Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government — in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost comes in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player. — Milton Friedman Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Crime
Thomas Jefferson: On the Removal of My Statue From New York City Hall
My fellow Americans – On Monday, the New York City Public Design Commission unanimously voted to remove a statue of me from New York City Hall. The statue has been there for nearly a century and was originally created to celebrate religious liberty. The City Council’s black, Latino, and Asian caucus said that the statue “symbolizes the disgusting and racist basis on which America was founded.” May I make a humble request? I’d like my statue to be replaced by a statue of George Floyd robbing a pregnant woman. Pillars of social justice like Floyd are the types of people we should be honoring, not slave owners like myself or George Washington, who never did anything for anyone. Read more →
Hiding the Facts from Readers Is the Opposite of a Journalist’s Job
From the National Review: As you may have heard [I actually didn’t hear, for reasons that will soon become clear], on Friday night there was a mass shooting in Austin, Texas, in the Sixth Street entertainment district. Fourteen people were shot; as of this writing, one has died. This apparently wasn’t one of those loser-shoots-up-his-school mass shootings, but one of the more common shootings involving “some kind of disturbance between two parties,” as the police put it. So the shooter didn’t kill himself or wait around for the police and force them into shooting him. He fled, and the police, naturally, put out a description of him. The Austin American-Statesman, the local daily, refused to publish that description. Instead, it put this editor’s note at the end of its report: Editor’s note: Police have only released a vague description of the suspected shooter as of Saturday morning. The American-Statesman is… Read more →
One Year Later: Santa Monica Looks Back on Riots
One Year Later: Santa Monica looks back on riots — Santa Monica Daily Press More than 400 people were arrested and more than 150 businesses sustained significant damage. The story has photos but none of my favorites, which were the ones with people dashing out of smashed storefront windows with stolen merchandise in one hand and a Black Lives Matter sign in the other . . . Read more →
Thomas Jefferson: Why Are Democratic Cities Such Disaster Areas?
My fellow Americans – A lot of people ask me, “Tom, why are Democrat-run cities such shitholes?” I was reminded of this by President Biden’s upcoming “soak the rich” tax plan. In my view, there are three Democratic philosophies that destroy American cities. For example, did you know that Detroit in 1950 was the richest city in America? Now it’s a wasteland where half the residents can’t even read. The first philosophy is that Democrats hate rich people because “they don’t pay their fair share.” What is their “fair share”? What is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for? I would suggest it’s nothing, but Democrats enact punitive tax rates on the most productive people, who then leave town and go somewhere else. The second philosophy is that Democrats hate business because corporate fat cats “don’t pay their fair share.” So they enact anti-business policies, the result… Read more →
A Lot of Controversies Are Spoiled By a Guy Who Actually Knows What He’s Talking About
I saw this headline today on theroot.com: A Judge Asked Harvard to Find Out Why So Many Black People Were In Prison. They Could Only Find 1 Answer: Systemic Racism The author of the article is someone named Michael Harriot, whose bio describes him as a “world-renowned wypipologist.” (Look it up.) The section that caught my attention was where the author proposes and rejects other explanations for the number of black people in prison. An excerpt: “White people make up roughly 74% of the Massachusetts population while accounting for 58.7% of cases in our data,” the study explained. “Meanwhile, Black people make up just 6.5% of the Massachusetts population and account for 17.1% of cases.” Of course, that could only mean that Black people commit much more crime, right? Nope. That’s it. No further explanation. No link to relevant data. Just “Nope.” I added a comment to the article: “Of… Read more →
“Mostly Peaceful”
Portland mayor says protesters are ‘attempting to commit murder’ and helping Trump’s reelection campaign — Los Angeles Times I’m not sure how those two things go together but look, Mr. Mayor (is this the “Summer of Love” mayor or is that in Seattle?), you’re not going out on a limb by taking a stand against murder. Pretty much everyone is opposed to murder. But if you’d enforced at some point over the last couple months the laws against lesser offenses like assault, theft and destruction of property, the state of affairs in your city wouldn’t have deteriorated to this point. You now look like a fool saying “Someone should do something about this!” Like who, the mayor? Read more →
Protests Considered Harmful?
I saw multiple people on TV this weekend looting stores, running out with a “Black Lives Matter” sign in one hand and stolen merchandise in the other. Maybe we should stop having these Black Lives Matter protests. The majority of the TV coverage is black citizens stealing things and setting things on fire, which doesn’t improve anyone’s lives and probably, in terms of prejudice and race relations, makes things worse. In this case, the George Floyd case, I haven’t heard one person say that kneeling on someone’s neck and killing them is good police work. So it’s really a protest against no one, except the one guy who did it and he’s already been fired, arrested, charged with murder and condemned by everyone from the president of the United States on down. There’s no opposing viewpoint to protest against. The mayor of Atlanta, who is a black woman and therefore… Read more →
I’m Going to Start Robbing Banks
Why do you rob banks? Because that’s where the money is. — Willie Sutton (probably apocryphal) I’m going to start sticking up banks. Not long ago, if you walked into a bank wearing a mask over your face, someone would immediately reach for an alarm or a gun. Now it’s required. I could walk in and clean out the teller before anyone suspects a thing. I think I’ll hone my craft first by knocking off a few gas stations and convenience stores. “Can you describe the suspect?” “I can’t, officer. He was wearing a mask.” Read more →
A Close Encounter with Burt Reynolds’ Legacy
I’m having dinner at a Japanese restaurant . . . in the booth behind me are a couple straight out of Sons of Anarchy. The man is about 45, large, with a shaved head, tattoos and a motorcycle jacket. Same description for the woman, except for the shaved head. Her jacket is emblazoned with PROPERTY OF TROG (or FROG or ????, couldn’t make it out clearly), which I assume is the name of either a motorcycle gang or the gentleman sitting across from her. Midway through the meal, Trog wonders aloud if Smokey and the Bandit is available on Netflix. To his chagrin, the movie doesn’t seem to register with his girlfriend, so to jog her memory, he pulls up the “Eastbound and Down” song on his phone and plays it loudly enough to be heard by everyone in the vicinity. He then launches into an analysis of the film… Read more →
See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings from the infernal regions! Man arrested at New Mexico compound was allegedly training child to commit school shootings — NBC News Here’s a photo of the gentleman in question, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj: One of the few black men in America actively involved in his children’s lives. Kudos, sir! See you in Hell . . . Read more →
“You’re Too Hard on Yourself”
“He has suffered enough” meant if we investigate this matter any further, it will turn out our friends are in it, too. A sufficiency of suffering, in public life, consisted in a loss of face perhaps, or office, or, earlier, in getting caught, or in committing crimes, or having wanted to commit them. And if the real sufferer was the public man in violation of the criminal law, and a sufficiency of suffering lay in his various states of mind, then it was perhaps everyone else who got off too easily. . . . Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn’t remember it, but if they had done it or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so… Read more →
See You in Hell: Fake News Edition
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings from the Underworld, my friends and foes! I’m reading about a hostage situation, including a fatal shooting of one of the hostages, at a Trader Joe’s in Los Angeles over the weekend. It was covered nationally and even internationally. Here’s a photo from a British news site of the suspect being taken away: I looked at the major US news sites — CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC — and about a dozen smaller sites . . . no one mentioned the race of the suspect, no one gave the suspect’s name, and no one ran a photo. I could understand a media policy where, in reporting shootings, we consider race to always be relevant, or we consider race to never be relevant, but not a policy where race is only considered relevant when the victim is… Read more →
Thomas Jefferson Explains Family Separations
My fellow Americans — The reason families are separated at the border is that the United States, like many countries, has laws governing border crossings by non-residents. When an adult is apprehended crossing our border illegally, they go into the criminal justice system and are placed in a detention center. Keep in mind that an American citizen apprehended in the commission of a crime is not processed any differently. If you are placed in a detention center, I assure you that your children will not be in there with you. A note on rhetoric: A strong line of argument should not require violent metaphors and manufactured hysteria — families “ripped apart,” children “torn from their mother’s arms” — to be persuasive. Read the Declaration of Independence, for example. Read more →
Presumption of Guilt
But some female lawmakers, like New York’s Kathleen Rice, have begun to ask why elected officials aren’t being drummed out like their private sector counterparts. “You see the actions that CBS, NBC take when there are allegations against very well-known men in positions of power, and we don’t do the same,” Rice said. “I think it’s a disgrace.” — CBS News “Allegations.” She’s talking about Al Franken and John Conyers. The Franken case has photographic evidence, so the allegations against him are provably true. But Conyers vehemently denies the allegations made against him. Why should he be “drummed out”? Why is there a presumption of guilt? Anyone who’s ever been alone with another person can be the subject of allegations. Why is there a presumption in favor of the accuser? A case study on false allegations, which you probably remember if you’re old enough, is the McMartin preschool trial: Members… Read more →
Round Up the Usual Suspects
Nose-Picking Masturbator Terrorizes NYC Subway Riders — NBC New York That description doesn’t narrow it down very much. Unless he was doing both at the same time. That would be unusual. Read more →
The Family Nut Tree
A brother of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was arrested in Los Angeles on child pornography charges. Their father was a bank robber once on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. The nuts didn’t fall far from the nut tree in the Paddock family . . . Read more →
Amber Alerts
I got an Amber Alert on my phone last night. The same Amber Alert is posted today on those lighted freeway billboards. How did we decide that child abduction is the one activity that merits a notification to the entire country? In this case, the woman in the photo, Kandice Johnson, stole a car at gunpoint with a 16-year-old boy in the back seat. I’m going to feel ridiculously bad if this ends poorly, but for a 16-year-old boy, being kidnapped by a femme fatale like Kandice Johnson is maybe not the worst way to spend a few hours of your life . . . Read more →
Why Gun Control Can’t Be Solved
On average, Democrats use guns for shooting the innocent. We call that crime. On average, Republicans use guns for sporting purposes and self-defense. . . . So it seems to me that gun control can’t be solved because Democrats are using guns to kill each other – and want it to stop – whereas Republicans are using guns to defend against Democrats. . . . Democrats are unlikely to talk Republicans out of gun ownership because it comes off as “Put down your gun so I can shoot you.” — Scott Adams Good points. The NRA gets a bad rap in some circles but you never hear of an NRA member going out and shooting random people. Meanwhile, Democratic constituencies are shooting each other like the Olympic Games of murder, which for some reason leads their representatives in Congress to insist that Republicans should have to give up on… Read more →
Ruff Sex
I assumed every woman with a dog (not just a wiener dog) is doing this, minus the videos of course . . . Police charge that the South Carolina suspect got intimate with a Dachshund on her 23rd birthday… Posted by The Smoking Gun on Friday, March 25, 2016 Read more →