That’s a still from cell phone video of a Aaron Kreag (with the pistol on the right) stopping Macmichael Nwaiwu (in the red car) from beating a woman who wasn’t named in the story. Kreag told reporters “This large gentleman just pounding on this lady, closed fist you know multiple times and heavy heavy elbows to the face and neck.” So Kreag, who had been out on a date with his wife, pulled out his concealed carry, pointed it at Nwaiwu, and ordered him to stop assaulting the woman in the car with him.
The story is an interesting counterpoint to concerns that civilians with concealed carry permits would turn the United States into the Wild West. As it turns out, the kinds of folks who go through the process of getting a concealed carry permit are not the kind of folks who tend to be trigger-happy, for the most part. It’s just also an interesting case-study in real-life, civilian gun usage. The tensest part of the video, in my mind, is when the cops show up. When you’re the one holding a drawn handgun and the cops roll up, expect to have one pointed at you in return, which is exactly what happened to Kreag. He put down his gun, surrendered, and got cuffed while the cops sorted out what was going on with bystanders.
Within a few minutes, however, he was released and Nwaiwu was in handcuffs. Still, I imagine those initial seconds when the cops drew on Kreag had to be nerve-wracking. It’s what Kreag was expecting, however, and it’s what all concealed carry holders expect to go through if they ever do need to draw their weapon (let alone fire) in the defensive of themselves or others.
A recent online debate involving Nathaniel (and me to a much, much lesser extent) brought up corporate income tax.[ref]I wrote briefly about the corporate income tax at The Slow Hunch (a couple times).[/ref] It reminded me of this recent article in the Wall Street Journal. The author lists ten reasons to abolish it altogether:
The “engine of tax complexity disappears. And with it disappears an army of lobbyists in Washington working to get favorable tax treatment for corporations.”
“With no corporate income tax, management would concentrate on what is now pretax profits, an artifact of actual wealth creation.”
“[T]here would be no reason to tax dividends at lower rates to compensate for the fact that they now are paid out of after-tax profits.”
Due to increased profits, “corporations would increase both dividends and investment in plant and equipment, with very positive effects for the economy as a whole and increased revenue to the government through the personal income tax.”
The “stock prices…would rise substantially, inducing a wealth effect as people see their 401(k)s and mutual funds rising in value.”
“[T]he distinction between for-profit and nonprofit corporations would disappear.”
“[M]uch of the $2 trillion of foreign earnings, now kept abroad to avoid being taxed when repatriated, would flow into this country.”
With no corporate income tax, “foreign corporations would flock to invest here…”
In order to compete, foreign countries “would be forced to lower or eliminate their own corporate income taxes, increasing domestic corporate profits and thus domestic investment and personal income…”
Finally, “eliminating the corporate income tax would deal a blow to crony capitalism.”
According to the White House, the FBI, and lots of other folks who really should be pretty sure of these things before making statements or taking action, North Korea was behind the infamous Sony hacks that have been in the news for most of the end of 2014. Apparently, the US was confident enough to retaliate by shutting down Internet to the entire country:
North Korea called U.S. President Barack Obama a “monkey” and blamed Washington on Saturday for Internet outages it has experienced during a confrontation with the United States over the hacking of the film studio Sony Pictures. The National Defense Commission, the North’s ruling body chaired by state leader Kim Jong Un, said Obama was responsible for Sony’s belated decision to release the action comedy “The Interview,” which depicts a plot to assassinate Kim.
And yet, as I’ve been paying attention to the story I am not convinced that we’ve got the write villain. It’s articles like this one that, as far as I can tell, make the strong case that the hack was actually an inside job pulled off primarily by disgruntled ex-employees of Sony itself. One of the first things to point out, for example, is that the hackers showed absolutely zero interest in “The Interview” until after media reports arose alleging a possible North Korean connection. Only at that point did the hackers make an issue out of it, as though taking a convenient opportunity to throw researchers on the wrong track.
Other reasons to think that North Korea might not have been to blame? Logs indicate that files were transferred at a rate that you would only get by physically plugging a device into the server to download files, not by moving them over the Internet. Specific IP addresses and user credentials were known to the hackers ahead of time, not discovered during preliminary hacks. Linguistic examination of online communication by the hackers (Guardians of Peace or GOP) suggests they are native Russian speakers, not native Korean or English speakers.
The leading theory, from where I’m standing, is that an angry, laid-off worker with tech skills (security researchers believe they have identified her individually) teamed up with the kind of hackers who resent Sony for attacking the Pirate Bay and other anti-piracy measures and maybe some friends left inside the company to pull off the hack. Why would the government get it wrong? Well, it’s not like it’s the kind of thing that North Korea wouldn’t or couldn’t do, so I don’t think it was a stupid mistake or a conspiracy theory or anything. But I don’t have a lot of confidence in the federal government’s ability to do this kind of analysis correctly and even less confidence in their ability to correct a mistaken impression once it takes hold at a senior level. Would you want to be the one who told the President he’d gone public with bad intel?
On the other hand, I can’t really think of a worse possible reason to start World War III than mistaken accusations about hacking a movie studio, so I really do hope they figure this one out.
The only time I got into a discussion with Damon Linker was a rather heated exchange a month or two back about an article he’d written about ISIS. I still think that was a bad article of his (and, since it didn’t make his list of bad pieces from 2014, I gather he still thinks it was a good article), but I was disappointed that it was our only contact since he’s written several articles that I thought were quite good. In fact, I wrote about one of them earlier this month.
I say “in some ways” because what Damon Linker thinks he got wrong is not the same as what I think Damon Linker got wrong. But that’s not that point. The point is that anyone writing an article about their missteps from the prior year is setting a healthy example of the rest of us. It’s a little late in the year for me to do a review of my own 2014 writings, but, in exactly one year, you can expect to read an article about what Nathaniel Givens got wrong in 2015.
In the meantime? Ironically, perhaps, the fact that I’ve got a plan to review my own mistakes makes me less worried about making them. I mean look: trying not to make mistakes is kind of a dumb goal. You can try to be careful. You can try to work hard. You can try to be honest. Those things are in your control. But, once you’ve done those things, whether or not you’re right or wrong is up to luck and fate. By planning on writing a piece about my own mistakes, I’m reminding myself that it’s just another one of those things that I can write about and analyze, not some deeply personal assessment of my value as a human being.[ref]Again, this is only after taking into account sincere efforts to be accurate and honest, of course.[/ref] So yeah: pressure’s off. Time to go to work for 2015.
Though we’re a couple days past Christmas, I think this message is worth carrying into the New Year. Reason highlights the soldiers who basically ended WWI for a couple weeks during Christmas 1914. It was in the midst of this truce that one solider wrote, “Never…was I so keenly aware of the insanity of war.” Implicitly recognizing the evils of the political machine in contrast to the basic decency within us all, truce participant Sir H. Kingsley Wood of the British House of Commons commented, “I…came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired.” A British lieutenant wrote home about the truce, describing the German soldiers who helped the British bury their dead as “extraordinarily fine men.”
The article explains,
The truce was a series of unofficial and widespread cease-fires that extended over two weeks. The truce between mostly British and German troops centered on the Western Front, defined by lines of trenches that stretched across France from the North Sea to the border of Switzerland. The trenches were often close enough for the combatants to exchange shouted words and to smell food their adversaries were cooking.
One German soldier
reported that hymns and Christmas songs were being sung in both trenches. German troops foraged for Christmas trees that they placed in plain view on the parapets of their trenches. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, so much interaction had occurred between the British and Germans that Brigadier General G.T. Forrestier-Walker had officially forbidden fraternization.
…Some officers threatened to court-martial or even to shoot those who fraternized, but the threats were generally ignored. Other officers mingled with enemies of similar rank. The Germans reportedly led the way, coming out of their trenches and moving unarmed toward the British. Soldiers exchanged chocolates, cigars, and compared news reports. They buried the dead, some of whom had lain for months, with each side often helping the other dig graves. At its height, unofficial ceasefires were estimated to have occurred along half of the British line. As many as 100,000 British and German troops took part. On Christmas morning, the dead had been buried, the wounded retrieved and the “no man’s land” between the trenches was quiet except for the sound of Christmas carols, especially “Silent Night.”
Pressure and threats of disciplinary action from the high ranks began to diminish to fraternization until the truce finally petered out. As the article concludes,
War is against the self-interest of average people who suffer not only from its horrors but also from its political fallout. Those who benefit from both are the ones who threaten to shoot those who lay down their guns: politicians, commanders and warmongers who profit financially. But even the powerful and the elite cannot always extinguish “peace on earth, goodwill toward men,” even in the midst of deadly battle.
Earlier this morning, a tense standoff in Australia ended in gunfire. A single hostage-taker initially held 17 hostages, of whom 12 had been released. When police heard gunfire inside the building, they responded immediately. The hostage taker and two hostages are dead. Three people are injured, including one police officer. All this info comes from an ABC News article, which also includes an apparent connection to radical Islam:
Two people inside the cafe were seen holding up a flag with Arabic writing on it that has been used by extremists in the past — raising fears that a terror attack was unfolding in Australia’s largest city.
Also this morning, I found an article with the headline: Australians Just Showed the World Exactly How to Respond to Terrorism With #IllRideWithYou. The article describes the origins of the #IllRideWithYou hashtag in which Australians are volunteering to accompany Muslims who wish to wear their religious clothes (e.g. hijab) on public transportation but are afraid of animosity or retaliation in the wake of the hostage crisis. The pictures–and the sentiment behind them–are noble and touching.
Read the bottom one first.
I agree with the idea of #IllRideWithYou. Even if you take–simply for the sake of argument–the strong and controversial position that the scripture or theology of Islam tend towards violence, it does not follow that all Muslims are violent. So, even in this extreme case, the correct response to peaceful, law-abiding Muslims is support and compassion.
But I do not agree with the headline. This is not the one true correct way to respond to terrorism. There are two correct responses. #IllRideWithYou is one half. Here’s what the other half looks like:
That photo[ref]from coverage at USA Today[/ref] shows one of the hostages running into the arms of a police officer moments after escaping the chocolate store through a side entrance. As lovely, as beautiful, and as necessary as the compassionate outreach of Australian commuters may be, none of that was what you would have been praying for if you were a hostage or had a family member held hostage in that store. There is also bravery and even love in the willingness to use violence–and be subject to the threat of violence–in lawful defense of the innocent.
A courageous and just society needs both of these responses. Not just one or the other.
This fits very nicely with Walker’s post from earlier today. He pointed out an article by Hernando de Soto in the WSJ arguing that–in the long run–you overcome terrorism not just with dronestrikes but also with economic development that gives people a better life.[ref]Walker and I wrote about this connection between love and economics for the journal SquareTwo: “No Poor Among Them”: Global Poverty, Free Markets, and the “Fourfold” Mission[/ref] As coldly calculating as the discipline of economics and the emphasis on free markets may appear, a focus on economic liberty and investment and development is really nothing but a sincere and informed desire for other humans to prosper and draw closer to us in webs of trade, communication, mutual interest, and interdependence.
Love of fellow man doesn’t always look like what we expect it to. Sometimes it comes in the form of sympathetic hashtags. Sometimes it wears body armor and wields automatic weapons. And sometimes it spouts statistics, theories, and economic jargon. We need to broaden our concept of what it means to love if we are to love as expansively as these dark times require of us.
As the U.S. moves into a new theater of the war on terror, it will miss its best chance to beat back Islamic State and other radical groups in the Middle East if it doesn’t deploy a crucial but little-used weapon: an aggressive agenda for economic empowerment. Right now, all we hear about are airstrikes and military maneuvers—which is to be expected when facing down thugs bent on mayhem and destruction.
But if the goal is not only to degrade what President Barack Obama rightly calls Islamic State’s “network of death” but to make it impossible for radical leaders to recruit terrorists in the first place, the West must learn a simple lesson: Economic hope is the only way to win the battle for the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.
So begins Hernando de Soto’s WSJ piece on economic freedom as a way to combat terrorism. He tells the fascinating story of his home country Peru and how it defeated the terrorist group Shining Path through a “new, more accessible legal framework in which to run businesses, make contracts and borrow—spurring an unprecedented rise in living standards.”
A recent publication by the Chicago Fed looks at skill gaps in numeracy, literacy, problem-solving, and non-cognitive skills and their relation to income mobility. Perhaps surprisingly (perhaps not), the author found
that inequality in an index of “non-cognitive skills” explains as much or more of the variation in intergenerational mobility than inequality in traditional measures of cognitive skills such as numeracy, literacy, and problem solving. An emerging line of research has argued that personality traits such as perseverance and grit play an important role in socioeconomic success. These results are consistent with the idea that the large gaps in skills in the U.S. population are part of what is driving both higher inequality and lower intergenerational mobility.
Hypersensitivity is a pernicious way to win a debate: if you can brand an argument as offensive/harmful, then you never have to respond it. Trolling is a destructive response to that tactic: provoking more and more outrage undermines the credibility of your opponent. These are, I think, the twin central dysfunctions of political debate today, and that’s what I decided to write about for Times and Seasons this morning.
I’ve relied on economist Mark Perry before regarding inequality and demographics. Not much has changed since last year. As Perry summarizes,
Specifically, high-income households have a greater average number of income-earners than households in lower-income quintiles, and individuals in high income households are far more likely than individuals in low-income households to be well-educated, married, working full-time, and in their prime earning years. In contrast, individuals in lower-income households are far more likely than their counterparts in higher-income households to be less-educated, working part-time, either very young (under 35 years) or very old (over 65 years), and living in single-parent households.
The good news is that the key demographic factors that explain differences in household income are not fixed over our lifetimes and are largely under our control (e.g. staying in school and graduating, getting and staying married, etc.), which means that individuals and households are not destined to remain in a single income quintile forever. Fortunately, studies that track people over time indicate that individuals and households move up and down the income quintiles over their lifetimes, as the key demographic variables highlighted above change…
See Perry’s post for a more in-depth look at the numbers.
