All e-mail submissions and comments are subject to publication or parody at the sole discretion of the authors of this site, unless prior arrangements have been made.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger. -- Mark Twain
Essays
Saturday, April 12, 2008
The Broken Window fallacy
I was just watching Neil Cavuto (well, listening, since I was facing the other way), and heard some moron advocate the economic fallacy that “creative destruction is good for the economy”.
The idea is an odd one, and easily disproven, even though it is a popular fallacy.
The scenario is this: a shop keeper is open for business when some young ruffian comes along and tosses a brick through the front window of his shop, shattering it. People come along to see the damage and start contemplating that the broken window is actually a good thing, because the shopkeeper will now have to hire a glazier to replace the window, and the glazier therefore gets business he might not have otherwise gotten. The glazier will then be able to spend that additional income on things he needs, causing additional ripples throughout the economic cycle, and that must therefore be a good thing for the economy as a whole.
Therefore, destruction is a good thing for the economy.
One problem.
The shopkeeper, who had been slowly accumulating a small sum of money he had wanted to spend on (say) a new suit, must now perforce spend those accumulated funds on a new window instead of the new suit he had wanted. So instead of having a window and a new suit, he is forced to be happy with just having the window. And while his money would go to the glazier, causing that ripple, it is now not going to go to the tailor, who would have made the new suit, and then spent that income in those expanding ripples, exactly as the glazier did.
But now the economy is missing a new suit, and is just that much poorer, since the wealth that would have created it now must be used to repair the damage. But because this new suit is never seen (since it was never made), the missing suit escapes the notice of the public, and the only one who knows about it is the shopkeeper. This is because Need is not the same as Demand. The shopkeeper didn’t need a new window, because he already had a window, and the savings would have been used for a different demand.
If you ever hear anyone arguing that natural disasters are good for the economy, feel free to laugh at them, and invite them to stand behind what they believe by destroying their belongings.
I found this clip over at Ace’s HQ, and it is possibly the most incisive dissection of the Liberal mindset I have ever seen.
Watch it. Save it. Learn it.
“Anything other than indiscriminiteness is the evil of having discriminated.”
Evan Sayet is a conservative writer and producer, and clearly someone who has given this a great deal of careful thought. It’s kinda long (about 50 mins), but take the time to watch the whole thing. You’ll thank me later.
I have been turned onto this site recently by two different people, one in a blog entry, the other in an e-mail (and the two are almost certainly unrelated, AFAIK), and I recognized the name, since I have been an avid reader of Sci-Fi for a long time, but have never really gotten into his books.
The name of this author is Orson Scott Card, and he also writes a weekly column, which has now been bookmarked as a weekly read.
But I ran across this incredible essay that sums up what I mean about a VERY divisive issue quite well.
That issue has much to do with several other of my personal pet peeves - judicial activism rather than vox populi, Professional Victimhood, others trying to enforce a specific morality by using government force, and proponents insulting any who oppose as a “hater” or accuse them of acting out of fear.
Care to guess? I’ll give you a hint: it rhymes with “Romosexual Carriage”.
A little dialogue from Lewis Carroll:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
The Massachusetts Supreme Court has not yet declared that “day” shall now be construed to include that which was formerly known as “night,” but it might as well.
By declaring that homosexual couples are denied their constitutional rights by being forbidden to “marry,” it is treading on the same ground.
Do you want to know whose constitutional rights are being violated? Everybody’s. Because no constitution in the United States has ever granted the courts the right to make vast, sweeping changes in the law to reform society.
I have made many of the same points in opposition to the current attempts - that homosexuals are not forbidden to marry (just that the State won’t recognize it), that they are permitted to marry a person of the opposite gender (and OSC points out that this has been occurring all through history, with both male and female homosexuals getting married and having children), and male-female marriage is the force behind the development of civilization.
But Mr. Card has those “Hedley LaMarr” fingers ("purtier than a twenny-doller whore") and I can only urge you to Read The Whole Thing. I will certainly be catching up on his other published works as soon as I can.
I will be happy to debate any of the points he raises. But leave the insults at home.
There are two major types of claims that are usually made in arguments (these two are not the only kinds of claims, but they are common enough to need to be aware of them when they happen) - from the general to the specific and from the specific to the general. They are frequently used.
From the general to the specific is often used when “stereotyping” an entity - most members of group ‘A’ act a certain way or believe a certain thing, therefore, allof the members of that group do, when such may not necessarily be the case. (For instance, there are Democrats who support the Iraq War, and there are Republicans who are in favor of higher taxes.)
From the specific to the general is used when trying to claims trends or make predictions, such as temperature graphs or historical events - when writing certain laws regarding taxes, specific outcomes usually result, so you can predict that when the same law is made, the same outcome will likely result.
I refer to these as “errors”, because of the strong likelihood that there may be exceptions to the stereotypes (such as a pro-choice conservative or an honest politician), and there is no real way to predict the future, despite all historical precedent. Both of these cases are really just a matter of “playing the odds”, which may or may not be a good idea.
I’m also not going to recreate the list of logical errors, since others have already done so (see here or here along with some good advice here).
What I do want to do is talk about thw two kinds of logic that are often misinterpreted as doing those two things - inductive and deductive.
Deductive is easiest to talk about so let’s warm up with a quick overview.
Deductive logic is of the type most often found in math classes when talking about “if p, then q; if not-p, then not-q”
The process begins with a few statements, taken as ‘givens’ (certain conditions you can accept as true), called “premises”. You then have to determine what other statements would be true if all of these premises are taken as true. For example:
Premise: All men are mammals.
Premise: Mike is a man.
Deduction: Mike is, therefore, a mammal.
Sometimes, arguers will start at the (to them, self-evident) deduction and skip the premises entirely as unspoken, and they can be challenged on their deduction based on what seems to be faulty premises. (For example, there might be some men who are not mammals, or Mike might not necessarily be a man.)
This is the argument “from the general to the specific”. Be careful when using this to ensure that all of your premises are true, or at least arguably so.
Now, Inductive begins with certain points of fact - verifiable data - and attempts to derive general conclusions from those facts. This is the “from the specific to the general” and is much tougher, because the conclusion may not necessarily follow from the data. For example, it is known that if one parent has cancer, the chances for a child of that pair to get cancer are much higher. But if the child does get cancer, it does not necessarily prove the induction, because some environmental influence may have caused it (exposure to toxins, overexposure to the sun, smoking two packs a day, etc.) rather than the genetic influence.
Deduction and induction are, by themselves, insufficient for a valid scientific approach. While deduction gives absolute certainty, it never interacts with the real world, there is no way to test the validity of the premises. And, while induction is driven by observation, it never approaches the actual level of proof of a Theory. The development of the scientific method involved a gradual blending of these two approaches to logic.
There are also various levels of “fact”. This includes, but is by NO means limited to:
tradition - something passed down from person to person, and may actually have been written down at one point. But merely writing something down does not speak to the veracity of the data.
anecdote - a story from one person’s point of view, or one person’s experiences with a phenomenon. Most religious claims are of this type.
prediction - used frequently when talking about future events based on possibly questionable data. But a prediction is not reliable evidence until the predicted event actually occurs.
experiment - which also includes polling data. The attempt to actually measure the phenomenon or determine general public opinion.
statistics - the product of multiple tests and their outcomes, attempting to eliminate extraneous influences. This allows for multiple trials, and is usually expressed as a chance of an event occurring, such as “next week’s weather forecast” or the chance of winning at craps.
clinical trial - working hard to eliminate all unnecessary influences and randomizing the choices to produce firm, reproducible data.
Scientific Theory - Theories can be safely used to predict future events to any needed degree of certainty.
natural physical law - usually expressed as a mathematical or physical definition, such as the operation of gravity or the speed of light
When evaluating the evidence, merely grading it as to “level of reliability” is insufficient. There is also “significance” (the magnitude of the fact as regards the number of people affected by it) and “relevance to the topic”. It may very well be a scientific fact that the speed of light is exactly equal to 299,792,458 meters per second, but it is not a significant fact when discussing National Health Care, nor is it particularly relevant to that topic. So something merely having been identified as a scientific fact does not necessarily end the debate.
So when evaluating evidence in general, you should look at it in several different ways. First, is it a single datum being used to indicate a trend or a trend used to predict a specific outcome? Second, how reliable is the evidence (which also include the credibility of the one presenting the evidence)? Third, is it actually significant to the topic? And finally, is the evidence actually relevant to the topic being discussed?
The first part is here in case you stumble upon this page by accident later.
The main reason that many of our national debates have not yet reached a decision is simple - the proponents of the various sides of the respective issues are pushing a different point of stasis. For example, let’s take the issue of abortion.
There are two major sides to the debate: those who think abortion should be legal, and those that think abortion should be illegal in varying degrees. Depending on who you are asking, you will get all kinds of differing labels describing the two sides, but “Pro-Choice” and “Pro-Life” seem to be the most common, even though the very names make this difference in stasis crystal clear.
See, the side that wants abortion to be none of the government’s business, right up until the baby’s first breath, describe themselves as “pro-choice”, implying that the other side is trying to limit freedoms of those who seek abortion as an option. Meanwhile, the side that wants to stop abortions to the greatest extent possible describe themselves as “pro-life”, implying that the other side is just a semantic nuance away from the Nazis and their Final Solution.
Did you catch it? It’s kind of subtle, but the side describing themselves as “pro-choice” are trying to define the stasis of Quality, that of “who gets to decide if an abortion is performed” (not whether an event is going to happen at all - that is a given in this argument - but who gets to decide), while the “pro-life” side is busy trying to set the stasis at “definition”, defining abortion as “mass murder” or “infanticide”.
As long as the two sides ignore the other’s assertion, this issue will never be decided, because the debate cannot even proceed until the stasis is resolved, one way or the other.
Same thing with Global Warming. The Climate Catastrophists are insisting that we have already progressed beyond whether or not anthropocentric Climate Catastrophe is happening (Conjecture), and beyond what to call it (Definition), and straight into the stasis of Quality - justifying the solutions only they are allowed to offer. At the same time, those who are more skeptical about the issue are still trying to get past conjecture (not whether or not the earth is getting warmer, but whether man’s actions have anything to do with it, and if so, to what extent). As long as the two sides cannot disagree on stasis, there will never be any kind of attempt at actually resolving the underlying disagreement.
In our next entry, I will be explaining some of the different kinds of evidence, and how best to evaluate it.
The lecturer spoke at length on different kinds of stasis - that is to say, “points of conflict” - the point beyond which a debate cannot proceed without being resolved. There were four that he defined, the Stasis of:
The Stasis of Conjecture is whether or not a thing exists, or whether an event occurred. Definition is how that thing or event should be referred to or defined as. Quality is usually presented as a justification or excuse. And Stasis of Place is a special case that usually preempts the debate, but I’ll cover that in greater detail in just a moment.
The examples that he gave were fairly clear, and define the stasis by how the response to an assertion is phrased. The original assertion in each of the examples will be exactly the same, but the stasis is defined by how what kind of response is given to the original assertion, that of being approached by someone in the street, who then asserts, “You stole my car!”
The stasis of conjecture - whether or not I actually stole the car - would be defined by responded, “I couldn’t have possibly have stolen your car because I never had your car.” In essence, I would be defining the stasis by saying the act never actually took place.
The stasis of definition - whether or not the act could be defined as “theft” - would be defined by responding, “I didn’t steal your car, I only borrowed it.” However, by using this, I am implicitly conceding the stasis of conjecture (whether or not I ever had the car in the first place).
The stasis of quality - whether the act made for a better outcome - would be defined by responding, “Yes, I took your car, and it’s a good thing that I did because this lady was walking along your sidewalk and tripped and broke her hip and if I hadn’t taken your car to get her to the hospital, she would have sued you, and so it’s a better outcome for all concerned.” However, I would be implicitly conceding both the stasis of conjecture, as well as that of definition (I did have the car, and I did take it without permission). As I pointed out, this is most often expressed as a justification or excuse.
The stasis of place is, as I pointed out above, a preemptive response, and is simply asserting that the accuser and accused are not in the right place to be making the assertion or a response. In our example, the accusation would be, “You stole my car!”, and the response defining stasis of place would be something along the lines of, “That’s a very serious charge, but this isn’t the place for such things. I’ll see you in court!”. This doesn’t concede any of the previous stases, but once the accuser and accused are in the right place, this can no longer be used to adequately define the debate, and one of the other three must be used.
The exception to that preemptive stasis would be debates about policy, because there is no real “right” place to discuss this, and policy debates are just as likely to occur in classrooms and cocktail parties as they are in legislatures and law offices.
I’ll be getting into more detail as to how these points of conflict should be best applied to issues being publicly debated today in later issues, but in the meantime, I’d love your input…
The topic of discussion for all of the law enforcement types for today is flashlights. Flashlights are a matter of near contention for the law enforcement community. Here in Los Angeles the LAPD is barred and banned for anything resembling a flashlight. After a criminal ran from an LAPD cop and was subsequently tackled and hit with a Mag-Light, an episode that resulted in a small bruise and a missed criminal offense on the cops’ RAP sheet, the LAPD told their cops they could only carry small pen-style flashlight. This resulted in a boom in the small tactical flashlights that many military outfits prefer, but for large agencies like mine, full sized flashlights are still the illumination tool of choice.
Only two flashlights have ever been considered worthy by cops – Mag-Lights and Streamlights. Any cop will tell you that Streamlights are far superior in illumination to Mag-Lights. There is absolutely no comparison. Mag-Lights are weak, you have to adjust the head of the light to get a worthwhile beam, and they go through batteries like there’s no tomorrow. Most Streamlights are rechargeable, the beam is brighter than the sun, and there’s no adjustment to make when you turn it on.
Light is very important in tactical situations. I remember going through a tactical course where we cleared a business for suspects and I had a 2-D cell Mag-Light with me because I left my Streamlight in my locker. The Mag-Light barely illuminated a quarter of a room, it was impossible to adjust the head of the light when I had my gun pointed in the direction I needed to face, and it weighed a lot. My partners that had Streamlights did a better job of illuminating my portion of the room when their lights were pointed in different directions simply by the ambient light from their flashlights. For illumination, Streamlights are the best choice.
Let’s talk about lights for situations that do not require heavy illumination. Most Sheriff’s departments make their deputies work in a custodial operation before heading out to the street. I spent five years working in the largest jail in Los Angeles before heading to the street. For this purpose, Mag-Lights are by far the best light you can have. In custodial settings, illumination isn’t a matter of life and death like it is on the street. Lights are always on (even in the middle of the night), and you use your light for doing things like looking under bunks, getting the attention of inmates, and of course, self defense.
Mag-Lights come in a variety of sizes. While working custody, I used a 4-D cell Mag-Light. It was about fifteen inches long, weighed about five pounds, and did a good job of illuminating dark spots while also acting as a baton when I needed it. My rule of thumb is that the best fight is one that I do not need to be close to my enemy. If someone has a knife, I want to be at least ten feet away with my gun drawn. If someone is shooting at me with a gun, I want to be secured behind something that can protect me from bullets while I take shots at them with a long-range rifle. Distance is the key, and a flashlight that will be used more as a weapon that an illumination tool is the key to surviving dangerous custody situations. Mag-Lights win the battle here.
Now let’s talk about durability. My Streamlight spent most of it’s time stuffed in one of the nice, soft, clean and padded lower pants pockets of my Class A uniform. My Mag-Light was dropped an infinite amount of times, tossed more times than I can count, hit against bars and walls at least thirty times a day, once flew down a two-hundred foot hallway when I got in a fight, and run-over by a full-sized bus transporting inmates. On top of that, it was used to pry open stuck cell gates, tear down ropes and makeshift hanging devices that inmates used in attempts (successful and unsuccessful) to kill themselves, and used as a barrier between the dirty ground and myself when I needed to search under a bunk. My Streamlight is battered and torn, and although it’s still working as wonderfully as the day I got it, it’s chipped and uglier than Lindsey Lohan after a hard night on the Sunset Strip. My Mag-Light looks as good as the day I bought it. One of my partners took note of it when I was working an overtime spot at a custody facility one day. He said, “… now that’s a new flashlight.” I said, “No way, dude. I’ve had this thing for ten years!”
As with everything, you have to shove out a few dollars to buy one of these things. If you’re a cop, you’ll be purchasing double of everything whether you want to or not. Police officers will have to buy a full sized Streamlight while they’re still the new guy on the block, and will hopefully move on to a Blackhawk tactical light once they earn their wings. Deputy Sheriff’s will buy a Mag-Light for use in custody, a Streamlight for patrol, a small Blackhawk tactical light once they earn their wings, and a small Streamlight once they head back to custody for some of that wonderful overtime that’ll put an extra grand in their pocket every month. Mag-Light’s that are powered by two D-cell batteries run around $15 dollars, while the preferred four D-cell Mag-Light’s run around $20 dollars. That isn’t too bad for a light that will last forever, do the job, and take a serious beating. Streamlights are a little smaller than Mag-Lights (roughly thirteen inches long), rechargeable, and you can replace each and every part of it in the even that it breaks (and each of those parts will at some point or another). The Streamlight SL-20 runs around $100 dollars with all of the goodies, including a charger that allows you to recharge on the go via the cigarette lighter in your car.
So what’s the bottom line? No matter what you’ll be spending at least $150 dollars on flashlights if you’re a cop. If you know you’re going straight to the streets, get a Streamlight SL-20 and grab one of the Blackhawk lights for use down the light. In the event that you’ll be stuck in a custodial facility for a few years, get a 4-D cell Mag-Light and a Streamlight SL-20 for the days that you make it out to the street. At least it’s all a tax write-off.
Okay, maybe a few tens of thousands, but “millions” sounds more impressive.
When mankind started to develop social structures, the obvious method of determining where one belonged was by family or (later) clan. This allowed people to call on help from those around them, because the ties of blood ran rather deep. The eldest of the clan arbitrated disputes between them and the patriarch’s decision stood, by virtue of tradition ("It’s the way things have always been") and threat of purgatory.
By “purgatory”, I don’t mean the Catholic belief in a nowhere place (although the principle remained the same), but a severing of the community ties and expulsion into Coventry. In pioneer societies, that was the worst sort of punishment imaginable - to be cut off from any sort of contact with civilization.
Some people could adapt, however, the collective opinion of those hermits was never a positive one.
However, once collections of groups became plentiful, and started forming into groups large enough to allow subdivision of labor and trade between them became possible and profitable, then it became possible for those booted out of one community to mingle among others who might not know of his violations of the social contract.
Now, this unwritten contract goes back to nothing more complicated than the earliest version of the Golden Rule (and I don’t mean “he who has the gold makes the rules"): “I won’t bother you if you don’t bother me.” It is what enabled man to conquer the world - the ability to turn his back on a stranger long enough to deal with the wild animal that is charging them both.
The right to be left alone is the beginning of civilization.
Don’t automatically scoff—think about it. The whole point of what we refer to as “modern civilization” is that as long as we obey the laws, we will be allowed to pursue happiness. Whatever society has decided to define as “illegal” - polygamy and prostitution, just to name two - can (and probably has at one point in history or another) be not only legal, but required under specified circumstances. There are many other examples, and I use them to show that society can change that contract as the generations march through the decades and centuries.
No matter what society demands at any given point in history, the breach of that societal contract will carry various levels of punishment, but the very worst our ancestors could conceive of is being cut off from any sort of support, either physical (food and warmth) or emotional, and it is that latter separation, combined with the need to prevent the expelled person from just picking up where he left off in the next county that caused society to start locking the miscreants up.
The very name ‘penitentiary’ shows this mindset, because it was a place to where one was sent to become ’penitent‘, to ‘repent’ one’s misdeeds. A small cell, where they are locked away from almost all contact with the outside world until they have been ‘rehabilitated’ - when they have repented and feel remorse for their actions in a desire to be restored to their previous position in society.
But sometime during the last few decades, we have moved away from trying to make criminals sorry for their violations of that general contract, and have started treating them as “victims” of society. Their mothers didn’t love them enough, or their teachers gave them a lousy A-minus, or they were suffering from sugar shock after eating a Twinkie.
They are locked up in the rough equivalent of a college dormitory, with soft beds, free medical care (up to and including sex-change operations), three excellent meals, cable TV, weight room and exercise yards, and all the opportunity to learn how not to get caught next time from other criminals.
We need to go back to the days when prisons were someplace to stay out of.
you actually heard a Democrat say “despite all of our (many) problems, we are still the greatest nation in the world...”?
Yeah, me neither.
Look, no one is doubting that we have issues that could be better off addressed rather than just left to fester. The best way to clean out the bullshit is to let in sunlight and fresh air.
So let’s do that, shall we?
First, I am sick to DEATH about the number of people who think it is the height of intellectual acumen to start from the (easily disprovable) notion that all of the world’s ills are the fault of the United States of America - either we’re too interventionist (Iraq) or not interventionist enough (Rwanda/Sudan), or we are spending too much on foreign aid (domestic suffering) or not enough on foreign aid (Indonesian tsunami/UN report), or our taxes are too high (Republican/Libertarian) or too low (Democrat/Socialist), or that we support thugs (Hussein/Noriega) or that we don’t support “popularly elected government” (Cuba/North Korea/Iran).
Or that a woman should be able to kill her unborn baby right up until the baby takes its first breath (Planned Parenthood/ACLU) or not from the moment she realizes that she could be pregnant (many religious organizations).
Or that religion should be the bulwark of government (the so-called Moral Majority) or not even allowed to be mentioned in public (ACLU, et al.)
Name any political or social position, you can find two people who are willing to blame the US for the fact that the world is not exactly as (he sees) it should be, and from opposite ends of that ideological spectrum.
They are both right, and for exactly the same reasons…
America is, and has always been, a compromise. It was a compromise between the forms of government that the colonists were familiar with (Congress, based on House of Lords/House of Commons) and a form they were NOT familiar with (who ever heard of electing the leader of a whole country?), between the pro-slavery/abolitionist crowd (that took almost a century - and a few hundred thousand deaths - to settle, and there are still overtones being argued even today). A compromise between those who think that the government should concentrate its entire effort into leaving its citizens the hell alone, and those who think that the government is the last best solution to any human problem (and, further, that any problem can be solved by throwing tax dollars at it until the problem just gives up).
Our form of government is a compromise of power between the Executive and the Legislative (with the Judicial existing to break any ties).
Everyone has to give up a little in order to get a lot. We give up a little of our paycheck in order to ensure that we can spend the rest of it in relative peace (financing the police, fire, military, and infrastructure). We give up a little of our essential liberty to allow others the same level of liberty (for instance, under a total anarchy, I would have the “right” to drive the freeways as fast as my car would move, but I surrender a little of that “right” to the state - to dictate how fast I can legally travel - so that everyone can move in a general level of safety). I’m not allowed to launch clay jars of flaming oil onto my neighbor’s property, secure in the knowledge that he’s also not allowed to do the same to me.
Look around your own life - I guarantee that you can find where the compromise (between “what you want” and “what you end up with") exists, in just about everything you do.
Our government is exactly such a compromise, with the Constitution existing to limit the government’s power to interfere with our daily lives - they cannot take away your freedom to express ideas, to worship the cosmos in any way you wish, to protect yourself and your loved ones, to walk the streets free from fear that you will snatched up to stand before a Star Chamber in some windowless room.
***
I’m a strict Constructionist when it comes to the Constitution. Our Founders - most of them well-educated lawyers and businessmen - wrote that document as a binding legal contract between the government and the citizens (who willingly grant that small portion of power to the government in exchange for keeping the rest of it), and they argued over the meaning of every word in much the way that corporate lawyers argue the placement of commas today. And because they took the time to explain exactly how they came to the results they were offering, that will allow us to extrapolate their arguments into the modern day and the experiences we go through today, and that ability to peek into their thought processes will prove invaluable to me over the coming weeks as I start walking us through some issues over the coming weeks, and what we should do about them.
I invite your comments, your (reasoned) criticisms and your questions.
if you suddenly have lots of spare cash under this dramatic new Democrat economy…
Returning to the topic of a few posts ago, I’ve decided that I’m going to let YOU guys get some of my stuff for me. Isn’t that nice of me?
I’m just kidding.
But I would suggest, as recommended reading (for “purely entertainment purposes”, of course, since some of the things you can learn might be illegal to put into practice, and we are all law-abiding citizens, are we not?) anything from Paladin Press, plus the online (but printable) version of the US Army Survival Manual.
I would also suggest (believe it or not) the Boy Scout Handbook. By consulting the handbook, you could learn to read a map, choose a campsite, pitch a tent, make a ground bed, build a fire, cook a meal, and deal with common injuries. If others were marooned with you, the handbook would give you excellent advice on how to live ethically, cheerfully, and democratically with the group. Older editions contain Morse Code, semaphore signals, sign language, how to build a lean-to and a shitload more that would come in very handy for under a kilogram.
There will be a test, but “Pass/Fail” will count for a hell of a lot more than a GPA value…
You know what the nice thing about being a pessimist is? A pessimist is either always being proved right, or pleasantly surprised.
Since we will have Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, and John Murtha as Majority Leader in the House, with Charlie Rangel chairing the powerful House Ways And Means Committee and Conyers chairing the House Judiciary, and Pat ”Habeus Corpus Rights For Terrorists” Leahy running the Senate Judiciary, it only stands to reason that they would immediately drop all of their partisan bickering and get to work solving the problems confronting our nation, right?
So, in the spirit of pessimists everywhere (and pragmatists, too), I wish to remind all of my readers to start stocking up on essentials in the event of local disaster. No, I don’t want to speculate on any particular kind of disaster that may happen to our nation while engaged in a war with an enemy who is cheering the Democratic victory and promising to bring the battle back to our shores - including blowing up the White House.
First, go read this story. Go ahead, I’ll wait, it’s kinda long.
No, go read the story.
*
*
*
First, yes, I know it’s Speculative Fiction (NOT Sci-Fi), and rather far-fetched in some of the details, but as the author points out in his (even longer) follow-up, imagine how a Time Traveller appearing in 1900 Europe would have been perceived, just reeling off the list of atrocities about to happen in Europe.
Imagine with what fury and scorn they would have rejected the Time Traveler’s simple, sad litany of events to come.
A Germany gone insane and slaughtering millions of Jews? Unthinkable.
A Europe ravaged by not one but two World Wars consuming most of the continent’s cities and cultures and killing a hundred million people? Ridiculous.
A continent ruled by reason, science, trade and diplomacy, a continent that had been at peace for decades, suddenly transformed by a rash of fanatical transformational fantasy ideologies into a reeking graveyard of slaughtered innocents and murdered innocence? Obscene.
The Time Traveler’s message would have been heard as pure hateful vitriol.
Now, on to business.
Get a pen and paper. Write this down to take with you on the next trip to the store. (Okay, so you may have to get some of these things at the hardware store, but that’s still legal...)
55 gallon plastic trash can with lid
Water (one five-gallon jug per person in your home - distilled will do, but avoid flavored)
Battery-powered radio and flashlight (with spare batteries)
First-aid kit and spare medications (don’t forget spare pairs of glasses)
Whistle, steel mirror
Dust Masks
At least two packs of Baby-wipes per person (for hygiene and clean-up)
Two hand-operated can openers (a spare will come in handy)
Matches in a waterproof container
Heavy-duty sleeping bag and 2 blankets per person
There are lots of things I’m forgetting, I know - partly because my brain is only working at about 70% efficiency today, and partly because if I include EVERYTHING that might be needed, it’s too much to fit into an 18-wheeler, much less a 55-gallon drum.
Think about it.
What kinds of natural disasters strike (or are likely to strike) in your part of the world - tornadoes, floods, massive power outage, blizzards, earthquakes, house fires, Sarin on the subway, dirty bombs?
What are you and your family going to need to survive for not less than three days with NO help whatsoever? (Seriously, you need to posit the absolute worst case scenario, and plan accordingly.)
What kind of equipment will you need (pots, pans, camp stoves, utensils, plates, cups, bowls, etc.)?
And, most importantly, what will you need to have to protect your hoarded wealth? Because if you actually manage to set all this aside while your Kumbayyah neighbors do not, and the hummus hits the HVAC, exactly how desperate will they become when it is clear that you are neither hungry nor thirsty nor dirty...? And they are...? And there are lots of these nice heavy rocks just lying around...?
Plan for the worst, folks. That way, you will either be ready for it when it comes, or be pleasantly surprised. Or both.
I’ll be providing links to the entire text at the end, but I’m gonna rant a bit…
I just heard some talking head rambling about what the Geneva Conventions do and do not contain, and he made assertions that just aren’t true, but your average person might not know.
So let’s chat a bit.
So what are the Geneva Conventions? They are an agreement between the various signatories to wage war (when diplomacy has failed) using a gentleman’s code of honor on the battlefield. Being willing to accept a surrender from a beaten opponent, treating the wounded, not abusing the prisoners, protecting the non-combatants, the works.
One other thing, though. It is clearly spelled out that these are voluntary guidelines, and once one side has violated them, they no longer apply to either side for the duration of that conflict. These are what people mean when they speak of the “laws of war”.
But there is a lot of verbosity, because the signatories wanted to make sure that everyone was singing from the same hymn book (so to speak).
They spelled out exactly what a combatant was and how to identify one. They spelled out which classes of person were to be protected (diplomats, Red Cross, medical personnel, clergy, etc.). They spelled out exactly what kind of treatment any prisoners were to receive, including receiving mail and packages from home, necessary medical care, religious opportunities, diet, and specific working conditions for the enlisted ranks.
They were quite thorough.
You can read Convention One (for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field), Convention Two (the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea), Convention Three (relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War), or Convention Four (relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War), or any of the ThreeAdditionalProtocols (links to all three of them are there).
But let’s take a look at the First Convention for a minute. A couple of things need to be made clear at the outset - primarily a few definitions that we will be using.
Art. 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:
(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
No matter whether or not the terrorist forces qualify as “soldiers” (a matter we will come to in a moment), they qualify as a “Party to the conflict”. How many times have they deliberately carried out any of those acts “prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons”? It’s almost a “gimme” that any hostages taken by the terrorists are executed in the most horrific manner their eleventh century minds can conceive.
But let’s see what else the Geneva Conventions say about what a soldier is defined as (so as to distinguish between a soldier and a civilian noncombatant), shall we?
Art. 13. The present Convention shall apply to the wounded and sick belonging to the following categories:
(1) Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.
(2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:
(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
(b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
(c) that of carrying arms openly;
(d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
(3) Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a Government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.
(4) Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civil members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization from the armed forces which they accompany.
(5) Members of crews, including masters, pilots and apprentices, of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under any other provisions in international law.
(6) Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy, spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
Did you catch that? It explicitly spells out specifically which persons are protected as Prisoners of War under these Conventions, and how they were to be identified.
Why take the time to spell out what a soldier is? Two things. One of them was spelled out in Bill Whittle’s masterpiece Sanctuary (Part 2):
Let’s speak to the Perennially Outraged as if they were the fully grown, post-pubescent children they pride themselves on being.
What is the obvious difference between an enemy Prisoner of War, and an Unlawful Combatant? Suppose two of them were standing in a line-up. What one glaringly obvious thing sets them apart?
That’s right! One is wearing a uniform, and the other isn’t.
And why do soldiers wear uniforms?
It certainly is not to protect the soldier. As a matter of fact, a soldier’s uniform is actually a big flashing neon arrow pointing to some kid that says to the enemy, SHOOT ME!
And that’s exactly what a uniform is for. It makes the soldier into a target to be killed.
Now if that’s all there was to it, you might say that the whole uniform thing is not such a groovy idea. BUT! What a uniform also does—the corollary to the whole idea of a uniformed person – is to say that if the individual wearing a uniform is a legitimate target, then the person standing next to him in civilian clothes is not.
By wearing uniforms, soldiers differentiate themselves to the enemy. They assume additional risk in order to protect the civilian population. In other words, by identifying themselves as targets with their uniforms, the fighters provide a Sanctuary to the unarmed civilian population.
The other part is the correlary of that Sanctuary - how to punish the violators. Those would be the ones who are combatants disguised among the protected civilians, in case anyone wasn’t following along…
If they are military personnel trying to escape detection by hiding among civilians, they can be executed as a spy without even the formality of a drumhead court-martial. In fact, that is what happened to this guy, summarily executed for being caught in a warzone out of uniform.
And the reason is because of those Conventions.
One last bit from the First Convention…
Art. 50. Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.
Okay, so when NOT ONLY are the terrorists and insurgents not a party to the Conventions, and NOT ONLY are they not obeying the Conventions, and NOT ONLY are they deliberately violating them by committing almost every one of the acts that are specifically prohibited against those who are given specific Sanctuary, they are specifically excluded from ever being a part of them because they deliberately blend themselves in with the innocent civilians around them.
From the Fourth Convention…
Art. 34. The taking of hostages is prohibited.
‘Nuff said.
Now that we have spelled out exactly why the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to any of these quasi-military forces claiming to be conducting a jihad against us, I want to explain why they don’t apply to our treatment of them.
The Conventions (and associated Protocols) are a TREATY, with Signatories and everything.
If a group or nation is not a signatory to these Conventions, they will STILL apply so long as that group or nation follows them while in a conflict with a signatory nation. All it takes is that they follow the Conventions.
Terrorists don’t. Thus, the Conventions do not apply, no matter how you want to spin it.
Legally, the United States is under absolutely no obligation to apply the provisions of a treaty to which our opponents are not bound. However, from an ethical standpoint, we do so because of our own personal self-image and the image we have as a nation.
I’ll be the first to admit that we are far from perfect in this regard - there have been offenses against the other side in every war from the fall of Jericho to Abu Ghraib. But we take care to identify and punish those rare individuals who break those rules, when and as they occur.
How do the terrorists handle those violators? They praise them as a lion of holy war and the mass media defends them.
It’s time to start realizing that those who are advocating putting limitations on one side while defending the total lack of any such limitations on the other are not being fair and balanced (to coin a phrase).
Next question would logically be, “Okay, which side are they actually on? Who are they actually cheering for? Which side are they trying to help win?”
But we’re not allowed to question their patriotism, are we?
Comes the story of one Dorian Cain. It seems Dorian graduated from one of our Nation’s public schools, yet he couldn’t read at a first grade level. John Stossel has the details:
His mom, Gena Cain, has been trying to get him help for years. If Dorian were in private school, or if South Carolina allowed parents to choose schools the way we choose other products and services in life, Dorian and Gena would be “customers” and able to go elsewhere — if any school were dumb enough to serve a customer as poorly as Dorian has been served. But since Gena is merely a taxpayer, forced to pay for the public schools whether they do her any good or not, she can’t even demand a better education for her son. “You have to beg,” she said. “Whatever you ask for, you’re begging. Because they have the power.” They do. What are you going to do — go elsewhere? Gena can’t afford that.
Gena’s begging eventually got results — just not results that helped her son. What the school bureaucrats did was hold meetings to talk about Dorian. (Bureaucrats are good at holding meetings.) At the meeting we watched, lots of important people attended: a director of programs for exceptional children, a resource teacher, a district special education coordinator, a counselor and even a gym teacher. The meeting went on for 45 minutes.
“I’m seeing great progress in him,” said the principal. “So I don’t have any concerns.”
So let me see if I understand this, this principal doesn’t have concerns, yet Dorian has been through 12 years of schooling and is still unable to read at a first grade level. Had this happened in the private sector this principal would find himself out of a job. Unaccountability is not a good thing.
Well, Gena still had a concern: Her son could barely read.
Strange how a parent notices the little things like that.
Was Dorian just incapable of learning? No. ABC News did see great progress in him — when we sent him to a private, for-profit tutoring center. In just 72 hours of tutoring, Sylvan Learning Center brought Dorian’s reading up more than two grade levels.
In 72 hours, a private company did what South Carolina’s government schools could not do in over 12 years.
So, a private sector company succeeded where a public school failed? Imagine my surprise. Of course this just proves the old adage, when you ask people to provide good money for a service you pretty much have to provide the service in the private sector.
Of course since transactions with the government are not consensual the government doesn’t have to listen to your concerns. Whereas when you engage in a consensual transaction with a private sector company, who provides the same service, they DO have to listen to your concerns, since you can (and if you’re smart you should) take your business elsewhere. And who says the free market won’t work for education? Oh, the Democrats that’s right.
Insofar as looking for answers from public “educators” is concerned, don’t bother, because they really do not have any, as Stossel found out when he talked to SC’s Superintendent of Education, who talked about SC’s “massive improvement” when it came to SAT scores:
That’s great. But when you’re ranked at the bottom, improvement doesn’t mean much, and South Carolina, even after its “No. 1 improvement” is still last among states. SATs don’t make for perfect comparisons because states have different participation rates, but South Carolina’s participation rate is about average, and yet its students perform well below the average.
That’s not good. Yet the superintendent said, “We are making tremendous progress in South Carolina, and we’re very proud.”
In government monopolies, that’s how bureaucrats think.
Not to mention how they act, arrogance personified, as evidenced by the majority of teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District enrolling their children in private schools. To bad the parents of the children they teach do not have the same option.
Yet, bring up the issue of vouchers and who are the people that scream the loudest? Teachers unions and their bought and paid for shills in the Democratic Party. (Via QandO)
I’m of the mindset that we should repeal the Seventeenth Amendment.
Y’see, back in the day, the Founders had seen what kind of problems could be developed through one branch abusing the other branches of government, so they decided on a separation of powers. The United States were a loosely confederated group of independent political entites. There were large states and small states heavily populated and sparsely populated, richer, poorer, whatever, but they were considered to be equal in the same sense that Portugal and the United States are considered to be equal. They had their strengths and weaknesses, their own state ruler and legislature, elected by the People, and the laws that they passed would only apply to that state.
That is why extradition of a criminal who is “on the lam” and gets caught in another state is a request and not an order.
I said “The United States were...” That’s the plural form of that verb, and I used it because I was treating the United States as exactly that - united States. Each with their own interest in their relationship with the Federal Government, which was designed only to protect all of the States at once, preferring no one State over any other.
Moving on…
They drew their military from the various State militias, funding the Federal Army only as needed, they made sure that they kept their greedy paws out of the economies of neighboring States (by preventing the taxation of anything crossing a State line), and each State wanted its own say in the decisions reached by that Federal Government - a voice and a vote, as the parlance goes.
The most numerous branch of Congress is required to be elected by the people every two years, and each district would be based on population - every man had the same chance to express an opinion to that Representative. Those citizens were also electing their State governments to handle things on the State level.
The original intent of the Founding Fathers was to give the various legislatures the authority to send two of their own representatives into the “Upper House” (it was originally called that because they were representing the State as a whole, not just “The People").
If you could get both the directly-elected representatives and the upper-level (i.e., appointed by the State) to agree on legislation, that would certainly simplify the issues.
Look it up. Our government exploded right around the time that the Federal Government claimed authority over every dime earned within its borders (the 16th Amendment’s “income tax") and took authority out of the hands of the States (by the 17th Amendment).
And today, it isn’t “The United States are...”, it’s “The United States is...”
The moment you were assigned a tracking number by the Government (known here in the US as a “Social Security number”, but by different names elsewhere*), you lost all claim to that privacy. The government keeps track of you through the various institutions that you will interact with as life moves on - schools, hospital visits, immunizations, home address, people you contact and communicate with (including by e-mail), driver’s license, group affiliations, military service, voter registration/affiliation, jobs held, cars/houses owned, taxes paid/owed, income, marriages/divorces/kids/adoptions, bank balance, insurance policies, Social Security, you name it.
If the government really wants to know, they can find out, and nothing you can do or say will stop them.
If the police ask questions and you refuse to cooperate, if they can get a tame judge to agree, you can be thrown in jail on a “material witness” order until you DO cooperate, “right to privacy” be damned. If you remain silent and refuse to even identify yourself, that is already a crime in some states, and you can be thrown in jail until they figure out who you are.
They can dig and dig and ignore the need for warrants or any of that other legal mumbo-jumbo that people depend on.
But the only catch is that if they decide to dig into your life without a warrant, they cannot use any of that data against you in criminal court.
Conversely, if a private individual decides to go digging through your background, finds something incriminating and turns it over to the police, the lack of a warrant is meaningless, since it wasn’t the police that went digging, and the Fifth Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect against private individuals, only the State.
Hell, even here on this site, I point out the IP address you are using (and by which you can be UNIQUELY identified, with odds of making a mistake on the close order of 4.3 billion to 1 against, or you wouldn’t be able to read this). I don’t need a warrant for that information, and every web site out there does exactly the same thing, with many of them quietly stashing “cookies” on your personal computer, which keeps track of your every mouse click.
You have no privacy. Get used to it.
“If you do not wish a thing heard, do not say it. If you do not wish a thing seen, do not do it.”
* - those of you from other countries know what I mean, but please leave a comment telling us which country and how it is referred to in your country. Just for the record, y’see…
