James R. Rummel

I am a self defense instructor who lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Voting With Your Joystick

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My fridge crapped out on me some months ago. I bought a new one from Sears and paid extra to have the old one hauled away to the dump. They contracted the heavy lifting out to a couple of guys with their own truck.

When they showed up I noticed two things right away. The first was that they had heavy Latin American accents, which is hardly surprising considering that both were from Venezuela. The second is that they were very surprised that I was willing to help them with the grunt work.

All of the doors in the house were too small to get the old fridge out. (How did it get in there? When they were building the house, did they install the kitchen appliances before framing the doors?) I dumped the box on the floor and took my ten pound sledge to the cooling coils on the back, pounding them flat. The contractors stood around and chatted with me while I worked out my frustrations.

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I’m Hot Under the Collar Due to Global Warming

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I have written before about how I view the Kyoto Accords specifically and plans to reduce global warming in general with a great deal of suspicion. First you have to get every single country in the world to sign on (impossible), and then you have to figure out a way to enforce the agreement if any country decides to ignore the treaty (double impossible).

According to this news item, India is telling it like it is. Their delegate to a UN conference on climate change currently being held in Bonn said that priority one was combating the crushing poverty under which a significant portion of India’s population suffers. The admission is that only way to do that is to increase emissions and pollution, not reduce them.

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A Sinking Ship Takes on More Ballast

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In this post I discussed a new French labor law. The law in question was supposed to reduce unemployment by allowing employers to fire anyone who was under 26 years of age, and as long as they had the job for less than two years.

(And in this post I wondered if all of the cars that protesters set ablaze affected the price of gas and automobiles in France. I didn’t get an answer, so I suppose that means we don’t have any French readers.)

This seemed to me to be the only sensible thing to do. While the new law couldn’t very well be seen as turning the French around so that they had a sound fiscal policy, at least it made the government’s stance a little less insane.

The news today is reporting that such a measure simply isn’t going to pass. Instead the government is going to offer incentives to companies if they will only hire more young people.

I seem to remember that they already tried to combat unemployment by passing a law which mandated a 35 hour work week. That was such a disaster that they had to rescind the legislation after only five years.

I’m certainly not an economist by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems to me that the French government is pretty much going to partially subsidize jobs offered to young people. This just boggles my mind. Where is all this money that the government is using to bolster the economy coming from? And how long can they keep this up before something snaps?

Yet Another Reason I’m Glad to be an American

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The headline reads “’Let Burglars Off With Caution’, Police Told”. It refers to new guidelines for the police in Great Britain that have just been handed down.

Burglars will be allowed to escape without punishment under new instructions sent to all police forces. Police have been told they can let them off the threat of a court appearance and instead allow them to go with a caution.
The same leniency will be shown to criminals responsible for more than 60 other different offences, ranging from arson through vandalism to sex with underage girls.

It’s important to note that these new rules are only iron clad when dealing with new criminals and are up to the officer’s discretion after that. A perp can walk if it is a first offense, while a repeat offender can go home only if he can sweet talk the officer who caught him. But it is also important to note that the Home Office has actually stated that a fair number of serious crimes should be dealt with in this way.

What blows my mind is that a few of the crimes that will get you a Get Out of Jail Free card are violent in nature. The author mentions threatening to kill, common assault, threatening behavior, and even crimes which result in “actual bodily harm”.

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