“Take Away Their Guns”

…and they’ll just use something else. Such as knives:

London saw four fatal stabbings on New Year’s Eve, taking the total of such knifings in the capital to 80 for the whole of 2017.
And the use of knives in general is now a serious problem all over the country. In June 2017, the Office for National Statistics listed thousands of ‘blade offences’ in the previous 12 months, including 214 killings, 391 attempted murders, 438 rapes, 182 other sexual assaults, and 14,429 robberies.
There were also more than 18,500 assaults involving an injury or intent to inflict harm with a blade and 2,816 threats to kill with a knife.

So much for taking away guns to reduce crime. But that’s not the worst part of the linked article. This is:

I have long known that crimes which would once have been classified as murders are often now downgraded to ‘manslaughter’. This is done to save money and time, and to make it easier to release the culprits early to stop the prisons from bursting. But in most cases it is legally difficult to point this out.
The Johnson case is different. He is a murderer, but people who should be alive are now dead because he was wrongly convicted of a lesser crime.
In 1981, Johnson pushed his wife Yvonne off the balcony of their ninth-floor flat, after first hitting her with a vase and an ashtray. He was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of ‘provocation’. She had, he said, been arguing with him.
She was, of course, not there to give her own version of who did the provoking. He was sentenced in 1982 to three years in prison. That’s right. Three years, though in those days it really meant three years. He was out by 1985.
In 1992 Johnson strangled another woman, Yvonne Bennett, with a belt. She had annoyed him by refusing to accept a box of chocolates which he had bought her to try to win back her affections.
He tried to hang himself from a tree, but the string snapped. String? Yes, string. He was much better at killing others than at killing himself. Doctors decided he was suffering from a ‘depressive illness’ and he was sent ‘indefinitely’ to a secure hospital.
Not indefinitely enough. He was out and under ‘psychiatric care’ after two years. He went on to kill a third woman, Angela Best, by beating her with a claw hammer and throttling her with a dressing-gown cord.
As after his second killing, he tried and failed to commit suicide afterwards, this time by jumping in front of a train.Now, having first tried the manslaughter plea again, on the grounds of ‘diminished responsibility’, he has pleaded guilty to murdering Angela Best.
His injuries from the attempted suicide have left him in a wheelchair, though I wouldn’t like to guarantee that he is harmless even now. Far too late, the courts have sentenced him to 26 years, which might just be enough.
Once, I would have said this was all evidence of a system which had lost all force since it stopped treating murder as a specially hideous crime. So it is. Once, I would have said that we should restore the death penalty for heinous murder. Now, I know this cause is lost. So I can only urge you to take care.
The law refuses to protect you. Those in charge of it lack the courage or the resolve to do so. Get used to it.

The next time some idiot tells you that the death penalty doesn’t prevent murders, feel free to use the above example to show that the death penalty applied to this asshole after his first murder would indeed have prevented two more.

Fortunately, we in the United States don’t have to “get used to it”; it’s our criminals who have to get used to the fact that a career of crime might be deadly — to themselves.

Carry a gun, and make sure you know how to use it. The life you save might well be your own, or of your loved ones. The life you take will be of no consequence to anyone except the goblin’s future victims.

Remember: when anyone asks you if your wallet is worth a life, remind them that that decision was not yours, but your assailant’s. He made the decision that your wallet was worth taking a life (yours), and all you did was go along with his decision, simply substituting his life for yours.

And be glad that you live in the U.S. and not in Britain, where you would face imprisonment for self-defense, instead of congratulations.

Reverse Psychology, Or Something

I tend to look at things in a fairly simplistic manner: if what we in the U.S. are doing is pissing off the EU, then we’re doing the right thing.

I’m just pleased to see that I’m not the only one who thinks this way, at least in the case of the new law which lowers corporate tax rates, and which has caused the EU to whine:

The GOP tax plan will cause companies to flee Europe and return to the US.
The plan will cause companies to move operations to the US, creating jobs for American workers, creating more demand for American labor. And in increase in demand invariably (this is really basic economics here) drives up the price meaning American workers, on balance, can be expected to be paid more.

More companies doing their business in the US rather than overseas is almost by definition growth in the US economy. And economic growth means a larger base for the taxation that remains which offsets the reduced rate.
In short, what Europe is complaining about is that the tax reform will do exactly what the GOP promised for it. The Democrats can scream about “the one percent” and “tax breaks for the rich” (tax break, as a percentage is actually mostly on the middle class, but they never let truth stop them, neither the Democrat politicians nor their cheering section in the major media). Meanwhile finance ministers in Europe fear not the claims of the Democrats, but that it will actually do what the GOP promised.

So there ya go. Trump/Republican tax plan 1, EU 0.

 

London Calling

Yup; by the time you read this, I’ll have left the Old Republic to its own devices, and will be winging my way back to Britishland.

That’s assuming there was no Unpleasantness With TSA (Seffrican version). You’ll find out tomorrow, assuming there’s wifi in a South African detention cell.

What It Means

As I said yesterday, the African National Congress party (ANC) held its leadership elections yesterday, the chief candidates being former socialist / trade unionist Cyril Ramaphosa and ex-wife of current SAPres, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, rabid African Nationalist and so on (whom I predicted would win in a walk, she being the worst possible choice for ANC leader, and this being Africa).

In keeping with most of my political predictions (i.e. total crap), I was wrong about this one, and Ramaphosa won, albeit by only 179 votes out of many thousands cast. His victory was greeted with sighs of relief by the SA business community and most financial institutions (e.g. Moody’s, who are considering upgrading Seffrica’s rating from Not-Quite-Venezuela to Better-Than-Zimbabwe). Even the trade unions seem to be okay with the result, Ramaphosa being one of their erstwhile heroes.

However.

This is South Africa, so things are seldom that simple. You see, one of the ANC’s platform planks is that lovely euphemism, “expropriation” — which, in this case, means “taking land away from Whites to give to Blacks”. A large number of ANC supporters and officials support this policy, and many are complaining that Ramaphosa will ally himself with the “big business interests” (Whites) and not carry out the expropriations. White land- and business owners are hoping he’ll end, or at least severely curb the policy — and given the implications, he should.

But the ANC also has to make sure that they maintain their hold on power, and in the next general election in 2019, they’ll have to fend off a party of rabid assholes called the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) who, according to their electoral rhetoric would not only take Whites’ property away, but their lives as well if resistance were offered. Needless to say, this policy would sit quite well with their philosophical comrades inside the ANC, who have been quite content to ignore (and even tacitly approve of) the ongoing slaughter of White farmers in rural areas.

So when the time comes to take the place of current SAPres Jacob Zuma, Comrade Cyril is going to have to walk that little tightrope very carefully: accommodate the business community and bring investment back into South Africa, and try not to alienate the land-thieves inside the ANC.

And by the way, that’s only one of the problems facing Ramaphosa. Another one is that Zuma might not want to go quietly into that long (albeit well-financed, bribe-fed) dark night of retirement — in fact, he’s kinda acting that way right now. (In the rest of Africa, Zuma would simply be assassinated, but this is the kinder, gentler South Africa now.)

The next few months are going to be interesting, in an African kind of way.

Oh, and one last thing. I’ve said several unpleasant things about Dlamini-Zuma, the loser in the current leadership contest. But credit where credit is due: despite the slenderness of her defeat, she’s not behaving like certain (all?) Democrats we know, and is not going to the courts to challenge the results of the election. Granted, the courts have repeatedly signaled that the ANC has to fix its own problems, but still. Party unity seems to be of paramount concern for the ANC, and it should be: the last general election gave them a very slender margin of victory (from memory, 54%). Anything less than 50% would force them to create a coalition government with one or more of the smaller political parties in South Africa — and man, an alliance with some of those (e.g. the rabid EFF above) would mean economic disaster for the country. To some, economic disaster in this still-capitalist country would be a feature, not a bug (as it is with their philosophical allies Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Maduro in Venezuela, and Bernie Sanders in the U.S.). But I’m pretty sure the ANC does not want to see “Venezuela” happen south of the Limpopo River, and that may be the only thing that saves the country.

My cynicism in matters African, however, tells me that I’m an idiot for thinking that way.