Affordable

 

I love that word, 'affordable'.  It reminds me of Steven Wright's remark (one-liner, really) that "everywhere is 'walking distance' if you have the time".

I was researching oceangoing catamarans for a short story I was writing, so YouTube naturally automatically subscribed me to The Catamaran Channel.  Isn't modern technology wonderful?  So, what do I find the next time I open YouTube?  A video for Silent Yachts' new e-55, an all-electric, solar-powered, 55-foot catamaran.  55 feet is absolutely 'oceangoing', and it's affordable!

But what does that mean, actually, 'affordable'?

In this case, it means €1.4M, or $1.6M.

Or, as Steven Wright would have said: "everything's affordable if you have the money".

 

Murder By Negligence

 

There is no such thing as an 'accidental discharge' of a firearm.  There are only intentional discharges and negligent discharges.

A St.Louis police officer was killed yesterday (Jan 24, 2019) when another police officer 'mishandled' his firearm.  The more correct phraseology is 'died as a result of a negligent discharge'.

There are rules* for the safe handling of firearms.  If you follow these rules, you will never accidentally kill someone:

1. Every gun is loaded.  "I didn't know the gun was loaded" can never be an excuse.
2. Never point a gun at anything you aren't ready to destroy.  Old Man Thompson, he of 'Thompson submachine gun' fame, considered it a firing offense for an employee to point a barrel blank at someone.  A barrel blank is a piece of pipe that will soon become part of a firearm, and most people would not consider it 'dangerous'.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you have decided to shoot.  If your finger is not on the trigger, most modern firearms will not fire.  If a modern firearm "just goes off", it was because somebody "just" had hir finger in the right place.
4. Know what is behind your target, because you will miss.  This seems so intuitive that it shouldn't even have to be said: nobody hits the bullseye with every shot, Hollywood special effects to the contrary notwithstanding.

One or both of the two other police officers who were on the scene when it happened violated at least three of these.  Where were they trained?  Who trained them?  Were they ever taught that their guns were not toys?  What sort of psych evaluation was done before giving them a badge?

Sadly, none of these questions matter, because this incident is not a one-off.  Cops regularly shoot other cops, innocent bystanders, the people they're supposed to be helping, and dogs — especially dogs.  The police, in fact, are beginning to look like the last people you want to call for help in any situation.  At the very least, these officers, having lethally demonstrated exactly how poorly trained they were and are, should be permanently disarmed.  If that means a felony conviction for negligent homicide, I'm okay with that.

It may, in fact, be time to disarm all police.  (What!!  Are you serious??)  Yes, I'm serious.  Today's police are not like the police of yesteryear.  Remember when they were called 'peace officers'?  That's so 20th-century!  Now they're 'law enforcement officers'.  Their charge is no longer 'keeping the peace' but rather 'enforcing the law'.  That's why your local PD has an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicle in their arsenal.  You don't need an MRAP to pour oil on troubled waters.

And their A-#1 top priority?  'Going home safely at the end of their shift.'  You may not make it home safely at the end of their shift, but you aren't their A-#1 priority.  Isn't it time for the people who pay the bill to become, once again, the beneficiaries of police work rather than its target?

 

* - These rules are generally attributed to Col. Jeff Cooper, but they can be derived from first principles by anyone with half a brain.

 

Civil Asset Forfeiture

 

You're driving along a busy highway when you notice a neatly-dressed young man apparently hitch-hiking.  Feeling that someone dressed as he is probably doesn't pose much of a threat — and you've got a pistol with you — you pull to the curb and offer him a ride.  Within a half-mile, a police car pulls you over, for what you can't imagine.  The police have been surveilling this young gentleman because he's a suspected unregistered pharmaceuticals distributor.  In the subsequent search, he is found to be in possession of large quantities of contraband.  You are both detained.  Your car is towed.

At arraignment, you explain that you were merely giving a ride to someone who seemed to need one.  The police report seems to corroborate your tale.  That, and the fact that you have no 'record' to speak of, leads the prosecutor to decline to prosecute you.  Your passenger gets the book thrown at him.

When you ask where you go to get your car and your pistol back, you learn that both have been seized as instruments involved in a crime.  "But all charges against me have been dropped! I didn't commit any crime!" you object.  Everyone nods knowingly, then they explain that the pistol was in a car that was used to transport a criminal, presumably to a place where he could continue to do criminal things.  You're free to go; your car and your pistol are staying.

This is how 'civil asset forfeiture' (CAF) works.  Originally, it was an additional penalty laid upon lawbreakers that their tools would be lost to them and, hopefully, make future crimes more difficult and thus less likely.  During the last 80 to 100 years, prosecutors discovered that there's gold in them thar hills.  The first sign of a new wave of 'prospecting' by DAs happened when men trolling for prostitutes in the seedier parts of town ran afoul of scantily-clad policewomen posing as hookers.  They would arrest the 'john' and seize the car.  Bonanza!  Nowadays, virtually anything serious that you're involved in — whether you're guilty or not — and this is the part most sane people find most incredible — is going to be accompanied by instant on-the-spot seizure of cars, cash, firearms, and even houses.  If it can be sold at auction, say good-bye to whatever it was.

Sure, you can get your stuff back, but in CAF cases, the state doesn't have to prove the item was connected to a crime — they collected it as part of an arrest or a search under reasonable suspicion — you have to prove that the item was not involved in a crime!  You have to get a lawyer, file a motion with the court, and contend against a system that has a large, taxpayer-funded budget for just such things.  You could spend $15,000 to get your $21,000 car back — if you win which, considering that the DA and the judge are both paid from the same budget, is not assured.  And if you win your car back, you'll still have to pay the storage charges, and that could be thousands more.

Something like that happened to Arlene Harjo of Albuquerque.  She let her son take the family car to the gym.  He went to a party instead.  There was alcohol.  He had some and got arrested on his way home.  APD seized the car.  It took her two years, but this last July, a federal appeals court judge ruled that Albuquerque's 'law' that allowed civil asset forfeiture without a conviction was unconstitutional.  That's two: New Mexico and North Carolina.  In the other 48 states, you can still lose your stuff to the system even though you aren't charged with, much less convicted of, anything criminal.

Now, you may think that CAF is a minor problem, and you might think so because you never hear about such things on the 6-o'clock news.  Think again.  Over the last dozen years or so, federal and state forfeitures amounted to more than the total for all burglaries nationwide.  Yes, the cops are a bigger problem than the robbers.

I urge you not to believe any of this, but rather to do your own research and discover what a big liar I am — heh heh heh.

 

The Left Is Dead; So Is The Right

 

Something brought up the topic of Kelo v New London on FaceBook the other day and I responded by copying in my essay from 2005, The Old Order Changeth, that I wrote as part of my continuing series for Tampa Bay Mensa's newsletter, The Sounding.  In response, JohnC, my old schoolmate and debate opponent, came back with:

Don't particularly like the call, but all ownership is a social construct, and if you're gonna play the game, you have to bow to the refs' call.

This casual observation is laced with significance.  It encapsulates the entire Weltanschauung of what we think of as 'the collectivists'.  Remember Obama's remark that 'You didn't build this'?  It's right there in that quoted passage: all ownership is a social construct.

While it sounds innocuous enough, there are some unpleasant corollaries to it.  For one, all that income you 'made' last year?  It's not yours.  It was never yours, and you should be absolutely blissful that 'society' allows you to keep as much of it as it does.  Your house, as Suzette Kelo discovered, isn't your house.  Society merely allows you to live there as long as it pleases your community.  Your so-called 'life' also is not 'yours'.  It's only yours for so long as society judges that its continuance benefits society.  This is the rationale under which totalitarian regimes eliminate ethnic groups like Jews, Armenians, or Kulaks: they are no longer beneficial to 'society'.

Libertarians, whether big-L or small-L, will assert that 'I own myself', and from that follows the entirety of the libertarian ethos, prime among which is that I own my life and the results of what I do with that life, whether it's money, or property, or fame, or a felony conviction for armed robbery.  Because I own myself and you own yourself, it follows that I cannot own you, nor you me, and that is the big difference between individualists and collectivists.  It may be the only difference, although 'only' in this context covers a lot of ground.

Of course, the thrust of The Old Order Changeth was that the old left-right paradigm is obsolete, and that the only reasonable way to categorize political views these days is individualist-vs-collectivist.  That, unfortunately, means that John and I will never see eye-to-eye on almost anything political or societal, and we might as well just face the fact that we will each be forever a thorn in the other's side.

It also means that libertarian arguments seem to collectivists exactly as insane as collectivist arguments seem to us.  We are well and truly speaking a foreign language to the other, and while The Golden Rule translates understandably for libertarians, it's likely just gibberish to collectivists.

If you comfort yourself with the thought that our system of government makes it possible for two such incompatible philosophies to coexist side-by-side, I have bad news for you.  While the libertarian live-and-let-live style can tolerate collectivists, the reverse is not true, and we can see the dawning realization of that problem manifested in the vitriolic reaction of the collectivists (generally what we used to think of as 'Democrats') against the not-quite-as-collectivists (generally what we used to think of as 'Republicans').  Meanwhile, the real individualists (generally what we think of as 'libertarians') stand on the sidelines and wonder when this civil war is going to engulf us all.  (If the libertarians ever gain a foothold in government, we're going to catch hell from both of those factions.)

Oh, you think I have mischaracterized Republicans as semi-collectivists?  It's the GOP that wants to ban marijuana and similar substances because you peasants aren't smart enough to figure out that that stuff is bad for you.  While they are friendlier to gun rights than their Democratic counterparts, few of them (in Congress, at any rate) have much of a problem with those 'reasonable restrictions' that seem quite unreasonable to many of their constituents.  And that 'Constitution' thingy?  George W Bush once called it 'just a god-damn piece of paper', and he got elected President twice!  Didn't The Donald just say, in respect of so-called 'red flag laws': "Take the guns first; due process later"?  If the GOP were really as big a bunch of individualists as some people claim, Trump would have been impeached for that!  He wasn't, therefore they aren't.

No, a real individualist would be staunchly upholding the Constitution's seriously-individualistic fundamentals: primarily, a small, tightly circumscribed federal government that rarely makes its presence felt in your town, your county, or your state.  Republican voters may think of themselves as individualists, but they don't vote that way...  enough.

And that's why we should all be preparing for Civil War II.