The rule of law continues to decline all across California. Today’s case in point: Oakland Bay estuary, where actual pirates are stealing and plundering ships:
In Oakland estuary, “the threats of pirates have risen to a new level.”
A few weeks ago, they were coming in off the water to steal dinghies, but now they’ve moved on to much larger boats.
A man outfitted his 40 foot boat as a survival home, and thieves came into the marina and stole it. He spotted it stuck to nearby rocks and asked police to impound it. They said he needed to file a police report first.
The police never came and his insurance company called to tell him the boat had been found trashed. “The stole GPS equipment, engine parts and three handguns.”
Two other large boats were stolen the same week.
Boat owners are now going armed.
The city of Oakland only has one boat officer.
Boat owners say they’re going to ban together to do whatever they must to protect themselves. “We don’t bother to call the police anymore. We’re going to handle it ourselves.”
California Democrats war on the rule of law in the name of “Social Justice” continues to fray the fabric of society. Piracy in the Americas died out because British naval action made it no longer profitable enough to be worth the increased risk. In their hurry to unmake civilization, social justice warriors have gone so soft on crime that it’s starting to become profitable again, at least in California.
Ward off the next attack by stationing Dan Crenshaw near the mouth of the Oakland estuary. With a bicorn hat and cutlass, he would strike fear into the hearts of modern marina marauders.
It’s ironic that our concept of vigilantism in the United States is largely drawn from the “Committee of Vigilance” instituted in the 19th century in, of all places, San Fransicko.
This ends 2 ways. First is the country somehow politically finds the social technology to deal with this issue. Second is people are just going to start shooting. This is ludicrous.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am no longer willing to testify against anyone defending themselves under any circumstance against these people. If selected for jury duty I will not serve. If selected for a jury I will work to nullify any outcome that seeks to penalize a man for defending his home, whether a boat or not. Let justice be done though the heavens fall.
You want license? You want there to be “no rules”? Anarchy? This is pretty much what you get.
California had paradise. The electorate got complacent, fell for the siren song of the New Age left that said rules wuz fur dummies. Now they know.
Where this really got started was Prop. 13. You could see it in how that got reacted to by the voters… They fell for a quick-and-dirty “Let’s starve government instead of doing the hard work of dealing with corrupt politicians…” that Howard Jarvis and his ilk came up with. “Starve government…” Yeah. Right. Like that has ever worked. You turn off the tax taps, leaving the same corruptocrat assholes in charge? What do you get? Precisely what California got, in terms of diverted funds, ever-increasing fees, and all the like. The real problem was the cancerous politicians running the place, and Prop. 13 never addressed that. It was fantasy-land thinking that didn’t actually address the problem, which was the people running the place.
Today’s California is a direct legacy of that BS, as are a lot of states. “Will of the People”? Yeah; right–How many voter-approved initiatives are ignored by the state, like the anti-affirmative action one? Only in California. And, Oregon. And, Washington…
The real problem in all three states is that the electorate hasn’t held any of the politicians accountable. That day will likely come, and it’ll be very ugly.
The purpose of the police is NOT to “prevent crime”, or to “protect the citizens”. Since nobody can predict with sufficient accuracy when and where the rabid dogs of society will strike, the best the police can do is pick up the pieces, and track down and arrest the criminals. One of their primary functions in doing so is to protect the criminals from the outrage of the citizenry.
The natural impulse of someone that has been a victim of violent crime is to strike back at the criminal. One of the problems with this is that during a time of such emotional upheaval the urge is to use overwhelming violence in response to the crime which may not always be justified. Had someone actually caught the criminals vandalizing their garage their first impulse might have been to smash to shards both of their elbows so that they’d never be able to spray-paint again (or eat, or wipe their butts, etc.).
What they’ll get by continuing to condone criminals through lack of arrest and prosecution will be some form of vigilante action, which I personally believe is the collectivist/statist/authoritarian goal. They’ll use it as an excuse to (attempt) to disarm the citizens. The other issue is that darned near every crime will now carry the death penalty, since once you’ve defended your life and property, YOU are now the “criminal”…can’t turn ’em over to the police, can’t let ’em go (fear of retaliation if nothing else).
In several areas in which I’ve lived there has been the “3S” rule, which is usually read to be “Shoot, shovel, and shut up”. If things keep getting worse on an ocean-front, I’m guessing that this will be turned into “Shoot, sink, and shut up”. A few well-chosen rocks and some wire…
Please note that I am NOT suggesting this is a legal, good, or proper course of action, since I’d MUCH rather live in a society that still exists with rule of law. But it appears to be where we are being driven by the left-wing lunatics.
@Blackwing1 wrote “I’d MUCH rather live in a society that still exists with rule of law”.
I, too. But such a society requires a high degree of social trust, which requires a high degree of conformity to a common set of values. America is no longer that. Sure, we had quite a bit of “diversity” in the past, but it was more variety (variations on a common theme: European, some variety of Christian, culturally derived from Rome, etc.) than today’s “everyone from everywhere believing everything” nonsense.
The less we have in common, the worse we get along. “Diversity” is death to a community.
Steven Moore @ Cato institute: “Did Proposition 13 really starve state and local services? Hardly. In real dollars, California’s budget climbed from $55 billion in 1980 to $97 billion in 1992 — a 75 percent increase above inflation! Only in government would a 75 percent real spending hike be considered inadequate and neglectful. What about revenues? In the 1980s state tax revenues as a share of Californian’s incomes actually rose — from 11 to 12 percent.“
The argument that Californians are under taxed is without merit.
Malthus, I don’t think you got the point I was making. Prop 13 wasn’t a solution, because the real problem wasn’t the taxes. It was the assholes levying them, and the spending they demanded.
They thought they’d cut off the money; they failed to comprehend that the pols would just reallocate other funds and find new revenue sources, like cutting services.
The bureaucracy leapt into helping them, too, because they resented the proles for daring to resist their own fleecing. Prop 13 was a solution that solved nothing. They fundamentally misidentified the pathology they were fighting.
Same with term limits. The fact that the incumbent seems to always win? That’s the fault of the voters; they don’t discipline their politicians at all, so the pols feel like nature’s noblemen and become ohsoveryarrogant…
“For every thousand men chopping at the branches of evil there is one man striking at the root.”
The phrase Latin phrase “radix maloram” (root of evil, used to describe money love) is where we derive the English term “root” (cf.w/ the root crop “radish”). “Radix” is the root word of “radical” also.
I am a radical. It takes greater commitment to strike the root than to trim a few branches. Proposition 13 trimmed a branch. This is more than Uniparty Republicans seem willing to do.
I remain committed to restoring the Founder’s Republic but despise no man who makes an effort, no matter how feeble, to restrain Leviathan while I work away from a different angle. The weary need encouragement, not condemnation.
You miss what I was saying, Malthus. The point is, you don’t put a stop to tyrants and rentiers by striking at them indirectly, which is what Prop 13 tried to do. The real hard work to be done was putting the pols on notice that they were being watched, and would pay the price for stepping over the limits. The electorate wanted a quick and easy gimmick; they didn’t want to do the hard work of weeding out the bad pols. So, Prop 13 turned into what it was… A distorting waste of time.
I dunno how you rein in politicians, short of having some kind of assassin’s guild you put to work when enough people get pissed-off. Nothing we’ve tried seems to work… You do term limits, and the embedded politicians just move to lobbying among the newly-elected naifs for their power.
I honestly think that what needs to happen is a codification of the Founder’s ideal, where you’d have a successful career doing something else, and perform a term or two in political office. They did not foresee a professional political class like ours.
[…] STATE BLUES: Newest Sign of California’s Decline: Pirates. “The rule of law continues to decline all across California. Today’s case in point: Oakland […]
“Ward off the next attack by stationing Dan Crenshaw near the mouth of the Oakland estuary. With a bicorn hat and cutlass, he would strike fear into the hearts of modern marina marauders.”
Eyepatch McCain is busy enriching himself via insider trading….
In the pre-internet days of computer communications, someone published a framework (quickly suppressed) of a global betting pool, wherein a name and a number of times-of-death would be posted, bets would be placed, and winners would be paid off, all through supposedly untraceable means. The theory was that the larger the pool (the more “popular” the prospective decedent), the more likely that one bet would “pay off” bigly, to the point that it could profit somebody to make one of the predictions come true. Just a memory of a more innocent time. ;-)
Blackwing1: “One of the problems with this is that during a time of such emotional upheaval the urge is to use overwhelming violence in response to the crime which may not always be justified. Had someone actually caught the criminals vandalizing their garage their first impulse might have been to smash to shards both of their elbows so that they’d never be able to spray-paint again (or eat, or wipe their butts, etc.).”
What about that punishment strikes you as unjustified?
Graffiti is basically gangs marking out their territories, much as wolves do by pissing on everything. It’s meant for the same purpose; keeping the prey terrorized, and signaling territory ownership to other predators.
It’s usually done by the footsoldiers and the wannabes. I don’t see a huge problem with crippling the little bastards for life; they’re part of the ecosystem, and in a non-carceral state, you either kill them or you cripple them. Ya want “no prisons”, well… That’s the price. Coming one way or another, as people lose their touching faith in the “just-us” system the leftoids have taken over.
I’d love to see someone with the balls to compare/contrast the prosecution and sentencing between say, Antifa-positive graffiti and someone spray-painting “All Lives Matter” on an abortion clinic…
Not a big fan of the Muslims, but they do deal with petty crime effectively. 1st offense they chop your right hand off, forever identifying you as unclean. Second offense, they cut off your head, oh and by the way, punishment happens that week. So where does cruel and unusual lie? Is it cruel and unusual to make us live in crime riddled streets? To allow the afflicting of criminal acts on our weak and elderly? We may need to re-think criminal justice in this country before too much longer.
Greg, you’ve obviously missed the real constituency of the Democratic Party and their flying monkeys throughout society. It ain’t you and me; it’s the criminal and the deviant perverts that they serve.
If you go back and look, historically? Ain’t none of this accidental or by chance. They started dismantling their loathed “boogie” targets back in the 1950s. We’re in the end-game, now.
It will be educational to observe whether or not the apathetic “silent majority” goes into the woodchipper without flopping around and fighting the gaff. I honestly don’t see how cities like Portland or Seattle come back, absent truly heroic effort that nobody seems to have the moral fortitude to make.
I never thought things would get this far, before people wised up, but here we are. Morons, the lot of them…
“I dunno how you rein in politicians, short of having some kind of assassin’s guild…”
Then how do you rein in the assassins?
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.—James Madison
Proposition 13 had the right idea. To control the government it is first necessary to limit their expenditures. That ship sailed when the Federal Reserve was founded. The Repubic’s coffin was nailed shut when fiat currency replaced silver and gold as legal tender.
Look back through our nation’s history. The power to oppress has been greatest when fiscal restraints are abandoned. Lincoln issued Greenbacks to fund the bloodiest of our wars. Almost immediately upon the Federal Reserve being chartered, we were at war in Europe and American dissenters were imprisoned, much like the J6 protesters have been.
If I could wave a magic wand that would hamstring the the worst excesses of Leviathan, I would make all debts payable in silver and gold. The Constitution requires it and we should demand it.
[…] violates UN rules for prisons, yet lobbies to retain seat on Human Rights Council BattleSwarm: Newest Sign of California’s Decline: Pirates, also, LinkSwarm for September 15 Behind The Black: Starship/Superheavy 2nd test launch likely […]
Ward off the next attack by stationing Dan Crenshaw near the mouth of the Oakland estuary. With a bicorn hat and cutlass, he would strike fear into the hearts of modern marina marauders.
It’s ironic that our concept of vigilantism in the United States is largely drawn from the “Committee of Vigilance” instituted in the 19th century in, of all places, San Fransicko.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vigilance
This ends 2 ways. First is the country somehow politically finds the social technology to deal with this issue. Second is people are just going to start shooting. This is ludicrous.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am no longer willing to testify against anyone defending themselves under any circumstance against these people. If selected for jury duty I will not serve. If selected for a jury I will work to nullify any outcome that seeks to penalize a man for defending his home, whether a boat or not. Let justice be done though the heavens fall.
isn’t this the purview of the Coast Guard? Piracy in US waters. Interesting times.
Wages of sin, etc.
You want license? You want there to be “no rules”? Anarchy? This is pretty much what you get.
California had paradise. The electorate got complacent, fell for the siren song of the New Age left that said rules wuz fur dummies. Now they know.
Where this really got started was Prop. 13. You could see it in how that got reacted to by the voters… They fell for a quick-and-dirty “Let’s starve government instead of doing the hard work of dealing with corrupt politicians…” that Howard Jarvis and his ilk came up with. “Starve government…” Yeah. Right. Like that has ever worked. You turn off the tax taps, leaving the same corruptocrat assholes in charge? What do you get? Precisely what California got, in terms of diverted funds, ever-increasing fees, and all the like. The real problem was the cancerous politicians running the place, and Prop. 13 never addressed that. It was fantasy-land thinking that didn’t actually address the problem, which was the people running the place.
Today’s California is a direct legacy of that BS, as are a lot of states. “Will of the People”? Yeah; right–How many voter-approved initiatives are ignored by the state, like the anti-affirmative action one? Only in California. And, Oregon. And, Washington…
The real problem in all three states is that the electorate hasn’t held any of the politicians accountable. That day will likely come, and it’ll be very ugly.
The purpose of the police is NOT to “prevent crime”, or to “protect the citizens”. Since nobody can predict with sufficient accuracy when and where the rabid dogs of society will strike, the best the police can do is pick up the pieces, and track down and arrest the criminals. One of their primary functions in doing so is to protect the criminals from the outrage of the citizenry.
The natural impulse of someone that has been a victim of violent crime is to strike back at the criminal. One of the problems with this is that during a time of such emotional upheaval the urge is to use overwhelming violence in response to the crime which may not always be justified. Had someone actually caught the criminals vandalizing their garage their first impulse might have been to smash to shards both of their elbows so that they’d never be able to spray-paint again (or eat, or wipe their butts, etc.).
What they’ll get by continuing to condone criminals through lack of arrest and prosecution will be some form of vigilante action, which I personally believe is the collectivist/statist/authoritarian goal. They’ll use it as an excuse to (attempt) to disarm the citizens. The other issue is that darned near every crime will now carry the death penalty, since once you’ve defended your life and property, YOU are now the “criminal”…can’t turn ’em over to the police, can’t let ’em go (fear of retaliation if nothing else).
In several areas in which I’ve lived there has been the “3S” rule, which is usually read to be “Shoot, shovel, and shut up”. If things keep getting worse on an ocean-front, I’m guessing that this will be turned into “Shoot, sink, and shut up”. A few well-chosen rocks and some wire…
Please note that I am NOT suggesting this is a legal, good, or proper course of action, since I’d MUCH rather live in a society that still exists with rule of law. But it appears to be where we are being driven by the left-wing lunatics.
@Blackwing1 wrote “I’d MUCH rather live in a society that still exists with rule of law”.
I, too. But such a society requires a high degree of social trust, which requires a high degree of conformity to a common set of values. America is no longer that. Sure, we had quite a bit of “diversity” in the past, but it was more variety (variations on a common theme: European, some variety of Christian, culturally derived from Rome, etc.) than today’s “everyone from everywhere believing everything” nonsense.
The less we have in common, the worse we get along. “Diversity” is death to a community.
“Where this really got started was Prop. 13.”
Steven Moore @ Cato institute: “Did Proposition 13 really starve state and local services? Hardly. In real dollars, California’s budget climbed from $55 billion in 1980 to $97 billion in 1992 — a 75 percent increase above inflation! Only in government would a 75 percent real spending hike be considered inadequate and neglectful. What about revenues? In the 1980s state tax revenues as a share of Californian’s incomes actually rose — from 11 to 12 percent.“
The argument that Californians are under taxed is without merit.
Malthus, I don’t think you got the point I was making. Prop 13 wasn’t a solution, because the real problem wasn’t the taxes. It was the assholes levying them, and the spending they demanded.
They thought they’d cut off the money; they failed to comprehend that the pols would just reallocate other funds and find new revenue sources, like cutting services.
The bureaucracy leapt into helping them, too, because they resented the proles for daring to resist their own fleecing. Prop 13 was a solution that solved nothing. They fundamentally misidentified the pathology they were fighting.
Same with term limits. The fact that the incumbent seems to always win? That’s the fault of the voters; they don’t discipline their politicians at all, so the pols feel like nature’s noblemen and become ohsoveryarrogant…
“For every thousand men chopping at the branches of evil there is one man striking at the root.”
The phrase Latin phrase “radix maloram” (root of evil, used to describe money love) is where we derive the English term “root” (cf.w/ the root crop “radish”). “Radix” is the root word of “radical” also.
I am a radical. It takes greater commitment to strike the root than to trim a few branches. Proposition 13 trimmed a branch. This is more than Uniparty Republicans seem willing to do.
I remain committed to restoring the Founder’s Republic but despise no man who makes an effort, no matter how feeble, to restrain Leviathan while I work away from a different angle. The weary need encouragement, not condemnation.
You miss what I was saying, Malthus. The point is, you don’t put a stop to tyrants and rentiers by striking at them indirectly, which is what Prop 13 tried to do. The real hard work to be done was putting the pols on notice that they were being watched, and would pay the price for stepping over the limits. The electorate wanted a quick and easy gimmick; they didn’t want to do the hard work of weeding out the bad pols. So, Prop 13 turned into what it was… A distorting waste of time.
I dunno how you rein in politicians, short of having some kind of assassin’s guild you put to work when enough people get pissed-off. Nothing we’ve tried seems to work… You do term limits, and the embedded politicians just move to lobbying among the newly-elected naifs for their power.
I honestly think that what needs to happen is a codification of the Founder’s ideal, where you’d have a successful career doing something else, and perform a term or two in political office. They did not foresee a professional political class like ours.
[…] STATE BLUES: Newest Sign of California’s Decline: Pirates. “The rule of law continues to decline all across California. Today’s case in point: Oakland […]
we invited them in, then we’re surprised when they go back to work…
“Ward off the next attack by stationing Dan Crenshaw near the mouth of the Oakland estuary. With a bicorn hat and cutlass, he would strike fear into the hearts of modern marina marauders.”
Eyepatch McCain is busy enriching himself via insider trading….
In the pre-internet days of computer communications, someone published a framework (quickly suppressed) of a global betting pool, wherein a name and a number of times-of-death would be posted, bets would be placed, and winners would be paid off, all through supposedly untraceable means. The theory was that the larger the pool (the more “popular” the prospective decedent), the more likely that one bet would “pay off” bigly, to the point that it could profit somebody to make one of the predictions come true. Just a memory of a more innocent time. ;-)
Blackwing1: “One of the problems with this is that during a time of such emotional upheaval the urge is to use overwhelming violence in response to the crime which may not always be justified. Had someone actually caught the criminals vandalizing their garage their first impulse might have been to smash to shards both of their elbows so that they’d never be able to spray-paint again (or eat, or wipe their butts, etc.).”
What about that punishment strikes you as unjustified?
Graffiti is basically gangs marking out their territories, much as wolves do by pissing on everything. It’s meant for the same purpose; keeping the prey terrorized, and signaling territory ownership to other predators.
It’s usually done by the footsoldiers and the wannabes. I don’t see a huge problem with crippling the little bastards for life; they’re part of the ecosystem, and in a non-carceral state, you either kill them or you cripple them. Ya want “no prisons”, well… That’s the price. Coming one way or another, as people lose their touching faith in the “just-us” system the leftoids have taken over.
I’d love to see someone with the balls to compare/contrast the prosecution and sentencing between say, Antifa-positive graffiti and someone spray-painting “All Lives Matter” on an abortion clinic…
Oakland Bay? Its the San Francisco Bay. Oakland is a city on the east side of the SF Bay. https://www.bing.com/maps?cp=37.780583%7E-122.246926&lvl=15.5&style=a
Not a big fan of the Muslims, but they do deal with petty crime effectively. 1st offense they chop your right hand off, forever identifying you as unclean. Second offense, they cut off your head, oh and by the way, punishment happens that week. So where does cruel and unusual lie? Is it cruel and unusual to make us live in crime riddled streets? To allow the afflicting of criminal acts on our weak and elderly? We may need to re-think criminal justice in this country before too much longer.
Greg, you’ve obviously missed the real constituency of the Democratic Party and their flying monkeys throughout society. It ain’t you and me; it’s the criminal and the deviant perverts that they serve.
If you go back and look, historically? Ain’t none of this accidental or by chance. They started dismantling their loathed “boogie” targets back in the 1950s. We’re in the end-game, now.
It will be educational to observe whether or not the apathetic “silent majority” goes into the woodchipper without flopping around and fighting the gaff. I honestly don’t see how cities like Portland or Seattle come back, absent truly heroic effort that nobody seems to have the moral fortitude to make.
I never thought things would get this far, before people wised up, but here we are. Morons, the lot of them…
“I dunno how you rein in politicians, short of having some kind of assassin’s guild…”
Then how do you rein in the assassins?
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.—James Madison
Proposition 13 had the right idea. To control the government it is first necessary to limit their expenditures. That ship sailed when the Federal Reserve was founded. The Repubic’s coffin was nailed shut when fiat currency replaced silver and gold as legal tender.
Look back through our nation’s history. The power to oppress has been greatest when fiscal restraints are abandoned. Lincoln issued Greenbacks to fund the bloodiest of our wars. Almost immediately upon the Federal Reserve being chartered, we were at war in Europe and American dissenters were imprisoned, much like the J6 protesters have been.
If I could wave a magic wand that would hamstring the the worst excesses of Leviathan, I would make all debts payable in silver and gold. The Constitution requires it and we should demand it.
[…] violates UN rules for prisons, yet lobbies to retain seat on Human Rights Council BattleSwarm: Newest Sign of California’s Decline: Pirates, also, LinkSwarm for September 15 Behind The Black: Starship/Superheavy 2nd test launch likely […]
@Malthus, who said:
“Then how do you rein in the assassins?”
No idea. None.
But, with the current crop of politicians we suffer under? I’m willing to run the experiment and see…
Frank Herbert had a theory on how to have a tolerable level of negative feedback…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tactful_Saboteur
Oakland? Brings to mind Jack London’s Tales of the Fish Patrol.
I foresee the issuance of Letters of Mark and Reprisal in the near future.