The progressive left’s mantra of “Defund the Police!” has taken on an entirely different interpretation on the basis of this sad and tragic episode. And now they want us to get rid of guns and rely on the police for protection? Ha! Gun control? No. Safety for kids? Yes, yes—a thousand times yes!
Horrid news. Despicable. A teen gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. About the only good thing in this occurrence is that this mass murderer was himself killed in this revolting event, and will no longer be around to plague civilized society. May the name of Salvador Ramos forever live in infamy. What could these two teachers, to say nothing of these 9- and 10-year-old children have ever done to deserve having their lives snuffed out by this monster?
The usual suspects are now calling for stricter gun controls. According to that sage, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” But disarming America would be a violation of the rights of millions of Americans who protect themselves from thugs and marauders under the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
In any case, if this evil person had wanted to perpetrate mayhem with a knife or a baseball bat, he might not have been able to murder quite as many helpless school children as he did, but with a little effort he could have shed almost as much misery. Are we to ban knives, baseball bats, and for that matter chairs, bows and arrows, steel-plated boots, rat poison, and all other implements which can be used to murder young kids? What about cars? On crowded sidewalks, they have been even more efficient means of destruction than rifles. Progressives also exaggerate the seriousness of this dastardly act in Texas: many more children are shot to death in Chicago, a city with very strict gun controls.
Several points about the situation in Uvalde are worth considering before politicians use the event to justify new gun-control measures:
Robb Elementary School was a gun-free zone. Why? The feminists who have taken over teachers’ unions feel compelled to engage in this sort of virtue signaling. Yet in other public places, politicians, judges, and civil servants are protected by gun-wielding guards. Pretty much every government building is defended in this way. But not school children, it would appear.
Robb Elementary is a public, not a private school. Why should that make even a bit of difference? Simple: private schools can lose money and go bankrupt if they do not satisfy their parental customers. The same does not apply to public schools. It is safe to predict that as a result of this horrendous event, private institutions, but far less likely governmental ones, will be more assiduous in protecting their young pupils. Is it any accident that this evil young man chose the school he did, rather than a possibly better-protected private one? The next perpetrator (and there will likely be one given the fallible human condition), if he is rational, will possibly take this into account. Thus, if all elementary education were privatized (there need not be any change in future subsidization for the poor via the implementation of the voucher system) future children will be safer.
Although full reports are not yet in, it looks as if it took one hour of stalling on the part of the cops before they got off their rear ends and finally did their job.
Writer and aspiring politician J. D. Vance recently offered this astute observation: “Barack Obama is articulate but has never made a memorable speech. The reason is that his views are utterly conventional. He’s [incapable] of saying anything outside the elite consensus. He’s a walking, talking Atlantic magazine subscription.”
Which should give us pause. Obama—who divides his time between a mansion in Washington D.C., another in Martha’s Vineyard, and similar enclaves where he lends his manicured hands to whatever elite cause needs them—recently gave a speech at Stanford expressing alarm that people are allowed to read things The Atlantic would never print. What Obama advocated was the suppression of political speech that is unpopular among people who live in places like Martha’s Vineyard and who send their children to schools like Stanford.
Obama remembered just enough from teaching constitutional law to know that he needed some obfuscation. So he burbled about the importance of protecting “democracy.” Most people equate that word with popular sovereignty, which indeed is what democracy has historically meant. But for Obama and his allies, it actually means a system that reliably produces the political outcomes desired by elites. Which is why The Atlantic and similar amplifiers of elite opinion cast nationalists and populists who win free and fair elections as threats to “democracy.” By contrast, globalists, who brazenly undermine governments actually chosen by voters, are portrayed as the true champions of so-called democracy. Hence, the consistent demonization of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Poland’s Law and Justice Party, a right-wing populist entity that combines staunch social conservatism, economic populism, and a distrust of elites, depriving such retrograde forces of the political power given to them by the voters.
Anyone on Facebook and, until recently, Twitter has a sense of how Obama-style democracy works. The plutocrats who controlled Facebook and Twitter in 2020 and 2021 waged concerted campaigns first to ensure that Donald Trump was not reelected and that no one questioned the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election, and then to promote whatever action was being urged at the moment by Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Every excuse in the book is given for inflation. But inflation has a single source: The Fed and the immoral fractional-reserve banking system. Why waste time on the periphery? Perhaps it’s to make sure that the “system” continues? That’s unacceptable. Go to the source!
The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class.
Moreover, state bureaucratic efforts to plan society from the center, Bakunin noted,
will demand an immense knowledge and many “heads overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars.
In twenty-first-century America, ordinary people are at the mercy of well-paid, unelected government experts who wield vast power. That is, we live in the age of the technocrats: people who claim to have special wisdom that entitles them to control, manipulate, and manage society’s institutions using the coercive power of the state.
We’re told these people are “nonpolitical” and will use their impressive scientific knowledge to plan the economy, public health, public safety, or whatever goal the regime has decided the technocrats will be tasked with bringing about.
These people include central bankers, Supreme Court justices, “public health” bureaucrats, and Pentagon generals. The narrative is that these people are not there to represent the public or bow to political pressure. They’re just there to do “the right thing” as dictated by economic theory, biological sciences, legal theory, or the study of military tactics.
We’re also told that in order to allow these people to act as the purely well-meaning apolitical geniuses they are, we must give them their independence and not question their methods or conclusions.
We were exposed to this routine yet again last week as President Joe Biden announced he will “respect the Fed’s independence” and allow the central bankers to set monetary policy without any bothersome interference from the representatives of the taxpayers who pay all the bills and who primarily pay the price when central bankers make things worse. (Biden, of course, didn’t mention that central bankers have been spectacularly wrong about the inflation threat in recent years, with inflation rates hitting forty-year highs, economic growth going negative, and consumer credit piling up as families struggle to cope with the cost of living.)
Conveniently, Biden’s deferral to the Fed allows him to blame it later when economic conditions get even worse. Nonetheless, his placing the economy in the hands of alleged experts will no doubt appear laudable to many. This is because the public has long been taught by public schools and media outlets that government experts should have the leeway to exercise vast power in the name of “fixing” whatever problems society faces.
People develop and improve self esteem by actually doing something; by actually accomplishing something; by actually learning something; by actually improving themselves. No one develops self esteem by participating in special school events designed for hollow non-achievement. The next time that you spot a child wearing some stupid sign like the “I.A.L.A.C.” (I Am Lovable and Capable) badges of the 1970’s
If guns were the underlying cause of mass shootings, in schools or in other places, what conclusion should be drawn from the mass school knifings that took place in China on the very same day as the Sandy Hook killings? “BEIJING (Reuters) – A knife-wielding man slashed 22 children and an adult at an elementary school in central China on Friday, state media reported, the latest in a series of attacks on schoolchildren in the country.”
Actually, few people will wonder about the underlying cause of knife-wielding assailants because most media sources have buried that story while setting their sights; while aiming their weapons at gun control. Shame…no, curses…on those who are willing to destroy the rights of millions of law abiding citizens simply because a very few by comparison…evil ones who would manage to get weapons despite any and all gun/knife/poison control laws…choose to act with cruelty and evil intent.
I am relieved to hear that some in Hollywood are finally coming forward to admit that video game, movie, and television violence set the stage…and in all too many cases actually encourage …the unhinged, as well as the borderline unhinged, to pattern their thinking and behaviors after evil role models.
Another great problem in this culture of media violence is that immature brains all too often misinterpret what they see on screens. When I talk to students about death being permanent, many argue with me, pointing out that although Actor X was killed in a TV show on Friday night, the viewer noticed that Actor X in different clothing was back, alive and well, in a movie on Saturday. Try to argue points of existence, roles, playacting and symbolism with an immature non-thinker of any age.
The problem of violence in America stems from the rot in our culture, and the blatant display of evil-in-action on screens of all sizes. For borderline individuals, guns have become the means to act out Hollywood type fantasies plus take their personal hurt out on other people. In America, in China, and elsewhere, knives and other tools can serve the same purposes for such individuals. Whether killers and destroyers use guns, knives, poisons, hands-that-strangle, vehicular-manslaughter, dousing-with-gasoline-then-lighting-on-fire, or other means to maim and murder, the reality is that when someone wants to hurt and kill, there is virtually no stopping them.
It is imperative that we teach children and others not to want to kill. Additionally, we must identify the underlying currents that create Empty people who are willing to load guns and sharpen knives with the goal of hurting others. In her excellent book, The Sociopath Next Door, (a book I strongly recommend that Everyone read as a prophylactic against the “1 out of 25” dangerous persons who populate our families, our neighborhoods and our world, disrupting and damaging our lives), Dr. Martha Stout quotes William Ralph Inge, speaking early in the twentieth century,
“The proper time to influence the character of a child is about 100 years before he is born.”
Since I am a person who believes that I was born at least 100 years too late, I paid special attention when I read that.
While many are discussing the cultural problems of visual-to-behavioral violence; the breakdown of the family; the delegation of parental roles to visual media; and the loss of a national moral compass, I would like to also direct attention to the schools. As a baseline for our thinking, let us consider this: When my husband (born 1941) attended school in small town Iowa, he and many other boys carried their guns to school and stored them in unlocked lockers. Teenage boys; Unlocked lockers; Possibly dozens of guns in the school building. A massacre in the making? Not at all. The daily outcome was that the boys…as soon as school let out…went hunting so that families might have fresh meat on their tables for evening meals.
In those days, character and values were formed by wisdom that had come down through the culture from …oh, about 100 years prior. Now, our culture treats individuals as though we are all still small enough, and dumb enough, to put beans up our noses. Rampant stupidity causes our do-gooders and tunnel-visioned leaders to erroneously conclude that outlawing beans must surely be the answer.
Empty people, not loaded guns or sharp knives, kill and indeed our schools excel at creating Empty People: Empty people with high-to-excellent self esteem.
For seven or eight decades now, public schools have failed to teach every non-retarded child to read, write, cipher, build a knowledge base, and use all of these tools for Thinking, Analyzing, and Wisely Concluding. School leaders at all levels, as well as teachers, not only fail to identify and take action to prevent the problems and repercussions associated with misfits trying to survive in society, but these supposedly well educated persons have even failed to understand the most vitally important rule of Education…that reading levels are determined by vocabulary levels. Why, the NAEP had to conduct an expensive research project just to arrive at the same conclusion that non-college educated (often teenaged) teachers in one-room schoolhouses knew intuitively, and that societies have known for thousands of years. It is shocking, but not a surprise, that public schools are failing our children in all ways, then blithly releasing amoral, soulless individuals who are capable of preying upon…financially, morally…and even murdering others in society.
Empty lessons create gaps in thinking and knowledge. Empty lessons create huge Holes in Souls and Missing Morals. The emptiest of all lessons are the phony-baloney “Self Esteem Improvement” ones. People develop and improve self esteem by actually doing something; by actually accomplishing something; by actually learning something; by actually improving themselves. No one develops self esteem by participating in special school events designed for hollow non-achievement. The next time that you spot a child wearing some stupid sign like the “I.A.L.A.C.” (I Am Lovable and Capable) badges of the 1970’s, reread The Sociopath Next Door and increase your vigilance as you determinedly watch for Empty People With Loaded Guns.
Linda Schrock Taylor [send her mail] is a reading specialist, writer, and retired teacher. She is the author of Read Better! For Adults and Teens, a manual for those wanting to read better with greater ease and more efficiency. The book includes short important lessons for use of the code in which English is written, followed by 80 practice stories arranged incrementally, ranging in difficulty from mid-elementary through college levels, with graded scoring for charting progress. Linda is now writing Spell Better, her second in a series for teens and adults. Visit Linda’s website to see lesson samples: http://www.ReadWriteSpellBetter.com.
So, how about those fuel prices? Fun ain’t it to spend more on filling up your tank than it costs for a decent meal at a second-rate restaurant?
So you thought you could afford that $45,000 truck and the $700/month payment.
Guess again.
After suckering everyone in with low monthly payments for obscenely overpriced clunkers, the Biden Junta spent 2021 setting up to let you out of your house because COVID was over, only to ensure you couldn’t afford to drive anywhere.
It was policy, folks. It’s always been policy.
Everything else they tell you is a lie.
High gas prices are NOT just a function of high oil prices, supported by purposeful disruptions to the market thanks to the slap-happy sanctions machines in DC and Brussels.
High gas prices are NOT even a function of more than 2 million barrels per day of refining capacity taken offline during the unnecessary and terminally-damaging COVID lockdowns.
High gas prices are most certainly NOT a function of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.
All of these things can be overcome by the ingenuity of human beings in times of chaos. If there’s one thing I have faith in is people’s ability to re-route their behavior and find workable solutions.
The natural response to an arbitrage opportunity always brings out the best in people, as they find ways to supply the things you demand to live your life.
The only thing standing in the way of that, invariably, is your government. In the case of the U.S., the Biden Junta has done everything possible to ensure that not only would gas prices rise to a completely unacceptable level, but that they would stay there until what’s left of the middle class is left broke and out of gas by the side of the road.
A couple of months ago there was a little announcement that the Biden administration would raise the cap on ethanol blending into gasoline stocks beyond the 10% limit in order to alleviate the ‘gas shortage.’
But strictly speaking, the libertarian philosophy offers no solutions to specific problems. That’s not what it does. It is not itself a solution. Rather, it describes an institutional environment in which imaginative people are free and motivated to discover innovative solutions to individual and collective problems.
“What’s the libertarian solution to social or economic problem X? How about problem Y or Z?”
No libertarian needs to wait long before hearing such questions. But strictly speaking, the libertarian philosophy offers no solutions to specific problems. That’s not what it does. It is not itself a solution. Rather, it describes an institutional environment in which imaginative people are free and motivated to discover innovative solutions to individual and collective problems.
That environment has moral, cultural, economic, and legal dimensions, all grounded in self-ownership, respect for others, property, competition, persuasion, and consent, as opposed to government authority, monopoly, decree, and coercion. The cultural dimension is especially important, though often unappreciated. Widespread resentment toward other people’s success, for example, is literally deadly, not only for those targeted but for society at large, especially those at the bottom.
Thus when a libertarian says freedom or the free market will solve a particular problem (if politicians stand aside), what sounds like an impossibly oversimplified response is actually highly complex. In contrast to the politicians’ boasts, note the humility here. Confidence in market problem-solving is confidence in free human imagination dispersed among countless individuals throughout society. Who can say who will come up with the solution? No one. That in part is why we need everyone to be free.
The unique grounding of the libertarian environment has far different built-in incentives for problem-solvers than any state-based alternative. State problem-solving is characterized by centralized bureaucracy, artificial knowledge constraints, nonconsensual financing (taxation) that precludes feedback, profligacy (producing the disruptive knowledge distortions of debt and inflation), and significant unaccountability. In contrast, social- or market-based problem-solving is characterized by multiple knowledge centers, competition, consensual financing, and the profit motive. In that environment proposed solutions are subjected to intellectual and product competition, which yields better knowledge than other arrangements. F. A. Hayek called competition a “discovery” process. I think of it as the universal solvent.
In the market, problems are potential profit opportunities for entrepreneurs, and as we know, the profit motive is potent. The entrepreneur’s job is to figure out where and how resources are used suboptimally relative to what people (not politicians) want most. Solving a problem often requires shifting scarce resources and labor from one purpose to another.
How can anyone know what’s the best way to go? Entrepreneurs find clues to that question in market prices, which is why the price system is so important and must not be tampered with by politicians and bureaucrats. If an entrepreneur is correct when thinks he can buy a quantity of resources and hire labor at one price per finished-product unit and make something people will want to buy at a sufficiently higher price, he will earn a profit. That’s a sign the enterprise solved a problem for its customers. Profit in the free market (absent government intervention) is a reward for success. It’s not a dirty word.
Indispensable to the entrepreneurial function is the consumers’ freedom to accept or reject offers as they see fit. Both responses communicate vital information to the problem-solvers. Coercion, the government’s way of doing things, sabotages the function.
The freedom-based process is vital in our world of scarcity, trade-offs, and imperfect knowledge. Improvement is always possible, and imperfect knowledge is not the only reason. Another is that people’s preferences change. What they wanted yesterday they may not want tomorrow, especially if something new comes along. A third reason is that the array of resources changes, with new materials, technologies, and organization methods proving superior to the old. Government restraints on this process do a disservice to people trying to improve their lives, especially those who have yet to “make it.”
But, regardless of how often Biden flees back to Delaware, he is in the limelight far more than during the campaign. He struggled to find his way off stage after a speech, and the video of him attempting to shake hands with invisible people on stage was jolting.
President Biden often looks like a punch-drunk old fighter sent into the ring once too often. At this point, the only thing lower than Biden’s approval numbers is his energy level. Is Uncle Joe too old to rebound?
At this point, Biden is running on little more than fumes and righteousness. In his televised antigun speech Thursday night, Biden proclaimed that he expected most people “to turn your outrage into making this issue [assault weapons] central to your vote.” Biden’s histrionic spiel was far more likely to turbo-charge gun owners than gun banners and could be another coffin nail for Democratic candidates in middle America. Biden perennially tells audiences that banning assault weapons is justified because the Second Amendment didn’t permit Americans to own cannons—a falsehood that even the Washington Post has repeatedly derided.
Inflation is the top issue by a wide margin for Americans nowadays. Biden’s inflation will soon have inflicted a 10 percent cut in the purchasing power of Americans’ paychecks. But Biden is indignant at criticism of his policies. When Peter Doocy of Fox News asked about the impact in January, Biden called him “a stupid son of a bitch.” In a March speech to Democratic members of Congress, Biden raged at being blamed for inflation: “I’m sick of this stuff! … We have to talk about it because the American people think the reason for inflation is the government spending more money. Simply. Not. True.”
Biden first tried to blame greedy corporations for inflation and then began railing about “Putin’s price hikes.” Didn’t work. Last week, the Washington Post revealed that Biden now blames White House aides who “were not doing a good job explaining the causes of inflation and what the administration is doing about it.” But his aides have a hell of a challenge when Biden boasts “a gallon of gas is down 14 percent today”—as he claimed based solely on a happy fantasy on March 9. Even wackier? Last Friday, Biden boasted that Americans feel more “financially comfortable,” thanks to his policies.
Biden won in 2020 in part because he promised in the final debate: “I’m going to shut down the virus.” Biden bet his presidency on covid vaccines. When their efficacy faded, Biden dictated a “jab or job” ultimatum to more than a hundred million Americans. The Supreme Court rebuffed most of that mandate but not before the omicron variant was causing a million new cases a day and obliterating Biden’s covid victory boasts. Last month, the White House predicted up to a hundred million new covid cases this fall—after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted that almost half of covid fatalities now are among the fully vaxxed. In lieu of more reliable vaccines, Team Biden is pressuring social media companies to crack down on “disinformation” that casts doubts on presidentially ordained injections.
Biden has a long DC reputation for trampling the facts. His first presidential bid collapsed in the late 1980s, thanks to his brazen plagiarism of a British politician. But the Democrats in 2020 were desperate to find someone who could defeat Donald Trump. Their verdict: “He’s a pathological liar, but he’s our pathological liar.” During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden was shielded by a phalanx of media allies and former government honchos who helpfully buried issues such as the damning revelations of Hunter Biden’s laptop (first exposed by the New York Post).
In what may be the high water mark for the “Soros DAs,” San Francisco voters have, by a large majority, decided to remove District Attorney Chesa Boudin from office. Crime surged while Boudin fired prosecutors, leading a Chinese-American community spearheaded drive to return to some sanity in SF. Will L.A. and the rest of California follow? Also today, are you ready for the Jan. 6th Commission propaganda hearings?
MCViewPoint 