Fair Play

Turnabout

©2015  Ross Williams

 

 

A number of years ago there was a nationally sensationalized video bomb purporting to expose the unglamorous aspects of obtaining pate de foie gras for the commercial market.  Pate de foie gras is Froggish for "paste of fat liver".  Pate, as it's called, is a culinary delicacy obtained from force-fed geese and ducks, whose livers go into overdrive, thus becoming fat, while attempting to metabolize all the food they are being force-fed.  It's rather unappetizing to think about, but it's just another of the myriad unappetizers which are necessary in the human food industry.  And as far as outright animal brutality goes, the process of fattening up poultry liver for pate is comparatively unremarkable.  There's a dozen things I can think of right now that I do on my small farm that are more disgusting than sticking a food delivery tube down a duck's throat. 

The notorious video showed fat ducks waddling around, fat ducks having their heads tilted back and being tube-fed a slurry of — essentially — creamed grain, what we humans eat for breakfast if we are pretending to have a healthy start to our day, and it showed an ill duck in a cage being unable to get away from a rat attack.  America's liberal sympathy junkies all had a hissy fit of neatly choreographed spontaneity.  Populist boob legislatures in various jurisdictions overpopulated with liberal sympathy junkies went on pandering legislative attack and outlawed the practice of force-feeding poultry in the first place, or simply outlawed the sale, purchase, or use of pate de foie gras.

As a result of this moronic moralizing legislation, America's chefs de cuisine staged their own neatly choreographed spontaneous hissy fit.  One of Chicago's more famous master chefs, operating one of Chicago's more famous [and expensive] restaurants, went so far as to publically announce that he would openly defy the ban on pate imposed by Chicago's Aldermen, who are virtually all liberal boobs.

Chicago's city council rescinded their ban on pate a few years later.

Over the years there have been easily a dozen similar insider videos showing the inner workings of slaughterhouses and the manner by which humans obtain their hamburger.  And, true to their script, America's liberal sympathy junkies, after each new video, arranged a spontaneous, choreographed hissy fit and wet their panties in public by the thousand.  Sadly, though, for the idiot liberal sympathy junkies, America is too in love with beef to do about it like was done with pate.  No matter how you slice it, pate is a food for the culinary one-percent; hamburger is cupidium populi.

But the table has been set on video sneak attacks.  If liberal ideologues can use this tactic to conjure up support for their faux-pious liberal cause celebre, then so can bluenosed conservatives use it to drum up sympathy for their own faux-pious issues.  Sure enough, James O'Keefe, apparently believing that political corruption only exists on the left, stuck a hidden camera in his navel a number of years ago, wandered into an ACORN office with a female accomplice, and asked the ACORN operative how he might be able to set up a human smuggling ring, a prostitution den, and vote fifteen times for Barry Hussein in the '08 general election.  The ACORN operative was only too glad to assist in those illegal endeavors.  The resulting legislative attack defunded ACORN which had, to that point, gotten its hundreds of millions of dollars in annual operating expenses from the federal treasury.  ACORN was thereupon forced to decentralize its operation and rebrand itself into a hundred or more local offices, all with different names, and all obtaining their hundreds of millions in combined operating expense dollars in individual federal grants.  Corruptio populi.

But still, what's good for the idiot liberal goose is good for the bluenosed conservative gander, and idiot liberal geese have no claim to squawk and honk in moral outrage when they are hoisted on their own fattened pate — as it were.

… which brings us to today's video sensationalism.  There are a handful of hidden camera videos floating around showing the seamy underbelly of the heretofore unassailable iconic bastion of gender politics: Planned Parenthood.  It seems that apart from obtaining their half billion dollars of annual operating expenses from the federal treasury, Planned Parenthood supplements its income by selling fetuses, in whole or in part, to researchers and/or ghouls.  Irony compels me to inject an Eric Cartman/Shakey's Pizza reference at this point … so consider it injected.

Planned Parenthood is universally lauded, by those who laud it, as a "women's health" operation dispensing birth control, gynecological exams, and otherwise serving "the women of America".  Yet there are no Planned Parenthood storefronts outside major metropolitan areas.  Planned Parenthood thus only serves urban — and therefore disproportionately poor and disproportionately liberal and disproportionately black — American women.  And while they do indeed give gynecological exams and write prescriptions for birth control pills, the lion's share of the service that Planned Parenthood provides is abortion, a fact that bluenosed conservatives continually harp upon and that idiot liberals continually dissemble after.  Planned Parenthood is therefore a front-line operative in ensuring a reduced future crop of poor blacks and liberals, exactly as its founder, eugenicist Margaret Sanger, envisioned all those years ago when she derided blacks as being wholly inferior to whites and needing to have their population controlled.  Irony compels me to inject another reference here, but I'll resist the urge and leave it as an exercise for the reader.

Federal law prohibits federal dollars to be used to fund abortion, and Planned Parenthood uses a common financial parlor trick to juggle their books on the matter.  In the same way states which justified lottery and, later, casino gambling in the name of public school funding never saw a dollar-for-gambling-tax-dollar increase in public school funding as they promised, Planned Parenthood never sees a dollar-for-federally-funded-dollar increase in their own funding for non-abortion services.  This juggling is childish, yes, it's verging on unethical, and it's undeniably dishonest and disingenuous.  But it's not illegal.

Also not illegal — yet — is selling fetal parts, although it is disgusting, repulsive, nauseating and, to many, emotionally wrenching.  And while I have sympathy for those who consider Planned Parenthood to be ghoulish beasts preying on poor, urban, black women, partly because I share some of their sentiments, the fact of the matter is: I am a libertarian who understands, when no one else seems to [or seems to even care], what it means to have genuine political freedom.

In a nation, such as ours, which is defined to have political freedom belonging to its people, it does not matter one gilded god damn whether a 50.001% or 99.999% majority of the population want the government to stop other people from doing the disgusting thing they're doing; all that matters is whether the defined powers of the government permit the government to get involved.  If the defined powers of the government do not include doing what the majority wants it to do, then the majority needs to go pound sand.  The government, furthermore, needs to stop pandering long enough to tell the majority that what the majority wants is outside the scope of defined governmental power.

Whether bluenosed conservatives like it or not, there is no defined power of the government to get involved in abortion.  Or fetal part sales, for that matter.  This means the government has no legitimate authority to stop abortions regardless of how many think it abominable, nor to stop what is being done with the resulting "tissue" irrespective of how many think that is abominable … which includes me.

It also means — idiot liberals — that the government has no legitimate authority to promote abortions, either.  "Not involved" means just that.  The government is required to stay out of it.  It may not prohibit; it may not promote.  If this means that our major metropolitan areas will be overrun within a generation by a superabundance of poor and mostly black youths all demanding their share of the federal, Chinese-funded pie that the idiot liberals sliced up in prior generations for the sole purpose of creating liberal voters, then so be it.  Our nation will simply run out of money faster, is all.  When China,  in mid-century, seizes those parts of California that Mexico could not annex as a collateral forfeiture for the sovereign debt the US cannot repay, thank the liberals who made it happen.  I plan to thank liberals from my retirement residence in Baja.  Liberals shit everyone's bed on this; they need to own the future consequences of their policies.  And change the sheets.

In the meantime, the next step in the video bomb script is for Congress to defund Planned Parenthood — and the call has already gone out.  The videos are so disturbingly callous that even many of those who support abortion rights, like me, are sickened and appalled by what Planned Parenthood has been doing.  There are more hidden camera videos waiting to come out as well, but the conservatives who took those videos appear to be barred from using the First Amendment; a federal judge in California is abusing his authority by prohibiting the release of any more videos.

No matter; the damage is done, and Planned Parenthood will soon cease getting federal money with which they can juggle their books and thereupon backhandedly perform abortions on poor, urban, black women.  …and that's as it should be; Congress has no legitimate authority to fund Planned Parenthood in the first place.  The Constitution gives no power to Congress over the matter, so Congress can neither prohibit abortion, nor promote it.  Not even if abortion is disingenuously redefined as "women's health".

Justifiable Paranoia

Justifiable Paranoia

©2015  Ross WIlliams

 

I've recently gotten into discussions — albeit short — with a few local media types over the spate of police shootings and the turmoil that follows.  The discussions are short because I am [probably] perceived as an ideologue who has all the time in the world to badger the media-type upon this issue while they have better things to do than indulge me.  It's the "never wrassle with a pig" thing, where I am naturally the pig: the pig likes it and you'll just get dirty.

My position in these dialogues is contrary to both of the standard police-state positions, by which I mean the typical conservative law-n-order mentality which posits that the police are always objective actors who do no wrong, and when they do it's only one in a million and "waddaya expect? ya gonna have a few bad apples!" and also the standard liberal big government position with its schizophrenic belief that the government agencies which actually enforce the big government on everyone is inherently racist.  They're both wrong.  And as usual, I'm the only one I see yammering about the matter who  is correct.

By Memorial Day of 2015, police killed 380-some-odd Americans with firearms.  This is a yearly rate of around 900.  The yearly average for the prior ten years was something like 320 per year.  That figure does not include the Eric Garners who died from a choke hold, nor the dozens who died from "non-lethal" tasers, nor the schlub in Baltimore who died, handcuffed, in the backseat of a police car from injuries sustained from bouncing around as the police car was being driven by a Bobby Unser fan.  Nor does it include the probable jail cell suicide death of Sandra Bland who should never have been in jail in the first place but who was put there by an autocratic asshole cop on a power trip who was too busy abusing his authority to do his job of policing a small portion of a free country in the manner in which police, in a free country, are required to behave.

It does, though, include the death of an unarmed Texas college football player who was ransacking a car dealership, the murder of a feeble Chicago octogenarian waggling a knife around in a medication-induced stupor, and the assassination of a Cincinnati resident who was no longer willing to participate in a needless traffic stop imposed upon him by another autocratic asshole cop on a power trip.

Simply put: police are targeting Americans.

Now, an overly simplified conservative position suggests that those who are killed by police deserve what they get, while an overly simplified liberal position would maintain that virtually all of those killed are black.  Notwithstanding that some and possibly many of those killed do in fact "deserve it" and that a good number of those killed are actually black, the reality is … I've said it before … police are targeting Americans.

ALL Americans.  Not just blacks.

The reason for this is … and I've said this before as well … police are, generally speaking, autocratic assholes on power trips abusing their authority, and with nearly universal impunity improperly granted them by the courts no longer willing to do their own duty in compelling the other branches of government to abide by the severe restrictions on their power that our nation was founded upon.

If statistics are to be relied upon, and they usually can be, the ratio of blacks being killed in 2015 will be roughly one-third that of whites being killed.  Race-baiting liberals will say that this proves blacks are being targeted more, because whites outnumber blacks by five-to-one.  It's simple math, they'll claim: five-to-one multiplied by one third means blacks are targeted 1.67:1 more often than whites … so there.

Sandra Bland and Eric Garner aside, police in our country rarely use weapons unless crimes are actually being committed — they confine their power abuses in most citizen encounters to being bossy, imperious jackasses.   The rate of criminal activity, where cops using weaponized force will nearly always be seen, is almost four times higher for blacks than it is for whites, which thus erases [and then some] any asserted racial bias in the use of police force.  Blacks are fractionally less likely to die at the pointy end of a cop's bullet when you factor "presumed criminal activity" into the equation.  This is not to say that criminals deserve to be killed on the street, but … sometimes they do, in fact, bring it on themselves.

Of course, this "presumed criminal activity" is very difficult to quantify, since this factor is not included in the statistics compiled by the Justice Department even though it is undoubtedly a valid consideration.  Michael Brown, for example, was killed after attempting to boost a cop's gun as he was being stopped for previously boosting a local convenience store, but this fact escapes the official tallyman.  It also escapes the mob which is tired of listening to official excuses for cops killing citizens by the score, and they are refusing to listen.  But let's just say that the figures are a statistical wash that do not support the hypothesis of a rampantly racist nationwide police force.  Individual cops' mileage may vary.

Instead, what the figures show thus far in 2015 is that police are killing Americans three-to-one more than they have since records were kept, and that the majority being killed are white, both in raw numbers and pro rata.  This supports, therefore, the hypothesis that cops are autocratic assholes on power trips abusing their authority.  They don't care who you are; they are going to push you around every chance they get and — since they have nearly universal impunity — no court is likely to say they were wrong to do so if you complain about it.  After all, do you think this is a free country or something? where citizens have rights and the government has strict limitations on its power to push people around?

The natural and predictable result of this is that citizens will fight back — it is the universal outcome of every history book ever written.  Nearly all citizens, though, will fight back like I am: by timidly using words of varying rudeness to unflatteringly describe the totalitarianism of the police-state we see emerging around us.  This, then, will ensure that more of us will be badgered, harassed and goaded by cops if we are ever officially encountered, thus supporting the "autocratic assholes on power trips abusing their authority" hypothesis.

Just as naturally and predictably, a small portion of the citizens who are badgered, harassed and goaded will elevate their pique to something more sinister, and still others will do the same as a sort of pre-emptive measure … and sure enough, the cops shot by Americans has "spiked", according to the FBI, up 89% in 2014 over 2013, and the preliminary figures for 2015 show another near-doubling.  Why, we're almost up to the number of dead cops we saw during the Prohibition Era!

And the comparison is telling.  The natural and predictable consequence of a citizenry which believes itself to be a free people in a free country and thus defined not to have to endure its government badgering them endlessly … is to fight back when they find that they are being badgered endlessly, over matters they were designed to be free from being badgered upon.

A free people does not have Prohibition thrust upon them.  When it is, resistance follows.  And during Prohibition, we saw resistance and cops died.  Thousands of them over the decade and a half that Prohibition lasted.

A free people does not have to prove they aren't terrorists at airports, nor to buckle their seat belts, nor to buy health insurance if they want to risk it, nor to stop selling loose cigarettes on the street, nor to stop smoking AFTER the traffic stop is concluded, nor to do any of the other countless things we are told — "for our own good" or otherwise — we must do or else have some uniformed and armed assholes abuse their authority at us about it.  When it happens, resistance follows.  We are seeing resistance today, and cops are dying as a result.  Hundreds of them.

This is a "duh" moment.

The only reason free citizens in a free country set ambushes for cops is because those citizens do not believe they are free.  They believe the government is out to get them, so they want to get the government first.  And when nearly 900 citizens are going to be killed by cops this year, up from 300 or so last year, those paranoid citizens would seem to have a good point.