Consequences, Intended and Not

Consequences, Intended and Not

Planning is usually a prudent thing to do and, usually, the planning pans out. Sometimes, though, especially when the planning is done by politicians, unintended consequences of misbegotten schemes make you wonder where the pols’ heads are.

Communist regimes are big on planning. Five Year Plans to re-vamp its economy were always a big favorite with the old U.S.S.R. commissars and always resulted in big failures.

One of the few sad remnants of Communism, North Korea, also has little luck when it comes to economics although it is spectacular in staging funerals. The recent obsequies for its late dictator Kim Jong-il were no exception.

North Korea demonstrated its expertise in not only planning its Supreme Leader’s funeral but in its consequences for hapless North Koreans who didn’t cry enough.

As an informant reported, within days of Kim Jong-il’s death, “The authorities are handing down at least six months in a labour-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organised gatherings during the mourning period, or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn’t seem genuine.”

So much for Communism, so much for the dictatorship of the proletariat where the proles are forced to grieve for a bloody tyrant.

More relevant to Americans are interesting intended and unintended consequences in the U.S.

Last month, the FBI released a report indicating that violent crime in the U.S. fell 6.4 percent in the first half of 2011 and property crimes fell by 3.7 as contrasted with the same time 2010 time period.

That was the unexpected good news.

The bad news–for liberals who seek to disarm law-abiding citizens–is that the increasing number of armed law-abiding citizens in the country no doubt accounted in large part for the drop in crime.

As proven in Florida and elsewhere, criminals are far less inclined to maim, murder, and break into homes and businesses when their prospective victims are prepared to blow them away.

The intent of gun laws is to inhibit the unrestricted ownership of guns, the true consequence of which is to concentrate guns in the hands of criminals while denying honest Americans the right to defend themselves. The joke on liberals is that the latter stocking up on weapons to defend themselves serves as a deterrent against the former.

In a related issue, a presumed unintended consequence of excessive liberality has led to excessive violence.

A federal court judge decided last year that allegedly non-violent California prisoners were uncomfortable in their crowded facilities. He didn’t comment on the discomfort felt by their victims but did order California to give more space to the perpetrators. Strapped California had no money to build more prisons and chose instead to release thousands of convicted and accused “non-violent” offenders into society.

According to La Puente Mayor John Solis, his city and others are suffering the consequences of the judge’s beneficence. Solis reports that ”Sexual assaults are up about 300 percent and assaults with guns and knives up nearly 150 percent citywide” since the release of the reprobates.

He blames “prison realignment,” a euphemism for loosing barbarians in a state where gun laws are strictly enforced and a resultant explosion of barbarity.
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=12104.)

Kim Jong-il, May He Not Rest in Hell

Kim Jong-il, May He Not Rest in Hell

Normally, it’s proper to show respect for the dead. Kim Jong-il, the bloodthirsty Communist dictator of North Korea is dead and deserved no respect, proper or otherwise.

It’s time, though, to reflect on the passing of the man former Democrat president Jimmy Carter and the United Nations mourned and whose designated heir Carter wished great success.

Apparently born Yuri Irsenovich Kim apparently in Siberia, apparently somewhere Kim decided he wasn’t Siberian and became Kim Jong-il and ruled North Korea in high heels for some 17 years until his apparent death on December 17th or 19th.

Many things are only “apparent” regarding the late despot except his official DPRK titles among which were General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of that country’s National Defense Commission and Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army–and unofficial titles of “Dear Leader,” “Generalissimo,” and “Great Father of People.”

My favorite Kim title is ”Biggest Fruitcake on the Asian Stage,” not including Hawaii which President Barack Hussein Obama said recently was in Asia.

Among Kim Jong-il’s accomplishments in the “hermit kingdom” were killing millions of his people, starving millions more, maintaining gulags tenanted by 200,000 political prisoners, and establishing North Korea as the most backward nation on the planet this side of Somalia.

As North Koreans were eating the bark off trees to ward off starvation, Kim found the funds to develop missile and nuclear capacities to threaten his neighbors, another feather in his cap not cited by either Mr. Carter or the U.N.

Granted, former President Jimmy Carter has been struggling with senility demons and a desperate search for a legacy following a failed presidency.

Granted, the United Nations is a boil on the world’s arse controlled by the Third World and struggling to seem relevant and objective.

However, have Carter and the U.N. lost what remained of their collective minds to, in Jimmy’s case, send condolences to North Korea and best wishes for success to his son Kim Jong-un and, in the sorry case of the United Nations, offer up a moment of silence in dad’s honor?

Condolences for what? . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=11613.)

Who Goes First, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-il?

Who Goes First, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-il?

The field has come down to two insane despots, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il. The question comes down to which of those two crazies will be first to precipitate a nuclear holocaust, the twice-elected Iranian 54 year old nut or the never-elected 69 year old fruitcake in North Korea?

It’s a bewilderment, I tell you, an absolute bewilderment, even if some would emphasize that the dynamic duo wouldn’t be the first country to nuke another country. The United States has undisputed claim to that first since we dropped ”Little Boy” and ”Fat Man” on, respectively, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War Two.

We also can proudly lay claim to being the only nation in the history of the planet to possses the ability to bring every other nation on the planet to its knees, enslave them if we had such a mind, and have them pay billions in tribute in perpetuity. We chose not to do any of that and instead chose to rebuild a devastated world.

It can only be speculated as to whether the Communist U.S.S.R. or the Communist People’s Republic of China–or today’s Iran or North Korea–would have picked that option, speculated only by the terminally naive.

However, back to our two contemporary loonies, Mahmoud and Kim, either or both of whom would have gleefully reduced the globe to glowing, radioactive dust had they been able 65 years ago and, as they themselves gasped their last glowing, radioactive breaths, still have blamed someone else. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=2793)