Self-Congratulations

This morning I listened to the live press conference from Boston regarding the tragic bombing of yesterday.  I usually don’t listen to such things, but I needed to give myself a manicure (so to speak, or just ‘cut the nails’ to be more accurate).  What I heard was revealing.

First up was a string politicians.  Each of them, in his own way, congratulated himself for being “on top of” this tragedy.  None of them spoke for a long time, but there were enough to make this parade of self-congratulations fairly long.

Eventually, when the politicians had released sufficient hot air, the various law enforcement officials involved finally had a turn.  They assured the listeners that they were busy doing everything that could be done to catch the bad guys.  A couple of them were honest enough to say that people should expect to see more uniformed people around Boston, but that the main purpose for at least some of this was simply to make people feel better.  Some were also honest enough to at least suggest that they were present before the bombing, but they were not able to stop it, nor could they be expected to make this impossible in the future.

Then came questions and answers.  As you might expect, no specific questions about the course of the investigation could be answered.  So there was nothing really to be learned from the questions posed by the press.

So from the great press conference, I learned that politicians tend to love themselves and think they are indispensible to our well-being.  I learned that law enforcement officials can’t be expected to stop these things in the future – though they might sometimes.  Finally, I learned nothing about the investigation.

This is why I don’t pay much attention to press conferences after these kinds of tragic events.

Our Friend, the Collective?

(CNSNews.com) -- In a 30-second promo for MSNBC’s Lean Forwardcampaign, Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry advocates that society end the “private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families,” and instead institute a “collective notion” that kids “are our children,” they belong to the community.

In the MSNBC advertisement, Perry says, “We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children.”

“So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities,” said Harris-Perry, a professor of political science at Tulane University and host of the Melissa Harris-Perry show on Saturday and Sunday mornings on MSNBC.

“Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments,” Harris-Perry added.

Kent comments:

Statists have a completely different view of life and the world than do those of us who do not subscribe to the (irrational) religion of statism.  Statists have their own set of commandments for their religion.  While these were never carved into stone anywhere, they exist nonetheless.  Notice some of these in the words of the statist priestess quoted above:

Anything “private” is bad.  Families are not important, but ‘communities’ are.  Children “belong” to the community, that is, the state.  Governments spending money is “investing.”  One converts to statism by “breaking through” rival religions.  And most importantly, the world is a bad place outside the reign of statism, and it will be a better world once statism is the ruling religious view.  (I summarized these in the order in which they appear.  See if you can find others I missed.)

The cult of statism is curious, but it is much more than that.  It is dangerous.  Our society has tried to flirt with it by allowing “a little bit of it” and then trying to contain it.  That was foolish, and it is failing.  Statism never retreats.  It is on a campaign to “save” the world by conquering it.  And it is in a unique position to do so because it, by its very nature, glorifies the state, the ultimate agency of force on earth.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry worships at the alter of the state.  So do many others.  Remember that compromise with them is impossible.

Self-Defense for Teenagers

There is a nice article by Rand Paul today stating his position on so-called “gun control.”  (Which is really a “people control” which amounts to “rights infringement.”)  In the course of his argument, Paul presents this:

For every national tragedy that happens, there are hundreds if not thousands of examples of Americans preventing similar killings from happening, thanks to the use of personal firearms. Last June, for example, a 14-year-old Phoenix boy shot an armed intruder who broke into his home while he was baby-sitting his three younger siblings. The children were home alone on a Saturday afternoon when an unrecognized woman rang their doorbell. After the 14-year-old boy refused to open the door, he heard a loud bang, which indicated that someone was trying to break into the house. The boy hurried his younger siblings upstairs and collected a handgun from his parents’ room. When the boy rounded the top of the stairs, there was a man standing in the doorway with a gun pointed at him. The boy shot at the intruder and saved the lives of his three younger siblings.

I hate to say this, but my impression of many who want to “control guns” is that they would react to this with:  “Fourteen-year-olds should not be allowed to touch a gun under any circumstances.”  I could be wrong, and I hope I am wrong, but I doubt that I am.

As Rand Paul points out in the article, and as many, many others have pointed out recently, the evidence says, “More guns mean less crime.”  But the “gun control” people simply do not seem to care about that.  Paul does not cite a source for the story above (and I didn’t expect that in an op-ed piece like this), but assuming it is true, my best guess is that in many locales, the parents of the boy would be charged with something-or-other for allowing the teenagers to touch a gun.

This is one of the current bandwagons driving around our culture.  Bandwagons usually carry a load that contains a heavy dose of insanity.