We have talked before about this case (“Nika Holbert and the BLM Myth”), but I must again address the death of Nika Holbert because one of the YouTube channels I watch regularly has featured it.
John Correia’s Active Self Protection channel is both entertaining and educational. If you want to see real-life violent confrontations analyzed by a specialist in self-defense, this is the channel for you. Seldom do I ever disagree with John Correia, but in analyzing the shootout between Holbert and Officer Josh Baker, Correia suggest that the way to prevent such incidents is to end “the drug war.” Watch the video:
John is just wrong on this issue of “the drug war,” and I’ll explain why.
Narcotic use is a proxy for stupidity. Yes, there are people at Harvard with drug habits, and plenty of folks with high SAT scores might enjoy the occasional tab of ecstasy or toot of coke, but in general — as a sociological statistic — dopeheads are not valedictorians. Beyond that simple fact of life, an important but less-appreciated aspect of the “drug war” is that the way you get busted for dope is by being stupid.
When I was a teenage dopehead, the importance of avoiding interactions with the law-enforcement community was obvious enough. You didn’t want to be caught “holding,” as we said, especially when you were involved in the, uh, commercial distribution of illegal substances.
A smart dopehead would not be driving around with dope in the car. Leave your stash at home, dude. But if you are going to carry dope with you, maybe you shouldn’t be driving a car owned by a drug dealer with six felony warrants. That was Nika Holbert’s stupid mistake, followed by the even more stupid mistake of pulling a gun on a cop.
Think of this in terms of incentives. As a society, it behooves us to reward intelligence, to make sure that the smartest people get into positions where their intelligence can be most usefully employed. Without clever people to design computers and so forth, our civilization’s technological advancement would be impaired. But the obverse this principle is also true — stupidity must be penalized. Why? Because stupid people, if left to do as they please, will screw things up for everybody.
Who Broke the Milkshake Machine?
Everything wrong in our country — from traffic jams to lousy restaurant service to the presidency of Joe Biden — is the fault of stupid people.
Think about all the ways stupid people make your life worse. Say you pull into the drive-thru line at McDonald’s. You’re going to wait longer than necessary because, somewhere up ahead of you in the line, there is a stupid person who can’t get their order right. Instead of ordering something simple — “Give me a Number Three meal” — they have to do it all complicated, and not communicating very clearly. Because they’re stupid. When you finally get to order your large chocolate milkshake, they tell you, “Sorry, the milkshake machine’s broken.” Why? Who broke the milkshake machine? A stupid person, that’s who.
Excuse me for digressing into a gripe about my pet peeves, but my point is, there is a shortage of intelligent people in America, whereas we have a vast surplus of stupidity. Why? Incentives.
As a society, we are no longer sufficiently penalizing stupidity. Among the potential penalties for being stupid is a loss of income, but apparently you can’t fire people for being stupid nowadays, because they’ll sue for “worker’s rights” or whatever, which is why McDonald’s keeps hiring idiots who don’t know how a milkshake machine works.
This same basic problem is why a fat idiot thinks she can drive around with dope in her purse and a pistol in a car owned by a drug dealer, but starts shrieking like an innocent victim when a cop tries to put the handcuffs on her. And then gets killed because she is apparently too stupid to know what happens when you point a pistol at a cop.
According to online records from both Metro and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Nika Holbert’s criminal background includes several repeat misdemeanors, including driving with a revoked license and theft under $500. Holbert also had a felony drug charge from 2010.
Her last listed interaction with law enforcement was a public indecency charge in 2017.
“Live and learn” as the old adage says, but stupidity is incurable. The only way to protect society against the harm caused by stupid people is by quarantine — put them behind bars so that they can’t make life miserable for the rest of us. Alas, however, stupid people are voters, and they tend to vote for the kind of politicians who think the answer to every problem is to make life easier for the stupid people who elect them.
“Let’s decriminalize drugs,” say the stupid people, who are statistically more likely to be dopeheads, and also more likely to get caught. Then the politicians who pander to such people get elected, and when their stupid policies turn communities into nightmare wastelands, everyone pretends to be surprised by this predictable outcome. Oregon legalized dope, and Portland is a lunatic hellscape. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
While we’re at it, let’s discuss the role of technology in what happened to Nika Holbert. You see, the reason she got pulled over was because he ran the license plate number on the Camaro she was driving and learned it was owned by a drug dealer with six outstanding warrants. Cops now have computers in their patrol cars that make it much easier to do this and, in many jurisdictions, police cars are equipped with automatic scanning devices that alert cops to vehicles that are stolen, or with other issues including outstanding warrants. You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that the Democrat-controlled city council in Nashville considered tag-scanning technology to be “controversial”:
License plate reader technology was previously banned in Metro Nashville back in 2017.
After street racing problems caused public safety concerns, the conversation has been brought back into focus for the Metro Council. At the start of 2020 three different bills looked to address how LPRs could be utilized properly in Nashville.
“We need some more tools in our toolbox in order to help completely eradicate this dangerous activity,” District 26 Councilmember Courtney Johnston said.
Johnston, whose legislation was deferred until February 2, said she listened to people’s concerns on how the technology would affect policing and privacy.
Who are the “people” who have these “concerns”? The same people, I suspect, who got tag-scanners banned in Nashville in 2017.
Stupid people, that’s who. You see, stupidity is a hereditary trait, and so there are a lot of people out walking around on our nation’s streets — voting for Democrats, and attending city council meetings — who have stupid relatives in prison. When you see a story in the media talking about how the “community” is concerned that police are being too successful at putting criminals behind bars, this “community” sentiment comes from the stupid relatives of stupid criminals.
Man, if I’d been stupid enough to get myself shot by cops back when I was a teenage dopehead, my family wouldn’t have been “demanding answers.” My kinfolk are smart enough it would have been obvious to them that I’d simply suffered the predictable consequences of stupidity.
“No, sir. I have nothing to say. I understand that I have the right to have my attorney present during questioning.”
Never went to prison, because I’m not stupid.
Also, eventually, I realized the error of my ways, and one of my youthful errors was hanging around with losers and troublemakers.
This is another reason why I’m against John Correia’s idea of surrendering to stupid people in what he calls “the drug war.”
Some People Should Ride the Bus
Stupid behavior leads to bad consequences, and smart people eventually notice this pattern, either in their own lives or by observing the lives of others. It is only the truly stupid among us — the hopeless dimwits — who are repeatedly in trouble with the law.
Did I mention that Nika Holbert’s criminal record was released by officials? As evidence of incorrigible stupidity, it’s quite conclusive. She kept getting caught for driving without a license, or driving with fake tags on the car, or possessing small quantities of marijuana, which are exactly the kind of things that stupid people get caught doing.
Stupid people should not be allowed to drive. That’s why we have public transportation, for people who are too stupid to drive. What part of “Nika should have been riding the bus” do I need to explain here?
America’s problem is not merely our failure to penalize stupidity, but also that intelligent people are far too polite for their own good. We have been taught that it’s wrong — “insensitive” or too “judgmental” — to make stupid people feel ashamed of their stupidity. This is an unfortunate consequence of the “self-esteem” cult that took root in our education system decades ago. The emergence of this cult was a typical example of what happens when mediocre minds (think, education majors) are exposed to sociology statistics without proper adult supervision.
Some education professional noticed that (a) successful people tend to have (b) high self-esteem, and concluded that (b) was the cause of (a).
Notice how I just assumed that the reader is (a) capable of understanding analogies and (b) familiar with Broadway musicals. This is because I understand that 1,500 words into a blog post is not where you find people who should be riding the bus, IYKWIMAITYD.
No, the kind of people who are still reading after 1,500 words are extraordinarily intelligent. So smart are my blog readers, in fact, that some of them are designing space robots for NASA.
And driving German cars. I don’t know if there are any sociological studies on this, but based on a small sample of space-robot engineers, I have observed a distinct preference for German automobiles. However, correlation is not causation, and simply buying a Volkswagen won’t turn you into a NASA engineer, the same way that high self-esteem won’t make you successful. This is the error of the Cult of Self-Esteem, which has ruined our school system because teachers think they can make kids succeed simply by telling them how wonderful they are.
That’s why no one ever told Nika Holbert she was too stupid to be allowed to drive a car. And she ended up getting shot for it.
Look closely at that photo. It’s what Columbus, Ohio, police Officer Nick Reardon was looking at a split second before he fired his pistol. The fat girl in blue jeans — 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant — had a kitchen knife in her right hand and was about to stab the woman in pink. In the parlance of cops, that’s called a “good shoot,” but the liberal media headline is not “HERO COP SAVES WOMAN FROM KNIFE ATTACKER.”
No, the media are playing the BLM “white guilt” race card here, simply because Officer Reardon is white. The fact that the woman he saved from being stabbed is black? Never mind that. It doesn’t fit the media’s preferred narrative, in which white is a synonym for bad.
Understand that I’ve spent months watching police videos on the Police Activity YouTube channel, so I’ve become sort of an amateur expert on how these kinds of incidents generally go down. As in this case, police often arrive on a scene of confusion, with only a brief description of what’s happening based on a frantic 911 call. When you watch bodycam video of incidents like this — and, as I say, what happened in the Ma’Khia Bryant case isn’t really unusual — it can be difficult to understand what you’re seeing, because it happens so fast amid confusing circumstances. But the important thing to know is, there is always a backstory.
Police do not go around shooting people at random. In most cases, the suspect who gets shot by cops has an extensive prior criminal history. Often, they are convicted felons out on parole or probation, engaged in drug dealing, driving a stolen car or illegally possessing firearms (sometimes all three at once). In other cases, the person who gets shot by cops is mentally ill, basically doing “suicide by cop.” So in terms of probability, the vast majority of people, whatever their race, are never in danger of being shot to death by police. It doesn’t happen randomly.
Even in the case of Breonna Taylor, the reason she got shot was because (a) her ex-boyfriend was a drug dealer who had been using her apartment as his mailing address, and (b) her new boyfriend had a gun and fired at the cops who raided the apartment, evidently fearing that it was Breonna’s ex-boyfriend busting down the door. It wasn’t random.
Franklin County Children Services (FCCS) released a statement saying that Bryant, 16, was a foster child who was under the care of the Franklin County Children Services. . . .
The girl’s aunt, Hazel Bryant, told reporters that her niece had been living in a foster home on the east side of Columbus, where the fatal shooting took place. According to her, several adult women had come to the foster home and started an altercation with the teenager, who had then called police, her biological father as well as her grandmother for help. Then to defend herself, Ma’Khia grabbed a knife. . . .
Her mother, Paula Bryant, told 10 WBNS, “She was a very loving, peaceful little girl. She was an honor-roll student, and Makiyah had a motherly nature about her. She promoted peace.” . . .
OK, two obvious questions:
Why was Ma’Khia in the care of county children’s services?
and
Why did these women “come to the foster home” and start a fight?
It seems difficult to reconcile the known facts with Ma’Khia’s mother’s claim that she was a peace-promoting honor student.
My guess (and it is only a guess) is that Ma’Khia being in foster care had something to do with her own behavioral problems, which in turn explains these adult women being in an altercation with her. We don’t actually know what happened or why, but whatever the story turns out to be, we can surmise that this was not a random incident. It never is.
Despite the big win for the “social justice” crowd, it can be expected that there will be nationwide riots tonight. Kind of like BLM won the Super Bowl of racial grievance, and now must celebrate by looting.
UPDATE: Time to go grab a free TV or whatever:
100% Retail discount in major cities tonight
— Crisis? What Crisis? C'mon Man! ???? (@berlilpry) April 20, 2021
Breaking: Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has declared a state of emergency in the city
BLM/Antifa have put out flyers calling for violence tonight in Portland no matter what the verdict is
“Thank you, George Floyd,
for sacrificing your life for justice.”
— Nancy Pelosi
She forgot to thank George’s fentanyl dealer.
UPDATE III: Contrary to widespread concern, there appears to have been no riots Tuesday night, at least not in Minneapolis. Of course, Antifa smashed windows in Portland, but that’s just the nightly routine there now, I guess.
During the course of the Best Ranger competition at Fort Benning, the teams ran or marched 62 miles in less than 60 hours while completing a series of tasks — obstacle courses, weapons ranges, etc. That’s basically back-to-back marathons, with a couple of 10Ks added on.
Team 41 did not win the competition, but they went the distance.
Fifty-one teams began the competition with a nine-mile run at dawn Friday, and by the time they had finished the first obstacle course and the Victory Pond water event at 10 a.m., Team 34 — 1st Lt. Vince Paikowski and 1st Lt. Alastair Keys, from the 75th Ranger Battalion — had ensconced themselves in first place, with a lead they never relinquished. Meanwhile, our family was watching Team 41 — Sgt. Maj. Andrea Copes and Staff Sgt. Robert McCain Jr. — and worried about their place at 30th in the standings. We knew that the first day’s cut was at 28. Before the competition began, Bob had told his mother not to worry about their standings: They had a strategy, not to exhaust themselves on the first run, and rely on their superior marksmanship skills to carry them through.
Sure enough, after the completion of the Urban Assault Course at 11 a.m., Team 41 had moved up to 26th place, and after the Wagner Sniper Range event, they were 22nd. Next came the Three-Gun Event and M4 Qualification Event, after which Team 41 was in 13th place.
Having advanced 17 places since the morning run, we had hopes that Team 41 would keep moving up, but certainly we had good reason to be confident that they would make the first cut, when the field of competitors was reduced to 28 teams. What we didn’t know — the teams being incommunicado for the duration — was that Bob had injured his knee during the first morning’s obstacle course event, and was now limping in agony. Next event? Army Combat Fitness Test, followed by yet another obstacle course, and then a 19-mile night march.
Nineteen miles on a bad knee? No pain, no gain.
Team 41 made the cut. What followed the 19-mile march was a series of exercises called “Night Stakes,” that went until dawn. The scores for the remaining 28 teams were posted, and we learned that Team 41 had dropped to 19th place. Oh, boy — more angst.
You see, the next cut is to 16 teams, and so our guys started Saturday three places below where they needed to be to make it to Day Three. What followed was a day of “Day Stakes” exercises, shooting and more running and, by the time that was all done, Team 41 was in 17th place. The final exercise before the next cut was Night Orienteering (land navigation) and our guys killed it, with the second-highest score. So we found out Sunday morning they had made the cut and were in 14th place. We had hopes that they might make it to a Top 10 finish, but fatigue and injuries took their toll, and they finished 16th. Here is video of Team 41 in the Combat Water Survival Assessment:
You’ll hear the commentator (the coach of Team 49) explain that Bob’s partner is a sergeant major in Italian Special Forces, serving as a trainer for U.S. Rangers. A few photos of Bob in that event:
