Guns and Homicides

According to The Fresno Bee:

More people are licensed to carry concealed weapons in Fresno County than any other county in California, according to data from the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office and the Fresno Police Department [17,400 licenses for a population of 994,000].

And

Orange County is next with 12,008 licenses [population 3.2 million].

And

Los Angeles County, with a population of more than 10 million, had only 424 permits as of last summer….

And

San Diego County [population 3.3 million] had fewer than 1,150, and Alameda County [population 1.7 million] had 186. The fewest licenses were reported in San Francisco County [population 883,000], where the state bureau reported that there were only two CCW licenses….

On the other hand, here are the homicide rates (2018 figures) for those counties:

Fresno County: 5.3 per 100,000

Orange County: 1.5 per 100,000

Los Angeles County: 5.5 per 100,000

San Diego County: 2.5 per 100,000

Alameda County: 5.5 per 100,000

San Francisco County: 5.3 per 100,000

High legal gun ownership doesn’t seem correlated at all with high homicide rates.  Quite the opposite: the trend is fewer killings as gun ownership increases.

Hypocrisy of the British Left

Yes, ex-Prime Minister John Major claims himself a Conservative, but he’s acting more and more Left.  Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister wannabe and front-runner to replace the resigned Theresa May, has said that if needs be, he’ll prorogue Parliament to block an anti-no-deal Brexit vote, if a no-deal departure is necessary.

Prorogue: a temporary suspension of Parliament following petition of the Queen by her first minister—the Prime Minister—for permission to suspend Parliament and her granting that permission.  This use is unusual; prorogation is normally used for normal terminations of Parliamentary sessions; the term also describes the interval between that termination and the normal opening of the next session.

The former British Prime Minister John Major on Wednesday warned he would personally take legal action to stop any leader using a suspension of parliament to deliver a “no-deal” Brexit.

And yet, he threatens:

In order to close down parliament the prime minister would have to go to her Majesty the Queen and ask for her permission to prorogue. If her first minister asks for that permission, it is almost inconceivable that the queen will do anything other than grant it.
She is then in the midst of a constitutional controversy that no serious politician should put the queen in the middle of[.]

Thus, the hypocrisy: Major says he personally will precipitate that constitutional crisis with his own lawsuit to stop the process.

I for one would be prepared to go and seek judicial review.

Never mind that his case can only lose: as part of the Queen’s (any British monarch’s) Royal Prerogative, the power and the authority to prorogue belongs only to the monarch.  No British court can overrule her.

Hmm….

Federal Government and Home Lending

Investors worry about the impact on home mortgage costs from the Trump administration’s efforts to reform Federal involvement in the business—for instance, cutting Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae loose from Federal controls and support.

The WSJ‘s subheadline of the article at the link sums up those investors’ worry:

[A]ny overhaul to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could reduce or eliminate the federal backstop

To which this investor—and home-owner and mortgage payer—says, “Yeah, and?”

There should be no Federal backstop at all, there should be no Federal involvement in this, or any other, industry at all.  Federal involvement only distorts the market, and Federal money, being the increased demand of additional and protected money, only drives up costs.

Health Care for All

In Great Britain, Justice Nathalie Lieven of the Court of Protection (an ironically named court, as you’ll see in a bit) has ordered a woman’s pregnancy be terminated by abortion in the mother’s 22nd week.  The woman has the mental capacity of a grade schooler, and so Lieven has ordered the abortion ostensibly for the mother’s own sake.

Never mind that neither the woman nor the woman’s mother want the abortion, and the woman’s mother has said she would care for the baby—her granddaughter—as well as her daughter (for whom she already cares).  Lieven insisted

I am acutely conscious of the fact that for the State to order a woman to have a termination where it appears that she doesn’t want it is an immense intrusion[.]
I have to operate in [her] best interests, not on society’s views of termination[.]

A judge operating on her personal view of “best interests” rather than written-down law or written Constitution definitions—and recall that our own Left considers our written Constitution not binding on anything—is a judge operating with far too narrow a view of justice, much less “interests.”

This judge, operating in her personal view of “best interests,” is carefully and cynically disregarding justice for, and the best interests of, the baby she’s ordered killed.

And this:

Doctors at the trust [NHS trust, a section of the Great Britain’s National Health Service] wished to abort her pregnancy and argued that, due to her diminished mental capacity, the abortion would be less traumatic for the woman than giving birth, especially if the baby would then be placed in foster care.

These are doctors who care not a penny for the trauma they want to inflict on the baby.  But, then, these are doctors operating under a Government program of taxpayer-funded health-care-for-all; these are doctors from whom Government has arrogated all moral responsibility; these are doctors therefrom wholly lacking personal moral concerns.

And this:

Lieven also said she did not believe the woman’s mother, who already helps care for her daughter, would be able to offer care for a grandchild at the same time.

Because no parent ever, much less a woman, has ever been able to take care of two children at the same time, even if one has a “mood disorder”—whatever that is in the British NHS lowest-bidder medical system.

No, this is the British judge’s decision: kill the baby before it’s born, lest it become an inconvenience to the health-care-for-all System.

This is taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand—judge’s as well as mother’s—that would be available under the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Government-run Medicare for All.

Update: Sometimes, justice strikes. Sadly, this only applies to the particular case, still, it is justice. Lieven’s shameful ruling was appealed by the mother, and it has been overturned. A British appellate court’s judges, Lord Justice McCombe, Lady Justice King, and Lord Justice Jackson, straight up reversed Lieven’s ruling; although they said they’d give their rationale only “at a later date.”

Prior to the reversal, Westminster auxiliary bishop John Sheridan had said [emphasis added]

Forcing a woman to have an abortion against her will, and that of her close family, infringes her human rights, not to mention the right of her unborn child to life in a family that has committed to caring for this child.

That last also emphasizes why this bit of justice is so narrow.  John McKendrick QC, representing the woman’s mother, told the appellate court that

Lieven’s analysis of what was in the woman’s best interests was flawed.

His argument wholly ignored that bit about the baby’s own interests, his inalienable right to life. As long as the baby’s welfare is routinely ignored in such debates, the whole question of abortion is badly skewed.

Green Cow Gas

…or something.  The Wall Street Journal opined Monday on the alleged hypocrisy of California’s Progressive-Democrats on the matter of going carbon-neutral in a shade over a decade.

California has plowed billions of dollars into green energy to wean the state off fossil fuels. But now progressives are complaining that biofuel producers are milking government subsidies intended to help dairy farmers cut emissions. Here is another illustration of the left’s anti-carbon contradictions.

The Editors went on in that vein, describing those Progressive-Democrats’ dismay over two companies thoroughly dominating the cow manure and flatulence emissions carbon credits market, even taking advantage of California’s laws governing those emissions.

The Editors closed with this gem regarding those Progressive-Democrat greens:

California dairies have been shrinking due to the high costs of complying with environmental regulation and water restrictions. By subsidizing methane digesters, the state intended to prevent more dairy farmers from leaving the state for less green pastures. But green groups now say the subsidies will encourage farmers to increase their herds, which could cause more water and air pollution from manure….

I have to ask, then: haven’t these editors (and other critics) heard? Sniffing methane develops magical thinking powers.