrangling in Washington” over the debt as a function of America’s “open and democratic society.”

Clever. I noticed that CNN, in its reporting today, had taken the same tack: Markets across the world were worried over political wrangling in the US, rather than the debt. It was essential for the Demopublicans to arrive at an agreement for markets’ sake. The fact that there is no money in the coffers: that’s of no concern. Why, the awful Gloria Borges, a banal mind if ever there was one, ventured that legislation ought to be passed to automate the raising of the debt ceiling so that “We don’t have to go through this again.”