The way to handle this in a libertarian society would be lawsuits. Lots of them, filed by individual consumers for deception and false advertising. That’s one thing that’s different in today’s society vs. a libertarian society. Today, using an egregious environmental example brought up by one of my fellow Humane Society lobbyists, the citizens of Smithfield, NC suffer from the stench of manure lagoons, their children get sick, and their only hope falls to the EPA.

The EPA in turn slaps Smithfield Foods (America’s largest pork producer) on the wrist with a one-time fine of .035% of Smithfield’s yearly sales for polluting so badly and making so many people ill– and, oh yeah, an award for environmentalism while they’re at it. Smithfield, of course, considers these puny fines the cost of conducting business and continues on like normal. Meanwhile, the company’s neighbors have no recourse or redress since the EPA has already done what it says it can.

Fast-forward to a libertarian society (no utopia, but better in many ways than what we have now). All of those individuals would personally sue Smithfield Foods in a slam-dunk case, collecting millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, in damages for this company polluting the entire town and rendering it virtually unlivable. Smithfield has also in the process of pork producing polluted the water sources of much of eastern North Carolina, so virtually everyone in that half of the state could jump in with lawsuits, too. What happens in this system? You guessed it, Smithfield would be out of business tomorrow.

So in our prospective libertarian society, there are many consumers who would be upset about their mislabeled fur and would sue and have an effect on these companies’ bottom lines that would make them sit up and label their products correctly. People wouldn’t be able to afford it, you say? The type of people who can buy $500 faux fur coats at Neiman Marcus can spare a few for a lawsuit and may even have lawyers on retainer. In our current system, instead of any semblance of justice on the part of those wronged by these companies, we have the Humane Society suing the deceptive companies under an obscure federal law (the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act) with no results and trying to get federal legislation passed at the same time.

So, I’ve told you what tactics I would use to immediately solve the problem of the deceptive fur sellers. Tomorrow, I’ll discuss why a federal law won’t really do anything on behalf of the cause of ending the fur mislabeling and could in fact make things worse.

But this photo tells a different story.

If anyone racially profiled, it was the Harvard professor’s neighbor, who apparently called police and reported two black men breaking into Gates’ house. This is another lesson in why it’s important to get to know your neighbors!

The neighbor may have not called in the cops if Gates and his driver were white, but she/he may very well have still done so. Let’s imagine a different scenario: a robbery had taken place at Gates’ house, and the neighbor comes forward to say she saw it occurring but had figured the person breaking in was the owner locked out; I can imagine how she would have been ridiculed for thinking such a thing.

So it’s no surprise that if the neighbor didn’t know Gates lived there, she might have thought the men breaking down the front door were breaking into the house. This is true whether they were white or black.

So just the neighbor calling the police wasn’t inherently racist. I have relatives who always forget their keys, yet they’ve never had to break the door down to get in; they call someone who has a key or they find a hidden one. I’ve never seen a person breaking their own door down, have you?

Now we have the police. Depending on whose story you believe, the police officer was rude to Gates in his own house OR Gates refused to show identification to prove that he owned the house while accusing the officer (loudly) of being a racist. According to a third party, Barack Obama, the police officer “acted stupidly.” And yes, that was more of a detailed answer than he’s ever given on health reform.

But an aspect of this that hasn’t been reported in the media is that one of the officers that arrested Gates was black. You can see in this picture that as Henry Louis Gates is being led from his home in handcuffs, one of the officers standing in front of him is black (Gates is biracial himself, just as Obama is).

Gates hasn’t mentioned this at all, the media hasn’t mentioned it beyond publishing this picture. Isn’t that an important fact to get the whole picture of this story?

This is an aspect of governmental incompetence I hadn’t previously considered, but it was just a matter of time until something like this happened, when scientists now regularly become government employees– Bruce Ivins had spent his entire career in an Army lab. Scientists want power just as much as anyone (read Cantor’s Dilemma for a nicely fictionalized explanation of this), and anyone who’s dealt with, say, a secretary in the local parking department may be aware that government employees often get full of themselves and drunk on their own power.

According to The New York Times:

The work became even more intense in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attack, as the field grew tremendously, with billions of dollars in new federal support for research on anthrax and other potential biological weapons and to buy new drugs or vaccines to handle a possible future attack.

Dr. Ivins was among the scientists who benefited from this surge, as 14 of the 15 academic papers he published since late 2001 were focused on possible anthrax treatments or vaccines, comparing the effectiveness of different formulations. He even worked on the investigation of the anthrax attacks, although this meant that he, like other scientists at the Army’s defensive biological laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., was scrutinized as a possible suspect.

Sure, it’s possible that a maniac could do a similar thing to get more private industry funding into science or patent royalties. However, at least it wouldn’t be taxpayer dollars wasted for the purpose.

(Of course, it took the FBI four years and cost taxpayers $6 million from a lawsuit before the right guy was found, but that’s another story altogether.)

I have two thoughts.

1.) Good riddance.
2.) Who cares?
Most of our members of Congress do worse things than this on their jobs every day. Shouldn’t voting for unconstitutional bills and amendments be an indictable offense in and of itself?

This is certainly not the worst thing Stevens has done during his reign of terror in the Senate. It’s not even the next-to-worst thing or anything approaching the median. Stevens is the guy responsible for the Bridge to Nowhere, which means you’d be hard-pressed to find a worse traitor to the founding principles of our country.

Some Americans may hate our country. They may even want to do things to destroy it, but few get the chance. Ted Stevens has taken his chance and seized it. The policies he has stood for have bankrupted the United States, and he is a disgrace. There are many Senators and members of Congress just like him.

It goes far beyond the $136 million-plus Bridge to Nowhere.

The name of the case is United States of America vs. Theodore Stevens.

How apt.

Good riddance.

I can’t say I was surprised to see that Ronald Gray is black, even less so that the next in line to be executed, Dwight Loving, is also black. Of the eight members of the Army sentenced to death for various crimes, six are black, one is Asian and one is white.

I’m not saying that Gray and Loving don’t deserve the death penalty. That doesn’t even factor into it. The question is instead: Why is the determining factor in getting the death penalty not which defendants have committed the most heinous crimes, but what color the defendant happens to be?

Why does the Army have an even higher ratio of blacks to whites sentenced to death than the civilian courts, which already have such a distorted ratio?

I would challenge anyone to find a statistic that proves that most Army murders are committed by black members of the Army. Why, then, are almost all of the men sentenced to the Army’s death row at Fort Leavenworth black?

“Frank Serpico – The first police officer not only in the history of the New York Police Department, but in the history of any police department in the whole United States, to step forward to report and subsequently testify openly about widespread, systematic cop corruption-payoffs amounting to millions of dollars.” — Peter Maas, author of the biography Serpico

For Serpico’s efforts, he was rewarded by his fellow police officers with the most difficult beat– the narcotics one– and shot in the face with some of his fellow police officers just standing by and refusing to help. Luckily, a civilian neighbor heard the gunshots and called for help. Serpico is a true American hero when it would have been much, much easier to just go along with the crowd. It was true then and it’s true now, people like this– especially in government– are rare.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Serpico has a blog and writes in one of his latest posts:
“I would vote Republican if Ron Paul was running.
At least we would get to the truth.”

More than anyone, Serpico knows the truth when he sees it. This week is Sunshine Week, in which journalists focus attention on the importance of open public records and the laws protecting that freedom. Needless to say, open and honest government are completely necessary for a democracy to work. You can’t vote the bastards out if you don’t know what they’ve been up to.

I’ve heard many people this week say that government agencies that lose battles for open records should pay court costs if they lose. This would all be well and good if it was in fact the agencies’ fault. It’s usually not.

These cases almost always amount to one or two bureaucrats who are trying to protect themselves by using the taxpayers’ money to outspend and outlast citizen plaintiffs in these cases. I argue that not only do we need open records for democracy to work, we need individual accountability on the part of government employees. The taxpayers shouldn’t take the fall when some political appointee doesn’t want his emails to his mistress revealed publicly and wages battle in court for years. It’s that person’s fault, and it should be that person who pays, not you or me or anyone who had nothing to do with his own unprofessional behavior. Most of the time this involves public employees conducting personal business and affairs in government offices while being paid to do a government job, which is unacceptable and means they should be fired immediately anyway– isn’t it amazing that they’re not? Only the government would defend an employee’s right to have an affair and give preferential contracts during work.

We need open records because there are still a lot of 1970s-era NYC cops who have government jobs in all bureaus and agencies, at the federal, state and local level, and there are far, far too few Serpicos.

Tags: Sunshine Week, open records, open records laws, Frank Serpico, Ron Paul, honest government

I have seen some discussion, but of course not from mainstream news outlets, of what actually could have helped prevent these murders. Sure, helping young people by mentoring them and tutoring them could play a role down the line not to become cold-blooded killers, but the only immediate defense that these girls could have had against their killers would have been a gun of their own.

Let me explain.

Thankfully, pictures of Eve’s alleged killer have been released. The suspect in question seems to not only have taken her car but also seems to have actually driven through an ATM and used her bank card while driving the car (this hasn’t yet been confirmed, but you can clearly tell that the car in question is in fact a Toyota Highlander, like the one Carson owned). In the fifth comment seen on this website, “SteveDinMD” comes up with a plausible scenario for what probably happened to Eve Carson.

At first I figured that the killer must simply be an idiot who had killed Eve and then gone to an ATM without her PIN number, or he had figured that her PIN number would be the same as her birthday as it so often is and taken a chance. However, it makes much more sense that she was in fact in the car with him while he went to the ATM, he was perhaps successful, and she tried to escape later, upon which time he shot her as she ran. This explains why blood was found on both sides of the road and possibly why she was shot in the head at close range– the killer could have hobbled her first, then shot her in the head to make sure that she couldn’t testify against him for the carjacking. The area in which her body was found was a secluded street off the main drag which, if followed, leads to Durham, which makes sense considering the buzz that this is the work of a Durham gang member as other shootings in Chapel Hill are.

If it is in fact true that she was carjacked and forced to go to the bank before being shot as she escaped, this is a perfect scenario in which a gun– even one kept in the glove compartment of the car and not actually on herself– could have helped her survive what turned into a kill-or-be-killed situation.

It is true that some rare victims are able to wrestle away an attacker’s gun in a life-or-death situation and shoot or kill him then– however, that’s never a sure thing and it’s best to know what your line of defense will be ahead of time.

Let’s take a look at some recent examples for scenarios in which innocent victims luckily were armed when an armed robber/carjacker attempted to attack them.

“When a Louisiana woman injured during an attempted carjacking retrieved her revolver from under the seat, the would-be car thief fled.”

“Investigators told Eyewitness News the would-be robber [in Houston] had the tables turned on him when the person he was trying to rob pulled out his own gun and shot the man.”

“The elder Jauregui, who was a police officer in Cuba before the Castro regime, reportedly told police he felt forced to fire because he believed his son’s life was in danger.”

Florentino Jauregui was called the “kindest, sweetest gentleman in the neighborhood” by a neighbor. In that vein, he didn’t want to have to use deadly force, but he had to when his son’s life was being threatened by a madman with a gun, and he did the ultimate “kindest, sweetest” thing when he came to his son’s rescue.

While cases like this do happen, unfortunately too few victims out there are armed and ready when their attackers come. After a gunman attempted to carjack 71-year-old Bobbie Gray, her son Keith came out of the house and shot the attacker. Gray’s husband had some words of warning for future carjackers.

“Marshall Gray, Bobbie’s husband and Keith’s father, warned others to be cautious.

‘Pass the word on,’ he said. ‘You never know the next person you’re going to carjack may have a gun bigger than yours in their car.’”

It’s highly unlikely that any one person will ever be in a situation where his or her life is threatened by a robber or carjacker or mass murderer (despite what the media says). However, there just aren’t enough people who are armed when the odds work against them and they do get attacked. Carjackers don’t yet seem to be afraid of people fighting back because it hasn’t happened on a mass scale. They have a gun, so they figure that they’re invincible. The more people who take matters into their own hands and fight back, the more people will be afraid to commit these sorts of crimes even if they do have a gun.

As shown in the first example above by the Louisiana woman who merely had to show her gun to the carjacker for him to run away, the mere presence of a gun can end the crime right then and there. No shots even need to be fired.

It’s probably also no surprise that young women are targeted for these “economic crimes of opportunity.” There is probably no demographic that is less likely to be armed for protection. Why is that? Maybe it’s not “feminine” or “attractive” or cool or liberal (an important consideration in a town like Chapel Hill) to carry around a gun. Maybe it’s not considered safe. Maybe you’re afraid people will think you’re weird. I have a concealed carry license myself, and I don’t carry around a gun for some of these reasons, so I can’t act like it’s amazing that no one else my age does. However, there is nothing cooler than saving your own life or saving someone else’s, as this “hero teacher” found out.

Another consideration is that guns are banned on the UNC campus. If you’re going off and on to campus, you’d be breaking the law if you had a gun for part of that time, and if you’re a law-abiding citizen you don’t want to break laws and therefore won’t have a gun. However, when has a would-be killer ever decided to turn back when they see the sign that says “Gun-Free Zone”? No, in fact, they know that they’re definitely going to have a lot of unarmed victims to do with what they will. After previous school shootings, some UNC students had pointed this out. Hopefully, some UNC students will also see the wisdom here. Arizona may pass a law allowing concealed weapons on campus after Eve’s shooting.

“But that’s what we have the police for.”

When Eve Carson was killed, the Chapel Hill police were not patrolling the residential neighborhoods where her body was found. The police do their best, but more often than not, they simply are not going to come to your rescue in time. They try to do their best to prevent crime, and they’ll certainly find your body after you’ve been killed and also do their best to try to investigate your murder, but odds are they will not be there to rescue you if you find yourself in this situation. In fact, one of these very police officers now investigating Eve’s murder told me that he wished all civilians would be trained for concealed carry. The police officers know that concealed carry saves lives; it’s time for the public to know this, too.

“The answer to gun violence isn’t more guns.”

Really? Well, what do the police do in response to gun violence, stand there and stare down the bad guys? The kids at Virginia Tech had one option when they were attacked: pretend they were dead. That was their best defense. Their ONLY defense. That’s completely unacceptable.

“If every student is armed, more students will be killed.”

First of all, not every student will be armed, just those who want to be and are trained and licensed for concealed carry (and pass an FBI background check). That means they have to know how to hit a target and attend a gun safety course and be mentally sound. In the 40 states that have concealed carry laws, a lot of innocent people have had their lives saved, and I have not heard of any cases where innocent people were killed due to someone, for instance, waving their gun wildly around or other such nonsense. It would not happen. Even a small percentage of college students being armed could serve as a large deterrent to potential attackers– all it takes is one person with a gun to stop a shooting in progress.

Why would this work?

We know it would work because it has worked. The heroism of the Israeli seminary student who stopped the gunman at his seminary the other day (along with the gunman’s 500 rounds of live ammo) has pretty much been ignored in the American media, but he saved people’s lives by being a trained individual with a gun at the scene of what in America would be a “gun-free zone.”

I listed, above, just a few of the many carjackings that were stopped in their tracks after a victim fought back with a gun. Here is a list of some of the mass shootings that have been stopped by a law-abiding citizen who saved the day by carrying a gun.

• Appalachian Law School shooting in January 2002

• The Utah mall shooting in 2007

• Colorado New Life Church shooting was stopped due to the presence of an armed volunteer security guard who fought back (saving up to 100 lives, according to her pastor). The gunman had 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and 700 people were in the church at the time.

• The Israeli seminary shooting in March 2008

“The heroism of an armed Israeli seminary student halfway across the world sends a message that we needn’t submit to murder in victim disarmament zones. That’s why his actions are getting such short shrift from America’s press. It’s a story they are loathe to report because it affirms a philosophy of self-reliance that they despise.”

Sure, no one wants to have to use a gun to protect themselves. No one wants or asks to be attacked, either. Don’t blame me for saying that people can protect themselves, blame these lunatics who see fit to murder people on campus.

Tags: carjacking, concealed carry, Eve Carson, gun-free zones, Lauren Burk, Yitzhak Dadon, gun, gun control, CCW, Gun Advocacy, Heroes, Jeanne Assam, Self Defense, Shootings, Women and Guns

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich refuses to release documents that Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has ordered him to release under the Freedom of Information Act– specifically, subpoenas regarding Blagojevich’s alleged corruption. Blago doesn’t want anyone to see the documents, to such an extent that he thinks it’s OK to fleece the taxpayers to the tune of $150,000 to send to his high-powered Chicago lawyers (thereby proving that the corruption charges are the real deal).

This is outrageous. Blagojevich should be impeached, thrown in prison like the criminal he is, and of course made to pay back anything and everything he has mooched off the taxpayers. Illinois is used to criminal governors (the one who served before Blagojevich, George Ryan, is currently in federal prison on corruption charges). Ryan at least had his pension taken away from him– Blagojevich should get the same treatment.

Blagojevich is a shining example of an unfortunate phenomenon in Illinois politics… a corrupt politician kept in office and even re-elected due to his Democratic ties in Chicago.

(As one example of how disliked Blagojevich is in Illinois, even among his own Democratic legislature, this is what State Senator Mike Jacobs (a Democrat) said after a meeting with Blagojevich, where Jacobs said that Blago threatened him: “If this governor would have been in East Moline, Illinois at one of my local taverns, I would have kicked his tail end.”)

Tags: Rod Blagojevich, Blagojevich, Blago, Blagojevich corrupt, Blagojevich corruption, Blagojevich subpoena

“50 YEARS AGO: Local prisoners on the state’s list of pardons and parolees included _____ ______, who had served 11 years and 11 months of a 25-year sentence.

He was sentenced in November 1945 for the killing of his three-year-old cousin, Connie Janet Rench, on October 3 on the Rench farm.

He entered a plea of guilty to the charge and said he fired at the girl to get even with her father, an uncle by marriage and in whose home the man lived. The bullet from the .22 rifle wounded her little brother who was standing nearby after passing through her.”

So, a man admits to murdering a three-year-old girl out of revenge against her father, gets only 25 years in the first place, and is then pardoned and paroled after 11 years? That was apparently justice 50 years ago. 25 years was considered to be too long?

If this is typical of the era, it seems like we’re much tougher on crime now. I wonder if it has made a difference in our crime rates between then and now…