BLUF:
[PJ] The nature of hierarchy in marriage, I suspect, is biologically ordained, as expressed in the ancestral distinction between the spear and the distaff. The Old English word for man is hläford ("lord") and for lady, hläefdige (bread). The idea was that men rely on their strength and hunt for the larder. Women are concerned with nourishment and cook for the family. The male is, so to speak, the breadwinner; the female is the breadbaker. This is obviously not always the case but it remains a hoary cultural archetype — a distinction that is now being erased and overthrown, to nobody’s benefit. The failure of masculinity, of the spirit of captaincy or guardianship, or, to put it differently, the misalignment of traditional gender roles, is one of the major factors behind the increasingly common scourge of discord in married life.
When the spear/distaff relation is reversed, a rift will open up between partners. One thinks of the host in The Monk’s Prologue in Chaucer’s "The Canterbury Tales" whose hot-tempered wife, fuming at her husband, cries:
[FoxNews] 'I would not let my wife or my kids walk down the streets of Houston at midnight under any circumstances,' Ray Hunt said.
Leaders of the Houston Police Officers' Union are sounding the alarm on the city's safety as criminal suspects walk the streets on bond while the police department battles officer shortages.
"I have never in my lifetime – and I'm a lifelong Houstonian – seen this many suspected murderers and capital murderers who are walking the streets of Houston out on multiple bonds," the union's executive director Ray Hunt told Fox News Digital.
"I would not let my wife or my kids walk down the streets of Houston at midnight under any circumstances," he continued. "It is not safe in major cities in 2024, and it's not safe here."
The warning comes as the Houston Police Department continues to struggle with recruiting and retaining officers, an issue plaguing departments across the nation.
"We're in a perfect storm right now," President Douglas Griffith said. "We had the George Floyd effect come down. We can't hire. We can't retain our officers. The people are leaving left and right."
"Who in the heck wants to be a police officer in 2024?" Hunt asked, "when every single thing that they're doing is going to be second-guessed by their body-worn camera that someone can watch three or four times to determine whether or not that officer made the right split-second decision. I don't know who would want to do that. I could not encourage any of my family to come be a police officer in 2024 with the situation that's going on."
According to Griffith, the Houston City Council was made aware of department shortages a decade ago, after a 2014 Sam Houston State University report revealed a shortage of 1,500 officers in the city.
"In 2014, it said if Houston was staffed like Chicago, we would have 9,602 sworn officers. At that time we had about 5,600 – 4,000 short. Now we have just over 5,000. We've already lost officers since then," Hunt said.
As a result of this shortage, "we will never be able to be able to investigate" every case, Griffith added.
"A survey of investigative division commanders revealed excessively high numbers of cases with leads that were not investigated in 2013 due to lack of personnel," Hunt continued. "This was 2014 they're writing this. For burglary and theft, nearly 15,000 cases were suspended – 3,000 assault cases in the homicide division, 3,000 hit-and-run cases for that year. They knew that. Everyone knew that we were shorthanded, and now everyone wants to say, 'Wow, these officers are lazy. They're not doing your job.' Completely untrue."
"This was presented to City Council at the time, this was presented to every person. And you can find the tapes on there where one of the council members says, 'Wow, y'all just put us on notice that we've got a serious staffing problem.'"
Griffith also called out the court system for "not doing their job."
"Their contention is that we can't hold somebody. We have to give everybody a bond, yes, the first time. Once they violate that bond, they can be held in jail until they go to court again. And we get people on six, seven, eight, nine bonds at one time. And that's a problem that we have to fix in the courts. And with the DA's office, you try to make sure that these public offenders can't be continued to roam the streets and victimize our citizens."
Hunt said suspects in Harris County, where Houston is located, may not go to court for five to six years. However, criminals in Montgomery County, just north of Houston, are held accountable.
"Crooks in this area know the boundary lines of Harris County and Montgomery County. They don't want to commit crimes in Montgomery County because they know they're going to be held responsible."
Last month, police in Austin, Texas described staffing shortages and longer 911-call response times in the aftermath of the city council's vote to defund the department in 2020.
Austin Police Association President Michael Bullock told Fox News Digital that a steady decline in public safety had put the city on the "brink of disaster." In February, a section of the city was notably left without a single police officer for a few hours on a Saturday.
#1
Fentanyl, COVID and the Jab did provide the desired population adjustment numbers. Known murderers and drug addicts have now been added to the mix. Additional wars, plagues, and pandemics are also in development.
#3
The smaller cities that surround Houston (and there are many) and the sheriff's department don't seem to be having a problem recruiting. Neither does the DPS (state police).
Maybe it has to do with management.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
04/21/2024 15:19 Comments ||
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#4
Was Houston ever a place to have your kids and wife walk the streets at midnight?
Posted by: Super Hose ||
04/21/2024 15:20 Comments ||
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#5
Only if they 'be doin' your bidness', SH.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
04/21/2024 16:58 Comments ||
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[Mises] Ludwig von Mises’s Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow has become quite popular recently. The Mises Book Store has sold out of its physical copies, and the PDF, which is available online for free, has seen over 50,000 downloads in the past few days.
This surge in interest in Mises’s ideas was started by UFC fighter Renato Moicano, who declared in a short post-fight victory speech, "I love America, I love the Constitution...I want to carry...guns. I love private property. Let me tell you something. If you care about your...country, read Ludwig von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian economic school."
The "six lessons" he is referring to is Mises’s book, Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, which was republished by our friends in Brazil under the title "As Seis Licões" ("The Six Lessons").
If you are interested in what Mises has to say in this book, which is a transcription of lectures he gave in Argentina in 1959, here’s a brief preview, which I hope inspires you to read the short book in full. As a side note, if you are an undergraduate student who is interested in these ideas, the Mises Institute’s next Mises Book Club is on this text (pure coincidence!).
Lecture One: Capitalism
Mises begins his first lecture with an overview of the development of capitalism out of feudalism. Businesses began "mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses" instead of focusing on producing luxury goods for the elite. These big businesses succeeded because they served the needs of a larger group of people, and their success wholly depended on their ability to give this mass of consumers what they wanted.
Despite the amazing and undeniable increases in standards of living, even for a growing population, capitalism had its detractors, including Karl Marx, who gave capitalism its name. Mises says that while Marx hated capitalism and that Marx dubbed it thusly as an attack on the system, the name is a good one
because it describes clearly the source of the great social improvements brought about by capitalism. Those improvements are the result of capital accumulation; they are based on the fact that people as a rule, do not consume everything they have produced, that they save—and invest—a part of it.
Prosperity is the result of providing for the future—more precisely it is the result of setting aside consumption today by saving and investing resources in production. Mises says that this principle explains why some countries are more prosperous than others. When it comes to economic growth, "there are no miracles." There is only "the application of the principles of the free market economy, of the methods of capitalism."
Lecture Two: Socialism
In the second lecture, Mises takes a closer look at Marx’s proposed system: socialism. Economic freedom means that people can choose their own careers and use their resources to accomplish their own ends. Economic freedom is the basis for all other freedoms. For example, when the government seizes whole industries, like that of the printing press, it determines what will be published and what won’t and the "freedom of the press disappears."
Mises acknowledges that there is no such thing as "perfect freedom" in a metaphysical sense. We must obey the laws of nature, especially if we intend to use and transform nature according to our ends. And even economic freedom means that there is a fundamental interdependence among individuals: "Freedom in society means that a man depends as much on other people as other people depend upon him." This is also true for big businesses and the entrepreneurs who lead them. The true "bosses" in the market economy are not those who shout orders to the workers, but the consumers.
Socialists despise the idea of consumer sovereignty because it means allowing mistakes. In their mind, the state should play the paternalistic role of deciding what is good for everyone. Thus Mises sees no difference between socialism and a system of slavery: "The slave must do what his superior orders him to do, but the free citizen—and this is what freedom means—is in a position to choose his own way of life." In capitalism, this freedom makes it possible for people to be born into poverty but then achieve great success as they provide for their fellow man. This kind of social mobility is impossible under systems like feudalism and socialism.
Mises ends this lecture with a short explanation of the economic calculation critique of socialism. When the private ownership of the means of production is prohibited, then economic calculation is made impossible. Without market prices for factors, we cannot economize production and provide for the needs of the masses, no matter who oversees the socialist planning board. The result is mass deprivation and chaos.
Lecture Three: Interventionism
Interventionism describes a situation in which the government "wants to interfere with market phenomena." Each intervention involves an abrogation of the consumer sovereignty Mises had explained in the two previous lectures.
The government wants to interfere in order to force businessmen to conduct their affairs in a different way than they would have chosen if they had obeyed only the consumers. Thus, all the measures of interventionism by the government are directed toward restricting the supremacy of consumers.
Mises gives an example of a price ceiling on milk. While those who enact such an intervention may intend to make milk more affordable for poorer families, there are many unintended consequences: increased demand, decreased supply, non-price rationing in the form of long queues at shops that sell milk, and, importantly, grounds for the government to intervene in new ways now that their initial intervention has not achieved its intended purpose. So, in Mises’s example, he traces through the new interventions, like government rationing, price controls for cattle food, price controls for luxury goods, and so on until the government has intervened in virtually every part of the economy, i.e., socialism.
After providing some historical examples of this process, Mises gives the big picture. Interventionism, as a "middle-of-the-road policy," is actually a road toward totalitarianism.
#1
In a nutshell: "What had taken place? What was the problem? What was it that caused the disintegration of an empire which, in every regard, had attained the highest civilization ever achieved before the eighteenth centuryin the history of mankind? The truth is that what destroyed this ancient civilization America was something similar, almost identical to the dangers that threaten our civilization today: on the one hand it was (government)interventionism, and on the other hand, inflation.
[Bee] At a recent press conference, President Joe Biden recounted a harrowing tale from his family's past: the time when his uncle had his heart ripped out and was sacrificed during a mysterious ritual in India.
Biden somberly recounted the gruesome events, describing how his uncle had been lured into a dark temple deep in the jungles of India. With a furrowed brow and a trembling voice, Biden detailed the scene.
"There he was, my uncle, standing before a group of chanting priests with strange, twisted faces," Biden recounted, his eyes misting over with emotion. "And then, in an instant, they reached into his chest and pulled out his beating heart."
As gasps filled the room, Biden continued his gruesome tale, describing how the next thing he knew, his uncle was being lowered into a pit of molten lava, somehow screaming all the way down. His uncles' squadmates barely survived, Biden claimed, after narrowly escaping a collapsing rope bridge and also dodging a big round boulder.
"Seriously folks — not a joke!" Biden insisted, his hand placed solemnly over his heart. "And if you don't believe me, then I'm not a Professor of Archaeology."
At publishing time, Biden's face had become grim, his gaze piercing through the camera lens as he warned the press you never know what dangers lurk behind those ancient stone walls.
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/21/2024 10:41 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[134 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
Tell us about the time you ate monkey brains, Uncle Joe!
[Hot Air] We could call this A Tale of Two Facilities. Iran launched an unprecedented direct attack on Israel in retaliation for the targeted strike on IRGC and Hamas commanders. That attack did little damage despite a volley of well over 300 missiles and drones, thanks to the regional defenses and the several hours of lead time necessitated by Iran's launch from its own territory.
That demonstrated the facility Iran has for offensive operations in the region. Israel responded by demonstrating its facility, and as the New York Times hears from officials in Iran and the West, the result shocked the Iranians:
An Israeli weapon deployed in a retaliatory strike against Iran on Friday damaged a defense system responsible for detecting and destroying aerial threats near Natanz, a central Iranian city critical to the country’s secret nuclear weapons program, according to two Western officials and two Iranian officials.
The strike, the Western officials said, was calculated to deliver a message to Iran that Israel could bypass Iran’s defense systems undetected and paralyze them, using a fraction of the fire power Iran deployed last week when it launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. That attack, intercepted by Israel and its allies, caused minimal damage.
Their shock didn't just come from the fact that Israel had denuded their critical Natanz site of effective air defense. It didn't come from realizing just how far Israel could strike without entering its airspace, either. What truly shocked the Iranians is that they had no warning at all before their expensive S-300 system got destroyed from a single strike:
A missile, two Western officials said, was fired from a warplane far from Israeli or Iranian airspace and included technology that enabled it to evade Iran’s radar defenses. Neither the missile nor the aircraft that fired it entered Jordanian airspace, the Western officials said, a gesture meant to keep the kingdom out of the conflict after it helped shoot down Iranian weapons last week.
The two Iranian officials said that Iran’s military had not detected anything entering Iran’s airspace on Friday, including drones, missiles and aircraft. Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, reported that no missile attacks had occurred and that Iran’s air defense system had not been activated.
How precise was the attack? The NYT got a look at satellite imagery of the Natanz S-300 system, both before and after the attack. The missile strike destroyed the S-300 radar system while leaving other related equipment undamaged:
Images showed that the precision attack at the Eighth Shekari Air Base damaged or destroyed the “flap-lid” radar, which is used in S-300 air defense systems to track incoming targets. ...
Other areas of the air base and adjacent airport also appeared to be undamaged. The precision of the strike, deep within Iran and with several sensitive sites close by, suggested Israel chose the specific and narrow target, the air defense system.
The radar is the key to any air-defense system. Without radar, the defense system can't track incoming attacks, and its missiles can only fire blindly at fast-moving targets. The rest of the Natanz air-defense systems are useless until the Iranians replace the radar -- and now they know the Israelis can take out it again as fast as they replace it. And they can't see it coming, either. All of their anti-aircraft defense is based on the S-300, which means Israel could nullify it entirely before the Iranians are even aware they're under attack
Posted by: Mercutio ||
04/21/2024 08:19 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[232 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran
#1
Oh my. Very useful information indeed, Mercutio.
#2
How precise was the attack? The NYT got a look at satellite imagery of the Natanz S-300 system, both before and after the attack. The missile strike destroyed the S-300 radar system while leaving other related equipment undamaged:
[SlayNews] Well, as more and more Real Science data is released and reviewed about the Clot-Shot. It is clear the public was likely lied to, and the Clot-Shot may end up killing more than the C-19 did Virus itself.
Cancer Doctor Issues Urgent Warning
The mRNA COVID-19 shots “should be completely banned! If they’re going to be used for anything, it has to be what they are, gene therapies.”
Prof. Angus Dalgleish says there is a “fundamental flaw” with COVID-19 shots, and the flaw is that… pic.twitter.com/MMSOQq9qtF
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Bee] At a recent press conference, President Joe Biden recounted a harrowing tale from his family's past: the time when his uncle had his heart ripped out and was sacrificed during a mysterious ritual in India.
[SlayNews] 
