Category Archives: News

News

UK woman warned for brandishing kitchen knife at trespassers

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These are both from ECM.

Self-defense and justified violence

Consider this story from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Miss Klass, a model for Marks & Spencer and a former singer with the pop group Hear’Say, was in her kitchen in the early hours of Friday when she saw two teenagers behaving suspiciously in her garden.

The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away.

Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon” – even in her own home – was illegal.

Jonathan Shalit, Miss Klass’s agent, said that had been “shaken and utterly terrified” by the incident and was stepping up security at the house she shares with her fiancé, Graham Quinn, who was away on business at the time.

He said: “Myleene was aghast when she was told that the law did not allow her to defend herself in her own home. All she did was scream loudly and wave the knife to try and frighten them off.

This happens all the time in the feminized UK. They think that violence is never justified, and that criminals are actually the victims of social inequalities. And since criminals aren’t responsible, it’s wrong for home-owners to stop them from committing crimes. This is just another example of the secular left’s view that there is no objective right and wrong, and that morality is relative. It’s not wrong to steal, they say – what’s wrong is to think that you have a right to own your own private property. Permitting the theft of your property is like – sharing.

A previous post I wrote explains how weapon ownership by law-abiding citizens deters crime.

Liberty and personal responsibility

Consider this story from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Heavy snow, low temperatures and a lack of gritting mean pavements throughout the country are too slippery to walk on safely. Hospitals have been struggling to cope with rising numbers of patients who have broken bones after falling on icy paths.

Yet the professional body that represents health and safety experts has issued a warning to businesses not to grit public paths – despite the fact that Britain is in the grip of its coldest winter for nearly half a century.

Under current legislation, householders and companies open themselves up to legal action if they try to clear a public pavement outside their property. If they leave the path in a treacherous condition, they cannot be sued.

It’s like people in the UK think that British citizens are all young children to be controlled, so that they won’t hurt themselves or anyone else. I wonder where that attitude comes from? It certainly wasn’t there 50 years ago. What changed?

News

What are the consequencs of treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue?

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Story from the UK Telegraph. (H/T Weasel Zippers via ECM)

Excerpt:

The chance to secure crucial information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen was lost because the Obama administration decided to charge and prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal, critics say. He is said to have reduced his co-operation with FBI interrogators on the advice of his government-appointed defence counsel.

[…]”He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up,” Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph.

[…]Abdulmutallab could have been held and interrogated in military custody under existing US legislation before a decision was taken whether to charge him before a military tribunal or a civilian court, according to Michael Mukasey, the last Attorney General under President George W Bush.

Mr Mukasey argues that it was crucial to gain intelligence from him immediately as details about locations, names and other plots is subject to rapid change. For the same reason, he dismissed the argument by John Brennan, Mr Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, that investigators will garner valuable data during any plea-bargaining talks.

Democrats are not serious about counter-terrorism.

Related posts

News

Unemployment rate among men aged 25-54 is 19.4%

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Check out this post over at Dinocrat. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

According to an analysis done by TIME Magazine’s Justin Fox, almost 20% of 25-54 year old men are unemployed today, a receord since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track of the data just after World War II. An unemployment rate of 20% among men in their prime is shocking. Absent the substantial government transfer payments today and the large labor force participation by women, the 20% male unemployment figure would be regarded as a national emergency.

Rome is burning. And yet Congress and the administration fiddle with crooked healthcare deals, tomfoolery such as AGW, perverse nonsense like cap and trade, imaginary “green” jobs, the treating of enemy combatants as mere crooks, etc. — and their policies towards hostile powers are even more ill-informed and provocatively weak. It’s hard to imagine a government more out of step with the people.

Here’s the graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing the decline since 1948. (H/T Time Magazine)

This is actually important to me, and something I am thinking a lot about. I have come to realize that marriage is really an incubator for passing on values to children that are often different from those of the state. Scholars like Stephen Baskerville and Jennifer Roback Morse have argued that the family is a buffer against the power and influence of the state. This is especially true for Christian men and women whose values are definitely not those of the secular leftist state. But where do families come from? How do they start?

In order to have a family, a man marries a woman who agrees with his worldview and values, and then they have children. It’s the man’s role to lead the family by protecting and providing for his wife and children. But that man needs a job so that he can have confidence that he can fulfill those responsibilities. The earning of money is what gives a man the respect and authority in the home so that he can lead his wife and children. Any challenge to the man’s role as protector and provider diminishes his authority to lead.

Already, I am concerned about how the massive tax burden placed on working men causes them to have their authority whittled down, since the state confiscates much of a man’s money and then provides services that he really should be providing himself. Often the services provided (abortion, etc.) are not compatible with Christianity at all! But this new statistic about 19.4% of men in their prime being unemployed is even worse, because now men are earning no money at all! How can they start a family with no income?

There really isn’t much thought going on today about the problem of how to get men to marry and stay married. Instead, people are more focused on dealing with a variety of of grievances from victim groups. I’ve blogged before about the problems that men are having in the schools today, largely due to the application of feminist theory to education. No one seems to be concerned about whether men are doing well in school, and whether they are being raised in families with actual fathers, instead being raised by government subsidies.

I think that young people really need to stop and think about what they want out of life. There seems to be a tendency today among young people to think that relationships are about fun, and that it isn’t necessary to be careful about your choice of mate because the government will always be there to take care of you if you get into trouble, (e.g. – unplanned pregnancy, abusive spouse, etc.). This must stop. We need to stop looking at the government as a substitute for making solid, long-term choices about sex and marriage.

At some point we are going to have to ask ourselves whether we are ready to abandon the family entirely and just substitute sperm donations and government checks for men. If the state is the source of money in a child-producing unit, then the state is the one who calls the tune about what the children will believe. And make no mistake – academics on the secular left are salivating at the thought of pushing their values onto the next generation of children. That is why they are hostile to voucher programs and private schools.

Related stories

Some stories from last year about just a few the problems men are facing.

There are actually many other problems that men are facing that I could have brought up, but my focus today is on education and jobs. These are serious problems and they have serious consequences.