Daily Archives: 30 January 2014

A Tiny Step

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But sufficient for the moment.  Recall this in the next Congress, though, and address it more firmly then.

What is this?  It’s the food stamp compromise just reached between the Democrat-controlled Senate and the people’s House of Representatives.  The compromise keeps food stamp benefits for most Americans while cutting them overall by $800 million per year—a 1% cut.

That’s a step in the right direction, albeit chump change, but serious revamping isn’t possible so long as the Democrats control the Senate.  First things, first, and that means here, as with most items to come up this year, Republicans and Conservatives have to stay focused—and they have to develop a unified message with concrete solutions beyond just saying “No” to the Democrats (“No” is the Progressives’ knee-jerk answer to real reform) on which to focus—on the failures of President Barack Obama and the Reid/Schumer/Durbin Senate and on Republican/Conservative solutions to those failures.

With that, they can increase their hold on the House and gain control of the Senate and thereby start, in the next Congress, making real progress toward redressing the damage done by the Progressive policies of the last five (six, by this fall) years.  Building on that, they can also win the White House in 2016 and then truly start repairing the damage done.

Improvements in Police Technology

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Criminals may not have a chance in 2025, when the cop of the future will be an imposing crime-fighting machine, able to see around corners in urban environments, identify suspects at a glance, safely pursue stolen cars and effortlessly bring unruly crowds under control.

And

Police departments around the country are already testing technologies like Google Glass, lapel cameras and tracking devices that allow safer pursuit of fleeing suspects.  But this is merely a glimpse of what’s to come, according to experts contacted by FoxNews.com.  They said increasing reliance on data mining, predictive analysis and all manner of gadgets will make getting away with crime harder than ever.

These technologies are ripe for misuse, too, by arms of the government, like police departments.  Does that mean we should work to deny these technologies to the police?  Absolutely not.  We expect them to put their lives on the line in order to “protect and serve” us; we have a moral obligation, if nothing else, to equip them with the tools and training needed to do that most efficaciously.

No, what we need to be vigilant about is this: our government cannot be permitted to deny us ordinary citizens those same technologies.

Think 2nd Amendment and the efforts of nefarious governments to disarm the citizenry, with the deleterious outcomes of those efforts.  Technology qua technology can be a weapon, too.  And, as gun statistic after gun statistic demonstrates, weapons widely in the hands of us ordinary citizens actually leads to reduced crime rates.