Congressional leadership from both houses and both parties today reached a deal on a long-term extension of the PATRIOT Act, exactly as worded and without any of the inconvenient civil rights provisions that the Obama Administration has been warning against. The deal would extend an additional four years.
Four years is quite a bit longer than most of the previous House versions of the extension but was quite a bit shorter that Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R – IA) call for the bill to be eternal as well as completely free of oversight. (Read more from antiwar.com)
Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.
In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry.
“We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” David said. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.” (Read more from nwitimes.com)
As Jonathan Last explains in the Weekly Standard, the antiphosphate frenzy began in Washington State, which was attempting to comply with a Clean Air Act mandate that a certain river be swimmable and fishable. This was a problem because tests found inordinate amounts of phosphate in the river. As part of the effort to comply, the state banned phosphates from detergents. That was in 2008, but the way politics works these days, the banning spread to state after state — again with the backing of federal law.
Now, it is clear that the law’s proponents knew exactly what the results would be. It would increase dishwasher use and even end up leading people to abandon dishwashers altogether, and either solution leads to much more water and energy use. In other words, even by the goofy environmentalists’ own standards, this is no savings.
Ice Makers the Department of Energy hates them. And so it has warned all makers of freezers that it will lower the energy-compliance rating of any freezer that keeps them.
Drain Openers Now let’s talk drain openers. Everyone knows that the best chemical drain opener is lye, or sodium hydroxide. It is wicked stuff that cuts through grease, hair, or just about anything else. It will burn right through human flesh and leave terrible scarring. But for drains, nothing else compares.
Now that less and less water is flowing through our homes (thanks to regulatory attacks on water use), and the water we use is ever more tepid (thanks to regulatory attacks on hot-water heaters), it is no surprise that clogged drains are ever more common, thus making lye an essential household chemical.
If you can get it. The mainstream hardware stores have stopped carrying the stuff. So have the grocery stores. When I asked around, I thought I would hear stories involving liability for injuries, but no: instead, the excuse is the drug war. It turns out that this stuff is an ingredient in the making of methamphetamine, and hence it too is on the regulatory hit list.
Here’s an interview with the man who said “I don’t want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it to the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Personally, I think he’s an inside-the-beltway pseudo libertarian. He should watch the Hoppe Video I recently posted, The Impossibility of Limited Government.
There is no way Von NotHaus’s coins could be confused with money. Some of the coverage of this story is disgusting: Von NotHaus designed the Liberty Dollar currency in 1998 and the Liberty coins were marked with the dollar sign ($); the words dollar, USA, Liberty, Trust in God (instead of In God We Trust); and other features associated with legitimate U.S. coinage.
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The FBI won a three-count conviction against precious-metals dealer Bernard von NotHaus on March 18 for the “crime” of minting memento “dollars” in silver, and the FBI charged in a press release that making silver coins is “domestic terrorism.” Jurors came to the unanimous verdict after only two hours of deliberation.
“Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney Anne M. Tompkins said in a March 18 FBI press release boasting of the verdict.
Making silver coins is “domestic terrorism”? Really?
“While these forms of anti-government activities do not involve violence, they are every bit as insidious and represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country,” Tompkins added. “We are determined to meet these threats through infiltration, disruption, and dismantling of organizations which seek to challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government.” (Read more from thenewamerican.com)
These are 10 arguments which were once used to justify slavery. Today, very similar arguments are used to justify government.
Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all parts of the world. To imagine human social life without it required an extraordinary effort. Yet, from time to time, eccentrics emerged to oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and therefore people should get rid of it. Such advocates generally elicited reactions ranging from gentle amusement to harsh scorn and even violent assault.
When people bothered to give reasons for opposing the proposed abolition, they advanced various ideas. Here are ten such ideas I have encountered in my reading. . . . (Read more from mises.org)
1. Hack your shower head.
2. Fix your water heater.
3. Go to a coin shop and compare real coins to today’s tokens.
4. Work for free.
5. Publish with creative commons (no Intellectual Property).
6. Visit a courthouse, and notice how benign our “criminal class” looks.
7. Go to jail. See what it means to be completely controlled by the state.
8. If you want to improve culture, do something wonderful. Don’t blame the market.
9. Tell the truth. Ideas are more powerful than armies.
* Most emphasis of KGB is in the area of ideological subversion, active measures and psychological warfare, not the Hollywood spy stuff.
* 4 stages
1) Demoralization. It takes 15-20 years of exposure of Marxism Leninism. The process in the US is completed (as of 1985). Most of it is done by Americans to Americans. A demoralized person refuses to believe contrary information.
2) Destabilization. 2-5 years. Economy. Foreign relations. Defense. In defense and economy Marxist Leninist influence is huge.
3) Crisis. 6 weeks.
4) Normalization. Indefinitely. A cynical expression.
* Leftists, like those in academia, are essential to the process of destabilization. They will then see Marxists Leninists come to power (instead of them), and will turn into enemies.
Rep. Peter King (R-New York) is the kind of in-your-face demagogue that only the state of New York could have elevated to high office. From his perch in the 3rd congressional district, in Long Island, King holds forth like a cruder version of Rudolph Giuliani, if you can imagine it. Yet we don’t have to imagine it, because it will be on full display when Rep. King, in his capacity as chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, presides over hearings on “the radicalization of the Muslim-American community.”
Those hearings portend a circus, in the course of which we’ll be subjected to a very public airing of the malignant views of people like Robert Spencer, Pamela “the shrieking harpy” Geller, and Frank Gaffney, a rogues gallery of anti-Muslimologist “experts” whose hate-filled rantings will further poison the atmosphere of an America itching for a lynching.
Although the neoconservatives were generally discredited in the wake of the Iraq war, when the complete failure of their policies – and prophecies – became all too apparent even to many of them, the dead-enders among them have sought to make a comeback by transferring their war on Muslims from the Middle East to the home front. The Ft. Hood massacre was a godsend to them, and they took full advantage of the opportunity. The “ground zero” mosque controversy was another shot in the arm for this movement, and Rep. King did not disappoint on that front: When it comes to crude bigotry and religion-based divisiveness, we can always rely on King to sink to the occasion, far lower than practically anyone else.
So the hearings will be a farce, a show trial of the Muslim community in which the mere act of putting up a defense gives the prosecution a legitimacy it could never achieve on the merits of the case. Because there is no organized pro-al Qaeda, pro-terrorist tendency in American Islam to speak of, at least so far. Which is why the FBI has had to resort to entrapment in prosecuting alleged homegrown “terrorists.” The last one was a confused Somali teenager, lured by the FBI into planning a bombing (Read more from original.antiwar.com)
Intellectual Property helps makes this behavior possible. In an IP-free world, people could more easily abandon a company that cooperates with abusive governments (like ours), but in our world, where ideas are considered property, and imitation can be halted by means of government violence, it is much less likely companies will have a reason to resist such invasive actions.
he US government has subpoenaed Twitter in a bid to support an ongoing criminal investigation into whether Wikileaks and people involved or connected to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic member of parliament, broke the law.
According to Wikileaks lawyer Mark Stephens live on the BBC News a short time ago, it is believed Facebook and Google (see here) have also been contacted regarding Wikileaks members and potential whistleblowers.
Update (12:20am GMT): Mark Stephens on the BBC News also makes clear that the court order will also cover the “600,000 odd followers that Wikileaks has on Twitter“. (Read more from zdnet.com)
Edit: I was hoping Iowa City would at least be nominated for the under 21 ordinance. Oh well. I’m sure the politicians are working hard on next year’s award.
“Democracy broke down, not when the Union ceased to be agreeable to all its constituent States, but when it was upheld, like any other Empire, by force of arms.” ~The London Times, 1865
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President with less than 40% of the popular vote.
Having run on a radical whig platform of high protective tarriffs, tax funded subsidies to favored corporate interests, and an aggressive funding of “internal improvements,” he sought to finally bring to fruition what Hamilton and Clay could not, a highly centralized Federal Government with diminished state sovereignty.
Holding that the Federal Government was in violation of the terms of the Constitution, South Carolina and several other states peacably and democratically convened their legislatures to decide on a withdrawal. The vote was for secession.
“The Union, in any event, won’t be dissolved. We don’t want to dissolve it, and if you attempt it, we won’t let you. With the purse and sword, the army and navy and treasury in our hands and at our command, you couldn’t do it. . . We do not want to dissolve the Union; you shall not.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
“I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction, but as the redemption of Democracy, and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.” ~ Lord John Acton, British House of Commons, In a Letter to Robert E. Lee, 1866
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I found these quotes/facts/opinions in this video:
I will add that slavery ended peacefully all over the world. I do not believe that 600,000 young American men had to die for it to end here.
More than 100,000 people were stopped and searched by police under counter-terrorism powers last year but none of them were arrested for terrorism-related offences, according to Home Office figures published today.
The statistics show that 504 people out of the 101,248 searches were arrested for any offence – an arrest rate of 0.5%, compared with an average 10% arrest rate for street searches under normal police powers.
The figures prompted the former Conservative home affairs spokesman David Davis to call for the controversial policy to be scrapped. (Read more from guardian.co.uk)
Congressional leadership from both houses and both parties today reached a deal on a long-term extension of the PATRIOT Act, exactly as worded and without any of the inconvenient civil rights provisions that the Obama Administration has been warning against. The deal would extend an additional four years.
(Read more from antiwar.com)
