As I’m not particularly interested in dramas about criminal gangs, I didn’t watch The Sopranos when it was on TV. This clip, courtesy of Arthur Sido, makes me wonder if I should have: There are multiple ironies embedded in that short scene… and one overarching truth: The urban neighborhoods that white Nineteenth-Century immigrant …
Category: law and order
May 12 2025
The War On Women: Dispatches From The Front Lines
It’s real, and it’s raging: This week’s evidence of the continued – in fact, increasing – derangement of the American left comes thanks to Riley Gaines, the brave female college-champion swimmer who stood up against men competing in women’s sports. Twice this week, Gaines has proved that young, supposedly progressive activists will react …
May 07 2025
Edge Cases And The Law
Yet another stimulating graphic from Mike Miles: That got me thinking about the “edge” of illegal entry to the United States. If we imagine that the “legal paradox” expressed above is actually the law, it raises this question: How far into the territory of the U.S. does an illegal entrant have to penetrate …
Apr 28 2025
Dodges And Their Dodgers
Way, way back in high school, as part of an essay contest, I was tasked to read a rather inane essay which lodged firmly in my damnably retentive memory: “On Not Prosecuting Civil Disobedience,” by “legal philosopher” Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin’s argument was as convoluted as such things always are. At the core, it consisted …
Apr 19 2025
Just Another Day In Multicultural Paradise
No one is safe anywhere: Jacob Couch and his wife Kristen were sitting on a bus bench on the corner of 6th and Broadway in Tucson on the morning of April 5. After a vacation, they traveled by bus from California back home to Alabama, but decided to stop in Tucson first to …
Mar 28 2025
Loyalty Of The Purchased Kind?
I admire PJ Media’s Stephen Kruiser. While I may not agree with him on everything, I always appreciate his forthright style, articulate even at its most pungent. This morning he presents us with a sterling sample: Rampant lawlessness was the hallmark of the four years that the nation just suffered under Joe Biden …
Jan 27 2025
“Hostis Humani Generis”
It’s always a special day when I get to use my Latin. The title phrase means “enemy of all Mankind.” It originally denoted the sort of predator who plies his trade where “the writ of law does not run:” i.e., a stateless region. These days, the principal stateless regions are the Arctic, the Antarctic, …
Jan 02 2025
“King Kong” Mode?
Well, it’s back to the dreary crap: (CAUGHT ON TAPE) A special needs child has caused thousands of dollars in damages after destroying multiple televisions at Costco. The boy’s parents claim their son was in “King Kong Mode” and that they were too afraid to intervene. pic.twitter.com/gPRwLB9CRu — Victory News Network (VNN) (@VictoryNewsNet) January …
Oct 29 2024
The Insistence On “Culture” As The Explanation
The statistics are devastating: Moreover, the trend is worse: Every year the FBI has collected statistics on violent crimes and crimes against property, the percentage of such crimes committed by young Negroes has increased. But the typical American who confronts those statistics will insist that “it’s not about race.” When pressed for an …
Oct 20 2024
A Storm Is Brewing
Strike that; it’s in the wrong tense. A storm has brewed. It’s ready to spill over. Dio of the Workshop, whom I admire, has expressed a sense of things I’ve detected in a great many decent Americans as we’ve marched toward Election Day: They are planning on a shitfestivus of fun cuz …
Oct 10 2024
A Glimmer Of Hope For LA
For some time now, California has been the next best thing to a free-fire zone. The ascension of pro-criminal administrations and prosecutors who decline to prosecute has brought a practical end to law and order, especially in the cities. But courtesy of Kenny “Wirecutter” Lane, it appears that a traditional force may be rising …
Sep 27 2024
Is Seattle Part Of America?
A good question: Beginning Oct. 1, the Seattle Police Department will only dispatch officers to alarm calls that come with “supporting evidence, such as audio, video, panic alarms or eyewitness evidence” that someone is breaking into a home or business, according to a letter interim police chief Sue Rahr sent to alarm companies. …
Sep 15 2024
A Future To Be Avoided, Or a Present To Be Regretted?
I’ve been reading a writer new to me: Henry Brown. And I’m impressed. He has a felicity of style buried within what looks at first like the flattest kind of narrative writing. And every so often, he looses an observation – within his fictional milieu, to be sure – that resonates with me. Here’s …
Sep 08 2024
Legitimacy, Its Departure, And What Follows
You’ve heard the term failed state, haven’t you? It’s been used a few times in recent years, notably with reference to Libya after the death of longtime dictator Muammar Qaddafi. We don’t often hear the term elucidated, but a working definition would be a state that cannot maintain order within its zone of asserted …
Jul 18 2024
Was It Really Simple Negligence?
The evidence is accumulating that the Secret Service has secrets of its own and means to keep them: The agency run by impeached migration czar Alejandro Mayorkas is interfering with the House’s investigation into the attempted murder of President Donald Trump, Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas), told Breitbart News. […] Cloud is …
Jun 19 2024
Gradually, Then Suddenly
When Ernest Hemingway was asked “how does a country go bankrupt?” he famously replied, “Gradually, then suddenly.” Hemingway had glimpsed an important truth about the onset of financial calamities. Yet that insight actually applies to a wide range of disasters. There will be some who can see the clouds of crisis forming when …
Apr 24 2024
Repeating The Old Mistakes
Back in the Sixties, when students on American university campuses first began to exhibit unruly and uncivilized behavior in large numbers, the administrators of those institutions made a fatal mistake: they tried to placate the disruptors. From that moment on, there was no quelling the mobs. Their principal agitators, most of them openly aligned …
Apr 10 2024
Avert Your Eyes, Citizen!
In this Year of Our Lord 2024, there are a multitude of things of which We the People are not supposed to take notice. The graphic just below lists a hefty few of them, whose effacement is assisted by “our” “news media.” There are others of note, some of them pertaining to the behavioral …
Apr 02 2024
Even a flatworm turns away from pain
And even Oregon can regain a modicum of sanity. On Monday, Oregon’s Democratic Governor Tina Kotek signed into law House Bill 4002, reverting the possession of small amounts of drugs back into a criminal offense and marking the end of a pioneering decriminalization experiment plagued by implementation challenges. To the surprise of absolutely nobody with two functioning …
Apr 02 2024
“…But I know it when I see it.”
Does anyone remember that little phrase? It became notorious in the early Seventies, after the Supreme Court issued a ruling in a pornography case. The original speaker was Associate Justice Potter Stewart. The stimulus, of course, was the question “What is pornography?” The Court did not issue a definition. Instead, the ruling centered …
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