Safety not worth the price

Mesa Legend (Mesa Community College) ^ | 12/24/03 | Ryan Baily

[Dan Evans]

Forget it. :-)

Have a good night Mr. Score, drive carefully.

[FreedomCalls]

Look up a little history. Start anywhere. Google "Bonus Army" and read about how the Hoover administration treated World War I veterans (and their dependants, including children) who were seeking their promised benefits.

Without looking it up, I believe their tents were burnt and they were chased out of town (DC).

Whatever abuse you come up with, it has happened before.

And that excuses it? Jews were put into ovens before. Does that make it OK if done today? Black children were sold into slavery just because their parents were slaves once too, so would it be OK if we did that today?

Fight the good fight--yes, that's great. We can and should do better and stuff like the breast-milk fiasco (one case--it hasn't become routine!) are horrible and must be condemned and stopped as much as possible.

Finally. Thank you.

///Gotta stop new///Minor problem in the house -- be back and will finish later///

[William Terrell]

The Drug of Choice

There are those who say we have a drug problem in America. They say the problem destroys individuals and families. They say our civilization is at risk as a result of the substance abuse sweeping the country.

What they say is true, in a way. But the drug of choice is not a substance, and the pushers thereof are not independent entrepreneurs working outside and against our system of government. The drug dealer is our system of government, and it deals in the most destructive, and popular, narcotic in the history of mankind's experiment with governments.

That is to say, security.

We have learned over the thousands of years of diverse human civilization that most people will do almost anything for security. Most will tolerate tyranny and submit to dehumanizing philosophies to keep it. They will commit acts of violence and sell their bodies.

The pushers of security will likewise gladly slaughter millions and sell their souls to the evils of rationalization for the revenues, for the return on that sale is the sovereignty of a increasing population of addicts. Money? Money pales against the prospect of power over the very heart and mind of a nation.

You ask, the most sought after state of being is a drug? Let's examine it. Security gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling of contentment, a high. Lack of it produces fear, a withdrawal. Introducing security into a fearful situation erases the fear, a fix.

Fear affects our bodies and so does contentment. Both affect our states of mind and, in fact, alters our consciousness. The presence of security alters the state of our consciousnesses and euphorizes our bodies. To avoid fear and feel happy, most will pay a dear price. Add to this the further fact that security is not necessary for life, it just makes life more comfortable. Otherwise we would have to sleep with one eye open.

Everyone learns to avoid too much of a good thing the first time they overeat. Over the rest of life we proceed to learn that there can be too much of anything. Like any physical drug, an appropriate amount of security elevates the equality of life.

Also, like any physical drug, abuse leads to loss of choice and loss of self respect.

Incredible as it may sound, we can have too much security. Most of us have too much right now. We get it from the worst place possible: our elected representatives charged with making and administering the law. We are dipping our drinking water from a mud puddle called socialism, filled in meager amount, at election time by those same representatives.

Now, there is nothing at all wrong with being secure in your life, liberty and property. After all, the things we have been able to achieve when insulated from the jungle have brought much glory to God and much prosperity to mankind. But to lose the jungle entirely is to forget the beast that ever prowls at the periphery of civilization, to wander in its den and be consumed.

While this is a nation whose motto is "In God We Trust", and which exclamation appears on even our medium of exchange, we trust in the largess of corruptible human beings to deliver an inferior savior, welfare, whose lifetime is short and whose demise is not on the cross of devotion and sacrifice, but in the gutter of poverty.

This nation was founded on the principals of duty and honor, and a devotion to the eternal fount of prosperity in freedom and self determination. For our experiment to work, we must follow the laws and commandments from the Source of that fount, and depend on that Source. To this purpose, we set up a government.

Let us state the truth outright. God does not create governments; He creates us and we create governments. The sad and inescapable weaknesses and failings of government comes from its creator, and which weaknesses and failings we can count, every one, on Capitol Hill, with the promises of wealth without effort and freedom without sacrifice.

Beware the wisdom whose genesis resides within the human mind and whose mission is false security in safety, leisure and entertainment. Beware the path of least resistance, where the cobblestones are painted with the thinnest of imitation gold leaf. That way lies the womb of the Great Mother, and the price of admission is the integrity of the soul.

[FreedomCalls]

Glenn Reynolds said it best: "A pack, not a herd."

Read this:

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A Pack, Not a Herd

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Published

10/30/2002

So the snipers that paralyzed and terrorized the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area are caught now. But it's worth thinking about how they were caught. After repeatedly slipping through the fingers of law enforcement, John Muhammad and Lee Salvo were caught because leaked information about the suspects' automobile and license number was picked up by members of the public, one of whom spotted the car within hours and alerted the authorities - blocking the exit from the rest area with his own vehicle to make sure they didn't escape. "You can deputize a nation," said one news official after the fact.

Yes. With proper information, the public can act against terrorists - often, as we found on September 11, faster and more effectively than the authorities. The key, as Jim Henley noted, is to "make us a pack, not a herd."

The problem is that this goes against the very grain of intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and so on. Within bureaucracies in general - and doubly within intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies - information is power, and power isn't something you want to share. And if you deputize a nation, doesn't that make the official deputies just a little bit less special?

The problem with this mindset is that it's all about bureaucratic turf, and not about getting the job done. Otherwise we'd have learned the lesson long ago. As Canadian journalist Colby Cosh remarks:

I'd have thought the Unabomber case would have taught police, I don't know, everywhere that it is better to be liberal than stingy in releasing information to the public. Remember the Unabomber - the serial killer who was caught because his prose style was recognized? Yeah, that guy. If Charles Moose and his merry men had actually succeeded in sitting on the information they wanted sat upon, Muhammad and Malvo might have been popping another D.C.-area shopper's head like a grape while you read this. Keep this in mind as you hear their police work praised in the days to follow.

That's a bit harsh, but to the point. There are good reasons police might want to keep some kinds of information confidential - they need details that will let them screen out calls from nutballs other than the real killer (though that didn't work very well in this case) and they don't want to create an unnecessary panic or start an orgy of finger-pointing and suspicion. These are worthy purposes, but like any virtue, they become vices if overdone, and police are overdoing them.

In fact, it seems pretty clear that the authorities, overall, view the citizenry as a herd, not as a pack. They see ordinary people as sheep, with themselves in the role of shepherd. Without close supervision, they assume, people will erupt into mob violence, or scatter in fear.

The evidence, however, doesn't support this approach. As sociologist Kathleen Tierney writes, the response of ordinary New Yorkers to the 9/11 attacks was "adaptive and effective:"

Beginning when the first plane struck, as the disaster literature would predict, the initial response was dominated by prosocial and adaptive behavior. The rapid, orderly, and effective evacuation of the immediate impact area - a response that was initiated and managed largely by evacuees themselves, with a virtual absence of panic - saved numerous lives. Assisted by emergency workers, occupants of the World Trade Center and people in the surrounding area helped one another to safety, even at great risk to themselves. In contrast with popular culture and media images that depict evacuations as involving highly competitive behavior, the evacuation process had much in common with those that occur in most major emergencies. Social bonds remained intact, and evacuees were supportive of one another even under extremely high-threat conditions.

What's more, such responses are typical, even though they often infuriate outsiders. For the government it's upsetting, because people aren't asking what to do. For the media it's frustrating, because there's no one in charge to interview. But we shouldn't assume that these frustrations have anything to do with effectiveness:

Effective responses to community crises often look messy from the outside, but that is part of what makes them effective. The failure to understand the emergence and complexity that is typical of major disasters often results in characterizations of disaster settings as chaotic and unorganized. Critical observers may express exasperation because "no one is in charge" - as if the activities of hundreds of organizations, thousands of small groups, and tens of thousands of individuals should be controlled in real-time by some single individual or overarching entity. These kinds of comments are often rooted in inappropriate militaristic command-and-control images of disaster management and in a mistrust of non-elites and non-experts. All such criticisms fail to appreciate the strengths of situationally-driven, problem-focused, locally-based, and improvisational response strategies like those observed in New York on September 11 and in the days that followed.

So while Chief Moose and the other talking heads were holding press conferences in which they castigated the press for reporting information, they should have been figuring out how to take advantage of the vast resources that a mobilized public can command. But the officials didn't want to, for fear of "vigilantes". Luckily for them, a leak saved the day.

Regardless of whether or not the D.C. snipers count as "terrorists" under your particular definition (they do under mine, but the authorities seem to be shooting for a much narrower standard) there seems little question that in coming weeks, months, and years we're going to be dealing with a lot of fast-moving, dispersed threats of the sort that bureaucracies don't handle very well. (Every domestic-terrorism victory so far, from Flight 93 to bringing down the LAX shooter to spotting the D.C. killers was accomplished by non-law-enforcement individuals, after all). Rather than creating new bureaucracies, we need to be looking at ways of promoting fast-moving, dispersed responses, responses that will involve members of the public as a pack, not a herd. Even if doing so reduces the career satisfaction of shepherds.

As David Brin says:

Amid all the noise and posturing, nobody proposes enhancing the one thing that actually worked well on that awful day. What appears to have worked, was the initiative and resourcefulness of common men and women. This may be hard to credit, or even to perceive. Throughout the 20th Century, the trend in our culture was monotonic, toward ever-increasing reliance on protection and coddling by institutions, formally deliberated procedures and official hired guns... none of which availed us at all on September Eleventh. Rather, events that day seem to suggest a reversal, toward the older notion of a confident, self-reliant citizenry.

Of course it's too early to forecast a major counter-trend. But indications are provocative. Rather than diminishing the role of the individual, advances in technology seem to be rapidly empowering average citizens, even as professional cynics forecast freedom's demise.

I hope that people in Washington are paying attention to this. But the evidence so far isn't too encouraging.

[FreedomCalls]

And read this:

http://denbeste.nu/external/Mead01.html

to put a label -- "Jacksonian" on my approach to security. We will not fail if the government will trust us -- its citizens. We will fail if the government treats us like children (or sheep). Freedom will prevail in the end.

[Dan Evans]

No he won't, because I'll be watching the whole thing and I'm a pretty good shot myself.

Who will be watching you?

It doesn't matter as long as I know I've done the right thing.

[FreedomCalls]

They said that during the height of communism in Russia in the 1950s, you could walk the city parks in Moscow at night after midnight with impunity. No one would mug you. You will certainly get mugged, if not killed, today. Are the people any worse off for not having street security? They have more freedom. The police will not knock on their door after midnight carting them away to Lyubyanka and on to the GULAG. What they had in the 50s was not freedom and it was not security either. We are a long way from Soviet-style oppression, but we are not encouraging freedom in people either. I would far rather be free, responsible for my own security, rather than trusting all to a series of ever-larger government entities. Am I less likely to be car-jacked in Texas where I can carry a pistol in my glove-box or am I less likely to be car-jacked in DC where private ownership of pistols are forbidden except to the police?

Which path would you rather follow, that of those on United Flight 93 who quickly organized themselves into a militia responsible for their ownselves, or those people aboard the other flights on 9/11 that thought they should leave everything to the police who would be waiting for them on the ground when they got back to the airport?

It's the "Statue of Liberty," not the "Statue of Security."

[Dan Evans]

I'm not fan of Bush, but he's the only sane game in town. Remember how close we came to having President Albert Gore

That brings up another issue. What happens if we do get another Clinton in the White House? Remember those 900 FBI files? What's the next Clinton going to do with the Patriot Act at his disposal?

[Dan Evans]

the government, airlines, etc. will be sued if something happens and people think they didn't do enough to secure the flights.

If I'm on the jury "securing the flight" means giving the crew and law-abiding passengers the right to carry.

People take it as a given that disarming people makes everything more secure.

[Dan Evans]

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." --John Adams

Mr. Score, are you suggesting that Americans are so immoral that the Constitution is now obsolete?

[Triple Word Score]

Al Gore got slightly over half the popular vote. A quick scan of the headlines is pretty convincing, too.

The moral majority, isn't, anymore. The Constitution is holding the rest of us together, but let's not kid ourselves that it governs the other half.

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

Captive Honour

Madness comes, and madness goes An insane place, with insane moves

Battles without, for battles within Where evil lives and evil rules

Breaking them up, just breaking them in Quickest way out, quckest relief wins

Never disclose, never betray Cease to speak or cease to breathe

And when you kill a man, you're a murderer
Kill many, and you're a conqueror
Kill them all ... Ooh ... Oh you're a God!

Megadeth 1992

[Dan Evans]

The moral majority, isn't, anymore. The Constitution is holding the rest of us together, but let's not kid ourselves that it governs the other half.

But the Constitution isn't intended to govern the people, it mostly restricts the Federal government. The way I read it, Adams was complaining that a government shackled by such a restrictive Constitution isn't strong enough to rule an unruly people. And he would be right if the Federal government were the only authority. But state and local government was barely restricted by the constitution (at least not until the 14th amendment, they say). And, most importantly, the people weren't restricted by the constitution either.

The trouble is that the Constitution is turned on it's head. Now the little old lady who advertises for a "Christian handyman" to live in her spare apartment gets fined for discrimination. People are scared to death of being sued for discrimination. Texaco is required to hire employees based on race.

We are left with the illusion that we are powerless, we must accept Muslims as tenants, as passengers, and fellow employees. So, for our safety, we must therefore give even more power to the Federal government to protect us.

The Constitution would work just fine if we were obey it and restore it to the original meaning.

[Triple Word Score]

This people won't obey it, nor are they interested in its original meaning. You are correct in all you said....

We could erase all law save contract law, and go back to the Constitution, minus the illegal income tax amendment that was not properly passed, and the Ten Commandments, and have a completely healthy country again. But it won't happen.

It's been a pleasure. Have a nice night.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Welcome to the police state. Your papers, please!

[dread78645]

Flight attendants must, in the ordinary course of operations, get way too close to potentially-malevolent people for them to be armed safely unless they have some sort of "holster lock" to prevent them from being disarmed. Otherwise two or three people, properly situated, could easily take out a flight attendent.

Uhhm ... If the rest of the passengers are armed, what would be the difference?

On this hypothetical "Freedom Air", the "malevolent people" wouldn't have to disarm the flight attendant, they could bring their own guns, box-cutters, etc.

[BigSkyFreeper]

Pardon, are you British?

If you don't mind my asking, what does that have to do with what I said below?:

Why go from victim to criminal all in one fell-swoop?

What I said made a lot of sense. And FYI, no, I'm not British.