Law

The Snowden Reset

muricaderp Law, Politics

Edward Snowden seems to have successfully hit official Washington’s Achilles’ Heel. The political and public responses to his disclosures are still in flux, so I’m hesitant to speak with any confidence as things currently stand, but the pushback against the surveillance state seems to be at or near critical mass.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), one of the most prominent members of California’s Congressional delegation, has publicly said that Snowden committed crimes with his disclosures but should be pardoned because he is a whistleblower who exposed wholesale subversion of the Fourth Amendment and that he should be answering questions about the surveillance state at home, not abroad. McClintock seemed to imply that he would like Snowden to testify before Congress. As I alluded to, the response to this scandal is growing by the week, so Snowden is conceivably on the verge of simultaneously being under federal criminal indictment for leaking state secrets and under Congressional subpoena to testify about the same state secrets as a whistleblower, not a defendant. This could easily put the Department of Justice in effective, or even official, contempt of Congress for obstructing the sworn testimony of a subpoeanaed witness.

If more members of Congress join McClintock, Justin Amash, Ron Wyden and company in demanding answers, and if the answers that they demand include sworn testimony from Snowden, my guess is that Eric Holder will be a couple of wrong moves away from impeachment. Prior to Snowden’s indictment, much of the Republican Caucus was steaming mad at Holder over the “Fast and Furious” gun-running debacle, and a smaller (and certainly less organized and vocal) contingent of populists from both parties was disgusted with him for failing to prosecute bank executives for fraud in the subprime mortgage meltdown. If Holder continues to vindictively keep Snowden in exile (he almost certainly will) at a time when Congress has called Snowden to testify in person (by no means assured, but likely enough given the rapidly shifting Congressional response to the NSA scandal), the vendetta against Snowden could be Holder’s last major project as Attorney General and an ignominious capstone capstone to his legacy. I’d be highly surprised if Holder manages to talk his way out of that sticky wicket.

On a brief sidenote, I’d say that Tom McClintock is now bar none the strongest prospective challenger to either Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein. California’s Republican primary voters have taken to nominating nobodies to challenge their state’s entrenched US Senators, and much of the state’s Republican establishment at all levels is buffoonish and bloodthirsty. Boxer and Feinstein (especially Feinstein) are authoritarian nightmares, but they have on their side inertia and a hapless opposition; McClintock is in a strong, and probably unique, position to singlehandedly destroy these advantages if he chooses to run for the US Senate.

Snowden’s supporters in Congress amount to a dissident faction trying to subvert the Politburo. The official response from the State Department, the Attorney General’s Office and the White House has been a clusterfuck. The sputtering rage at an exiled dissident has become so extreme and pervasive that the Washington press corps, normally prone to flatter the subjects of its coverage in exchange for access, is barely trying to spin the official response into anything rational. These high officials and spokespeople insulted, in succession, the sovereignty of Hong Kong (for allowing Snowden to lawfully enter and leave its territory in accordance with Chinese immigration law), China (mostly for unrelated geopolitical grievances that were irrelevant on account of Beijing’s delegation of political control in Hong Kong to the territory’s British-style parliamentary government), Ecuador (for offering Snowden asylum), Bolivia (again, for offering asylum, and additionally by grounding the country’s presidential plane to search for Snowden as President Evo Morales returned from official business in Moscow), several Western European countries (by intimidating them into closing their airspace to Snowden), and most recently Russia.

Washington’s belligerence towards Moscow has been especially foolish. The State Department effectively made Snowden stateless by revoking his passport while he was holed up in the Sheremetyevo Airport international transit zone. Moviegoers may remember Tom Hanks in a similar predicament. State decided to reenact Airport, but in another country’s airport. Then various shrill officials took it upon themselves to publicly berate the Kremlin, one of Washington’s most celebrated adversaries, for not deporting a US citizen from a transit zone specificially set up for foreigners who did not intend to clear Russian immigration, for allowing that US citizen to hold a press conference in the transit zone and providing incidental logistical support to escort members of the press through passport control, for even thinking about granting this fugitive dissident asylum, and finally for granting him temporary asylum. Washington is now in the embarrassing position of having an American citizen and political fugitive freely and lawfully living in Russia without a valid US passport but with a valid Russian residency document under the odd name of “Snouden Edvard Dzhozef.” Washington could easily have avoided this embarrassment. It took a month of shrilly berating the very nationalistic government of a major military power, adversary, and oil and gas exporter to get Mother Russia to finally embrace the young man. One does not simply end up with Russian documents.

Notice, too, how calm Vladimir Putin has remained throughout the mess. Jay Carney yelling at a KGB Zen master was never auspicious, and indeed it has been fruitless. Putin was reticent in his public comments, initially calling Snowden a patriot, then describing the tar baby that the Snowden incident had become with a classic Putinism about shearing a pig (“a lot of squealing but little hair”), and keeping mum when, all but certainly on his explicit approval, Snowden was granted temporary asylum. Putin is continuing to let Washington officials do the talking about the White House’s cancellation of one-on-one talks that he was scheduled to have with Barack Obama next month, talks that have admittedly been canceled in part to punish Putin for granting Snowden asylum.

This is nuts. My country’s highest officials are acting like toddlers. For the last two months, they’ve been picking fights with any foreign government that dares cross them by showing or even considering showing mercy to a whistleblower whom they want to jail for exposing unconstitutional wholesale domestic spying. They’re cavalierly destroying goodwill with any country that thwarts their effort to persecute one of their own citizens for embarrassing them and trying to hold them accountable for secret subversion of the Constitution.

Comparisons to the Brezhnev-era USSR are appropriate. Snowden was a refusenik for a month, and the reason he is no longer one is that a moderately autocratic regime centered around a neotsarist personality cult gave him asylum at a time when he was stranded in one of its airports, forsaken by his own government.

We have a balance of powers again. This can’t be the “reset” of relations that Hillary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov sought. Russia is again welcoming American dissidents, much as the Soviet Union welcomed unemployed laborers and disaffected black activists in the 1930s. Angry US officials demand that Russia hand over a political fugitive, Russian officials calmly refuse, and the US officials build up an even stronger head of steam. We’re approaching the point at which Obama bangs a shoe on the podium while Putin quietly smirks and, if he says anything about the outburst, says something unimaginably crude and yet eloquent.

Ed Snowden isn’t exactly a loose cannon, either. Washington picked the most sympathetic whistleblower imaginable to target with its unprecedented campaign of smearing and intimidation. Snowden hasn’t been silenced like Bradley Manning, and he isn’t eccentric like Julian Assange. He’s as normal as they come, and the public knows it. The public also knows that his critics are overwhelmingly a bunch of amoral Beltway careerist freaks.

This huge mess may get resolved a lot more quickly and thoroughly than I had feared.

Libertarian Foreign Policy: A Dialogue on Imperialism

Brandon Christensen Law , , , , , , , ,

Now I got you right where I want you. Let’s start with your assertion that you are not anti-Muslim. I wholly agree with you, and reading back on our first exchange (Peace At All Costs…) it is clear to me that you were making exactly the points that you mention above. Here is what you said:

Jihadism does not mean “re-conquest” of what was once Muslim but conquest or domination of the whole world. (See the Hamas Charter on this blog). The only acceptable outcomes are conversion or living as dhimmis, second class citizens, for Christians and Jews. Pagans – that would include Santa Cruz Buddhists, as well as Hindus – can be slaughtered freely or reduced to slavery under Islamic law. In fact, any Muslims man can seize any “pagan” and make him or her a slave. Female slaves are called “concubines.”The Muslims scriptures thus clearly condone rape. The rational Muslims I know will say, “ That was a long time ago. We would not do it now.” In the meantime, the permission to act in this manner remains on the book. It can be invoked at any time and is. I don’t know for sure but I would bet that there is not a single fatwa condemning any of these outrageous acts.

I can see now that you were really attacking the notion of Political Correctness that is so prevalent in the minds of most young people these days. I don’t care what everybody else says, you are a very, very good teacher.

Moving on, let’s go over the case of Rwanda really quickly, so that misunderstandings over the doctrine of nonintervention can be cleared up. You said:

The most useful thing you did recently to help this cause is to affirm clearly that we, as a nation, have no responsibility toward the victims of mass massacres in which we could intervene at little cost and at little risk to ourselves. I refer to Rwanda, of course and not to Iraq where there was always much risk.

We have radically different moral compasses. There is an impassable gulf there.

This is not really an instance of morality. The horrors of massacres and genocide make me sick to my stomach to think about, but that by itself is no reason to send a military into an area that is suffering.

We have to think things through. For example, should we have intervened in Rwanda on behalf of the Hutus or the Tutsis? That in itself presents a great problem. You may reply with an emphatic “who cares, they are all slaughtering each other!“, of course, but then this begs the question as to what our military should do upon arrival. Showing up to a state, no matter how divided, uninvited and with the intent to make everybody play nice together doesn’t sound like my idea of a solid plan to prevent violence and bring about democracy.

On top of this, how would the rest of the region perceive this “humanitarian mission” undertaken by the West? Is it not true that most of the states in Rwanda’s region of the world are governed by former guerrilla leaders who won their power under the guise of anti-imperialism? You will no doubt respond with another “who cares, they are slaughtering each other, and if we can take a few dictators with us, then it’s all the more reason to do it!” Yet now we have created a situation that involves not just the failures of one post-colonial state, but we have drawn in regional players to boot. Instead of a civil war with minimal interference from neighbors, we have a regional problem and one that gives those ex-guerrillas more reasons to justify their brutal regimes.

In essence, instead of a small intervention with little or no costs, what we would probably get is a protracted regional war in which the republic’s safety is in no danger at all. And just think about the image of the United States around the world in a situation like this. I’m sure other states would be very understanding of our position that we are only using our military there to bring about peace, even as all-out war descends across the entire region and it becomes apparent that Washington never really had a plan in the first place, save to prevent genocide among the Hutus and Tutsis without taking sides.

I hate Ron Paul! I hate Ron Paul! I hate Ron Paul!

Ron Paul was using this statement by a former Brigadier General in regards to the air conditioning costs. Is a highly-ranked logistician and West Point graduate’s rough estimate not good enough for you? I’d be willing to condemn Ron Paul as a demagogue if you could provide me with some exact budget numbers from the DoD. Otherwise, I see no reason not to believe a former General’s lamentations regarding Washington’s profligate spending on our “nation-building” exercises.

This argument is also absurd when we remember that Ron Paul said this during a live televised debate. Even if this number turns out to be false – and we have absolutely no reason or evidence to suggest that it is – such a statement should be pretty well-ignored when we consider some of the whoppers that the other candidates have come up with. I am thinking specifically of your pets Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich.

The Constitution vs. “Congressional authority”

This is what I mean by tinkering with words. I thought it was something that only liberals do, but apparently I am wrong.

All name-calling and poo-pooing aside, I think that something important is at stake here: namely The Rule of Law. If we continue to let elites define the letter of the law as they go, then we will continue to see our liberties slip from our grasp.

Article 1 Section 8 of the constitution clearly, explicitly, and plainly states that “The Congress shall have the Power To […] declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;”

We already know what letters of marque and reprisal means because you have mocked David Theroux for it in the recent past. Yet, if you think about it, turning bin Laden over to bounty hunters seems like a mighty smart thing to do after ten years of hindsight. Perhaps Mr. Theroux is just a cowardly pacifist, but then again maybe he is concerned that Washington’s policies abroad are eroding The Rule of Law.

The Joint Resolution did indeed give the President the authority to wage war against the perpetrators of 9/11. Ooops. Here we are ten years later, and Osama bin Laden is dead. He was killed in Pakistan. Our military is now working with al-Qaeda (in Afghanistan), and that’s actually a generous way of putting it.

More “congressional authorization”: The Use of Military Force Against Iraq. Ooops. Here I think it would be pertinent to ask “what does ‘military force’ mean?” Evidently it meant removing a dictator from power within 3 weeks, and then implementing policies meant to transform Iraq into a multi-party democracy in the middle of the Islamic world. Eight years later, we are still there, and 700,000 innocent people have been murdered in the ensuing chaos caused by “congressional authority”.

I guess I’ll ask the question again: what part of “only Congress can declare war” don’t you understand?

Declaring war gives a nation and its policymakers a clear-cut goal. It eliminates the ambiguities associated with “congressional authorization” for something or other regarding foreign affairs. Declaring war is a precise and serious way of telling citizens and enemies alike that all options to come to an understanding have been exhausted. Declaring war is the most honest and straightforward way of dealing with hostile polities in the diplomatic arena, and as such, it is the most fitting way for a republic composed of free citizens to go about engaging in international squabbles.

It also eliminates the loopholes created by congressional authorization techniques, techniques that have been used for centuries by power-hungry tyrants to get around The Rule of Law.

Feds File Charges Against SAC Capital

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, Law , , ,

Thanks to Dr Gibson for alerting me to this. He’s also got a piece on insider trading that was first published in the Freeman in December of 2010. We’ve been able to reproduce it here at NOL. He writes:

Insider trading is restricted but not entirely forbidden. Just what constitutes the “bad” kind of insider trading? This is generally understood to be trading on information originating within a company that could have a material effect on the share price had it been publicly known. The law applies not only to insiders—employees and directors—but also to any outsiders to whom inside information is disclosed […]

We see that insider-trading regulations are subjective and arbitrary, rivaling antitrust laws in this respect. It is no wonder that Congress never defined insider trading and that the SEC resisted defining it for many years; the courts have had to make up the rules as cases arose. Every so often someone like Martha Stewart is thrown to the lions, drawing cheers from the jealous and spreading fear to successful and therefore high-profile managers.

Dr Gibson’s suggestions for alternatives to government regulation are, by themselves, worth the price of admission.

Update: this piece, also by Dr Gibson, explaining what hedge funds are is well worth your time, too.

Around the Web: the underbelly of Portland

muricaderp Current Events, Economics, Law, Links

1. Trouble on the waterfront. White longshoremen, members of a union rife with open nepotism, go on strike at grain docks on the Columbia River, management brings in black strikebreakers, and racial nastiness ensues.

This is not a one-off episode. There is a huge amount of multigenerational animosity between longshoremen and port owners. It’s so bad and enduring that I’m inclined to think that the whole port industry in the US (and probably in many other countries, where it is at the very least corrupt) is deeply poisoned.

2. In which a tweaker named Axmaker stabs a man named Savage, then sings “Girl on Fire” over the dispatch radio from a stolen sheriff’s patrol car. The uncanny names of the parties only add to the righteousness of a scenario that was fated to someday happen somewhere between Tacoma and Medford.

3. Portlandia absolutely has to “honor” this bizarre tale from the Portland Police Bureau. The episode should be called “Nazi Behind the Bush.” Radley Balko originally brought Captain Mark “Ehrenbaum” Kruger to my attention when Kruger was controversially chosen to teach a leadership course to other police commanders, but the back story is even better, as it involves apparent collusion on the part of other city officials to hide evidence of Kruger’s scandalously Germanic extracurricular activities, an aptly named sensitivity course called “Tools for Tolerance,” a deputy city attorney named Manlove, and, Scout’s honor, a Cmdr. Famous.

4. Not quite the Majors-Cullen school of excellence in nursing, but still, smart money says that Jeffrey Neyle McAllister, RN, will be taking a long-term disciplinary assignment at Dr. Kitzhaber’s Big House.

There are at least two kickers to this story. First, the Oregon State Board of Nursing renewed McAllister’s license without disciplinary provisions while he was under police investigation for sexually assaulting patients. Second, a double kicker from McAllister’s employment history: before being hired as an RN, he worked as a hospital security guard and as a municipal police officer in the cities of Independence, Beaverton and Seaside.

La mort d’un jeune homme, le verdict, la montee du fascisme, le racisme.

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law , , , , , , ,

Je suis desole pour le manque d’accents et de cedilles. Avec mon logiciel de traitement de texte americain ils sont simplement trop difficiles a former.

Introduction

Fin Mars 2012, un homme denomme Zimmerman tuait d’un cou de feu un adolescent de dix-sept ans nomme Martin. Je decris le debut de cette affaire dans un rapport intitule: “Un adolescent noir assassine….”

Le treize Juillet 2013, Zimmerman etait acquitte. Je brosse ci-dessous ls principaux faits de la suite de cette affaire. Je mele a cette description mes commentaires et mes opinions, en caracteres gras.

La victime

Ce n’etait pas le jeune garçon joufflu que TV5 – la chaine francophone internationale – a eu l’outrecuidance (ou la betise) de montrer mais un adolescent de dix-sept ans, plutot grand, bine bati. Il aurait pu facilement faire du mal a l’inculpe. (Je ne sais pas s’il l’a fait, bien sur mais il en etait capable, physiquement), un homme un peu courtaud. La main-courante de son ecole indique que Martin etait un petit deliquant, un voleur pour etre precis. Il n’etait pas particulierement pauvre. Lors de sa rencontre fatidique avec l’inculpe il rendait visite a son pere divorce dans un quartier residentiel economiquement un peu superieur a la moyenne.

Lors d’une breve conversation telephonique avec une de ses amies le soir de sa mort, la victime a brievement employe un terme raciste anti-Blanc (“Cracka”).

Absents du dossier: Tous les antecedents judiciaires de la victime s’il y en a . Je ne sais pas s’il y en a. Possible usage de drogue induisant la rage. Continue reading →

What I’ve Been Thinking All Along

henrymoore Current Events, Law , , , , , , , ,

And never had the patience to say until now.

These are my thoughts and observations on the Zimmerman case. I did follow the news and commentary when the shooting happened, and in the following weeks. But trials bore me to tears, so I didn’t really pay much attention (I wasn’t the only one) to it. In fact, other than the verdict, this is what I knew about the trial and its periphery, commentary throughout:

– Zimmerman was charged with manslaughter as well as second degree murder. I don’t know if these were leveled against him at the same time or if they dropped one to pursue the other. I could probably easily find out but I’m feeling lazy.

– The prosecution had a really lousy case against Zimmerman. Much of what they did helped the defense. The prosecution’s witness’s own statements indicated that Zimmerman had a right to be where he was (for the record, I’ll take an impetuous neighborhood watch volunteer over the well-trained police, any day of the week, and twice on Sunday), and that he was the one being attacked. Any provocation, short of a threat or assault, may have been stupid, but it was hardly criminal. So you have the testimony of witnesses who didn’t even see all that went down. From the start it was pretty obvious that the prosecution didn’t have much more than this. Maybe Zimmerman did throw the first punch. Who knows? But it has to be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. It seemed pretty obvious from the facts the public was made privy to well before the trial that the prosecution would never be able to do this.

– Certain groups wanted a guilty verdict, no matter what. Some of them for their own sincere reasons, but many simply because they have an agenda. Few if any of them, from what I could tell going all the way back to when the shooting happened, even had the capacity to empathize with George Zimmerman. This is fine, but when it becomes a racially motivated witch hunt with a presumption of guilt, and then the media gets a hold of it, and the outcome of the trial begins to take on consequences that could have repercussions throughout the nation, we have a major problem on our hands.

The fact is, it is really no one’s business besides the accused, the victim’s family, the lawyers, the witnesses, and the local courts and police. Not even really the community’s beyond the general task of stamping out crime. Some would argue that this trial has major consequences, and so we must pay attention to it. They are right, but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Making a big deal is what makes it a big deal. The only reason it has any consequences for anyone other than those involved or anywhere besides where it actually occurred is because we have been paying far more attention to it than it ever merited. And the reason for this is a collectivist mentality, where all formerly and currently oppressed folk must band together to defend their own even though they might just be in the wrong.

How could a case like this possibly have an impact on trials or laws or liberties or race-relations or childrearing or property rights in other states without the media and special interest groups hyping it beyond its actual scale and scope?

I certainly don’t want to sweep injustice (if there even was any besides the presumption of guilt placed upon George Zimmerman) under the rug, but it is illogical to think that widening the circles of those who think they have a say in this matter will lead to a preferential outcome. For all the clamor and hyperbole this case was still decided in the courts by an impartial jury of Zimmerman’s peers (well, sort of). The way certain people on the television, on the radio, on the web, in print comported themselves could have had little other effect than to pressure the jurors to follow the guidance, not of their own conscience, but of a bloodthirsty lynch mob. Even if they happened to hand down the correct verdict under these circumstances, and Zimmerman got what he “deserved” (whether exoneration or incarceration), they could in no way claim that they served the cause of justice. Neither the mob nor the jurors.

America is a nation full of self-serving big-mouthed know-it-alls, not that this is news or we need a reminder. Unsurprisingly then, the cause of justice was the last thing on these peoples’ minds. I place most of the blame on Trayvon’s (most vocal) sympathizers as it looks like Zimmerman’s were mostly reacting to the trend of busy-bodies, community organizers, and race-baiters who ran with this non-story to further an agenda: gun control, person control, race control, but not self-control.

But guess what? The real haters lost. So it was all one big distraction. A waste of everyone’s time. It was fascinating and all, but can we talk about something important (in its own right) now?

The Zimmerman Verdict, Racism and Trial by Jury

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Liberty , , , , , , , ,

First of all, I have to admit up front that I had not been following the Zimmerman trial at all until the Not Guilty verdict flooded my Twitter feed and Facebook page. The case was just too common, too parochial and had attracted the type of Americans who normally don’t read the more cerebral musings found on this blog (if you get my drift).

I knew it was racially-charged, and that it was taking place in the South, but other than that I had really been in the dark about the relevant details. Nevertheless, you’re gonna get my two cents.

Here are the details that I have found relevant. Some of them may not, at first glance, seem relevant because they don’t even pertain to the Zimmerman-Martin case at all, but stay with me:

  1. George Zimmerman identifies as a Hispanic, not a white person, and is a registered, tried-and-true member of the Democratic Party. I bring this up first and foremost because race in this country has become an odd thing, to say the least. Perhaps it always has been. See Dr Delacroix’s ethnographic musings on race in America here for more on race in the US.
  2. In Jacksonville (also in Florida), a black woman was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a judge (not a jury) for firing warning shots at her estranged (and black) husband. It is unclear if the woman had a prior criminal record.* She was seeking a restraining order against the man and her defense team used the same “Stand Your Ground” laws used by Zimmerman’s team.** The trial was taking place at the same time as the Zimmerman one.
  3. In Miller Place, an affluent, predominantly white hamlet of Long Island in New York City, a black man was convicted by a jury of killing an unarmed white teenager who showed up at the black man’s house in the early hours of the morning and was threatening to assault the man’s son. The white teenager, now dead, had been friends with the black man’s teenage son.

All three of the verdicts were handed down over the weekend. I take away a couple of things about American society from these three cases. Firstly, the only white person involved in any of these cases directly was an unarmed teenager who got shot in the face. Secondly, America still has a long way to go before racism becomes more irrelevant than relevant. Jim Crow ended in the late 1960s, but its legacy of state-sponsored racism lives on in a number of ways that I don’t want to list here (feel free to do so in the ‘comments’ section).

Thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, I think that, were the woman from Jacksonville to have received a trial by jury (and it is still unclear to me why she did not get this constitutional right), she would have been found Not Guilty. Given this speculation, and given the large amount of ignorance about each of these cases on my part, I still have to conclude that the juries made the right decision.

Tocqueville once wrote about the unique trial by jury system found in the United States and argued that it was the jury itself which guaranteed liberty and freedom in the United States. Were this unique system ever to be removed from the legal system, Tocqueville mused, it would signify the beginning of the end of the American experiment in self-government. The right to be judged by one’s peers, instead of by a member of the court, is a right too few Americans appreciate enough. The trial by jury is not perfect, not by a long shot, but it is also no accident that liberty, tranquility and prosperity reign prominently in the few societies where it has been implemented.

*[Update: the woman had no prior criminal record]

**[Update: the Zimmerman team did not use the “Stand Your Ground” law of Florida]

Around the web: Casual Friday

muricaderp Economics, Law, Links

1. How to reduce absenteeism by monitoring the help instead of maybe abusing it less.

2. The Great Australian Sickie: “People taking a sickie are more reluctant to fake it to a kindly nurse on the other end of the phone line.”

If you’re thinking that of course you wouldn’t fake it with an Australian nurse, remember:

3. Men can be nurses, too.  See also Exhibit 3B.

4. Another reason not to give your son the middle name of Lynn. Some of this stuff just can’t be made up: “On March 2, 2005, the Park City council terminated Rader’s employment for failure to report to work or to call in.”

Because RULES. But it’s fitting. Rader has always believed in them, at once too much and too little.

5. Don’t believe me? Ask my buddy Kasper. D. Lynn Rader is much more of a model prisoner than some of my people are. The Roths left some real scuzzies behind.

Yo, bro, suck it up and pray!

muricaderp Law, Liberty, Links, Religion

It’s time for the libertarian discourse to get rude again. Stephanie Drury called attention yesterday to a donnybrook over a Family Research Council prayer campaign graphic, a graphic one indeed, that has been construed to depict a man performing oral sex on one of his fellows.

Did that coalition of family men after God’s heart in fact publish such an obscene image? You be the judge. I suspect, however, that this is an instance in which Potter Stewart would have known it when he saw it. Ignore, if you wish, the civic mind rot in the preceding link about the Family Research Council having been “officially designated a ‘hate group.'” It’s unfortunate that such a bigoted organization’s opponents aren’t suggesting that its members get in line for the coming Sunday’s “services” instead of insinuating that their free speech be chilled merely because it offends a lot of people, especially since it’s so easy to demonstrate that the FRC’s modus operandi is to misuse concern about the health of American families for the purpose of censorious asshattery pending the nationwide implementation of Comstock-style theocratic government. Thankfully, it’s also an organization that tries too hard to be hip and ends up with slogans like this:

call 2 fall 

On our knees for America.

June 30, 2013

I’m in. 

Or, as General Petraeus said to Colonel Broadwell, “Yeah, baby, I’m all in.”

The whole thing has to be seen to be believed. I’ll note without further commentary that “I’m in” is written in white lettering on a smeared blotch of red.

For a counterpoint in defense of family values, prayer, and all that, let’s now turn to Drury’s “Facebook comment of the day”:

“Thanks for pointing this out. I did not know about the call to prayer which I certainly will join. The group that wrote this article would think a Christian sleeping is daydreaming of homosexual activity. They are mean, biased and christian-haters. That is rather obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of objectivity or integrity. Only a perverted mind would see a man praying and construe it as this article does.”

Project much? This “call 2 fall” is, of course, in response to Wednesday’s  Supreme Court rulings invalidating the Defense of Marriage Act and California Proposition 8 on equal protection grounds. A summary layman’s explanation of why these laws were properly held to be unconstitutional is that they denied numerous civil benefits to committed cohabiting partners on account of their sexual orientation, many of these benefits having nothing whatsoever to do with childrearing.

In other words, this is a national call to prayer for the sole purpose of reversing court decisions expanding equal protection under the law. It’s bigotry and bad civics. At the risk of causing further hurt to already tenderized religious right fee-fees, I should add that bigotry and bad civics are the stock in trade for much of the religious right. At rock bottom, much of the religious right’s agenda is the soft subversion of the United States Constitution.

To return to the subject of sexual purity, no prominent, Bible-teaching evangelical pastor has ever regularly consorted with a male meth whore and partaken of the crank pipe. That kind of thing is obviously the province of liberals: secularists, pluralists who are against religious tests for public office, low-class people who are too busy having unsanctioned sexytime to make it to church on Sunday morning, those of us who get a bit rattled or disgusted when the in-your-face nutters take over our congregations, those of us who find that morning services conflict with some combination of sleep and Face the Nation, those of us whose attitudes towards whores are at least as favorable as St. Augustine’s. We, not sexually repressed evangelicals in Colorado Springs, are obviously the ones with impure inclinations. We’re the ones who kick girls off football teams because they’re fixing to cause lust among teh boyz. It must have been a freak like Ron Wyden who publicly told an unsubstantiated story about bathroom privileges being restricted for high school girls in Southeast Oklahoma in response to an epidemic of lesbian sex, because it couldn’t have been a pious, conservative man of God like Tom Coburn.

If I dare say so, I have reasons for being all in for the return of the Victorian gynecological day spa, as well as an increase in the number of its manly counterparts. In fact, I haven’t come close to providing a comprehensive survey of these reasons. I just know that Senator Coburn is itching to get in on that action, no matter what he says. Methinks the doctor doth protest too much. Switzerland, with its sixteen-year-old age of consent and distance from the power centers of the Northeast Corridor, will be an appropriate jurisdiction for him and Chris Hansen to ply their new trade.

Ladies, don’t get any dirty ideas, but in an ideal world I’d be available for outcall massages in the Salem area. In the real world, I’m doing stoop labor with Yamhill County felons. There’s no sexual angle to that pathetic situation, so I don’t expect any intercession from the Family Research Council.

Blow me.

Maryland v. King: Scalia’s Noble Dissent

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law , , , , , , ,

I’m definitely not Antonin Scalia’s biggest fan, but – as the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson writes – “if there’s ever a time when Antonin Scalia really rises to the occasion, it’s when he serves as the Supreme Court’s liberal conscience.”

His dissent from the recent SCOTUS ruling on Maryland v King is, like the somewhat recent ObamaCare ruling, a glimmer of hope amidst all the despair. For those of you who are wondering, Maryland v. King is about whether or not the government has the right to extract your DNA – once you are arrested (but not booked or taken to jail) – and place it into a national search database.

And, in case you are further wondering, the distinction I drew between being arrested and being booked or taken to jail is an important one. This is because cops can arrest you without ever using handcuffs. All they have to do is utter the magic words: “you’re under arrest.” So, as an example, a cop can pull you over for having a broken taillight and if he doesn’t like your attitude he can simply arrest you. You don’t even have to get out of your car.

Here is a breakdown: Continue reading →

Around the web: class, work, and a call for the totalitarian oppression of servants

muricaderp Economics, Law, Liberty, Links, Politics

In the course of a recent internet search for “lazy millennials,” “entitled millennials,” “milliennial brats,” and the like (call it an effort at self-diagnosis, if you wish), I came across one of the most biting and clearheaded blogs I’ve found to date covering work and the workplace. Normally, everything that I find on these subjects in any medium is some combination of banal, derivative, sycophantic, foolish, and intellectually dishonest. Perhaps this is in part because, although I disclose this at some risk to my credibility, I follow John Tesh on Pinterest (but mainly to enjoy him ironically and hipster-like; he, and Wilford Brimley, are my PBR). Tesh, however, does not set the lower bound for workplace advice; browsing workplace-themed blogs at random or the book section of any office supply chain is weirder and more disgusting. Michael O. Church, then, is a welcome relief from the endless drivel, and a fine writer and political thinker to boot.

One of Church’s favorite concepts is “libertarian socialism.” Outwardly, this may sound as ridiculous as the UK being governed by a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, but what he proposes, a government safety net beneath a dynamic private sector, is exactly what most Western governments have attempted, with varying degrees of success, since the Second World War. Church’s proposal avoids by a wide margin the sclerosis of command economies (which, in extreme instances such as North Korea’s, causes an outright death spiral), but it also renders moot the sclerosis of large, ossified corporations, with their legions of marginal-to-useless bureaucrats, layers of political intrigue, and penchant for regulatory capture. His model is for an advanced sort of Jeffersonian yeomanry as an alternative to, and eventually a replacement for, the Hamiltonian model that predominates today. Here’s one of his critiques of the current system: Continue reading →

ObamaCare Snark

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Politics , ,

Oh, the delicious irony. From Yahoo! news:

Unions backed the health care legislation because they expected it to curb inflation in health coverage, reduce the number of uninsured Americans and level the playing field for companies that were already providing quality benefits. While unions knew there were lingering issues after the law passed, they believed those could be fixed through rulemaking.

But last month, the union representing roofers issued a statement calling for “repeal or complete reform” of the health care law. Kinsey Robinson, president of the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers, complained that labor’s concerns over the health care law “have not been addressed, or in some instances, totally ignored.”

“In the rush to achieve its passage, many of the act’s provisions were not fully conceived, resulting in unintended consequences that are inconsistent with the promise that those who were satisfied with their employer-sponsored coverage could keep it,” Robinson said.

Well no shit Sherlock. There is more: Continue reading →

The IRS and Fascism

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law , , , ,

If I wanted to set up a secret police in the US, would I try to create a Gestapo from scratch? Would I call it “Gestapo,” or “NKVD,” or “KGB”?

Or would I rather take an existing, comparatively efficient agency, familiar though unloved by the mass of the people, and simply extend the reach of such an agency? I mean the Internal Revenue Service, of course.

Do I believe that President Obama  ordered the IRS to discriminate against Tea Party-sounding groups and others identified as conservatives? No, I do not.

I think he is responsible for the actions of low-level underlings because he created a statist, totalitarian atmosphere. He did this a lot through his non-actions regarding his old friends, in particular, including the bomber- terrorist Bill Ayres. He is responsible for allying himself with out-and-out extremist groups in his first election. The mainstream press is light-heartedly helping him erode democracy in this country.

None of these important actors is fundamentally evil (not even Ayres today). The president is a man who looks so good in a suit that he is the suit itself in the end, an empty suit. The liberal press is silly in the manner intelligent people who are seldom contradicted become silly. Many of the ordinary Americans who voted for Mr Obama are keeping their eyes and ears tightly shut in an effort to keep believing that everything is alright because they elected a man of color. I mean even college professors, aside from journalists. Black voters have been trained to have low expectations. They tell themselves it’s good enough that the president is (more or less) African-American.  Another kind of supporters, unions, is as corrupt as ever. Take all the teachers’ unions, for example….or, rather, don’t!

I think Mr Obama is the non-Fascist leader of a genuine, grass-root American Fascist movement. The recent discoveries at the IRS are just one manifestation of creeping fascism.

The Second Amendment has rarely been more relevant.

I Agree with Obama on Guantanamo but….

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Liberty , , , , ,

I agree with President Obama. It’s unacceptable that we, the US, have kept people as prisoners for as long as ten years without trial or any other procedure that could conceivably result in their release or conviction.

Let me say first that it’s not an issue of toughness or not toughness. I, for one, think it’s ridiculous to invoke the Geneva Conventions to protect people who burn women and children alive and who assassinate while wearing  civilian clothing. I am also in favor of making their lives difficult, of increasing the hardship of doing their disgusting job any way we can. That would include making a public announcement that specific individuals may be volatilized from the sky anytime, any place. That sure would create a circle of isolation around them. I would also be in favor of including an option to surrender and be investigated (by us.) I don’t understand why this option does not already exist.

There are three purposes for keeping people locked up. One is  to secure them while they await trial. The lock-up time in this case should be as short as technically possible. The second reason is that they are serving a prison term, a punishment imposed  after a conviction of guilt in a well-described, appropriate procedure.

The third reason  to prevent people from leaving is to keep them out of any situation where they can hurt others. Thus, the classical treatment of prisoners of war is to secure them until there is peace. No punishment ought to be intended. In fact, there is international agreement that such prisoners should be treated the same as the soldiers of the nation detaining them. Again, to punish people, you have to try them formally and to find them guilty of something. That’s true even if the accused are prisoners of war, for example. A prisoner of war may also be guilty of crimes. The two issues are separate. A civilized society should not allow its collective judgment to drift from one situation to the other.

I often hear comments among my fellow conservatives that obscure the existence of a line separating the task of punishing terrorists from the mission to keep them out of our harm’s way. I also hear an absence, the absence of realization that the issue if not one of some Middle-Eastern strangers’ – many of whom openly hate us – rights. It’s about our rights. (It always is, in the final analysis.) Confinement to a small space open has not chosen is experienced as  punishment regardless of intent.  It’ s even the most severe punishment several other civilized societies have. I agree with President Obama that we should not punish severely individuals who may be completely innocent. They may be people who are no more guilty of violence against the United States and against Americans than I am. (Repeat this sentence. Make th”I” yourself.” )

I suspect many of my fellow conservatives believe in their hearts that those detained by American forces because they are suspected of terrorism must be at least a little guilty, or guilty of something. Of course, there is no such thing as being a little guilty in our legal tradition. The idea belongs in totalitarian societies.

If we need to control  some people’s movements for the third reason, to prevent from from doing us harm, in a war that may never end, we owe it to ourselves  as a nation to develop inventive solutions that don’t confuse our need to be safe with the imposition of undeserved punishment. I can think of two such solutions .

We could develop a place to keep them that does not resemble prison except that it should be guarded from intrusion by outside forces. High-tech surveillance methods on the periphery of such a place connected to  missiles, for example come to mind. I am thinking of a sort of armed Club Fed. It could even be a Guantanamo Two, a decent resort where the detainees could lead a life more closely approximating normal life. Inside the resort, they would govern themselves as befit people who are not in jail or prison. There is no reason why they couldn’t have a normal family life with spouses and children. I can hear some already snickering about the cost of such a scheme. It’ s extremely unlikely that it would be more expensive to maintain than the highest security jail this country has ever had. It would also be less expensive than war, any kind of war.

There is another, a sort of libertarian solution to the problem of neutralizing those we suspect of wishing to do us harm.  We could try to free them  on bail. Let me explain: There are millions of individuals around the world and thousands of organizations who profess to be terminally disgusted by the very existence of Guantanamo prison. Among the latter are hundreds of Muslim non-government organizations (NGOs). Some of the latter have thousands and tens of thousands of  members. The US government could negotiate the transfer of custody to private NGOs of inmates who have been held for several years and who are not slated to be tried. The US government could ask for a vertiginous bail amount, millions or even billions of dollars per inmate so transferred. The bail money would be refunded after  a determined number of years (say, when the detainee reaches a certain age) if the detainee had not been killed or recaptured in the process of conducting or of supporting terrorist activities.

Either some would take up this offer of privatization of custody or not. If the offer were taken, we would at least have put some distance between us and the practical problems of dealing with people we think dangerous. (This includes, as I write, the horror of force-feeding.) Relapses of terrorists would become more publicized than they are now, less subject to the constant suspicion that the US is manipulating appearances.  At the very least, if there was no no rush to adopt Guantanamo detainees, it would be nice to point  out the hypocrisy of our critics.

Cool PDF on the Dishonesty of Debate

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Liberty, Religion , , , ,

From one of the concluding paragraphs:

We have therefore hypothesized that most disagreement is due to most people not being meta-rational, i.e., honest truth-seekers who understand disagreement theory and abide by the rationality standards that most people uphold. We have suggested that this is at root  due to people fundamentally not being truth-seeking. This in turn suggests that most disagreement is dishonest.

This reminds me, mostly, of debates about the illogicality of more federal gun control laws or using American military power to intervene in a foreign conflict that has nothing to do with national security (see, on this last point, my recent post “Imperialism: The Illogical Nature of Humanitarian Wars“).

Why, just the other day I was deleted by a female FB acquaintance for pointing out to her that her facts were wrong on gun control and that the numerous, hastily Googled  studies that she threw at my feet contained either errors in statistical reasoning (“saying that ‘more guns equals more crime’ is like saying ‘the black cat is a cat because it is black'”) or simply wanted to inflame passions rather than discern truth from tall tale.

On this second point, I even went so far as to suggest that since the piece did not contain any quantitative reasoning whatsoever, it would be safe to agree with me that it was merely an attempt to inflame passions rather than educate. The female (a UC Santa Cruz alumni, in her defense) did just the opposite: after acknowledging that the piece contained no intellectual argument whatsoever, she stated – matter-of-factly – that the piece was an attempt to document all 62 mass shootings over a 30 year period with visuals (posting the killers’ faces to a timeline) and explain that most of the guns used were obtained legally. Therefore, it was quantifying the evidence and proving that mass murders were on the rise, federal gun control is proven to work, and that bans on certain types of guns have been proven to work.

Indeed. This is the face of the enemy of freedom, and it’s not Satan. It’s the bimbo next door.

Read the whole PDF. Grab a cup of coffee or hot tea first.

A couple of tips for figuring out if you are on the right side of the facts or not:

  1. If you are defending somebody else’s words – especially the words of a politician, a religious leader or even an intellectual, there is a good chance you are on the wrong side of truth.
  2. If you attempt to justify the horrible crimes committed in the past by looking at the virtuous deeds that were accomplished because of the crimes, then you are most likely on the wrong side of the facts. For example Franklin Roosevelt’s policies did absolutely nothing to get the US out of the Great Depression. All economists are in agreement on this. Where they disagree is on whether or not his policies exacerbated the Great Depression – as most libertarian economists argue – or simply that the New Deal did absolutely nothing (Left-wing economists generally see World War 2 as the economy’s savior). Yet many people give Roosevelt credit where credit is not due. They even go so far as to overlook his ruthless campaign to rid the West Coast of citizens with Japanese and German ancestry (locking them up in concentration camps), copying Hitler’s policies of cartelizing the economy, banning Jewish refugees from entering our shores, and raising taxes to unjustified levels in order to carry out his worthless policies. Fidel Castro is another good example of this.
  3. If you take the argument personally, then you are on the wrong side of the facts. If you have a tendency to delete people on social media sites because they failed to acknowledge your genius, then you are on the wrong side of the facts.

Hope this helps!