They should be sent to prison for deprivation of rights under the color of law but a Federal Judge frowning at the TSA and telling them to get public comment on the body scanners is better than nothing.
Category Archives: Freedom
Quote of the day—bob r
If you cut out the tumor, what is it going to be replaced by?
If you kill the rabid dog, what is it going to be replaced by?
If you cut out the gangrene, what is it going to be replaced by?
If you remove the mudslide from the road, what is it going to be replaced by?
If you remove the nail from the tire, what is it going to be replaced by?
If you remove the excess fat from your ass, what is it going to be replaced by?
If you remove the worm from the apple, what is it going to be replaced by?
If you remove the slug from the garden, what is it going to be replaced by?
If you remove the hornet nest from the entry way, what is it going to be replaced by?
bob r
July 14, 2011
Comment to Random thought of the day in response to ubu52 asking, “If TSA goes away, what is it going to be replaced by?”
[As Say Uncle has said, “Same planet, different worlds”.
ubu52, and many others, have completely different base assumptions about the world we live in, politics, and human nature than I and the people I usually associate with do. This makes it hard to have meaningful discussions let alone share the same government.—Joe]
Gambling with Societal Stability
That title reads like it’s from one of the pathetic doctoral theses that students are forced to write, and that no one will ever read, doesn’t it?
No, I’m talking about gambling, or “gaming” as a business.
Gambling, it was said, should be outlawed because of the horrific problems that can result from it. Some people, lured by the prospect of easy money, cannot control themselves, and so on. And so gambling was outlawed. To save us from ourselves. It’s based on the thoroughly Marxist tenet that says; if we’re allowed to make our own decisions, we’ll surely mess up everything. Because we suck.
Oh, but wait; there can be a lot of money to be made in gambling, so we should have a state lottery! Cool! Think of all the sweet, sweet money!
Now, all of sudden, and just because the government owns it, gambling is WONDERFUL! Why, look at all the things it funds! Think of The Children!
The Washington State Lottery has been running radio ads telling us of all the beautiful, wonderful, loving things that the lottery does for all of us and our community. They quote the happy winners and urge us to gamble like there’s no tomorrow, imploring us to ask ourselves with the catchy phrase; “Who’s world could YOU change?”
See, you cops and you in the justice system and you legislators; this is how the remaining shreds of respect for the law, and law enforcement, are being eroded.
It’s the worst, most destructive thing in the world when WE deoit, but it’s the very definition of beauty and all things holy when YOU do it.
I have a friendly tip for you in this regard– FUCK YOU! You’re not helping to stabilize your communities with this sort of crap. You’re helping to de-stabilize your communities with the enforcement of laws that punish people who HAVEN’T violated anyone’s rights.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why, if we’re going to de-criminalize drugs, we must keep the drug trade as far out of the hands of government as possible. This is the sort of crap that led to the creation of the BATFE following the horrors of Prohibition, if you know your history.
If we follow that horrid model, let’s see; “We gave some of the gambling to Indian tribes, so maybe we can give the pot trade to…hmmm…maybe the Hispanic Americans? Maybe the poor white trailer trash? Or should they be given the meth trade? Oh what the hell, lets have the government play the role that used to be played by the syndicated crime gangs that the government created with substance laws in the first place. Sure—they own it already, by rights. Fine, now what about prostitution?”
I’ve been asking the question for years; haven’t we learned a single thing from the Prohibition era? Now I’m wondering. Maybe we did learn something from Prohibition. Maybe we learned that there’s a ton of money and power to be gained from making certain things illegal, causing a bunch of crime and chaos, ratcheting up the law enforcement and reaching for more “tools” for said enforcement, then when it’s so far out of control that the people are saying they’ve had enough and they’re demanding “something” be done, government takes it over where the gangs left off. State pot dispensaries, AND we still have all the 4th amendment incursions we had during the drug “war” AND we still have the DEA. “Top down, bottom up, inside out” (that model fits perfectly here, so if you haven’t heard of it, you had better start googling it. We’re being set up). And you people think it’s a freaking great idea. Suckers. Fools. Dupes. You think you’re for freedom, and you’ll be begging for this shit, as an improvement. Just as it was planned. The BATFEM, here we come. You’ll call for it, thinking yourself clever, but you’re just someone else’s Stradivari.
On the other hand, we could have a free society, like we were promised after the Revolution. Now which would you rather? A free society, or a government-run, hypocritical shit hole with different rules for different groups of people and still different rules for government-run businesses? We fought a revolution over much less than this, and defeated the most powerful military in the world in the process. Americans tend to think freedom is worth fighting for. It’s in our blood.
Random thought of the day
Barron suggests people show the TSA some verbal disrespect if you happen to meet them when they are not in a position of power over you.
I can’t find much fault with what he suggests. Perhaps it is just a waste of time. What I wonder is how much of this it would take before it would cause the turnover rate to noticeably increase. Beyond that how much would it take before the TSA would be shut down? And how many people would it take to accomplish this? This question can be generalized to other disliked organizations (not even restricted to governmental organizations).
If you say there are some organizations that can’t be eliminated this way then you don’t have enough imagination. Hypothetically the level of force can be scaled up to any level so in the extreme case this would be deadly force. And for small enough organizations, say a few dozen, one could imagine that a single “activist” could eliminate the entire organization and not get caught. Hence, in this extreme case one person could rid the planet of one hated organization by themselves.
At the other extreme you have one individual frowning at a single member of the hated organization composed of millions. The effect of which could not possibly be measured.
In between these two extremes there must be some level of force and number of applications of that force that results in the organization being disbanded. Could it be possible to determine what the minimum force and minimum required number of applications without going up against the TSA? Surely there is data that could be extrapolated from. If nothing else interviewing people that divorced their spouses or quit their jobs would provide some hints.
Suppose we had the numbers and we knew, for example, that the organization would disband if one of the following were true:
- 50% of the organization were verbally abused every day for one month
- 10% of the organization were physically assaulted at least once every month
- 1% of the organization were murdered each month.
Now we look at the problem from a different perspective, the moral acceptability of the actions. Suppose the organization were the Police Battalions moving through Poland and the USSR in 1941-2. Morally any level of force would be justified because of the defensive of innocent life. On the other end the organization might be activists for a Pro-Choice/Life organization and even though they might stir up some strong emotions it would be difficult to justify using force beyond verbal abuse.
Now comes the tricky part. How do you measure the moral tradeoff in quantity versus level of force? That is, for the example at hand, suppose that you could end the TSA by slapping a single TSA agent. Probably one could justify that. It would be worth violation of moral principles because you stopped the violation of other principles by the TSA. Very much like using deadly force to defend innocent life from those that take it.
So is that how one should balance the moral scales? Force must be in proportion to that applied by the hated individual or organization? That works when the numbers are one on one. But what when the offenders number in the 10s of thousands and they offend hundreds of times per day and will repeatedly offend into the endless future? How are the scales of morality balanced now? What can be justified as the weight of those millions of offenses stretching on into eternity are balanced against a small number of greater offenses? Is one person suffering a vigorous slap the moral equivalent of 10 full body pat downs and five nude body scans of the innocent victims?
Closely related is another question. How many people would someone have to kill before a law were changed or broken law ignored? Imagine some criminal is holed up in a building, surrounded by the cops, and the negotiator tells him to surrender. The criminals says he wants to consider his options and asks, “How many people do I have to kill to be allowed to go free?” The negotiator says, “It doesn’t work that way. You will not be allowed to go free no matter how many people you kill.” The criminal says, “You lack imagination. Obviously if I kill everyone else on this continent I will go free. But I don’t want to do that. That would be too terrible and too difficult. But if it were somewhat fewer I might consider it. So I want to know what the number is.”
So what is the answer? If the “right people” people in the executive branch, down through the local police force, are killed that would probably do it too. That number might be relatively small. Perhaps a few hundred. It would be exceedingly immoral of course. But posing the question fascinates me because of the implications. It appears that if an extraordinary evil is perpetrated against, perhaps, some very small number of people then the entire fabric of our society could be changed.
9/11 was a crude example but that data point supports the hypothesis. The people who were murdered were, for all intents and purposes, chosen at random. And although it had profound changes on our society the response was different from that intended by the attackers. But what if the people attacked were individually chosen for their position of power and it was believed the attackers could do it again at will and probably never get caught? The attackers don’t have to put themselves into positions of official power. They just have to have “veto power” over the lives of those who wield it.
Our society and political system is perhaps far more fragile than we would like to believe. It’s resilience is extremely dependent upon being able to almost completely thwart those that would exercise “veto power” and get away with it.
Update: Mexico probably has a lot of data that could be used to answer the questions.
No guns for Negros
This is a JPFO video via Full-Scale Tactics:
The JPFO almost always puts out good stuff.
Quote of the day–Ilana Rovner
Stung by the result of McDonald v. City of Chicago, 130 S. Ct. 3020 (2010), the City quickly enacted an ordinance that was too clever by half. Recognizing that a complete gun ban would no longer survive Supreme Court review, the City required all gun owners to obtain training that included one hour of live‐range instruction, and then banned all live ranges within City limits. This was not so much a nod to the importance of live‐range training as it was a thumbing of the municipal nose at the Supreme Court. The effect of the ordinance is another complete ban on gun ownership within City limits.
…
The ordinance admittedly was designed to make gun ownership as difficult as possible. The City has legitimate, indeed overwhelming, concerns about the prevalence of gun violence within City limits. But the Supreme Court has now spoken in Heller and McDonald on the Second Amendment right to possess a gun in the home for self-defense and the City must come to terms with that reality. Any regulation on firearms ownership must respect that right.
Ilana Rovner
July 6, 2011
Circuit Judge, United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit
RHONDA EZELL, et al., v. CITY OF CHICAGO
[The entire ruling could be summed up as telling the city and the lower court that they reversed, “You suck and we hate you.” It’s pretty brutal. As a hint, Rovner, above, was the more sympathetic of the judges. While concurring that the preliminary injunction should be issued against the city she didn’t go quite as far as Kanne and Sykes did.
It was a pleasure to read. There was agreement with so many things we have been saying for decades. That the anti-gun people have dismissed these arguments almost without discussion and to now have a court rule with us is an extreme pleasure. Most importantly they explicitly and repeatedly use the First Amendment as an analog to the Second Amendment. I will not restrain from saying, “We and many others told you so!”
See also Sebastian’s post on the topic.
As a side note which may have some relevance, while an infant Rovner and her mother immigrated to the U.S. from Latvia to escape Nazism.—Joe]
Posit
A coercively funded, government controlled education monopoly verses liberty.
I’ll put it another way. Let’s suppose we put that on a national ballot. You have two selections. You may vote for the coercively funded, government controlled education monopoly on one hand, or liberty on the other. Either/or. That’s your choice.
But wait; do you or anyone else, no matter your numbers, have the right to vote against liberty? Why?
Quote of the day—Kevin Baker
To surrender completely to the control of others – either a secular government or a religious one – control that invades every waking action, requires people unwilling to do for themselves. The first step is and must be the destruction of education. People must be prevented from thinking for themselves, from reasoning. George Orwell explained it with “Newspeak” in his novel 1984:
…
That preparation started in the early years of the 20th Century. Thus today we have “politically correct” speech. With destruction of language skills comes the destruction of logic skills – if you can’t read, you can’t integrate ideas new to you. In fact, new ideas are gibberish – words that have no meaning. “Politically free” is a null value to someone planted in the fields of politicism. It’s a weed.
A free society requires an informed and virtuous citizenry.
“Free,” “informed” and “virtuous” have become null terms.
The 21st Century will be a century of struggle between freedom and politicism. Polticism has two competing versions – Marxist and Muslim. Freedom?
Null term.
Kevin Baker
July 4, 2011
TL;DR
[Kevin has some good points. There are even some points that he doesn’t directly address that support his pessimistic outlook. For example, the title, “TL;DR”, is very telling. Our society changed dramatically with instant entertainment. I’m certain that television and even radio are factors in the transformation of our culture into a more ignorant one. We can be mindlessly entertained rather than improving our minds and/or our bodies or producing something of value. The idiot boxes are such a great temptation that instead of doing something productive we take another hit of the entertainment drug. And there is so many “drugs” to chose from. If one doesn’t grab you in the first 15 seconds you change the “channel” until you find one that does grab you. Instant gratification is critical to success of a “channel”. Who in their right mind would be willing to read and understand, let alone write, books like those of Locke and Hobbs (unless it was Calvin and Hobbs) when you have Grand Theft Auto, Entertainment Tonight, and meth available? Those are so much easier to understand and offer near instant gratification. Who has the time to even read a Kevin Baker post? Understand it? Bah! In the grand scheme, it’s almost no one.
The fraction of the population that is capable of that is so small and the fraction of those that would care even if they could understand it that the blip on the vote tally would be impossible to detect in the statistical noise let alone the voter fraud. And the voter fraud will always be aligned against the likes of Kevin.
I understand all that. But I still have, perhaps perverse, optimism for the outcome. While the upside of our near instant communication isn’t as obvious as the downside I still think the potential exists to ultimately prevail. Because we have the ability to communicate to thousands across vast distances at nearly the speed of light and publish we have a incredible advantage over Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Samuel Adams. They were part of a nation of just three million people and built the foundation of most powerful economic and military force the world has ever seen. We have three million or more like minded people in our country now. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are ten times that many. The problem is that those people’s voices have been drown out by the noise from the parasites clamoring for “social justice”, or “their fair share”.
There have been many great civilizations before us that collapsed and some of the causes may even be common to our own. Internal and/or external enemies, exhaustion of natural resources, over population, or even climate changes (you have heard of the little ice age, right?). But our current crises is mostly due to internal enemies with some added pressure by external enemies. As Kevin points out these are the cults created centuries ago by Marx and Mohammad. I think the Marx cultists is doing most of the damage and is the bigger threat. But I think it is possible that even they have reached the zenith of their power and may soon experience a catastrophic collapse even more rapid than our society as a whole.
What the socialist/communist/progressive masses don’t understand is that they are, as Ayn Rand pointed out, looters. And the life of an unhindered looter is only great as long as there is someone left to loot that doesn’t offer meaningful resistance. And they just looted the last “store” on the planet.
The Marxists always describe people in terms of “class”. I think there is a grain truth to be harvested from a class division of people. But it’s not the class division taught by Marx and his cult. The class division I find useful is of producers and looters. And as the economic realities of discovering the last store on the planet has already been looted the looters will either become producers or they will die off. I suspect there will be lots of dead. Most from starvation and disease and a few from being shot by the producers that finally start doing what should have been done a long time ago—protecting their property from the looters.
The instant communication channels will allow us to find other producers and identify looters. This will give us hope and it will enable our cooperation. This is the upside to our technology and may yet save our species from the great endarkenment looming over us. This is an ace-in-the hole that no civilization before us ever had available.
The looters of the future will not be so well camouflaged as the looters of today. Today they have a few leaders who wear suits and smile as they wave to the camera and ask for your vote. In the not so distant future their leaders are likely to live lives that of the last couple of years of Saddam Hussein and meet similar ends. The looters will be hungry, dirty, and run in wild packs. Without the camouflage producers will recognize them for what they are and appropriate action will be taken.
I don’t know the end result of the coming final class struggle. Maybe the looters will destroy the last of the producers and it will be another ten thousand years before a civilization can rise from the ashes. But at this point I don’t think that is a forgone conclusion. I think the producers may have to look the other way as millions of looters become beggars and then finally corpses. They may be millions of tons of rotting flesh to be cleared but the producers may be able to survive the coming apocalypse and end up with a much stronger society two or three generations from now.
Some lessons are very, very difficult to learn. But sometimes you cannot advance to the next level until you master the current level.
I just hope Gerard Vanderleun is wrong and our society can learn the lesson of this level before we have lost all our lives and it is game over.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Walter E. Williams
Becoming a burden on society is not a problem of liberty and private property. It’s a problem of socialism where one person is forced to take care of someone else. That being the case, the government, in the name of reducing health care costs, assumes part ownership of you and as such assumes a right to control many aspects of your life. That Americans have joyfully given up self-ownership is both tragic and sad.
Walter E. Williams
2009
Who May Harm Whom?
[Via Lyle in the comments.
Read the whole thing. I think the concepts presented have the ability to shut down, in my favor, many of debates that I sometimes get into.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Ron Paul
My hope is that the recent hearing will further expose the ATF’s and Attorney General Eric Holder’s assaults on law-abiding gun owners, and more people will start questioning the need for unconstitutional agencies like the ATF that exist solely to infringe on American citizens’ God-given right to keep and bear arms.
Ron Paul
June 21, 2011
Rep. Ron Paul slams Obama over gun scandal, Second Amendment
[This is a little weak. The words “right to keep and bear arms” should be replaced with “rights”.
At least that would be a good start. Calls for tar and feathers would gain further support from me.—Joe]
This Public Servant Bit Needs More Discussion
This is an addendum to the post below.
As stated; as a public employee, as a public servant, your job, your individual tasks, your pay and the very existence of the department for which you work, exists purely at our (The People’s) pleasure. It is our prerogative to alter this relationship, to dismiss you, or to eliminate your department entirely, at a whim.
As a public servant, you have no “right” whatsoever to a particular salary, or to a particular job, etc. If we decide we must lower your pay or dismiss you altogether, your proper response would be something like; “I understand. Thank you for the opportunity to have served you.” At that point you are free to go your own way and prove your worth in the marketplace as you see fit. May you live long and prosper.
If you decide, on the other hand, to get hostile about it and start in with the name-calling and the threats, what can We The People conclude about the relationship we’ve had with you? Look at me when I’m talking to you!
In private practice, a servant that gets hostile with the home owner will probably result in the police being called in on a domestic disturbance. At the very best it would result in an unflattering reference when you apply for another job. This is OUR house. If the hostility continues and becomes threatening, what are we to do? If the police aren’t able to help us get you public servants under control, well then, what? What are we left with for options in that case? You aren’t going to get your way, let me just put it like that. Not for long, I can tell you. This is OUR country.
Exposing Leftists
College students are asked to sign a petition to impose Affirmative Action upon the basketball team (for diversity), to redistribute GPA points, ban conservative talk radio, etc. Good stuff. Enjoy.
What I took away was the students’ apparent total lack of ability, or preparation, for these discussions, meaning that high schools and universities aren’t encouraging such critical thinking at all. I believe my son, who just graduated from high school, could give these petitioners a resounding talkin’ to.
HT to Glen Beck
And You Thought FEMA was All About Helping People
Admit it– somewhere in the recesses of your mind, you thought there were only the best of intentions behind the creation of FEMA.
Little Grasshopper; I’ve been trying to get this across for some time now. I know it’s extremely difficult, but you have to try harder to grasp this pebble from my hand. People with good intentions want YOU TO BE STRONG ALL ON YOUR OWN. In the harder times, when you fall down and get seriously hurt, they want YOUR LOCAL COMMUNITY TO BE STRONG ALL ON ITS OWN. In the hardest of times they want YOUR REGION TO BE STRONG ALL ON ITS OWN. If the end of the world seems to be upon you, they want EVERY INDIVIDUAL TO BE AS INDEPENDANTLY STRONG AS POSSIBLE. Only then can Mankind face the biggest challenges and come out strong.
Creating a system that operated through coercion, funded coercively, which by its nature weakens charities and weaken individuals in favor of centralized power, is not the result of good intentions. It is the result of hatred. I know it’s extremely difficult, Little Grasshopper. I know there are all those assertions of warmth and light and compassion, but those are deep, deep lies, all the more the egregious because of their mockery of love and compassion.
What evidence will it take to convince you?
Rearden Metal Bracelet
If there were a woman close to me that had read the book I would seriously consider buying this bracelet for them.
In other news Atlas Shrugged Part II is scheduled to be out in the fall of 2012.
Quote of the day—Erica Goldberg
Although some government officials may wish otherwise, protected speech is called “protected” for a reason. The courts will safeguard it at the financial peril of those who violate the Constitution. Parody cannot be criminalized, and those who create parody cannot be treated as criminals.
Erica Goldberg
June 7, 2011
Court Holds Prosecutor Personally Liable for Unconstitutional Search of Student Who Created a Parody Newsletter
[H/T Say Uncle.
Someday we need to leverage this ruling or others like it into legal action against those that violate our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.—Joe]
Quote of the day—Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence
There is no legal basis to the idea that the Second Amendment protects the right of an individual to take up arms against the government.
Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence
June 7, 2011
The Truth About ‘Second Amendment Remedies’: How to Counter Insurrectionist Arguments
[I see. Are they saying there is no law, no act, no outrage so terrible that the individual has no legal option but to endure it?
It seems to me people of that mindset are inviting a future which resembles the worst of our past and the most dystopian of our visions. When the police are again the KKK and the police battalions become executions squads will the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence still be advocating for compliance?
I can only see two possible reasons for these people to make such claims. Either they are either incredibly naïve useful idiots or they are advocates for tyranny.—Joe]
Quote of the day—John Sharp Williams
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government.
Senator John Sharp Williams
From Respectfully quoted: a dictionary of quotations found in Williams works, Thomas Jefferson: His Permanent Influence on American Institutions, p. 49 (1913). Lecture delivered at Columbia University, New York City, 1912.
Although this is often attributed to Jefferson himself this is probably false with Williams deserving most of the credit.
[This certainly applies to many many instances of bad government. I suspect it is a direct effect of power corrupting. The more power a government has the more it becomes corrupted. The only real solution, realized at the time our country was founded, was to enumerate and limit the power of government. Now that those enumerations and limitations are ignored we again have corrupted and bad government.—Joe]
1.5 Watts! Wow! No wait…
I was over at friend, Cliff’s house last night. He showed me his new LED light bulbs. They’re awesome. Nice spectrum, smaller than a regular bulb, plenty of light, no observable strobe effect from the power supply, and IIRC they used only 1.5 Watts. Cool to the touch after being on for hours.
But wait. This is the North. With the low temps this Spring, we’re still heating our homes. Therefore any reduction in the heat output of your lighting and other appliances has to be made up, one for one, by the home heating system. Zero energy savings until we get warmer weather (outdoor lighting is of course exempt from this issue – any reduction in consumption means direct energy savings).
That means there will be maybe 120 days this year in which your ultra efficient indoor lighting pays off anything in this region. Remember that when making your pay-off calculations.
Cliff is in the stage production supply business. He showed me some of the new LED Par cans (stage lighting, in this case also computer [MIDI] controlled). Stage lighting can be brutal on the performers, since even with the biggest, most powerful sound systems, it is the lighting that traditionally used the majority of the electrical power. That’s why you’ve so often seen performers soaked in sweat. We’ve been running the old, hot cans, and then running clusters of fans to try keeping the performers halfway comfortable. With these new LED cans, it’s going to be much, much nicer to be on stage, and we won’t need to have the sometimes difficult to accommodate power requirements in our performance contracts. This particular model also changes color by switching the LEDs, something like the way a color video display uses the different color pixels, which means no more screwing around with color gels.
Technology is wonderful, just so long as we keep the retarded politicians (but I repeat myself) out of our business. Let them shovel shit instead. With some training in shit shoveling, maybe they could be of some small service to humanity. I’ve done it. It can be quite important at times.
Quote of the day—Lyle@UltiMAK
It never ceases to amaze me that so many can get so upset over something so innocuous as simply leaving people alone.
Lyle@UltiMAK
May 31, 2011
Comment to Quote of the day—Dave Workman.
[Yeah. Amazing isn’t it? But yet it happens over so many things like homosexuality, skin color, what (if any) religious beliefs you observe, and how many rounds of ammo your gun holds. Why should there even need to be constitutional protection for something so innocuous?—Joe]
Quote of the day—Mad Rocket Scientist
I would just love to hear about one these RAIDS coming up short because the doors wouldn’t batter down and the windows just chipped instead of breaking. I can just imagine the SWAT team standing outside of the little bungalow they tried to force, a bit perplexed that they couldn’t get it, when grandma’s voice comes out of the intercom speaker by the door, “Can I help you?”.
Mad Rocket Scientist
May 24, 2011
I think I’m gonna start a business
[There are other outcomes that I have fantasized about which also bring a smile to my face. But implementations are not cheap and the risks are unacceptably high even though the deterrence effects would be “significant”. It also probably would require “entrapment” of the police by the homeowner which would be frowned upon by many.—Joe]