Monthly Archives: November 2006

Let’s Make Them Prove It

You’ve heard of The Free State Project ?

Well, someone else is starting up The Free Lunch Project.

Are you frustrated at the loss of a free-ride and sense of entitlement in America, while the growth of government involvement and distribution of wealth stalls? Do you want to live in communities where your right to three meals a day and universal healthcare are respected? Do you want others to fund welfare by forcing them to redistribute, by force if necessary, the earnings they have worked hard for? Are you looking for freedom without responsibility?
If you answered “yes” to these questions, then the Free Lunch Project has a solution for you.

Heh.

Right now, they’re taking nominations for the state they’ll all move to and turn into a socialist paradise, and Jay Tea at Wizbang is nominating his home state neighboring state of Massachusetts.

I am personally endorsing Massachusetts, for the following reasons:

  1. It’s a smaller state, both geographically and population-wise, so it’ll be easier to influence.
  2. It’s been losing population since the last census, so a sudden influx of 20,000 newcomers could have a tremendous affect in elections.
  3. With Democrats now having an absolute lock on both Houses of the legislature, the governorship, all ten House seats, and both Senate seats, it’s well on its way already. The “Massachusetts Republican” is just shy of making the endangered-species list.
  4. It’s right next door to me, so I can nuke up some popcorn and enjoy the show.
  5. It has New England winters, so their theories will be put to a much harsher environmental test than California will (excluding earthquakes, brush fires, mudslides, and other far less predictable natural hazards).

The only question is, if this happens in The Bay State, how will we be able to tell the difference ?

How One Man’s Bad Ideas Can Affect A Nation

Today’s Washington Post has a profile on the man credited with being the father of the modern anti-immigration movement, and a sad story of how one man can help create a movement that destroys freedom:

PETOSKEY, Mich. — Let’s just get this out of the way. John Tanton, mastermind of the modern-day movement to curb immigration, is a tree-hugger. Literally. He has a favorite pair of ash trees “this big around,” he says, spreading his arms wide. He likes to visit them every so often in the forest just north of here, see how they’re doing.

He worries about them, too, whether — or when — the invaders, the metallic green emerald ash borers, will overwhelm them, wipe one of the dominant native tree species off the North American continent. To think that this little bug could do such a thing, he says, “it’s just hard to take.”

But it’s not just environmentalism that impacts Mr. Tanton’s thoughts:

Three decades after he began agitating about it, immigration has become a hot-button issue — the House passed a $6 billion bill to build a fence along the Mexican border, and several local governments have passed measures to crack down on illegal immigrants already here. But the courts have struck down several of these.

Tanton worries — how will the United States survive the “invasion” of people from Central and Latin America, not to mention China and Korea? More than ever, he is convinced that as they continue to come — waves of legal and illegal “interlopers” — the environment, the culture and the economy of the country will irreparably erode.

“We have 19 cities now on the globe with more than 10 million people in them,” he says. “Only one of them [Tokyo] is in the First World. So all the rest of them have got poor water supplies, poor sewage, poor public services.”

Okay, but how many of these cities are actually located in the United States. None of them, of course.

Interestingly enough, Tanton’s anti-immigrant beliefs are not of recent vintage, but stretch back to the anti-capitalist 60’s:

In 1964, while he was interning in a Denver hospital, his young wife, Mary Lou, provided family planning information to low-income women who had wanted two children but were leaving the maternity ward with their fifth or sixth. In this, Tanton saw a looming apocalypse, living evidence of the theory postulated in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, “The Population Bomb” — left unchecked, the world’s population would double every 35 years, occupying the remaining habitable open space and overrunning cities and towns.

This did not come to pass. But, Tanton says, the threat is still out there. “I’m anti-immigrant like a person on a diet is anti-food,” he insists. But the intake must be controlled. “You don’t wait till you’re at 390 million [people] and think you can deal with the problem.” His ideas became even more focused after he read the French novel “The Camp of the Saints,” a darkly prophetic allegory of a million destitute people fleeing Kolkata and landing in Europe, where they loot, rape and pillage.

Yes sir, but that was a novel. In reality, immigration, and the increased population of workers and contributors that comes with it, has been a net-plus for the United States.

You Can’t Possibly Be Smart Enough ……

In the “consumers are really dumb, which is why you need us bureaucrats to make decisions for you” category, we have this story. A company that manufactures a sausage known as Welsh Dragon sausage has to change the name of the sausage. Why?

…..trading standards’ officers warned manufacturers that they could face prosecution because it does not contain dragon.

The response of the manufacturer?

Jon Carthew, 45, who makes the sausages, said yesterday that he had not received any complaints about the absence of real dragon meat.

That’s right folks, you are incapable of realizing that the sausage is not made from a mythical creature. Remember to thank your government for spending your tax dollars wisely.

Welsh Dragons are manufactured by Black Mountain Smokery.

The Problem With No-Knock Raids

There have been several posts here this week about what can go wrong when police execute a so-called no-knock search warrant, or more generally when they shoot first and ask questions later. In Atlanta, in resulted in the death of a 92 year-old woman. And, in New York, the shoot-first-ask-questions-later philosophy resulted in the death of a 23 year-old father on the eve of his wedding.

If these were only isolated incidents, we could possibly place the blame on over eager police officers in a particular jurisdiction, or perhaps a police force that doesn’t train its officers well enough on the use of deadly force. As Randy Balko, who has been on top of this issue for a long time now, points out, though, these are just the most recent incidents among many, and points to this report of another shooting in Merced, California:

Mary Silva, a 68-year-old retiree, said deputies got the wrong house when they burst into her Winton Way apartment at 6:30 a.m. on the day of the raids.

Silva said she was sleeping when she heard loud banging at her front door and a voice calling “Open up!”

Before she could answer, Silva said, deputies broke through her front door and threw a smoke bomb onto her carpet. As Silva stood in her nightgown, about 10 officers surrounded her with weapons drawn, she said.

They shouted, “Where is he? Where is he?”

Silva told deputies she lives alone. She said they responded, “Shut up! Don’t move!”

The team was looking for 24-year-old Reginaldo Ramirez, who lives next door to Silva.

But the search warrant deputies gave Silva lists an entirely different address — not Silva’s house or the house next door. Silva said deputies gave her the search warrant several hours after the initial raid.

Pazin said deputies may have transposed numbers in the address on the warrant, but that law enforcement acted in good faith when they entered Silva’s house.

The police are blaming the suspect they were looking for, who allegedly used Silva’s house when he was arrested at some point in the past. But, as Balko, points out, that’s just evading responsibility:

Police, on the other hand, are accountable to us. The least we can demand of them is that they do the necessary legwork before barging into our homes. Parzin’s men failed the people they serve in that regard. They took the word of a criminal. They did no corroborating investigation to see that the address he listed was indeed where he lived, or to see if other, innocent people may live there. Not only that, but they then transposed the numbers on the search warrant. They erred. Big time. They ought to cop to it. That is precisely where the “finger of blame” ought to be pointed.

The problem is, I think, that no-knock raids make it easy for the police to evade that responsibility. The warrant says they can go into a particular house without announcing their presence, so they do it. The fact that they may not even have the right house apparently doesn’t even enter their mind.

If nothing else Silva is lucky she didn’t have a gun in the house or that she otherwise didn’t try to defend herself, or she would’ve ended up like the woman in Atlanta.
Related Posts:

More Police Shooting Justice
Another Police Shooting

Shooting Shows Need For Reform
Another Victim Of The Drug War

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