[NYPost] If you watch TV crime shows, you would think the Federal Bureau of Investigation works tirelessly to protect us from terrorists and criminals. But the real FBI is a much less impressive organization.
After the horrendous Colorado shooting last week, we learned that the alleged shooter, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, had a record of violence and arrests. His brother described him as mentally ill, paranoid and "very anti-social." He was also on the FBI’s radar because of someone with whom he associated.
In this, Alissa joins a long list of "known-wolf" killers, including Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter; the Tsarnaev brothers, who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing; Omar Mateen, the Pulse nightclub shooter in Florida; and some of the 9/11 hijackers.
The FBI’s failure to catch that last set of perpetrators is especially enraging — and shows the agency has been atrophying for a long time. "For two and a half weeks before the attacks," as Slate noted, "the US government knew the names of two hijackers. It knew they were al-Qaeda killers and that they were already in the United States."
The two, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, lived under their real names, loud and proud. Per Slate: "They used those names for financial transactions, flight school, to earn frequent flier miles and to procure a California identity card." Nevertheless, the FBI failed to nab the pair until, on Sept. 11, 2001, they slammed an airliner into the Pentagon.
The bureau’s performance disappointed FBI agents themselves. Agents trying to get a warrant to search the laptop of 9/11’s "20th hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui, joked that Osama bin Laden must have had a "mole" in the FBI’s DC headquarters because they were meeting with so much interference.
And as the Boston Herald’s Howie Carr reminds us: "Remember serial killer Gary Sampson? Before he murdered three innocent men in 2001, he called the FBI office in Boston from a pay phone in Abington and offered to turn himself in on some unsolved bank robberies." But the FBI apparently keeps banker’s hours, and the call came on a Friday afternoon; the bureau ignored the call. "The following day, Sampson started his two-state carjacking murder spree."
So what’s the FBI good for? The answer is, the kinds of things that wouldn’t make for flattering TV.
Some of it is humorous, as when the bureau sent no fewer than 15 agents to investigate a "noose" in race driver Bubba Wallace’s garage that turned out to be an innocent pull cord.
Most of it isn’t so funny.
Agents in the FBI’s Boston office, for example, protected notorious mobster James "Whitey" Bulger from law enforcement, while simultaneously accepting gifts from him. They may even have helped him in his efforts. Carr also notes that the bureau’s Boston office was guilty of "railroading four Boston men onto death row for a 1965 murder they did not commit, allowing them to rot in prison for 35 years while corrupt FBI agents protected the real murderers from justice." Fire everyone G-12 and above
[Washington Examiner] Sen. John Kennedy slammed a CNN report that claimed "gender identity" is unknowable at birth by laying out that there "are only two sexes."
"It's very easy to tell a boy from a girl. A boy has a penis, a girl has a vagina. Those are physical characteristics," the Louisiana Republican told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Wednesday evening.
"Sex is the language we use to describe reproduction," Kennedy said. "In humans, there are only two sexes — male and female. Males have the potential to produce sperm; females have the potential to produce ova. These are observable physical characteristics. Sex is not a spectrum. It's binary; you're either male or female."
His comment comes in response to a CNN article on South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem issuing executive orders banning transgender girls and women from competing on women's sports teams.
[Mises] Few political movements can boast of success like the firearms movement in the United States. Often overlooked is how before the 1980s there was no concept of licensed, let alone unlicensed, concealed carry in the overwhelming majority of the country. The sole exception was Vermont, which through an idiosyncratic state supreme court decision in 1903 has had unlicensed carry for over a century. “Vermont Carry,” the concept of unlicensed concealed carry, would be the Holy Grail for Second Amendment advocates for up to a century.
In the intervening decades, in large part motivated by notable transgressions on the right to bear arms during the 1930s and 1960s, activists took to using gradualist methods in their efforts to relax gun control laws at the state level. Starting in the late 1970s, Georgia kicked off the modern licensed carry movement after it joined states like Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Washington in enacting some form of licensed concealed carry. Soon thereafter, states began adopting licensed carry one by one, and by the twenty-first century, most of the nation had some form of licensed concealed carry.
At first, the idea of unlicensed carry seemed like a quixotic prospect only odd states like Vermont were capable of adopting. However, the dam broke after Alaska ended America’s century-long unlicensed carry dry spell by signing its own constitutional carry bill into law in 2003. An even more pronounced momentum shift took place in 2010 after then Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1108, Arizona’s constitutional carry bill. From there, a wave of states have followed suit in making constitutional carry the law of the land.
Constitutional carry’s success is not a coincidence. It reflects a concerted effort by many disaffected gun owners who realized the federal government was not responding to their demands to scale back infringements on gun ownership. Rather than engage in the pie-in-the-sky federal campaigns that the average conservative organization would generally be involved in throughout the post–World War II era, many gun owners shifted their political sights toward state legislatures.
Indeed, there is something to be said about Barack Obama’s occupancy of the White House serving as a lightning rod for gun owners at the state level. At the time, many gun owners were thoroughly spooked by Obama’s campaign promises to enact gun control legislation. Their fears became more pronounced when the Obama administration pushed for a far-reaching gun control package in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.
Although Obama’s gun control desires never came to pass, gun owners became sufficiently motivated to not only take action against his gun control attempt at the federal level but to shift their attention toward the state level. Several creative Second Amendment organizations picked up on the grassroots dissatisfaction of the Tea Party and leveraged that energy for state-level projects such as constitutional carry. By the time Obama left office in 2016, there were eleven states with constitutional carry as law. More at the link
[ZMan] Way back in the early days of the conservative movement, it was assumed that Federal spending was both unsustainable and damaging to the country. Cutting the size and scope of government was their thing. The tool they eventually settled on to reduce Federal spending was taxes. If they made high taxes so unpopular with the public, the Left could not keep raising taxes. If they could not raise taxes to cover their spending, they would eventually have to yield to the mathematics.
Obviously, that never happened. The big tax reforms of the 1980’s did simplify taxes and lower rates on rich people, but revenues remained stable. At the same time, spending kept growing. One of the unspoken truths of fiscal policy is the percent of GDP that is consumed by Federal taxes does not change much of time. The range is between 15% to 18%, depending on when tax policy was changed. This is the logic of the flat tax. One rate, no deductions and no more IRS.
Spending, of course, keeps going up, no matter who is in office. Despite their rhetoric, the Republicans are the big spenders. In the 1980’s they had to spend on the military to win the Cold War. In the Bush years it was the crusades against Islam. It is only when a Democrat is in the White House that the Republicans get tight-fisted, and even that is mostly ceremonial, as we have seen with the last Covid bill. It turns out that there is no relationship between taxes and spending.
Another shibboleth of conservatives is that eventually the bond markets will force a haircut on the government. The so-called bond vigilantes will drive up interest rates, which will make borrowing more expensive. The theory here is that there is a hard limit on debt. Once that limit is reached, spending must go down or taxes must go up in order to reconcile the books. Like the belief that taxes will curtail spending, faith in the mythological bond vigilantes has been misplaced.
snip
This rather shabby track record should raise a question. That is, is the field of economics just pseudoscientific nonsense? It has lots of complexity and lots of very clever solutions to the complex problems it unearths, but outside of the most basic of concepts like supply and demand, economics is not very useful. In all of the important things, it turns out to be wrong. Astrologers have a better record than economists, because they know they are grifters, not scientists.
Putting that aside, the lesson here is that contra the libertarians, economics is downstream from politics. No amount of fiddling with the tax code can fix the defects of the political class. Even further, the right people in a corrupt system cannot correct the defects of the corrupt system. This is why the people come and go in Washington, but the corruption rolls on unimpeded. In the great chain of causality, economics is the last link in that chain. It is the final effect of a chain of many causes.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/02/2021 08:50 ||
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#1
is the field of economics just pseudoscientific nonsense?
#2
No: economics isn't downstream
of politics. We've just been a combination of lucky and ruthless. Within three years we are all going to learn a hard, once-in-a-lifetime lesson about what the word "inflation" means.
#5
We've been here before -- the 1970s. We'll see a huge shift internally but America itself will remain (relatively) strong for the simple reason that the other possible alternate hegemons are so unattractive.
Europe is a joke, the Russians are puny economically and totally dependent on a handful of natural resources - one of which we're now the dominant player in -- and the Chinese are chaotic and growing old fast.
America will become more corrupt, more oligarchic, more skewed and divided politically.
Eventually we'll have two distinct nations loosely United by a federal structure, sharing a military and a currency and an interstate highway system but little else.
If I were advising a hostile power, I'd tell them to do everything in their power to split the two Americas from each other and try to ignite another Civil War. Oh wait…
[American Thinker] "...and for other purposes" seems to be included in the titles of so many bills these days that it’s always enlightening to dig a little deeper, past a bill’s obvious provisions. In the case of H.R. 1 -- the 2021 Omnibus Federal Electoral Fraud Enhancement Act -- the revelations are pretty scary. They’re intended to drive from politics people Democrats don’t like and to consolidate in Congressional hands information that violates the Separation of Powers doctrine or the Bill of Rights.
Others have spoken forcefully about the bill’s proposed unjust and ruinous changes to the Federal Election Commission, campaign finance reforms, and general election processes. Today, let’s see what the last 100 or so pages of this nearly 900-page bill bring us. This is where all the "other purposes" are hiding and they’re as bad as the rest of the bill.
Section 10001, calls for Presidential and Vice Presidential tax transparency. What it really does is suppress candidate turnout by requiring that the last ten years of income tax returns be submitted to the Federal Election Commission within 15 days of becoming a party’s nominee.
Those records, with certain limited redactions, then become public just like any report filed with the FEC. Opposition research is complete and available to China, Russia, new or former relatives, all of Congress, the media, the whole world, in fact. For the candidates who are not elected, those records stay public forever. This will discourage private citizens like Trump — as opposed to lifelong political hacks — from running for high office.
This requirement seems to be a clear violation of the 4th Amendment which protects an individual’s papers against unreasonable seizure. This is a taking if there ever was one. Surprise! The IRS already has possession. If these documents are required by Congress for any purpose, a simple warrant based upon probable cause is all that’s necessary to obtain them.
#1
H.R.1 at 791+/- pages, stop and think of how long it took to develop it, reach agreement within the Socialist-Democratic leadership, write it, edited it and present it to the rank and file.
Question: Was this planned years ago. Like for Hillary back in 2016 even maybe? Or just a consolidation of various trial balloons over the last 4+ years?
[Townhall] There’s always an uproar when we see Asian-Americans being beaten to a pulp or murdered on video and the people around them just stare instead of intervene. But why are we surprised? They are just doing exactly what society has told them to do. It’s not necessarily cowardice. They are making an entirely rational choice based on our society’s unequivocal message that we should stand back and watch.
If we, as a society, want to have people leap into the fray, and I would like that, then we need to do the things that make it a rational choice to do so instead of one that might very well bring ruin, imprisonment, injury, or death.
But we do the opposite, then act stunned when people conform to the reality we create. Let’s look at the logistics. The people pummeling others are usually pretty big, and they’re criminals for whom violence is a way of life. Most normal people are not streetfighters, and taking on the criminals is extremely dangerous and can easily get you hurt or killed. Now, a civilized society would want to encourage people to intervene, and that means not interfering with normal citizens’ right to bear arms. Many states do not, but the Ninth Circuit just informed us that the right to "bear" arms doesn’t actually mean you have a right to bear arms. So, in many places, society has deprived you of the ability to intervene with some measure of safety and effectiveness.
But if you do intervene, your trouble just begins. Even if you are in the right does not mean an intervention will go your way. If you are in the wrong jurisdiction, with one of those leftist-bought district attorneys, then you run the risk of being prosecuted even if you did everything right. Take it from a lawyer — innocent people get shafted all the time by the system, especially when the system wants them shafted. Maybe you eventually get acquitted, after a couple years of hell, some time in jail, and financial ruin — congratulations!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[NYPost] If you watch TV crime shows, you would think the Federal Bureau of Investigation works tirelessly to protect us from terrorists and criminals. But the real FBI is a much less impressive organization.
