Why the pro-illegal lobby owns Wednesday’s murder in San Francisco

Masters of non-compliance. (Image: AP via deadline.info)

Assuming that 45-year-old Francisco Sanchez is the right suspect, in the apparently random murder of Kathryn Steinle on Wednesday, 1 July, in San Francisco – and Sanchez is, of course, innocent until proven guilty – the case against lawless pro-illegal policies will be clear-cut.

The failure of Democrats and Republicans in Washington to cut off illegal entry across America’s southern border is why Sanchez was here in the first place.  He’s here illegally, and he has already been deported five times.

He also has seven felony convictions in three different states (Arizona, Oregon, and Texas).  According to the Daily Mail and NBC San Jose, he has “a slew of phony birth dates and aliases.” This all no doubt has something to do with why he’s been deported five times.

Yet he keeps getting back in.  And here’s where the tale gets extra disgusting.

Federal regs II: State Dept’s new regs would transform the Internet beyond recognition

Rusty Weiss called to our attention Monday morning an update to “arms trafficking” regulations posted to the Federal Register last week by the State Department.  The National Rifle Association has sounded the alarm, having recognized quickly how these new regs would effectively shut down the exchange of information among gun enthusiasts on the web.

But the chokehold effect would be felt in other quarters as well.  This move by the State Department is an absolutely terrible idea across the board.  Even if it dealt with international trade in pork bellies or chicken parts, rather than arms, it should still be opposed strenuously on principle.

Its effect will be to make a tremendous chunk of what people talk about on the web every day subject to prior restraint, by, of all agencies, the State Department – or, potentially, other federal agencies, depending on topic.

Bruce/‘Caitlyn’ Jenner and the collapse of the Western mind

Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker.” (Image via bigthink.com)

There is no way to write comprehensively about a subject this big in one post, and I won’t try here.  I want to just highlight a few points that have struck me forcefully this week, as the spectacle of media fawning over Jenner – whom I will call XY Jenner – unfolds before us.

The first and most basic point is that we have a body of empirical knowledge that tells us XY Jenner is a human male, and that he cannot be made female.  If one day we will have the ability to manipulate DNA in such a way that that is possible, we don’t have it today.

The concepts of “gender,” and nature-vs.-nurture, are meaningful ones.  But the evidence of our eyes, and the sum total of our shared knowledge, tell us that male (XY) and female (XX) correlate powerfully with “man” and “woman,” to such a pervasive extent that there is no value for our lives in tossing that assumption aside.

MSM fail: Pope did NOT call Mahmoud Abbas an ‘angel of peace’; *UPDATE*, with double-down

(Image: AFP via La Stampa (IT))

Fueled by wire stories from AP and AFP, the mainstream media have been running with a headline that Pope Francis, during a meeting at the Vatican on Saturday 16 May, called Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas “an angel of peace.”

The problem: the pope did not call Abbas — aka the terrorist Abu Mazen — an “angel of peace.”

He did utter the words “angel of peace,” and he suggested that Abbas could or might be one.  In the context of the pope’s complete statement about the meeting, the implication was that Abbas could be an angel of peace if he resumed direct negotiations with Israel.

Why did Francis say the words “angel of peace” at all?  Because he was making a gift to Abbas of a medallion engraved with an image of the Angel of Peace.  The Vatican Insider feature of Italy’s La Stampa has this summary in its English version:

Dumbing debate down on the Mohammed cartoon contest and Jade Helm 15

The ticket price for joining the mainstream debates on many topics these days seems to be ritual ad hominem attacks.  Besides being unhelpful, this is evidence of profound societal illness.

The phenomenon isn’t confined to the left.  We see it more and more frequently from the right-that-ought-to-know-better – or, perhaps, the right-that-ought-to-have-more-backbone.  I wrote about one major instance of it last year during the crisis at the Bundy ranch, when conservative pundits whom we have counted on to bring logic and intellectual courage to public issues suffered “CLIF”:  complete loss of intellectual function.  They went from being able to talk about things like government limits and property rights to being unable to do anything except rail against Cliven Bundy.