Author: VD

Mailvox: the thin, blue, and not very bright line

A police officer responds to today’s column on public pensions:

Some public pension systems are over the top. Here in Oregon, most public employees contribute nothing to their pension funds. When I was a police officer in SoCal, my pension fund was a contract. I contributed so much per paycheck and it was matched by the public entity I worked for. Periodic raises and benefits were negotiated without threat of strike or public demonstration.

I chose police work because I liked it. No one held a gun at my back and said be a cop. Just as no one held a gun at another man’s back and told him to be a carpenter. You accept the good and bad as with any profession. As far as my pension is concerned, it is subject to the same cutbacks as any pension system would be given the current economic downturn. Plus, I pay for any increase in medical premiums for me and my spouse, just as millions of other retirees do.

Lastly, to make the statement about police officers not risking their lives like a Marine in Afganistan shows your ignorance. A police officer is under the gun every single day he or she is on the job. Every time you knock on a door, you do not know who or what is on the other side. Statistics show it. People can do four years in the Marines and never hear a shot fired in anger. I suspect that you, Mr. Day were never in the military and have never worked a shift in a patrol car. How pathetic.

To which I responded thusly: “It would appear that police work doesn’t require much in the way of mathematics or logic. If you believe being a policeman is more dangerous than being a combat soldier in a war zone, you clearly don’t know the first thing about statistics. In any case, no amount of potential danger justifies being paid over $100k per year for not working. Especially when there is no money to pay for the non-delivery of services.”

Our police friend makes a massive error of basic logic by comparing all HYPOTHETICAL police danger to ACTUAL Marine Corps combat zone danger. It’s true that some Marines can serve four years and never hear a shot fired in anger, but most police serve their entire career and never hear one either. I would have thought this was obvious, but since it might benefit our enbadged protectors to have it spelled out slowly for them, I shall herewith do so.

800,000: Total number of US police officers
126: Number of US police officers “killed” in the line of duty in 2009.

70,000: Total number of US troops in Afghanistan
318: Number of US troops killed in Afghanistan in 2009

Obviously, a police officer is 28.8 times less likely to be “killed” in the line of duty than a soldier is to be killed while stationed in a combat zone. Furthermore, the reason that I put quotes around the term “killed” is that barely half the police “killed” were, in fact, purposefully killed by anyone. The 126 number includes heart attacks, car accidents, and even one entitled “accidental” which could be anything from slipping in the shower to autoerotica gone awry. The comparable number is actually 58, which means that the average soldier currently faces 62.7X more risk of death than does the average policeman.

I don’t think the “danger” argument is one that police would be wise to utilize in order to justify why they are paid so much more in salary and pension plans than America’s soldiers.

WND column

Pulling the Pension Plug

The Founding Fathers understood the inherent risks of democracy. This is why they did not establish a proper democracy in America, but rather a strictly limited form of representative democracy in a republican structure. They did this in fear of the tyranny of the majority and to place a limit upon the momentary passions of the general public.

However, it has become clear that limited representative democracy has evils of its own that are arguably more pernicious than the vagaries of unlimited democracy. As American history demonstrates, representative democracy rapidly devolves into an system where various interest groups band together and form a kleptocracy wherein the government is little more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from the people to the interest groups.

The poor will always be with you

In which the New York Times’s best liberal writer flirts with the idea of reviving Western imperialism after belatedly discovering that not everyone is inclined to behave like an upper middle class liberal New Yorker:

Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found that the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.

Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.

Naturally, Kristof thinks the idea is to give – GIVE – women more control. How very white and neo-colonial of him to decide how Africans should live their lives. And, as PJ Tobia, who is not PJ O’Rourke, points out, they already have control, indeed, the African social system appears to be arranged so that women can keep their men happily occupied with doing nothing but drink while leaving them free to get the work done.

The best part about all of this is that these guys are able to sit around long enough to get drunk on a drink that has almost no alcohol content. For one thing, their wives know exactly where they are, whom they are with, and what they are doing, and don’t have a big problem with it. For another, as these men sit and drink, the village comes to them. Boys will make the rounds of each Chibuku bar, selling cigarettes. A village woman will arrive with pieces of meat on a skewer or hardboiled eggs with little baggies of salt and hot-pepper flakes on the side. Down the street someone may be roasting corn or making maize fritters. The whole community does their part so the drinking can continue uninterrupted.

In short, the drinkers of Africa have it made. Sure, they have no healthcare, the literacy rate is among the lowest in the world, and December through March is the “famine season,” but they can drink and hang with their friends pretty much all day. Also, the word “nag” doesn’t even exist in any of the more than two-dozen languages spoken in the region.

What rural African regions lack in material wealth, infrastructure, and modern conveniences, they more than make up for in drunken leisure time.

When you put it that way, it’s clear there are worse ways to spend your life. Raise your carton of Chibuku and drink to great grass hut matriarchy!

No sympathy

Given the present anti-father legal regime, why would any man feel any pity whatsoever for this clueless British mother who signed custody of her son away to her dead husband’s relatives?

Rebecca Jones signed legal papers written in Arabic and witnessed by her dead husband’s family – believing they were about an inheritance for her boy Adam. But instead the documents gave full custody to 77-year-old Mariam Al Madhaiki – who immediately swept the frightened child away from Rebecca and enrolled him in an Islamic school in Qatar. Last week, to Rebecca’s dismay, Sharia judges in the Middle East state THREW OUT her appeal to win him back after a seven-month battle – despite Adam sobbing in court: “I want my mother.”

The judges ruled she can see her son twice a week for just FOUR HOURS, supervised by cops in a room. Now the 43-year-old mum from Sheffield is going to the High Court to try to get justice over what she calls a “kidnap”.

“I was tricked into it. This is completely against the rights of my child and me as his mother,” she said.

So she lost custody of her son. Boo freaking hoo. Precisely how is that any worse than what happens every single day to men who are divorced by their wives, robbed of their children, and stripped of their assets? At least she had the option to NOT sign a contract she couldn’t read in a foreign country and she still gets to see him every week. Moreover, she doesn’t have to foot the bill for his expenses or the lifestyle of her in-laws either.

Notice the tone of the article. Newspapers don’t even bother to report on men losing their children because it happens so often and it is something that many journalists outright support. But if a mother loses custody of her child, then naturally it must be grounds for an international incident.

To be honest, I have zero sympathy for any Western woman who is foolish enough to get romantically involved with an Arab man these days regardless of how the relationship eventually implodes. The difference between Western and Middle Eastern legal and marital norms have been well known for at least two decades now, so there’s no excuse for claiming one didn’t know about them. And of course they all act charmingly modernized at first, it’s not as if anyone was ever likely to get a date riding around on a camel shrieking “death to the infidel!”

Contra the bricklayers

In which I respond to an erroneous assumption made by a commenter on John Scalzi’s blog:

I think Libertarians are the most idealistic people in the world. They really do believe that left to their own devices people will do the right thing. Look at Alan Greenspan and his shock that large corporations didn’t act in their investors’ best interests.

This is a wildly incorrect notion of libertarianism and is almost precisely backwards. It is because libertarians understand that people are capable of committing great acts of evil, especially the sort of people who desire power over others, that they wish to prevent government from interfering in people’s lives to the greatest extent possible. We libertarians most certainly do NOT believe that people will do the right thing if left to their own devices, rather, we believe that since most people will do the wrong thing if given power over others, it is in the interests of everyone to make sure that the force multiplier offered by government to those people is as small as possible.

As for Alan Greenspan, it is important to understand the difference between the supposedly innnocent, self-servingly revisionist Greenspan and the coldly calculating servant of Wall Street. There was absolutely nothing libertarian about Greenspan’s actions; it wasn’t as if he eliminated all of the many government regulations that create and govern corporations as well as forcing them to sell their stock on certain specific private exchanges rather than freely on the Internet.

As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was positive in that it overturned government enforcement of segregation, which was a clear violation of the Constitutional right of free association. And it was a negative in that it also violated the individual’s Constitutional right to free association.

It is profoundly stupid to claim that a private individual does not have the right to refuse to serve someone on the basis of race, sex, or any other criteria he happens to choose, given the right of free association. (Yes, I am aware that the Supreme Court has declared otherwise, that still doesn’t change the perfectly clear text of the Constitution.) Once you eliminate that right, you have transformed the individual into a legal serf with no control over his own services as there is no bright line on further directives from the government except the momentary whims of the responsible agents.

Libertarians are those few who understand that the problem with the brick is not the brick itself, but that it is another brick in the wall.

I should note that it is also profoundly stupid, in many cases, for business owners to exercise their right to free association on the basis of superficial factors. If I manufacture computers and refuse to sell to Asians, I am voluntarily abandoning a huge international market. If I own a bar in Detroit and refuse to serve blacks, I am not likely to remain in business very long. These things tend to sort themselves out over time courtesy of the inexorable market forces. On the other hand, in some cases, it is necessary for other businesses owners to exercise their free association right on a superficial basis if they are to remain in business. The successful fitness franchise, Curves, is built upon little more than anti-male discrimination whereas the traditional men’s social clubs are all but extinct because their customers were not interested in patronizing the government-dictated mixed-sex format.

Everyone discriminates/exercises their right to free association, the only question is where one happens to draw the line. The primary problem with permitting the government to draw the line for everyone is that the government is a dynamic entity. Those who cheer government involvement in telling business owners they cannot discriminate against homosexuals are unlikely to be happy about a government telling business owners they must discriminate against them. But once you have permitted the camel’s nose into the tent, you have very little control over which part of the tent it will eventually choose to defecate.

Best to keep the damn camel outside where it belongs!

Mailvox: the whitewashing of Lincoln

It’s kind of sad when Electric Six presents a more accurate view of Abraham Lincoln than most mainstream historians. AJ wishes to better understand why:

My father recommended to me a book called “The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War” by Thomas DiLorenzo. I’m not sure if you’ve read it or heard of it – I’m guessing that you have – but this book’s main focus is Lincoln’s rape of the Constitution, and the downfall of state sovereignty. Checking out the sources DiLorenzo used – as amateur as I may be in that area – they all look legit.

I’ve never really been a Lincoln fan in the first place, but this book made me sick to my stomach. Other books I have read and sources I have looked at, among them Murray Rothbard’s “Just War”, corroborate all of the evidence that Lincoln was a liar, power hungry, and a sociopath of the highest order. His Emancipation Proclamation was designed to provoke slave uprisings in states where the North did not have control, knowing full well that only women and children remained in those areas – yet it is hailed and revered as one of the greatest and most moving speeches ever given by a president. He has his face on Mount Rushmore, on our currency, a memorial in DC, and his own day in February – the same man who suspended the writ of habeas corpus, muzzled the press when it spoke out against him, imprisoned thousands of NORTHERNERS for political dissent (re: clamoring for peaceful secession) and is described as a dictator by even his most ardent of historians (though a benevolent one, they insist).

If people knew the truth about Lincoln – specifically the blacks who hold him up as the Great Emancipator, despite his desire to ship them all out to Africa and/or South America to preserve the “purity” of America – life in America would be drastically changed. And if they saw the similarities between the goings on before the War of Northern Aggression and what’s going on now, they might see some disquieting parallels. The only difference is that our current president doesn’t have to muzzle the media – they’re his already. The least of his crimes were against civil liberties, and the worst was starting the bloodiest war on American soil for the sole reason of destroying state sovereignty. Dishonesty in science and archaeology usually just annoys me, but I consider it par for the course. The same goes for most historians, but this is just too great to ignore. This makes me angry, and it should make everyone else angry, too, if they weren’t so historically ignorant.

I’m sure you know all of this already, and have probably written about it before, but my question is this: WHY have historians ignored Lincoln’s obvious agenda and wickedness? Why have they painted him in such a false light? I understand this isn’t anything new for history writing, but all of the evidence is there. I understand dishonesty in certain arenas, but against a corrupt politician? Historians usually revel in that sort of thing. Why does Lincoln get a free pass?

AJ answered her own question when she said “If people knew the truth about Lincoln… life in America would be drastically changed.” Lincoln is a secular saint for the same reason that the Roman Senate deified Octavian Augustus – he was the first emperor of Imperial America. Lincoln was, without a doubt, the worst president the united States of America because he murdered what had been a free and voluntary republican confederation in the name of a Federal Union imposed by violence.

Naturally, the would-be totalitarians of today revere him. But every freedom-loving American, black or white, should mark the end of the Republic by him. Sic semper tyrannis.

Rookie mistake

Rand Paul hasn’t quite figured out the art of dealing with critics looking for gotchas:

Rand Paul is coming under attack for things he said about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed race discrimination in privately owned restaurants and hotels.

First of all, I would absolutely voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is an egregious violation against property rights as well as the Constitutional Right of Free Association. That being said, it is remarkably stupid for any politician, of any party, to comment upon what he would or would not have done had he been voting on a bill 46 years ago.

The correct response would have been to say: “Rachel, I have no more intention of speculating about how I would have voted on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than I have of speculating how I would have voted on the Declaration of War against Spain of 1898 or the Proclamation of Imperial Divinity of 14 AD. I was not a Senator in either Washington DC or Rome at the time of those previous votes, and while hypothetical speculation is always interesting, it’s simply not relevant to a Kentucky Senate campaign in 2010.”

Of course, if she pressed further, I would answer the question as if she had asked about the Augustan godhood. “Well, Rachel, there’s no question that Octavian accomplished great things and reunified the empire after it was riven by a series of failed triumvirates and the subsequent civil wars, but I’m not sure it actually required the mind of a deity to outthink Marc Antony.” If your interlocutor is being silly, the idea is to respond in a way that highlights the inherent silliness of his approach, not be dragged down into the mire of the ridiculous.

Mailvox: where is the love?

KC is concerned about my willingness to express my opinion about others’ capacity for applied intelligence:

Vox, I enjoy reading your blog a lot of the time: you provide interesting stories and insight into them, and I appreciate your faith. However, might I suggest that you refrain from labeling “most people regardless of what they believe” inane/idiots? It seems very judgmental of you and makes me question your fundamental attitude towards humanity or what God is capable of doing in/through the least of us. It often seems as though you place more worth in the intelligence of your fellow man than their fundamental worth in God.

An impoverished farmer in Korea that has received no education and is, by all secular account, worthless intellectually could have MUCH more to teach me about the Kingdom of God due to his close relationship with God than the most highly acclaimed theological intellectuals.

Acts 13When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. 14But since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say.

All I am saying is that Jesus “cherished” the unlovely and unintelligent because they were human. You might not have MEANT that uneducated/unintelligent believers are to be “cherished” less in an absolute sense, as I know you are speaking to an intellectual wanting to learn intelligent Christian arguments. However the basis of faith and love of God is not primarily supposed to come from our ability to grasp high falutin arguments but a fundamental heart change and love of God and neighbor. Valuing intellectualism above this makes it an idol as abhorrant as the golden calf. 1st and 2nd commandments, man.

I know, and you know, you’re a lot more intelligent than many people in a lot of ways however that really means nothing in God’s eyes, as he has given us all everything we have. What we will be judged on is our hearts, and our hearts are only changed when we willingly submit ourselves to his desire for us, greatest of which is for us to LOVE. I don’t know you and don’t want to presume to have more insight into your attitude than I do. However, you – I think you know this – very often do not present yourself as loving and hurting for humanity (actually I seem to recall you boasting about your arrogance!), but as an annoyed and in some instances even amused observer at the shortcomings, failings, and sin of your fellow man. For instance, you more quickly laugh at the deeply delusional feminist who is in confusion about how her former choices have led to her current pain than show compassion. Obviously her choices were/are bad and she is not accurately perceiving reality but should we LAUGH AT her? Is that would Jesus would do? Is that the attitude God wants you to cultivate in yourself and share with others? Or should you feel deep compassion for the pain her sins have caused her and the state of the secular world that is so deeply influencing people to make decisions that will lead them to eternal condemnation?

Anyway, I hope that you will receive this with an open heart and not attack me if you do respond to me. I don’t know if anyone else has shared this with you but it from what I have observed, it is area in your life that is not congruent with the way Christ would have you think and behave. We are not to cultivate an attitude of mocking, dismissing, and writing off those immersed in this fallen world, but to continually beseech God for a heart of compassion and desire to see them brought to the Light. Have you meditated at all on 1Corinthians 13?

I think KC is operating under a severe misapprehension with regards to my opinion of intelligence. In my opinion, it is no more judgmental to declare that someone is “an idiot” or “inane” than to declare that he is “short” or “brown-eyed” or “Asian”. It’s just an observable fact, based on the individual’s behavior which indicates either a lack of cognitive capacity or a disinclination to use one’s cognitive capacity in a rational manner. While one can argue over the legitimacy of the application of the observation, once the matter has been demonstrated to a reasonable degree, there is no reason beyond the vagaries of etiquette to shy away from applying the correct label to an individual. And Internet etiquette is a very different thing than RL etiquette.

I would be the very last one to argue that God cherishes the unintelligent. Compared to Him, we are all complete idiots and yet He loves some of us anyhow. [Idiots and the Scripturally ignorant will please submit their erroneous arguments about God loving everyone equally here.] And given that I believe an impoverished, uneducated North Korean farmer is more useful and possesses more intrinsic human value than a Goldman Sachs investment banker with an Ivy League diploma, I don’t find it hard to imagine that God might find genuine value in him as well. But love and an accurate summation of cognitive use and capacity are simply two different things. I think it would correct to chastise me if I was walking around and attempting to hurt people by telling them how idiotic they are without any provocation, but that’s simply not the case here.

The statistical fact of the matter is that most people, the overwhelming majority, are functionally sub-normal. Since 50% of the population possesses IQs below 100 and a majority of the population with IQs above 100 observably spend absolutely no time thinking about anything, one can only conclude that most people are idiots regardless of one’s individual vantage point. And we’re all functional idiots from time to time; I could certainly fill weeks of blog posts about my own lapses into functional idiocy.

But getting back to KC’s primary point, I see no love in indulging the idiocy of others and none in enabling idiotic behavior either. I believe the Biblical model is to speak the truth, to provide a clear warning of consequences, and then to let those who willfully choose or are for one reason or another doomed to idiocy experience the full and unmitigated consequences of their actions.

As for any subsequent pointing and laughing, well, KC has probably got a relevant point there. Mea maxima culpa. I shall in the future endeavor to focus solely upon the surgical dissections and leave any amused appreciation of the artistry to others.

Wake up and smell the depression

Some silly and formerly-rich women clearly do not understand the dynamic nature of investments:

Michelle Young was supposed to face her estranged husband Scot in the High Court this week, but has had to postpone the hearing while she finds further funding. For the last three years, the couple has been embroiled in a bitter fight over his alleged multi-million pound fortune which she says he is hiding and he claims he no longer exists.

Last December, Mr Young was ordered by the court to pay his wife £27,500 a month pending their divorce settlement but he has since been declared bankrupt. At their last court appearance, Mrs Young said she was down to her last £13,000 of savings and owes £660,000 in unpaid legal fees.

The guy has been declared bankrupt. The money is gone. Clearly his creditors understand this, so what sort of cretin finds it hard to grasp the concept? You don’t make £400 million without leverage, so it’s not at all hard to figure out where the money went. Profit by the leverage, die by the margin call.