CHARLES C.W. COOKE: Want to Limit the Use of Police Force? Limit the State: Progressives refuse to see the connection between government and force.

Ultimately, “the State” is a synonym for “organized violence.” “If you refuse to pay your taxes,” Representative David Brat recently noted, “you will lose. You will go to jail, and if you fight, you will lose. The government holds a monopoly on violence. Any law that we vote for is ultimately backed by the full force of our government and military.” In consequence, Brat proposed, we should be careful about when and how that violence is utilized. Certainly, civilized nations need laws. But it is one thing to recruit armed men to prevent murder and rape and grievous bodily harm, and it is quite another to do so in order to regulate the manner in which cigarettes may be sold. Eric Garner was not killed while robbing a bank or starting a fight in a bar, but while selling tobacco on the street without a license. Is this really what the state is for?

If you judge people by what they do, rather than what they say, then that is what the state is for, more than anything else.

Plus:

Roughly speaking, this argument runs like this: 1) The state of New York wished to regulate the sale and taxation of cigarettes; 2) Eric Garner wished to violate those regulations; 3) As a result, he was subjected to the full force of the law; 4) In the process of its application, he died.

Was Garner killed deliberately? No, of course he was not. Whatever the protesters might be chanting today, intent matters a great deal, and we are quite obviously not dealing here with a premeditated murder. Nevertheless, we should all be willing to acknowledge that Garner would never have been so much as approached had the city not wanted its pound of flesh in the first instance. Because there are consequences to all laws — however minor — it is incumbent upon us to ask if those laws are worth the risks that they yield. What, I wonder, would the anti-tax rebels who threw off the British Empire make of the news that a man had lost his life for peacefully selling a “loosie”? Is this why governments are instituted among men?

Again, judging by actions, yes.

NUTRITION: 9 Lies About Fat That Destroyed The World’s Health.

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I’M ACTUALLY PUTTING IN A GENERATOR. GOT THE GAS LINE INSTALLED LAST WEEK. Bill Whittle: Afterburner: When The Grid Goes Down.

UPDATE: People in the comments want details. I’m getting a 22KW Generac — I think it’s this model but I’d have to get out the paperwork to be sure — and I’m getting it with a Y adapter so that it can run off of tanked propane too, though I doubt I’ll ever need that. In truth, in a grid-down situation lasting months like Bill describes, no home generator would be all that great, except maybe one that ran off a huge buried diesel tank. But this would be good through any lesser disaster.

THE LAST WORDS of Eric Garner.

BUT, SADLY, WE DON’T TRY HARDER: It’s official: America is now No. 2: Chinese economy overtakes the U.S.’s to become the largest. Well, in recent years both China and the United States have been fundamentally transformed.

EUGENE VOLOKH: Could ‘Barry’ sue Lena Dunham over her memoirs?

THIS STORY WAS SENT TO ME BY A FORMER STUDENT, WHOSE HUSBAND WITHDREW FROM A CHURCH YOUTH GROUP BECAUSE HE THOUGHT IT TOO RISKY: “It is a tragic fact that today’s child-protection culture and related laws often have the perverse consequence of leading decent adults to withdraw from interacting with children.”

TOM MAGUIRE: The College Rape Crisis is less significant when it doesn’t involve members of the White Patriarchy.

MILO YIANNOPOULOS: The Sexodus, Part 1: The Men Giving Up On Women And Checking Out Of Society:

Never before in history have relations between the sexes been so fraught with anxiety, animosity and misunderstanding. To radical feminists, who have been the driving force behind many tectonic societal shifts in recent decades, that’s a sign of success: they want to tear down the institutions and power structures that underpin society, never mind the fall-out. Nihilistic destruction is part of their road map.

But, for the rest of us, the sight of society breaking down, and ordinary men and women being driven into separate but equal misery, thanks to a small but highly organised group of agitators, is distressing. Particularly because, as increasing numbers of social observers are noticing, an entire generation of young people—mostly men—are being left behind in the wreckage of this social engineering project.

Social commentators, journalists, academics, scientists and young men themselves have all spotted the trend: among men of about 15 to 30 years old, ever-increasing numbers are checking out of society altogether, giving up on women, sex and relationships and retreating into pornography, sexual fetishes, chemical addictions, video games and, in some cases, boorish lad culture, all of which insulate them from a hostile, debilitating social environment created, some argue, by the modern feminist movement.

You can hardly blame them. Cruelly derided as man-children and crybabies for objecting to absurdly unfair conditions in college, bars, clubs and beyond, men are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: ridiculed as basement-dwellers for avoiding aggressive, demanding women with unrealistic expectations, or called rapists and misogynists merely for expressing sexual interest.

Gosh, you could write a whole book on this.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The 4-Year Degree Is Largely Mythical. “The report suggests some obvious reasons for this trend—students taking too light a course load during each semester, for example. Others are administrative failures on the part of the universities, like restrictions on students’ ability to sign up for classes, or on credits that can be transferred from school to school. One reason the report gives is particularly striking: large course catalogs overwhelm students who lack guidance from adults who can help them choose a course of study. These are all particular failures on the part of colleges that can and should be fixed, but the story is notable because it shows how widely higher ed actually diverges from the ambient beliefs about it (for instance, that it lasts four years). To make higher ed work better for everyone, time spent in educational institutions should trend shorter rather than longer, so the fact that the baseline expectation is now six years for a B.A. is not encouraging.”

VICTORIA COATES: David’s Slingshot: The relationship between great art and democracy.

THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL offers a nice review by Tony Mauro of David Lat’s first novel, Supreme Ambitions.

From Alex Kozinski: “So realistic, it makes your teeth hurt.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Stress Could Be Turning Your Hair Gray. Luckily, both my life and my recliner are stressless.

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REMEMBER, ONLY TRAINED LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS CAN BE TRUSTED WITH GUNS: Cop Who Killed Tamir Rice Was Previously Kicked off Force for ‘Dismal’ Gun Performance, Emotional Instability.

NEWS FROM THE CIVILIZED WORLD: South Carolina police chief charged in death of unarmed man. “A white man who was the police chief in a small South Carolina town was charged with murder Wednesday in the shooting death of an unarmed black man nearly four years ago. . . . A grand jury in Orangeburg County indicted Combs on Wednesday, the same day a New York grand jury refused to indict a white officer in the chokehold death of an unarmed black man. And it was been more than a week since a grand jury similarly refused to indict a white officer in the death of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.” Meanwhile, I should note that in my own hometown, when a deputy was videoed choking an unresisting student until he passed out, my local sheriff, J.J. Jones, fired him immediately.

Perhaps they need to send some folks from the NYPD down south for training in responsible policing.

RECYCLING: Discarded Laptop Batteries Keep the Lights On: Millions of batteries discarded with computers have more than enough life to power home lighting for one year, researchers in India say.

HOW BADLY IS THE DEMOCRATS’ BRAND DOING IN LOUISIANA? Tom Steyer Dem Runs As Republican In Louisiana Runoff.

SOME COLUMNS I’VE WRITTEN ON LAW ENFORCEMENT AND CIVIL LIBERTIES THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST LATELY: On modern policing and its disconnect from the community.

On photographing the police.

On prosecutorial discretion.

On privileges for government officials and modern day titles of nobility.

THEY VALUE YOUR PRIVACY: Another California Cop ‘Shares’ A Suspect’s Intimate Photos With His Fellow Officers.

IT’S COME TO THIS: ‘Like Holocaust Denialism’: Slate Writer Slams Breitbart Over Dunham Investigative Piece.

So I guess I was only just barely ahead of the curve with this tweet:

So as I understand it, Atticus Finch is now the bad guy in "To Kill A Mockingbird," because he doubted a story about rape.

— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) December 2, 2014

THE SCIENCE BEHIND silencers.

WELL, THE BIGGEST CLUE IS PROBABLY THE “USPS” PART: Why Did the USPS Make a Useless Augmented Reality App?

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY WE’D SEE A RETURN TO RACIAL SEGREGATION. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Missouri white students told not to take part in Ferguson ‘die-in’ demonstration.