Have you heard the one about the man who shot the tiger?

One of the tigers owned by Steve Sipek, the Tarzan actor, escaped. When he lunged at a game warden he was shot. Sipek has been screaming about how that tiger was his brother and he is at war with man who shot him.

Good publicity, BAD move.

You see, if you have a dog that gets off its leash or runs away, you are legally responsible, even if the dog is a tiny one. If you have a snake or a lion, this puts you in much greater legal, not to say moral, danger.

If I had a tiger, even if I had been vicious enough to declaw it (that is a horrendous procedure, you are taking off a part a cat’s foot. It is never really a cat again), your legal danger is MUCH greater.

If you ever have such an animal escape, let me tell you what you DON’T Do, You don’t get on national television and announce, “That tiger was my brother. That tiger was my responsibility. There is no way I can confuse anybody by blaming this on the keeper or somebody else. This was my brother.”

Nobody can tell if a tiger is declawed when it lunges at you. The man who has the lawsuit is the man who was terrified and had to shoot the tiger. That man is also a public official, which could mean jail time for the person responsible for the animal.

Sipek should go to jail.

Last night I attended a little meeting, six people, which was about decent treatment for prisoners. This seems odd, given that I am a raging right-winger. We are supposed to HATE all prison inmates.

My reason for being at that meeting can be summed up in three words:
I hate cruelty.

When I say I hate cruelty, this does not fall into a general Christian philosophy of Respect for Life or something. I just hate the idea of anyone being hurt if there is not a damned good reason for it.

I am not a generally nice person when it comes to punishment.

I do not value life all that much, if by “life” you just mean a beating heart and the ability to experience pain. That is for preachers to rave about. They make their living on stuff like that.

I do not have A Respect for All Life. I would cheerfully kill a Ted Bundy with my own hands. But I am not capable of hating him.

There is an old saying, “A man should shoot his own dog.” So if someone says, “You believe in the death penalty, but could you do the killing yourself,” I reply “Yes.” I know myself very well by now and I would do it myself.

I do not even believe in Justice, if that means hurting people just for the sake of getting them back because they have done bad things.

I do believe in PREVENTIVE cruelty. Preventive cruelty is the only thing that will scare bad people into not hurting others. And yes, I will do it myself.

I know a lot about the nastier sides of life. Most of what I know is better left unsaid.

But I can say this on the record: I have worked in prisons and many of my sponsees in alcohol and drug recovery were ex-cons and I have conducted recovery meetings in prisons and so forth. I have been there, I have done that.

The fact is that bad people need to be frightened into line. This is not abstract justice, this is a matter of protecting people.

There is inexcusable sadism in the prison system. Yet the term “prison reform” sticks in the craw of decent people for a very good reason.

“Prison reform” has been used as a cover by those who hate white gentiles and want to help anyone who is a criminal in our society. In his trilogy, “The Gulag Archipelago” Aleksander Solzhenitsyn described the Soviet concentration camps he was in, but he did more than that. Solzhenitsyn went back and did an entire history of those camps and the tens of millions who died in them. They were agonizing deaths, not as merciful as gas chambers.

In one chapter Solzhenitsyn describes “the thieves,” career criminals who lorded it over all the political prisoners in those camps. The career criminals were given the right to beat up other prisoners, to steal from other prisoners, to torture political prisoners, to kill other prisoners.

Since the book was written for Russians, the chapter on these career criminals in the camps had a title Solzhenitsyn never explained. It was called “The Socially Friendly.”

Here is why he used that title. It is an explanation every person familiar with Marxist theory already knows:

To a Marxist, the people of a country are the enemy. The enemy of the people, the career criminal, is described in Marxist ideology as “the socially friendly.” To a leftist, the enemy of society, the murderer, rapist or thief, is “socially friendly.”

Leftists use “prison reform” for their own purposes. They have given it a bad name. They are the friends of our enemies, the bad guys, the career criminals and psychopaths.

On the right, the reaction against this leftist type of “prison reform” has been used just as cynically.

In prisons, the easiest way to prevent hardened criminals from making trouble is to make sure each hardened criminal inside the prison has his own young sex slave. This is standard practice and anybody who objects to it is said to be “soft on criminals.”

So dedicated people try hard to get this sort of inexcusable abuse into the public eye. They keep trying to get people to pay attention to it and are ignored. The minute they succeed in finally getting this sort of outrage into the public eye, professional “prison reformers” grab hold of it for their own purposes. The people who fought so long to get attention on the real abuses are then pushed aside by those who make their living on this sort of thing.

The professional leftists make it a part of their political agenda and “prison reform” is discredited once again.

Then the professional rightists take back over and prison authorities are given free reign once again.

I told you before that the Council of Conservative Citizens is being taken away from the inarticulate people who fought so hard to make it successful. Now that it has some potential due to their hard work, the screaming preachers are taking it over. The same thing happened to “prison reform.”

The same thing happened to environmentalism. When hard-working grassroots people defied the industrialists and got the runaway pollution of America into the public eye, they were shoved aside by the leftists who wanted “protecting the environment” to be their battle-cry for turning the entire economy over to the bureaucrats.

So “environmentalism” got discredited for people on the right and the polluters get a free ride under Bush.

Anyway, that’s the way I see it.

Supply and demand is the basis of modern economics.

There is another simple rule that is just as basic to our society as supply and demand:

Punishment is cheaper than rewards. Any idiot can hurt somebody. It takes talent and work to make people happy. That is why Gangstah Rap is so popular with incompetent young people. They can only get what they want by simple-mindedly hurting people.

This is why Hell is so much more realistic to people than Heaven is. Everybody can imagine Hell. Nobody can imagine Heaven. You can visualize a hundred forms of agony. But how about permanent ecstasy?

In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift talked about a society that did not so much punish people for crimes as it rewarded them for honesty. Nice idea. Why didn’t anyone try it?

Because it would be too expensive. Rewarding honest people would be costly to say the least. Hanging the bad ones was cheap. America has two million people in its enormously expensive prisons. But that is cheaper than rewarding the other two hundred and seventy million or so other Americans for not committing crimes.