Right Wing Nation

Yes, I know those crime rates probably shouldn’t be percentages. Thank Excel’s auto-formatting. However, the data are posted, and I can’t be bothered to change it. Deal with it.

Ralph Peters published an interesting column today, Troops and Crimes: History’s Best-Behaved Military. He makes his case well, although just how law-abiding our troops are compared to the general population is somewhat muted by seeing numbers mixed into the paragraph. So let’s look at the data. Over the last 19 months, there have been 59 courts-martial. If we adjust that for a year, we have 37.26 courts-martial. And to compare it to, say, several different towns and cities in the US, we need to calculate a per capita crime rate, which comes out to 0.0266%.

Peters compared the commission of crimes in the military with Ann Arbor, Santa Cruz, and Lynchburg. For curiosity and additional comparison, I threw State College into the mix.

Let’s compare the crime rates of the military to the cities:

Of the cities, State College has the lowest crime rate, at 2.0815%. But that’s quite a bit larger than 0.0266%, the crime rate for the US military. How much larger is striking.

So State College’s crime rate is 78.20 times the crime rate of the US military. And the crime rate in Santa Cruz, where everybody is into peace and love and flowers and passing bongs and going to giant puppet head protests and screaming about the military being baby killers, is 250.36 times that of the US military.

Funny, that.

Of course, your garden-variety leftist would claim that the military doesn’t police itself, but that’s nonsense — particularly coming from liberals, who do not believe in punishing crime. Peters says:

If Santa Cruz were as serious about punishing its criminals as our military is . . .

The military doesn’t do warnings and probation. If a soldier does the crime, he or she will do the time or pay the other relevant penalty - court-martials directly reflect the number of crimes committed. That means that our troops in a combat zone have had less than 1 percent of the crime rate in Santa Cruz - whose City Council in 2003 was proud to be the first in the United States to adopt a resolution denouncing the war in Iraq.

And of course, every day in the news, we have example after example of liberals refusing to punish criminals or take crime seriously, patting murderers and rapists on the head and wringing their hands over what awful childhoods they had.

Perhaps when the leftists start screeching about crime, they should look in the mirror.

Ace is sick of leftist fag-bashing I mean really sick of it.

Let me break it to you now. It has not been a good day.

Understand that for months, not even a half-mile down the road, there’s been a construction site (I believe it’s the new medical center building, but don’t quote me on that). I’ve never seen construction go up so slowly. As often as not, there is no sign of life there, and all they have to show for the months they’ve been collecting paychecks is a partial steel frame. The other day, I was on my way to the store — two miles down the road — and some guy was holding a stop sign, stopping all of the traffic going toward town. The traffic coming onto Scotia was flowing non-stop, and of course, I waited for it to stop and the guy to signal us to go through.

I waited about ten minutes, with the traffic onto Scotia (back toward the house where I’d just come from) flowing freely, with no indication that we’d ever be let through. So I, and the line of about 25 vehicles behind me, turned onto the Scotia Road to drive an elongated S — 12 miles to get 2 miles down the road.

That was the other day, but since there has been no sign of anything happening there on any Friday so far, I expected to be able to just drive the two miles to the store.

Wrong. This time it was a woman, holding a stop sign. This time, I didn’t wait. I just turned, and again, drove 12 miles to get 2 miles down the road.

I wanted a tomato. You walk right into the produce section, and when I did, they had $25/pound, free-range tomatoes out right there in front. Having driven 12 miles to get only 2 miles down the road, and having had to park way the hell and yonder away from the frakking door (I hate that), I was not in a very patient mood and I wanted to get in and get out.

There happened to be a guy working the produce section (well, he was standing there with his thumb up his derriere, that kind of working) as I walked in, so I asked him where the tomatoes were.

“Right here,” he said, pointing to the $25/pound, fair-trade, certified disenfranchised-friendly tomatoes.

“No,” I said, “Normal tomatoes, not hippie tomatoes.”

He was rather puzzled, to judge from the drool running down his chin, so I tried to explain.

“You know, regular tomatoes. Not organic tomatoes. Not free-range tomatoes. Not special-needs tomatoes. Just tomatoes.”

“Oh.” He seemed to understand that, and led me back, back, back, to the normal tomatoes. As it happens, they’re selling local tomatoes (they’re labelled “field tomatoes”), and I got a nice one for 60 cents. I just grabbed a bag of cherries, since they don’t sell loose cherries, even though it’s way more than I need. I picked up some mascarpone, and headed to the rush register, you know, the 7-or-fewer items register behind two women.

This was Wegman’s, the yuppie store, and you don’t associate Wegman’s with foodstamps, but of course, today, in the 7-or-fewer register line — the one that’s supposed to move faster than the others — the line wasn’t moving because the cashier didn’t know how to ring up foodstamps (okay, I’ll give her a break on that), and had called the manager. So the manager came and gave the cashier a little step-by-step lesson in kindergarten-teacher-speak (v-e-r-r-r-y s-l-o-o-o-o-w-l-y-y-y), and had just started to turn away when she suddenly said:

“Oh I’m sorry, she can’t buy those with foodstamps.”

“Those” were the $5.99 each very yuppie Thai TV dinners. So there was an extended, at points rather heated, discussion about what one can and cannot buy with foodstamps, while the yuppie-on-foodstamps kept whining, “Why? That doesn’t make any sense!” But eventually, she dug through her purse, finally found her billfold, and handed a couple of twenties to the cashier.

The adjacent lines, in the meantime, had been moving along, and all of the people who had been in line when I got there had left the store. Had there not been three people behind me, I would have changed lines.

While the cashier was bagging the $5.99 apiece Thai TV dinners, she and the government-housing-yuppie had another extended conversation about how silly it was that you can’t buy $5.99 apiece Thai TV dinners with foodstamps, and how they would both write their congressman about it. That would be John Peterson, and I suspect he won’t have much sympathy.

The woman in front of me was up, and everything was fine until she tried to run her card through the machine. Nothing happened. She tried again. Nothing happened. Five times, the cashier had her run the card, and every time, the same thing happened.

Nothing.

So again, the cashier called the manager, who finally came and again, had the woman run her card, this time only four times, and every time, guess what happened.

Nothing.

So the manager proclaimed the reader inoperative and fled. The woman had all kinds of green sticking out of her billfold, but no, she dug for her checkbook. She finally found it, wrote out the check, then handed it to the cashier, who asked her if she had a Wegman’s card.

Of course, she didn’t.

So the cashier sent the woman to apply for a card, then come back, and we stood there. And stood there. And stood there.

The woman came back, the check was cashed, and finally, I was up. The cashier looked at me and said,

“Are you paying with cash? The system is down.”

Really? I had no idea! I told her yes, I was paying with cash.

Finally, I got back to the Explorer, and every big, honking, fat-4ssed vehicle on the road was trying either to get into the particular parking lot lane where I was, or out. I finally got to the road, and headed back.

The free-range tomato and $5.99 each Thai TV dinner with foodstamps episodes had driven out of my mind the woman with the stop sign, and after it was too late, I remembered. But once again, there was no sign of life. Not a single construction worker or vehicle, not a movement, nothing — until I got to the far end of the construction, and there she was, the only human being on the site, holding up a stop sign.

And that’s where I’ve been today.

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