An Old Slur In A New Incarnation

     One of my pet peeves is – surprise! – the twisting of the meanings of words for unholy purposes. Yes, it’s a common occurrence in political cut-and-thrust, but it also features in exchanges between common citizens. Humpty Dumpty thought he could get away with it, but the rest of us need not be Alices.

     A long, long time ago, an elderly friend wrote a piece for a very minor publication I edited in which he argued that even in a wholly anarchic society, a State exists locally and temporarily wherever like-minded persons can muster a local preponderance of force. If we look at The State as its function – i.e., to wield coercive force for particular purposes – rather than as an institution, Ed was absolutely correct. Wherever you have a group united on a purpose and large enough to get its way, you have a State for local and temporary purposes.

     A lynch mob is functionally a State. That should give a few people pause for thought.

     That doesn’t mean that the anarchic society is impossible. It means only that our expectations of it must be tempered by our grasp of human nature. People do get exercised over things. They do band together for specific purposes. If they’re not opposed by equal or greater forces, they can impose themselves on others, against those others’ wills.

     Another friend of more recent vintage liked to say that “Anarchy is the perpetual Loyal Opposition.” He saw anarchy as beckoning from the sidelines. It keeps politicians and bureaucrats mindful that an alternative to them exists and always will. He had a good point.

     When a disorderly movement “pops up” in the midst of a normal – i.e., State-ridden – society, it sometimes gets its way. You may remember the Occupy Wall Street affair that arose in New York City in 2011, during Michael Bloomberg’s mayoralty. Bloomberg refrained from directing law enforcement to quell it for several weeks. It was a good illustration of the transient and conditional nature of State hegemony.

     Whenever a miscreant is treated gently by the “official” justice system, he faces the possibility that an “ad hoc State” will arise to impose a greater penalty. The more heinous his crimes, the more likely he’ll face “private justice.” Say what you will about vigilance committees, that was their genesis: “the authorities” had either failed to act against violent criminals or had given them the proverbial slap on the wrist. It doesn’t happen with perfect predictability or unanimous approval of the results, but it does happen. It’s why men convicted of raping children fear to go to prison.

     Heinlein made a point of this in his magnum opus The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:

     “All our customs work that way. If you’re out in field and a cobber needs air, you lend him a bottle and don’t ask cash. But when you’re both back in pressure again, if he won’t pay up, nobody would criticize if you eliminated him without a judge. But he would pay; air is almost as sacred as women. If you take a new chum in a poker game, you give him air money. Not eating money; can work or starve. If you eliminate a man other than self-defense, you pay his debts and support his kids, or people won’t speak to you, buy from you, sell to you.”
     “Mannie, you’re telling me that I can murder a man here and settle the matter merely with money?”
     “Oh, not at all! But eliminating isn’t against some law; are no laws—except Warden’s regulations—and Warden doesn’t care what one Loonie does to another. But we figure this way: If a man is killed, either he had it coming and everybody knows it—usual case—or his friends will take care of it by eliminating man who did it. Either way, no problem. Nor many eliminations. Even set duels aren’t common.”

     When young Fran first read that passage, he was as nonplussed as Stuart LaJoie, the tourist being tutored in Lunar ways by protagonist and first-person narrator Manuel O’Kelly Davis. But it’s the way human societies self-organize in the absence of a State. History does provide examples thereof, including medieval Iceland before Denmark incorporated it and pre-British-invasion Ireland.

* * *

     The above disquisition was triggered by – drum roll, please! – a slur aimed at a perfectly nice young woman on X who goes by the moniker “Libertarian Goth:”

You support pedophilia because you oppose State force to stop it. A libertarian fantasy society is a pedophile tolerant society.

— Sterling Reece 🗡️🇺🇸 (@SterlingReece26) August 28, 2026

     Anyone who might say such a thing to me would be invited to a pre-dawn kaffeklatsch with pistols at ten paces. Libertarian Goth was more restrained:

Despite me directly telling you my beliefs you say that I believe something else right after. Can you please tell me who my favorite band is? I want to listen some music. Or maybe I don’t. Do I? You tell me. 🤷🏻‍♀️ https://t.co/SdF6AyB8Q9

— 🥀 🖤𝔏𝔦𝔟𝔢𝔯𝔱𝔞𝔯𝔦𝔞𝔫 𝔊𝔬𝔱𝔥🖤🥀 (@LibertarianG0th) August 28, 2026

     I applaud that young lady for limiting herself to ridicule in response. Were I in her place, I might have used the kzinti method of issuing a challenge:

     Speaker-To-Animals said one thing more before he turned back to his table. "Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap."

     In short, the absence – or passivity – of a State does not imply the absence of justice. Pedophiles know it. Verbum sat sapienti.

The Unique Product

     States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude and their decay. – Walter S. Landor

     Incentives and disincentives determine everything.

     Yes, I know that’s too strong a statement. But to put it that way makes it memorable, a mantra for the armchair analyst. He can chant it as he strives to understand some process that at first looks baffling.

     Franz Oppenheimer divided human action in pursuit of a goal into two categories: the economic means, which is characterized by production and peaceful trade; and the political means, whose determinant is the use of coercion: i.e., force and intimidation. For most of the past century, the economic means has steadily if grudgingly given way to the political means. This deserves to be studied far more deeply than it has been to date, for the political means is inherently parasitic. It does not produce; rather, it feeds on the production of others.

     The organization of the political means is the institution we call the State.

     The specifics of how States originate have varied across the millennia, but the conditions required for its persistence have always been what they are today: It must possess both the tolerance, however grudging, of the subject populace, and the acceptance of all forces sufficiently powerful and proximate to challenge it. I’ve written about the latter requirement on several occasions. Today, my focus is on the former one: specifically, what might cause a State to lose the tolerance of its subjects.

* * *

     The detail questions behind subjects’ tolerance of a State are simple:

1. What “product” does the State offer us?
2. Can we afford it?
3. Is it “good enough?”
4. If any of the answers to the above questions are negative, what would it cost to oppose and perhaps ultimately topple the State?

     The answers to those questions are never uniform and never static. They change according to time, place, and the identity of the person answering them. When the answers begin to coalesce in the negative direction, the State is at risk of rebellion.

     States claim to offer their subjects many things, but beneath them all is an offer of justice. Give the State the monopoly power to define and enforce justice, and thereafter the State will see to those duties. Those who seek to offend against justice will be pursued and punished; when possible, their victims will be made whole. That offer is the State’s basic product.

     In the usual case, subjects are not permitted to refuse the State’s product. Penalties are imposed upon those who try. The State is therefore not only a monopolist, but one that can enforce the acceptance of its product. That brings the price and quality of the product to the forefront. How good is the State’s justice, and how expensive is it over the long term?

     In the marketplace, vendors compete through price, quality, and their reputations. That allows many vendors to sell products that perform the same or greatly similar functions. The State’s product is qualitatively different.

     Competition is anathema to the State, for it must involve the loss of the State’s monopoly over the use of coercion. When a competitor arises, the State immediately moves to crush it. Should it succeed in doing so swiftly and without greatly disturbing its subjects’ tenor of life, it would represent its action as justice. Otherwise, the applicable terms would be insurrection, rebellion, or civil war.

     But a competitor to the State can only be potentially viable if it can outperform the State at its own game: justice. That is the incentive for the State to deliver on its promise of justice. The open and obvious non-provision of justice by States around the world is a curiosity of note.

* * *

     Inasmuch as States have been notably deficient in providing their subjects with justice, they must defend themselves from potential competitors who are willing and able to do the job. There aren’t many ways to pre-squelch competition. Probably the commonest approach is to deny potential competitors the means by which to compete: i.e., to outlaw the possession of weapons by anyone but agents of the State. It’s been widely tried, but it’s seldom worked.

     In one of the most dramatic cases of competition in the provision of justice, the Cosa Nostra, deeply analyzed in this essay, has evolved an approach of unsurpassed competitive effectiveness. In parts of Italy it commands more respect than the State. Yet the Cosa Nostra is more voracious than the State, and even more ruthless. Russia’s Bratva is organized along similar lines, and is similarly voracious and ruthless.

     Many States have been baffled by organized crime. They recognize the threat and move against it, but without much success. That they’re being out-competed and could redress the problem simply by fulfilling their promises of justice at a modest cost to their subjects seems not to occur to them. At least, that’s the gentlest explanation.

     Justice is a unique product. The State inevitably insists on being a monopoly provider, then proceeds to underperform ever more visibly as time passes. That incentivizes the emergence of competitors.

     When several organizations in a given locale simultaneously offer to provide justice, violence won’t necessarily produce a victor. Even the most powerful State can fail to maintain its monopoly. Sometimes the only possible resolution is a fragmentation into separate territories – “turf” is the usual term – involving agreements not to compete across territorial borders.

     This is the process that has produced our current world order, in which States compete with one another for territory and population. It also accounts for how and when new nations are born. That having been said, I shall leave all further inferences to my Gentle Readers.

Context Matters Part 2

     The talk about Citizen Vigilante continues hot and heavy. There are critical voices in the mix. Some consider the film dangerous, while others cheer for the Michael Sanders character and express a yearning that someone make him real. It’s perfectly clear what sensibilities and spirit the film has tapped.

     The facet of the film that’s excited the most negative comments is the scene in which Sanders, enclosed in a steel box, must shoot it out with two dozen SWAT team members. “He didn’t have to do that!” shriek the critics. And indeed, they’re right: he didn’t. But once they had confronted him and made it plain that their mission was to cut him down regardless of the consequences, the moral choice became too clear to avert.

     What did it say about the priorities of those police and their commanders that they would bring seemingly overwhelming firepower to the task of killing Michael Sanders? When rape and murder are running riot throughout Europe? When those same police have been told to treat violent savages as if they were made of spun glass? When justice has become the bitterest word in any language? What did it say about their commander that after the first wave had been eliminated, he sent a second wave, no better prepared, to the same fate?

     It may strike even some who see the matter as I’ve delineated it above as unfortunate, unnecessary to the movie and preferably to be omitted. I disagree completely. I find it to be the element of the film that cuts through all the noise:

The State’s highest priority is always to assert and preserve the supremacy of The State.

     Michael Sanders gave those SWAT members a chance to back away. He allowed that “You’re only doing your jobs,” but followed by telling them what “doing your jobs” – i.e., following their commander’s orders – would bring about. Their commander, a loyal State employee who mouthed “democracy” as if that shibboleth could excuse the complete abrogation of justice, sent them forward into withering fire.

     It had to happen. It was entirely in keeping with both the context of the film and the nature of the State.

* * *

     The question must be posed: Are matters in Europe – or anywhere else – really that bad? Would a real-life Michael Sanders who committed himself to delivering justice to proven criminals be acclaimed by Us the People? Would the minions of the State do their level best to cut him down, while ignoring the savageries being perpetrated by those criminals? And would Sanders’s acclaim among common people have any effect on State priorities and practices?

     Apart from the occasional reportage of some immigrant atrocity, I haven’t really kept track. But it does seem that Europe, which has admitted millions of Third World immigrants to its shores, is trending in that direction. Indeed, matters aren’t that much better in North America.

     Let it be said outright: the majority of those immigrants are Muslims. They were schooled in the most aggressive and violent “faith” the world has ever known. That faith tells them that it’s quite all right – indeed, it’s their duty to Islam — to rape and murder the “unbeliever.” Many of them cannot read the Koran that exhorts them to those deeds. Few have anything to “contribute to society,” even if they have the potential.

     They’ve behaved as the soldiers of a savage conquering army have always done. As their numbers swell, so will their crimes… perhaps faster, at that.

     I’ve written elsewhere that justice in this world is a human artifact. The concept of justice is one of Mankind’s highest intellectual creations. Men have tolerated States among them in the hope that an entity supposedly dedicated to the maintenance of justice would improve upon “nature red in tooth and claw.” The challenge of our time is to read the news and evaluate the validity of that hope.

The Greater Crime Part 3

     The C.S.O. and I saw Citizen Vigilante yesterday evening. It’s a fairly crude movie in most ways. It attempts no character development, though it does give protagonist Michael Sanders a couple of scenes in which to depict a broader character than a mere man of violence. Its focus is on Sanders’s actions in the furtherance of justice. Those actions are unsparing, to put it mildly.

     Yet this simple story of a man who has decided “to take justice into his own hands” is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It’s racked up tens of millions of views, despite being condemned in most First World countries and banned in several. Its popularity eclipses any other movie released these past two decades.

     Citizen Vigilante, in sum, is a wake-up call to those rapacious entities that call themselves governments. It has revealed the immense hunger for justice and protection among the peoples of Europe and, increasingly, America. Their enthusiasm should make it plain to anyone how abused and frightened they feel.

     The governments of Europe, in particular, will not profit by attempting to suppress the movie. (The government of the United States, as clubfooted as it is, won’t try.) Too many of the events of the past year – see this piece for a prominent example – have built the case for a real-world Michael Sanders, or for many such.

     My longtime friend Pascal and I have discoursed many times on the Death Cults active among us. Islam is one such; the promoters of abortion and euthanasia are another; the opponents of the right to life are a third. But too narrow a focus is a mistake. The Death Cults’ enablers are equally culpable. Their greatest enabler is government, the engine of death and suppression that claims the monopoly power to mete justice, but seldom does.

     I wrote long ago that “justice in this world is a human artifact. Either it’s made by individuals or it doesn’t exist.” I stand by that assertion, and that no individual nor institution can claim a monopoly over it. Furthermore, I maintain that attempts to exert a monopoly power over justice are never in the interests of justice itself. Neither are they in the interests of those who have suffered injustice.

     Michael Sanders is a fictional character… for now. But that might not remain so for much longer.

The Greater Crime

     While I lament the slow death of Blogdom, I must admit that intelligence and insight can be found elsewhere on the World Wide Web. X / Twitter has become ever more interesting since the takeover by Elon Musk, though its mindless “Security” apparatus continues to present users with severe problems. One user who’s made some striking and thoughtful observations goes by the moniker of Black Dumpling:

     BD has made some penetrating and provocative statements, but none more so than this one:

The list of crimes I now think people should be put to death for has grown exponentially because I think it's not the crime one should be put to death for, but the mindset that informed committing it.

This is why I think people who engage in high speed police chases, torturing… https://t.co/ggKSwBhvtw

— BLACK DUMPLING™ (@BlackDumpling) June 29, 2026

     Please click through and read it to the end. For those who “can’t spare the click,” I’ll excerpt the part that hits hardest:

     What would be required for you, as an adult human being, to engage in the willful torture of a dog? Can you think of ANY rationale for why you would do such a thing? If the answer is no, then ask yourself why you would want to share a civilization with a person who not only can do such a thing but would do such a thing.

     BD’s questions cut to the heart of the matter we call justice.

* * *

     The Latin roots of the word justice mean holding rights. The philosophical basis of justice in Christian-Enlightenment societies is the proposition that we who believe in individuals’ rights have an ethical obligation to redress violations of them: if possible, to make the victim whole. That obligation strikes some people as not pertaining to them personally: “Let it be someone else’s problem.”

     As with many other chores we’d rather not be bothered by, we’ve “outsourced” justice to a third party: The State. But while private individuals are largely unwilling to take personal responsibility for justice, popular sentiment about State justice is negative. Witness the tremendous outpouring of applause for the recent movie Citizen Vigilante.

     Black Dumpling’s proposition in the previous segment accords with the general conviction that at this time, State justice is inadequate. Citizen Vigilante and its popularity underscore that conviction. It’s been called “a feel-good movie.” Ponder that for a few seconds and feel your brain itch. But what matters above all else is the subconscious quasi-logic behind it.

     We entrusted the maintenance of justice to the State. The consequences include an expanding tide of violence and predation against peaceable citizens. That is unacceptable. Therefore, the maintenance of justice cannot be entrusted to the State; other enforcers must step forward.

     Note that the above paragraph makes no mention of what “justice” is supposed to mean. Indeed, it could mean nightly Bingo tournaments, or free durians on national holidays, or anything at all. All that matters is that unacceptable consequence. The implication follows directly, though with imperfect logic.

     Ponder that for a moment before continuing on.

* * *

     Most people don’t think about fundamental things. They’ve had terms such as justice indoctrinated into them. “Justice? Isn’t that what the courts do?” You won’t find many high school graduates who answer some other way.

     But as we can see from the previous segment, in the popular conception, “justice” isn’t about correcting violations of rights. It’s about the protection of the innocent from the violent and dishonest. By that criterion, State justice is a failure. But what else is there?

     Only vigilantes. Only killing.

     A people who feel imperiled will countenance the killing of miscreants. They’ll tolerate it, even if at some level they disapprove of it. They’ll know, without needing to reason it out, that when State justice fails, “private justice” – i.e., vigilantes – becomes the only recourse. Many will deem that to be acceptable. But they won’t have considered the second-order effects.

     The masters of the State will note the developments. They will reason that if the populace tolerates vigilantes doing the only thing vigilantes have ever done, then they’ll tolerate a State justice system that executes more often than it currently does. Moreover, the justifications for execution will embrace a wider spectrum of reasons, including imputed intent.

     If you must have a State, do you really want to empower it to kill a man because of what it conceives his mindset to be?

     Black Dumpling has fingered a fundamental question: what shall we do with persons too mentally aberrant to be tolerated among us? Are there any answers other than the one she propounds?

     Have a nice day.

Something Actually Newsworthy

     Perhaps you remember this story:

     A couple of days ago, something unusual happened Across the Water: A Briton dared to defend another Briton against the threat of rape by an immigrant.
     If you aren’t familiar with the details of the event, the defender was a 14-year-old Scottish girl named Mayah Sommers. The intended victim was her 12-year-old sister. The would-be rapist was from... somewhere else, probably the Middle East or Africa. Mayah protected her sister by brandishing a large knife and a hatchet at the immigrant. Apparently that was enough to daunt him, and thank God for that.

     The U.K. being the totalitarian state it is, Mayah Sommers was immediately arrested for her courage. Britons aren’t allowed armament, regardless of the circumstances. (You can’t have a Second Amendment to the Constitution when there’s no Constitution to amend.) There was an outcry, but it proved insufficient to liberate young Mayah.

     But time marches on. (No, it’s not relevant; it’s just beautiful.) And just a couple of days ago, Mayah Sommers was vindicated:

     A man has been found guilty of making sexual remarks to a group of girls aged between 12 and 14 in Dundee before grabbing and pushing one of them to the ground.
     Ilia Belov, 22, claimed he confronted the girls after receiving abusive remarks and said he saw one of the girls with a knife in her waistband before the assault.
     His sister Nadjedzha Belova, 20, previously admitted assaulting a 13-year-old girl by seizing and pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground, and striking her on the head to her injury during the incident.
     The pair will be sentenced at Dundee Sheriff Court on 5 August.

     Very nearly a full year passed before this emerged. While it would be Pollyannaish to expect Britain’s powers that be to apologize to Mayah, or to imagine that Britons’ rights to protect themselves will receive greater respect henceforward, nevertheless this “should” clear Mayah’s name and expunge the arrest from her record.

     Yes, those are sneer quotes around “should.” Regular Gentle Readers of this dive will already know how I feel about “should.” The police who arrested Mayah Sommers are as unlikely to acknowledge their fault as Keir Starmer. To admit to an error, however slight, would undermine the Authority of the Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omnibenevolent State and is therefore “right out.”

     I could go on in this vein, but there’s little point to it. (Yes, I know that hasn’t stopped me in the past.) Britain has been conquered; its people have been subjugated; the flood of migrants lord it over them as a triumphant army, with the open connivance of the government. Native Britons, once among the proudest peoples of the world, are less than serfs: they’re mere sources of revenue for the State.

     What Americans and other freedom lovers can do is to publicize this development:

• To make clear that those two immigrants did pose a threat to those Scottish girls;
• To proclaim that a courageous young woman has been vindicated;
• To make plain the British State’s attitude toward its people.

     Will it overturn that criminal State? I doubt it. But one must start somewhere.

Did It Happen That Way?

     The jury has returned its verdict in the case of Austin Metcalf and Karmelo Anthony: Anthony has been pronounced guilty of first-degree murder. The crowd of black protesters outside the courtroom, who have been stridently vocal that Anthony is “innocent,” was upset.

     I stopped myself from prefacing the previous sentence with “Needless to say.” Yet it was predictable that people protesting on the defendant’s behalf, would be unhappy that he’s likely to be imprisoned for the rest of his life. A few of them had some “interesting” things to say: e.g., that Anthony should have killed Metcalf’s twin brother as well.

     Austin Metcalf’s family must be wary henceforward. Threats have come at them from several directions. This is the way of things in these United States in the Twenty-First Century. Even peripheral contact with a case of interracial violence makes your future uncertain.

     Yet the entire incident was video-recorded, from several angles. There’s no dispute that Anthony pulled a knife and killed Metcalf. Even several of the witnesses for the defense testified that Metcalf had not attacked Anthony – that Anthony was not defending himself from a credible threat to life or limb. Those demanding that Anthony be freed cannot argue away the facts of the case.

     Their beef, of course, is that Metcalf was White and Anthony is black.

     There were no blacks on the jury that convicted Anthony. Those who were called to the voir dire all admitted freely that they would have trouble “putting a brother in jail.” The prosecution challenged them off for sufficient cause. As the resulting jury was all-White, the blacks incensed about the verdict are screaming “racism.”

     It’s unnecessary for me to comment on that aspect of the case. We’ve seen it before. But it is necessary to ponder something commentator Matt Walsh observed:

     Now go back and consider every supposed racist atrocity from decades or centuries ago. Every “innocent” minority wrongfully persecuted by racist whites. I’m not saying that all of those stories aren’t true. I’m saying that you can’t assume that they are true. If they can lie about the stuff we all witnessed with our own eyes, imagine what they can do with the things none of us witnessed.

     Enough such incidents were reported by a single source to make them disputable. The sources themselves were sometimes of dubious credibility.

     The justice of a verdict is often disputed. In these days of ubiquitous security cameras and cellphones that can video-record, the facts of a case are less disputable than ever before. But those conditions have only obtained for about three decades. Everything before that is a matter of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence.

     And recent interracial incidents, many of them meticulously filmed, have undermined the credibility of the record.

     When we speak of things that happened long ago, credibility is less important than credulity. People are inclined to believe accounts that accord with their beliefs and convictions. Written records are often disputed on the grounds that the writer “had an agenda.” The most thoroughly reported and recorded event in all of history, the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, is frequently waved aside on that basis, even though the chroniclers were almost all put to death for maintaining it.

     Today, credulity is less important than an activist agenda. The activists vocal about the Anthony verdict have such an agenda. What they’ll do, now that that agenda has been thwarted, remains to be seen. Apparently there was some violence immediately outside the courtroom when the verdict was announced.

     Now, with a number of thoughtful people openly inquiring whether we can trust the historical records of “minority persecution,” the matter will be further inflamed. Yet there is justification for re-examining those accounts, to the extent possible. The record is almost purely one of White persecution of blacks. But the purity of the record itself provides grounds for dispute. Was it really that way in every case? Is there no possibility that in some cases the “victim” was objectively guilty of a heinous crime? Or were the recorders themselves pushing a particular viewpoint on the rest of us?

     Unpleasant, distasteful food for thought. In our current climate, it will be spoken of more openly than ever before. I fear to imagine the consequences.

Forward, Into The Past! 2026-04-25

     (Thank you, Firesign Theater, for anticipating this need.)

     Quoth Matt Walsh:

Matt Walsh “Almost all of the arrests that happen in a given year are from like 5% of the population”

“Cause you take out the 70% who are never arrested, you take out the 25% who are arrested one time in their entire life, and you're left with 5% of the entire population that's… pic.twitter.com/NnTeztc84n

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) April 24, 2026

     Yes, those are valid statistics. They may mix misdemeanors with felonies, but I’m unable to resolve that at this time.

     Time was, there were “three strikes” provisions on the law books in several states. Those laws constrained the sentencing practices of judges: a criminal convicted of a third felony offense was automatically sentenced to life without parole. For a while, those states locked up felony recidivists permanently; the public was permanently protected from their proclivities.

     I’m not sure what happened to those three-strikes laws. This article sheds some light, but not enough to be sure that the three-strikes provision is still enforced. Among the facets of criminal law that would bear on this is the propensity of judges and prosecutors to alter an indictment on their own authority. A judge who dislikes the three-strikes provision might unilaterally dismiss a felony indictment to keep an accused criminal from suffering permanent incarceration.

     There is also the racial aspect to consider. If we go by national demographics, American prison populations already overrepresent blacks and Hispanics. The implications are not hard to grasp. Neither is the message a further concentration of imprisoned blacks and Hispanics would send to the White majority.

     The hawkers of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are violently hostile to an accurate representation of blacks and Hispanics among felonious criminals. It’s the statistic they dislike most. So they screech about “social justice” and “the legacy of slavery,” as if those were valid justifications for allowing habitual felons to continue to prey on the rest of us.

     However, another statistic is on my mind this morning: the population of these United States. That’s estimated at 330 million persons. If we were to imprison 5% of that number, that’s 16.5 million permanently incarcerated persons. I don’t know if enough prisons could be built and staffed to accommodate that many permanent residents. A far smaller number of persons are imprisoned today – about 1.25 million – and cries of “prison overcrowding” already resound nationally.

     An old friend, a far harsher person than I, advocated not lifelong incarceration for the habitual felon but execution: “Three strikes and you’re dead.” Given the way the death penalty is treated today, that wouldn’t relieve the pressure on our prisons. But Tom is a forthright fellow; he envisioned the application of the penalty to occur immediately after the third conviction.

     That calls to mind a scene from Neal Stephenson’s early novel The Diamond Age:

     “Congratulations, Bud, you're a pa,” Judge Fang said. “I gather from your reaction that this comes as something of a surprise. It seems evident that your relationship with this Tequila is tenuous, and so I do not find that there are any mitigating circumstances I should take into account in sentencing. That being the case, I would like you to go out that door over there”—Judge Fang pointed to a door in the corner of the courtroom—“and all the way down the steps. Leave through the exit door and cross the street, and you will find a pier sticking out into the river. Walk to the end of that pier until you are standing on the red part and await further instructions.”
     […]
     The pier did not turn red until the very end, where it began to slope down steeply toward the river. It had been coated with some kind of grippy stuff so his feet wouldn't fly out from under him. He turned around and looked back up at the domed court building, searching for a window where he might make out the face of Judge Fang or one of his gofers. The family of Chinese was following him down the pier, carrying their long bundle, which was draped with garlands of flowers and, as Bud now realized, was probably the corpse of a family member. He had heard about these piers; they were called funeral piers.
     Several dozen of the microscopic explosives known as cookie-cutters detonated in his bloodstream.

     Efficient, yes, but I’m fairly sure our anti-death-penalty activists would disapprove, to say nothing of the social-justice crowd.

     Still, that 5% statistic has considerable power. If it were to get the right amount of airtime and column-inches, who could say what might follow? The conversion of Manhattan Island into a giant, open-air prison camp, perhaps?

     Just an early-morning thought.

The Felony Of Life (UPDATED)

     Great age tends to diminish the energies required for certain activities, such as fulminating about injustices. Even so, there are some discoveries that still light my boiler and turn it up to 11.

     This is one such:

     WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden “withheld evidence” and approved “aggressive arrest tactics” when targeting pro-life defendants — and then slapped them with longer prison sentences than pro-abortion ones, according to an explosive internal review released Tuesday.
     The DOJ revealed the stunning abuses in a nearly 900-page report after examining more than 700,000 records related to the Biden administration’s prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
     The 1994 law was passed to protect access to houses of worship, religious institutions, abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers.
     But the Biden DOJ was found to have engaged multiple times in “biased enforcement” of it — while also collaborating with and even seeking to fund pro-abortion groups, according to the DOJ Office of Legal Policy report.

     The article is long, but it’s eminently worth your time, regardless of your opinions about abortion. I thought I was past taking umbrage at the Biden Administration. I was wrong.

     Rather than froth at the mouth over this, I’ll simply point out that Joe Biden is, nominally at least, a Catholic. A plurality of seriously active pro-lifers are Catholics. So a Catholic president presided over a Justice Department that pursued and prosecuted Americans for their Catholic affiliation. When the prosecutors were able to secure a conviction under the notoriously vague “FACE Act,” they exhorted the sentencing judge to be far harsher toward the convicted pro-lifer than toward a pro-abortion defendant convicted for the same offense. So much for Catholic politicians taking orders from the Vatican.

     Meanwhile, we have violent offenders – assaulters, rapists, kidnappers – being given light sentences because of their “religion:” Islam. A number of such criminals, here and in Europe, have been able to avert punishment by pleading that their “religion” commands that they do as they did. Given the propensity of Muslims to riot over cartoons and such, I doubt that requires a great deal of explanation.

     Could it be clearer that the First World, these United States in particular, need a clarification of what constitutes a valid religion protected under the First Amendment? Could it be clearer that religious affiliation must be excluded from decisions to prosecute, from sentencing decisions, and from peremptory challenges during the voir dire? Could it be clearer, given the events of the Mark Houck incident, that the “FACE Act” must be repealed, or failing that, heavily revised to make absolutely objective and indisputable what constitutes an offense?

     “The law is a ass—a idiot,” wrote Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. Sometimes, definitely. Especially when it’s made by villains with an axe to grind, and enforced by others who seek to ply that tool against the necks of disfavored persons and groups.

     UPDATE: I've just learned that Mark Houck has won a $1,000,000 award from the FBI for the tactics it used against him. I can't think of anyone who would deserve it more.

The True Bastion Of Liberty

     I hadn’t planned to write anything today, despite it being “1984 Day:”

     April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films….

     George Orwell had important things to say about liberty, despite being socialistically inclined. Nevertheless, he omitted mention of one thing that, sadly, a great many Americans have failed to appreciate. Indeed, the majority of us squirm to escape involvement with it. And for that reason among others, we’re losing its protection:

     The jury functioned as a localized check on state power, granting the common citizen the authority to temper the rigid application of the law with communal common sense. The historical power of jury nullification, whereby a jury refuses to convict a defendant despite overwhelming evidence of guilt, was historically celebrated as a triumph against state overreach. Cases such as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the Royal Governor of New York, cemented the jury’s role as a bulwark of liberty. The jury possessed the ultimate veto, ensuring that the laws enacted by the sovereign could only be enforced if they aligned with the moral intuitions of the populace.
     As detailed in the University College London (UCL) academic paper, “Decline of the ‘Little Parliament’: Juries and Jury Reform in England and Wales” by Sally Lloyd-Bostock and Cheryl Thomas, the jury was vigorously defended as an ancient right and a bastion of liberty, a mechanism whereby the ordinary person’s moral compass could inform legal decisions and contain the powers of government.

     If you follow the news from the United Kingdom, you’re probably already aware of how badly the right to a trial by jury has been abraded:

'So judges are just better at finding facts?'
'They're experienced at it.'

Sir Brian Leveson, who led the criminal courts inquiry, explains why he thinks Lammy is absolutely right to scrap jury trials. pic.twitter.com/qDTQFw7acY

— LBC (@LBC) December 2, 2025

     But Celina’s essay, quoted above, makes a shattering point about the preconditions required for trial by jury to exercise its protections:

     Nonwhite jurors display clear ethnocentric bias against white defendants and in favor of their own. The data is undeniable. The elites know it. That is why they are quietly abolishing peremptory challenges, gutting jury trials, and now planning to scrap them for almost everything except murder and rape. Demography is destiny, and if the English, Americans, or Australians become a minority in their own courtrooms, there will be no justice left.

     From here, I could light off in several directions, but I’ll content myself by quoting an earlier tirade:

     The combination of the Constitution plus the Common Law, which we inherited from England, had a consequence few persons have openly articulated. Under their combined principles and terms, and from the then-customary definition of a government, the United States was an anarchist nation. The argument is simple: A State must have the recognized authority to decree punishment. But under the Constitution's requirement for a jury trial for all penal offenses, plus the Common Law's traditions concerning the jury's freedom to nullify any law it finds noxious, only a jury of private citizens can do so. Therefore, U.S. governments lack an essential qualification for being States -- and therefore, we are an anarchy by the strict meaning of the word.

     Now consider what would follow the abolition of the jury trial. No longer would a jury’s assent be required for the State to punish a defendant. Thus, defendants irritating to the State would be at great hazard, for an indictment would guarantee a subsequent conviction. Worse still, jury nullification would vanish. The State could proclaim arbitrary laws that would not have survived a jury’s veto. The worst features of feudal systems would be laid atop our advanced, information-oriented societies.

     But let’s not stop there. Let’s ask about the driving influence Celina has cited:

     When a society is fractured along ethnic and cultural lines, the jury ceases to be a microcosm of a unified nation. Instead, it becomes a contested battleground for competing tribal loyalties. Historical nullification, which used to be a noble tool against state tyranny, has mutated into ethnic nullification, where jurors refuse to convict members of their own in-group regardless of the evidence. This weaponization of an ancient right paralyzes the state’s ability to maintain basic order and shatters the epistemic foundation of the legal system.

     Juries have stood in the way of unbounded State power since John Peter Zenger. They who seek unbounded power would naturally be averse to the right to a trial by jury. Were our “elites” aware that unlimited immigration from the Third World would destroy the jury trial as an instrument of justice? Was it part of their planning?

     The U.K. is already far gone toward the abolition of the jury trial. Given travesties of justice such as the acquittal of O.J. Simpson for his murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, and the willingness of a largely nonwhite jury to convict Donald Trump of a slew of felonies even if they had to invent them, Americans’ right to a trial by jury cannot be deemed safe from demolition.

     And I have no doubt that, whether or not this demise of an ancient, liberty-preserving right was a planned consequence of open immigration, our “elites” will find the outcome to their tastes.

Carta Obsoleta

     It’s difficult to deal with the news coming out of the United Kingdom these days.

     My Gentle Readers already know about some of the things beleaguering the Sceptered Isle. There are the increasingly restive and assertive Muslims, the theft and street chaos, the “grooming” of white girls by immigrants, the sinking economy, the rash of dependency, the use of the police to suppress dissent, and more.

     But can you believe that the Labour government wants to scrap the trial by jury?

'So judges are just better at finding facts?'
'They're experienced at it.'

Sir Brian Leveson, who led the criminal courts inquiry, explains why he thinks Lammy is absolutely right to scrap jury trials. pic.twitter.com/qDTQFw7acY

— LBC (@LBC) December 2, 2025

     Trial by jury is guaranteed by Magna Carta, which serves Britain as a partial constitution. You would think that a man knighted by the Crown would have at least a passing acquaintance with that document. Perhaps he does... yet he’s perfectly ready to violate that guarantee for “efficiency.”

     If Britain’s courts are “clogged,” what’s the nature of the cases that clog them? Might a great many of them be the fruits of luxuriant law and the overextension of government power? How many are free-expression cases, in which the State has striven to punish “misinformation,” or “hate speech,” or sentiments it simply disapproves? How many arise from regulatory overreach, whether via the State or one of the ubiquitous QUANGOs?

     But let’s look a bit deeper yet. What are the foreseeable consequences of a “justice system” that lacks the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers?

1. A trial judge not restrained by a jury verdict can rule on his understanding of the law alone, which eliminates the possibility of jury nullification of a bad or unconstitutional law.
2. The trial judge has authority over what evidence may be introduced; thus a trial judge can pre-justify any verdict whatsoever merely by excluding evidence that leans in the opposite direction. Thus, as appellate judges are not permitted to assess the evidence, the probability of a successful appeal is greatly reduced.
3. The State can ensure the imprisonment of any British subject, merely by lodging an accusation against him and bringing him to trial before a government-owned judge. Given the British government’s notorious hostility toward freedom of expression, that would effectively establish a censorship regime.
4. Inversely, the State can ensure the acquittal of any subject, by routing his trial to that selfsame government-owned judge. That would allow it to create classes of subjects who are guaranteed immunity from penalty for their crimes.
5. All the above make the “justice system” a weapon the State can use against anyone it pleases: to coerce compliance in whatever direction it pleases.

     That is completely opposite to the conception of the process for ensuring justice that the United States inherited from Britain two and a half centuries ago.

     But David Lammy, Britain’s “Secretary of State for Justice,” insists that there’s no other way to “unclog” Britain’s courts. Notably, he claims that his “reform” is victim-oriented: i.e., that the elimination of the jury will result in the “right” verdicts more often, faster, and with appropriate relief to the victimized. Never mind the other consequences I’ve delineated here. The judges can be trusted to get it right.

     If Parliament allows Lammy to get away with this abridgement of Britons’ rights, it’s all over for the denizens of the Sceptered Isle. Having their right to bear arms taken from them, the British State can now ride roughshod over them. However many pitchforks Britons still possess, they would not suffice to bring down that all-powerful edifice.

You Say You Want Justice?

     Justice is an appealing concept. Just about nobody rejects it, at least in the abstract. But even those loudest in calling for it seldom appreciate what it would require.

     Our nation is rife with injustices. Some of them are perpetrated by the very organs that are supposed to enforce justice. Others occur because all too often, the “forces of justice” are disinclined to do their jobs, or have been told not to do them. And still others are consequences of previous injustices that haven’t been remedied.

     Oh, sorry; I’ve neglected the proprieties, haven’t I? Good morning, Gentle Reader! I hope your day has been going well. As for myself, I’ve been up since 4:00 AM. That’s become my “normal” rising hour. And ever since I awoke, the word justice has been rattling around in my head.

     When injustice runs riot, the imperative question is why? The answer is almost always unpleasant.

---

     Late in 2020, I wrote about the prospects for the return of the “vigilance committee.” The possibility seemed to loom large at that time, owing to the rioting that had afflicted so many American cities. To the best of my knowledge, nothing of the sort happened. Given the rampant injustices being inflicted on peaceable Americans and their property, one must wonder why not.

     We’ve been propagandized relentlessly about “private justice.” The propaganda equates it to injustice, as if The State has some magical quality that blesses acts of coercion. But it’s not so. “The State” is a fictitious entity. It works through the wills and deeds of individuals in its service. If those persons succeed in “doing justice,” what distinguishes them from persons not in The State’s service who would have done the same things?

     I put those thoughts into the mouth of my best-loved protagonist:

     The Friday afternoon confessions were seldom well attended. Schliemann hadn’t had a penitent in more than ten minutes. His mind was beginning to wander when a new shadow appeared on the confessional screen.
     “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
     The old priest sat straight up.
     “Louis?”
     “I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve been by, Father.”
     “I’ve been worried, Louis. Are you all right?”
     There was a long silence.
     “No. This will probably be my last confession.”
     A cold hand slipped around Schliemann’s heart and squeezed.
     Oh, my God.
     The priest listened in silent agony as Louis recited a litany of minor faults and self-indulgences.
     He always confesses to the same things. Never anything serious. He’s about to face the Particular Judgement, and I have yet to hear anything about two killings committed in his front yard.
     Louis fell silent, waiting to hear what his penance would be.
     “Anything else, Louis?”
     “No, Father, I’m done.”
     I can’t let it pass!
     “What about the two men you killed?”
     A hiss came through the screen. The shadow head pulled itself a little higher.
     “What about them, Father?”
     Schliemann’s throat was dry. “I seem to recall a commandment on the subject.”
     “As do I. But did it forbid killing, or murder?”
     “The text says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ “
     “That’s the English text. What was the Aramaic? Or the Hebrew?”
     Schliemann started to expostulate and stopped himself. A twitching was developing in his right elbow. It made him want to jerk his arm.
     “Actually, Father, it isn’t two men, it’s four. And all for the same reason: because I caught them practicing the abuse of the helpless. I don’t tolerate that sort of thing.”
     “You don’t tolerate...when and where were the other two?”
     “About eight years ago, on a back street on the fringe of the city. They were raping a teenage girl, holding a knife to her throat.” Louis’s tone was conversational. “I killed them both and walked the girl home.”
     “How is it that a man of your size and gentility knows so much about violence as to be able to kill two men at will? You weren’t carrying your shotgun that day, were you?”
     “No, Father, I wasn’t armed.”
     “Well?”
     There was a pause.
     “Call it a gift. I’m not exactly what I appear to be. I never have been.”
     “And you feel no remorse for any of this? My God, Louis, what kind of man are you? Have I ever known you at all?”
     “I may not be exactly what I appear to be, Father, but I am a man.” The words were droplets of molten iron. “Twice, when there was no one else to do it, I’ve acted in defense of my kind. To do so, it was necessary that I kill. Was it horrible? Yes, just as it should be. Did it leave me with nightmares? Yes, just as it should have. If the necessity were to recur, would I do it again? Yes, in a heartbeat. And that, too, is as it should be.”
     Schliemann had had all the words shocked out of him. The twitch had traveled down from his elbow to his hand, whose fingers were dancing beyond his control. Something seemed to be happening in his ribcage, too.
     “The Church doesn’t have much to say about earthly justice, Father. I’ve always wondered why. Maybe the notion of divine justice is as much as it has to give us. But justice in this world is a human artifact. Either it’s made by individuals or it doesn’t exist. I have made my share of it, and I don’t regret it in the slightest. Now you’ve heard about all of it, though I never intended that you should. Does the Church cast me out for this?”

     Well? Where lies the difference that condemns “private justice” but sanctifies “justice” in the hands of The State? If there is no difference, then when The State fails to do justice, why don’t we act? When injustices are perpetrated by The State itself... why sit we here idle?

---

     One recent case has fired many persons’ fury: the August 22nd killing of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown Jr. on a North Carolina train. Brown, a career criminal with 13 convictions to his record, attacked Zarutska for no imaginable reason. But what has followed?

     Brown has been indicted for first-degree murder. Yet no one could say that justice has been swift. Rather, Brown has been remanded for 60 days for “psychiatric evaluation.” The question on many minds is whether he could face the death penalty. Incredibly, the answer is six months away:

     CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) - The man accused of killing a Ukrainian woman on a Charlotte light rail almost two months ago was scheduled to have a crucial court hearing on Thursday.
     Decarlos Brown Jr., the man accused of killing 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska back in late August, was scheduled to have a Rule 24 court hearing on Thursday, Oct. 16. A Rule 24 hearing is for the state to determine whether or not they would pursue the death penalty.
     Court documents said that the hearing has now been pushed back until April 2026.
     The decision to delay the hearing came from Brown and his attorney, Daniel Roberts. However, the reason for the delay was redacted, according to court documents.

     “The reason for the delay was redacted,” eh? A black career criminal wantonly murdered an innocent white woman? All the facts were multiply witnessed and video-recorded? But whether the murderer will face capital punishment must be delayed, for reasons the public cannot be allowed to know?

     That doesn’t sound like justice. Not even like justice-in-process.

     I shan’t speculate on why the delay was granted. (It’s fairly clear why Brown’s attorney requested it.) But if this sounds like justice to anyone, I haven’t met him.

     The attempts to guarantee justice built into the American system are best expressed here:

     Amendment V

     No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

     Amendment VI

     In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

     Six months merely to determine the possible penalty, plus God only knows how much longer before the trial can be held, does not sound “speedy.” More, at least one part of the process is deliberately being concealed from the “public.” And of course, the psychiatric evaluation mentioned above is being kept secret as well. Whatever the ultimate verdict of the evaluators, we’ll never learn the basis of their decision.

     If this is the quality of “justice” that the worthy citizens of North Carolina can expect from The State, beware. For summary justice rendered by private hands looks splendid in contrast. And the more incidents such as the murder of Iryna Zarutska come to light, the better the only possible alternative will seem.

---

     For further thoughts on this subject, please refer to these essays.

Issues

     Have you noticed? No one has problems any more. No one has a character defect that demands correction. And no one is ever irritated. Instead, we have issues.

     Issues, they say, are for “working out” – and you know how hopeless it is to argue with They. Of course, there are better and worse means of working out an issue, but we wouldn’t want to be judgmental, would we? Each to his own vision of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful!

     Except that some of them are pretty damned ugly, aren’t they? Especially the ones that involve rape, murder, and rioting in the streets.

     I’m a long-time admirer of Mark Steyn. There’s hardly any other commentator in the Right who equals his gift for unsparing penetration. He’s especially good at coining a pithy phrase. I have several of his books, and that pattern of penetration married to eloquence persists throughout.

     But by my lights, one of his coinages stands above the rest. He made it in America Alone, in discussing the evil that has striven to displace national pride, patriotism, and love of justice: multiculturalism. He called it “societal Stockholm Syndrome:”

     If Islamist extremism is the genie you’re trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn’t help to have smashed the bottle. At the core of multiculturalism is the assumption that a non-Western culture is somehow primal and immutable, but that an advanced nation is no more than the sum of its parts. It’s a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome—a desperation to identify with anything that comes along other than your own.

     That appears to have become the dominant approach to multicultural “issues” throughout Europe. Muslims think it’s just grand to kidnap and rape white European teen girls? Muslims force their own pre-teen daughters into marriages to much older men? Muslims harass Jews in public places, sometimes with violence? Well, it’s okay in their homelands, so who are we to condemn it? Besides, we wouldn’t want them to become angry with us, would we?

     I have an issue with that. So did this young woman. But it appears that few of her countrymen share that issue.

     Remember the Nuremberg tribunals? No, I wasn’t there, and I doubt you were either. But the principle they established is one that deserves a lot more thought than it routinely gets. They ruled that there is a standard of justice above all political law – that the Nazi war criminals brought before them could not stake their defense on the laws of the Third Reich, but must be judged according to that supreme standard.

     Europeans who cower before the Muslims that have flooded into their nations are as culpable as any Nazi official who claimed that he was merely following the laws of his nation. They avert their eyes from vicious and savage behavior, preferring “tolerance” to being called “racists.” They permit those hordes to disrupt the public life of their countries, rather than assert their long-established norms. They shun all possibilities of confrontation.

     And it’s coming to America. Muslim street prayers designed to monopolize parks, impede traffic, and assert dominance. Muslim demonstrations against Israel in public parks and before public places. Muslims marching and chanting for sharia — in Idaho, of all places. And no one says a word, much less does anything to prevent or correct it. Even in districts where there are water cannons and snowplows aplenty.

     Do you have an issue with any of that, Gentle Reader?

The Evolution Of Punishment

     Time was, Americans believed that people who did bad things should – indeed, must – be punished for them. I know, I know; the idea is simply too 19th Century! We can’t have some people claiming a moral superiority over others that entitles them to inflict punishment! Why, that would imply an absolute standard of right and wrong! Far better that we “understand” the lawbreaker, and perhaps help him to see the undesirability of his deeds. In an appropriately diverse, inclusive, and environmentally friendly way, of course.

     But back in those benighted, hyper-moralistic days, we also believed that people should experience the full consequences of their mistakes, that they might learn to do better. Bad! Supercilious and heartless! Just one more expression of superiority – in this case, a superior understanding of cause, effect, and the linkages between them. We can’t have people flaunting their excessive wisdom! It could lead to hurt feelings. Deficits in self-esteem. After everything our educators have done to promote it!

     No, today we not only tolerate lawbreaking, we condone it. We excuse it on the grounds of single-parenthood upbringings, or structural racism, or the incentives of poverty. We hold persons such as George Floyd, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Breonna Taylor up as icons of the New Thinking. Martyrs to the Cause. Heroes, even.

     In short, today we neither punish the lawbreaker nor expect the dissolute and self-indulgent to suffer for their mistakes. Instead, we – the law-abiding, self-sufficient, and responsible persons of America – punish ourselves.

---

     In yesterday’s reading I encountered a brief report about a man who’d just died of “natural causes,” at 71 years of age. Dog Bites Man? Suitable only for the Obituaries column, or the bottom right corner of page A36? Not quite: The deceased, James Odle, was an inmate on death row. Indeed, he’d languished there for 37 years, more than half his Earthly life. He’d passed away before the authorities could arrange his demise in the legally prescribed fashion.

     You have to do something fairly far out of the ordinary to get put on death row these days. Murder alone normally won’t do it. It must be an aggravated murder, a mass murder, or a torture-murder. In some states you can get there by killing a cop. Which should tell you something about the value the Omnipotent State puts on the lives of We the Sheeple, the ordinary private citizens of the realm.

     So this...person had to have done something truly vile. His victim must have been a black transgendered lesbian socialist climate-change activist. Maybe he killed her while wearing a MAGA cap. On Eid-al-Adha. But the state of California didn’t get around to executing him in time to keep him from enjoying 37 years of free food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and assorted fringe benefits at taxpayer expense, then exiting this vale of tears without the judicially intended ceremony. There’s no report of his last words, though I’d hardly be surprised to learn that they were “Beat you to it!”

     Many death-row inmates languish there for 20 years or more. Multiple-murderer Stanley “Tookie” Williams, co-founder of the “Crips” street gang, spent 25 years on death row. According to Wikipedia, about a quarter of those who take up residence in the world’s least sought-after housing die of causes other than execution.

     So James Odle is just an unusually extreme case of our contemporary reluctance to punish the evildoer.

---

     Our favorite Bookworm invites us to share some dark thoughts about the “plight of the drug-addicted homeless” in her former district of residence, San Francisco:

     It occurred to me — and this is where I say that I had a horrible thought — that Narcan is largely responsible for the plight we find ourselves in. In the old days, people with serious drug habits died from overdoses. You couldn’t get to a critical mass of homeless drug addicts. They Darwined themselves out.

     Thanks to Narcan, though, while a serious narcotic habit leads people to horrific lives of degradation and suffering, that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, Narcan means these people keep going like energizer bunnies. For example, in San Francisco, the whole equation would have been different if 3,000 people hadn’t been saved from imminent death (although I suspect many of those 3,000 were repeat offenders).

     Those people would no longer have been on the streets. They would no longer have engaged in crime, and their deaths might have scared a handful of others straight. That would have substantially lessened the horrors of San Francisco streets, both for other homeless people and for the ordinary people trying to conduct their lives in the middle of a nightmare world.

     And of course, without Narcan, there would be a smaller market of drug users buying goods from Mexico, thereby weakening the cartels. (And, incidentally, weakening China’s involvement in damaging American through the fentanyl trade.)

     Bad, naughty, evil Bookworm! The idea of letting people experience the consequences of their bad behavior without other, good-hearted types rushing in to “save” them is obsolete! Antiquated! Practically 19th-Century! You must be one of those hard-hearted Social Darwinist types who expect individuals to learn from their mistakes! No Brie and Chardonnay for you!

     But she’s right. San Francisco allows the drug-addicted homeless to inflict several indignities, including a fair amount of serious crime, upon the law-abiding. Then it uses funds from the public treasury to “rescue” the OD-ing street bum from the consequences of his folly. What has such “benevolence” done to what was once the most beautiful of the cities of the Pacific coast? What message does it send to the law-abiding, self-supporting, overtaxed San Franciscan, who mainly wants to be left in peace?

     Don’t prattle to me about “mental illness.” We used to confine the mentally ill, too. We didn’t do so to punish them. We aimed to protect them from themselves, and to try to help them back to sanity. We also sought to spare others from being afflicted by them, as the homeless are doing to normal San Franciscans.

     What’s that you say? We shouldn’t imprison the mentally ill as if they were lawbreakers? Good point! We shouldn’t. Instead we’ll reserve incarceration for the mentally ill and go back to ritual mutilations, the stocks, and public floggings for the sane lawbreaker. Thanks for the suggestion!

---

     I could go on, but I think the point stands as established. The reluctance to punish, whether actively, as in the case of the lawbreaker, or passively, by allowing the fool to experience the logical consequences of his folly, has resulted in the penalties they have earned being inflicted on the decent and responsible. You and I must suffer the lashes and other torments that were once meant for them. Worse, we must endure the indignity of paying monetarily for “programs” supposedly to combat crime, homelessness, mental illness, and drug abuse... programs the greater part of whose funding becomes salaries, benefits, and perquisites for government employees.

     Every one of the social evils and maladies that were on the decline prior to World War II is on the increase today. It baffles the meliorists and the humanitarians. What more can we do? they cry. Print another billion! Hire another thousand social workers! It’s as if they’d never heard of Herbert Spencer, Thomas Mackay, or Ralph Waldo Emerson. But of course they haven’t – and if they had, they’d never have bothered to read them. How could the thinking of a bunch of fusty old 19th century writers be of any relevance to our hoppin’ and happenin’ era?

     In So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish, the fourth of the late, deeply lamented Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide” novels, there’s a character who calls himself Wonko the Sane. He lives in a house built inside-out – shingles and gutters and lawn on the inside; sheet rock, carpeting and such on the outside – which he calls The Outside of the Asylum. It’s a perfect physical representation of the state of contemporary Western society.

     Yet Adams wrote that novel in 1984. I wonder what he’d think of what passes for sanity today?

Applecart Operators Want Applecart Left Undisturbed

     It stands to reason that men who profit heavily from a certain state of affairs would want to preserve that state of affairs against anything that might disturb it. It’s equally reasonable that when such men detect a threat to their applecart, they’ll do whatever they can to quell, avert, or dampen that threat before apples can start to spill into the gutters. And so, by way of the invaluable “sundance,” we have this:

     While it might seem frustrating to see republicans and conservatives demanding that President Trump stop talking about the greatest act of sedition and usurpation, within our Constitutional Republic in the history of our nation, this espousal by Andrew McCarthy is factually a very wide-spread opinion within the DC beltway:

     Take the intents in their best possible light, and the basic premise is that no-one cares about the abuses of power that took place.

     Sundance and I would disagree with that premise:

     How does the office of a U.S. president; and more importantly the republic itself; survive a coordinated coup effort involving all three branches of government; while simultaneously those in charge of exposing the corruption fear the scale is too damaging for them to reveal?

     The anti-Trump coup revealed a staggering fault in the Republic. It demands to be addressed publicly, through the justice system – if it can still be trusted to do so – and with appropriate penalties meted out to the participants regardless of their altitude in federal service. Some of the conspirators, indeed, deserve to be tried for treason, the penalty for which can be as severe as death.

     Didn’t we do that to the Watergate burglars and the planners that dispatched them? Didn’t we oust a sitting president for trying to “fix the case?” How, then, could we permit this far greater offense against the Constitution and the people of the United States to go unpunished?

     The very suggestion that the Russia hoax not be treated with the gravest seriousness – apparently, the attitude being taken by McCarthy, Lowry, and other Beltway insiders – implies that there are two standards of justice in this country: one for us hoi polloi, the other, far more lenient one for the politically elevated and well connected. Even a major profiteer from “insidership” should be able to sense the magnitude of the threat this poses to the American polity. If he wants any portion of the system that’s fattened him to survive, he should be screaming for justice to be done. If justice is not done, far too many people will decide that there is no law as Americans have always understood it.

     Can you envision the consequences? I can.

     We’ve all heard the term “moral hazard.” It would take a back seat to moral anarchy. “The law” would become whatever the biggest local goon squad says it is.

     It’s bad enough that the odious Hillary Rodham Clinton is likely to escape justice for the wheeling and dealing she did while Secretary of State. It’s bad enough that her scrofulous husband will never face prosecution for his diddlings on “Epstein Island.” And it’s certainly bad enough that the vile Barack Hussein Obama, who routinely scamped his Constitutional duties while arrogating powers the Constitution never allowed the president, will never face justice for his crimes. But with the FBI, the CIA, and a large fraction of the Department of Justice provably having colluded to overturn an election, justice must be done.

     It won’t be enough to cull a few bad apples. Too much of the fruit is rotten. The Establishment’s applecart must be overturned. Whole federal departments must be terminated. Major figures must face severe sentences. The Constitutional order must be reasserted without compromise, before the American people decide that the Republic has degenerated too far to merit saving.

     Let the chips fall where they may.

The Only Basis Upon Which Legislated Law Can Rest

     Quoth philosopher of law Lon Fuller:

     If we accept the view that the central purpose of law is to furnish baselines for human interaction, it then becomes apparent why the existence of enacted law as an effectively functioning system depends upon the establishment of stable interactional expectancies between lawgiver and subject. On the one hand, the lawgiver must be able to anticipate what the citizenry as a whole will accept as law and generally observe the body of rules he has promulgated. On the other hand, the legal subject must be able to anticipate that government will itself abide by its own declared rules. . . . A gross failure in the realization of either of these anticipations—of government toward citizens and of citizens toward government—can have the result that the most carefully drafted code will fail to become a functioning system of law.

     [Lon Fuller, The Principles of Social Order]

     A system with two tiers of citizens – one subject to the law, the other above it and immune to it – is inherently unstable. When the “tier above the law” consists of public officials – executives, legislators, judges, appointees, civil servants – the instability is magnified by the evident injustice: “Rules for thee but not for me.” It will topple, or it will be toppled. So are conditions in these United States as matters currently stand.

The Return Of The Vigilance Committee

     Matters are coming to a head:

     Three Philadelphia police officers riding in an unmarked car were checking on a man on a bike when he pulled out a gun and fired at them before a second shooter joined the fray, setting off a gun battle that saw two officers briefly hospitalized, police said.

     The 14th District officers, two men and one woman, were driving down the 1400 block of Sharpnack Street, in the Cedarbrook section of the East Mount Airy neighborhood, when the first gunman pulled up next to them on his bike around 8 p.m. Friday, Philadelphia Police Department Sgt. Eric Gripp said.

     The officer driving the car rolled down his window to check on the man when he suddenly pulled out a gun and started shooting, causing the officer to pull off Sharpnack Street and onto Fayette Street, where he crashed the car into a fence, Gripp said.

     The first gunman kept firing after the officers crashed, striking their vehicle multiple times, with one bullet piercing the car door, going through the seat and hitting the driving officer in the back, Gripp said. The officer’s bulletproof vest saved him, the sergeant added.

     As the cyclist kept shooting, the officers were able to get out of the car and return fire, but that’s when a second shooter further down the street joined in and also rained bullets on the officers, placing them in a crossfire, Gripp said.

     If it went as reported, this seems to have been a “hit:” a planned and coordinated two-person assassination attempt on the Philadelphia police. It’s not the first such attack in recent weeks, though reports of previous attacks on the police have generally not spoken of multiple attackers.

     Glenn Reynolds, not given to excesses of sentiment, opines thus:

     So at what point, faced with assassination attempts, do the police go rogue and form their own death squads to neutralize their enemies? That’s what generally happens in corrupt third-world polities, which is what our Democrat-run cities are becoming.

     One of Glenn’s commenters expands on his thought:

     [I]t WILL NOT create support for gun confiscation. It will, slowly, support the formation of "Societies of Vigilance", in which "law enforcement" is fast and certain, but perhaps at the cost of "justice". Because if I can't call the police to remove a live criminal from my property, I'll call the coroner to remove a dead criminal from my property.

     And indeed, a return of the vigilance committee of the 19th Century West is looking very good.

---

     Vigilance committees, whence we get the pseudo-pejorative vigilante, are of course disparaged, even condemned, in the official histories of the United States. The term of opprobrium most often attached to them is private justice, which is intended to imply that when justice is privatized it ceases to be just. But is that truly the case?

     Yes, some of the vigilance committees of yore did commit excesses. However, the committees arose in response to a need that would not have existed were the “official” mechanisms of justice in those places and times honest and responsive. In The Enterprise of Law, his massive survey of justice systems outside of State control and sanction, Bruce Benson of the Pacific Legal Foundation argues that in many cases the vigilance committee was a superior substitute for the “official” organs of justice:

     Local governments were established to replace privately produced law fairly rapidly in some places in the western frontier, and public police (e.g., sheriffs) were appointed. State and federal officials also appeared on the scene. But in several instances this government law enforcement was so ineffective or corrupt that private citizens had to re-establish law and order. As Alan Valentine wrote, “If the people had the right to make their own laws and to elect their own officials, then it followed in pioneer logic that the people had the right to change or overrule them. When they were sufficiently aroused to do so, they were not inclined to waste time on fine points of procedure or to show much deference to a protesting officer of the law.” Perhaps the best known cases of this kind occurred in San Francisco.

     Most of San Francisco’s laws during the late 1840s and early 1850s were developed through popular assemblies of citizens. Governmental law enforcement was instituted early, however, so anyone accused of a crime had to be arrested by the publicly employed sheriff and waited for a trial in the next Court of Sessions, which met every two months at the county seat. Lawyers often got trials delayed, and because jail facilities were scarce or nonexistent “postponements almost always meant that the accused would be discharged if he had not escaped first.” Witnesses had to pay their own expenses; and given the delays, many did not wait for the trial. With the swelling of San Francisco’s population during the gold rush, things began to get out of hand. In Valentine’s words:

     As they became increasingly harassed by crime and arson, San Franciscans became more and more ready to sacrifice legal procedure for elementary justice and security. The situation was becoming worse, not better, as new criminals moved in and more and larger fires swept across the city. The better citizens were torn between two fears: fear that nothing short of popular tribunals could cope with crime and fear that popular tribunals would degenerate into lynching mobs, led by the worst elements in town. . . .

     Many of the most respectable citizens believed that the only compromise between rampant crime and rampant lynching was an organized, stable popular tribunal that could be controlled by the better elements in the city. . . .

     San Franciscans wanted something better than slapdash justice, whether legal or popular, but above all they wanted crime reduced.

     The city’s press was urging drastic action by early 1849, but the citizens of San Francisco held back until February of 1851.

     On February 19, 1851, the owner of a San Francisco clothing store was robbed and beaten. The sheriff arrested two men and charged them. A large number of people gathered the next day before the city offices, demanding quick action against the accused. Some speakers advocated an immediate hanging, but one, William T. Coleman, prevailed. He told public officials,

     We will not leave it to the courts. The people here have no confidence in your promises, and unfortunately they have no confidence in the execution of the law by its officers. Matters have gone too far! I propose that the people here present form themselves into a court. . .that the prisoners be brought before it. That testimony be taken, counsel on each side allotted. . .if the prisoners be found innocent let them be discharged, but if guilty let them be hung. . . . We don’t want a mob! We won’t have a mob! Let us organize as becomes men!

     A committee of fourteen prominent citizens, including Coleman, was chosen to take charge of the case. The legal authorities were invited to participate but declined, although they raised no resistance and handed over the prisoners. The committee impaneled a jury and appointed three judges and a clerk. Two “highly regarded” lawyers were appointed to represent the prisoners; Coleman acted as prosecutor. After hearing the case, the jury voted nine guilty and three for acquittal. The prisoners were turned back over to the authorities. The impetus for a vigilante organization was in place, however.

     Plainly, had San Francisco’s “authorities” been trustworthy and diligent, Coleman’s call for an alternative would not have resonated with the public. Compare this to today’s situation in America’s riot-torn cities...and in other places where agitators are permitted to harass private citizens dining, shopping, or going peaceably about their business.

---

     If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”

     While no institution – especially no “public” institution – is wholly trustworthy and perfectly diligent, America’s police forces, on net balance, are an asset to the maintenance of public order, and of justice as Americans generally understand it. Private citizens are rightfully outraged, both at the “orders from above” that have handcuffed the police in dealing with looters and rioters, and at attacks on the police such as occurred in Philadelphia. Both varieties of outrage testify to a developing urge among decent Americans to act as law enforcers, especially in those districts where the police are unable or unwilling to do so.

     If modern vigilance committees should arise, I have no doubt that our “public officials” will condemn them – “Private justice!” they will shriek — and issue orders to the police that they be suppressed. Whether the police will comply with such orders, given those selfsame “public officials’” unwillingness to allow them to enforce the laws that “protect” life and property, I cannot predict. But we may be sure of one thing at least: questions vital to the conception of justice itself will be raised and hotly discussed:

For whose benefit is there law?
Who owns it?

     With that, I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.