Displaying posts published in

August 2019

Flagging Future Killers Some useful steps to identify and deter dangerous individuals.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/flagging-future-killers-11565132691

The Dayton and El Paso shootings have spurred familiar calls for more gun control, and by all means let’s have a debate. But the focus should be on denying weapons to the potential killers rather than on gun laws that may be politically satisfying but won’t make much difference.

Start with the calls for more “background checks,” which implies none now exist. Yet nearly all gun purchasers today have their backgrounds checked on the spot via the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Most mass shooters obtained their guns through licensed dealers after checks, or from family members. The Dayton and El Paso killers, and the Gilroy, Calif., shooter of late July obtained their firearms legally.

Democrats want to expand background checks to person-to-person sales, though policing that would be a challenge as most such sales could be done off the books. They also want to extend to 10 days from three the amount of time dealers must wait to get a response from the background check system before proceeding with a sale. Senators Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) and Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) want background checks to cover unlicensed sales at gun shows and online, but exempt sales between friends and family.

Congress should have that debate, but no one should think they would reduce the number of mass shootings. Most mass shooters don’t have a criminal history that would pop up in the background system. There is also no evidence that longer waiting periods reduce suicides, homicides or mass shootings. Determined killers can always get a weapon.

UNRWA Donors Put Off by Sex, Lies, Nepotism (but not Terrorism) By Lori Lowenthal Marcus

https://saraacarter.com/unrwa-donors-put-off-by-sex-lies-nepotism-but-not-terrorism/

Last August the Trump Administration closed the US taxypayers’ checkbook to a 70-year old bloated and chronically mismanaged international aid program: The United Nations Refugee Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). A handful of nations are now following President Trump’s lead.

But the reason those nations are rethinking the $billions in international aid which has enabled the Arab Palestinian leadership to focus on – including the diversion of that international aid towards efforts to – eliminating Israel, rather than on infrastructure, education and health care, is a sizzling report of illicit sex, nepotism, retaliation and discrimination.

WHY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION CUT OFF UNRWA FUNDING

When the United States announced its decision to end siphoning taxpayer’s funds into UNRWA, the State Department spokesperson called the Agency an “irredeemably flawed operation” which had been “in crisis mode for many years.”

The U.S. had been shouldering the bulk of UNRWA’s astronomical financial burden for decades despite U.S. pleas that other nations – particularly Arab nations, step up and take on a greater proportion of the cost. In 2017, the U.S. donated in excess of $364m. The contribution of the next four highest donors, the EU, Germany, UK and Sweden combined did not equal the amount the US contributed. There were only three Arab nations amongst the top 25 donor states, and their combined donations equaled less than a quarter of that of the U.S.

The State Dept. Spokesperson announcing US cessation of UNRWA funding also blasted the Agency for its “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries.” The population UNRWA serves has ballooned to more than five and a half million, from its initial 860,000 displaced by the Arab war against Israel’s independence in 1948.

In addition to the financial vortex known as UNRWA, there are two unique aspects of the Agency that demand attention. The first is definitional, the second is its exclusivity.

The Corporate Scolds of Contemporary Capitalism Paul Collits

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/08/contemporary-capitalisms

At the recent National Conservatism conference in the US, Fox News host Tucker Carlson made the startling observation that the biggest threat to personal freedom was now not the State but the Corporation.  Carlson suggested that making this claim was unbelievable, even to him. Similarly, Matthew Crawford in American Affairs talks of “outsized commercial entities that play a quasi-governmental role in our lives”.  US Senator Tom Cotton calls the new corporate reality nothing less than a “dictatorship of woke capital”.

No less a woke oligarch than Mark Zuckerberg himself has stated, “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company … We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.” George Orwell must be spinning in his grave.

Is Carlson’s making this claim, and is it plausible?  Well, yes, it is entirely plausible, and this should chill us all. Many of us, for a long time, have been defending corporations against what might be termed the “old Left”. What Carlson was referring to is not simply the “corporation” as we all once knew it.  No, he is speaking of the emergence of a fundamentally new kind of corporation.  Let me explain.

The modern corporation – ubiquitous, unaccountable, condescending, emboldened, menacing – acts on a very, very broad canvas, with coercive powers and in ways previously unimagined, way beyond the original remit of traditional private sector companies. 

These are corporations that enforce oppressive new rules and protocols for employees, contractors and recipients of sponsorships, rules that are inimical to the exercise of personal freedom, of freedom of speech and of conscience.  They are seeking to set social standards for us all, they are limiting behaviour in the workplace, they are attacking opponents, they are punishing and rewarding governments according to whether their policy decisions meet corporate approval, they are boycotting states (in the US), they are bullying other businesses. In short, corporations are seeking to drive social change and this is constraining individual lives and transforming our culture — all in ways that not so long ago only governments could and did. 

Yes, the U.S. Has a Mental-Health Problem By John Hirschauer

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/yes-the-u-s-has-a-mental-health-problem/

What Congress can do to fix our broken treatment system

The Dayton killer, according to his ex-girlfriend’s interview in the Washington Post, heard voices, suffered troubling hallucinations, and battled psychosis from his youth.

But there is no connection between violence and mental illness. Say it over and again if you must, at least until you disabuse your lying eyes. The experts have spoken. CNN distilled the media’s recitation of this creed in their headline Monday: “Blaming mass shootings on mental illness is ‘inaccurate’ and ‘stigmatizing,’ experts say.”

“Experts say,” as employed here, means what it usually does: a handful of ideologues get to pawn off their ideology as fact under the pretense of “expertise” to those in the media eager to toe a particular line. Whatever the “experts say,” the fact remains that the untreated, seriously mentally ill (those with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, most often) are significantly more likely to engage in violence. Individuals with schizophrenia, most of whom are non-violent, still commit homicide at a rate 20 times that of the population at large. The prevailing social science on the matter suggests that at least 33 percent of mass shootings are committed by someone with a serious mental illness (even when this is narrowly defined).

What are we to do about it?

Congress might start by repealing the Johnson administration’s so-called “IMD (Institutions for Mental Disease) exclusion” in the Medicaid statutes, which prevents individuals over the age of 21 from using Medicaid funds at a facility with more than 16 psychiatric beds. The measure was included to forward the vision of Johnson’s late predecessor, John F. Kennedy, whose final legislative act was the signing of the Community Mental Health Act (CMHA) of 1963. CHMA usurped state control of mental-illness treatment and anointed the federal government architect of an entirely new method of care.

Another Evil and Deranged Bastard By Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/another-evil-and-deranged-bastard/

I have been away, so have just caught up on the reporting on the Dayton shooter from the last couple of days:

Connor Betts, the Dayton, Ohio mass shooter, was a self-described “leftist,” who wrote that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.”

Betts’ Twitter profile read, “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” One tweet on his page read, “Off to Midnight Mass. At least the songs are good. #athiestsonchristmas.” The page handle? I am the spookster. On one selfie, he included the hashtags, “#selfie4satan #HailSatan @SatanTweeting.” On the date of Republican Sen. John McCain’s death, he wrote, “F*ck John McCain.” He also liked tweets referencing the El Paso mass shooting in the hours before Dayton. The Twitter page contains multiple selfies of Betts.

It’s a banal point to make at at this point, but there obviously hasn’t been the same focus in the media on his politics and religion as there would be if he had been a right-wing Christian. Indeed, the press has been scrupulous about attributing a motive to him, taking an appropriate care it doesn’t show in other cases.

Politics aside, he was obviously deeply disturbed:

During his senior year of high school, Connor Betts seemed to always have caffeine pills in one hand and an energy drink in another. He was unable to sleep, he told his then-girlfriend Lyndsi Doll, because of dark, animal-like shadows that tormented him at night.

Seven years after they dated, Doll recalls Betts as a serious and reserved kid who wrestled with hallucinations and menacing voices in his head.

Democrats’ Debate Cowardice, Hypocrisy, and Nuttiness By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/democratic-party-debate-cowardice-hypocrisy-nuttiness/

Rarely has America seen a more unhinged group of candidates.

H alf of the Democratic 20-person primary field in the debates appeared unhappy, shrill, and self-righteous, and determined that no candidate should out-left any other.

So far, they certainly sound clueless about how they sound to those in western Pennsylvania or southern Michigan.

Their timidity also only accentuated rampant hypocrisy. It manifested itself a number of ways, from fear of defending their own past records to cowardice in calling out the rank socialist absurdities of the demagogues on stage.

Does any candidate believe in one’s prior convictions?

In debate one, Joe Biden could have barked back at the attack-dog Kamala Harris that federally mandated school busing was always a bad and unpopular idea. He could have asked her whether the young Harris was aware of the chaos of the 1970s that surrounded forced busing, the dislocations that caused more problems than any problem that busing solved. He might have mentioned that forced busing would find zero support today.

Should Democrats Change Debate Format?

Could not Harris have tried at least in some small way to defend her own work as a prosecutor and, in broken-windows fashion, argued that she had put tried to tamp down on rampant drug use and associated criminality that we now see as endemic on the streets of San Francisco and integral to the decline in the quality of life? How in the world did crime dive in the 21st century if not for strict law enforcement, incarceration, and a new insistence that what had been seen as minor lawbreaking instead created the landscape for greater and more pernicious crime? Why Harris didn’t say that San Francisco today is a less civilized place than when she was a city prosecutor?

Could someone have apprised Spartacus Booker that the Russians did not hand the election to Donald Trump by preventing African Americans from voting in Michigan in 2016 — a yarn that ranks with his “T-Bone” fantasies? When Booker whined that the erstwhile policies of a Senator Joe Biden had helped to ruin his “community,” which community was he referring to? The hometown where he grew up as the child of two IBM executives — tony Harrington Park, N.J., which is less than 1 percent black and one of the most affluent bedroom and commuter communities outside Manhattan?

Joe Biden talked again about Iraq, and again almost everything he said was untrue — and unquestioned by his rivals. Biden wholeheartedly supported the war and voted for it. He bailed only when the polls went south and the violence increased — and he wanted to run for president. He opposed the successful Bush surge yet, thanks to the surge, entered office as vice president with a calm Iraq. So calm was it that Biden himself bragged of our ongoing peacekeeping deployment and claimed ownership: “I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.” When Obama, bolstering his reelection talking points, pulled out every American peacekeeper, Iraq collapsed, the “jayvee” ISIS was born, Biden went mute and then doubled down as a counterfeit anti-war zealot. And as far as white privilege is concerned, no politician can match Biden’s racialist banter: Ask Barack Obama or the doughnut-shop owners of Delaware.

Could one candidate, other than Joe Biden, have faced down Julian Castro’s open-borders demagoguery? After all, where in the world is there a nation that allows foreign nationals to cross its border illegally and whenever they please? Could someone have asked Castro what exactly would happen should he or any other American citizen enter the United States without a passport, or adopt a false Social Security number? Is everyone who seeks to crash the U.S. southern border inherently a noble person, or at least more noble than an Indian Ph.D. or a Korean M.D., waiting legally and patiently to enter the U.S. after years of paperwork and fees?

Could not one would-be president have a Sister Souljah or a Reaganesque “I am paying for this microphone!” moment? Candidates would have won support if they’d told the adolescent Kirsten Gillibrand what would probably happen to her if she went into a saloon in Indianapolis or a restaurant in Dayton to lecture “suburban women” about their own white privilege. Since when does an affluent Dartmouth graduate and attorney oozing with inherited and acquired privilege talk down to other women without it?

When Andrew Yang pontificated that it was time to head for “higher ground,” could someone have asked Yang whether he would sponsor a program for the middle classes to buy discounted coastal property from the elite, who are now wisely heading toward Fresno and Appalachia?

Does Yang advise his friends to sell their homes in Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons? Does he live on high ground? And could anyone have asked the sanctimonious Jay Inslee whether he wished to travel to West Virginia to inform coal miners, in person, à la Hillary Clinton in 2016, that their jobs would be eliminated as soon as possible after his election?

These candidates bashed corporations and white privilege, and yet in their personal lives, they embody the abstractions they trash. From the elite interrogators on the CNN panel to the $100,000-honorarium-earning old Joe Biden, the three-home Bernie Sanders, the house-flipping Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker, the privileged son of two IBM corporate grandees, the well-to-do demonized the well-to-do in a tiresome display of moral virtue. These would-be socialists sounded like apparatchiks of the late Soviet Union talking about “comrades” while relaxing in their Crimean dachas.

Do we really believe — for all the populist pushback against the vast “inequality” sired by the corporate elite — that Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Pierre Omidyar, the great donors of the neo-socialists, are not corporate grandees, and that they did not transgress the ethical guidelines as established by the new Puritans on stage?

Steyer made a great deal of money throughout Asia, trafficking in huge coal mines and plants. (Should he give a few hundred million back to the severely polluted communities of Indonesia as reparations?) Soros cannot travel to France, out of fear that as a felon convicted for insider trading he might be arrested.

Will we see some sort of progressive pledge not to accept money from global corporatists who have either violated laws or profited from fossil fuels? But to imagine such consistency from our new green magnates would mean that Al Gore would never have sold his failed cable network to the anti-Semitic Al-Jazeera, funded by polluting petrodollars.

Instead, the problem is that most leftward on the stage are often not just among our most privileged; they are also the most eager to skirt rules to obtain such privilege.

Remember the ethnic fraud of the careerist Harvard-aspiring Elizabeth Warren. Or note the nature of Mrs. Sanders’s plush retirement package after essentially leading the college that she led into a disastrous land deal and insolvency. Or fathom how Kamala Harris jump-started her political career as the consort of the married and compromised insider pol Willie Brown, the epitome of realist back-scratching she now seems to so vehemently oppose. Examine the Biden family’s lucrative overseas influence-peddling.

After listening to these debates, we can deduce a number of truths so far. Hard-left rhetoric has little to do with how candidates live their lives, which for the most part are bourgeois and suburban to the core. The most vocal are about as poor as were Robespierre or Lenin. Democrats attack wealthy people in the abstract and occasionally “the Koch brothers” but otherwise stay silent about particular wealthy persons in the concrete. Apparently, they accept that the big money in the United Sates in general and in particular of the political donating class — a Bezos Bloomberg, Buffett, Gates, Jobs, Omidyar, Soros, Steyer, or Zuckerberg — is liberal or hard-left and quite useful.

Despite the debate boilerplate about “white privilege,” race seems to have little to do with class on stage. Cory Booker was raised in affluence. Kamala Harris’s parents were far better educated than those she routinely scorns as enjoying privilege. The Andover graduate Andrew Yang is a likely multimillionaire. Julian Castro grew up in a woke, solidly middle-class family. For all the talk of an uncaring, mean-spirited country, Booker, Castro and Harris probably benefited far more from affirmative-action programs than they suffered from the supposed systemic white privilege that they decry from the stage. Cannot one Democrat ask for a pause in racial stereotyping? Most whites lack the privilege of a Booker, Castro, Harris, and Yang, and to lump them into some amorphous blessed class is about as moral and accurate as the old pejorative stereotyping of the non-white.

To serially charge that Trump is more coarse, crude, and cruel than any past high official (rather than attributing his behavior in part to a historically hostile media, the new arena of the Internet and social media, and that fact that he was hounded for 22 months by a special counsel for what was largely a Clinton-purchased hoax) requires sober and judicious critics to contrast Trump’s recklessness with their own professionalism. Lying and spinning yarns does not show Trump up as a rank exaggerator.

So far, rarely has America seen a more animated and, yes, crass group of candidates. “Liar,” “racist,” and “traitor” were voiced often and without detail. The number of Democratic high officials who have threatened or dreamed of beating up Donald Trump or physically assaulting him grows each week. Joe Biden bragged twice about beating up the president. Cory Booker did too, who claimed his testosterone might get the better of him. So how odd that Biden, Booker, and Harris (who once joked about wishing Trump would die in an elevator) are now lecturing us that strong language can influence the unhinged to pick up a gun and kill the innocent.

More recently, Senator Tester (D., Mont.) boasted that one needed to hit the president in the mouth to stop him. At about the same time, Jeff Daniels and Tom Arnold variously tweeted or talked of hitting Trump or enjoying the recent pounding of Rand Paul. It used to be that elected officials did not emulate has-been celebrities. Kirsten Hildebrand, nursed on politics by the less than saintly Bill Clinton, claimed she would have to sanitize the Trump office (“Clorox the Oval Office”), apparently to rid it of his germs and offal.
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If Trump is deemed crazy, then his critics are utterly unhinged, given their calls for hundreds of billions in immediate reparations for slavery, which ended nearly 160 years ago at the cost of some 700,000 lives, or the call to abandon the coast immediately for high ground, or to shut down the natural-gas industry, or to de facto green-light partial-birth abortions, or to “tax the hell out of the rich” — this coming from the New York mayor who was willing to delay air passengers at La Guardia to get to his guest spot on The View on time.

Meanwhile, the middle-age, moderate deer-in-the-headlights guys like Bennet, Delany, Hickenlooper, Ryan, and Bullock don’t seem to get it that the more moderate they sound on matters of finance and public policy, the more they are hated as whimpering Girondists on their way to the Jacobin guillotine.

Has Any Democrat-Controlled City Come Up With A Good Solution For African-American Poverty? Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&i

Last week — after President Trump via Twitter had accused Representative Elijah Cummings of Baltimore of “incompetent leadership” and making a “mess” of his very-high-crime, high-poverty district, and after numerous media critics had responded by hurling the charge of “racism” at Trump — I weighed in with a post titled “It’s About Time That Someone Pushed Back About The Disaster Of Democrat-Controlled Cities.” The post made what I think is the obvious point that when a group of people have for decades promoted certain government spending programs as the appropriate solution to low incomes and poverty in African American communities, and when after decades of time and trillions of dollars of spending the problems of low income and poverty persist and indeed worsen, it is entirely appropriate to hold the promoters of these spending programs accountable for their failure.

On July 30, the often-creative Kevin Williamson of National Review offered his own even more contrarian view on the subject, in a piece titled “Which Party Can We Blame For Poverty And Crime?” (More contrarian than the Manhattan Contrarian? How is that even possible?) Williamson points out that Census data from around the U.S. give no clear correlation between poverty and crime on the one hand, and Republican versus Democratic governance on the other. He notes that the very poorest county in the whole country is Owsley County, Kentucky — a place with almost entire white demographics (98+%) and very strongly Republican politics. Meanwhile, there are numerous examples of Democrat-run cities that Williamson says are “very good places to live,” with relatively low-ish rates of crime and poverty. He cites Austin and Denver as prime examples.

As Nation Mourns Shootings In El Paso And Dayton, Chicago Sees Most Violent Weekend Of Year By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/06/nation-mourns-shootings-el-paso-dayton-chicago-sees-violent-weekend-year/

Fifty-five people were wounded by gunfire in Chicago this weekend, with seven killed in what became the most violent weekend for the Windy City this year.

The Chicago Tribune reported that nearly all of the gun violence that took place Friday night through Monday morning occurred in the west and south sides of the city, with victims ranging from ages 5 to 56 years old among those whose wounds were fatal.

The weekend shootings left the city with a toll that was slightly higher than Chicago’s last major outburst of gun violence during the first weekend of June, when 52 people were shot and eight of them killed.

According to data from the Tribune, more than 1,600 people have been shot this year in Chicago, along with 300 homicides. While the paper reports that both numbers are still down from last year, the city has struggled to shed its reputation as a crime-infested city where gun violence is rampant even though Illinois has some of the strictest gun laws in the country.

Residents in the state are required to have a license to own a firearm and must undergo a 72-hour waiting period before owning a gun. Residents are also subject to “red-flag laws,” where relatives or law enforcement may request that a court take away firearms from individuals who could be a threat to themselves or others.

This weekend’s outbreak of violence in Chicago comes on the same weekend where back-to-back shootings occurred in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, leaving a total of 31 people dead. The weekend’s events have once again led to calls for more gun regulations from Democrats and for an increased focus on mental health from Republicans.

Ruthie Blum Shameful comparisons in the name of politics

https://www.jns.org/opinion/shameful-comparisons-in-the-name-of-politics/

Referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the same breath as Kim Jong-un and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan goes beyond the pale.

Is it too much to ask of Israeli politicians that they take a pause before providing priceless ammunition to the Jewish state’s worst enemies?

Clearly, the answer is “yes.”

In what can only be described as a frenzy to finalize party lists and mergers before the Aug. 1 deadline (and ahead of the Sept. 17 Knesset elections), the already disturbing rhetoric used by candidates and wannabes against one another in general, and against Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu in particular, has sunk to new lows.

This is no small feat, considering the vile name-calling that characterized the previous campaign, which culminated in the coalition stalemate responsible for the current re-do.

Until Sunday, when Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman called Netanyahu’s style of running the ruling Likud Party “North Korean,” the most egregious crossing of ethical red lines came from Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz.

In an interview on April 7, exactly one week before the last Knesset elections, Gantz had the gall to compare Netanyahu to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and to express “deep worry” for the future of Israeli democracy.

Trump’s Middle East Plan to Undermine the PA Shoshana Bryen

https://www.dailywire.com/news/50269/bryen-trumps-middle-east-plan-undermines-shoshana-bryen
The Trump administration’s presentation of an economic plan — rather than a political plan — for the Palestinians was generally mocked or dismissed. As it percolates, however, it appears the administration, as is its habit, was reading trends. The formulation takes an axe to the notion that all plans, politics, money, and political benefits have to be filtered through the “Sole Legitimate Representative of the Palestinian People” — i.e., the PLO or its successor, the Palestinian Authority (PA).

This plan, unlike then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s idea to funnel $6 billion in “investment” through PA strongman Mahmoud Abbas, acknowledges that the PA is a terrible steward of its people and their lives. Inviting individual Palestinian businessmen — even if they didn’t show up — and Arab state representatives and businessmen, instead of the PA, may have evinced proper judgment.

In a recent poll by the Palestine Center for Public Opinion, published by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, only about one-third of respondents supported the a priori rejection of President Trump’s plan by PA officials. And 86% of respondents in Gaza, along with more than 60% of respondents in Jerusalem and the West Bank, favored Arab government participation in the process. The president himself did not poll well, indicating that those polled differentiated between the individual and the process.