Monday, February 22, 2016

A Quick Run Around the Web -- February 22, 2016


Survival/Self-Defense/Firearms

Other Stuff:
... According to the House of Commons library, anything between 15 and 50 per cent of UK legislation now comes from the EU; and remember that this type of legislation is very special.
    It is unstoppable, and it is irreversible – since it can only be repealed by the EU itself. Ask how much EU legislation the Commission has actually taken back under its various programmes for streamlining bureaucracy. The answer is none. That is why EU law is likened to a ratchet, clicking only forwards. We are seeing a slow and invisible process of legal colonisation, as the EU infiltrates just about every area of public policy. Then – and this is the key point – the EU acquires supremacy in any field that it touches; because it is one of the planks of Britain’s membership, agreed in 1972, that any question involving the EU must go to Luxembourg, to be adjudicated by the European Court of Justice.
    He could have been writing about the U.S. federal government and its relationship with the States (remembering that when the United States was formed, the individual states viewed themselves as nation states, not provinces or prefectures).
    • "Weimar America"--Victor Davis Hansen at PJ Media. A nice review of the decline of the United States over the last decade. Among other things, he points out:
    Since Obama’s reelection, the southern border has been wide open, in naked efforts to recalibrate American electoral demography. The U.S. has taken in more immigrants, legal and illegal, than has any other country.... The U.S. last year allowed nearly $80 billion to be sent in annual remittances to Mexico and Latin America, mostly from those here illegally. ...
    • Related: This is what we are importing: "Children snatched from their beds, dealers peddling heroin in front of cops and a murder every night: The deadly Mexican state run by 'narcos' who laugh at desperate families forced to pay their ransom demands"--Daily Mail. One of the most useful books for understanding violence is Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (which I reviewed here). Pinker describes 6 trends that have resulted in steadily lower rates of violent death in Western/Northern Europe, Australia, Canada, and United States. What needs to be kept in mind when considering immigration or refugee issues is that only the first trend--the development of nations states--has been experienced world wide. Or, in other words, most nations and cultures in the world have only experienced one (or, at best, a few) of the trends. That means that these cultures are inherently (and independent of any genetic predisposition) going to be more violent than those cultures with Western or Northern European roots. Also, there is nothing predestined or inevitable about the trends that Pinker describes: they can go into reverse or disappear, along with their influence. 

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