James R. Rummel – Page 45

Third Place

March 9, 2006 by James R. Rummel

Last year I discussed how the newspaper industry in general and the New York Times specifically were losing customers at an alarming rate. Now a blog dedicated to discussing business matters takes a look at the financial health of that august news organization. He even has a graph!

Summary: Things don’t look good.

(Since this is a “go look” post where I didn’t add anything of substance, the comments are closed. Please click on over and let Tom know what you think. He is smarter than I am about this stuff, anyway.)

The Commission is a Crime

March 9, 2006 by James R. Rummel

People who dedicate themselves to teaching self defense skills are, by and large, motivated by a profound sense of fair play. They just don’t see any reason why a 90 pound woman should automatically lose when attacked by a 250 pound weightlifting sexual predator.

It is that same devotion to the ideal of a level playing field that keeps me from endorsing so-called hate crime legislation. Violent assault is already a crime, just as it should be. But why in the world should the penalty be greater if the victim just happens to be a member of a minority group? Not only doesn’t that seem very fair to me, it also appears to violate the principle that we are all equal under the law.

Let us turn this around and look at it from the other side. Should the sentence be harsher if the criminal is a minority? Most people would instantly reject the idea as being blatantly racist and discriminatory, yet it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that attempting to add layers of protections to minorities that the rest of the population won’t share is also a form of racism and discrimination.

They Don’t Walk the Walk

March 7, 2006 by James R. Rummel

Today’s Strategypage.com has an interesting post by Harold Hutchinson. (Post dated March 7, 2006.) The post discusses a recent decision by a Federal judge which forced the release of the names of more than 500 detainees currently being held at Gitmo. The court case was brought by the Associated Press in order to force the DoD to comply with a Freedom of Information request that they had filed.

Hutchinson says that the decision is a great victory for our terrorist enemy in the Global War on Terror, and compares it to the Axis powers in WWII learning that their codes had been broken by the Allies.

I don’t know enough about the intelligence gathered through interrogations at Gitmo to know if Hutchinson’s assessment of the damage to our efforts is hyperbole or not, but it is certain that one point he made in his short essay is correct. The release of this information will put the lives of those who cooperated in the capture of the detainees at risk. Not only that but, knowing something about the feud mentality of most terrorists, the lives of their families will also be in jeopardy.

Let’s be very clear about this. Innocent people will probably die.

The Standard of Excellence in Canadian Media

February 19, 2006 by James R. Rummel

Last week I received a curious Email from the Canadian magazine The Western Standard. The publisher, Ezra Levant, was asking for my personal help by sending out a form letter in a mass Emailing.

And what was troubling TWS? It seems that Mr. Levant published the Danish cartoons that have offended so many Muslims of late, and retailers across Canada were refusing to stock the magazine. Not only that, but a “Calgary Muslim leader” (as Mr. Levant puts it) reported the magazine to the police and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, accusing Mr. Levant of hate crimes.

Paying the Piper

January 31, 2006 by James R. Rummel

In this post I discussed how Canadian border guards are unarmed and pretty much useless because they don’t have the means to impose a monopoly of force. For decades the SOP was to let dangerous and potentially violent people in to the country, and then to call the nearest police station and let them handle it. The primary function of a border guard, essentially to guard the border, was passed off to other law enforcement agencies within the interior.

The incoming Conservative government has vowed to arm the custom agents. How many are to be armed, and what they are going to have so far as firepower is concerned, are issues that haven’t been resolved as of yet. But the one thing we can be sure of is that it’s going to cost money.

Don’t just mean the cost of a few thousand handguns. Training costs money and the people who go through it have to take refresher courses every so often. Realistic training is tough on equipment, so guns will have to be replaced and ammunition purchased in large quantities. And, of course, there will be unanticipated legal costs just as soon as a suspect sues the government because a law enforcement officer points a gun at them.