Stevie Wonder Boycotts Stand-Your-Ground States - Really?

So let me get this straight, Mr. Wonder. You consider states in which you are required by law to attempt to run away, thereby turning your back on a potentially dangerous assailant or in which you must actually wait until you are fired upon, struck or, preferably, shot first by an assailant before you are allowed to defend yourself somehow safer than states where, if you are attacked you don't have to run away or wait till you are shot when you are assaulted?  Who is safer under such a system, Stevie?  Certainly not the folk on the receiving end of assaults, robberies and what Rachel Jeantel (the girl on the phone with Trayvon Martin" calls "an ass whooping".

"Do not harm your attacker" seems to be the message the anti stand-your-ground folk like Stevie are trying to deliver to innocent folk everywhere. So are we not, therefore, teaching our children that it is better to be the attacker than to be the innocent victim - at least so far as your potential survival is concerned?  Are we not virtually guaranteeing the shaping of a society in which the aggressor is the protected person and in which the victim must submit to what Rachel Jeantel colorfully described as a deserved "ass whooping" or face jail time. Rachel Jeantel further claimed in a CNN interview that Mr. Zimmerman didn't understand that Travon "went back" only in order to administer a beating, not to murder George Zimmerman.  Travon's assault was, she explained to an aghast Piers Morgan, not as an attempt to kill Zimmerman, but, according to Jeantel, because Travon thought Zimmerman was gay and needed to be taught a lesson so that Zimmerman wouldn't attempt to molest Travon's family members.  If, as Jeantel maintains, George had simply taken his beating none of this would have happened.

Someone needs to keep that girl off television if they're going to ever maintain the "poor little innocent boy" image of Martin the politicos are using to stir things up. I am just as sorry this happened as anyone, but is this the case the left wants to hang its humanity on?  With the incredible rate of slaughter going on lately in Chicago, which has strict gun control and no stand-you-ground laws, one has to wonder as to the efficacy of this strategy. Recently a kid Travon's age was found behind a Chicago dumpster four days after gang members beat him to death for refusing to join a gang. Is this what happens to the innocent in a society that tells you that you may not arm yourself for self-defense and that you must run or submit to being shot or struck if you don't?

Who exactly are we defending by insisting on a mass repeal of stand-you-ground laws. I know in my home state, the rates of assaults, home invasions and burglaries dropped significantly when my state adopted the castle doctrine.  In my heavily armed neck of the woods it certainly did.  If someone levels a gun at you or raises a fist or club to strike you, your odds of survival go way down if you do not act fast and first. I fail to see how a person being attacked would find it better to be shot or struck in the back than to stop the attacker by any means at hand.

Or perhaps we should simply make a law that all would-be attackers must wear a t-shirt that says, "I'm not going to kill you, just administer an ass whooping" just to make sure we submit to our well-deserved beatings and don't try to shoot assailants or cause them unnecessary trauma.

Well, there are some 30 states in the US with "stand-your-ground" or "castle" laws.  That leaves Stevie just 20 states he can sing in. This is a free country.  Stevie can do that.  And even though Stevie has a nice voice and does some really good songs, I can boycott HIS music.

It's a free country.  I can do that.

For now.

Just sayin'

© 2013 by Tom King

Che' Defects to G.O.P.

Dateline:  7/12/13 - California

Famed revolutionary Che' Gorilla announced today that he is joining the Republican Party. "I didn't leave the Progressive Socialist Workers Party," he told a press conference from his home base at the Sandy Diego Primate Habitat, "They left me!"

In related news, baboons protesting Che's defection cancel their hunger strike when it is discovered that skipping meals would make them not only hungry, but ineligible for Federal banana subsidies.

Wal-Mart Likely to Pack It's Bags and Leave DC

• “The question here is a living wage; it’s not whether Wal-Mart comes or stays,” said council member Vincent B. Orange (D-At Large), a lead backer of the legislation, who added that the city did not need to kowtow to threats. “We’re at a point where we don’t need retailers. Retailers need us.”

This reminds me of the time East Texas rural public transit director, Roxanne McKinley told a bunch of us transit advocacy folk that "Public transit doesn't have to make its customers happy.  Our customers have to make us happy in order to get a ride."  Ever once in a while, the progressives open the box a little bit so we can see what we're really voting for (before we find out what's in it).

What DC shoppers ought to look like.....

Is this the sort of person we want to attract to DC?

The new, breathlessly titled "Living Wage" law passed in Washington DC city council this week, forces certain large retailers (like Wal-Mart) to pay a 50% premium wage over and above DC's already higher-than-average minimum wage. Wal-Mart which is building 3 stores in DC with plans for 3 more is having to rethink building any stores at all in the DC area.  The snobs who passed this punitive, anti-discount retailer bill are quite happy with themselves.  They don't like Wal-Mart anyway - all those oddly dressed poor people rushing in and out of there at all hours of the day and night. I mean really.  Do we really want the sort of people Wal-Marts attract living in our nation's capital?

By the time these guys are through with their misguided, if not sinister attempts at social engineering, the only people who will be able to afford to live in DC are wealthy politicians and corporate fat cats. 

Perhaps that's the point.

The guys making the new "living wage" (at least the ones who still have jobs) will all have to move out of DC to towns that do have Wal-Marts and they will spend a big chunk of that new "living wage" commuting into the city, not to mention adding hours to their working day commuting, an activity for which they do not get paid?  And they'll spend most of the money outside of Washington which will, although the smart guys on the DC city council probably don't realize it yet, lead to a reduction in sales tax income.  No matter.  Just raise the sales tax to compensate.  After all, with the new living wage, everyone will be able to afford it.

AND, with longer working days, they will spend less and less time with their families and what happens to their kids?  Will they mandate add after-school "programs" to keep the unattended kids off the streets.  Will we let the government raise them while we're sitting on a bus or a train 3 to 5 hours a day?  One thing this kind of social engineering does do very effectively is push the working poor out of places like DC where costs rise beyond bearing.  Marginal folk will have to leave the city.  When they do the poorer parts of town can be "cleaned up" for the well-to-do who can afford to pay five bucks for a tomato down at Le' Groceree' Boutique Organic Foods.

Perhaps "the wealthy" will be able to buy out the abandoned DC slums for a song, bulldoze them and turn them into palatial dachas for politburo members. Not the Wal-Mart wealthy, though. They aren't welcome to do business in DC.  So, they live and do business in places like Arkansas.  Out in the country. Where real people live.

Of course, the whole forced living wage and increased government "planning" idea didn't work out so well in Detroit, but then, as always with progressive socialism, the whole thing depends on how smart the leadership is and don't we have all our smartest leaders gathered in Washington DC? 

What could go wrong?

Plus the sponsors of this wrong-headed law will get to claim they did it all for "the poor". No matter that more and more people will be living "lives of quiet desperation" as Thoreau described it.  Oh, well, the middle class has been getting too fat and comfortable over the past century. They are beginning to get uppity.  The bread and circuses approach to the pacification of the masses isn't working as well as the nouveau-nobility had hoped it would.  And reality TV seemed like such a good idea too. Perhaps, after all, it is time for the application of a little "quiet desperation" to get the masses to settle down and shut up.  You know, just to remind them who's boss.

Jesus must be loading up the bus to come get us because this whole thing is going to blow up soon - right in their progressive little faces.

Just sayin'

Tom King (c) 2013

US Energy Policy's Unintended Consequences

Making the "masses" happy - central planning style....

High fuel costs force Filipinos to resort to inadequate public transit.

The world's intellectual elites believe along with famed braniac, Albert Einstein, that the smart people of the world should be able to figure out how to make everyone happy and content. So they've tried it out with a variety of political strategies designed over the past hundred years to centralize power in the hands of our intellectual "superiors" and to give them a shot and cleaning up the mess for us all by increasingly controlling our lives from on high.

Unfortunately, as much as Einstein knew about physics, he apparently understood little about human beings in large groups.  Sadly, even those with advanced degrees in the science of managing the affairs of people in large groups know very little about the subject. Sociology, philosophy, entertainment, politics and economics are as much akin to the practice of voodoo or the science of shooting craps as they are to physics or biology. The leading lights of these sciences like Frances Galton,  Karl Marx, William Fulbright, George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Sanger and John Maynard Keynes have tried diligently to promote policies that would improve the human race (mostly the lesser members of said race).

President Obama is the child of this idea - that the human race can be improved through a more powerful government and by placing smart people in charge of planning the lives of the masses.  One of the things he believes strongly in is the idea that the planet is being killed by the people who live on it and that something must be done about it.  It is obvious to Mr. Obama and his cohorts that smart people must figure out a way to manipulate the dullards of this world into doing things that will save the planet.

One of their pet ideas is the idea that people need to be concentrated into smaller planned communities and that personal transportation should be limited.  Fossil fuels have emerged as the environment-destroying villain since they are relatively cheap - a quality that only encourages people to use personal transportation machines fueled by fossil fuels. 

The social-political brains have, therefore, decided that fossil fuel must be made far more expensive in order to force more people to use public transportation.  Once people become used to using public transit, pollution from fossil fuels will be dramatically reduced and our dependence on fossil fuels vastly decreased.  The air will be cleaner and people will move closer to city cores where the jobs are and urban sprawl will be arrested and nature can reclaim the abandoned suburban wasteland.  It makes deceptive sense.

Unfortunately, the big-brained central planners do not have brains big enough to handle everything.

One of the results of discouraging oil exploration and fossil fuel resource development that the left may not have thought of when they decided that higher fuel costs would "save the planet" was the impact their manipulative energy policies have on the "poor" whose welfare is supposed to be their raison de'etre for doing all this in the first place.

The picture above is a peek at the future. Increasing fuel costs have forced Filipinos to use public transit to get to work, just as the President promised us it would do in the United States before he was even elected.  What he didn't figure into his calculations was the impact of higher fuel costs in the US on the economies of poorer nations.  So we get scenes like this in countries whose infrastructures have not grown fast enough to keep up with the central planners and their bright ideas for making everyone safe and happy. 

These jammed crowds are an immunologists nightmare. How do you clean places like this where people are jammed cheek by jowl practically 24 hours a day?  Turn loose some new strain of flu or a biological weapon in a transit station like this and it will spread via public transit like a viral nuclear bomb.  And why do you think terrorists set off bombs in places like this?  For maximum effect, of course. People crammed together are not only easier to blow up, but when panicked, tend to climb over each other and trample further hundreds of their fellow travelers to death.  What US energy policy as driven by the political left in the United States has done is create easier and better targets for terrorists both here and abroad.

Don't worry.  The central planners have a solution for that - condoms, abortion and birth control.  Reduce the population, insure plenty to eat for all, provide universal medical care, reduce education standards so that everyone graduates and feels good about themselves and the population will, because they have the most important elements of Maslow's Hierarchy of Need" settle into nice quiet complacency and "self-actualize".  So goes the theory anyway.

Trouble is, it's not working in the US. All we've done is create shortages of workers in key areas, which other countries, that don't have unlimited abortion on demand, are happy to send us from their surplus smart people, leaving poorer countries with fewer of the skilled workers they need to drag themselves up out of poverty. While the US has always benefited from the brain boost we get from waves of legal immigration, it doesn't do much for the increasingly socialist societies from which we are draining the intelligence.The rush to socialism is a bloody nightmare!

The problem for the central planners and collectivists is that no group of people and certainly no one person is smart enough to figure out how to control everyone's life.  It's too complex. You'd have to reprogram everyone's brain to some level of uniformity in order to get them all to behave in a simple enough way that would allow for the simplicity you need to successfully make everyone happy as Einstein hoped. You'd have to adopt the method advocated by the Greek King who was asked by a neighboring king how to rule his people and hold onto his power. The Greek King took him to a ripening cornfield and had his soldiers go into the field and lop off the heads of any corn stalk that stood higher than the others. Lesson delivered.

No man is smart enough to control a society of individuals with free will other than by brute force.  As Ronald Reagan said, "Socialism will only work in two places - heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it."

Only God can manage to create a society where all are truly happy and content and I don't believe that's Him sitting in the oval office.

Just sayin'

Tom King (c) 2013