Currently I'm not at liberty to go into great detail on what is happening with the return of the DVDs constituting 99+% of the information we obtained in discovery. That will soon be fought in court and I can probably talk more about it then. What I can say is that PNNL claimed the information on those DVDs was "extremely sensitive" information and hence my lawyer and I were required to return it. The judge agreed without giving us an opportunity to refute that claim. This is acceptable in certain extraordinary circumstances which PNNL/Battelle claimed were present.

I thought people would be interested in knowing what PNNL defines as "sensitive". This is from their public website (IIRC PNWD stands for Pacific NorthWest Division):

sensitive information

At PNWD, information is considered sensitive if any of the following criteria are met: information is protected under the Privacy Act information for which Battelle would be liable if released to unauthorized individuals information for which Battelle is legally responsible information of which corruption or loss would substantially delay a project or impact the completion of a mission or goal information that cannot be reproduced or that would be unreasonably expensive to reproduce information that could profit an employee or outsider through unauthorized use, modification, or disclosure; or information that could be harmful to DOE, Battelle, or cause unfavorable publicity (e.g., financial, technical, or supply data) data identified by DOE as unclassified controlled nuclear information (UCNI) or data identified as export controlled information.

Bold emphasis added by me.

Needless to say we are challenging the validity of this as being sufficient reason to withhold discovery data. These guys are slime-balls and know that public disclosure is not good for their future.

I can understand their motives. Being rented out to their fellow inmate bidding the most cigarettes is something to be postponed as long as possible.

It was a day when men, recognizing the reality of evil, carried weapons that enabled them to stand in the gap for those being unjustly tormented and threatened. Virtually any man on the street could come to the aid of a victim like Clara.

That was then; this is now.

Bob Allen
April 4, 2007
How gun control trades life for death
[Clara is the woman killed in the CNN building yesterday.--Joe]

And you choose to be unarmed? To me, that just doesn't make sense.

Nicki Stallard
Pink Pistols: The Gay Group That's Getting Armed
Posted April 3, 2007
[Jeff Soyer, gay gun blogger at Alphecca, is quoted in this article as well.--Joe]

All warfare is based on deception.

Sun Tzu Wu
From The Art of War
[PNNL will love seeing this one today.--Joe]

Boomershoot 2007 stuff. There are even mugs, posters, bibs, thongs, and boxer shorts. All with this awesome image (edited by Xenia Joy):

A flight attendant accidentally carried a gun on board an airplane. She apparently went right through security with it. If they can't defend against people accidentally carrying weapons on board then they sure as heck can't defend against people that deliberately attempt to get them past security. They should investigate the alternatives and just give up this tremendous waste of money.

Back when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now a state openly committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we shrug: Can’t be helped. Just the way things are. One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get ’em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran’s head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that’s part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.

Mark Steyn
Facing Down Iran
[It is my belief we will "wake up" when Israel or an major U.S. city gets hit with a surprise nuclear attack. And although the "progressives" will whine about "it must have been our fault" we will finally take appropriate action. The question is how many 100's of millions, on both sides, will die due us waiting so long? Thanks to my brother Doug for sending me the quote and the link.--Joe]

Can you imagine what would have happened if some wide spot in the road had kidnapped a boat full of 'Er Majesty's tars back in the days of Pax Britannia?

HMS Thunderer would have dropped anchor in the harbor of whatever pathetic hamlet they were being held captive. Royal Marines would have been disembarked. Crowds of Wogs would have been mowed down by Gatlings and run through with Martini bayonets. The local rajah would have forked over his prisoners, or he would have found his house burned to the ground and Tommy Atkins pissing on the ashes.

Tamara K.
March 30, 2007
England, ma'am. It's where Great Britain used to be.

In a way I'm relieved they took back the DVDs with all the data I was going through. It had been a gold mine of useful information but this weekend I can let the caffiene circulatory system revert back to blood and get some sleep. It was wonderful to refresh my memory on so many things and be much better prepared to ask questions but I really needed some rest. The battle over the DVDs will be fought by the lawyers and either way Battelle comes out looking like a bunch of clowns and/or jerks.

The depositions and even the close of discovery may be delayed because of this. It's hard to imagine the fight over the DVDs will be over in time to keep on schedule. We'll see...

Yesterday I was talking about the current state of things with one of my primary financial backers. He congratulated me on hiding my true intentions on this blog. He said early on he was concerned about me being able to do that but that he was completely sucked in by my disinformation campaign. Cool! But what was so hard about it?

The Personal Protection Act has succeeded in destroying the myth that legally-armed citizens are somehow a threat to the general public. We knew they were wrong, and now everybody else knows it, too.

Joe Waldron
March 30, 2007
Executive Director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
ANTI-GUNNERS WRONG (AGAIN) ABOUT MINNESOTA CARRY

This case just gets more and more interesting.

Matthew Bean
March 29, 2007
[Bean is my lawyer in the PNNL case. Today the bad guys got a court order to demand we return 17 DVD's (and destroy all the copies) we had obtained as part of discovery. A lot of the information they gave us last week were printouts of my blog, nothing new for me to find there. Subtract that and the portions of the personnel file I already had and they took back more than 99% of the information they supplied to us. I had to leave work and get them to the lawyers office as quickly as I could. They sent someone to pick them up. Like I said before, I was shocked they hadn't destroyed some of the stuff they gave me. They might now. Fortunately for me the more data of theirs they suppress or destroy the more of the total evidence consists of my log files. Yes, they are backed up in numerous safe places and I'm adding another location tomorrow. I was right to go into full overdrive mode to get through as much data as quickly as I could. As I told Barb today, they can't legally delete my mind.--Joe]

So when is "legislating from the bench" valid, and when not?

I would argue that two conditions must be met. First, it can and should only be done by the Supreme Court. To bestow that power on lower courts invites, if not anarchy, then disrespect for law by the citizenry. Second, any decision that violates stare decisis must be done in order to broaden individual rights and freedoms - the "privileges and immunities" of citizens - that have been improperly restricted by decades of grain-upon-grain infringement.

Someone has to have the power to say "That's a heap," and knock it down.

Kevin Baker
March 6, 2007
Dred Scott and Legislating from the Bench
[This is a difficult question and I am very pleased with the answer Kevin came up with. If you read the entire post you get a better statement of the problem and why this solution is correct. Government power tends to grow and "legislating from the bench" should only be done to reduce that power.--Joe]

Very, very impressive.

Far, far more bravery than I could muster. I would love to fly and probably would try parachuting. This is a couple orders of magnitude beyond that.

Please don't tell my daughter Kim about it. I'd worry too much.

[Thanks to Lyle for the link.]

Sorry-- almost 600 words here, but I think you'll like it.

My wife recently told me she might run for mayor of our small town.

Not being one to miss out on a good argument, I started strafing her with questions until I decided to try one I've been saving for a while:

==========================
Is there anything, anything at all, in human life or endeavor that you consider to be absolutely none of government's business whatsoever?
==========================

She had to pause and think for a bit, because (and this is the point) few people ever consider the question.  She disappointed me slightly by blurting out what I would have predicted (I bet 90% of you have already come up with the same answer): "Sex."  Then she caught herself, "Uh, between consenting adults, uh, of consenting age, uh, twenty-one."

Age of consent, 21?  That was a real surprise to me, coming from her.  No matter.  I then asked her, "You don’t favor government funding for AIDS research"?

"Uh..."

“Should government be given any role in STD statistics gathering, prevention, cures, or any such related matters?"

"Uh..."

Clearly, most people, when backed into a corner thus, will eventually admit that they do indeed believe government has some business in our sex lives, and that's even before you get to the product of sex-- children, and with that-- raising children, child custody, child support, compulsory education, sex education and family law.  (When our first baby was born, we were visited by a government case worker who interviewed us and inspected our house, clipboard in hand, to make sure we were fit to keep and raise our own child)

Again I asked: "Is there anything at all that should be entirely beyond the jurisdiction of government?"

"Yes-- private matters.  Some things are private"

"Such as..?  We go to our neighbor down the street and buy a dozen eggs each week (they keep a few chickens).  Is that a private matter?"

"Yes"

"I agree, but that $52 has to be declared to the IRS.  Now let’s say word gets around and eventually everyone in our town goes to that neighbor and buys a dozen eggs each week.  That's around 500 dozen eggs per week, or $26,000 per year in gross revenue.  Is that government's business?"

"Yes, we have to collect taxes...but we could barter for the eggs.  We can do yard work for the neighbor in return for the eggs.” (this is one of the infinite variations of; ‘other people should be taxed, sure, but we can find a way to sneak around it for ourselves without getting caught.’  This particular, instant knee-jerk reaction tells us a lot about politics all by itself).

“Sorry.  That’s a taxable transaction according to the IRS, and if barter were to be made officially non taxable, you’d see a major shift in the economy as people found ways to barter and avoid taxation.  Would you support that?”

“No.  We have to collect taxes.”

On it went.  The bottom line is; my wife's initial reaction was that, certainly, there are many things that are properly none of government's business.  However, she would eventually say that each aspect of our lives, once I questioned her further, is actually government’s business in some way.

I ask you to consider the question, in this age wherein we have fallen to discussing (seriously, even) a ban on light bulbs, in this the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave:  Can you name anything at all within the realm of human activity that in your opinion should be absolutely none of any government’s business whatsoever?