Category: Editorial O’ The Day

Bloomberg Tries To Control Others Because He Can’t Control Himself

He’s an arrogant snob, but we already knew that.

There used to be a social stigma against believing and behaving as if one is entitled to tell perfect strangers how to speak, what to do, or how to live.

Sadly, that stigma is all but gone today. More people than ever are willing to use the force of government to compel their fellow citizens to comply with their own changing set of mandates.

I am fascinated by the causes that have compelled so many Americans to lose perspective on this fundamental principle of freedom.

Take Michael Bloomberg, please! What drives this man with the freedom to enjoy his wealth in 65 billion different ways, to spend his time trying to curtail the freedoms and choices of others, even down to the size soda they drink and the amount of salt they ought to be allowed to sprinkle on their spinach?

Coloradans know all too well that the former New York Mayor and Democratic Presidential Candidate spent boatloads of cash pushing state legislators to clamp down on their God-given right to defend themselves and their families. He has pushed freedom-sucking and blatantly biased “Red Flag” bills in numerous other states around the country.

Mayor Busybody simply can’t stop telling others what to do. It seems to be an obsession with him—or maybe, a compulsion too. I gained insight into this when I returned to a New York Times article from 2009 that described Bloomberg’s eating habits.

“He dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot. And his snack of choice? Cheez-Its.”

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is about control. Controlling one’s out-of-control thoughts, feelings and behavior by attempting to control his external environment. Consciously or unconsciously, those afflicted do this in vain, to the point where they feel unable to control the compulsion as well (as in excessive hand-washing).

Most sufferers aren’t dangerous unless they have 65 billion dollars and a God-complex.

The Times went on to report this delicious insight:

“…he (Bloomberg) is known to grab food off the plates of aides and, occasionally, even strangers. (“Delicious,” he declared recently, after swiping a piece of fried calamari from an unsuspecting diner in Staten Island.)”

Behavior like this exhibits a staggering and extreme lack of boundaries. The Times seems to only snicker at this, but it’s painfully clear that Bloomberg has great difficulty respecting the basic boundaries of civil society. No wonder it’s so easy for him to help himself to your freedoms and your choices, when he can’t stop helping himself to your calamari.

As a rule of thumb, the most flawed and arrogant people are most likely to believe they know what’s best for everyone else and should be allowed to trample on our freedoms. Those who are secure and comfortable in their own skin do not have a need to control others. They have the basic self-confidence to tolerate and even enjoy the uncertainty of others’ choices and behavior. They reserve more extreme action for times in which there has been the actual commission of a crime.

These cultural underpinnings of freedom have been essential to what is America. Socialists have been systematically unraveling these norms in a big way. They have not only been more open about their ideology, they have been working feverishly to put it into practice and prepare more Americans to accept it.

How can we put an end to the presumptuousness of these troubled, would-be tyrants? First, we can return the stigma attached to telling other adults what to do and how to live.
 We can once again elevate the notion that the right to think one’s own thoughts, make one’s own choices, and live one’s own life is sacrosanct, regardless of how flawed, unpopular or even offensive those choices might be.

The imperative of Liberty requires that the individual take responsibility for his own successes and failures so he can learn from his mistakes. In protecting others’ freedoms, he protects his own. We used to know this but it has been unlearned.

As for Michael Bloomberg, he has begun to help our side more than he could have imagined. His off-the-scale ignorance and arrogance was hilariously exposed in his first Democrat primary debate.

If we play our cards right, Bloomberg could help us take a “Big Gulp” toward returning a sensible social stigma of proclaiming oneself as lord and master over the rest of us.

It’s a reasonable strategy, and it shouldn’t cost 65 billion dollars.

Joe Biden doesn’t get why gun rights are a bulwark against tyranny

Oh, Plugs understands RKBA alright enough. He, like other elitists, can’t stand that it confounds their tyrannical desires for power so they have to try an discount its effectiveness. And it does have effect on them, or they wouldn’t be so adamant about gun bans.

As Joe Biden’s flailing campaign headed toward a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire, the former vice president managed to get off some doozies. Perhaps most memorable was the time he jokingly dismissed a student questioner at one of his events as a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier.” But the man who first held federal office during the Nixon administration also managed to reveal his ignorance about one of the key arguments for gun rights.

“Those who say ‘the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots,’ a great line, well, guess what?” Biden lectured his audience in the “Live Free or Die” state. “The fact is, if you’re going to take on the government, you need an F-15 with Hellfire missiles. There is no way an AK-47 is going to take care of you.”

Even though we believe that the Biden candidacy is fated to pop soon, the argument he made is such a prevalent misrepresentation of why gun rights supporters view the Second Amendment as a bulwark against tyranny that it’s worth addressing.

Yes, of course, critics are right that civilian gun owners wouldn’t be able to overthrow completely a government willing to deploy a vast, expansive, and technologically elite military force. But that’s not the point. Our founders believed that every man has the fundamental right to resist tyranny.

Furthermore, one doesn’t need to defeat the government in armed civil war for an armed populace to still serve as a bulwark to tyranny. What matters is that citizens can put up a fight. An armed populace dramatically increases the cost of imposing and maintaining tyranny. Sure, perhaps a tyrannical future president could subdue a resistance, even in a country with more guns than people, such as America, but it would require months of bloody conflict, substantial military losses, and a protracted political nightmare.

Contrast this to a scenario in which an unarmed citizenry is completely at the government’s mercy, able to sweep in and crack down on its people with immediacy and ease. It’s clear that just imposing a higher cost to repression in and of itself is a check on would-be tyrants, even if the people couldn’t, in fact, overthrow the government successfully.

In China, the tyrannical government under Xi Jinping has launched a brutal crackdown on the Uighurs, rounding up people of the Muslim ethnic minority and putting them in reeducation camps. It’s an international outrage and human rights disaster. But it’s also one that would have been less likely to have happened if the 1 million Uighurs had AR-15s at home.

A similar scenario has unfolded in Russia, where Vladimir Putin’s regime has allowed a vicious, anti-gay purge to occur in the Chechnya region. Surely those innocent gay men facing electroshock torture would disagree with Biden’s assessment that a citizenry’s ability to offer armed resistance to tyranny isn’t worth protecting.

For a man who is running on his half-century of experience in politics, it’s amazing that Biden doesn’t understand the Second Amendment or its supporters.

Is Trump’s Unorthodoxy Becoming Orthodox?
The U.S. has become no better friend to an increasing number of allies and neutrals, and no worse an adversary to a shrinking group of enemies.

When candidate Donald Trump campaigned on calling China to account for its trade piracy, observers thought he was either crazy or dangerous.

Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump’s tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do.

The accepted bipartisan strategy was to accommodate, not oppose, China’s growing power. The hope was that its newfound wealth and global influence would liberalize the ruling Communist government.

Four years later, only a naif believes that. Instead, there is an emerging consensus that China’s cutthroat violations of international norms were long ago overdue for an accounting.

China’s re-education camps, its Orwellian internal surveillance, its crackdown on Hong Kong democracy activists, and its secrecy about the deadly coronavirus outbreak have all convinced the world that China has now become a dangerous international outlier

Trump courted moderate Arab nations in forming an anti-Iranian coalition opposed to Iran’s terrorist and nuclear agendas. His policies utterly reversed the Obama administration’s estrangement from Israel and outreach to Tehran.

Last week, Trump nonchalantly offered the Palestinians a take-it-or-leave-it independent state on the West Bank, but without believing that a West Bank settlement was the key to peace in the entire Middle East.

In short, Trump’s Middle East recalibrations won few supporters among the bipartisan establishment.

But recently, Europeans have privately started to agree that more sanctions are needed on Iran, that the world is better off with Soleimani gone, and that the West Bank is not central to regional peace.

Iran has now become a pariah. U.S.-sponsored sanctions have reduced the theocracy to near-bankruptcy. Most nations understand that if Iran kills Americans or openly starts up its nuclear program, the U.S. will inflict disproportional damage on its infrastructure — a warning that at first baffled, then angered, and now has humiliated Iran.

In other words, there is now an entirely new Middle East orthodoxy that was unimaginable just three years ago.

Suddenly the pro-Iranian, anti-Western Palestinians have few supporters. Israel and a number of prominent Arab nations are unspoken allies of convenience against Iran. And Iran itself is seemingly weaker than at any other time in the theocracy’s history.

Stranger still, instead of demanding that the U.S. leave the region, many Middle Eastern nations privately seem eager for more of a now-reluctant U.S. presence.

For the last 20 years, much of the American orthodoxy had agreed with Europe that the increasingly anti-democratic, pan-continental, and borderless European Union was the remedy to all of Europe’s past 20th-century catastrophes.

As a result, American presidents did not do much when EU nations typically racked up large trade surpluses with the U.S., often a result of asymmetrical fees, tariffs, and fines.

The U.S. largely ignored the increasingly anti-democratic and anti-American tone of the EU.

Nor did Americans object much when lackadaisical European NATO nations habitually welched on their defense-spending commitments.

But then Trump again blew up more old assumptions.

NATO will now only survive if its members keep their word and meet their spending promises. An economically stagnant, oil-hungry, and top-heavy EU will have to make radical changes, or it will sink into irrelevance and eventually break apart.

Trump got little credit for these revolutionary changes because he is, after all, Trump — a wheeler-dealer, an ostentatious outsider, unpredictable in action, and not shy about rude talk.

But his paradoxical and successful policies — the product of conservative, anti-war, and pro-worker agendas — are gradually winning supporters and uniting disparate groups.

After all, the U.S. is beefing up its military but using it only sparingly. It hits back hard at enemies but does not hit first. For Trump, being conventional is dangerous; being unpredictable is far safer.

For all Trump’s tough talk, his ace in the hole is American soft power — based on a globally dominant economy, its global lead in the production of gas and oil, and an omnipresent cultural juggernaut.

The result of the new orthodoxy is that the U.S. has become no better friend to an increasing number of allies and neutrals, and no worse an adversary to a shrinking group of enemies. And yet Trump’s paradox is that America’s successful new foreign policy is as praised privately as it is caricatured publicly — at least for now.

 

 

 

FROM THE EDITOR: Can someone explain the gun control endgame?

End game? They want to disarm the population, because they want you dead.

With another legislative session in Olympia, there is another slate of gun control bills that have conservative Facebook whipped up in a frenzy. For the umpteenth year, gun control is among the top issues when it comes to politics and that probably will never change.

We hear the same tired stats that have been thrown out and modeled for everyone’s argument. While I do like to look at some sort of basis when it comes to political topics, it almost appears facts really don’t matter anymore because you can cherry pick basically any subset of data to support your view.

A quick glance at cable news and you might think we have a huge gun violence problem since it is always being talked about. However the top killers in the U.S. for 2019 is:

647,457 dead from heart disease
599,108 from cancer
169,936 from accidents.
160,201 from chronic lower respiratory diseases
146,383 from strokes
121,404 from Alzheimer’s disease
83,563 from Diabetes
55, 673 from influenza and pneumonia

But how often do people draw opposing lines in the diabetes debate, or talk about the accident lobby? When did cable news do a wall-to-wall special report on heart disease?

Some of these causes of death due to poor life choices and poor diets. “Eat healthier” isn’t going to transition into a viable bill on Capitol Hill. Our healthcare system is hopelessly tangled, and while cancer treatment keeps getting better, we don’t have a cure. No amount of legislation is going to stop cancer. We usually don’t even think about the flu or pneumonia but they are actually big killers

When it comes to violence, there are some weird things to consider. You have definitions and terms thrown out there that aren’t clearly defined. There is no accepted definition of “mass shooting,” for example.

While the 30K+ people died in shootings is thrown around a lot in the media, the breakdown of these stats paint a slightly different picture.

In 2016, nearly 23K of these deaths were from suicides, 14K came from homicides and just 71 of them came from mass shootings.

But again this breakdown is really never presented to us by the media or politicians when discussing gun control bills. There was a recent story saying 2019 had the most number of mass shootings on record resulting in the death of 211 people combined.

It’s tragic. It’s sad to see. I’m not condoning gun violence or shrugging it. But when things get put into perspective, blunt objects kill more people a year than guns, with 443 people killed. There were 1,515 people who died in a year from knives or cutting objects. There were 672 deaths from fists, feet and other personal weapons according to the FBI. The maligned firearm – the rifle – was around 400 people.

To me, it begs the question, what good will gun control laws do if it “may” prevent 400 deaths? That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the 30K+ deaths a year. The handgun is the biggest perpetrator of shootings and a large majority of these are people taking their own lives – which is a completely different topic to unpack. While firearms make it easier, people have many other methods that could be used to take their own lives as well.

The reality and numbers smack into what is coming from bills in Olympia and how the argument is framed. Heck the recent rally of thousands of gun rights activists in Virginia was called a “White Nationalists gathering” and the rally was portrayed as something that could erupt in violence at any point. You know what happened? Nothing. People just showed that they want to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.

I was asked “wouldn’t you feel uncomfortable if you were among that group?”

No. No one is going to mess with an armed group of people. Gun owners to me are the people who follow the laws, and I’ve never felt uncomfortable around 2nd Amendment enthusiasts. On the flip side, a recent shooting in Seattle showed that a criminal not following gun laws currently on the books had no problem getting a firearm — again proving our government’s inability to control guns except by making law-abiding gun owners criminals with sweeping rule changes.

I’ve said before, there is plenty of dialogue that needs to happen in this country. I, for one, would like to see more gun training, gun safety courses and more teaching moments. The anti-gun movement is so patently ignorant about how guns even operate, how can they govern them? More information needs to be spread.

But gun control narratives and misrepresentations get spun. It is a perfectly suited political football. Both sides can form their ranks, talk about how the other side is either taking away rights, crazy, out of touch or hellbent on turning America into a hellscape.

But why?

With no solution reached in decades of gun debate, what exactly are the goals? Prevent 400 gun deaths out of 38K? Take guns away from law abiding citizens while criminals can still acquire guns? I would just like someone to lay out their end goals as opposed to root for their team in the debate

Fighting off assaults on Second Amendment

Had 22,000 people showed up in Richmond, Virginia, to demand stronger gun control laws, it is a safe bet that proponents of them would pronounced the crowd to be conclusive proof most Americans want such restrictions.

But when a group estimated at that size demonstrated on Monday against new firearms ownership limits, some gun control advocates insisted the crowd was small — and evidence not many people worry about Second Amendment rights.

“I was prepared to see a whole lot more people show up than actually did, and I think it’s an indication that a lot of this rhetoric is bluster, quite frankly,” commented state Delegate Chris Hurst, a Democrat representing an area in western Virginia. In fairness to Hurst, it needs to be noted he has a personal stake in gun control; in 2015, his television journalist girlfriend was killed in shooting.

More than “bluster” was on display Monday in Richmond, however. As The Associated Press noted, those who turned out to protest what they view as infringements upon Second Amendment rights did so in spite of very cold weather. They came from throughout Virginia, as well as some other states.

Prior to the rally, state officials including Gov. Ralph Northam had expressed concern about white supremacists attending the event. Members of some such groups did attend, according to observers — but the rally passed peacefully. There was just one arrest, of a woman who broke a state law by wearing a mask that covered her face.

What happened Monday in Richmond was a demonstration that many law-abiding citizens — representing millions of other like-minded Americans — are concerned about politicians who continue assaulting the Second Amendment. Officials in the Old Dominion, as well as elsewhere, shoud take note of that.

Virginia’s Second Amendment attack

By WALTER WILLIAMS

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam apologized for his medical school blackface stunt, but he will have much more to apologize for if he signs into law a bill that attacks Virginia residents’ Second Amendment rights.

The measure is Senate Bill 16, which would ban “assault” firearms and certain firearm magazines.

Since Democrats have seized control of Virginia’s General Assembly, they are likely to push hard for strict gun control laws. Those laws will have zero impact on Virginia’s criminals and a heavy impact on Virginia’s law-abiding residents who own, or intend to own, semiautomatic weapons for hunting or their protection.

As a friend once explained to me, “I carry a gun because I can’t carry a cop.”

I am proud of my fellow Virginians’ response to the attack on their Second Amendment rights. Firearm owners in the state have joined with sheriffs to form Second Amendment sanctuary counties. That means local authorities will be required to protect Second Amendment rights in the face of any attempt by Virginia’s General Assembly to abrogate those rights.

Eighty-six counties – over 90 percent – in the Virginia commonwealth have adopted Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions. Spotsylvania County’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve a resolution declaring that county police will not enforce state-level gun laws that violate Second Amendment rights.

Sheriff Chad Cubbage said, “Be it be known that the Page Sheriff hereby declares Page County, Virginia, as a ‘Second Amendment Sanctuary,’ and that the Page County Sheriff hereby declares its intent to oppose any infringement on the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.”

Culpeper County Sheriff Scott Jenkins made a vow during a Board of Supervisors meeting, where the board unanimously agreed to declare the county a Second Amendment constitutional county, to “properly screen and deputize thousands of our law-abiding citizens to protect their constitutional right to own firearms.”

In an attempt to appease residents’ resistance, Northam suggested there would be a ban on only the sales of semiautomatic rifles. He would allow gun owners to keep their current AR-15s and similar rifles as long as they registered them. Otherwise, they must surrender the rifles.

I’d urge Virginians not to fall for the registration trick. Knowing who owns what weapons is the first step to confiscation. Northam further warned, “If we have constitutional laws on the books, and law enforcement officers are not enforcing those laws on the books, then there are going to be consequences, but I’ll cross that bridge if and when we get to it.”

Some Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill say that local police who do not enforce gun control laws should face prosecution and even threats of the use of the National Guard.

Virginians must heed the words and capture the spirit of their two most distinguished residents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. These resolutions referred to the federal government, but are just as applicable to state governments in principle.

They said: “Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government … and whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”

Too many Americans view the Second Amendment as granting Americans the right to own firearms to go hunting and for self-protection. But the framers of our Constitution had no such intent in mind. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 46 wrote that the Constitution preserves “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … [where] the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote: “What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”

Similar quotations about our Founders’ desire for Americans to be armed against the possible abuses of government can be found at https://walterewilliams.com/quotations/arms/.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.