Individual rights – ILANA MERCER

In Defense Of Jacko’s Doctor

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

What a difference a few years can make. In July of 2005, cable TV’s crusaders wanted that frail stick figure, Michael Jackson, locked away forever. Jackson was a danger to “our” children, they insisted. Had not his accuser said so? The “kid” in question was a five-foot-seven, hirsute, habitual liar and shoplifter, who was following in the tradition of a family of transients and tramps.

Today, the same characters on the networks are having a whale of a time at the prospect of jail time for Dr. Conrad Murray. Murray was convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of Mr. Jackson. The pop sensation died of a fatal dose of the anesthetic propofol. It had been administered in the singer’s bedroom on June 25, 2009.

Dr. Murray, who had been out on bail, was promptly declared a dangerous offender by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Pastor. “This is a crime where the end result was the death of a human being. That factor demands rather dramatically that the public should be protected,” said Pastor.

What a difference a day makes. Before the verdict, Murray was out and about among the public, during which time he did not put anyone under.

Jackson, whom I defended when the prosecutor known as ‘Mad Dog’ (Thomas) Sneddon picked up the star’s scent and gave chase, charging him with child sexual abuse—was a deeply disturbed, body dysmorphic, drug-addicted man. Nevertheless, he was an adult, not a child. His decisions were his to make. And Michael Jackson had hired Murray to feed narcotics directly into his bloodstream. Taking his “milk” is how the warped Mr. Jackson called this necrophilic practice.

Murray agreed to become Jackson’s personal physician for $150,000 a month but was never paid because the singer died prior to signing the contract. Dr. Conrad Murray is an odious character, but he is innocent in libertarian law. He would not be my choice for a medic, but he does not belong behind bars.

From dwarf tossing to drug taking: The legislator has no place in voluntary exchanges between consenting adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these might be. A drug purchaser and a drug pusher have agreed on an exchange. If it is voluntary and consensual, then both parties expect to benefit ex ante. A voluntary exchange is, by definition, always mutually beneficial inasmuch as, at the time of the exchange, the buyer valued the purchase more than the money he paid for it, and the seller valued the money more than the goods he sold.

There will always be meddling third parties who’ll seek to circumscribe and circumvent a voluntary activity not to their liking. Some feminists want to stop pornographers from making or consuming the stuff. Other busybodies would like to coerce adults to quit gambling. These third parties have no place in transactions between consenting adults, unless these trades infringe directly—not foreseeably—on their property or person.Ultimately any transaction that was at the time of occurrence voluntary, and hence beneficial to the participants, can, retrospectively, be denounced as harmful and regrettable.

Michael Jackson was looking to hire someone to put him under every night. Far and few are the competent, aboveboard medical practitioners who would agree to provide the type of “service” Jackson sought from Murray; the sample of highly skilled and ethical professionals willing to provide such a dodgy service is bound to be small. By definition, Jackson was looking for a risk-taker, and worse.

With a steady stream of “milk of amnesia,” Mr. Jackson should have expected an unsteady practitioner.

Were drug dealing legal, Jackson might have had access to a better class of celebrity drug pusher. However, even Mr. Jackson had to know that a medic who was prepared to anesthetize a man to sleep each and every night was not the cream of the medical crop. Poor Michael Jackson lacked the smarts to sign a contract stipulating Murray’s medical responsibilities. Had Jackson done that prudent thing, however, Murray would have likely still flouted his ethical obligations, irrespective of the Hippocratic Oath he took.

Still and all, if not for the medicine of this and the other sloppy doctors in Jackson’s employ, the singer would have ended-up dead ages ago, in a back alley, a needle stuck in his arm. In his ethereal appearance and odd appetites, Michael Jackson had always seemed closer to death even when alive.

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All Burglars are Home Invaders

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:00:00 +0000

On July 23, 2007, two men were apprehended at the scene of a crime—the Petit family home in Cheshire, Connecticut. The culprits were Joshua Komisarjevsky and his accomplice Steven Hayes. Their crimes:

• Raping Mrs. Hawke-Petit and her 11-year-old daughter Michaela.
• Strangling Jennifer Hawke-Petit.
• Setting the family home on fire, thereby killing Michaela and her 17-year-old sister, Hayley.

Dr. Petit, who had been beaten and bound in the basement, managed to escape. He had hopped up the stairs and made his way to a neighbor, who called the police. Twice alerted, the cops were conspicuous by their absence.

The crimes were premeditated. The two career criminals had stalked the Petit women. They “messaged” one another in anticipation of an orgy of violence. At one stage during the six-hour ordeal, Hayes popped out to purchase four gallons of gasoline. He also escorted Jennifer Hawke-Petit to the bank to withdraw cash. She had the wherewithal to alert a teller. Right away, the bank manager rang the police to report that a crime was underway at a home on Sorghum Mill Drive.

Hostage to procedure and self-preservation, police concerns were allayed by the late Mrs. Hawke-Petit’s optimistic assessment of the situation. She told the bank teller that her assailants were “being nice,” and that they likely wanted money, nothing more.

Last year, Hayes was sentenced to death. Komisarjevsky’s turn has arrived. In court today, Capt. Robert Vignola hearkened to Mrs. Hawke-Petit words to explain “why police decided not to enter the home.” “The police had no reason to believe anyone was in immediate danger,” seconded CNN stupidly.

Media and law enforcement are in the habit of describing a deadly home invasion as “a robbery gone wrong.” Consequently, homeowners have been culturally conditioned to consider the uninvited house guest as one would a modern-day Jean Valjean. Like Victor Hugo’s protagonist in Les Misérables, the “thief” is likely looking only to take a loaf of bread and leave—that is unless he openly announces his intentions to harm his reluctant hosts.

One extremely conservative writer even bristled when a news reporter broke protocol and applied the “home invasion” appellation to the offense of breaking and entering:

“… burglary is when a person illegally enters private property and steals things. A home invasion is when people illegally enter a home in order to terrorize, harm, or kill the residents… If we start calling all burglaries ‘home invasions,’ we lose the distinction between them.”

The sooner we lose this distinction the better! All burglars are home invaders in-the-making.

Confronted with a criminal breaking and entering, there’s precious little the occupant can do to divine the intentions of the invader. It should be assumed that anyone violating another man’s inner sanctum will willingly violate the occupant. The law should give latitude to the invaded, not the invader—it ought to regard all burglaries as potential home invasions, and forgive the resident who finds himself using deadly force to defend hearth and home. The Castle Doctrine used to proceed from just such a premise. But exceptions to the doctrine are fast becoming the rule.

If you believe in the sanctity of life you should fight for the sanctity of private property. It is a man’s right—even obligation—to defend his life and the lives of the loved ones living under his roof. Arguably, a right that is not vigorously defended is as good as a right forfeited.

Life is too precious to skirt an indelicate matter: Komisarjevsky and his accomplice entered the Petit home through an unlocked rear door. In correspondence with author Brian McDonald, child killer and rapist Komisarjevsky revealingly wrote the following:

“Hayley is a fighter; she tried time and time again to free herself. … Mr. Petit … ran away when he thought his life was threatened, and ran away to leave his wife and children to madmen… Had Mr. Petit fought back [at] the very beginning, I would have been forced to retreat. … You’re the first line of defense for your family, not law enforcement.’”

The least a man can do is to lock up the house before he retires. If he refuses to arm himself, let him arm an alarm system.

From inside his home in Cape Town, South Africa, a man close to this writer watched as two men waltzed into the back yard on a Sunday afternoon, as the family relaxed by the pool. The man saw his wife flee as in slow motion. He rushed to the safe, and retrieved the gun. He aimed at the invaders and roared, “Get the hell out of my home.” They obeyed. Since then, this man has strapped a piece to his ankle.

Petit family members or friends are particularly well-placed to take up the cause of self-defense and Second-Amendment rights.

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Home-Free on Facebook? Think Again

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 +0000

When free-market economists say markets don’t discriminate, they are only partially right.

“Rational self-interest does indeed propel people, however prejudiced, to set aside bias and put their scarce resources to the best use. But, as I argue in my new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” to state simply that “‘discrimination is bad for business’ is to present an incomplete picture”: “The market, by which we mean the trillions of capitalist acts between consenting adults, is discriminating as in discerning—it is biased toward productivity. Hiring people on the basis of criteria other than productivity will eventually hurt the proprietor’s pocket. Thus, we can be fairly certain that, say, absent affirmative-action laws, the market would reflect a bias toward productivity. In other words, what the good economists are often loath to let on is that a free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented.” (Page 127.)

Parity in prosperity and performance between all players can be achieved only when someone plays socialist leveler. And, it is not always the State. Read on.Built into all markets are certain biases.

To optimize their outcomes, operators within these many markets screen for certain select characteristics. If these actors are recruiting Angels for Victoria’s Secret, a perfect 10 is required.

Consider your Facebook universe. My own is geared toward gathering as many potential converts to a certain set of ideas as the forum will allow. In the process, each potential friend’s value system is checked—not his skin color, country of origin or religion. I’ll briefly browse the petitioner’s biographical Information to determine the degree to which his or her political philosophy approximates my own. Or, alternatively, how likely he or she is to be curious about ideas other than his own.

A potential Facebook friend’s page could be in French or Polish, but if it sports icons of Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Frederick Bastiat, Lysander Spooner, Ron Paul, Henry Hazlitt, Walter Williams—libertarian heroes all—then he’s a fit for me. The “libertarian” handle will almost always prompt a click to “Accept Friendship.”

A “Respond to Friend Request” has just popped up on my screen. Not a thing do I know about the middle-aged man who stares back at me from the pixelated page—other than that, under “Activities and Interests,” he lists Peter Schiff, Ron Paul 2012, Campaign for Liberty, S. 604: Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009, Thomas E. Woods Jr., Lew Rockwell.

In sum, he’s a friend.

In the process of refining this friendly agora of ideas, you discover other characteristics that serve as surrogates for the qualities you’re seeking in Facebook friends. Born-again Christians, Catholic conservatives, and Glenn-Beck or Jesse Ventura conspirators—all are more inclined to like liberty than liberals. The other day, I found myself turning away the well-populated Facebook presence of an anti-hate speech activist. Probably liberal or neoconservative. Wall posts agitating for the regulation or banning of speech are not for me.

Earlier this year, which is when I joined Facebook, I was befriended by a fellow who flooded my Newsfeed with odes to George Bush (whose wars I have spent close on a decade prosecuting on WND’s “Return to Reason” column). A Facebook Wall is a fraternity, not a war zone. That fellow was dropped. For me, Facebook is an informal marketplace of ideas.

Although I develop my social network by screening individuals for compatible values—not for race or religion—nevertheless, a profile of a Mercer Facebook friend has emerged, and he is mostly, but not always, a white male. Mercer is not biased; libertarianism is. To women and minorities (overlap considered), libertarianism is not that attractive. My Facebook market is biased toward libertarianism, a category which further filters out a lot of women, for example.

This Facebook example is innocuous. However, certain habitual social meddlers have tried to imply that the forum is racist. In particular, a public-spirited ditz named Danah Boyd, who is “Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.”

A while back, Boyd was given a significant cameo on CNN to discuss a deeply silly “research” paper she had slapped together. Cloaked in the raiment of “research,” Boyd’s narrative is titled “White Flight in Networked Publics: How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook.” Sic and sic again: Yes, not even Microsoft’s woefully inadequate grammar and syntax checks have caught up with such linguistic infelicities.

Boyd’s infantile efforts were published by Routledge in the Digital Race Anthology. The banal Ms. Boyd claims to have smashed our “techno—utopian belief” that the internet has eradicated undesirable divisions. All this was accomplishes not with evidence of rank racism, but with a smashing postmodern word salad—”spatial referents,” “taste markers,” “reproduction of social categories,” on and on.

The “findings” in plain English: Caucasian teens were more likely to congregate on Facebook than on MySpace. Naively, the teens told Boyd (or her proxies) that the former matched their values—esthetic and courting style—more than the latter. For fleeing the “digital ghetto” (MySpace) to gentrified cyberspace (Facebook), our internet police girl framed these white teens as racists.

Just as you thought you were home free on Facebook to associate and dissociate at will, some intellectually compromised, corporately controlled control freak moves in to shape cyberspace in politically pleasing ways. I am now convinced that American society will collapse upon itself like a black hole under the weight of a young (mostly WASP), idiocracy rising, in the mold of Boyd.

I mean, who would hire Danah Boyd, much less befriend a person with her set of skills?!

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José Medellín’s Dead; Cue The Mariachi Band

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000

After raping Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña in every which way possible, José Medellín proceeded to strangle, slash, and stomp the young girls to death. “The bitch wouldn’t die,” he complained when one of these vibrant lasses lingered. Before dumping the bodies, Medellín and his gangbangers—for whom this orgy was an initiation rite—stripped them of “valuables,” which were then given to girl friends.

José Medellín was allowed to go on living in jail almost as long as Jennifer and Elizabeth had lived on earth. Finally, Rick Perry, the (dashing) governor of Texas, defied Mexico City, The Hague, and their enablers in Washington, and ended Medellin’s miserable life. He was executed on August 5, 2008, 15 years after the crime, because the usual local, international, and loco “liberati” fought ferociously for his life.

Said a grateful Randy Ertman, Jennifer’s father: “I love Texas. Texas is in my blood.”

About Medellín’s guilt there was never any doubt. The perp bragged about what he had done. The evidence was irrefutable. “Medellin was found to have raped both girls, and to have helped to murder at least one by holding one end of the shoelace used to strangle her,” wrote Medellín’s pals at the “International Justice Project.”

But the case, and 50 others like it, roiled liberal hemophiliacs at home, abroad and at the World Court. For they had uncovered—or, rather, minted—new rights: “consular rights.” The right to a consular consultation is, apparently, on par with the right to life, liberty, property, freedom of speech and religion, and due process of law.

Indeed, there is much here that jars, not least the ponderous references to “consular rights.” A procedural default such as the failure to apprise a defendant of his consular contacts is never a violation of a natural right. “Consular rights” are of a piece with Miranda rights and the Exclusionary Rule—technicalities tarted up as real rights.

Fail to Mirandize a murderer properly, and his confession will be tossed out. In the same vein, a procedural violation of the Fourth Amendment, say, an improper search, can get evidence of guilt—a bloodied knife or a smoking gun—barred from being presented at trial. More often than not, such procedural defaults are used to suppress immutable physical facts, thus serving to subvert the spirit of the law and justice.

Nevertheless, Medellín claimed he had been deprived of due process as his jailors did not brief him about his right to contact the Mexican consular post, a “right” embedded in the “Vienna Convention on Consular Relations,” to which the US is a signatory.

Texas courts and the federal courts dismissed the notion that a failure to contact the Mexican Consulate impeded due process or changed the facts of the case. Mexico promptly sued the US in the International Court of Justice on behalf of Medellín and other killer compadres awaiting a similar fate.

My apologies if I’ve given you the reader the impression that the president of the United States failed to pull out all the stops for Medellín. Bush would wrestle a crocodile for a criminal alien. Medellín the murderer was no exception.

The president had set a precedent in the case of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. For defending their country, and in the process shooting a drug smuggler in the derriere, Bush sicced his bloodhound, U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton, on these Border Patrol Agents. With the same inverted morality, Bush rode to the rescue of another Mexican outlaw, Medellín; this time against the state he once governed. The president ordered Texas to heed the World Court. Texas said NO. The Supreme Court seconded Texas.

Liberals tried to have a technicality trump the truth about Medellín; Texas turned them down.

If mainstream media were not so adept at shedding darkness on these and most matters they’d have quizzed Obama and McCain about the meaning of Medellín. (Here the reader is encouraged to fill in all the clichés of improbability he can conjure.)

I predict that certainly Obama, and probably McCain—whoever succeeds King George—will cede the rights of Americans to global governors and jurists. They’ll both baffle “Boobus Americanus” with references to the “Supremacy Clause” in Article VI of the Constitution, which states that all treaties made by the federal government shall be “the supreme Law of the Land,” and shall usurp state law. “My friends,” McCain will mumble condescendingly, “I don’t want the ‘consular rights’ of an American abroad compromised.” If Obama’s The One, he will rationalize treason similarly.

But should an American visiting overseas do what Medellín did, the thought of him getting what he deserves warms the cockles of this heart. Give him due process, I say, and his “consular rights” be damned.

©BY ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
August 8, 2008

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Tasers ‘R’ Us

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician, unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, and even killed.

Evidence of tyranny in America is mounting. For the offense of questioning Democratic Sen. John Kerry persistently and vociferously, Andrew Meyer, a journalism student, was pounced upon by campus police, tasered, detained overnight, and charged with violently resisting arrest (a felony), and disturbing the peace (a misdemeanor).

We listened transfixed as Sgt. James Kuehnlein terrorized and threatened to fabricate charges against a motorist, Brett Darrow. In yet another episode, memorialized in online video, Ohio Patrolman Richard Kovach stands over a handcuffed woman, and repeatedly tasers her. Sadistically, Kovach keeps jolting the helpless woman. Disoriented, she is seen crawling on the ground, her head slamming against the police car.

Discharging an electrical current into a human being is not without its dangers. It can cause permanent heart-muscle damage. If the person is thin, has exposed skin, a preexisting heart condition, or is on certain drugs, a tasering can result in death, warns John McCrie, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Emily Delafield was tasered for 160 seconds during an April 2006 confrontation with police in Green Cove Springs, Fla. She died of heart failure, linked to the electrocution. The burly bullies who killed her were, apparently, incapable of otherwise restraining a wheelchair-bound woman

Are such violations on the rise? Or are they simply more likely to be videoed, in the age of YouTube? The former says McCrie. “There are more tasers out there,” and cops are eager to test them out. “Police have long sought to have a non-lethal weapon, and this is the weapon of choice. And so they’re just inclined to… overuse it sometimes.”

The cases of Meyer and Patrolman Kovach’s victim, Heidi Gill, 38, exemplify an excessive use of police force, McCrie told CNN. Ditto the case of the disabled, now-dead Delafield. “If a person is threatening a police officer,” or someone else; if he’s about to take his own life, or to do something dangerous—throw a bomb, for example—using a taser is then reasonable, explained McCrie.

Otherwise, there can be no excuse for deploying a dangerous device to tackle someone who is confined, cuffed, or non-confrontational.

Abuse of power was caught on camera again, as a man peacefully removed himself from a discordant council meeting in Roseland, Indiana. Police pounce on him and arrest him for no other reason than that they can.

The case of Monica Montoya offers more evidence that “‘To Protect and Serve’ often translates into harass and control,” as one blogger put it. This Good Samaritan stopped to assist at the scene of an accident. When she attempted to depart, Montoya was tackled, cuffed, and carted off by the cops, bawling in bewilderment. Her legal travails continue today.

The law was brought into disrepute once more when Police Officer Wendell Adams arrested 20-year-old Kendra Bull for “reckless conduct.” The McDonald’s employee served His Highness an excessively salty hamburger.

With distressingly few exceptions, the punditocracy, left and right, gleefully agreed that it was OK for campus police to assault Meyer, the pacifist protestor. The young man’s cries of “Don’t tase me, bro” provided endless comic relief. Representing the ruling class—and also no friend of freedom—Kerry concurred. Virtual bags of bloggerel were devoted to rationalizing the incident: Meyer had orchestrated the disturbance; Darrow was in the habit of baiting cops. Blah, blah.

Even if these assertions are true, so what? These incidents are not about an annoying kid, who might have been playing to the cameras (Meyer). Or an insufficiently subservient subject (Darrow), who dared to assert his rights to his sovereign (Sgt. Kuehnlein). What’s at stake is the proper role of law enforcement in a free society. Free people grasp that assaulting a person who has not harmed a soul is unconscionable. Fail to recognize this simple thing and you are no better than a slave—or perhaps you haven’t internalized that you too could end up on the receiving side of such usurpations.

Freedoms, you say, are secure so long as citizens can check police excesses by recording, photographing or videotaping these public servants performing their duties. Not so. The police can video us without our consent, but we film them at the risk of a felony prosecution.

“There’s been a rash of arrests of late for videotaping police,” Radley Balko, a vice and civil liberties specialist. Balko has catalogued countless cases where individuals who’ve filmed police excesses have been arrested on felony wiretapping charges and threatened with lengthy jail sentences. Balko has called for a repeal of laws “explicitly forbidding the recording, photographing or videotaping of police officers. [W]hile they’re on duty, they serve the public. And the public, their employer, should have every right to keep them accountable.”

As Thomas Jefferson said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

©2007 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com (September 28),
“Police are Becoming Tasers ‘R’ Us,” Orange County Register (October 2)
& Colorado Springs Gazette (October 3)

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Jackass Cooper & The 1-Trick Donkeys

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

“Tarting up” and “dumbing down” the news is how veteran reporter Dan Rather dubbed Katie Couric’s effect on the “CBS Evening News.” The job description does not belong exclusively to Couric. The many females manning the front desks on cable, Y chromosome carriers included, do their daily bit to entrench a shift from hard to soft-news stories.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper is a major culprit in changing the face of news. Forehead furrowed into a perpetual I-feel-your-pain frown, Cooper’s broadcasts are an interminable kvetch that elevates feelings above facts.

Needless to say, the Cooper/Couric effect has not enhanced the numbing presidential debates. Cooper presided over a Q&A session between YouTube users and the eight Democratic candidates. CNN’s Senior Vice President David Bohrman and Political Director Sam Feist, no less, were said to have helped Cooper and the crew handpick the cross-section of freaks and exhibitionists who debuted during the debate.

Here’s Cooper unraveling a skein of complex topics aimed at “keeping them honest” (a tagline he uses on his “Anderson Cooper 360º” sob-along): “Senator Dodd, you’ve been in Congress more than 30 years. Can you honestly say you’re any different? Congressman Kucinich, your supporters certainly say you are different. Even your critics would certainly say you are different… What do you have that Senator Clinton and Senator Obama do not have?” [A trophy wife?] And the deft follow-up: “Senator Clinton, you were involved in that [how-am-I-different] question. I want to give you a chance to respond. Senator Obama, you were also involved in that [how-am-I-different] question as well. Please respond.”

Asked by a YouTubester to define “liberal,” Hillary Clinton revealed that she knows the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but then settled on “progressive” as the label of choice for her Fabian plank.

Classical liberals (this writer) are distinguished in that the only rights they recognize are the individual’s right to life, liberty and property, and the pursuit of happiness. The sole role of a legitimate government is to protect only those liberties. Why life, liberty, and property, and not housing, food, education, health care, child benefits, emotional well-being, enriching employment, ad infinitum? Because the former impose no obligations on other free individuals; the latter enslave some in the service of others.

Which is what Hillary and her fellow front-runners all want. Indeed, Clinton was correct to state that the old liberalism, which she knows of but doesn’t value, entailed “the freedom to achieve.” What Hillary failed to divulge is that the founding fathers were classical liberals; she is a Fabian socialist. Social democrats like Hillary (and the Republican candidates bar Ron Paul) presuppose a strong centralized state to ensure “effective” wealth distribution. State intervention, naturally, always leads to more of the same, beginning with selective nationalization of sections of the economy such as health care. Individuals unfortunate enough to have chosen medicine as a vocation will soon be turned into rightless serfs.

Contra Hillary’s illiberalism, the liberalism of the founders holds that the individual has the right to pursue happiness, but no right whatsoever to demand that government rope others into working to make him happy and healthy. Although the Hildebeest professed a belief in individual rights and freedoms, her idea of individual rights comports with what Harvard scholar Richard Pipes termed “the right to the necessities of life at public expense, i.e., the right to something that was not one’s own.” Her claim to the contrary notwithstanding, Hillary’s “progressivism” is as American as Jalal Talabani is Jeffersonian.

Next, a pontifically solemn Cooper announced that questions on race would feature prominently in his YouTube selection. Intrepid journalist that he is, Cooper swooped down for the kill. Did he raise the need to address injustices inherent in the fact that “blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa”? Did he take up the inequities that flow from blacks being “2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa”? Perish the thought! After all, Cooper has his finger on the political pulse: “Senator Obama, how do you address those who say you’re not authentically black enough?” (Ignore the syntactical redundancy; grammar is so yesterday.)

Then came shake-down time. The conscience of the nation (and the son of heiress Gloria Vanderbilt to whom money is no object), Cooper featured the following YouTubester’s demand: “Is [sic] African-Americans ever going to get reparations for slavery?” Most of the candidates disavowed reparations. But, coupled with assorted race-based redistribution plans, they vowed to continue to take “jobs away from one group in order to compensate a second group to correct injustices caused by a third group who mistreated a fourth group at an earlier point in history”—that’s Edwin Locke of the Ayn Rand Institute’s distillation of America’s discriminatory hiring practices.

The evening meandered into mindless prattle about Iraq—to stay or to go or to decamp to Darfur, That Was the Question. Cooper, however, was quick to retreat to less shaky grounds, preferring to plunge deep into the guts of the education crisis:

Cooper: “Who was your favorite teacher and why? Senator Gravel?”

WorldNetDaily.com

June 27

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As She Lay Dying

Ilana Mercer — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Aside from having a hard time disguising their collective God Complex, most doctors are reductionists. They think squiggles on a machine are an accurate map of the whole person. That a person is more than the sum of his or her parts is not a proposition they often entertain ~ilana

I‘ve yet to hear one liberal enunciate in the Terri Schiavo case the principle that moral law supersedes man’s law. But whether they defer to reason or to revelation, I’ve heard scores of conservatives articulate the a priori truth in this case. Which is: Notwithstanding my own belief in the right to die, the only authority that has jurisdiction over Terri Schiavo is Terri Schiavo. In the absence of a living will or a clear directive from her, a court’s decision—no matter which court—cannot be equated with her will. Ditto her husband’s hearsay. We simply don’t know—and can’t divine—Terri’s wishes, although it’s reasonable to assume that if she wanted to die, she didn’t wish for the death she’s been dealt.

As a society, we have no right to decide Terri’s fate; ours is an obligation to do her no harm—to uphold her right to life in the absence of a directive from her, and in the overwhelming presence of evidence she is being harmed. (How do cognitively competent people know Terri is being harmed? Hmm… let me see: does being starved qualify—in the absence of clear, persuasive evidence one has requested such treatment?)

Federalism, discovered belatedly by liberals, is not the issue here; the right to life is. The level of decision-making is immaterial; what matters is the decision. Had a federal court found for her life, the decision ought to have been hailed as the right one—one consonant with natural justice. No one has the right to kill an innocent human being. By logical extension, it matters not who saves her—which state or federal official—just so long as someone does.

For natural rights antedate the state apparatus. Although federalism is an excellent principle, it is not a religion. Predicating Terri’s right to life, as it has been, on the outcomes of a judicial review is to concede that the courts have a right to deny her life. As I’ve written, to the extent the law upholds natural rights, it’s good; to the extent it violates the right to life, liberty, and property—it’s bad. In this particular case, it doesn’t matter who upholds the right to life, just so long as someone does.

Terry’s condition is yet another irrelevance: The party that wants to err in favor of killing says she is in a “persistent vegetative state.” The cautious camp claims she is “minimally conscious.” Like federalism, Terri’s medical condition is also immaterial in this particular case, the premise of which is that her right to life depends on state-of-the-art medical expertise.

Aside from having a hard time disguising their collective God Complex, most doctors are reductionists. They think squiggles on a machine are an accurate map of the whole person. That a person is more than the sum of his or her parts is not a proposition they often entertain. For example, it took doctors a long time to “discover” what mothers have known all along: Newborns do a great deal with their heavy, wobbly heads. In response to stimuli, my own three-week-old girl used to crack a broad smile. Her pediatrician (this was admittedly a while ago) cautioned she was windy, not amused. Naturally, when the jovial child began chuckling at three months (to this day she finds her mother a scream), shoulders shaking and all, I didn’t tell him. Who knows what St. Vitus’ dance he’d have diagnosed?

The point being, the (disputed) state of Terri’s cerebral cortex does not give the state the right to cause her death.

If the case of poor Terri Schiavo has taught me anything it is how utterly loathsome liberals are. In their ever-so “progressive” zeal for euthanasia, they’ve discovered principles for which they’ve hitherto had nothing but contempt. In the liberal vernacular, States’ Rights are synonyms for discrimination, that is, until Ms. Schiavo. Now Democrats shriek louder than Dixiecrats ever did that the intervention by a federal court in a so-called state (or personal) matter undermines this “cherished” principle. (So they know about the 10th Amendment?)

The only kind of marriage liberals had ever glorified is the gay kind. But thanks to Michael Schiavo, the sanctity of marriage is fast becoming a liberal sacrament, with the proviso it has to involve “mercy killing.” It took Michael Schiavo’s devoted efforts to starve and dehydrate his wife to restore liberal faith in the institution. As we know, liberals, inexplicably, have insisted over and over again that Terri Schiavo’s husband is his helpless wife’s sole and indisputable guardian. Furthermore, to liberals, males have always been the guilty party in just about any heterosexual interaction. Michael’s monstrous single-mindedness has changed all that.

“We are a nation of laws” is the latest—not last—in liberal two-facedness. The law, after “due process,” has sentenced Ms. Schiavo to death, therefore die she must. Illegal aliens are trampling the rule of law and States’ Rights as we speak. Show me a Democrat who’ll support the right of State residents to refuse to teach or medically treat these lawbreakers.

Consider the liberals’ “let nature take its course” chant. They generally believe “nature,” the animal kingdom in particular, is the appropriate metaphor for civilization. It would apparently do humans a whole lot of good to imbibe even more animal “ethics” than we already practice.

What distinguishes civilized beings from animals, primitive societies, and liberals is that they don’t see nature as an exemplar of all that is fine and good. To the contrary: the civilized don’t abandon the burdensome or the enfeebled to nature. When some of us do, others will always strive to rescue them.

The tragedy of Terri is a testament to how irreconcilable certain liberal leanings are with civilization itself.

Exclusive to WorldNetDaily.com

March 26

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SELF-DEFENSE: A UNIVERSAL RIGHT

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 00:00:00 +0000

My mother in-law, a fierce and fiery South African, has a gun and keeps it loaded and close to hand. This is the only sensible course in a country considered one of the most dangerous outside a war zone. But in the “new” South Africa, self-defense has become a crime against the state.

President Thabo Mbeki has no patience with Western notions of “individualism.” This Marxist has explicitly rejected what he calls the ideas of the Right: the paramountcy of private property and public order, and the remedial value of punitive justice. He has sworn renewed fealty to the paramount idea of the Left: the elevation of the state above the individual.

Mbeki speaks of the Left’s vaunted tolerance and respect for minorities, but one South African minority has been excluded: the nearly extinct white farmer. Well over 1,200 Boer Afrikaners have been butchered in more than 6,000 attacks since Mbeki’s democratically elected African National Congress (ANC) took power in 1994. Despite the threat of systematic extermination, farmers are forbidden automatic weapons. So they must battle their ubiquitous assailants with only a shotgun, a handgun and a limited number of rounds at their disposal.

In “free” South Africa there is an official blackout (or shall I say whiteout) of national crime statistics. When they are divulged, officials prefer to use difficult-to-understand ratios. In many instances, data have been doctored. Government sources claim there were 21,553 murders in 2002. The Mail & Guardian estimates that between January 2000 and March 2003 there were almost 48,000 murders in South Africa (population 44.6 million). In comparison, the “high crime” United States (population 288.2 million) suffered 16,110 murders in 2002.

I used to rest easier knowing that if a thug entered the Western Cape home of my relatives (where the murder rate is a staggering 84 per 100,000, compared to 5.6 per 100,000 in the U.S.) my elderly mother in-law could easily dispatch him with her six-round .32 Special. It was comforting to know that in the unlikely event she required further firepower, my father-in-law could weigh in with his .38 Special. But that was the old South Africa. The ANC, like all leftist governments, is determined to disarm law-abiding individuals and criminalize their naturally just actions.

As first reported in the CapeTimes, the grotesquely mistitled Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula has unveiled “an arsenal of stricter gun-control laws.” “Gun-toting cowboys” will no longer be tolerated and thus “non-threatening” home invaders will no longer face on-the-spot justice. In “liberated” South Africa, being a robber and being “non-threatening” are no longer mutually exclusive existential conditions.

Should my in-laws awake to find a malefactor beating down the door, short of conversing in Xhosa to put him at ease, they shall have to hold their fire and attempt to ascertain his manifestly acquisitive – and almost certainly murderous – motives. “Molo Butte (Good morning, brother), your plans don’t happen to include slitting my throat, do they?” The same rule now applies to “visitors” already in the house. If they greet your polite inquiries with gun or knife, well, perhaps you can say a prayer to Nelson Mandela.

Safety and security in South Africa now means that self-defense may be defined as assault or murder. If the victim of a break-in shoots to kill, the intruder can kill him and claim justification. As Barry Ronge of the Sunday Times points out, this “effect[s] a switch that makes the victim of the crime the felon and turns the felon into the victim.”

In a country where, as Ronge notes, husbands and children are routinely forced to watch while mothers are raped, victims must now “calibrate the extent of the menace” before defending loved ones. Even for giving chase, victims may now be prosecuted as aggressors.

And in a wicked sleight of hand, applicants for firearm licenses must now prove their need. “Being resident in South Africa,” a spokesman for the opposition New National Party retorted, “is just the reason why any law-abiding citizen would require a gun.” South Africa is, after all, a country where almost everyone knows someone who has been raped, robbed, hijacked, murdered or all of the above.

It remains to be seen whether existing gun owners such as my in-laws will be exempted from reapplying every few years for a new license, which would require an “assessment” by the incompetent – often criminal – gangs that pose as policemen, or whether they will be forced to undergo “competency training.”

Of one thing we are certain. The right to defend one’s life (even Hobbes was for it) and property are worthless in post-apartheid South Africa.

Of course, a person’s right to own a firearm is not contingent on whether he lives in a “safe” community. The right to self-defense, implicit in the right to life, belongs to every non-aggressor, imperiled or not. Natural rights are not subject to the vagaries of crime rates. Or, for that matter, to the whims of the state (or Rosie O’Donnell). Natural rights are not for governments to grant but to uphold.

Despite being safely ensconced in a very low-crime American neighborhood, and after maneuvering through the labyrinthine bureaucracy, I shall soon be sleeping with a silver-plated, five-round .357 Magnum revolver by my side. I am grateful I no longer live in South Africa.

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NO RIGHT OF SELF-DEFENSE IN BLAIR’S BARBARIC BRITAIN

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 06 Aug 2003 00:00:00 +0000

A British Times Literary Supplement reviewer recently took a shot at tracing the “providential themes” in George Bush’s political rhetoric. Indeed, the interminable war on “tyrants and terrorists” is laced with evangelical zeal. The American president, however, is not alone “in the redemption business.”

British Prime Minister Tony Blair fancies himself every bit the redeemer of mankind. Etched all over Blair’s address to Congress was the devotion to the “mystic [and, might I add, malevolent] idea of national destiny.”

One particularly chilling dictate was this: “I know out there there’s a guy getting on with his life, perfectly happily, minding his own business, saying to you, the political leaders of this country, ‘Why me? And why us? And why America?’ And the only answer is, ‘Because destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do.'”

The tyranny implied in Blair’s maudlin grandiosity should be obvious.

First, the little guy back home ought to be the one calling the shots, not Messrs. Messiah and Company. Second, before Blair joins Bush in rousing the “visionless” middle-class American from his uninspired slumber—The Great Redeemer thinks it’s below contempt to harbor a civilized desire to mind one’s own business and live in peace—he ought to take a look at the little guy back in England.

Tony Martin, for one, is not having a terribly tranquil time. Blair’s blather to Congress about “the spread of freedom” being “the best security for the free” must ring hollow to the law-abiding, English farmer, who would no more advocate the spread of British-style freedom than he would the bubonic plague.

Tony Martin was recently released from jail after being arrested for the crime of defending his home—he killed a career criminal by the name of Fred Barras and injured his accomplice, Brendon Fearon, when the two broke into the elderly man’s homestead. Martin was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, the court finding that he had no freedom to use force to defend his property or his life.

The traditional “Rights of Englishmen”—the inspiration for the American founders—are no longer cool in Cool Britannia. The great system of law that the English people have long held dear, including the 1689 English Bill of Rights, which entails the right to possess arms, is in tatters. The British elites, many of whom enjoy taxpayer-funded security details, have disarmed law-abiding Britons, who now defend themselves against the protected criminal class only at their own peril.

A right that can’t be defended, however, is a right that exists only in name. In Britain today there is, in effect, no real right to life or property.

In Blair’s Britain, the law has been turned around to break and subdue proud and self-sufficient people like Tony Martin. The Crown rejected his self-defense plea, although his conviction for murder was commuted to manslaughter once Martin capitulated and agreed to accept a diagnosis of mental illness. In other words, to defend your home in Britain is to evince a paranoid personality disorder.

Martin’s case, unfortunately, is far from unique, and the consequences of this policy have been appalling. According to a recent UN study, writes Historian Joyce L. Malcolm, author of Guns and Violence: The English Experience, “England and Wales have the highest crime rate and worst record for ‘very serious’ offences of the 18 industrial countries surveyed.” Whereas violent crime in America has been plummeting for 10 consecutive years, criminal violence in Britain has been rising.

Since Blair’s 1997 total ban on armed self-defense, things have gone from very bad to even worse. “You are now six times more likely to be mugged in London than New York,” notes Malcolm. “Why? Because as common law appreciated, not only does an armed individual have the ability to protect himself or herself but criminals are less likely to attack them….A study found American burglars fear armed homeowners more than the police.” The most dangerous burglaries—the kind that occur when people are at home—are much rarer in the Unites States, only 13 percent, than in Britain, where they constitute 53 percent of all such home invasions.

How far has British barbarism gone? Malcolm’s evidently garden-variety accounts include the story of an elderly lady who fought off a gang of thugs “by firing a blank from a toy gun, only to be arrested for the crime of putting someone in fear with an imitation firearm.”

Similarly, when Eric Butler was brutally assaulted in a subway, “he unsheathed a sword blade in his walking stick and slashed” at one of his assailants. Butler was added to the lineup—he “was tried and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.”

Tony Martin was almost denied parole because he failed to show sufficient contrition for killing one of the creatures that invaded what was supposed to be his castle. In the words of a probation officer, Martin continues to be “a danger to burglars.” In a truly civilized country, of course, that would be a compliment.

To add insult to injury, after having been robbed of three years and five months of his life for the crime of self-defense, Martin’s ordeal is still not over. The surviving ruffian, who has more than 30 convictions to his name, has been granted permission to sue his victim, even given legal aid to so do, for the injury he suffered on the “job.”

In addition, the criminal protection and reinforcement program that is contemporary British justice also entails honoring career criminal Brendon Fearon’s “right” to know where his victim, the old farmer, will reside now that he’s been released.

Tony Blair has gone to great (and dubious) lengths to make a case for Britain‘s right to defend itself from perceived threats in the international arena. He ought to be reminded that self-defense, like charity, begins at home.

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CRADLE OF CORRUPTION

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 04 Sep 2002 00:00:00 +0000

When he demanded, at the United Nation’s World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD), that the world’s poor be liberated from poverty, South African President Thabo Mbeki was not inviting the upliftment that results from voluntary and peaceful trade, but summoning the force of a centralized Global Government.

The WSSD’s social engineers began by inking reams of paper with their odes to diversity, which is code for homosexuals, lesbians, and the gender-challenged, those living with the consequences of rampant sexuality, namely the HIV-inflicted, poor non-whites, women and witch doctors.

The problem, as these central planners see it, however, lies not with the culturally exotic, but with the differences that dare not speak their name—the natural inequalities between men which also happen to drive development and innovation.

This is the diversity they want to eradicate.

To end the variety that leads to “global apartheid,” Mbeki and the stakeholders at the conference want to use the steamrollers of the “democratic system of global governance.” The bluntness of global governance stems from its overarching nature—a global government constitutes the ultimate monopoly because it straddles all nations. Once subject to global enforcement, inhabitants of nation-states, whose leaders have betrayed them by becoming signatories to global wealth-distributing agreements, have no escape routes. They cannot contest UN policies by upping and leaving. Well aware of this, the UN is working diligently to homogenize laws the world over. Once the same laws and regulations blanket all nations alike, citizens will be trapped.

Shrewdly, Mbeki figures that a lunge for wallets not his own starts by counterfeiting “human rights” and compelling “global society” to slake them.

Contrary to and notwithstanding the UN’s rights minting, the only rights of man are the rights to life, liberty, and property. These rights exist irrespective of governments. Rights always give rise to binding obligations. In the case of natural rights, the duty is merely a duty to refrain from doing. My right to life means you must refrain from killing me. My right to liberty means you cannot enslave me. My right to property means you should not take what is mine, or stop me from taking the necessary action for my survival, so long as I, in turn, heed the same strictures.

If to exercise a right a person must violate someone’s life, liberty and property, then the exercised right is not a right, but a violation thereof. Because my right to acquire property doesn’t diminish your right to the same liberty, this right is known as a negative right. Negative rights are real or natural rights because they don’t conscript me in the fulfillment of your needs and desires, and vise versa. They merely impel both of us to keep our mitts to ourselves.

Which brings me to a different set of rights; those manufactured by governments and interest groups, also known as positive rights. Still under construction, this list of rights is defined by Harvard scholar Richard Pipes as “the right to the necessities of life at public expense, i.e., the right to something that was not one’s own.”

Access to clean water, sanitation, health care, energy and “food security,” as specified at the WSSD, don’t just materialize. Someone must be made to work in order to provide for those who’ve been granted the right to live “healthy productive lives in harmony with nature.” Equally, the right to have one’s debt forgiven means that someone will be defrauded.

And it won’t be the UN. Neither the UN nor any other government has wealth of its own. To deliver these “rights,” the UN must steal from taxpayers. This is why the rights dreamed up at the WSSD by its many initiative-yielding conferences have no moral authority; they are predicated on forcibly taking property that is already spoken for, and thus on the violation of the individual rights of other human beings.

Some argue that making some people supply others with work, water, and medical care will increase overall liberty in society. At best, this is a dubious claim. Like all welfare programs, the UN’s initiatives compound the problems they are supposed to cure. As economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out, taking from original owners and producers and giving to non-owners and non-producers discourages ownership and production, and encourages non-ownership and non-production. In short, while overriding the rights of its unwitting funders, the UN underwrites and perpetuates parasitism on a global scale.

Even if this were not the case, liberty is not an aggregate social project. Every individual has rights. And rights give rise to obligations between all men, including those who are in power. That men band in a collective called “government” doesn’t give them license to violate rights. No politician has the right to enslave some for the benefit of others, not for any reason whatsoever.

Much less is it legitimate to claim, as the democracy demagogues do, that the democratic process licenses entitlement programs. (Despite being crowned at the WSSD as “the most universal and representative system in the world,” the UN doesn’t even pass the flawed democratic test.) The position that the law is always just because it was arrived at through majority vote is a species of legal positivism. In opposition to classical natural law theory, legal positivism equates justice with the law of the state. According to this reasoning, Hitler’s actions must be considered legitimate. Did he not come to power democratically? Clearly, that over half of the voters voted for a government which then murders, launches unjust wars, and takes from some to give to others doesn’t legitimize the immoral actions. Theft or murder at the behest of majorities is still theft and murder.

Neither will it do to resort to the Constitution for a license to steal. If I sign a contract giving, for evermore, a portion of my income to you, you do indeed have a positive right to this income because I’ve voluntarily consented to give it to you. Although it authorizes the levying of some income taxes, not one of us was consulted or got to personally ratify the Constitution. Taxes by constitutional fiat are thus theft. To the extent that the Constitution sanctifies the natural rights of man—those to life, liberty and property—it is legitimate. To the extent that it enlists generations of non-signatories in the fulfillment of the needs of others, it is illegitimate.

If anything, the Constitution is the thin edge of the wedge that has allowed U.S. governments to cede the rights of Americans to the UN. Specifically, the “Supremacy Clause” in Article VI states that all treaties made by government shall be “the supreme Law of the Land,” and shall usurp state law. Article VI has thus further compounded the loss of individual ri
ghts in the U.S.

To recap, a right is a legally binding claim against other human beings. Recognize the rights of all people to a guaranteed income or to certain life conditions and you also recognize the right of a bureaucrat to garnish property and enslave its owner to fulfill these “rights.” The rights the World Summit for Sustainable Development wants to fabricate are not genuine human rights, but a means through which the UN seeks to expand its control.

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