Why anyone would ever be surprised by this is a mystery. Law Can Not deter crime. The less of it the better. Most people know what is right and wrong. Adding endless penalties to try and deter them is unjustifiable. The problem is a system that is motivated by politics rather than letting a judge determine what sentence should be imposed.
There are probably no more sex crimes today than ever but we are setting ourselves up for bigger problems when everyone is a sex offender including the 6th grade boy who snaps a girls bra in the lunch line. You Are All Criminals as far as your government is concerned. They pass thousands of new laws every year. Believe me when they want you they will already have you tried and convicted.
If you are a believer, it will probably be for a capital offense…that’s death penalty for those who don’t know. Hve a Good day in Amerika.
August 30, 2011
Two studies in the latest issue of the Journal of Law and Economics cast doubt on whether sex offender registry and notification laws actually work as intended.
One study, by J.J. Prescott of the University of Michigan and Johan Rockoff of Columbia University, found that requiring sex offenders to register with police may significantly reduce the chances that they will re-offend. However the research also finds that making that same registry information available to the broader public may backfire, leading to higher overall rates of sex crime.
Meanwhile, another study by University of Chicago Ph.D. student Amanda Agan finds no evidence that sex offender registries are at all effective in increasingpublic safety.
Prescott and Rockoff—Do Sex Offender Registries and Notification Laws Deter Crime?
Using data from 15 states over more than 10 years, Prescott and Rockoff examine the evolution ofsex offenserates as states passed and began to enforce their registration and notification laws. Registration laws require that sex offenders check in with and provide information to the police following their release from prison, whereas notification laws make sex offender information available to the public, often via theInternet. The researchers analyze sex offender registration and notification laws separately, which is important because the laws are designed to work in very different ways.
Prescott and Rockoff find that a registration requirement without public notification reduces reported sex crime substantially, most likely through better police monitoring and more effective apprehension of recidivists. For a state with an average-sized registry, a registration requirement reduces crime by about 13 percent from the sample mean. The drop in crime gets larger as registries grow larger, indicating that registry laws lower crime by discouraging registered offenders from re-offending, as opposed to discouraging potential first-time offenders.
In contrast, public notification laws, such as the listing of released offenders on the Internet, may actually undo some or all of a registry’s crime-reducing power. While Prescott and Rockoff discover that the threat of being subjected to notification deters some potential first-time sex offenders from committing crime, released offenders appear to become more likely to do so. In fact, adding public notification to an average state’s registration law leads to slightly higher levels of total reported sex crime. Taken as a whole, the research shows that while police registration discourages sex offender recidivism, public notification actually encourages it.
Why would public notification encourage sex offenders to re-offend? Perhaps because they have little else to lose. In particular, notification can make the threat of prison less effective. According to Prescott and Rockoff, their findings suggest that “convicted sex offenders become more likely to commit crimes when their information is made public because the associated psychological, social, or financial costs make a crime-free life relatively less desirable.”
Amanda Agan—Sex Offender Registries: Fear Without Function?
Agan findsno evidence that sex offender registries are effective in increasing public safety.
Her study used three different types of analysis to test the effectiveness of sex offender laws. First, she compared arrest rates for sex crimes in each U.S. state before and after registry laws were implemented and found no appreciable changes in crime trends following the introduction of a registry.
Second, Agan tested whether registries discourage convicted offenders from re-offending. To do that, she looked at data on over 9,000 sex offenders released from prison in 1994. About half of those offenders were released into states where they needed to register, while the other half did not need to register. She could then comparecrime ratesin the two groups.
She found little difference in the two groups’ propensity to re-offend. In fact, those released into states without registration laws were slightly less likely to re-offend.
“The results show that an offender who should have had to register appears to behave no differently, or possibly worse, than on who did not have to register,” she writes. “If anything, registered offenders have higher rates of recidivism.”
Third, Agan looked at census blocks inWashington D.C. to see if higher numbers of sex offenders in a given block correspond to higher rates of sex crime arrests. She found that crime rates in general, and sex crimes in particular, do not vary according to the number of sex offenders in the area.
The block-by-block analysis was designed to assess “the potential effectiveness of registries by considering whether where offenders live is predictive of where they offend,” Agan writes.
“The results show that knowing where a sex offender lives does not reveal much about where sex crimes, or other crimes, will take place,” she writes. That result calls into question the rationale for creating registries in the first place.
She concludes that sex offender registries do little to increase public safety, “either in practice or in potential.”
Amanda Y. Agan, “Sex Offender Registries: Fear without Function?” Journal of Law and Economics 54:1.
Friday, April 15, 2011
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com
(NaturalNews) The medical police state is alive and well in Detroit today, whereChild Protective Services(CPS) called in the police to aid in their kidnapping of a 13-year-old daughter from an African American mother who refused to medicate her with dangerous psychiatric drugs. As this case is clearly showing, refusing to medicate your children with Big Pharma‘s mind-altering drugs is now being treated as a felony crime.
• Child Protective Services (CPS) personnel attempted to kidnap Maryanne’s 13-year-old daughter. They accused her of not giving her childpsychiatric medicationprescribed by her doctor.
• Maryanne says the medication causedside effectsin her daughter and made her condition worse, which is why she refused to give her daughter the medication.
• The medication wasRisperdal, a neuroleptic antipsychotic medication known for causing serious side effects such as abdominal pain, vomiting, aggression, anxiety, dizziness and lack of coordination (http://www.risperdalsideeffects.com).
• When Maryanne refused to let CPS take her daughter away, CPS personnel then called the police, who then smashed down her front door and attempted to raid her home to kidnap her daughter by force.
• The police did NOT have a warrant or any court documents whatsoever granting them any right to enter Maryanne’s home, according to Godboldo’s attorneys.
• Police say that after they smashed in the front door, Maryanne opened fire on them. (Who wouldn’t open fire on a group of armed assailants trying to kidnap their daughter, by the way?)
• A SWAT team was then called in, carrying semiautomatic rifles and sniper gear. A 12-hour standoff ensued.
• Maryanne eventually surrendered to the SWAT team, and the state took her daughter to a psychiatric hospital where she is now being molested by the staff there, her mother says.
• Maryanne Godboldo now faces multiple felony charges: firing a weapon in a dwelling, felonious assault, resisting and obstructing an officer, and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
• CPS lied about the child’s father’s ability to take care of her as a tactic to kidnap her from her mother.
• Community groups in Detroit are now rallying on behalf of the family there, shouting “Free Arianna” (the daughter).
What you are witnessing here with Maryanne Godboldo isthe tyranny of the medical police stateand the wicked criminality of Child Protective Services workers who are now front-line enforcers of Big Pharma’s deadly agenda to drug our children.
Make no mistake: What’s happening today is thatthe state is now breaking down the doors, assaulting, arresting and imprisoning parents who refuse to medicate their children. This is being accomplished with the use of armed force against innocent victims.
This unholy alliance between Big Pharma, CPS and the police has gone too far. It has becomethe weapon of medication compliance.
When medicine has become so dangerous, so forceful and so utterly harmful to the People that the state must use bullets and guns to force people to take it,you know it’s all gone way too far.
It makes you wonder: What kind of system of medicine is so bad that prescriptions have to beenforced at gunpoint?
That this is happening is not just an assault on Maryann Godboldo, butan assault on our rights and freedoms as sovereign human beings. Do we not have the right to say NO to a medication we don’t want our children to take? Do we not have the right to protect our children from kidnappers? Do we not have the right to use firearms in the defense and protection of our homes from armed invaders who are conspiring to kidnap our children?
The real criminals in this case are the CPS workers. They should be brought up on attempting kidnapping charges as well as a criminal conspiracy to commit kidnapping. The gun-toting cops who broke into Maryanne’s home and attempted to kidnap her daughter should be arrested and brought up on charges ofarmed robbery, breaking and entering and conspiracyto commit the felony crime of kidnapping.
And yet, instead, Maryanne is now facing multiple felony charges while the CPS criminals and cops who raided her home are charged with nothing.
Where is the justice in America today?How did medication become something to be enforced with bullets and SWAT teams? And more importantly,how far will this gobefore this tyranny ends?
Next, will they just line everybody up against a brick wall, and those who can’t produce a receipt for medication get a bullet in their heads?
Resistance is necessary to achieve freedom
I hope you see where this is headed. I’ve been warning you about this for years, urging you to resist the rise of the medical police state… warning you about what I called “gunpoint medicine” back in 2006 (http://www.naturalnews.com/019512.html).
Learn the truth or you will surely be crushed by it. Big Pharma will stop at nothing to force their drugs onto your children. They will use guns, SWAT teams, kidnapping, the breaking down of your front door… anything it takes!
If you really want to learn the truth about the psychiatric industry and itswar on children, visitwww.CCHR.organdwww.CCHRint.org
And please, forward this article to everyone you know. Spread the word about reading NaturalNews.com to stay informed about health freedom. We must protect ourselves from thesemedication tyrantswho use kidnapping, armed assaults and the threat of violence to force us to drug our children.
A Mundane kneels before a royal carriage bearing the Sanctified Personage of the Killer-in-Chief.
Force — Force to the utmost; Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust. —
Deranged mass murderer Woodrow Wilson explains his philosophy of government, April 6, 1917.
The scientific concept of dictatorship means nothing else but this: Power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws, absolutely unrestricted by rules. —
Jared Loughner reportedly posed that question to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a forum two years ago. Perhaps unwittingly, Loughner answered that question himself by murdering six people and attempting to murder fourteen others, including Giffords. In doing so, the young nihilist effectively privatized government’s central function.
Shorn of the sophistries that provide it with a moral disguise, pared down to its essentials, political government is the systematic use of exactly the same kind of criminal violence employed by Loughner, only on a much grander scale. This was illustrated the day before Loughner’s murderous rampage, when agents of the government ruling us used a remote-controlled drone operated from the safety of an office building in Nevada to murder six people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan region.
Americans were not admonished to observe a moment of chastened silence in memory of the victims of that exercise in criminal violence. This is, in part, because observances of that kind would quickly become tedious: Since 2008, Pakistan — a country with which the government ruling us is not formally at war — has endured at least 250 drone attacks, in which roughly 1,400 people have been killed.
Hundreds of civilians have likewise been massacred in the ongoing “surge” in Afghanistan, many of them in nighttime raids by “Special Operations Forces” — that is, death squads — whose behavior is not easily distinguishable from that of Jared Loughner. At least a hundred thousand civilians have been annihilated in the continuing war in Iraq, which was inaugurated for reasons just as delusional as anything that percolated in Loughner’s distressed mind.
For those who worship at the altar of the omnipotent State, mass murder of this kind is an exercise in sanctified violence. In a 2009 interview with Foreign Policy magazine, Bill Clinton– who has repeatedly denounced “anti-government” speech as a form of criminal sedition –defined terrorism as “killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority.” (Emphasis added.) What this means, of course, is that “killing and robbery and coercion” by duly authorized agents of the State isn’t terrorism, it’s policy.
You see, bombs and drones may demolish homes, but only “anti-government” words can harm us. This is why one of the political elite’s most urgent priorities is the control and criminalization of anti-government speech.
Thus Rep. Robert Brady, a Pennsylvania Democrat, announced that he would propose legislation criminalizing verbal or symbolic expression that could be perceived as conveying a threat against a federal official, or an incitement to violence against such exalted personages.
“The president is a federal official,” observed Brady. “You can’t do it to him; you should not be able to do it to a congressman, senator, or federal judge…. The rhetoric is just ramped up so negatively, so high, that we have got to shut this down.”
That last statement, of course, is an oblique but unmistakable threat: How else would federal officials “shut this down” without the involvement of armed functionaries authorized to kill those who would resist?
“All we’re doing is trying to protect ourselves,” simpered Brady, announcing that this new assault on what remains of the First Amendment would begin as soon as Congress re-convenes. He also reported that his proposal found support on both sides of the aisle. This isn’t surprising. For House Speaker John Boehner, the most important thing in the aftermath of the Safeway Massacre was to assert the primacy of the coercive class: “An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Such acts of violence have no place in our society.”
If Boehner’s intent was to denounce criminal violence against the innocent, why did Boehner italicize the sanctified status of Judge Roll and Congresswoman Giffords?
The same priorities were on display in the charges filed against Loughner in his arraignment: One count of attempting to assassinate a member of Congress, two counts of unlawfully killing a federal employee, and two counts of attempting to kill a federal employee. The crime committed in Tucson is covered by Arizona’s state laws, of course, and the victims — including all four who were murdered, not merely the federal judge and congressional aide — were all residents of the state.
But in death, as in life, those on the federal payroll are to be regarded as consecrated beings. This is why an attack them is not merely a crime of violence, but — in the words of FBI Director Robert Mueller — an “attack on our institutions and our way of life,” or, as totalitarian theologian Jim Wallis put it, an attack on the “soul of the nation.”
Wallis could be considered the Obama administration’s court prophet. Economist andinvestigative journalist Bill Anderson points out that neither Wallis nor his publication,Sojourners ever so much as mentioned — let alone condemned — the 1993 federal massacre at Mt. Carmel, in which scores of innocent people (including seventeen young children) were either immolated or slaughtered by automatic gunfire when they tried to escape their burning sanctuary.
“The people who were shot and immolated at the Branch Davidian location were not real people to Wallis, who sees literally everything in political symbolism,” observes Anderson. “So, the rule of thumb is that if he cannot find a way to put an incident into his worship of the State, it simply doesn’t happen.”
Bellows insisted that Abraham the Destroyer, as “head of the nation,” was literally “a sacred person…. You cannot rudely assail the personal character or judgment of a Chief Magistrate, without weakening public respect for the office he holds…. To rally round the President — without question or dispute — is the first and most sacred duty of loyal citizens….”
Rev. Bellows extolled the U.S. President as a literally messianic figure; his text was the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 9:6, which contains the phrase “and the government shall be upon his shoulder.” Those who condemned Lincoln’s crimes against the Constitution, he insisted, were made of the same wretched stuff from which were formed “the enemies of our Saviour, who were always flinging in his blessed face the authority of the Mosaic law.”
Bellows granted that Lincoln violated the Constitution in countless ways, but maintained that just as Jesus was the incarnate Lawgiver, Lincoln should be regarded as the living Constitution. Were the actual written document to prove an insuperable impediment to Lincoln’s divine mission, “the sooner it were abandoned, the better.”
But Rev. Bellows wasn’t content to hymn the praises of the Divine Lincoln and heap anathemas on the heads of those who failed to recognize his transcendent magnificence. Indeed, his purpose was to plead “the sacred cause of Government itself.” He shuddered with pious disapproval at the spectacle of “Government despised, sneered at and distrusted by its own children.”
Those in the employ of the Federal Government, Bellows insisted, are men “whose characters and reputation ought at this time to be under the shield of every patriotic citizen’s allegiance and gratitude.” Yes, at one point they were mere Mundanes, commonplace human beings burdened with the same weaknesses that afflict all of us. Now, however, “the lightning of God has touched them, and rendered them sacred,” Bellows pontificated. They are entitled not only to dispose of the lives and property of the lesser beings they rule, but to their praise and worship as well.
“Thus, brethren, do I commend to you the cause of unconditional loyalty,” Bellows summarized, issuing an idolatrous grand commission to his congregation to become “missionaries” of the divine State “wherever you go, and with whomsoever you are conversant. Let our women and children become the propagandists of unconditional loyalty. The country needs not only the fealty of her sons, but of her daughters who sing the songs of patriotic devotion at your hearth-stones…. Frown on every syllable of distrust, of wavering, of disrespect, that pollutes the air you breathe. Require of all your friends to be first the friends of the nation! Have nobody’s love that does not love the country more! Make a religion of patriotism.”
Bellows’ oration was one of many he made in the service of what he called the “holy war” to vindicate the power of the central government over those who had withdrawn their consent to be ruled by it. In coming decades, the themes and tropes he expressed would be embroidered and delivered by other acolytes of the Total State — in Russian, German, Italian, Korean, and other languages. And the Bellows Estate should collect a royalty payment every time critics of government are accused of fomenting “violence” by speaking irreverently of the Holy State.
Occasions like the Safeway Massacre should prompt condemnation of all criminal violence against the innocent. Instead, they prompt public liturgies that celebrate the Divine State and its monopoly on the “legitimate” use of lethal violence — and offer the President an opportunity to carry out his ceremonial function as Pontifex Maximus of the civil religion. Some people describe this kind of thing as an “Oklahoma City moment,” in which an episode of mass bloodshed inspires an altar call for Americans who have lost their faith in the divine State: The prodigals are given an opportunity to “Come to Molech,” as it were.
Shortly after winning re-election in November 1996, Bill Clinton confided to reporters on Air Force One that his political recovery began with the Oklahoma City bombing: “It broke a spell in the country as people began searching for our common ground again.” That “common ground,” as Rev. Bellows put it, is found in unqualified submission to the central government.
Just weeks ago, interestingly enough, former Hillary Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn described Clinton’s “OKC moment” during a panel discussion on MSNBC’s Hardball program. Barack Obama “right now seems removed” from the public, Penn pointed out. “It wasn’t until that speech [after the bombing] that [Clinton] really clicked with the American public.” According to Penn, Obama needed “a similar kind” of opportunity for greatness.
Obama now has that opportunity.
By way of a postscript….
Rep. Peter King, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and former bagman for the IRA, plans to introduce legislation proscription wouldn’t apply to those employed to protect those sanctified personages, of course. that would make it a federal crime for Mundanes to carry firearms within 1000 feet of a federal official. This
The facts in those cases are not disputed, yet Miller has not been charged with a crime. However, he is being sued by Jason Anthony Graber, one of his victims. In light of Miller’s documented history of criminal violence, the plaintiff’s attorney has demanded that the assailant not be permitted to bring a firearm while being deposed.
The Department’s Operation Manual requires that officers be “armed at all times” — a provision that poses some interesting challenges for officers who choose to bathe, assuming that there are any who do. “Requiring a uniformed or non-uniformed police officer to disarm when he is compelled to give a deposition at an attorney’s office, or at any other unsecured location, presents a significant officer safety issue,” whines an affidavit provided by Lt. Dikran Kushdilian of the Denver PD.
Attorney David Lane, who is representing Graber, quite sensibly insists that some precautions must be taken in deposing people who are “defendants because they have acted illegally and violently toward others in the past.”
The Denver Police Department has a well-earned reputation for brutality and corruption, and Lane has deposed more than a few abusive cops, and those proceedings “can get very contentious. When I’m cross-examining cops about their misconduct, past and present, they get angry, and I don’t wish to depose angry people who have a long history of violent behavior while they’re wearing a gun strapped to their waist.”
Lane demands that the deposition take place in a setting in which neither side is armed. Denver’s municipal government demands that the examination should take place at the federal Courthouse, where Miller and other officers in similar cases “would surrender their weapons to the custody of the U.S. Marshall [sic], and would be unarmed during the deposition.”
In other words, it’s not quite the case that Denver officers have to be “armed at all times”; the critical issue is the preservation of the government’s monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force in all circumstances. Lane should counter Denver’s demand by offering to permit Miller to carry his firearm to the deposition, while specifying that he and his associates would also be armed. The official response to that counter-proposal would be instructive.
Leading lambs to the slaughter: "Toy Gun Bash."
While Lane most likely wouldn’t choose that approach, he is sensible enough to recognize that the State’s agents of armed coercion are the most dangerous element in society, and prudent enough to act on that understanding.
Owing to the tireless efforts of the organs of official indoctrination, a large portion of the public assumes that the opposite is true, and as a result can be easily convinced that only those commissioned to commit violence on behalf of government can be entrusted with the means to do so.
A splendid example of this deadly agitprop is offered by the “Toy Gun Bash,” which was first inflicted on Providence, Rhode Island seven years ago by the criminal clique running the municipal government.
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Each year around Christmastime, children living in Providence are compelled to line up and feed their toy guns into the maw of the “Bash-O-Matic,” a device described by theBoston Globe as “a large, black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.” In exchange for feeding their toy guns into this recombinant monstrosity, each child is given a substitute toy that is deemed to be suitably “non-violent.” They are also forced to endure a harangue regarding “the dangers of playing with guns, real or fake.”
Maintaining the monopoly: Burning confiscated guns.
The Providence event, continues the Globe, is “a version of the gun buyback program in which adults trade firearms for gift certificates.”
In fact, gun “buyback” programs are a form of what Dr. Edward J. Laurance of the UN’s Register of Conventional Arms calls “micro-disarmament” — or, more to the point, civiliandisarmament.
The expression “buyback” assumes that government has a monopoly on the use of force, and that only duly authorized agents of officially sanctioned violence should be permitted to own guns and other weapons — and thus the State is taking back from Mundanes a privilege to which they’re not entitled.
Gun “buyback” and turn-in programs are a common feature of military occupations, both here and abroad. U.S. military personnel in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan have employed that tactic (as David Kramer notes, this helps the occupiers to acquire a useful hoard of “drop guns” that can be used to frame innocent people as “terrorists” or “insurgents”). The same approach was used to disarm American Indians as they were cattle-penned on reservations.
Over the past decade, UN-aligned activists in several countries have staged events in which guns confiscated from civilians have been destroyed, a ritual sometimes called the “Bonfire of the Liberties.” This is in keeping with UN-promoted dogma (expressed most forcefully in its 2000 agitprop film Armed to the Teeth) that the only “legal” weapons are those “used by armies and police forces to protect us,” and that civilian ownership of firearms is “illegitimate.”
The UN’s campaign for civilian disarmament — which, just like matters of national disarmament, is assigned to the world body’s Office for Disarmament Affairs — was inaugurated in 2000 as part of the “human security” agenda promoted by then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. In late 1993 and early 1994, Annan — who at the time was head of the world body’s “peacekeeping” operations — presided over the disarmament, and subsequent annihilation, of roughly 1.1 million Rwandans.
Annan was actually an accessory before the fact to that genocide: Informed in early 1994 of the impending slaughter by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian officer commanding UN peacekeeping troops, Annan ordered Dallaire to pass along his intelligence to the same government that was planning the massacre.
Dallaire, who had been ordered to disarm the future victims, was ordered not to raid the government arms caches that were later used to carry out the murder rampage.
Most of the killing was carried out by machete-wielding mobs acting as government subcontractors. But it would have been impossible to butcher hundreds of thousands ofarmed people, nor would the mobs have been able to round up and annihilate the targeted population without the active support provided by the regime’s armies and police forces — you know, the armed agents of state violence who were there to “protect” those who were hacked to pieces.
Children should learn what happened in places like Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda(as well as places like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee) when people willingly surrendered their guns to their rulers — but a government school classroom is no place for lessons of that kind.
One of the cases used to promote the Toy Gun Bash in Providence actually underscores the reliably fatal consequences of a government monopoly on force. The Globe points out that as children were herded toward the Bash-O-Matic, they were told the cautionary tale “of a 14-year-old boy who police nearly shot after they confused his air pistol with a real gun.” For rational people, this incident illustrates the compelling need to disarm the police, rather than swipe toys from innocent children.
The same schools that use DARE programs to recruit children into the Pavlik MorozovBrigade consistently force psychotropic drugs on children who display unfortunate symptoms of non-conformity. This principle applies to the issue of firearms: In the name of “Zero Tolerance,” children are routinely punished for such supposed offenses as bringing toy “weapons” to school (including — I am not making this up — candy canes), improvising them from school supplies, or even drawing pictures of guns, yet they are routinely encouraged to write letters to members of the imperial military who are “serving our country” by killing people who have done us no harm.
Those who insist that religion has no place in the government-run school system aren’t paying attention: The entire purpose of “public” education is to catechize youngsters in the worship of the Divine State. Rituals like Providence’s Toy Gun Bash serve a sacramental function; they are the equivalent of a child’s first communion in the government-sponsored church of collectivist self-destruction.
While the little lambs are taught to be docile, submissive sheeple, the Regime is honing the lupine instincts of those supposedly tasked to protect them.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal recently described how recruits at the Metropolitan Police Department Academy are indoctrinated into perceiving the world as a 360 degree battlefield, where they are perpetually under siege and should be prepared to employ lethal force without hesitation.
“When you put that badge on, there are people who want to kill you,” intoned Officer Wil Germonsen, who — like a large and growing number of local police officers, has a military background.
“After some time on the street, the recruits will never see the world the same way. They’ll always be on guard — carrying a gun on duty and off, checking out fellow shoppers at the grocery store, thinking about those worst-case scenarios while having dinner with the family. It’s like a switch that flips on and never turns off….”
“I believe every single recruit here, when they put that badge on, they are warriors,” insists Germonsen. “We’re fighting a war.”
What this means, of course, is that the state-created armed tribe to which Germonsen belongs is an army of occupation — primed to kill, given broad discretion in the use of lethal force, and trained to consider all of us who don’t belong to their tribe as potentially lethal enemies. Some way had better be found — and pretty damned soon — to de-fang those wolves in sheepdog disguise. Meanwhile, it would be wise to do what we can to avoid placing ourselves at a potentially fatal disadvantage when dealing with those who belong to the Brotherhood of Sanctified Violence.
UPDATE: Bringing the War Home
“Many law enforcement officers called up to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are finding it difficult to readjust to their jobs once home, bringing back heightened survival instincts that may make them quicker to use force and showing less patience toward the people they serve,” reports the AP.
A report compiled last year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance “warns that the blurring of the line between combat and confrontations with criminal suspects at home may result in `inappropriate decisions and actions — particularly in the use of … force. This similarity … could result in injury or death to an innocent civilian.'”
The Imperial Military makes increasing use of Guardsmen and Reservists whose “civilian” job is domestic law enforcement, and domestic police agencies increasingly recruit from the ranks of combat veterans. As noted above, police recruits are being trained to consider themselves “warriors” on a battlefield, rather than peace officers. We really should dispense with the illusion that contemporary law enforcement is anything other than the domestic branch of a seamlessly integrated military apparatus.(h/t The Agitator.)
Second Update: Seattle as a Battlefront
Courtesy of commenter QB we see the following video of 27-year-old Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk gunning down John T. Williams, an artisan who was carrying a carving knife and a block of wood. No more than four seconds pass between Birk’s demand (it wasn’t a lawful order, because Williams was threatening no one) that he drop the knife, and the first of several gunshots fired by the officer. The entire encounter lasted roughly eight seconds.
Williams had a troubled past, but was not known to be violent. He had some emotional problems and, most importantly, was functionally deaf — which meant that he couldn’t hear the demand that he drop his knife — which was closed when photographed by crime scene investigators, despite Birk’s claim that it was open at the time of the shooting.
A peace officer in this situation would have taken at least a little more time to resolve the situation without drawing his gun, let alone discharging it. But, as we’ve seen on numerous occasions, contemporary law enforcement officers are on a war footing, which means that their default setting is “overkill.”
It’s worth noting that one of the officers who responded to Birk’s “shots fired” report tells him that he did the “right thing” — even though the official review subsequently ruled that the shooting wasn’t justified.
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Doesn’t it seem like almost everything is becoming a crime in America now? Americans are being arrested and charged with crimes for doing things like leaving dog poop on the ground, opening up Christmas presents early, not recycling properly, farting in class and having brown lawns. But is it healthy for our society for the police to be involved in such silly things? Every single day the United States inches closer to becoming a totalitarian society.
One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does. This, America faces today, which it has never faced in its history.
While there are some that would welcome this shift, the truth is that throughout history the societies that have experienced the greatest economic prosperity have all had at least a certain level of freedom. Business thrives when people feel free to live and work. When a government tightens the grip too much, many people just start shutting down. As we continue to criminalize relatively normal behavior our slide toward becoming a totalitarian state will only accelerate.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, as of the end of 2009 a total of 7,225,800 people were either on probation, in prison or on parole in America.
That is a sign of a very, very sick society. Either we have a massive crime problem or the “control grid” that our leaders have erected for us is wildly out of control.
Or both.
Many people believe this is just because the society we live in is criminalizing normal behavior and this would in turn create an expanding “prison industrial complex” where prisons (which are privatized, for-profit industries with shareholders who build and invest in them) make money. Believe it or not, most prisons and detention facilities are privately owned, not government owned. This means that they get money (Lots of $$) from the city, state or federal government from taxes collected by citizens to pay for the costs of the facility, at a profit. You heard me right, many prisons get money (Lots of $$) for every person they put in their prison and the shareholders and owners of the prisons make money on that.
Many of the arguments you hear about to support the continuation and expansion of this “prison industrial complex” are usually something like, “well the prison provides jobs for people and keeps the economy growing.” See, when they build one of these huge prisons to eventually overcrowd (since they know normal behavior is being criminalized) they need to build roads to get to the prison, housing districts to house the workers, power plants to supply power, police stations, shopping centers, etc. A prison creates a mini-society that will eventually grow. It puts all the people in the prison it doesn’t like in society (like thinkers, rebels, artists, undesirables, people who don’t follow orders or assimilate) and when those people are in prison, the rest of society functions fine, without anyone causing a problem or trying to demand rights or demand oversight or demand equality or the like. Prisons create the perfect, mindless zombie society for the 1984 type or Brave New World type of future that some people in power want. When people get out of prison, they can’t get jobs and try to adapt back to a normal life, because no one hires criminals. They have to go on parole and pay money to the state even AFTER they served time and then deal with psychologists and UA’s and all kinds of uphill battles. Most people get out of jail and go back to environments that allow for them to continue their self-abuse (which most crimes, especially drug offenses) lifestyle. Drug offenders who are addicted to serious drugs might need a doctor, but should we be destroying their lives forever by putting them in prison?
Now does it look so weird when you see overcrowded prisons and perhaps your city passing laws that make no sense? Our society is criminalizing normal behavior, people. This is something much of the South started after the civil war. Instead of slavery, Southern states outlawed marijuana use, knowing that much of the use was culturally bias towards non-whites. This in turn allowed them to build the first big prisons and detain people against their will for “breaking the law” and then forcing them to work. Thats right, prisons force people to work. Cleaning roads, building license plates, you name it. Even farming. In the South, the prisons that force inmates to work are allowed to sell their services or products at a profit on top of the money they make maintaining their prisons, at a profit, which they collect from taxpayers. Sound crazy? Take a look at what they pay some of these inmates. In some cases its $.02 cents an hour. No joke.
In one case, a judge was sending children to juvenile detention so much the facility overloaded with inmates. Turned out, the judge was a shareholder in the detention facility. This means that legally, the judge had a “conflict of interest” in all cases he oversaw seeing as how his income was affected by the decisions he made as judge. The more people he put away, the more money he made. Sound criminal? It is. But our society is so apathetic to corruption these days that nothing is being done.
But how in the world are we supposed to have a healthy economy if our entire nation is being turned into one gigantic prison?
Sadly, it is not just hardcore criminals that are being rounded up and abused by authorities these days. The following are 14 of the most ridiculous things that Americans are being arrested for….
#1 A Michigan man has been charged with a felony and could face up to 5 years in prison for reading his wife’s email.
#2 A 49-year-old Queens woman had bruises all over her body after she was handcuffed, arrested and brutally beaten by NYPD officers. So what was her offense? The officers thought that her little dog had left some poop that she didn’t clean up.
#4 In Milwaukee, one man was recently fined $500 for swearing on a public bus.
#5 Several years ago a 12-year-old boy in South Carolina was actually arrested by police for opening up a Christmas present early against his family’s wishes.
#6 In some areas of the country, it is now a crime to not recycle properly. For example, the city of Cleveland has announced plans to sort through trash cans to ensure that people are actually recycling according to city guidelines.
#7 A 12-year-old girl from Queens was arrested earlier this year and taken out of her school in handcuffs for writing “Lex was here. 2/1/10″ and “I love my friends Abby and Faith” on her desk.
#8 Back in 2008, a 13-year-old boy in Florida was actually arrested by police for farting in class.
#9 The feds recently raided an Amish farmer at 5 AM in the morning because they claimed that he was was engaged in the interstate sale of raw milk in violation of federal law.
#10 A few years ago a 10-year-old girl was arrested and charged with a felony for bringing a small steak knife to school. It turns out that all she wanted to do was to cut up her lunch so that she could eat it.
#11 On June 18th, two Christians decided that they would peacefully pass out copies of the gospel of John on a public sidewalk outside a public Islamic festival in Dearborn, Michigan and within three minutes 8 policemen surrounded them and placed them under arrest.
#12 A U.S. District Court judge slapped a 5oo dollar fine on Massachusetts fisherman Robert J. Eldridge for untangling a giant whale from his nets and setting it free. So what was his crime? Well, according to the court, Eldridge was supposed to call state authorities and wait for them do it.
#13 Once upon a time, a food fight in the cafeteria may have gotten you a detention. Now it may get you locked up. About a year ago, 25 students between the ages of 11 and 15 at a school in Chicago were taken into custody by police for being involved in a huge food fight in the school cafeteria.
#14 A few years ago a 70 year old grandmother was actually put in handcuffs and hauled off to jail for having a brown lawn.
Why in the world would anyone approve of the police arresting ordinary Americans for such things?
Most of the people in jail or prison are NOT violent offenders either. They are people who were convicted of a drug related offense.
Don’t you think that prisons were originally meant for people who were a danger to society, not for people who are a danger to themselves. People with drug addictions need serious medical help, from a doctor, not thrown in a tiny room and confined and then have their futures ruined because of a criminal record. This is why drug legalization is not just a common sense argument, it is a moral argument. Its not about defending the abuse of drugs, it is about appropriately categorizing the right punishment or consequence for abusing drugs. Drug abuse is a medical concern, a self inflicting abuse issue, not a society harming one. Drug abuse is for doctors to treat, not for prison guards to beat inmates.
Listen to the host of New World Order Report interview Mason Tvert, the leader in marijuana reform laws activism:
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 23, 2010; 7:17 PM
Television evangelistPat Robertson has made inflammatory remarks in recent years that offend gays, Muslims and others, but a recent comment he made on his Christian Broadcasting Network was more notable for whom it pleased: people who want to see marijuana legalized.
“We’re locking up people that take a couple of puffs of marijuana, and the next thing you know they’ve got 10 years,” the controversial pastor said on “The 700 Club” on Dec. 16, in a clip unearthed by bloggers this week. “I’m not exactly for the use of drugs – don’t get me wrong – but I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot and that kind of thing, I mean, it’s just, it’s costing us a fortune and it’s ruining young people.”
It was a surprising admission from a Christian conservative and favorite target of liberals, who have pounced on his assertions that the earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capital city in January resulted from a pact with the Devil, for example, or that Hurricane Katrina was punishment for abortion and the country’s general moral decay.
His views on marijuana lit up the Internet on Thursday because they seemingly aligned him with liberal groups that have long complained of the punitive nature of the nation’s drug laws. The comments have been seized on by pro-marijuana groups that cite them as evidence that their message is gaining traction not only in the mainstream but within the religious right.
“His voice is respected by hundreds of thousands or millions of people who might not otherwise think about this issue seriously. His comments were a very important step forward,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a group that supports legalizing and taxing marijuana. “The only way that this country’s going to end up with more sensible and sane drug laws is if people call for it from across the political spectrum.”
On Thursday, a CBN spokesman said in an e-mail that Robertson is “unequivocally” against illegal drug use and that he does not support legalizing marijuana.
The nation’s attitude toward marijuana has changed dramatically over the past two decades. In an October Washington Post poll, 43 percent of respondents said they would be in favor of legalizing the possession of a small amount of marijuana for personal use – up from 22 percent in 1997.
Fifteen states and the District allow marijuana to be used for medicinal purposes, and there are signs that public consternation is growing over the sometimes severe punishments doled out for minor drug offenses. In Montana last week, a group of potential jurors objected en masse upon learning that a man was arrested on marijuana possession. The uprising led the prosecution to seek a plea deal.
Self-described conservatives remain the most opposed to legalizing marijuana, with 69 percent against such a change in the laws in the Post poll. But there have been recent efforts to convince conservatives that it is in line with their small-government philosophy to consider alternatives to imprisonment for minor drug offenses.
Gary Johnson, a libertarian and former Republican governor of New Mexico, took his pro-legalization message to tea party rallies this summer. Gov. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. (R-Ind.) this month embraced a proposal to reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders, including some drug criminals, and to increase access to drug treatment programs – in the name of government efficiency.
“Conservatives for a long time have supported a one-size-fits-all solution, which is: Lock them up and throw away the key. There’s a growing realization that it hasn’t worked very well and it’s been very expensive,” said David Guenthner, spokesman for Right on Crime, a Texas-based group that advocates for criminal justice reforms from a conservative perspective. The group does not support decriminalizing marijuana, however.
Guenthner would not comment on Robertson’s remarks, which came after “The 700 Club” aired a segment on Right on Crime and faith-based programs in prisons.
“Those men and women want to know the Lord, but there’s something else we’ve got to recognize. . . . These judges, they say, they throw their hands up and say, there’s nothing we can do because of these mandatory sentences,” Robertson said.
He continued: “We’ve got to take a look at what we’re considering crimes, and that’s one of them. . . . Young people go into prison . . . as youths and they come out as hardened criminals, and it’s not a good thing.”
Polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.
This is the message that was given to Cheyenne Irish, the newborn daughter of New Hampshire residents Jonathan Irish and Stephanie Taylor, who was literally stolen from her parents hours after her birth on October 6.
While there are reportedly some “very serious” criminal allegations involved in this matter, the focal point of the case should be this: Among the reasons cited by New Hampshire’s child “protection” directorate as supposed justification for the seizure of Cheyenne was the fact that “Mr. Irish associated with a militia known as the, [sic] `Oath Keepers,’ and had purchased several different types of weapons including a rifle, handgun and taser.”
“Whether or not the charges against Mr. Irish are true, this action is entirely unconstitutional and represents a very dangerous precedent,” Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, a practicing defense attorney, pointed out to Pro Libertate. “Using this man’s political views and alleged affiliations to define parental suitability in any way is entirely illegitimate, and a direct threat to the rights of parents who are political activists of any kind.”
This is hardly the first time law enforcement officials and social workers have cited “political extremism” to justify severe and extra-constitutional sanctions against people who have not been convicted of an actual crime.
Those unsanctioned opinions, coupled with legal firearms purchases, led to Girard’s arrest and detention as a “danger to the community” — but he was never formally charged or prosecuted. He was simply taken into Soviet-style administrative detention while the local members of Lavrenti Beria’s fraternity — that is, the county prosecutor and judge — tried to devise a criminal charge to justify his imprisonment.
Political Prisoner Gregory Girard
After Girard spent four months in jail without a criminal charge, his case was eventually “dismissed without a finding.” He was designated a “ward of the court,” compelled to undergo routine psychiatric evaluation and treatment, and notified that he could be arrested and subjected to indefinite detention at any time such action was deemed suitable by his persecutors.
This was done to Girard because he was classified to be what law enforcement organs in the Soviet Union called a “socially dangerous person.” This same calculus appears to have been used to justify the government kidnapping of Cheyenne Irish — a much graver crime, given that it involved not merely the seizure of a man’s means of self-defense, but of his newborn child.
Cheyenne “wasn’t even 16 hours old when they came in and stole her from us,” reports her father Jonathan. The head of security at Concord Hospital “had a nurse come in while Cheyenne was sleeping [who] lied to us that they just wanted to take her to the nursery to see the doctor to be discharged. Even though I said NO to have the doctor come in the room they took her anyway…. I followed [them] out to the nursery because I didn’t want my daughter out of my sight, as we were walking out I saw several gentlemen wearing suits with detective badges and my gut just started wrenching.”
“They rushed her into the nursery and locked her in,” Jonathan continues. “[W]hile I was talking to one of the other nurses the head of security comes up behind me, grabs my arm and starts walking me down the hall saying `you need to keep an open mind, you need to just hear them out’ and he just kept repeating himself ignoring my questions as to who ‘they’ were.”
Cheyenne, shortly before her abduction.
How typical of an agent of government aggression to be accusing the victim of “intolerance” even as the crime is in progress. This little touch is a variation on the police tactic of bellowing “Stop resisting!” to a helpless victim at the bottom of a thugswarm.
“When he got me in Stephanie’s hospital room and sat me down on the couch the police department and DCYF [Division of Children, Youth and Family services — that is, the child-snatcher apparat] showed up. Three uniformed patrol officers and 3-4 detectives with 2 DCYF social workers walked in the room…. [One] of the patrolmen asked if he could pat me down. I said NO, not giving my consent…. The officer grabbed my wrist, bent it behind my back and stood me up and proceeded to pat me down anyway.”
After seizing a pocketknife and cigarette lighter and asking if Jonathan had “any other weapons” — officer safety uber alles, you know — the childnappers “gave us a fabricated affidavit … telling us they were taking custody of our newborn daughter.”
Jonathan was then informed that he would be shadowed, Stasi-style, by a “security officer.” When contacted by Pro Libertate at approximately 3:45 MST on October 8, Mr. Irish was being forced to leave the Concord Hospital parking lot pursuant to a “notice” he had been sent by the local police.
“I received a phone call a while ago telling me to go to a website” — that is, a Facebook page — “where a group of people had taken it on themselves to organize a protest and rally,” Irish recounted to Pro Libertate. “I was then sent a document by the Concord Police that said I wouldn’t be allowed to go inside the hospital, or even be in the parking lot, unless it involved a medical emergency, otherwise it would be considered ‘criminal trespass.’”
Irish refers to Cheyenne’s mother, Stephanie Taylor, as his fiancee. The affidavit mentions that the couple had been under DCYF scrutiny “for approximately 21 months … in a case involving two children of Stephanie Taylor; neglect petitions were filed on January 7, 2009 and a Termination of Parental Rights trial was recently concluded as to these two children….”
For reasons not specified in the document, Irish was “ordered to attend Ending the Violence with Scott Hampton; however, to date, has not completed this program.” (Remember this point; we’ll return to it anon.) The police complain that they have “responded to multiple calls” involving Irish and firearms, which resulted in “a pending charge for possession of a concealed weapon without a permit.” It was in the context of that trivial paperwork matter that the affidavit mentioned Irish’s “association” with the Oath Keepers, which was misrepresented in the affidavit as a “militia.”
The Oath Keepers is an organization of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who have pledged not to carry out patently unconstitutional orders. The group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, emphasizes that it encourages lawful, peaceful non-cooperation, rather than armed insurrection, as a way of interposing against the all-encompassing criminal assault by the Regime against individual rights.
Had an Oath Keeper been present at Concord Hospital on October 6, he would have refused to be party to the criminal abduction of Cheyenne Irish.
The “association” referred to in that document consists of occasional involvement by Irish and his fiancee in an on-line discussion group involving the Oath Keepers. Mentioning this tenuous connection served the immediate interests of the child abduction bureaucracy, since it created a caricature of the father as a potentially dangerous “extremist.” But it also serves the long-term interest of the Homeland Security bureaucracy by using Jonathan Irish as an indispensable defendant in a potentially precedent-setting case.
“I know practically nothing about Jonathan Irish,” Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers told Pro Libertate. “Whatever we learn about his problems, the real question is this: Why was such prominent mention made of his political beliefs and supposed affiliations?”
If Mr. Irish is a legitimate criminal suspect — as opposed to a troubled parent who is considered a political criminal — why wasn’t he taken into custody? Why was he left relatively free, while his newborn daughter was wrenched from her mother and father through deliberate deception and the threat of lethal force?
The Oath Keepers have been targeted by the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an immensely profitable leftist “watchdog” group run by the degenerate fraud named Morris Dees. Through an illicit relationship with law enforcement agencies, both federal and local, the SPLC has become deeply involved in an effort to indoctrinate police (as well as educators and social workers) regarding the ubiquitous menace of “anti-government extremism.” Rhodes points out that the SPLC, a nominally private group that is unaccountable to the public, is a member of the “Homeland Security Advisory Council” (HSAC) which published a report on domestic “radicalization” and “extremism” last Spring.
A work in progress, the HSAC describes itself as striving to prevent “violent crime that is motivated by extreme ideological beliefs” through “threat mitigation” and “community policing.” That last term of art came into vogue during the early part of Bill Clinton’s first term: Washington began to lavish funding on states and municipalities for the purpose of integrating the police with the social services bureaucracy, the better to create a seamless web from which no family could escape.
"Community policing"; below, more of the same.
Before she presided over the Holocaust at Mt. Carmel as the federal Attorney General, Janet Reno was a forceful advocate of “community policing” in order to draw recalcitrant parents into the suffocating embrace of the omniprovident Nanny State.
“They sit behind doors and they glare out at officialdom in whatever its form — a building inspector, a Housing and Urban Development manager, a police officer — and they don’t believe that person,” complained Reno in a 1993 speech to the Police Foundation. “They won’t come out. They won’t bring their child to the clinic … because they are suspicious and unbelieving that government really cares.”
That speech, incidentally, was given on April 9, 1993 — just ten days before the government Reno served so eagerly displayed its “caring” nature by immolating the children of the Branch Davidian community.
Reno, according to a Los Angeles Times summary, urged that local governments assemble teams of “community-friendly, highly respected police officers, social workers, public health nurses, [and] community organizers” to pry open the doors of people burdened with a healthy mistrust of the congealed mass of corruption called government.
The group that carried out the abduction of Cheyenne Irish is a perfect example of a Reno-style “community policing” strike force in action.
Among the reasons cited for seizing Cheyenne was Scott Irish’s refusal to attend a seminar taught by Dr. Scott Hampton, Director of an organization called Ending The Violence. Hampton and his organization offer “training and consultation … to child protective workers, probation and parole officers, judges, attorneys, medical professionals, clergy, teachers, and law enforcement” as well as offering “expert witness testimony in both civil and criminal cases.” Hampton has conducted hundreds of workshops and seminars throughout North America and Europe, and is past President of the National Supervised Visitation Network.
Most importantly, he is an unabashed proponent of totalitarian attitude reconstruction, the sort of social engineer C.S. Lewis referred to as an “official straightener.” Although he eagerly cites the work of “tolerance” peddlers such as Morris Dees, Hampton believes that tolerance is inadequate. Unlike those who believe that only God has jurisdiction over the inner life of human beings, Hampton — like others who would use the power of the State to tear windows into men’s souls — maintains thatthe government literally must reprogram the inner life of people who hold “bigoted” beliefs.
“Tolerance does not require that you give up your hatred. It just tells you how to act when you hate. Not good enough,” sniffs Hampton in his new book Tolerant Oppression. “It is time that we teach people how not to hate.” What this requires, of course, is court-ordered reconstruction of individual attitudes using whatever leverage may be necessary — apparently up to and including child abduction.
Like Jonathan Irish, Baltazar Cruz was deemed an unsuitable parent on the basis of unproven allegations. An employee at a local Chinese restaurant, she had reportedly come to the United States as an illegal immigrant, and was accused of “trading sex for housing.” Her immigration status would not justify the seizure of her child, and the prostitution charge was never investigated. Nevertheless, it took more than a year and a half for Baltazar Cruz — working with a self-described “public interest law firm” — to regain custody of her stolen child.
A federal lawsuit filed against the hospital and others responsible for this atrocity correctly condemns the “unconstitutional actions” of those who abducted Baltazar Cruz’s child. Their unconscionable acts inflicted severe emotional and physical harm on the bereaved mother, alienated the newborn from parental affection, and “substantially interfered with [their] constitutionally protected right to family integrity,” the lawsuit observes.
Exactly the same case can be made on behalf of Jonathan Irish, Stephanie Taylor, and their daughter Cheyenne. It’s not likely, however, that the legal activist group that defended the parental rights of Cirila Baltazar Cruz — the Southern Poverty Law Center — will volunteer its services on behalf of Cheyenne and her parents, given that organization’s distant but substantive role in the crime that was committed against them.
If you ever fell victim to the prejudice that people today are smarter and more intellectually sophisticated than the people of the 1st or 13th centuries, you need only ask your friends and neighbors about the terrifying word “anarchy” to prove to yourself that our generations are just as stupid and foolish as any others. Even mentioning the word with a straight face is bound to put your acquaintances on edge, which is remarkable in itself. But, once they recover their senses from hearing the word pronounced out loud without a clap of thunder following on its heels, they will usually offer an argument against anarchism that rivals in its sheer stupidity any arguments that the flat-Earthers ever gave in antiquity.
It usually goes something like this: Human nature is so intrinsically evil and depraved that, without cops walking the streets, judges locking up potheads, and politicians buying hookers and crack in Washington, the entire world would devolve into a horrifying bloodbath. Murder and rape would run rampant as soon as the “criminals,” (that is, all of us, as per our shared evil nature), got word that the police were no longer in the business of shooting, beating and incarcerating them. Virtually everyone and everything would be killed or destroyed in the ensuing mayhem. Cannibalism would probably even reappear for the barbaric survivors of the initial anarchic bloodbath. That’s right, cannibalism.
So, as you can clearly see, the fragile fabric of society is held together ultimately by the simple police officer, whom we all take for granted, and whose life is spent deterring the innumerable “criminals” out there from butchering one another, like you and me. Without police officers, given human nature’s intrinsic depravity, life would indeed be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The sheer stupidity of arguments along the lines that human nature is so totally depraved that society would devolve into cruel chaos in the absence of police officers is almost difficult to fathom. One can forgive the flat-Earthers of yesterday for not being gifted enough in astronomy and mathematics to determine that the giant hunk of rock they stood on is spherical, but how can one forgive the people of today for thinking that that guy wearing blue polyester with mustard in his mustache in the corner of the deli is the very linchpin of human society? How can one forgive an intellectual error as large as the one that presumes that you and I would probably fight each other to the death if it wasn’t for that woman with a mullet and a radar gun under the highway overpass? How will future generations be able to comprehend an intellectual error as large as the one that holds that our very lives and our entire civilization hang oh-so tenuously from a 56-inch braided duty belt?
If our lives and fortunes were indeed dependent upon protection from a handful of people swaddled in hideous blue polyester, mankind would have long ago lost them. If human nature were truly as depraved as these arguments would have us believe, then the chubby blue line would long ago have been annihilated by its vastly numerically superior criminal adversaries. No “criminal” worth the name would be deterred from committing his favored atrocities by a small group of lightly-armed fat people, whose national reputation is tied inextricably to the donut. To even suggest that this 300 million-strong horde of savage, would-be criminals are kept at bay only by some irrational fear of blue polyester is so asinine that it makes the flat-Earthers look like geniuses by comparison.
This intellectual error is all the more inexcusable in America, where the population is armed to the teeth with high-powered rifles, pistols, and shotguns. If the American population were truly as depraved as this argument would have us believe all people are, then its bloodlust could hardly be contained by a few pudgy men and women carrying small caliber pistols. The thought is as laughable as would be an argument to the effect that the hardened and rifle-toting farmers of Mayberry were deterred from slaughtering one another by Andy Griffith and his slow-witted sidekick.
On another level, moreover, arguments to this effect are deeply insulting to people like you and me, for they insinuate that you and I are savage beasts that are only kept in check by those enlightened and portly souls who populate the local police force. Unlike those ultra-civilized “public servants,” you and I would like nothing more than to cut each other’s throats, if only the peace-loving police officers of the world weren’t holding us back. The truth, as anyone with eyes in America should be able to tell you, is precisely the reverse, since police officers and soldiers are often the most depraved perpetrators of the very crimes they claim to “protect” Americans from. The police are people just like us, after all, even if their waists are often larger, and they are capable of the same brutality as any other people.
There are some intellectual errors that one can excuse, or at least understand. The people of antiquity could not see that the Earth was round, so one can understand that they did not grasp that seemingly obvious truth There are other intellectual errors, however, that are so idiotic and so self-evident that they smash to pieces any sense of superiority we might be foolish enough to entertain over other peoples. Such is the magnitude of the error of dismissing the sublime idea of free-market anarchism by assuming that the geniuses in blue keep us savages from killing each other.
October 5, 2010
Mark R. Crovelli [send him mail] writes from Denver, Colorado.
"I WOULD REMIND YOU THAT EXTREMISM IN THE DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE! AND LET ME REMIND YOU ALSO THAT MODERATION IN THE PURSUIT OF JUSTICE IS NO VIRTUE!"
~ BARRY GOLDWATER
Friday, April 15, 2011
On another level, moreover, arguments to this effect are deeply insulting to people like you and me, for they insinuate that you and I are savage beasts that are only kept in check by those enlightened and portly souls who populate the local 
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