Jul 24 2010

A brave officer’s story

Category: crime,justice — harmonicminer @ 8:02 am

The next time you see an officer making a routine traffic stop, consider what you’re about to see. If YOU are the one being stopped, be extra nice… and keep your hands in plain sight at all times, just to make the officer feel more comfortable.

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No doubt, some people will criticize some of this officer’s procedure. I’m sure that he would now see things he could do differently.

But the message here is the courage it takes to do the job at all, and the debt we owe to the people who do it.

These two criminals, at least one a twice deported illegal alien, were obviously willing to kill anyone who got in their way… and odds are good that they would have killed someone else had this officer not stopped them, been shot, and reported enough to get the criminals apprehended.

Who knows whose life he saved that night, who is now alive because these killers aren’t now on the loose?

Jun 11 2010

Britain R.I.P.? Part four

Category: guns,justice,liberty — harmonicminer @ 8:00 am

The previous post in this series is here.

The extreme nature of British gun bans has still not protected the people from the occasional mass murderer with a gun.  In fact, even in the USA, they only tend to happen where virtually everyone is known to be disarmed by law, like in schools, government offices, universities, post offices and military bases [go figure, but they’re disarmed].  When was the last time you heard of a mass murder at a gun show?  Or a gun range?  Of course, in Britain, everyone is disarmed all the time everywhere, by law…  so mass murder can happen anywhere at all.  According to Peter Hitchens, Perhaps these deadly rampages aren’t so ‘inexplicable’ after all:

Yet another gun massacre is followed by yet another typhoon of psychobabble,
sentiment and bogus declarations that ‘this must never happen again’, when everyone knows that it will.

It’s difficult to argue for tighter gun laws, since they’re already so tight, though I’m sure the authorities will think of something suitably irrelevant and futile, as they did after Hungerford and Dunblane.

They are determined to make sure nobody in this country is armed, apart from criminals and terrorists, the invariable effect of ‘tough’ gun laws that trouble only the law-abiding and have no impact on illegally held weapons at all.

The truth is that until 1920, Britain’s gun laws were so relaxed they made Texas look effeminate, but we had virtually no gun crime. That only really began to increase here after we abolished hanging.

But that truth doesn’t fit the Leftist dogma which has ­everyone, including the Tories, the media and the police, in its grip, so the facts will be ignored.

What can we learn from the Cumberland murders? Well, first of all that the police are no use to anyone once a crime has been committed. They never were and they never will be, except if they can do first aid.

It’s such a pity they’ve forgotten their job is to prevent crime rather than hold verbose Press conferences afterwards and festoon the countryside with silly scene-of-crime tape copied from American TV shows.

It’s possible an old-fashioned village constable, on the spot, might have done something to halt Derrick Bird, or have realised something bad was going to happen before it did.

It’s ­certain that the modern fire-brigade approach to policing with its sirens, helicopters, computers and flash cars was no use.

This is another area where the “mother country” of the USA has simply lost its mind.  Hitchens goes on to conjecture that anti-depressant drugs are at the heart of some of these mass murders.

Maybe.

The next post in this series is here.

Jun 07 2010

Egyptians losing citizenship because they marry Israeli women

Category: freedom,Islam,Israel,justice,liberty,middle east — harmonicminer @ 12:28 pm

Egypt restricts marriage to Israelis

Egypt’s Supreme Administrative Court upheld a ruling on Saturday, that orders the country’s Interior Ministry to strip citizenship from Egyptians married to Israeli women.

The court said that the Interior Ministry should present each marriage case to the Cabinet on an individual basis. The Cabinet will then rule on whether to strip the Egyptian of his citizenship, taking into consideration whether a man married an Israeli Arab or a Jew when making its decision to revoke citizenship.

Saturday’s decision, which cannot be appealed, comes more than year after a lower court ruled that the Interior Ministry, which deals with citizenship documents, must implement the 1976 article of the citizenship law. That bill revokes citizenship of Egyptians who married Israelis who have served in the army or embrace Zionism as an ideology. The Interior Ministry appealed that ruling.

The lawyer who brought the original suit to court, Nabih el-Wahsh, celebrated Saturday’s ruling, saying it “is aimed at protecting Egyptian youth and Egypt’s national security.”

The government has not released figures of Egyptians married to Israeli women, but some estimates put the number around 30,000.

Israeli officials said they had no comment on Saturday’s ruling.

Somehow, I doubt that the UN Human Rights commission, the National Organization for Women, and liberal feminists everywhere will be any more forthcoming. 

Now, imagine if Israeli women who married Egyptians automatically lost their Israeli citizenship. 

Feminists everywhere would be deeply indignant.

As always, essentially ANY insult aimed at Israel is merely business as usual, even though the reverse would suddently become an intolerable outrage.

Jun 04 2010

Did it have to turn out like this?

Category: God,government,history,justice,liberty,military,national security,society — harmonicminer @ 8:00 am

The next time you get a chance to take a shot at a future conqueror, take it. No, lefty nitwits, I’m not talking about taking a shot at the next Republican president-elect. I’m talking about people whose overweening ambition makes them think they have the right to conquer the world.  By definition, no US president qualifies, because all have left office, willingly or not, without coercion, and gone home to write their memoirs, if they lived long enough. 

No, I’m talking about a Hitler, or a Stalin, or a Mao, or….  well, you get the idea.  Kaiser Wilhelm, without whom World War I would probably not have occurred as it did, is one such, though that seems not to have been immediately obvious to Annie Oakley…  a dead shot if there ever was one.  Although after WWI started, she seems to have caught on quickly enough about the Kaiser’s character.

THERMOPYLAEHILLBILLY: Annie Oakley and Kaiser Wilhelm II

Where would we be today if Annie Oakley had just a little more to drink in 1889? Kaiser Wilhelm II was the Reich’s new leader and had a box seat to watch Oakley at the Berlin Charlottenburg Race Course. She was appearing with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and had cleaned her Colt 45 the night before. Annie announced that she would shot the ashes off any man or woman’s Havana cigar. Normally her husband Frank Butler come out of the audience and her speech was just for show.

She never expected anyone, including Kaiser Wilhelm II to take her up on her offer and here came the Kaiser out of his box seat. Oakley had made her dare, there stood the Kaiser and she couldn’t back down. So as she measured her distance the Kaiser took out a cigar and started puffing. The German police thought it was a joke until the Kaiser took up his position. The Kaiser told the police to get out of the way.

Annie Oakley, American sharp shooter, raised her pistol, aimed and blew the ashes off Kaiser Wilhelm II cigar. Had she missed the woman from Cincinnati may have prevented the First World War 25 years later. When World War I started Annie wrote the Kaiser asking for a second chance. Silence followed……………

What If Diaries » What if Annie Oakley had shot Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1889?

One chilly November afternoon in 1889, a fur-coated crowd assembled in Berlin’s Charlottenburg Race Course to enjoy a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild Wild West Show, which was touring Europe to great popular acclaim. Among the audience was the Reich’s impetuous young ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been on the throne for a year. Wilhelm was particularly keen to see the show’s star attraction, Annie Oakley, famed throughout the world for her skills with a Colt. 45.

On that day, as usual, Annie announced to the crowd that she would attempt to shoot the ashes from the cigar of some lady or gentleman in the audience. “Who shall volunteer to hold the cigar?” she asked. In fact, she expected no one from the crowd to volunteer; she simply asked for laughs. Her long-suffering husband, Frank Butler, always stepped forward and offered himself as her human Havana-holder.

This time, however, Annie had no sooner made her announcement then Kaiser Wilhelm himself leaped out of the royal box and strutted into the arena. Annie was stunned and horrified but could not retract her dare without losing face. She paced off her usual distance while Wilhelm extracted a cigar from a gold case and lit it with flourish. Several German policeman, suddenly realizing that this was not one of kaiser’s little jokes, tried to preempt the stunt, but were waved off by His All-Highest Majesty. Sweating profusely under her buckskin, and regretful that she had consumed more than her usual amount of whiskey the night before, Annie raised her Colt, took aim, and blew away Wilhem’s ashes.

Had the sharpshooter from Cincinnati creased the kaiser’s head rather than his cigar, one of Europe,s most ambitious and volatile rulers would have been removed from the scene. Germany might not have pursued its policy of aggressive Weltpolitik that culminated in war twenty-five years later.

Annie herself seemed to realize her mistake later on. After World War I began, she wrote to the kaiser asking for a second shot. He did not respond.

Annie Oakley, the Butterfly Effect, and You

In the late 1800s, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was a dazzling display of horsemanship, gunplay and other cowboy skills. One of its acts involved the sharpshooting of the great Annie Oakley. Dubbed “Little Sure Shot,” Oakley had an amazing routine, she would shoot out lit candles, for example, and the corks of wine bottles.

For her grand finale, she would shoot out the lit end of a cigarette held in a man’s mouth at a certain distance. For this, she would ask for volunteers from the audience. As no one ever volunteered, she had her husband planted among the spectators. He would “volunteer” and they would complete the dangerous trick together.

Well, during one swing through Europe, Oakley was setting up her finale and she asked for volunteers. To her shock, and the surprise of everyone involved with the show, she got a real volunteer.

The proud young Prince (soon to be Kaiser) Wilhelm bravely stepped down from among the spectators, strode into the ring and stuck a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Reportedly out late the night before enjoying the local beer gardens, the unexpected appearance of this famous volunteer unnerved her. But the show must go on.

She took aim and fired… putting out the cigarette, much to Wilhelm’s amusement.

Thus, she also created one of historians’ favorite “what if” moments. What if her bullet went through the future Kaiser’s left ear? Would World War I have happened? Would the lives of 9 million soldiers and 6.6 million civilians have been spared? Would Hitler have risen from the ashes of defeated Germany? All sorts of questions come to mind…


Many historians think that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, leading to the Soviet Union, would not have occurred without World War I to weaken the Czar (who was made by Lenin and Stalin to seem rather a nice fellow, by comparison).  Nazi Germany is difficult to credit as a likely outcome of a Germany that didn’t fight in WWI, because no great German angst would been present about a non-existent Treaty of Versailles, and no not-quite-imperialistic Kaiser would have tolerated Hitler in the feckless way German proto-democracy did.  In any case, without the agony of the post-war years, Hitler would have been only another anti-Semite, with no way to get traction with the German public at large.

World War II is hard to imagine without World War I.  Germany simply wouldn’t have had the drive to do it, absent the peculiar circumstances of the end of WW I.  At most, Japanese imperialism might have been a problem…  but strong British Empire, not weakened by WWI, would have been in a clear position to oppose Japanese aggression in China and elsewhere, and probably given the Emperor so much to consider that attacking the USA would have been a very low priority.

So imagine a 20th century without two world wars, without a cold war, indeed, without communism, which would have meant no Korean War, no Vietnam War, etc.  Imagine a still-strong British Empire still ruling the waves, shipping around the world the incredible output of American industry.

I know that cultural trends are present in history.  But I’m also pretty sure that without specific deeds by specific people, everything would have been different.

All of which occasionally leaves me wondering, in a much more pedestrian way, what deeds or words of everyday folk can sometimes have an effect that is seemingly far disproportionate to their obvious impact?

Apr 16 2010

Was the Civil War necessary?

Category: freedom,justice,left — harmonicminer @ 10:51 am

What if the Civil War had not been fought?

When would slavery have finally ended in the USA?  Would it have been as late as Brazil?  (If, of course, you consider slavery in Brazil to have been abolished yet.  See the link.)  Or even later?

I hear a good many people on the Left who like to strike the pose of being “anti-war.”  One wonders, given that slavery was the central issue that organized the states into unionists and secessionists, if these same people believe that the Civil War should not have been fought, and slavery should have been allowed to go on, penetrating further into the territories, etc.

I suppose it would depend on whether the Union stayed together, in an uneasy compromise, or if the Union had split, and no war had been fought to keep it together.

If the Confederate States of America had existed into modern times, how long might slavery have existed there?  I imagine several decades, at least, given the entrenched nature of it, and the failure of the South to organize its economy around manufacturing instead of agriculture.

If the Union had stayed together but continued in the toleration of slavery, it seems that it would still be likely that slavery would have continued for a very long time.

Generally, the social/economic forces were less present, in the USA, that helped the moral imperative of ending slavery along in other places.

Dedicated “no war for any reason” activists of the Left should consider what price they might have been willing to pay for avoiding the war, in the human cost of slavery.

Apr 11 2010

Love Life

Category: abortion,government,justice,legislation,liberty,love,theology — harmonicminer @ 8:14 am

h/t: SuzyB

Mar 28 2010

Seven Contradictions of Gun Control

Category: government,guns,justice,liberty — harmonicminer @ 8:20 am

Six Contradictions, Seven Contradictions, who’s counting?

Herewith, Seven Contradictions of Gun Control:

*  Guns are used in crime  —  yet we have many laws restricting guns

*  We have many laws restricting guns  —   yet criminals can always get guns illegally

*  Criminals can always get guns illegally  —  yet we need more laws restricting guns

*  We need more laws restricting guns  —  yet states with more guns have less crime

*  States with more guns have less crime  —   but too many people have guns

*  Too many people have guns  —  yet we have many laws restricting guns

*  We need more laws restricting guns  —  yet criminals don’t obey gun laws

Coming soon:  Six Contradictions of Pinball

Mar 18 2010

False connections

Category: church,justice,left,media,politics,religion,right,society — harmonicminer @ 8:22 am

Article and picture from CNN: Evangelical leader takes on Beck for assailing social justice churches

An evangelical leader is calling for a boycott of Glenn Beck’s television show and challenging the Fox News personality to a public debate after Beck vilified churches that preach economic and social justice.

The Rev. Jim Wallis, president of Sojourners, a network of progressive Christians, says Beck perverted Jesus’ message when he urged Christians last week to leave churches that preach social and economic justice.

Now here’s what’s sad/funny about this article.

First, the United Church of Christ, as a denomination, is “pro-choice.”  So they’re for “social justice” for everyone but the most innocent among us, who apparently do not deserve legal protections of any kind.  And as a member in good standing of the National Council of Churches, they never saw a South or Central American socialist/communist dictator they didn’t like.  Which means, of course, that they weren’t for “social justice” for the people in political prisons (or dead) in those places.  I mean, how bad can a communist dictator be if he has national health care in his country?

Second, when they show a United Church of Christ sign, and quote “evangelical” minister Jim Wallis, they create by association the notions that the United Church of Christ is evangelical, and that evangelicals as a whole have any serious disagreement with Mr. Beck.  Both are false.

Third, “social justice” is a euphemism for statist solutions to “social problems.”  Otherwise, churches that use the term would be talking about Christian charity, love, mission and service, which are wonderful, old and uncontroversial ideas, not “social justice.”  And, of course, the origin of the term “social justice” had nothing to do with any church, being an artifact of Marxist thought and its intellectual descendants.  (And isn’t Mr. Beck taking heat for pointing that out.)

It’s interesting that by pointing that out, Mr. Beck has become the subject, instead of the perversion of the concepts of Christian charity, love, mission and service into “social justice” that is preached by the “Christian Left.”

Fourth, the United Church of Christ is shrinking, fast.  It is simply dying out.  Along with most of the rest of the “mainline protestant” groups.  That’s what happens to Christian groups that abandon their central teachings and moral values to appeal to the world.  So in a few years or decades, it’s likely that no local congregation will be around to maintain the sign above.

Some churches are converted to skating rinks when they’re sold due to lack of interest, or lack of surviving members, if the building is big enough.

That sign looks big enough to list prices and hours of operation.

Mar 09 2010

Volunteering to aid the enemy

Category: constitution,government,jihad,justice,Obama,politics,terrorism — harmonicminer @ 9:04 am

Andrew McCarthy makes the case that The Gitmo Volunteers are no more noble in volunteering to represent the Guantanamo prisoners than a restaurant owner who gave free food to Al Qaeda. It’s all worth reading, and it’s difficult to refute, I think.  He has some especially pointed observations about how the legal profession sees itself as being above the rest of us, particularly the left-liberal wing of it.  Read it all if you can.  Here’s the ending bit:

America’s enemies are no more entitled to counsel in pursuing legal claims than, say, a pro-life group that chooses to file a lawsuit. If I went out of my way to contribute my services for free to a pro-life group, do you suppose the New York Times would have the slightest hesitation about drawing the inference that I was sympathetic to the pro-life cause? Of course not. The Gray Lady wouldn’t pretend that I was just, in the Gillers lexicon, promoting “the administration of justice.” After all, no one would have forced me to take that case. There are countless causes that a lawyer willing to donate his services can find. When you’re a volunteer, you’re doing what you want to do, not what you have to do.

As the law is currently understood, it is legal for a lawyer to volunteer his services to America’s enemies. It is absurd, however, to suggest that we have to applaud that decision. And it is equally ludicrous to suggest that we are forbidden from drawing the obvious conclusion that a lawyer who makes such a decision is predisposed to condemn the United States and to sympathize with America’s enemies on some level.

Here’s the landscape: The Obama Justice Department is staffed with many lawyers who volunteered their services to America’s enemies. Since those lawyers have been running the department, there has been a detectable shift in favor of due-process rights for terrorists, a bias in favor of civilian trials in which terrorists are vested with all the rights of American citizens, a bias against military tribunals, the extension of Miranda protections to enemy combatants, a concerted effort to publish previously classified information detailing interrogation methods and depicting the alleged abuse of detainees, efforts to subject lawyers who authorized aggressive counterterrorism policies to professional sanction, the reopening of investigations against CIA interrogators even though those cases were previously closed by apolitical law-enforcement professionals, and the continued accusation that officials responsible for designing and carrying out the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies committed war crimes.

You may think this is a coincidence. I don’t. And I’m not going to pretend it is because some lefty lawyer screams “McCarthyism.” This isn’t demagoguery. It is cause and effect. And if it is hurting President Obama politically, that is because he deserves to be hurt for indulging it.

Jan 08 2010

Tougher on journalists than possible terrorists

Category: freedom,government,justice,liberty — harmonicminer @ 9:55 am

Armed TSA Agents Threaten Travel Journalist

At 7:00 p.m. on December 29, armed TSA agents banged on the door of photojournalist and KLM Airlines blogger Steven Frischling’s Connecticut home. “They threatened me with a criminal search warrant and suggested they’d call up my clients and say I was a security risk if I didn’t turn over my computer to them. They said ‘we could make this difficult for you,'” Frischling told me in a telephone interview the following afternoon. By then, TSA had removed Frischling’s computer from his home, made a copy of his hard drive, and returned the computer to him.

The federal agents, dispatched form the Transportation Security Administration’s Office of Inspection, had wanted Frischling, a respected travel journalist, to name names. They wanted Frischling to tell them who had given him “TSA Security Directive SD-1544-09-06,” which Frischling and another blogger had posted online three days earlier.

“It was a double-edged sword for me because I did not know who sent me the document. And it was absurd because that document had been seen by approximately 10,000 airline personnel around the world, including personnel in Islamabad, Riyadh, and Nigeria, so the idea that it was somehow in their control” was false, Frischling said.

Frischling explained that he posted the document because he wanted people to be able to read it and form their own opinions and ideas about it. The document was not marked “classified,” and it had already apparently been posted on some airline websites. The email had been sent to him anonymously from someone with a gmail address. TSA believed it was one of their own and wanted to know who, exactly.

For Frischling, thinking beyond the immediate safety of his three children, alone with him in the house, was difficult. His wife works at night and was already gone.

“I stood talking to the agents with my three-year-old in my arms,” Frischling told me.

While the agents were intimidating him, he feared if he were to be arrested then his children would be left without a parent present. He telephoned an attorney, who suggested he cooperate with TSA since there was no federal shield law to protect him in matters deemed national security threats. Besides, the agents “made it clear that if I said ‘no’ to letting them have my hard drive, they were going to come back with a search warrant,” Frischling explained.

If this report does not make you lividly angry, if it does not provoke a certain amount of adrenalin, if it does not leave you wanting take specific action against government goons who abuse their authority, you are already a sheep, I’m afraid.

And the wolves have your number.

We are individually and corporately responsible to fight this sort of thing.

The issue almost doesn’t matter that led the federal thugs to this man’s door.  They should have gotten a warrant first, or stayed in their office.  This kind of intimidation is not appropriate in any case except perhaps with known criminals or terrorists.  It certainly isn’t appropriate for private citizens with no criminal background or intent, and is especially egregious when used to intimidate journalists.

I know who the criminals are in this story.  Of course, if this had been done in the Bush administration, perhaps under color of the Patriot Act, the media would have been all over it.

Hint: people who make threats to intimidate the innocent ARE the bad guys.

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