Vin Suprynowicz

Word that ailing Cuban dictator, “president” Fidel Castro, has decided to step aside and turn over the reins of power to his younger brother (how democratic!) appears to be evoking some predictable nostalgia from America’s political left, which holds that Cuba is an economic basket case only because the United States viciously allows the island nation to trade with only 191 of the 192 member-states of the United Nations, on the pathetic pretext that Castro seized the properties of all foreign investors (not to mention all Cuban investors) in 1960 and still refuses to pay for them.

Yes, Castro and his acolyte, Che Guevara, are still revered as romantic camouflage-clad Robin Hoods in the leftist enclaves that spread from Washington to Boston and further colonize many a tenured American college faculty — just as the American left still ridicules the notion that Joseph Stalin maintained a huge Communist spy ring in the U.S. State Department and purposely murdered millions of his own people, instead insisting that 74 years of Russian peasant starvation were the result of “bad weather.” More »

I see where Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes has responded to the drive-by murder of a 15-year-old Palo Verde High School inmate by another one of Mr. Rullfes’ young charges not by admitting a failure of his own tutelage (the first responsibility of educators, surely, being to mold character), but instead by whining it’s difficult to prevent his young wards from shooting each other given today’s “easy access to guns” and television violence.

I’m not sure about the TV part — seems to me most of the drive-bys I’ve seen portrayed on the tube have concluded with the perpetrator going to jail, which Mr. Rulffes might explain to his young charges as “just like school only it doesn’t last as many years and you can’t take your boom-box.”

But as for the “easy access to guns” part, since the hoplophobes insist on referring to guns as “penis substitutes,” anyway (never explaining why any male but Hemingway’s Jake Barnes would need a “substitute,”) I await Mr. Rulffes explanation that some of his young darlings commit the crime of rape due to the currently excessive “easy access to penises.”

Just as it’s true that there would be fewer shootings if we “got rid of all the guns,” so would there doubtless be fewer rapes if we “got rid of all the penises.” But — as attractive as the scheme might seem to the disciples of Andrea Dworkin — I suspect there might be some hint of a civil rights problem with a society-wide program of penis removal, even though the right to keep and bear those organs is not protected as explicitly in the Constitution as the right to keep and bear arms of military usefulness.
The point, if I must connect the dots, is that only an infinitessimal percentage of those possessed of either, um, tool use it to commit a crime, so we might want to look beyond “easy availability” for an explanation of such behaviors.

Once again last week, all our overlapping “gun control” laws failed to work. On the other hand, if the young perpetrator had been taught proper gun safety on the school shooting range — such facilities were ubiquitous through the 1960s; I was taught safe supervised shooting at Eaglebrook in Massachusetts starting at age 12 — what are the chances this young killer would have remained so chillingly opaque to the likely consequence of his actions? More »

Struggling to close a $4.4 billion state government budget gap caused by excessive spending — as is usually the case, revenues continue to rise — Democratic Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer has proposed making New York’s illicit drug dealers pay a tax on their stashes. The new tax would apply to cocaine, heroin and marijuana, and could be paid by buying and affixing “tax stamps” to bags of dope.

The proposal has drawn a predictable wave of ridicule.

“I guess if it moves, he’ll tax it,” charged Republican state Sen. Martin J. Golden, who dubbed the proposal “the crack tax.” Other opponents told The Washington Post that because cocaine and weed would be subject to the new levies, it should more aptly be called “the crack-pot tax.”

“How do I explain to my 16-year-old son that we’re giving a certain legitimacy to marijuana, cocaine and heroin?” asked Golden, a former New York City police officer who represents a Brooklyn district. “Is prostitution next?”

Actually, at least 21 states, including Nevada, already have such seemingly hypocritical taxes in place. Nevada Revised Statute 372A, enacted in 1987, levies a tax of $100 per gram on marijuana and $1,000 per gram on other controlled substances — absurdly large multiples of the actually street prices of these plant extracts, equivalent to a tax of $40 to $80 on a gallon of milk. More »

More than 100 irate Las Vegas newcomers crowded into a meeting room at the Aliante Public Library on the evening of Feb. 13, jeering, heckling and throwing things at elected officials and Clark County staff invited to explain plans — 24 years in the works — to build a 900-acre shooting park in the empty desert north of town.

“Get it out of here! We don’t want it!” shouted resident Jeff Peters, who 14 months ago moved into a home in Carmel Canyon, a new subdivision about a mile from where the $64 million facility will be built.

The residents complained home-builders did not tell them the shooting park was planned when they bought their homes.

Jennifer Knight, a county spokeswoman, pointed out the county has held 18 public meetings since 2000 in which the park was discussed. Notices were sent to houses within a nearly 4,000-foot radius of the site in late 2005, and signs were posted on a road near the property, she said.

Those plans and meetings received prominent coverage in this newspaper — and not in the “fine print.” What else was the county supposed to try — sky-writing? More »

Last week, we again delved into John Taylor Gatto’s invaluable text “The Underground History of American Education,” citing his summary of the career of George Washington.

The point of Mr. Gatto — a former New York city and state (government) Teacher of the Year — when he summarizes the careers of men like Washington, Franklin, David Farragut, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie, is twofold. First, the careers of these men — by no means all child geniuses, by no means all the offspring of wealthy aristocrats — demonstrate that literacy, fame, and high character have often been achieved In America without the benefit of more than a few years’ formal schooling. That is to say, the insistence of today’s educrats that anyone deprived of a full 12 years locked up in their compulsory propaganda camps is doomed to a lifetime as an illiterate loser is self-promoting nonsense from those anxious to perpetuate the largest make-work “jobs” program in history.

But Mr. Gatto then goes much further. He argues careers like those of Washington and Edison and Carnegie would not have been possible — those great Americans would never have gained the life skills necessary — had they been locked away in a government school for a dozen years. More »

Diana Bickel is upset with the east side jewelry store called Tower of Jewels, at 896 E. Sahara Ave. She contends a one-carat engagement diamond which jewelers at the store set in a ring at her behest proceeded to fall out of its setting one month later.

Tower of Jewels attorney Aaron Maurice says store owner Jack Weinstein believed the dispute had been resolved through the offices of the Better Business Bureau — Ms. Bickel was supposed to get a discount on another diamond.

But the merits of the dispute aren’t important. What’s important is that Ms. Bickel decided to start picketing the store last month, carrying signs that read “I have a problem with Tower Jewels” and “I want my cash back Jack.”

Last month, District Court Judge Susan Johnson looked into the ownership of the sidewalk in question, which sits on the border between Clark County and the city of Las Vegas. On Jan. 22, her honor ruled the sidewalk belongs to the business and issued a restraining order, commanding Ms. Bickel to stop exercising her First Amendment rights to free speech on the sidewalk in front of the store. More »

George Washington remains the greatest man of our age. But he was no genius.

That our children don’t really know of Washington’s greatness is a devastating indictment of our current schools. As little as a century ago, American children memorized the Farewell Address, with its stern warning against “entangling European alliances.” Why do you suppose that’s now gone? Too many big words?

Washington’s officers wanted to march on the capital for their back pay and install him as king. He pulled on his eyeglasses and declined. I have met a few modern politicians who might have had the decency and humility to turn down such a serious offer: George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Mo Udall. But I have trouble visualizing any of them also winning the action at Trenton, let alone Monmouth.

Monmouth receives little attention in the history books, since it was “indecisive.” The Brits were withdrawing from Philadelphia to New York. Washington was determined to make his presence felt. But he arrived on the scene to find General Charles Lee — we will be kind and call the man who requested the honor of command merely incompetent and confused — withdrawing in disarray. Witnesses report Washington halted the retreat by mere strength of personality but then sat his horse for some seconds, dumbstruck, as his men waited to see what he would do. This was not some desperate raid, like Trenton. A major battle was in the offing; Washington’s troops had just been found running the wrong way; he was suddenly in personal command, and he had not even surveyed the ground.

Then, that indomitable spirit took command. As Teddy Roosevelt Jr. was to do when he found himself on the wrong beach in Normandy 166 years later, the general decided to start the battle right where he was. For no better reason than because no one would dare disappoint Washington himself, an army that had been on the verge of rout lined up as directed, stood their ground, and killed the advancing infantry of the greatest army in the world all day in the hundred-degree heat.

When it was finally dark enough the Brits withdrew — leaving the much-ridiculed “Yankee Doodles” in possession of the field, and the whole of New Jersey.

Washington didn’t need any French fleet that day.

Yet to many of his contemporaries Washington was a mere hick, and not a particularly bright one. John Adams called him “too illiterate, too unlearned, too unread for his station and reputation.”

Washington’s father died when he was 11. His older brother got everything. Determined to make it on his own, George started with nothing. More »

In their private lives — what today we would call “lifestyle choices” — there’s a tradition in America and particularly here in the West to let our neighbors alone, in hopes of being let alone, ourselves.

An imperfect tradition, but one in which we continue to make progress.

One of the great exceptions is in those areas where the “Big Brother” statists can argue (and do) “That particular lifestyle choice increases collective medical costs for all of us, so it has to be harshly discouraged” — by taxes and restrictions at first, followed by prohibition if and when they can get away with it.

First they tried alcohol, opium, marijuana and cocaine. Then tobacco. How about seat belts? Motorcycle helmets?

Proposals to limit restaurant portions and ingredients by law — even to bar restaurants from serving fat people, outright — were at first offered as absurd parodies, but are now at hand.

There are two problems. First, the argument that the majority, through the armed force of government, has a moral right to restrict our neighbors’ behavior due to our “collective responsibility” to pay their medical bills, is simply wrong.

Moral and religious leaders can argue we have a MORAL responsibility to help our less fortunate relatives or parishioners or neighbors. Indeed, American hospitals since their founding have had charity wards; nor is anyone in dire need of care turned away from any American emergency room, despite cynical moaning about the supposed millions of Americans “without medical care.”

But that doesn’t mean the state has a LEGAL right to seize money from our paychecks to treat the drunken and the indolent. That’s enforced collectivism — anathema to any free people. (It also encourages drunkenness and indolence, as we encourage anything that we subsidize.) More »

In the past, former President Bill Clinton has been frank enough to admit that his party and administration lost momentum and public support — eventually, control of Congress — by promoting radical left-wing agendas far beyond what most Americans will easily tolerate.

The former president specifically attributed the loss of Congress in 1994 to the ill-considered efforts of the far-left wing of his party to further restrict lawful gun ownership. But before that, there was another issue the revealed to the public just how far out in “left” field some of those surrounding President Clinton really were. And that issue was socialized medicine.

American collectivists have learned not to call it that, any more. Instead, they use euphemisms like “single payer” — as though they seek to hold some giant lottery in which a Yazoo City garage mechanic from named Billy Bob Bufus would be selected to reach into his coveralls and pay everybody else’s medical bills for a year.

But that’s not the “single payer” they really have in mind, of course. They want every doctor to work for the government — the system the causes even devoutly socialist legislators to flee France for medical care in the United States when their own lives are at risk, the system that reduced male life expectancies in Russia below 50. More »

Hundreds of years ago, banks and insurance companies — the businesses are related; both need to quantify risk — went belly-up fairly often. Folks could be left in the lurch.

Most consumers probably assume that can’t happen today because of government regulation. Indeed, regulatory standards may have helped. Though it could be argued a consumer presumption that “Nothing can possibly go wrong” presents a new , counterbalancing danger.

But the main reason such companies now do a better job of setting their premiums and interest charges to earn respectable returns while staying competitive is something else entirely: actuaries.

Hundreds of years ago, how did an insurer judge the risk that a merchant ship would sink? If two of the last 20 ships had gone missing, he might assume the risk was 10 percent, and set his rates accordingly. If three of the next six ships sank, he went bankrupt.

Today’s actuaries have gathered a whole lot more data. Working with bigger numbers, they can give bankers a far more precise estimate of how many borrowers will default. Rates are then set to show a competitive profit despite that anticipated failure rate.

But now imagine a new factor is inserted in the equation. Instead of courts and judges working as neutral referees in the enforcement of those written loan contracts, judges presiding over bankruptcy cases are suddenly empowered to play Santa Claus. More »