French prisons breeding grounds of jihadism

What is going wrong in France's prisons? - Telegraph - Harriet Alexander:

January 17, 2015 - "Mohamed Merah, the 2012 Toulouse attacker, moved from being a wild petty delinquent to a hardened jihadist while behind bars, and on his release travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to train for jihad. He returned to France and murdered seven soldiers and Jewish civilians.

"Mehdi Nemouche, author of the May murder of four people in Brussels, was also radicalised in prison – travelling to Syria when he was freed and then coming back to attack the Jewish museum.

"Chérif Kouachi was already involved in jihadi circles when he went to prison, and found the experience a Petri dish for his extreme views. Coulibaly, like Merah and Nemouche, went in a simple delinquent from the banlieus, but came out a dangerous Islamist.

"What is going on in France’s prisons?

"Of the 67,500 people currently behind bars in France, it is estimated that 70 per cent are Muslim – when they comprise only eight per cent of the French public. It is illegal under France’s strict laicity laws to count the number of Muslim prisoners, but experts agree that the figure is an accurate average – with some prisons, like those near Paris and Marseille, seeing an even higher percentage....

"French authorities state that 283 people are currently in prison for terrorism, of whom 152 are classed as dangerous Islamists. Sixty of them – almost all incarcerated in Paris – are deemed particularly dangerous.

"France is the country in Europe which has the highest Muslim population, and has also seen the highest number of people - estimated by the Brookings Institute this month at over 900 - travelling to Syria to join Islamic State....

"On the front line is Mohamed Boina M’Koubou, imam inside Fleury-Merogis – the prison where Kouachi and Coulibaly were both pushed towards extremist views.... He said that when he arrived in 2004 at Fleury-Merogis – a vast concrete pentagon, 20 miles south of the centre of Paris – there was no dedicated space for Muslims to pray, which emphasised the feeling of discrimination that the prisoners felt....

"Mr Boina attends prison twice a week, for an hour or two. He teaches prisoners how to read the Koran or talks to them about Islam. He also shows them how to pray, and follow the pillars of Islam.... Mainly he works with the young, aged 14 to 35.

"'Some of them leave prison as grown men. They regret what they have done'... But some, he added, do not find leaving prison easy. 'They can’t survive like that for long if society doesn’t help them,' he said. 'If they find nothing out there for them, they will slip back into bad ways.'

"One such prisoner was Coulibaly, who predicted his own return to a life of crime when he left behind Fleury-Merogis, having spent seven months in the same wing as Chérif Kouachi and hardened Islamist Beghal.

"Behind bars for armed robbery – one of his many sejours at Fleury – he filmed life inside with a secret camera, footage from which was used in an April 2009 documentary. It showed the violence of life in Europe’s largest prison – but also the ingenuity; food was cooked on improvised stoves, marijuana was given to the guards to keep them on side, and messages were passed from cell to cell with “Yo Yos”, plastic bottles swung between bars on a ripped strip of a bed sheet.

"'It’s a school of delinquency,' said one of the inmates."

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11352268/What-is-going-wrong-in-Frances-prisons.html
'via Blog this'

Meet the "brutalists" (I): Hans-Hermann Hoppe

A Realistic Libertarianism - LewRockwellLewRockwell.com - Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

September 30, 2014 - "Psychologically or sociologically, the attraction of non-discrimination policies to libertarians can be explained by the fact that an over-proportionally large number of libertarians are misfits or simply odd – or to use Rothbard’s description,  'hedonists, libertines, immoralists, militant enemies of religion …., moochers, scamsters, and petty crooks and racketeers' – who became attracted to libertarianism because of its alleged ‘tolerance’ toward misfits and outliers, and who now want to use it as a vehicle to free themselves from all discrimination typically, in everyday life, dished out to their likes....

""From that vantage point, the ‘victim’ groups and their ‘victimizers’ are easily identified. As it turns out, ‘victims’ make up the vast majority of mankind. Everyone and every conceivable group is a ‘victim,’ except that small part of mankind composed of white (including northern Asian) heterosexual males, living traditional, bourgeois family lives....

"While this view of human history strikes one as bizarre in light of the amazing civilizational achievements originating from precisely this minority group of ‘victimizers,’ it coincides almost completely with the victimology also propagated by cultural Marxists....

"You, you small group of ‘victimizers,’ must always be especially ‘nice,’ forgiving, and inclusive vis-a-vis all members of the vast majority of ‘victims,’ i.e., the long and familiar list of everyone except white, heterosexual males! And as for enforcement: All ‘victimizers’ not demonstrating proper respect to some victim-class member, i.e., victimizers who are ‘nasty,’ unforgiving or exclusive or who say ‘nasty’ or disrespectful things about them, must be publicly shunned, humiliated, and shamed into obedience!

"Why should anyone be particularly nice to anyone else – apart from respecting ones’ respective private property rights in certain specified physical means (goods)? To be nice is a deliberate action and takes an effort, like all actions do. There are opportunity costs.... Time devoted to ‘niceness to others’ is time lost to do other, possibly more worthwhile things ... in rewarding the vast majority of ‘victims’ with extra love, care and attention, one accomplishes precisely this: less time and effort is devoted to exhibiting nasty behavior toward those actually most deserving of it. The power of the State will not be weakened by universal ‘niceness,’ then, but strengthened.

"And why is it in particular the small minority of white, heterosexual males, and especially its most successful members that owes some extra-kindness to the vast majority of all other people? Why not the other way around? After all, most if not all technical inventions, machines, tools and gadgets in current use everywhere and anywhere, on which our current living standards and comforts largely and decisively depend, originated with them. All other people, by and large, only imitated what they had invented and constructed first. All others inherited the knowledge embodied in the inventors’ products for free. And isn’t it the typical white hierarchical family household of father, mother, their common children and prospective heirs, and their ‘bourgeois’ conduct and lifestyle – i.e., everything the Left disparages and maligns – that is the economically most successful model of social organization the world has ever seen, with the greatest accumulation of capital goods (wealth) and the highest average standards of living? And isn’t it only on account of the great economic achievements of this minority of ‘victimizers’ that a steadily increasing number of ‘victims’ could be integrated and partake in the advantages of a worldwide network of the division of labor? And isn’t it only on account of the success of the traditional white, bourgeois family model also that so-called ‘alternative lifestyles’ could at all emerge and be sustained over time? Do not most of today’s ‘victims,’ then, literally owe their lives and their current living to the achievements of their alleged ‘victimizers?’

"Why not the ‘victims’ giving special respect to their ‘victimizers’? Why not bestow special honor to economic achievement and success instead of failure, and why not give special praise to traditional, ‘normal’ lifestyles and conduct rather than any abnormal alternative that requires, as a necessary condition of its own continued existence, a pre-existing dominant surrounding society of ‘normal’ people with ‘normal’ lifestyles?...

"In effect, by outlawing all discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, age, race, religion, national origin, etc., etc., a vast number of people are declared State-certified ‘victims.’ Anti-discrimination laws, then, are an official call upon all ‘victims’ to find fault and complain to the State about their own ‘favorite’ ‘oppressors,’ and especially the more wealthy ones among them, and their ‘oppressive’ machinations, i.e., their ‘sexism,’ ‘homophobia,’ ‘chauvinism,’ ‘nativism,’ ‘racism,’ ‘xenophobia,’ or whatever, and for the State to respond to such complaints by cutting the ‘oppressors’ down to size, i.e., in successively dispossessing them of their property and authority and correspondingly expanding and strengthening its own monopolistic power vis-a-vis an increasingly weakened, fragmented, fractionalized and de-homogenized society.

"Ironically, then, and contrary to their self-proclaimed goal of wanting to shrink or even eliminate the State, the left-libertarians with their peculiar, egalitarian victimology become accomplices to the State and effectively contribute to the aggrandizement of its power. Indeed, the left-libertarian vision of a discrimination-free multicultural society is, to use Peter Brimelow’s phrase, Viagra to the State."

Read more: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/09/hans-hermann-hoppe/smack-down/
'via Blog this'

The above text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0) license

Few jailed drug offenders are real criminals

Most people in federal prison for drug offenses have no serious criminal history - Vox - German Lopez:

November 13, 2015 - "In October, the [U.S] federal government conducted the largest ever release of federal prisoners, letting 6,000 drug offenders out into the world. As bipartisan support pushes criminal justice reform forward at the state and federal levels, Americans should expect these types of releases to continue. But many people, such as Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, are worried this will lead to more crime and chaos.

"But there's a good reason not to worry: There's little indication most federal drug offenders are violent or dangerous, even if they were involved in drug trafficking.

"A new report from the Urban Institute ... found that a majority of drug offenders in federal prison have no serious, violent criminal history. A little more than one in five have a minor history, such as simple assault and other crimes that don't typically lead to serious injury. Fewer than one in four drug offenders in federal prison has a serious history....

"Only 14 percent were sentenced for being a manager, supervisor, leader, or organizer in an offense. Fewer than 14 percent were sentenced for using violence, making a credible threat to use violence, or directing the use of violence during the offense. And more than 75 percent didn't have or weren't in the presence of a weapon during the offense.

"The result: There are a lot of people serving long prison sentences — on average, more than nine years, according to Urban Institute — for what amounts to small-time drug dealing. The general consensus among criminal justice reformers is that there's little reason to think this population is a serious risk to society and should be in prison at all or for very long, so maybe releasing them a little early isn't a bad idea."

Read more: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/11/13/9730702/drug-offenders-facts-statistics
'via Blog this'

59% of Canadians want marijuana legalized

Poll: 59% Of Voters In Canada Say Legalize Marijuana | The Weed Blog - Johnny Green:

November 13, 2015 - "The 2015 Election in Canada was a very big victory for marijuana reform .... when Justin Trudeau was elected it dramatically increased the chances that Canada will legalize marijuana sooner than later.... Trudeau included marijuana legalization as part of his campaign platform, and said after he was elected that he would push for marijuana legalization straight out the gate.

"As if electing a pro-marijuana candidate wasn’t enough to show how popular marijuana reform is in Canada, a poll was recently released which found overwhelming support for marijuana legalization. Per Forum Research:

In a random sampling of public opinion taken by the Forum Poll™ among 1256 Canadian voters, the majority, close to 6-in-10, approve of the Liberal government’s promise to legalize, tax and regulate marijuana (59%), and this is an increase over the proportion who said they agreed marijuana should be legal in mid-August of this year (August 20 – 53%).

The government’s policy promise is especially popular with the youngest (67%), the wealthiest (66%), in Atlantic Canada (75%) and BC (68%), among Liberals (70%) and New Democrats (65%) but not so much among Conservatives (28%).

"The same poll found that roughly 20% of Canadians have consumed marijuana in the last year. All eyes in the marijuana community are tightly locked on Canada right now, waiting to see what the next move is."

Read more: http://www.theweedblog.com/poll-59-of-voters-in-canada-say-legalize-marijuana/
'via Blog this'

Rand Paul wins 4th Republican debate (video)

Post-Debate, Is Rand Paul Back? - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Brian Doherty:

November 11, 2015 - "Pundits from The Week to the generally libertarian-hating Salon credited Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul for winning last night's Republican presidential candidate debate aired on Fox Business News. The Week said Paul was 'the calmest, most relaxed' guy up there and won for offering opinions on foreign policy that might have the most independent appeal, vital for national victories if not for getting GOP audiences to applaud. Salon found Paul winningly coherent and reasonable and willing to say things the GOP red-meat audience might not want to hear.

"Vox declared him a winner, if not the winner, for making himself flashy and relevant tussling with Marco Rubio over fiscal conservatism and militarism and fact-checking Trump. National Review, generally not a pal to Pauls, also gives him a winner status for being 'more cogent and less peevish' than they think he usually is. (A different NatRev writer hat tipped to Paul for being right in opposing a Syrian no-fly zone.)

The Washington Post gave him credit for having a 'strong' debate and both the Los Angeles Times and Vanity Fair gave him cool points for being the only person smart or brave enough to point out Donald Trump seemed to believe, mistakenly, that China was a party to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact....

"[L]ast night's debate performance did, I'd say, demonstrate he's the most thoughtful guy on the stage, combining a sense that we need severe changes in the way government taxes, spends, and behaves with a demeanor and style that feels comfortably mainstream, both in the GOP context and perhaps more importantly in a national context."

Read more: https://reason.com/blog/2015/11/11/post-debate-is-rand-paul-back
'via Blog this'

Why I’m not wearing a poppy

Why I’m not Wearing a Poppy | The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG - D.J. Webb:

October 30, 2013 - "Once again the annual row on the wearing of poppies is taking place.... However, the issue has been rather muddied for me by Britain‘s habit of sending young men abroad into wars that have no conceivable connection to our national interest. I support our soldiers unconditionally, whether the wars are justified or not, as they are British soldiers. I also feel very sorry for those wounded, or killed, in wars staged for the convenience of the liberal elite. But I have not worn a poppy for several years now.

"I know many conservatives will be pained to read a short article explaining why a poppy should not be worn. But to my mind, the wearing of a poppy is tokenism at its worst, considerably cheapened by the wearing of poppies by BBC correspondents and members of the political class – in most cases, people who are not remotely interest in Great Britain as a nation-state. I don’t watch television, and so I don’t know if David Cameron has been espied this year wearing a poppy, but I expect he has done so or will be doing so very shortly, and the juxtaposition of that with his decisions to support 'the bringing of democracy to Afghanistan', as well as similar campaigns in other countries, just illustrates to me the false nature of the whole thing.... In the Queen’s case, as she does sign off on the sending of young men, without proper equipment, into wars that are not for the national interest, her wearing of a poppy is rather to be deprecated....

"Worst of all for me is the fact that the poppy seeks to depoliticise Britain‘s wars. After the First World War, when 'lions were led by donkeys', an accounting with those who had encouraged an unnecessary war would have been appropriate, including a public explanation by King George V as to why he, as commander-in-chief, had authorised Great Britain‘s joining of the war in the first place. Yet the bringing in of the poppy tradition has encouraged a non-political 'commemoration'. What is the point of commemorations if our political class are committed to sending more and more young men abroad into 'wars of choice' in the years ahead?

"I would not want to show disrespect to Britain‘s war dead, but to me the greatest respect that can be shown is to mount a political discussion of Britain‘s role in the world and whether it should be attempting to remain a military power in the way it is and whether it should be continuing to intervene in distant countries in fatuous attempts to impose democracy. I cannot wear the White Poppy that is used to symbolise peace, as I would support war for the national interest (such as the Falklands War), but not the staging of foreign wars for the political convenience of British leaders where no national interest is at stake."

Read more: https://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/why-im-not-wearing-a-poppy/
'via Blog this'

Rand Paul budget deal video gets 19 million hits

Rand Paul’s viral video surprise - The Washington Post - David Weigel:

"Last week's 'filibuster' of the deal to raise the debt limit was widely seen as a bust for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). With great fanfare, one day before the CNBC presidential debate, Paul said that he would take the floor and make life difficult for the deal's backers 'until we talk about proposals.' In the end, he talked for less than two hours -- and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) arrived to talk even more.

"Then, to the Paul campaign's surprise, one video of his speech transformed into a hit. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a member of Paul's 2010 Tea Party class, shared the longest stretch of the Paul speech on Facebook. 'I was proud to vote with Senator Paul on his point of order that would have protected Social Security, and I ask you to help me shine a light on what Washington has tried to hide from you in the darkness of night,' Lee wrote. 'If everyone who sees this message shares it, it will reach millions of Americans.'

"Paul's campaign had not uploaded much of the speech to its YouTube account; none of the clips that made it up got more than 3,500 views. But over two days, the Lee video got more than 19 million impressions. (By contrast, the most popular YouTube video posted by Cruz has nearly 600,000 YouTube views.)

"'Virality means increased traffic, sign ups, and of course digital donations,' said Paul's digital strategist Vincent Harris. '[It's] a huge number in a short amount of time by any standards, especially considering the fact the campaign didn't pay a cent to promote it. Seems to be the most 'viral' moment since the senator stood up for life against Debbie Wasserman Schultz in New Hampshire months ago in a video that went around as well. It happened because people online appreciate Senator Lee, who shared the clip, and the senator's message on spending and our broken congress.'"

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/02/rand-pauls-viral-video-surprise/
Watch video here: https://www.facebook.com/senatormikelee/videos/1028817943816565/?permPage=1
'via Blog this'