Arnold Kling says that it’s the nature of politicians.

We have to expect mediocrity from political leaders. They are selected by a very unreliable process. In general, I try to avoid contact with narcissists who spend their time pleading for money. Those are hardly the intellectual and emotional characteristics that make someone admirable, yet they are the traits of people who go into politics.

…The libertarian view is that private institutions, both for-profit and non-profit, are better at problem-solving than government institutions. Regardless of whether political leadership is wise or mediocre, our goal should be to limit the damage that public officials can do. Do not demand that they “solve” health care, “fix” education, or launch a “Manhattan project” for energy independence. Even for experts, those are impossible tasks. The harder we press our existing leaders to address these issues, the more trouble they are going to cause.

That’s what it looks like the Australians have been doing with their gun buy-back program:

Although furious licensed gun-owners said the laws would have no impact because criminals would not hand in their guns, Mr Howard and others predicted the removal of so many guns from the community, and new laws making it harder to buy and keep guns, would lead to a reduction in all types of gun-related deaths.

…Politicians had assumed tighter gun laws would cut off the supply of guns to would-be criminals and that homicide rates would fall as a result, the study said. But more than 90 per cent of firearms used to commit homicide were not registered, their users were not licensed and they had been unaffected by the firearms agreement.

Yes, politicians assume all kinds of idiotic things.

As the US gets its 300 millionth resident, is Europe in one?

As the US gets its 300 millionth resident, is Europe in one?

As the US gets its 300 millionth resident, is Europe in one?

Kaus amusingly dissects some particularly stupid arguments against “the fence.”

7. “[E]fforts to protect pronghorn sheep and encourage the jaguar to return to the United States could be seriously affected.” We can patrol the whole border with high-tech cameras and “ground-based radar,” yet we can’t cut some holes for pronghorn sheep and patrol just them with cameras and “ground-based radar”? That would be something for the unionized border guards to do! But I guess we might have to give up the jaguar…. Oh wait, we don’t have jaguars. We might have to give up re-acquiring the jaguar. OK. Which will it be: No new jaguars or no new illegal immigrants. Let’s vote!

Here’s a post that the trolls can comment about to their black little hearts’ delight. The lefty troglodytes once again display their fascist thuggish tendencies, and cognitive dissonance, in their threat to “take it to the streets.”

One of the laughable things about the charge of Bush

I’d like to ask Jim Webb, ““what has changed“?

One of the catch phrases of the Simpsons is when Reverend Lovejoy’s wife, in response to some event requiring community action/some new law, is “What about the children! Won’t anyone think of the children?”

Given human nature (particularly the maternal instincts of women, who are more often the target of such political tactics), it’s an effective form of demagoguery. A very effective one.

For instance, it’s often used by gun controllers, by using statistics talking about how many “children” are killed by guns in the inner city. Unfortunately for their case, the “children” killed by guns often turn out to be late teenagers (you know, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen?) and often people even in their early twenties, due to insufficient vetting of the actual ages of those killed in the gangland shootouts (no, tell me that it isn’t so…).

Even more egregious is those who, like potential Nobel laureate (and the fact that she is even being considered for this is at least as devastating an indictment of the uselessness of that award as the actual awarding of it to the likes of Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter) Cindy Sheehan, talk about sending our “children” to fight and die in Iraq. This ignores the fact that no one goes into Iraq involuntarily–all who sign up for the all-volunteer military do so under the influence of their own will. (Note: If anyone can find a case in which someone delivered their “child” unto the evil maws of the Bushitler-Cheney-Rumsfeld war machine, with the infant kicking and screaming in protest, let me know pronto, so I can amend this post). Moreover, these “children” are old enough to drive, to vote, and (in many cases) to legally purchase alcohol. But it makes for much better anti-US (not anti-war–many of them are just on the other side) sound bites to bleat about the “children” that we are “sending” off to die.

So now comes the usually reasonable Representative, and aspiring Senator, Harold Ford, who reportedly said yesterday:

I’m just not going to take morality lessons from a party

Instapundit has a roundup of links about a story that students are actually being taught to defend themselves.

All of them seem to miss a critical point.

There are few instincts to any life form, let alone humans, more fundamental than those designed for survival. If we have to tell people (yes, even children) to defend themselves, we ought to be asking why such advice is necessary.

If children have to be told to not hide under desks, to throw things, to not be passive sheep, why is that? Why is it that, in contravention of their genetic heritage, they would be expected to act as a herd, and not a pack? Why is it that, in opposition to their fundamental nature, they would have to be instructed in basic survival techniques?

One can only conclude that, because one of one of the more modern traits inherent in humans, it is because we have trained them to be passive, to submit, to go along with whatever program whatever terrorist has planned for them, because after all, The Man will come and save them, if they can only survive long enough for the actual negotiators to come along and offer whatever submissive supplications that the terrorists will demand to spare the lives of the tots.

After all, we all know that the way to peace is submission. Appeasement. Surely their demands must be reasonable–else they wouldn’t make them. Wouldn’t they?

So, every day, we inculcate our young’uns in the culture of appeasement, to protect them. If they’ll be nice to their captors, their captors will surely be nice to them.

Well, actually, we learned a different lesson on September 11th. More specifically, the passengers on UL Flight 93 learned that perhaps going along with the program wasn’t the ideal course of action. But they’d have never known it from their pre-flight instructions, or the constant barrage of propaganda from the peacemakers in the media and their supposed protectors in government agencies. No, they had to learn it from forbidden cell phones, from which they learned, illegally, that other planes, just like theirs, had been hijacked, and flown into skyscrapers.

They were headed for Washington, where there were no skyscrapers. There were only national monuments. And a White House. And a Capitol Building, with many representatives of the people inside. And a Pentagon…

They had been told not to resist, but they did. They were adults, with the faculty of reason, and the ability to change their programming as events, and information about them, required.

But the thought that we have to teach children to defend themselves should give us pause. How did they know to defend themselves when we were living in caves? How did they know when under seige? How did they know when on the frontier, against the wolves, and the cougers, and the bears?

They knew because they were bred to know. It is only today that we have to reteach them things they already know, because we’ve previously taught them nonsense. Let us hope that the unteaching of nonsense is easier than the teaching of it, and more enduring.