The Right Path to School Safety

 

The dust has largely settled from the massacre in Uvalde, TX, and facts — what few we have gotten — can now be analyzed with the clarity of 20/20 hindsight.

Once again, local police who should have been able to confront a maniacal killer chose, instead, to 'play it safe' and wait until the shooting had died down before putting their own lives in danger.  In the end, it was actually a Border Patrol officer who engaged the shooter and ended the standoff.  Reliance on paid, trained professionals has once again proved to be the wrong path to school safety.

Some have suggested that combat veterans, having been in high-stress situations analogous to school shootings, ought be hired as school security guards.  The drawbacks to this should be obvious:  a fair few of the candidates may already suffer from PTSD, and might be more of a danger than a help and, as we have seen before, even paid, trained professionals are often "as useless as tits on a bull".

Allow me to offer a modest proposal:  While not all teachers will be able to act as first responders, to suggest that no teachers will be both willing and able to do so is, frankly, not borne out by the experience of many school districts across the country.  Therefore, I suggest that school districts be mandated to offer to all willing and qualified teachers and staff a "training and readiness stipend" not less than 6% of the employee's annual compensation, in exchange for which the employees will be expected to carry their own firearm (concealed) during their work day.  Whatever training the district deems necessary will be provided by the district at no cost to the employee.

It is clear that school shootings only occur in schools and districts where teachers and staff are prohibited from being armed in their own defense.  There are no countervailing examples.  There have been no school shootings at schools in districts where teachers and/or staff are permitted to be armed during their work day.  The solution to school shootings thus suggests itself:  no districts may be permitted to disallow self-defense by its teachers or staff.

We should expect that "school shootings" will become the stuff of legend, and the few that do still occur never rise to the level of "mass shooting" (4 or more dead per incident).  Anyone who objects to this plan has the obligation to put forward an alternative that, even if only theoretically, works.  Failing that, zip your lip.

 

Uvalde, TX

 

Well, it's happened again.  A mentally-deranged teenager has shot up another school, this time an elementary school in Uvalde, TX.  There seem to have been several warning signs that were handled, not surprisingly, inadequately by the authorities, nineteen 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-graders are dead along with two of their teachers and the shooter who was killed by a Border Patrol officer.  Thoughts and prayers, &c.

Texas, it turns out, allows school districts the option of letting their teachers be armed on the job.  This school district chose not to allow their teachers to be armed.  As a result, the 18-year-old shooter had no opposition after barricading himself in a classroom full of potential victims.

How long are we going to put up with this?  How long are we going to put up with ivory tower academics who are more concerned with the negative P.R. associated with teachers who are ready and willing to defend themselves and their charges?  How long are we going to be bullied by a gun-phobic bloc of teachers who threaten to quit and make a scene if any of their colleagues are permitted to pack heat in their classrooms?

How many dead children are we willing to put up with until we implement a real solution?

 

What Hath Roe Wrought?

 

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case Roe v Wade centered around the topic of abortion.  Up to that point, some states allowed it, others prohibited it, and still others regulated it.  The 7-2 decision in Roe was based on an implied right to privacy originating in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  The effect of that decision was that the law on abortion became uniform throughout the 50 states: permitted absolutely in the first trimester, regulated in the second, and prohibited in the third.

When Justice Lewis Powell retired from the court in 1987, President Reagan nominated Robert Bork to replace him.  This was the first of the contentious Supreme Court nominations, so ferocious that it spawned a new verb, to bork (v. tr.), defined as

"To defame or vilify (a person) systematically, esp. in the mass media, usually to prevent his or her appointment to public office; to obstruct or thwart (a person) in this way." 

The attacks on Bork were primarily based on his response to a question regarding Roe v Wade, specifically that he thought the Supreme Court should not have opined on the topic since it was clearly a matter of state jurisdiction (that is, the way it was prior to Roe).  Bork's nomination hearings set the pattern for all subsequent Supreme Court nominations, the most recent being those for Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Roe has generated intense controversy over the decades since 1973, virtually none of it related to the notion of "federal legislative authority".

Until now.

Comes now before the court Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that addresses a law in Mississippi banning abortion after 15 weeks (that Roe presumably permits).  JWHO sued because this was a contraction from the previous limit of 24 weeks.  A firestorm has erupted over the leak of a draft decision in the case that, were it the majority decision, would overturn both Roe and Planned Parenthood v Casey and return the entire issue into the hands of state legislatures as it was prior to Roe.

Article I section 8 of the Constitution begins: "Congress shall have power to..." and goes on to list 17 areas of concern that Congress shall have power to legislate in.  There is not a single one of those 17 that can be construed as providing federal jurisdiction over abortion or the states' methods of addressing that issue.

Bork was right, but Bork was an originalist.  He also, unlike too many Americans, too many American judges, and too many American Congressmen, understood the Constitution.

For reasons that are not at all obvious, we apparently now have a Supreme Court that is as smart as Robert Bork.

 

The Biggest Mistake

 

When the USSR, the Soviet Union, went out of business on Christmas Day 1991, President George H. W. Bush saw it merely as the United States having one fewer competitor.  It never occurred to him that a former competitor ought to become a valued trading partner.

Of all the mistakes that mistake-prone President ever made, that was the biggest.

A truly forward-looking leader would have immediately sent hordes of diplomats winging toward Moscow with instructions to kiss babies and hand out lollipops.  Bush didn't do that.  He congratulated himself on being the last man standing and let the opportunity pass to make friends with a country that was still a superpower despite having shrunk its territorial borders.

Opportunity, they say, only knocks once.  When it did, Bush the elder was busy.

 

I'm Tired Of Hearing About Russia And Ukraine

 

It's awful that Russia invaded Ukraine.  That's the end of that story.  Ukraine has no strategic value to the United States, and we are five times as far away from Ukraine as is Germany.  If Russia invading Ukraine is a serious political problem, it's five times as much of a problem for Germany as it is for us.  Before we get involved in another European Pissing Contest Among Cousins (see WW-I), I want to see several European countries get involved first.  Poland has already said "Thanks, we'll pass".

As punishment for their dastardly deeds, the U.S. is imposing sanctions on Russia, cutting them off from the international banking system.  Of course, the power elite in Russia, the political leaders and the oligarchs, are largely unaffected by the sanctions.  It's The Man In The Street who is most affected.  Idiot Americans think we're doing the Lord's work by bashing Russia.  What we're actually doing is confirming in the minds of ordinary Russians that we're a bunch of ignorant bullies.  That's largely true, but we don't have to confirm it daily, do we?

Meanwhile, the mostly-made-up conflict with Russia provides the perfect villain upon which our incompetent administration can blame the high price of gasoline.  Forget the fact that Biden's first official act as President was to kill the KeystoneXL pipeline.  Forget the fact that Biden's second official act as President was to ban fracking.  None of those had anything to do with the price of motor fuel.  How odd, then, that this week for the first time ever, we paid more than $4 per gallon for gasoline; $4.249 to be precise, and that's with a 5¢/gallon discount, so $4.299 for almost everybody else.  Energy independence?  Who needs that?

Almost everyone is now aware that inflation has infected the economy, but being economic illiterates, few understand why inflation has infected the economy.  Anyone even moderately conversant with the Austrian School of Economics knows the answer.  Since the Trump Presidency, the Fed has been issuing letters of credit to the U.S. Treasury, and the U.S. Mint has been printing greenbacks... $8Trillion worth.  80% of all the dollars in circulation have been printed... new... within the last two years.  The only surprise is that inflation has only hit a 40-year high and not a 90-year high (to account for the Great Depression.

Back in 2016, I predicted an oncoming economic crash, and I was very surprised that it didn't happen.  I predicted it in 2012, too.  Perhaps I was too much of a pessimist back then, but I have not seen anything that makes me feel optimistic about our country's future path.  My (Republican) Congressman, Gus Bilirakis (FL-12), gleefully reported today that he helped spend another trillion — for the children and for the troops!  And to reward them for all their good work, the 'emergency spending bill' also included a raise for members of Congress!

Really, as long as the bulk of voters insist on sending to Washington politicians who see their job as 'spending money as fast as possible' there's no way we're going to escape runaway inflation.

Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

 

Fungible Commodities

 

There's this delusion making the rounds that buying Venezuelan oil is better than buying Russian oil.  The only people holding this delusion are those who fundamentally misunderstand economics.  In America, alas, that's 'nearly everybody'.

The notion of a 'fungible commodity' is that product from location A is largely replaceable by similar product from location B.  Let's use 'oil' as the base product for the sake of discussion — although the identical analysis is applicable to almost everything that fits within the ambit of 'commodity': diamonds, wheat, beef, silver, lumber, helium...

If we decide that we don't want to buy oil from place A, what happens?  We have created a local reduction in demand for A-oil.  This will cause the price to drop momentarily and other oil buyers will be drawn to it.  If those other oil buyers move away from B-oil and replace it with the now cheaper A-oil, this will cause the price of A-oil to rise as the price of B-oil drops.  We then swoop in to buy the now-available B-oil, driving its price back to equilibrium.  Everything is the same because the supply of oil (whether A- or B-) is the same, and the demand is the same.  Executing a preference for a fungible commodity from one place causes an automatic rebalancing of other people's preferences for a different place.

What causes the price of a commodity to change is imbalance in supply and demand.  If location A curtails the supply of oil but demand stays constant, the equilibrium price will rise.  If you're wondering why gasoline is suddenly getting more expensive, it's because supply has been reduced but demand has not.  The reduction in supply began when the U.S. government began making it harder for American refiners to obtain oil — by closing pipelines, by restricting certain production methods (e.g.: fracking), and other supply-chain-related causes.  President Biden has asked Saudi Arabia to pump more oil to backfill for the oil that U.S.-based pumps are no longer producing, and SA has declined because high prices are, to them, a good thing.  Now, Biden is trying to make a deal with Venezuela to buy their oil, but this, even if successful, won't change the equilibrium point.  Other oil buyers will simply get theirs from Russia.  The supply will still be low (and the price high) because we're no longer pumping.

There is a second cause for the high price of oil — the higher price for everything, actually — and that's 'inflation'.  We're seeing the same syndrome with inflation that we're seeing with oil: we're printing dollars that aren't backed by anything.  In effect, the supply of dollars is going up but the wealth that dollars putatively represent isn't rising at the same rate.  The value of each new dollar is zero, but paper money is a fungible commodity: you can't tell one dollar from another, so the average value of any given dollar is reduced until the total of all the dollars in circulation balances with the available product that they can be used to purchase.

This is what happens when you let people run your economy who don't actually know how to run an economy.

And here's the really bad news: nobody knows how to run an economy.  Only the economy can run the economy.

 

U.S. vs Guy Reffitt

 

(CNN) — The first trial for a January 6 US Capitol attack defendant won't have any members of the public, media or even the wife of the defendant in the courtroom to witness much of the proceedings, a federal judge decided on Monday.

Judge Dabney Friedrich decided not to allow any members of the public to witness the evidence presentation in person at the historic trial that's expected to last more than a week.  A few are being allowed to watch jury selection, which began Monday, and opening statements.
...
Friedrich cited space concerns due to stringent coronavirus protocols at the federal courthouse in Washington, DC, designed to ensure that jurors and witnesses at trials are spread out from one another.

Amendment 6

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

IANAL, but the text of the 6th amendment seems pretty plain to me:

• speedy and public trial — Refitt has been in the pokey nearly a year so 'speedy' this isn't, and it isn't going to be 'public', either, if the public won't be permitted to even see the 'evidence'.
• impartial jury — that hasn't happened in a federal court in well over a half-century.
• if the U.S. federal government's Judicial branch can't provide an appropriate venue for a trial, one that comports with the requirements of the Constitution, how is that an excuse for ignoring those Constitutional requirements?

It almost goes without saying that the defendant will not be permitted 'discovery' of the estimated 14,000 hours of video of the so-called insurrection.  These flaws alone are enough to ensure any conviction is overturned on appeal by anything like a fair court.

Then there's this: if such blatant injustice turns out to be the trigger for civil war, will Judge Dabney Friedrich object when his trial is likewise held in secret?  The Golden Rule tells us that how you treat others is how you, yourself, wish to be treated, so the judge can't have any objection to that, could he?

Will a Republican House and a Republican Senate, if that's the outcome of the 2022 election, have the intestinal fortitude to impeach and convict jurists like Friedrich, ensuring they never service (pun intended) the American people ever again?  Don't bet on it.