War on Drugs/War on Terror - A Waste of Time?

If the War on Drugs created more drug users, then will the War on Terror create more terrorists?

That's one proposition being posted all over the web lately by the usual libs (liberals and libertarians).

It's flawed logic.  It's the classic propaganda ploy.  Start with a "truth" that isn't true and then extrapolate a false logic conclusion from it.  In this case, if the War on Drugs created fewer drug users, the premise would fall flat.  And there's no evidence that the war on drugs "created" any more drug users.

Reducing the supply of anything, even drugs makes that thing more expensive.  Nothing will get rid of drug use or people willing to supply drugs.  That's true, But let's look at the current administration's relentless efforts to reduce the price of oil and gas in order to raise the price and force us to reduce our consumption.  It follows that if that works, then if you deliberately reduce the supply of drugs and the price will go up and people will have to either quit or use less. 

Making it all okay and safe to peddle drugs as liberals and libertarians suggest only makes for more drug users we have to take care of in the end.  Besides, contrary to the mythology, Prohibition actually worked.  A recent article in the American Journal of Public Health argues that Prohibition actually was a success in many ways and only failed politically.  Prohibition changed the larger culture from one in which alcohol was pervasive to one in which the majority of the Prohibition-era children were raised in alcohol free homes.  It took years for alcohol consumption to rise and again become pervasive in the culture.  We're only now seeing alcoholism rising again and we will bear the health care costs that go with it if we don't continue to insist upon temperance efforts like the prohibition on advertising addictive substances like alcohol and cigarettes.  If we hope to stem the tide, history shows you have to build levees and dikes. 

Repeal was caused by political failures, the Depression and false promises of greatly increased tax revenues.  It passed, sort or, even though prohibition was still widely supported.  The rate of alcoholism remained low for some years after Repeal because many states and counties kept prohibition laws in place and alcohol had been dislodged from its once ubiquitous place in American homes.  I lived in two counties in Texas that are still "dry", 80 plus years after Prohibition. If you drink, you have to really, really want to drink in Smith and Johnson Counties. The nearest liquor store is in the next county.

Legalization didn't reduce either crime or alcoholism.  The criminals simply found other criminal activities to take up.  It became easier for folk who were already alcoholics to get booze.  But the culture that once surrounded alcohol consumption had been taken out of the mainstream in a big way.  Repeal brought some alcohol use back into the culture, but the experience of Prohibition forever attached a stigma to drinking.

In the same way repealing drug laws will only serve to make drugs more "acceptable" in American culture and make it easier for people to become drug addicts. Prohibition it turns out, did a lot of good and actually helped stem a rising tide of alcoholism in the United States that would soon have done irreparable damage to our economy and culture.  Do we really want to see the rates of alcoholism in our nation rivaled by rates of drug addiction?

With addictive substances, you can be certain that the more of it that's out there, the more addicts these substances will create.  Studies showed, for instance, that rhesus monkeys given unlimited access to cocaine, took so much they laid down, quit eating and died. That's a problem with availability. The monkeys didn't take more coke because it was denied to them.  The forbidden fruit theory only works so far as the fruit doesn't become too costly.

With terrorism, taking out the supply caches and leadership makes it harder and more expensive to conduct acts of terror.  The 9/11 operation cost Al Quaeda a good deal of money and manpower to pull off.  Without the money, the operations get tougher to do, so you get fewer terrorist attacks no matter how badly they want to carry them out.  When President Bush was pounding Al Quaeda strongholds and taking out Al Quaeda operatives, there were fewer terror attacks on Americans.  So they started blowing each other up because it was more convenient and attacking American soldiers who shoot back with deadly accuracy. 

Since Obama has let up on the war on terror, terror attacks have only increased and come home to an America perceived as weak once more.  

How many more attacks will America have to endure before the President decides we've all been punished enough for America's "sins" and starts doing something serious about it instead of merely excusing terrorism and blaming it on some video no one ever saw.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King (c) 2013

The Old World Really Wants to Meddle with the New

 UN Investigator Wants to Go After Bush Too
(c) 2013 by Tom King

And now the UN is getting in on the Bush-bashing - as we knew it would given a little Obama encouragement.  The president seems to have been taking lessons from Clinton on the art of misdirection. Now he's got his internationalist buds blaming stuff on Bush too.  These guys aren't going to be happy till they put the former president in jail.

All I've got to say is - from 9/11 to the end of the Bush administration and for months beyond it - no terrorist attacks on US soil.  Teddy Roosevelt always said, "Speak softly and carry a big stick."  Bush did that pretty well. The Arab nations understand the big stick.

The Obama administration is more like "Speak a lot but don't actually do anything really meaningful unless France gives you permission."  Unfortunately, the Arab nations see that as weakness and an opportunity to go after us again. This UN report basically says, that when you go after terrorists, you must be polite about it and stick to Marquis of Queensbury rules and protect the human rights of terrorists with great care. 

If you don't, the reasoning seems to go, the terrorists might try to blow you up... 

They also want to prosecute American leaders they don't agree with which sets a dangerous precedent.  This kind of UN meddling reminds me a bit of that one world government with "teeth" that even international church leaders like the pope endorsed a couple of years back - one that would be organized by trade and labor unions, international political parties, and diplomats which would be strong enough to keep powerful nations like the US in line. Now we have the UN demanding we prosecute US leaders for being too tough on terrorists.  Next they'll be assigning international representatives to monitor our elections..........................oh, wait.  They've already done that.

We are seeing the rise of internationalism on every hand, which might not be bad, were it to focus on stuff like stopping terroristm, preventing one nation from attempting to drive the people of another nation into the sea or driving tanks over another nation's borders in order to permanently expand their own borders or harboring terrorist training camps and paying terrorists to perform terrorist acts or developing nuclear weapons when they are openly and vocally threatening other nations and supporting providing equipment and training to terrorists and terrorist nations.

That might be useful.  Unfortunately, the focus of internationalists seems to be on weakening the US and creating a strong enough world government to reduce America to a feeble, economically weakened, militarily impotent power. In this, they've had the aid of our own libs (both varieties - the progressive and Ron Paul isolationist varieties - I can't see a lot of difference between the two on this issue).

Look, I've seen the way most of these nations form governments. It's a mess and heaven help you if the bad guys get enough votes to take over. That is NOT something we want to be subservient to. The United States is a haven of liberty, personal, religious and physical liberty. If we take down the walls that protect that liberty, if we lay down our arms and lock up the guard dogs, we will not last long.  If we as a nation decide to do this and submit ourselves to "international" opinion, we will soon find ourselves living in a nation like all those other coutries our ancestors left, piling on freighters, cattle boats and anything they could find that would float in order to get to America. 

Now we have their descendants clamoring to bring the Old World that our forefathers left into America's business - with TEETH? Do they NOT teach history in public schools any more.  The Monroe Doctrine should still be in force.  Hey, we'd even make it a two-way deal and leave them all alone, if the Old World wouldn't keep calling us over to clean up their messes every time we leave them to their own devices for any length of time.

There are reasons our ancestors left the Old World.  Perhaps we need to re-examine those reasons ever once in a while.

Let's Write Some MORE Laws - That's the Ticket!

(c) Tom King

License  Some rights reserved by jurvetson


After a week like this one, we're sure to see a string of teary-eyed politicians telling us we've got to do something to prevent these kinds of tragedies from ever happening again - as if politicians have the power to stop anything bad from ever happening or causing anything good to happen for that matter.  Politicians live to make laws.  It's the politician's raison d'être. A politician does not feel like he or she is a politician if there's not a law passed with that politician's name on it.  The media encourages that by remarking sagely as to the number of laws named after a politician when the pundits and political hacks are evaluating said politician's career (usually after the former senator, congressman, mayor, etc. is safely dead).  Passing law is the mark of political success.  I've never heard of a politician being praised on the six o'clock news for getting rid of laws, have you?

It makes sense then that in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings that politicians would feel and overwhelming urge to pass a law. And you can bet it will be a gun control law.  The thinking is that if you get guns out of the hands of these people, then they can no longer go on shooting rampages. Only they won't go that far because the NRA is too powerful.  They'll just reduce the legal size of magazines, figuring criminals won't be able to kill as many people if they can't shoot so many without reloading.

Problem is, these guys aren't criminals that shoot up schools and shopping malls. They're people who should be in a mental hospital.  Virtually every one, from the guy who shot Gabbie Gifford to the autistic kid who felt no pain in Connecticut, virtually every one was identified as mentally ill at some time prior to their shooting rampages.

Making the gun harder to get is not going to stop them.  Making magazines smaller or doing away with semi-automatics isn't going to help.  Charles Whitman killed 13 people, an unborn child and wounded 32 others. He seemed normal enough, even exemplary in his behavior. He was an Eagle Scout and ex-Marine.  He used only bolt-action rifles, a shotgun and some pistols. He had no automatic weapons. 

A gentleman with a handgun stopped a man this past week who attacked people with a knife and was set to start a mass slaughter. He didn't have a gun.  An off-duty cop working as a movie theater security guard at a San Antonio mall stopped a man who was planning to shoot up the place.  The people who do this kind of thing are not generally working with both oars in the water.  Sweden has the most restrictive gun laws in the Western world and a terrorist managed to kill 70 unarmed people at an island resort there.

Even though these things are horrific, they aren't really getting more frequent.  We just hear about them more often because we have 24 hour news and, as political commentator Armstrong Williams aptly noted, "If it bleeds it leads." Still, when we hear about this stuff, all of us are seized with a desire to make it stop.

The problem is, you can't stop it. Evil and lunacy exist in this world and will, on occasion, strike.  We decided almost three decades ago that putting people willy nilly in insane asylums was a bad thing to do.  Government-run asylums, we discovered, were terrible places.  So we turned them all loose - or at least most of them.  That's how the government solves a problem. If there are people locked up unjustly and you demand they stop doing it, the government just lets everybody go. Big government is not subtle We had an explosion of homelessness after the great release experiment in the 80s when all those who had been in institutions hit the streets with no place to go.

The problem with the folks at the government being the ones to stop school massacres is that the government always takes a sledge hammer approach to any problem it tries to solve.  You don't get a lot of nuance in decision-making when it comes to laws being written in Washington and designed to provide a one-size-fits-all solution for 350 million people.

So, they jump on gun control as the easy fix for what is actually a mental health problem. People can't get help for mentally ill loved ones who need it.  I know. In my own family I've had to watch loved ones with mental illness deteriorate to the point that they attempted suicide quite spectacularly. I've got a loved one living in a storage building 3000 miles away and I'm too broke to help him.  The system tries to do as little as possible and only helps when they absolutely have no other choice. Any kind of even temporary committment is next to impossible because they fixed that in Washington back in the 80s after a Mickey Rooney movie about the subject of unjust mental incarceration.  It was widely viewed and in true Washington fashion, laws were passed to "make it stop".

Our mental health system is a wreck. In working with therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists, I've experienced first hand what they go through in trying to help patients. I spent two years in a graduate rehab psych program and worked in mental health programs for 25 years.  The average mental health practitioner walks among his patients like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs (occupied by lawyers).  They are so hemmed in by regulations and potential lawsuits that people who should be taken off the streets for their own good as well as the safety of the community can't be.  Sometimes a mentally ill person volunteers for a stint in the hospital, but if they volunteer, they can check themselves out whenever they want to, like when the killin' urge comes over them.

I worked at a treatment center for kids and watched severely disturbed kids turn 18 and be turned out into the world with virtually no supports. That's how the law worked. Some places tried to provide them help - usually faith-based facilities with church partnerships to help the kids integrate into the community. Most such programs operated without public support and under the disapproving eye of state mental health authorities.
In the past 30 years, we've learned more about the human brain and how to treat it and what to expect of various types of brain diseases.  Yet with all this knowledge, we find ourselves prevented from doing the very kinds of things that would prevent people from going berserk and shooting up an elementary school.

But that's what happens when you get politicians doing hip shot law-making. You want to prevent mass murders in our country?  Two things:

1. Protect likely targets.  If a movie theater can hire a sharp-eyed security guard, a school can.  Off duty cops have the training and are always looking for extra work. Ex-military guys can be trained for the work and lots of them come home looking for jobs. Protecting kids is a job they were trained for.
2. Get those with violent mental illnesses off the street.  Yes it will cost money, but not nearly as much as the massive bureaucracy needed to manage the highly restrictive gun control laws that are being proposed right now.  And hospitalization is not a life sentence. Proper treatment and medications can help unstable people cope and learn ways to avoid going out of their minds and committing these heinous acts.

Charles Whitman, the University of Texas Sniper, left a note. In it he said if his life insurance was any good, to pay off his debts and give the rest to mental health research so they could find out why he was compelled to kill all those people. 

Everyone asks why this happens every time it does. Some blame it on the devil. Others blame it on God.  Some, like the president in his memorial speech in Newtown, do both. Obama remarked that evil exists in the world and then qualified that by saying "God called them home". So we've assigned blame to both God and the Devil.  Throw in Republicans and the NRA and that should spread the blame around even more.

We look for a reason for the unreasonable, when these things happen. There is no reason other than the obvious one.  When you ask God to leave you be; when you tell Him you want nothing to do with Him, He goes away and leaves you alone.  We've no excuse for asking where God was.  We've asked Him to stay out of our schools.  We've left the crazy people out on the streets, uncared for till they lost their minds altogether.  And worse, when the angels left along with God, we didn't replace them with security guards.

If we're not willing to open our schools to God's protection and if we insist on trying to solve this problem in Washington instead of in our communities, homes and churches, where things like this happen, then the carnage will continue unabated. We cannot keep waiting for the government to do for us what can only be done by us.  We do not have to wait for permission to fix our own communities; to make them safer.

God will make things right in the end, despite our best efforts to muck it all up. While I don't believe He chose how those kids would die - that He "called those children home" as the President suggested - I do believe He will take them home one day when He comes back to clean up our mess. 

God help us all when He sees what we've done to this place.

Tom

 

How's That Gun Control Working Out for You?

Restrictive Gun Laws in Mexico Make It Open Season on Women and Children
(c) 2012 by Tom King

This past weekend, a large band of armed men (some of them law enforcement officers) descended on a church youth campout near Mexico City, raping 5 women and girls and sexually abusing and brutalizing an unknown number of youth in a lengthy rampaging attack on the camp. Seventeen of the attackers have been rounded up so far - cold comfort for the traumatized kids and their sponsors. 

Mexico's constitution, like ours guarantees its citizens the right to bear arms, but no one at the camp had any means to defend themselves. Despite its constitution, Mexico has already done what progressives want to do in the US.  They have piled on such heap of restrictive gun ordinances that owning anything larger than a 22 caliber popgun is nearly impossible - unless you're a gang member or drug cartel member of course.

Mexican citizens who obey the laws are sitting ducks for the heavily armed and increasingly brazen gangs of thugs that roam the countryside raping, robbing and murdering ordinary Mexican civilians. The death toll has been horrific. It's little wonder so many Mexicans are willing to risk swimming the river to escape.

With recent rash of mass shooting in the US, there has come the predictable calls for new, more restrictive gun laws ostensibly to prevent such events. As groups like the NRA continually point out, taking guns from the innocent leaves only the authorities and criminals armed.  A liberal friend of mine pointed out it only takes minutes for police to get to you if you call 911 for help.  Unfortunately, most shootings are over in just seconds.  The Colorado theater shooting was over in less than two minutes including time for the perp to reload.  While it's nice to catch the bad guy, catching a mass murder as he attempts to run away doesn't help the dead much.

If advocates of restrictive gun laws would like to see the consequences of a government legislating disarmament of its citizenry, one need look no further than Mexico. I don't know about your church, but when mine takes its kids camping, we take along our men and many of them go well-armed - just in case there are bears, you know.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

The Promises We Made - Remembering 9/11

There were two reactions that day in September - fear and anger. The fearful curled up and hid somewhere, hoping they would not be next. The angry stood up and did something, even if it was only to go outside and hang a flag out front of the house in defiance. I remember hanging my second flag (I already had one up), looking around the neighborhood in defiance and thinking, "Bring it on, wherever you are hiding. Here I stand!"

Maybe John Edwards was right. Maybe there are two Americas, but I doubt it was the two Americas he envisioned.  I think the two Americas are inhabited by the fearful and the brave. Like children on a playground, the fearful surrender and submit in hopes that the local bully won't hurt them much. The brave stand up to the bully and take a pounding if they have to, but they refuse to submit or surrender.  The cost of cowardice is far too high to pay and you will never cease to pay that price.  Its not just we who pay the cost either. It will be our children and our children's children who will pay the price if we are too fearful to stand up to the bullies of this world.

God placed us in this land to create a refuge for the bullied peoples of the world. He blessed it so that those refugees now live in the most prosperous, peaceful land in the world.  We didn't steal it our prosperity from others.  We dug deep, worked hard and held on against those same bullies and thugs who would follow us here to prey on us in this new land.  Our forefathers taught us to fight tyranny, to fight the bully boys of the world that our children might enjoy the blessings of liberty. We fought tyranny during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. We fought it again during the Civil War, and World War II. We owe our fathers and our children a toe to toe, knock down drag out fight like this world has never seen to preserve our sacred liberty in this generation.  There are those among us who would surrender our liberties to the very same thugs and bullies that generations of Americans fought so hard to free themselves from, mainly because they are too afraid to fight.  Dylan Thomas' famous poem says, "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage against the dying of the light."  Good advice for this generation of Americans for we are in danger of slipping quietly into the long night of tyranny in exchange for bread and circuses and the illusion of peace and safety.

It is well on this anniversary to remember 9/11 and what can happen to us if we cease to be vigilant.  It is better that we remember the promises we made to ourselves and our posterity in the days after 9/11 when the horror of what was done to us was still fresh in our minds.

Tom King, Tyler, TX

* Image available at: http://concordville.org

9/11 - Media Reluctance to Use the "T" Word is Nothing New

I stumbled on an archive file of video clips of the news coverage on the morning of 9/11. It was stunning how long some of the mainstream news media avoided using the "T" word.  CNN and NBC kept trying to suggest that the FAA had some sort of malfunction or something. You have to hand it to Fox News in Washington and Charlie Gibson on ABC. Fox mentioned the potential that it was a terrorist attack and confirmed it when the second plane hit.  Charlie called it an attack. I was watching Charlie and you could here him square his shoulders just before he called it an attack. Diane stumbled a bit, but followed his lead. I'm sure the producer wet his pants at about that point, but to his credit, he kept the clips coming in.  Even after the second plane hit, you could here the CNN reporter still pushing almost desperately for the "FAA malfunction" explanation and they still hadn't used the "T" word.

You want to know where Fox News Network came from. It was the the way CNN botched the 9/11 coverage by refusing to call it what it was until way after their audience had figured it out and were collectively shouting "It's a terrorist attack you moron!" at their TV sets..

Much of the confusion was the product of serious wishful thinking on the part of news media. President Bush came on quickly and called the act what it was - terrorism.  Then he called for a moment of silent prayer for the victims and then said an amen for all of us.

Internationally, the most rattled news reporter was the Russian news anchor who was hyperventilating during his entire report. Can't blame him.  Someone had just hit the largest nuclear power in the world and he was sitting on ground zero if we thought it was them.  This guy knew what it would mean if it had been his own country attacked - in terms of retaliation. The guy was probably hoping Putin was on the phone going, "It wasn't us! It wasn't us!"  The Chinese reporter was almost perky - it was kind of weird, like "Look what's happening to those crazy Americans now!"  The Canadian reporter just stopped talking when the second tower came down and mentioned later that the Canadians were taking security precautions just in case.  The Iraqi report mentioned Kuwait and showed bits of a downed Navy jet. I couldn't understand a word, but it seemed like cautious gloating to me. The reporter guy looked nervous (turned out with good reason). BBC was typically restrained, but did mention terrorism early on. Within hours they released a special report that sounded like an Alistaire Cooke documentary.

The Japanese had the best high-quality photographs and video - way better than the other guys early on and much of it shot at street level.  Of course there were probably 10,000 Japanese tourists in New York at the time with 30,000 or so top of the line cameras strung round their necks.


Our media had a hard time reporting it.  Matt Lauer and Katy Couric were eerily calm, but confused like they couldn't believe this was happening.  Frankly everybody did that at first, but they never quite got over it. 

When you don't believe in evil, you naturally want to look away when you see it happening right in front of you. Military and ex-military guys figured out it was an attack early on.  The more liberal the news media outlet, the longer they took to use the "T" word even after it was obvious that we were under attack.  The Fox Station in New York nailed what was going on from the moment they came on the air with the report.  The "T" word was used in the first 60 seconds.

What I found really interesting was how so many stations cut to commercial before coming on with the news.  The Fox locals just broke straight to the story.  At one time news in this country, when something like that happened, Walter Cronkite would cut in.....

"We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring your this breaking news story!"

Now, it's more like "What?, uh, we have, a uh............We'll be right back after this commercial break"

Just watching the coverage, however, will take you right back to the day it happened and help you remember the magnitude of what was done to us. Next time someone tells you about how wrong the war is or how we had no reason to wage it, send them to this archive page and spend an hour or two remembering.

Oh, and God bless George Bush. Watch his announcement of the attacks.  He calls a spade a spade. The man had more leadership in his pinky finger than the entire bunch of goobers that run the current administration.  Can you imagine Al Gore handling the announcement?

"Uh, we have, uh, experienced a tragic, uh, event this morning. First reports indicate that these terrible plane crashes were the, uh, result of American caused global warming and the justifiable anger of the Muslim people over our exploitation of their resources, our abuse of the planet, the polar bears and our attacks upon the culture of the middle-east. Oh, and our support of the Israeli oppressor.  Pray for the souls of the brave, but misguided patriots who were driven to do this terrible, but understandable thing to us.............I'll be in my bunker. And you all take care of yourselves."

(Sorry I keep promising I won't do that anymore.......")

Tom

OFFICIALS SEEK TALIBAN RECRUITER - Ooh, ooh, pick me, pick me!

According to the Sunday paper headlines officials are searching for a Taliban recruiter.  As a good card-carrying conservative, I decided rather than actually reading the article, I'd just go ahead and go off on a rant if that's okay with you.

The economy sucks.  Nearly one in five of us is out of work if you count the guys that flat gave it up and are hibernating for the winter. I saw that headline about them needing a Taliban recruiter and I thought, "You know, I could do that."

I could send those boys some real prizes to trick out as suicide bombers.  America is such a fertile ground for finding candidates for a job as a one way mystery shopper. I can imagine the interviews with the fellers I'd send old Achmed the Terrorist Human Resources Director.

SCENE: A Cave in Afghanistan

(Achmacrankypants the Terrorist Human Resources Director enters and seats himself behind a dead water buffalo that is serving as a desk.)

Achmacrankypants:  Miss Farouch, send in first Amerikan jihadist applicant!  And bring me coffee – extra goat milk.  My stomach is making noise like camel.

Miss Farouch:  Infidel number 1. Approach!

Cletus: “Howdy there.”

Achmacrankypants: You are Mr. Cletus Hogwallow

Cletus: Yup!

Achmacrankypants: You wish to join the Taliban and kill imperialist Yankee dogs?

Cletus: Jest point me toward them rascals.

Achmacrankypants: You will wage jihad!

Cletus: Yeeha!

Achmacrankypants: It is called Jihad!

Cletus: Yeeha!

Achmacrankypants: No, it is Jihad!

Cletus: That's what I said. Yeeha!

Achmacrankypants: I am admiring your spirits.  Let's try on special vest.
(Hands vest with dynamite and detonators to Cletus)

Cletus: Hey, I like this outfit there Mr. :Poopypants.  Hoo, boy, that there's some big old shotgun shells on this thang.

Achmacrankypants: Now, we just plug this wire in here like this.  Now you hold this little box like this.....

Cletus: I gotcha. This is one o' them radio thangs or somethin' ain't it?

Achmacrankypants:    Yes, Mr. Cletus. You must go and stand in the Yankee Imperialist Swine Market and push this button when I say to push it.

Cletus: Like this?

Achmacrankypants: No, no, no.  You must wait until I say “Push” on the radio.

Cletus: Push?

Achmacrankypants: Push

Cletus: Push?

Achmacrankypants: Yes, Push!

Cletus: Okay................

BOOOOOOOOOOOM!

I bet I can find a bunch of really exciting new Taliban recruits for 'em.

Tom King – Flint, TX