Shooting Back

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The second amendment is also an area of increasing logical failure. And factual failure. The killing of innocents is a crime no matter how much news is generated. When a group of innocents are killed, and the news multiplies, along with public upset, and the killer has used a gun to do the killing, there is no longer room for common sense. All gun owners are blamed… and responsible.

Guns are objects, mechanisms, machines. None does anything until intimately directed by a human. Ahh, but they facilitate the doing, don’t they? Any sane proto-murderer would blithely discard whatever hatred, passion, ill-will or socio-pathology that may have bubbled up prior, when faced with the lack of a firearm. Right?

Well, no, silly, but at least he or she won’t be able to kill as quickly as he or she might with one of those… those… scary-looking GUNS. For Heaven’s sake, use your head!

Maybe that’s right; how silly of me.

On the other hand, Timothy McVeigh managed to quite efficiently eradicate 168 of our fellow citizens and injure nearly 800 more without a single bullet or gun to fire it.

Oh! Be serious! An act like that takes a lot of planning and preparation. Most gun-involved deaths are spur-of-the-moment acts of passion or stupidity. There’s no point to be made bringing up Oklahoma City.

You know, you’re probably right… if your point is how the government can make it harder to be an efficient killer. In fact, that is where the argument is, isn’t it? If we can somehow make murder by amateurs harder to do, we’ll save a few lives. And, as any person who shrinks from the silhouette of a scary assault rifle will quickly tell you, “If it saves only one life of an innocent child, it’s worth it!”

Maybe that is sufficient reason to lop off a chunk of the Constitution, but I’m not so sure. To start with, look at the nature of past and proposed gun bans and their possible positive impacts.
The 1994 “Assault Weapons Ban” had a nebulous impact on U. S. so-called “mass murders.” A stricter ban in Australia appears to have had a more significant effect on multiple-murder events, there, but a single statistic does not a story tell. There are so many social-demographic differences between Australia and the United States that a far broader analysis is needed before we should try to set public policy (and Constitutional subversion) based on an apparent impact on a very different population.
Most of the parameters of the “ban” were derived from the appearance of the weapons, and not their functions. The one key exception was the size of the magazines, which could have a limited role in inhibiting a mass-murder. How would that work?

Suppose the situation were like that at Newtown, Connecticut. A sick, twisted, bent-on-mass-murder dope breaks in to a purposely gun-free school. Instead of a 20 or more cartridge clip, he is limited by the availability of no more than 9-shot clips. So, he brings 2 extras, with one in the rifle. As soon as the first few shots are fired, everyone is scrambling to save him or her self or to protect the kiddos. No one is charging at the murderer. When the clip empties there would be a brief quiet period – but very brief: maybe 5 seconds while the clip is popped and a new one inserted and the slide pulled to “cock” the rifle again. The next 9 shots will fully terrorize a grade-school staff that is not only ignorant of firearms, but who fear them, firing or not.

Murderous dope will get his 27 shots off with no problem. If that Newtown numbskull had more clips he could have walked to another classroom and murdered some more people. He shot himself when police arrived, evidently acting out a suicide ritual he had long contemplated.

So the 1994 “Assault Weapons Ban” would have made no difference unless the rifle, itself, had not been available at all. In all likelihood, the difference would have been that the murderer would have made more shots with pistols. One can imagine that in lieu of a large-magazine rifle, our knucklehead would have brought maybe 3 or 4 handguns and equally terrorized the school’s population with 20 to 30 bullets fired slightly slower than with a scary-looking Bushmaster. No one there was prepared or equipped to challenge him, either physically or psychologically. Dope’s mom could have prevented the tragedy by keeping her legal firearms away from her known-to-be-disturbed son.

Essentially, all the non-NRA proposals that have spawned from the Newtown tragedy will have one basic effect: children in school buildings will be left defenseless, but, since murderers will eventually be a bit less efficient, a few fewer kids will be murdered than otherwise. Hopefully, mom and dad, your defenseless kiddo will be one of the lucky ones.

Those who are aiming at complete confiscation of all but BB guns, could, if their hare-brained concept ever comes to pass, conceivably save most of the TWO hundred lives lost to non-drug, non-gang, non-criminal gun events each year. They might prevent a few suicides, too, and consider the loss of freedom well worth the cost.

What they won’t prevent are the tens of thousands of criminal gun events, because criminals don’t register their weapons and can hide them fairly easily when the Gestapo comes looking for them. I hope that no one reading this is looking forward to living in a country that can even attempt to confiscate private property (or forcibly buy-back) from tens of millions of owners. It’s the same country that doesn’t enforce the gun laws it has now.

All plans for restricting guns and their law-abiding owners can be seriously considered only by putting on blinders to some serious, serious reality. There are many myths that liberals and those further left, continuously proclaim as truth, and which all the people that matter believe. Here are a few:
• The presence of guns will spur an increase in gun accidents, stupid gun crimes, and random, foolish shootings. The opposite is what reality is, in fact.
• Attackers will take a defender’s gun and use it against him or her. This happens extremely rarely, and can be made even rarer with proper education. Rare means a literal handful of times each year. It is more common that unarmed defenders wrest weapons away from attackers.
• Gun deaths increase, overall, because of the availability of so-called (ie. “scary-looking”) assault rifles. In truth only about 6% of shootings involve such weapons, and not even 6% of deaths. Most deadly shootings are done with handguns, often with small calibers.

Finally, the far more important statistic, the far more life-preserving and crime-preventing statistic is this one: EVERY YEAR IN THE UNITED STATES, PRIVATE FIREARMS ARE USED IN SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 830,000 AND 2 MILLION DEFENSIVE EVENTS. Most of these involve no discharge of the weapon, but not only lead to hundreds of thousands of apprehensions, but prevent many tens of thousands of other violent crimes because perpetrators encountered an armed defender, leading to arrests. The logical argument is that we could not enjoy a civil society without private gun ownership.

The only truly effective change that should come from Newtown, Aurora and other such murders of defenseless innocents, would be to teach gun safety and handling to every child, starting around age 8 or 9, including proper self-defense. Teach it right in public school. It is certainly more productive and worthy than lesson plans based on homosexuality and gender-identity problems. Worse, they teach kids how to have sex “safely” in far too early years. There are thousands more lives ruined with pre-marital sex by kids, than by guns. Taking away the unalienable right of self-defense, and damaging the Constitution in the process is a “solution” that deserves the very highest skepticism and suspicion.

Stupid is as stupid does.

Brussels

Obviously the correct response for the U. S. to the murders in Brussels… (wait for it), is to invite a few tens of thousands of Syrian or other refugees to our country. This will have two guaranteed effects: One is that they will know we love them and sympathize with their unfortunate circumstances; then it will keep Europe safer. It’s a win-win! Certainly they will be grateful and become model citizens.
I would refer you to Prudence Leadbetter’s “Book of Obvious” on Immigration. If you would like a copy of the “Book of Obvious” just say so in your comments. Leave your eMAIL so that we can arrange the shipping. Nominal expense.

When Work Is a Spectator Sport

06062011_McD_Robot_2_cropped_articleThe lack of knowledge, especially skilled knowledge, is forcing production managers, from McDonald’s to General Motors, to automate. This isn’t new. Until quite recently there was value added to both products and services by the presence of a competent human. Such beings are becoming rarer. Whether one wishes to blame education – and not just public – or welfare and dissolution of the “family,” America is turning out relatively fewer highly competent, decision-capable graduates than in the first 175 years of our constitutional history. Such a societal change has severe consequences. We can see it reflected in our latest choice of president and other elected leaders. It is an outgrowth of essential socialism: the dissipation of responsibility, specifically, personal responsibility.

So far we have limited our concentrations of incompetent adults to inner cities, and built a sloppy welfare industry to keep them from causing too much trouble. No one running for president in 2016 is talking about how the next 50 years of public policy will significantly change that pattern. The current president, Obama, has been struggling against laws at every level to… well, make it worse. Our nation’s future will be that much more painful.

One approach has been to inject “federal” dollars into college tuitions through ridiculous loan obligations that some pandering politician will forgive someday. The problems, of course, come from wrong attitudes, and those come from wrong governing. We have taught our least responsible residents to hate their masters (who hand out the sustenance). Education is to blame for a lot of this, too, which is to say, government, again.

Now this is translating into demands for higher wages for very low-skilled, entry-level jobs. Those jobs are relatively low-paying because they are tied to selling relatively inexpensive products and services in a marketplace that demands those low costs. As the cost of, say, frying prepared french-fries and filling paper containers with them, increases by 40% or 50% with artificially high wages, the owners of the french-fries, Frialators, electric bills, buildings, uniforms, liability insurances, payroll benefit obligations, training costs, supervisory costs, advertising expenses, franchise fee obligations, parking lots, snow-removal charges and sundry materials, rags, grease trap cleanouts and so much more, will have to find a way to CUT that arbitrary cost increase. Believe it or not, the preparation and dispensing of french-fries was automated – or robotized, if you will – over 44 years ago.

But the integration of all the steps for the early machines to do that relatively simple, repetitive task, was not smooth and didn’t justify the added capital cost for the complex machinery. In part, this was because the designers were trying to mimic humans in the performance of those steps, and modern computerization wasn’t available. New designs, already in test, are not based on human workspace; they are smaller and designed from freezer to fryer to deliver bags of hot, salted fries when needed. The advantages – aside from almost no payroll costs, health insurance or withheld taxes – include better portion control, increased employee safety, reduced waste, fresher net product at point of sale, and reduced noise in the workplace.

And… lower cost-per-portion, enabling the restaurant owner to keep his or her prices lower than those available in traditional eateries. That is the business model, after all.

At one point in the late 1980’s, nearly 10% of all employed workers had once worked at a McDonald’s. There they had learned to keep schedules, serve real customers, show up on time, dress presentably, follow directions and respect managers. Those opportunities are now perceived as oppression. The claimed needs of low-skilled potato fryers threaten to drive costs for such employees sharply upwards with no possible way to increase production of fried potatoes more than a percent or two. Higher-paid workers will not increase demand for fried potatoes; higher resulting prices for fried potatoes will significantly reduce demand for them. This will reduce demand for potato-frying employees and all of their training and re-training and other costs, and hasten the installation of robotic frying systems. Those will be “trained” by the manufacturer through software and never complain about their low-paid jobs.

There will be employees in another place – or country – who will manufacture the robotized fryers. However many of those there are, will make possible the frying production of ten to twenty times as many on-site employees. The low, nearly UN-skilled people, who thought they could make $600 a week resentfully frying potatoes, will remain on welfare. It is not, and has never been the duty of a McDonald’s operator to correct the failings of families, schools and individuals. It is his or her job to earn a profit in the business. “Displaced” potato fryers will have to find a job that can’t be automated.

The example, above, will play out in literally hundreds of occupations in the next 20 to 30 years. This process may be more rapid, but not differ materially from the industrial changes that Luddites fought in the 18th and 19th centuries. Resisting it still draws the opprobrium of “Luddite.” However, in a mostly settled world, carrying 7+ Billion people who depend upon remote sources of critical materials and finished products, there are not the options to “check out” of the labor market and simply provide for oneself. The accelerating robotic upheaval in the means of production will displace a very large fraction of the least-skilled “workers” that we seem to be creating at an equal rate. This cannot go on for long.

Increasingly, a shrinking number of “producers” will own the production upon which we all depend.

Monopolization, always preferred by owners of production, will multiply by default. What will be the political response – indeed, international, GEO-political response?

Will governments appropriate profits to finance growing dependency? Will producers keep being productive if there are no rewards? History teaches ‘no.’ Will governments attempt to nationalize all production? History teaches us that such a reaction is almost instinctual among government-types. The past also shows that general living standards will decline under communism.

How can “we” maintain technological progress and living improvements, high efficiencies that make living costs decline, overall? Will governments force producers to break up their processes to maximize net jobs? Will work weeks decline to 32 hours? Twenty-four?

What will happen to quality if three people must be trained and maintained to accomplish what we consider one “job,” today?

If “products” like clothing, tools, appliances and even houses become much cheaper because of robot production, and fewer and fewer people have high-paying jobs, such that there are fewer people who can afford even those cheaper things, how will “we” make sure that everyone receives the essentials of life?

This looming, virtually unavoidable consequence of robotics, contains the seeds of the greatest political stresses and conflicts a republic might face. Unlike the generational traditions of public assistance for our official underclass, the need to “share” productive surplus with large populations of historically productive families will require better application of political / police force than we have experienced – and rewarded – to date.

Political power has been granted to people of varying honesty, indeed, for a lifetime, who can trick a majority of voters into paying and borrowing enough to pacify the underclass while guiding federal advantage to favored industries and institutions. It has been shamelessly dishonest and the reason we face many, many trillions of dollars in debt. That is, much of our economic “success” and relative luxury has been a hoax – a lie – and about to be stressed beyond reason. One path, likely to be recommended by controlling types, is for “government” to appropriate larger fractions of productive surplus. They always have the answers. The redistribution of those resources – assuming they continue to be produced – will generate fierce, possibly insurgent conflict. The stability of social function and public utilities, could devolve into police power: a police state, in other words. Culture and heritage be damned.

Yours in liberty, Prudence.

In The Tradition of Sam Adams


Prudence says…
There was a meeting of the Sam Adams Society in the Holy City of Lowell the other day (hey, it’s as holy as any holy city in the Western Hemisphere) and in the process of a 2-hour lunch the 4 members pretty well dissected current events and partially predicted the future. Because we are conservatives we tend to be right about many things. Anyway, one of the members is very close to Prudence’ heart.

Naturally, the “Trump situation” was discussed, along with a number of “RINO” machinations, world economic problems, tax policies and self-driving cars and other robots.

None of this is meant to imply that Trump is a robot – far from it. In his way he’s brilliant, as only a human could be.

Some have wondered if Mr. Trump is a plant, intended to destroy conservatism… or to destroy the Republican party (the two movements being only vaguely congruent), or to help Hillary in some way? Do you really think the Clintonistas are that devious, that Machiavellian, that mendacious? Well, okay, but do you think they are also clever enough to do it? Maybe, but I doubt that Trump would be the guy to try it with. Like I said, he’s pretty sharp.

He’s also stubborn, acerbic, annoying, independent and brash… and he’s on a mission. Men like him because he sounds like an actual guy instead of some feminized fop who’s afraid to offend someone. Women like him because he sounds like he won’t take any guff from anyone who’d threaten their safety or that of their families.

At least two of the Sam Adams members voted for Cruz, so the meeting was not a Trump lovefest. However, the possibility of his candidacy doing damage to the Republican party seems quite real. As one functionary with a good view of it says: If he wins the nomination it MAY hurt the party; if the insiders yank the nomination away from him, it WILL hurt the party. Talk about the horns of a dilemma.

On the other hand, there is no way Trump can hurt conservatism. Conservatism is a body of age-old truths about history and human nature. Neither Trump nor anyone else can shake its foundations. Nor does it matter if Trump is, himself, a staunch conservative! That argument is a bright, crimson herring among dozens strewn by the Republican establishment.

Trump’s main qualities to conservatives include the fact that he can work with them – unlike the establishment RINOs and unlike establishment liberals and socialists. And, he does have some instinctively conservative ideas which damn few others have or are willing to express. This is said in the sense that the first task of conservatives is to conserve the integrity and ideas of
America that make us a great nation.

Finally, it can be said that of all the people vying for the world’s biggest job, we know more about what Trump will DO if elected than we know of ANY other, mendacity notwithstanding.

Immigration Fundamentals

illegal_alien_minors_come_to_us_on-trains_2The administrations of the last 3 presidents, possibly last 7 presidents – basically every presidency during which Edward M. Kennedy was a senator and declared “socialist,” has failed to varying degrees in terms of securing the borders of this nation. None has failed to the extent of the Obama administration. The misfeasance of Homeland Security, Interior, Department of Justice and the Department of State, since 2009, is mind-boggling.

If you aren’t sure what boggling is when applied to minds, try to imagine growing up in a nation of fifty states, each of which knows its own borders and limits. Overlaying these states is a single, external border – a construct of national identity that stands for the PRIMARY covenant the federal government has with the citizens of all 50 states – and with the states, themselves. That covenant is to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Inherent in that defense is the inviolability of our national border… by definition.

Some might consider that this is a problem for “border” states, but, since the inception of air travel, every state that has an airport is a “border” state. By secretively shuttling illegal entrants all over the country, the Obama traitors have driven this point home to every state.

Inherent in that inviolability is control of who can cross that border – anywhere – whether entering or exiting. Put another way, one could say that failure to control the border at any point, in either direction, is the same as having no border. More seriously, conscious or intentional failure to control the border would be abrogation of the most fundamental contract the federal government has with every citizen. It is the clearest expression of treason, by definition. Those whose office requires swearing to defend the Constitution of the United States, cannot support that document – that covenant between U. S. citizens and the federal government they and their respective states created – and fail to respect and defend the collective border with other nations.

The past several years have been an organized travesty. Thousands – tens of thousands – of “children” up to ages of 35 or more, have been welcomed at the border, loosely organized and delivered to their illegal-entrant cousins or supposed guardians – all self-declared – in dozens of cities across the country. It is a pattern totally indefensible, except by those who adopt a strange, growing way of thinking.

These are they who believe that the United States is less legitimate than other nations for a number of reasons. One is that it was founded and formed by Christians. Christianity has two failings in their eyes: 1) It imposes moral values upon non-believers, who perceive themselves as free of moral judgments since they are not Christians; and, 2) It is a religion of White people, some of whom owned slaves 150 years ago. Since slavery, or “racism” is ineradicable, even if invisible, nothing those old dead white people believed, including the principles of America’s founding, and the Constitution, in particular, is legitimate or worth defending. These mental errors justify open borders in their minds. One of these dopes is now president. God save us.

Prudence Leadbetter

A New Dialectic Trumps All

Ever since the Serpent convinced Eve and Adam to break God’s Law, numerous serpents have worked tirelessly to move the goal line farther and farther away from truth. In American politics since Bill Clinton, their work has taken a new slither, and you can see it’s collaborative parts in the “Stop Trump” firestorm.
With their fellow bottom-feeders, the liberal “press,” leftists have created a foul narrative that makes Trump worse than Bull Connor (infamous Democrat party leader near Selma, Alabama), as Evil as Hitler, possibly as racist as Harry and Robert Byrd. The picture has been painted Jackson Pollock-like, in shades of hatred only Liberals can splatter by the pails-full.
Into the artificially wide gulf between modern American communist campaigning and what is actually quite rational reaction to the destruction of American institutions and morals, strides the beatific Hillary Clinton, posing as a “Centrist.” She’s more of an Alinskyite than Barack Hussein Obama, and a more effective far-left hustler than even Bernie Sanders, but in the cartoonish images the liberal press has conjured, she can claim sensibility compared to the Donald. Very neat. Don’t fall for it.

Prudence

Minimum Wage hokum

PRUDENCE SAYS: I don’t like the concept of minimum wage. Why can’t a person agree to work for an amount of compensation? Why can’t a person offer an amount of money, or, say, ice cream, to get some wood chopped or something, and another free, sovereign citizen agree to accept two ice-cream cones of his or her choice in exchange for the chopping of that wood?
I’ll tell you why: governments can’t tax ice cream. The greatest beneficiary of “raising the minimum wage” is… wait for it… the government! You see, da’ gummints think employers are 1) greedy; 2) lying connivers; 3) stingy and miserly; 4) not to be trusted. Plus, they don’t like them. Everyone knows businesses all have a room in the back that’s full of cash – cash they are just too mean to share with their down-trodden, exploited employees.
What happens when the “minimum” wage is increased? Income taxes increase. Social Security contributions increase. Medicare taxes increase. State income taxes increase. Government types, because they have no understanding of business, freedom, free enterprise, profit and the multiplication of wealth, don’t grasp that all of those revenue increases they are hoping for, aren’t going to happen (with a key exception we’ll get to) and that, in fact, overall revenue will probably go down, as follows:
1) There will be fewer employees overall. Raising people’s pay doesn’t increase sales or profits; it only raises expenses for the employer, as in, raising the cost of goods and services he or she is trying to sell. Government types think the employer can just take less filthy lucre for himself and share it with the least productive, least profitable employees. The employer can only reduce the quality and value of what he sells, or reduce payroll some other way, usually by eliminating the least productive of the least productive employees, and then pay no taxes for them, at all. Indeed, the newly unemployed start collecting welfare from others’ taxes. 2) Lower taxes from less profitable businesses and, here and there, the end of businesses altogether.
Now, here’s the key exception: Many negotiated labor contracts are tied to multiples of the minimum wage. As a result, raising the minimum wage will eventually raise lots of higher wages and we’re back to the real reasons: 1) buying votes with other people’s money; and, 2) raising taxes. How benevolent can they get? People at the bottom are still out of work, of course, except now they are unemployed from a $12 or $15 job instead of a $9 one.
Here’s what may be the worst effect of mandating higher pay for less desirable workers: The cost of discriminating against them becomes LOWER. If a desirable, friendlier, neater, better-performing and acting employee now costs the same as a poorer, less-friendly, less manageable employee, there will be far fewer of the less-desirable actually employed. Prior to the mandate, less-desirable employees had a cost advantage that would encourage employers to hire them for less-valuable tasks. If that cost difference were $10, lots of less-desirable people would get a chance to work. If the difference is mandated to be $0, hardly any will get that chance. Did you know that this was the exact strategy of unions under apartheidt in South Africa? The unions “went to bat” for blacks by insisting that everyone’s wages be equal! Sounded great, but the purpose of it was to make sure fewer white unionists had to compete with black applicants.
Unfortunately, our government “… of, by and for the people…” is demanding that every employer be subject to racial and other quotas, regardless (almost) of abilities to function at a profit. Things are becoming less American bit by bit. I don’t like it.