Clear Thinker

Flash Mob of Hundreds of Black Youths Attack White Fair Goers – What Would You Do?

Legal Issues, Self Defense No Responses »

Aug 072011

Mayhem and potentially murder when riots rage around you

The good news is this appalling incident is less likely to happen much more in the future, because it occurred in Wisconsin, which last month passed a law allowing its citizens to get concealed weapon permits.

But the bad news is that it happened at all. I don’t know if it is a passing craze, or a new media focus, or whatever, but my sense is there are a growing number of ‘flash mob’ type mini-riots occurring in the country these days, situations where a group of people suddenly congregate and go wild for no apparent reason, attacking ordinary peaceful other citizens in a location that you’d not normally consider an at-risk location.

Here is a report of this particular flash-mob that formed at the exit to the Wisconsin state fairgrounds. You’ll note that the police were less than effective, and some police, a mere block or two away, busied themselves with directing traffic rather than going to assist at all! Although some police did get into the middle of things, and were even injured, they were woefully outnumbered and unable to protect and prevent lawful citizens leaving the fairgrounds from being victimized, terrified, and assaulted.

Once again, we’re reminded that the only people we can count on to defend us in an emergency is our own selves – us personally and hopefully the loved ones and close friends with us.

Note also the muted reporting on the subject of whether it was black people selectively attacking white people only. On the other hand, this report quotes people with obviously vested interests as saying it was only black people fighting other black people. Ordinary citizens saw black people selectively attacking white people, but public officials did not. Hmmmm……

What Would You Do?

This sort of situation raises a very difficult question. What would you do if you found yourself in the middle of such a mob, and a group of youths attacked you? (Assume, for the sake of this discussion, that you were carrying a pistol with you, as hopefully you always do.)

The significant outcome of most of these flash mob attacks is that no-one has been killed, or even gravely/critically wounded. Sure, people have been punched up, kicked down, and generally injured, but is it really a situation where you can truly say you feared for your life; is it truly a situation that warrants the use of deadly force?

On the other hand, it may well be that you had no ability to retreat. If your state has a ‘stand your ground’ law, why should you either try ineffectively to run away, or passively accept a beating? And just because few people have been critically injured or killed, that’s no guarantee that you might not be less fortunate.

Let’s think what would happen if you did resort to your gun. When you pull it out, if you don’t start shooting immediately, one of three things will happen. Either the flash mob will run away screaming, or it will taunt you and get closer to you (and they may already be way too close for comfort), forcing you to either use your gun or lose it, or, option three, someone in the flash mob also has a gun, and he (or they if more than one) will draw it and shoot you first.

If the flash mob runs away screaming without you needing to fire a single shot, then good job, well done. But how likely is that?

Let’s think about scenario #2. They crush in towards you, leaving you no choice but either to surrender your gun (and risk having it used against you) or to start shooting. Even if you managed to disable the weapon before it was taken from you (at the very least, releasing the magazine and kicking it away) you’ve raised the odds and probably increased the severity of the beating you’ll get.

Maybe you fire a warning shot in the air (not really advised by most experts). Perhaps they’ll now turn around and run away screaming, but even if they wanted to, maybe – if there is a crush of others behind them, they can’t. Do you then start shooting for real, or do you surrender your weapon and hope for the best?

And what if you start shooting? You’ll have half a dozen people all crowding in on you, and more behind them. How to fight them all off with only one gun and however many rounds in its magazine?

The answers to these questions fall into two parts – legal issues to do with the justifiability of you shooting at these attackers, and the tactical issues of how best to get a positive outcome from your situation.

Legal Issues

I asked a respected attorney who specializes in gun law issues for his opinion on the situation. Unfortunately, his opinion is only valid in the one state he practices law in, and each state has different legislation (and customary practice) in terms of what is acceptable use of deadly force and what is not.

Based on the laws of his state, he believes that shooting at your attackers would probably be justified in his state – a state that says there is no obligation to retreat, and which allows you to shoot in self defense if you have a reasonable fear of imminent danger to yourself or loved ones and if such an action is what a reasonable person could be expected to do.

But your state laws may be very different, and no matter what your laws are, there is also this very vague standard of what a ‘reasonable’ person would do. Maybe your state law allows for use of deadly force in terms of the theory of the legislation, but maybe the practice of how the case law has modified and interpreted the words of the law is such that what you think is a permissive empowerment to defend yourself is actually no such thing.

Maybe a ‘reasonable’ person in your state might think it more reasonable to submit to a beating than to kill one or many attackers? Surely you’ve heard people say ‘nothing ever justifies taking a human life’ – maybe they say this in opposition to capital punishment, even for the most depraved mass murderers, and often they say it when explaining why they think no-one should be allowed to own guns. Normally you might just roll your eyes when hearing this and move on, recognizing a viewpoint that you have nothing in common with and are unlikely to change. But what would you do if you were faced with a jury of people who all subscribed to that point of view – all viewing your actions as ‘unreasonable’ by their fervently held viewpoints?

So the legal issues are murky. Let’s all pray you don’t find yourself becoming a test case in your state. If you have a genuine concern, you should consult a good attorney in your state who specializes in firearms and self defense law, and if you get a written opinion with him, please share it with us so we can share it with everyone else.

Tactical Issues

Okay, so if you find yourself where you are forced to shoot, what is the best way to solve the problem you are confronted with, causing minimum loss of life and ensuring your own safety?

I asked two people, both with a huge amount of real world experience, what they would recommend. One is a former Marine, and a former LAPD officer in some of the worst neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and is a massively credentialed firearms trainer. The other is a former Navy officer and sworn member of one of the Justice Department’s many branches, and again a well credentialed firearms trainer.

They both agreed that the thing to do is to assertively point your weapon at the person who seems to be ringleader, simultaneously look him straight in the eye, and tell him ‘Back Off! Or you’ll be the first person I shoot!’ Then point it at a second person and say ‘You’ll be second! Back Off!’ and perhaps give the same warning to a third person.

Then, if they continue to advance, and particularly if they are getting to ten feet or so of you, and they have ignored your warnings, you’re going to need to start shooting. One of these two people said ‘If there are other people behind them (and there probably will be) consider dropping down on one knee and then shooting up at the person’s head so that the round doesn’t pass through their body and into additional people behind them’.

I understand the good sense of that advice, but you’re sacrificing dexterity and maneuverability in doing so, and head shots are more difficult to take at the best of times. Do you really want to put yourself at much greater risk so as to make it safer for the person behind the first bad guy – a person who is far from being labeled as an ‘innocent bystander’? Furthermore, by dropping down to this position, you’re less authoritative – although it could be argued that the gun in your hand that starts shooting compensates for that!

If you’re comfortable with your ability to drop to a one knee position and still command the situation, shoot accurately, and fight effectively, by all means do so. But right now, your highest priority is your personal survival, not protecting the people who you may well be forced to shoot in a few seconds time.

A Force Multiplier

Lastly, a thought that you need to get front and center into your mind, always. Try and encourage the people who go places and do things with you to also be armed. This will not only enhance their own personal safety, but yours too.

Which would you rather experience? A deadly threat from multiple attackers where you have to simultaneously protect you and a second, defenseless person; or a deadly threat where you have a partner alongside you, also armed and skilled at the use of their firearm?

Friends don’t let friends be unarmed.

One last thought. You are less likely to need to use your guns if there are two of you and both armed, because you’re a much stronger adversary and you can probably defuse the situation without needing to resort to lethal force. Which is an interesting concept to tell a friend who is not sure about carrying – ‘If you have a gun, too; then we’re less likely to need to use them than if I am the only one armed’.

We’ll return to the topic of encouraging your friends to become armed citizens in a subsequent post. It is a very important topic, deserving of its own standalone post.

Religious Hypocrisy Rules as Islam Displaces Christianity in Canada

America in Decline, Political Correctness, Reverse Discrimination, Society's Strangeness No Responses »

Aug 042011

School prayers are encouraged in Toronto, but only for Muslims, not Christians

Canada seems hell-bent on committing national and social suicide; turning its back on the country’s traditional values while welcoming and giving preferential treatment to a value system that is hostile to everything that Canada’s society has been built upon. And while the examples in this post are in Canada, we all know the same thing is happening here in the US, too.

Here are two examples that you should read and ponder the implications of.

First, here is a fairly straightforward situation showing how Muslims get given ‘get out of jail free’ passes by the Toronto police. Behavior that would get us arrested is apparently acceptable if you are a Muslim.

Okay, so that is something to get upset about, for sure. But it seems like a finite sort of issue, rather than one which threatens to overturn Canadian society on its head, right?

So now please read this second article, and be afraid – be very afraid. The scary part is not the appalling hypocrisy that has Canadian public schools banned from any type of linkage to anything Christian, but which allows them to encourage strict Muslim prayer sessions. While that is bad enough, the really terrifying part is the analysis, towards the end of the article, about the demographic trends in western society. To put it bluntly, Muslims are immigrating to western countries at greater rates than people of other religious persuasions, and once they get there, they are outbreeding us by two to one (in some cases even more).

Our future looks to be increasingly Muslim dominated. In the past, it has made no difference to us if our neighbors are Protestant or Catholic or Jewish or agnostic/atheist. Or, let’s open our minds some more – it also didn’t matter if they were Hindu or Buddhist or even Zoroastrian or – let’s go all the way – belong to some sort of ancient fertility cult. Because, in at least the last hundred years or so, all these other religions and their adherents have been able to peacefully co-exist in western society (even if not necessarily in their own home countries!) without seeking to change our society and demanding that non-followers of their religion must adhere to their own personal opinions, views, and values.

But the Muslims seem to be different. They seek to impose their values not only on themselves, but on the people around them too, and their values and behaviors are very different to ours.

That wouldn’t be a problem if we stood up and said ‘Sorry, you’re in our country, which is founded on Christian values of tolerance, decency, and egalitarianism’ and insisted they either conform to our social standards or return back to the squalor from which they’ve escaped. But, for reasons that I can’t start to comprehend, we don’t do this.

Let’s be frank here – when Muslims move to our countries, they are moving to countries with vastly better living standards than what they’re leaving behind them (why else would they come here?). And – here’s the irony of it – the reason our societies are so much more affluent and appealing to them – is because we have Christian/western standards and those have allowed us to build the positive societies that these immigrants simultaneously seek out to live in and then wish to destroy.

The ultimate sadness in all of this? Our problem is not really the Muslim invasion that is occurring everywhere around us. Our problem is ourselves and the passive way we go out of our way to accommodate them and their beliefs, even though those same beliefs are the opposite of the traditional values that our societies are built on. Most of all, our problem is the hypocrisy that sees us restricting and debasing our Christian heritage while welcoming the new Muslim system and giving it preferential treatment.

We have met our enemy, and it is, alas, none other than ourselves.

10 Reasons Why A Handgun Is Better Than A Wife

Just Plain Weird No Responses »

Aug 012011

Hopefully there's room in your life for guns and gals, but if you ever had to choose.....

Many thanks to a reader for sending this in – ‘an oldie, but a goldie’.

10 Reasons Why A Handgun Is Better Than A Wife

10. You can trade an old .44 for a new .22.
9. You can keep one handgun at home and have another for when you’re on the road.
8. If you admire a friend’s handgun and tell him so, he will probably let you try it out a few times.
7. Your primary handgun doesn’t mind if you keep another handgun for a backup.
6. Your handgun will stay with you even if you run out of ammo.
5. A handgun doesn’t take up a lot of closet space.
4. Handguns function normally every day of the month.
3. A handgun doesn’t ask, “Do these new grips make me look fat?”
2. A handgun doesn’t mind if you go to sleep after you use it.
And, the number one way a handgun is better than a wife :
1. You can buy a silencer for a handgun.

Dangerous Political Grandstanding

Ammo, Politicians' Nonsense No Responses »

Jul 192011

Otis Rolley, a gun hater and Baltimore mayoral candidate

Mayoral candidate Otis Rolley wants to tax your ammo

There are few creatures more venal than politicians running for office. They’ll say or do just about anything in the desperate hope of winning the election. Normal people find this impossible to understand, because most of the time, normal people also can’t understand who in their right mind would run for most public offices. But no-one has ever accused politicians of being normal.

An egregious example of idiocy is on display in Baltimore where mayoral candidate Otis Rolley has proposed a new way of reducing crime – by imposing a $1 tax on every bullet bought. Baltimore is one of the most violent cities in the nation – I wonder if there is any relation between its appalling crime record and Rolley’s past position as the city’s planning director between 2003 – 2007?

In Rolley’s alternative universe, adding a $1 tax to every bullet would make it too expensive for criminals to use guns when committing crimes and so would result in less crime being committed, with or without guns.

Let’s think about this (distasteful but necessary). Most criminals never fire a gun in any crime. Indeed, probably most of the time, criminals don’t even carry a gun. These criminals will be unaffected by Rolley’s bullet tax.

But what about the criminals who do carry a gun? Adding a $1/bullet tax would mean that instead of spending $500 – $1000 on a gun and then $10 on a box of bullets, they now need to spend an extra $20 or so to get enough bullets to load their gun. Wow – that will sure make a difference, won’t it.

And what about the criminals who actually fire their gun? Maybe they fire their gun half a dozen times in the course of a crime that nets them some thousands of dollars. Will an extra cost of $5 – $10 really make that much of a difference to them?

Rolley of course deliberately chooses not to think about the other people impacted by his plan – honest ordinary law abiding citizens who shoot guns for recreation or for training. People like you (I hope!) and me.

We fire hundreds, possibly even thousands of rounds a year so as to ensure we can safely and competently use a gun. The cost to us would be hundreds or even thousands of dollars. That would sure impact on us.

There’s a bit of good news, though. Baltimore is just one single city, and in a very small state. So it isn’t too far to drive out of Baltimore to find a gun shop in a city not suffering from a crazy mayor, and to buy your ammunition there. Or to get it online. Hmmmm – maybe even the criminals will do that, too? Do you reckon?

Otis is a Democrat. But you probably guessed that, already.

Good news in Wisconsin

Hand Guns 4 Responses »

Jun 292011

A pseudo-official looking Concealed Weapon Permit badge

At times it is easy to feel that the gun-grabbers are winning and that our second amendment rights are being steadily whittled away.

There is, sadly, some measure of truth in that perception, some of the time. But the gun grabbers aren’t getting it all their own way (but please don’t get complacent!).

In addition to two recent favorable Supreme Court decisions, there’s been a quiet grass roots revolution going on for the last 25 or so years, whereby states have been reversing a century or more of restrictive laws constraining our ability to carry concealed weapons. In 1986, only eight states had ‘shall issue’ laws obligating law enforcement authorities to issue concealed carry permits, and one additional state allowed concealed carry without any permit being needed at all.

Since that time, the number of shall issue states has been steadily increasing, leaping up to 30 by 1996 and continuing on to 37 by 2006, with now three states also allowing concealed carry with no permit at all. Another two states have fairly administered ‘may issue’ type laws whereby law enforcement has discretion in who they will and won’t issue permits to, leaving six ‘may issue’ states who tend to never issue permits (for example, California and New York are ‘may issue’ states) and two hold outs that refuse to ever issue permits – Illinois and Wisconsin.

Just this week it seems that Wisconsin is now moving from the hall of shame to the hall of fame, and is poised to join 40 of the other states with a very positive ‘shall issue’ law. If we include the two fairly managed ‘shall issue’ states, that leaves only seven states that remain resolutely gun unfriendly.

Yay to Wisconsin and its residents. More details here.

Gun Sales Continue to Increase, Crime Rates Continue to Decrease

Gun Control, Guns 'n Ammo, Police and Crime 5 Responses »

May 292011

15 million guns will be purchased in 2011

The entire logic of people who oppose free ownership of guns is that gun ownership causes crime. They seek to restrict and control who can own guns and what sort of guns people can own, on the basis that the fewer the people who own guns, and the fewer the guns that are owned, the safer that society will become.

But there is no evidence to support their contention. Quite the opposite – there is irrefutable evidence to completely contradict their claims. The number of guns sold each year continues to steadily increase, while crime rates are equally steadily dropping rather than rising.

The FBI is the agency charged with collecting, collating and publishing uniform crime reports in an attempt to get a consistent national picture of crime in the US, and it has been doing this since 1930. It draws data from nearly 17,000 different law enforcement agencies across the country, and their reporting is considered the ‘gold standard’ on which to measure crime rates.

They have just released a preliminary report for 2010. And it is full of good news for us as citizens. Robbery is down 9.5%, murder and manslaughter down 4.4%, forcible rape is down 4.2% and aggravated assault down 3.6%. Overall, violent crime is down an average of 5.5%, and all four regions of the country showed decreases.

This decrease in violent crime isn’t a one time aberration, either. Their report includes a table showing that in addition to the 5.5% decline in 2010, there was a 5.3% decline in 2009, and lesser declines of 1.9% in 2008 and 0.7% in 2007.

Prior to 2007, an earlier FBI report shows that for the ten years 1997 – 2006, violent crime dropped in total by 13.3%. Reaching back even further, for the four years 1993 – 1997, violent crime dropped by 6.9%. (I stopped looking further back when reaching 1993 due to laziness and the fact that surely 17 years of data is enough to accurately establish a clear trend.)

These statistics are all the more remarkable when you consider that at the same time the number of crimes are dropping, the number of people living in the US is increasing – for example, the 6.9% decrease in the four years 1993 – 1997 would be a 10.2% if expressed in terms of crimes per (eg) 100,000 people.

So, the good news that everyone can welcome is that violent crime is down, down, down. In total, for every 100 violent crimes reported in 1993, it seems that today there are only 70 crimes reported. At the same time, the US population has increased from 258 million in 1993 to 309 million in 2010. So, if we adjust for the population increase, the actual reduction in crime per constant number of people is from a base count of 100 in 1993 to 59 in 2010. Violent crime rates have almost halved.

Now what about gun ownership? The same period of time has seen a resurgence of gun ownership in the US. More and more states have allowed concealed and/or open carry of weapons, and gun sales have steadily increased.

It is hard to know both how many guns there are in private ownership, and how many people or households actually own guns. But since late 1998, it has been possible to at least get an approximate understanding of how many new guns are being sold.

Almost without exception, all new firearms sold in the US now require the purchaser to get an authorization from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), a system instituted in late 1998 and operated by the FBI. This provides a convenient measure for gun sales activity.

However, one check can sometimes result in the purchase of two or more guns, but offsetting this, some second hand gun sales are also processed through the NICS system. A second hand gun sale does not represent a new gun added into the population, but instead is simply a transfer of a gun from someone presumably no longer needing/using it to someone who is likely to value, need, and use it more than the seller.

For the sake of estimating, it perhaps is acceptable to say that the number of second hand gun transfers is balanced by the number of multiple gun transactions authorized by a single NICS check, so let’s approximately equate NICS checks with actual new guns sold.

Rates of gun sales, as empirically measured by NICS checks, have been increasing steadily every year without exception since 2002 (when 8.45 million checks were conducted). 2006 was the first year in which more than 10 million checks were carried out, and by 2008 checks were being carried out at a rate 50% greater than in 2002 (12.71 million).

In 2010, a new high of 14.41 million checks were carried out, and for the first five months of 2011, checks have been running at a rate about 10% higher than 2010, suggesting a total for 2011 in the order of nearly 16 million checks – nearly twice the rate of nine years earlier. You can see the NICS statistics here.

In total, from the start of the NICS system in November 1998 through the end of April 2011, there have been 130 million checks conducted; which can be considered to imply about that many new guns purchased in the US. Let’s say sales were occurring at a lower rate of 7.5 million a year prior to that. So, during the same time frame 1993 – 2010 that violent crime rates have dropped 41%, there have been 170 million new guns sold.

It is not known how many of these purchases are replacement guns, to replace guns that have been lost or destroyed or rendered unusable by accident or design. But most firearms have a very long life – it is not uncommon to see 30 or 40 year old guns, and because they don’t drop in value greatly as they age, few people simply throw away an ‘old’ gun, but instead will either keep it or give it away or sell it. So most of the new guns being purchased are additional guns rather than replacement guns.

It is also not known how many of these purchases are to existing gun owners simply choosing to buy another gun to add to their existing gun or guns (although in this latter case, sometimes a current gun owner buying an additional gun will then sell one of his previously owned guns via a private sale to someone else, without the transaction needing to be processed through NICS). It is probably fair to say that half the guns sold each year are to existing gun owners – in other words, while the number of guns in the country may be increasing, the number of gun owners is increasing more slowly.

However – and here is the point – whatever the numbers are, gun ownership is steadily growing in the US. And, at the same time, crime is steadily dropping.

I don’t necessarily claim there to be a direct or close link between the two statistics. But what I do very strongly point out is that the main reason gun control advocates use to justify their claim that guns should be restricted and controlled – a claim that guns ’cause’ crime – is utterly wrong. Notwithstanding a surge in gun ownership, and many more states allowing concealed carry of weapons, murder rates are down, rape rates are down; indeed, all violent crime rates are significantly down and have been consistently reducing year after year after year.

To summarize this morass of statistics, and for the period 1993 – 2010 :

Violent crime rates reduced by 41%
170 million guns sold
With less than 130 million households in the US, this is an average of 1.3 guns sold per household
Rates of gun sales are increasing and rates of violent crime reduction are similarly accelerating

So where is the harm in gun ownership?

As far as the numbers tell the story, and accepting the anti-gunners own claim that there is a linkage between the prevalence of guns and crime in society, more guns clearly reduce crime, not increase it.

So, my question to the would-be gun-grabbers : With 170 million new guns in circulation in the US, and a 41% reduction in violent crime rates over the same period, where is the harm you allege guns are causing to society? Shouldn’t you be advocating for more gun sales?

Should the Government Force Cadillac to Open Dealerships in Slums?

Political Correctness, Politicians' Nonsense, Reverse Discrimination No Responses »

May 132011

Few Cadillacs are sold in downmarket neighborhoods

Okay, so this might seem like a trivial question with an obvious answer, although perhaps asking if the government can force General Motors to do something is a bad example; being as how these days GM translates more to ‘Government Motors’ due to the massive bailout and shareholding in GM by the federal government. Maybe they truly can force GM to do something as crazy as to open a Cadillac dealership in a depressed downtown slum area.

We can all surely agree that any car manufacturer should be free to open dealerships wherever it chooses, and should be equally free to not open dealerships wherever it does not wish to open them, correct? That is just common sense and part of the free market. There is not any suggestion that car manufacturers are obliged to offer their models in all marketplaces – a Yugo dealership should not be forced to open in Beverly Hills, and a Rolls Royce dealership should not be forced to open in Watts.

Let’s try another example. Should the government be able to control where supermarket chains open stores? Should they be able to say ‘No, you can’t open a store there, but you must open a store here instead’? This might be more sensitive – could they say ‘It is unfair on this section of the population not to have a huge big upmarket Whole Foods in their neighborhood’, accuse Whole Foods of discriminatory practices, and force them to open their up-market overpriced stores in poor neighborhoods? Do people have some sort of built-in right to have expensive supermarkets in their neighborhood, even if they can’t afford to buy the goods offered for sale in them?

Hopefully you agree that supermarkets too can open and close stores as they wish.

Now, for the third one. Should the government be able to tell banks where they must open branches? Unless you can see some way in which banks are different to car dealerships, to supermarkets, and to just about every other sort of commercial enterprise, you’ll probably agree that government has no business interfering with the normal commercial decisions of banks and where/how they open or close branches.

But, as this article reports, the government is doing exactly this; indeed, the Justice Department has opened a new division with 20 officials to try and force banks to do things which they would not otherwise choose to do themselves, including forcing them to lend money to risky borrowers and to open branches in areas they don’t see any commercial sense in having branches.

This is justified as a way to forcibly prevent banks from ‘red lining’. Red lining was a practice, some decades ago, where banks would automatically refuse to lend money to a person based on where they lived. This was before computerized data bases of credit reports, and at a time when discrimination was much more prevalent, and it suited banks’ purposes to simply say “If you live in a ‘bad’ area, we don’t want to risk our money with you”. Was this fair? Probably not, although on the other hand, whenever the government tries to force banks to lend money that they wouldn’t otherwise lend, we seem to end up with huge bailouts at the end of the day.

But these days, no-one in any bank ‘red-lines’. They simply call up a credit report on their computer, and within 30 seconds, have a FICO score and a series of financial ratios in front of them that indicate if the applicant should be given a loan or not, and if the applicant should be allowed a discounted interest rate due to being an excellent credit risk, or if they should be charged an increased interest rate due to being a poor credit risk.

This is the same as – well, to use the car dealership example again; you go in to a dealership with a vehicle you want to trade on a new car. If your old car is in good condition and low miles, you’ll get a higher trade-in value than if it is in poor condition and with high miles. And if it is a vehicle that they know they can’t sell on, they might even refuse to accept it at all, or massively low-ball you on the price.

No-one is suggesting that car dealers should give the same trade-in on all vehicles. But the Justice Department is blathering on about how banks should adopt identical policies for all potential borrowers, and ridiculously accusing banks of red-lining when in truth all the banks are doing is making prudent commercial decisions based not on race but on financial issues.

So bank regulators are setting the banks up for another banking crisis, by forcing them to open branches in areas where they don’t want to do business, and forcing them to lend money to people who by all normal measures are unlikely to be able to pay back their loans. Does that sound familiar to you – aren’t we currently in the middle of a multi-trillion dollar economic crisis as a result of banks being pressured to make ridiculous loans to people who obviously had no way of ever paying them off?

One of the interesting consequences of this financial melt-down is that even the people the government was trying to ‘help’ have been massively harmed as a result of their dysfunctional help. No-one has won, except perhaps for the government itself, which has used the financial crisis it generated largely by itself as a justification to become even more involved in all parts of our nation’s economy and commercial dealings.

It is common for some people to vilify bankers as being greedy and short-sighted, but spare a thought to who is forcing them to do these clearly stupid things – our own government. There was a time when everyone respected their local banker – what has changed? Government regulation is what has changed.

I’ll close not with answers, but with two questions.

1. Why should the government treat banks differently to car dealerships, supermarkets, and just about every other type of private enterprise?

2. Why can’t the government learn from its past mistakes, rather than repeat them?

What Are These People Looking At?

Military Matters, Politicians' Nonsense No Responses »

May 062011

Obama, Biden, Clinton, etc, all pretend to be watching the bin Laden raid

You probably read one of a dozen different accounts of the Osama take-down, many of them including this picture, showing our illustrious President, together with Biden, Clinton, and various others all intently watching something out of the picture.

We were told this picture was taken as they were watching the realtime events unfolding at Osama’s compound. Here’s a video clip of John Brennan (White House Counter-Terrorism advisor) talking about the group, depicted allegedly ‘monitoring the situation realtime’ and with full visuals. And here’s one of dozens of articles including the picture.

But it now turns out that for the early 24 minutes of the 40 minute raid there was no video feed at all, and that the picture was a subsequently staged picture for the press rather than a true picture of what happened.

Apart from the assassination in cold blood of bin Laden, it seems everything else that was volunteered and proudly proclaimed about this mission were lies. And let’s understand this clearly – it is one thing, in the heat of battle, to confuse some of the facts. But is an entirely different thing for people to invent total lies (and to stage fake pictures) and pass them off as truth to us.

A 40 minute fire-fight? Ummm, no. Only one bad guy had a gun, and he was shot almost immediately. Our guys did kill another person or two or three, but the only bullets heading downrange were from our guys, not the other side.

The helicopter loss was first described as a mechanical failure, then being shot down by ‘heavy enemy fire’ (which was non-existent) and then finally described as having collided with a side of the building.

Osama was first described as initially shooting at the good guys through a window as they stormed the compound, then of course, shooting at them in his bedroom with an AK-47 and hiding behind one of his wives; whereas now it turns out he never touched a weapon, wasn’t hiding behind a wife (who was first described as shot and killed and now the woman in question is described as having been injured) and was unarmed. But he was ‘resisting’ (by turning and running away).

As for Obama himself, he was described as shot twice, three times, and now possibly only once. But we don’t know, because the pictures we were promised, we will not know get to see, for fear of upsetting our enemies.

Talking about our enemies, initial reports cited the raid as being done in conjunction with the Pakistanis, and even said there was doubt who it was who shot Osama – maybe our guys or maybe the Pakistanis. Now we learn that the only role the Pakistanis had in the raid is taking the remains of the destroyed helicopter and threatening to sell them to China or Russia or anyone else who would be interested in seeing the previously undisclosed new stealth technology that was on the helicopter.

The million dollar compound in which Osama was described as living luxurously in? As any of the pictures of it made immediately obvious, it was a squalid ramshackle building, apparently already decaying in places although barely five years old, and the one million dollar cost estimate has been downgraded to a quarter million or less.

And the ‘incredibly gutsy’ decision made by Obama (quoted here)? What exactly was gutsy about sending other people to take out Osama? If Obama had decided to lead the mission himself, then that would be gutsy (and foolish). But the only sacrifice he made was missing half of a golf game (apparently his 66th golf game since taking office – he is able to golf about once a week on average).

Please tell me what is gutsy about sending in a couple of dozen troops to take out Osama bin Laden. After the months of monitoring, we probably knew exactly the extent and nature of the people in Osama’s compound (ie very few soldiers and very little resistance, resulting in zero casualties on our side) and was the issue of ‘Do we/don’t we take out Osama?’ even a question that needed to be asked or answered?

Obama risked nothing personally, nor even anything politically. If the mission failed, it would have been kept secret, or else publicized so that he got points for trying. And if it succeeded, as we are told it did, then of course, Obama would seek to cover himself in glory, as he double definitely has indeed attempted to do.

In an attempt to play up the element of ‘gutsy’ involvement, Obama then turned around and awarded a Presidential Unit Citation to the SEAL team involved in the action. A PUC is the highest honor that can be awarded to a unit, sort of the collective equivalent of a Congressional Medal of Honor.

But, let’s think about this. This group of SEALS were helicoptered in and out, fought against one armed man and another three or four unarmed men, in a friendly country, and took no casualties of their own, with a very mono-dimensional mission that had been as close to completely scoped out in advance as anything ever can be.

Yes, they were successful, and yes, it was a high value target. But in a world where SEAL teams are tasked with truly risky missions, involving extraordinary feats of strength and endurance, lasting days or weeks at a time, in massively unfriendly places – both in terms of weather and the local people, and against much larger forces, often taking casualties in the course of the action, does this 40 minute ‘stroll in the park’ really qualify for the highest award possible?

I’m sorry, Mr President, but giving out a Presidential Unit Citation doesn’t make your own actions any more courageous or ‘gutsy’ and in doing so, you debase the actions these brave men and their fellow soldiers undergo most of the rest of their lives.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad we found bin Laden some time last year, and pleased to see bin Laden now dead. I’m glad we killed him. But doing so has changed nothing for the better in our ongoing battle against Islamic extremists. They still hate us – possibly now more than ever. Al Qaeda is not going to unravel or give up, just because of the death of bin Laden. And all the dozens (possibly hundreds) of other Islamic terrorist groups are still there, too.

Now is not the time to celebrate another false feeling of a mission accomplished. Now is the time to double down and to press the battle harder, because for sure, that is what the other guys will be doing to us.

Glaring Example of Media Bias

Media Bias No Responses »

Apr 262011

Biased headline, biased article

For sure, George Bush was a controversial President and attracted a huge amount of criticism (and, alas, not all of it unjustified). But do you ever remember reading a headline ‘Left Wingers Continue to Mean-Spiritedly Nitpick at President Bush’?

Now look at this article, prominently featured on Yahoo and elsewhere, but with two key words changed : Left becomes Right, and Bush becomes Obama.

This article is an appalling example of media bias, from the headline, to the content, and even to the gratuitous insults offered to conservative politicians at the end.

In the interest of fairness, let me match the lack of history knowledge by a congresswoman with Obama’s reference to ‘all 57 states’ – he doesn’t even know how many states there are in the United States! And let me match Sarah Palin’s hand notes with Obama’s slavish reliance on a TelePrompTer wherever he goes – a total inability to deliver unscripted speeches.

But you won’t see any of this in that article.

Instead, in a desperate attempt to defuse the shameful silence on Obama’s part regarding Easter (click the link for an excellent article on that), and to try and pathetically explain why he enthusiastically talks up Muslim religious holidays instead, the article and its writer does what the left wing has become so skilled at – it attacks and insults the conservatives, rather than choosing to enter into a fairminded debate about the issues.

And that is probably why you’re here, reading this. Thank you.

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