Category Archives: Freedom

Halbig vs Burwell

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The DC Court of Appeals handed down it’s decision in Halbig vs Burwell, an ObamaCare challenge. The crux of the challenge is that the law, as written, says that people on exchanges established by a state can get the subsidies, people using the Federal exchange established by Uncle Sam cannot. This was done (they said at the time) as an incentive to encourage states to set up their own exchanges, and it was estimated that only a small number of knuckledragging states would fail to do so (so screw them)… (OK, so the last part was my words for their actions).

But when 34 states failed to set up their own exchange, it caused a problem. Millions of people don’t want to have their promised subsidies “taken away.” So, the HHS said “well, it really means any exchange, including the Federal one.” The DC Court of Appeals just said “No, state means state.” And, as an added bonus, just a few days ago the HHS itself said that in the ACA, “State” means “State,” not “state and/or territories.” A bit more than a week ago, Obama’s law professor said it would likely turn out this way.

This is potentially a nuclear bomb in the heart of the law. Next stop, en banc review on the (packed?) court, or the Supreme Court. Only downside is finding out how the Rs will manage to shoot themselves in the foot with this news (with the media’s willing help, of course.)

UPDATE: the 4th Circuit just ruled the other way on the same thing. Wow, that was timely.

Another good analysis.

Another one from Forbes. If upheld, it would cancel the subsidies, AND the tax for not buying insurance (i.e., kill the mandate).

Electronic Marques

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Interesting idea. The US Constitution authorizes operations against pirates. Article 1,Section 8, Clause 10 “To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;”

It also covers issuing letters of Marque and Reprisal, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;”

Why not do the suddenly obvious and issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal to private corporations to go after international electronic pirates, foreign agents who are attacking our corporations and infrastructure electronically? Makes sense to me.

IF by Rudyard Kipling

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Via the late Jeff Cooper.

No wonder we were not introduced to Kipling in school.

Sadly perfect gun case?

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In order to advance gun law in the right direction, it is often (sadly)  necessary for bad things to happen to good people in order to create the “correct” circumstances for a compelling court case that can overturn stupid laws. There may be one in New Jersey now. Short version: a Pennsylvania nurse with a concealed carry permit drove into NJ, got busted during a traffic stop, charged with second degree handgun possession, faces three to ten years if convicted. She has no criminal history, a good job, and two kids, and prosecutors are passing up every opportunity to lighten the charges or penalty. If the facts of the case are as presented in this article, this would be a case to take to the supreme court to strike down such idiot laws. For her sake, I hope the Governor steps in and slaps some sense into the prosecutor and she gets off with a warning- but it shouldn’t have to need that. Anti-gun people like to compare concealed carry permits to driver’s licenses. Well, here’s their chance to see how well that works.

Random thought of the day

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If putting serial numbers on bullets is a good idea to help solve crimes involving guns wouldn’t it also be a good idea to put them on prescription pills to track down whoever is supplying those who abuse those drugs? Or how about serial numbers on cigarettes to help prevent cigarettes from getting into the hands of underage smokers? Or tracking the serial numbers on paper money to combat the recreational drug trade?

The answer is no to all these ideas. Anyone that suggests serial numbers on bullets is as stupid and/or ignorant as someone who suggests serial numbers be tracked on the other items.

Rights+ vs Rights-

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There are two main views on “rights”: positive rights, and negative rights.

Negative rights are those rights that say you (or the government) can’t do something to me. For example, you CAN’T take my guns. You CAN’T throw me in jail forever without charging me. They impose a restriction on someone else’s actions.

Positive rights are those that say you (or the government) must do something for me. For example, you MUST provide me with health care. You MUST keep me safe.

It is very rare that conflicts arise between competing negative rights. But problems arise often and in nasty ways with positive rights, because your positive right imposes an obligation on other people, that is, it requires active coercion on other people to secure those items and services and provide them to you, but there is no reciprocal duties placed upon you. But that, obviously, sets up a whole chain of conflicts.

The demands and costs of negative rights are, by definition, limited. They require little more than restraint, doing nothing.

Positives rights are an illusion, they cannot stand, they are not compatible with freedom, they are synonymous with slavery, abuse, stagnation, and lawlessness, because the demands (coercion required) of positive rights are without limit, and therefore destructive to the public weal.

Quote of the day—Eric Krupin

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“The Gulag Archipelago” is not beach reading. (Although Solzhenitsyn’s searingly sarcastic style makes it anything but a dry collection of facts.) The evil that it obsessively documents is so dark that even reading about it is often difficult to bear. But anyone with pretentions of understanding the world we live in needs to go through it from first page to last.

But if you aren’t willing to make the effort, here’s the lesson boiled down for you: Totalitarianism doesn’t begin with a Stalin or a Hitler. It begins with *you*, on the day that you let a government become more powerful than the people it governs. Remember that or someday it might not be the Russians or the Jews or the Serbs that the men with guns come for. It just might be you…

Eric Krupin
June 13, 2001
Comment to Amazon’s listing of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One).
[For many years I put off even considering these books because they were so massive. I couldn’t imagine the topic could be interesting enough to keep me going. I imagined it to be an exhaustingly long, dry, and difficult slog.

I was wrong. I was very wrong.

I’m not sure how Solzhenitsyn did it. I’m not sure I see it as “searingly sarcastic” although there is some of that. Maybe it’s that he didn’t do a chronological telling of his eight years in prison from his arrest, through interrogation, transport to the various prisons and labor camps and the conditions there. You get that in bits and pieces but you also get those same aspects from the perspective of numerous other survivors who were in different interrogation centers, on trains, and in different camps and prisons.

You learn about the economics of the slave labor. You learn how the edicts of production “norms” resulted in the falsification of records at the slave labor camp where raw materials were harvested (trees, clay for bricks, ore for metal, etc.), continuing through the transportation, storage and distribution facilities, and then finally having the nonexistent finished product “stolen” or “destroyed by weather”. At each stage the people responsible had strong incentives to continue the fraud and did.

The lies told for public relations were amazing. The canal built with hand labor in 30 months “without a single fatality”. There were 100,000 people who started on the project and there were 100,000 when they finished the project. Never mind the 250,000 replacements brought in during the course of the project.

Stalin wanted the canal built in 30 months and no one dared to fail in completing it on time. As in software on a tight schedule features were removed during the course of the project until they did meet the schedule. The canal was only 14 feet deep in places. Only the smallest of ships could traverse it and traffic was near zero when it was finished.

It is an amazing set of books and I agree with Krupin. Read them. And stop that from happening here.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Glenn Reynolds

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When police trespass on your property to stop you videoing them, you should be allowed to kill them, put their heads on pikes as a warning to others, sell their organs to Chinese organleggers, and use the money to buy billboards mocking their superiors for lawlessness.

It’s a modest proposal, but it would probably reduce misconduct.

Glenn Reynolds
July 10, 2014
MY LAW REFORM PROPOSAL
[I was a little surprised to see this from a law professor but I can see a case to be made for the proposal.

I suspect we would only have to have a national discussion about the merits of such a reform to effect a change in police attitude.—Joe]

A dystopian advocate

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Amazing: Let’s nationalize Amazon and Google: Publicly funded technology built Big Tech

It’s mind boggling to read this crap. One of the arguments is that they are spying on people, which he doesn’t like. So putting them under government control is a good idea? Hasn’t this idiot heard of the NSA in the last few months?

It should come as no surprise he wants to destroy the “pioneer fantasy” of gun ownership.

Either he thinks of The Gulag Archipelago as a utopia instead of a dystopia or he is so naïve and/or stupid that he doesn’t realize what he advocates would create those conditions.

Quote of the day—smileycreek

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Food, water, shelter, and basic medical care are all basic human requirements that should never be withheld in a civilized society.

smileycreek
July 2, 2014
Comment to Income Inequality: A Desperate Situation With Real Solutions
[In smileycreek’s universe a “civilized society” is one where the government takes from each according to his ability, and gives to each according to his need.

I’m reading about just such a place in The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) and The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1918-1956. Tens of millions of people were murdered in an attempt to create such a society and it failed. And that is just one of many attempts that all ended in deaths of hundreds of thousands and in the case of the USSR tens of millions.

Even just this one sentence in smileycreek’s comment reveals the distortion required to believe lie of communism. The lie of communism is that people with no incentive to produce all they are able to will do so anyway. Who would willingly become a provider of “food, water, shelter, or basic medical care” if they could be forced to give it up without compensation by anyone?

The big distortion here is that is if I refuse to give my food, shelter, or (if I were a medical provider) my services to another unless I am compensated is considered “withholding”. That’s a warped definition. Yet that is also the basis of the current uproar about the SCOTUS ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. Nothing has been withheld. But the sound bite is better if it is phrased that way.

Communists like smileycreek can only win by lying. And they have lots of practice at it. It’s how government murder millions of innocent people.

Today people that openly support the beliefs of the Nazis are rightly hounded into silence and oblivion. Yet support for the beliefs of Communists is considered by nearly half of our country’s population to be the mark of decency, righteous, and “civilized society”. But the Communists of the 20th Century proved the Nazis were pikers in the game of governments murdering innocent people.

Perhaps that is the key to understanding those who advocate Communism and yet hate Nazism. To them the Nazis weren’t ruthless enough.–Joe]

Random thought of the day

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Political heresy is more of a threat to the collective than is a thief or murderer. The common criminal only affects a few people. A heretic can affect all of society.

This insight is almost directly from Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1918-1956. This is why the political prisoners were treated worse and had longer sentences than thieves and murderers.

It also might explain why the political left in this country are so violent toward their political opponents. They, at some level, have reached the same conclusion as their political brethren of the former USSR. And that is that independent thought is a threat to the entire power structure and the very foundation of their existence.

Classy

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Progressives are so violent:

— natalie(@heartsinireland) July 1, 2014

I hope Kendall Jones gets mauled by a lion. The evil, disgusting coward pic.twitter.com/kQy2uLm0yK

— Jack (@JackLewBaines) July 1, 2014

I hope #KendallJones gets eaten alive #Facebook http://t.co/IqrQ4GRUyZ

— Wendy Fiore (@wendyfiore) July 1, 2014

It appears to be in their nature.

Quote of the day—Susie Madrak

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Do we have the ATF and BLM agents roll up in armored tanks? Do we use drone strikes? I can see the administration’s reluctance to have that confrontation — after all, it’s not as if gun control advocates were flooding the White House switchboard, screaming to ‘take them out!’ And then we do have the militia types all over the country, just waiting for an excuse to start their own local uprising. These assholes want a civil war so bad, they can taste it.

Some days, I wonder: Should we let them, and just get it over with? You know, settle the burning question about whose is bigger.

Susie Madrak
June 23, 2014
So At What Point Do We Actually Stand Up To The Gun Nuts?
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via Phil.

Molṑn labé Susie.—Joe]

We were right again

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For years the anti-gun people talked about terrible it was that people could buy guns even if they were on the terrorism watch list:

The Brady Campaign even coined the phrase “terror gap”. Their web page (http://www.bradycampaign.org/legislation/backgroundchecks/terrorgap) has since been taken down and the phrase cannot be found on their website (but you can find it on bradynetwork.org) but it was an issue they tried to get traction on (see also this search result).

And during that entire time we tried to tell them such action by the government would violate due process protections. They ignored us.

We were right. Again. And it is not just on the constitutionality of using such a list to deny someone their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. The present implementation of the “no fly list” itself is a violation of due process:

A federal judge on Tuesday found unconstitutional the methods by which the federal government places U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents on a “no fly” list without letting them see the evidence against them, or letting them contest it.

…

“Accordingly, on this record the court concludes the absence of any meaningful procedures to afford plaintiffs the opportunity to contest their placement on the No-Fly List violates plaintiffs’ rights to procedural due process.”

The right to travel isn’t clearly spelled out like the right to keep and bear arms. A judge could (and may still) find a weasel worded way of saying you don’t have to be to able travel by commercial airplane as long as there exist private airplanes you can hire. Hence due process protections for the right to keep and bear arms should be even greater than for the right to travel.

This also has implications for mental health restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms which is something the anti-gun people are trying to implement.

Quote of the day—Hillary Clinton

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I believe that we need a more thoughtful conversation, we cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.

Hillary Clinton
June 17, 2014
Hillary Clinton On Gun Control: We Can’t Let ‘A Minority Of People’ Terrorize The Majority
[There you have it. She is coming out against the First Amendment, and freedom in general, as well as the Second Amendment. She doesn’t want you to even “hold a viewpoint” that she doesn’t like.

“Thoughtful conversation”? Somehow I don’t think she is planning on including gun owners in that “conversation”.

I suspect she is in close alignment with her husband Bill in that “we can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans…”.

She should have moved to the USSR in the 1960’s. Her ideology would have fit right in and the world would have been a better place.—Joe]

Anti gun-rights Microsoft?

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From the firearm blog.

This would help explain the trend toward cloud storage and toward not really owning, but renting your software. It appears that Adobe, for another example, now only provides the latest version of Photoshop as a monthly subscription service, so you’re not the owner, but the tenant, and they the property manager.

If you don’t have exclusive control of your software, user files, or your contact lists, etc., it could all be pulled out from under you, or used for other purposes via remote control by other people, at a whim. Same as your bank account now, by the way. The Endarkenment proceeds apace.

Quote of the day—saintonge235

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Twice in my life I got beaten up because I was in a fight and really didn’t want to hurt the person I was fighting. Recovering from the second beating, it occurred to me that “they don’t matter”, “they” being anyone who attacked me. From then on, I never lost a fight, because when I saw that violence was going to occur, I hit first without warning and didn’t stop till they were helpless. Acquiring that mindset is the most important self-defense lesson I know.

saintonge235
June 14, 2014
Comment to The Naive Idiocy of Teaching Rapists Not To Rape
[One might be wise to apply that mindset to a great many other things as well. Politics and war come to mind.—Joe]

All guns are always loaded

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That’s gun safety rule one. Cooper said that it’s not a guide to behavior but rather a statement of condition. (For those unfamiliar, “condition” in this sense refers to the status of the gun, whether it’s loaded, or cocked, whether the safety catch is on, etc.)

That’s the problem with weapon “safety” isn’t it? If you keep a gun for self defense, and you treat all guns as though they’re always loaded, and it turns put that the one you need to defend your life is unloaded, you’re not at all safe. A gun is supposed to be dangerous! but only to your chosen target.

As a matter of personal taste I prefer the NRA rule “Always keep the gun unloaded until ready to use”. The guns I keep for defense are “in use” all the time and so they are loaded, whether on my hip or leaning in the corner.

I showed a couple how to load a percussion revolver the other day, by “loading” it with powder and bullets, but since we never applied caps to the cones, it still isn’t “loaded” because I won’t fire without caps. I’ll twirl it if I want to, and you can’t stop me, but I generally won’t twirl a loaded gun even it is single action with the hammer down and nothing you do to the trigger alone can ever make it fire.

We’ve come to a point where we’re making too big a deal out of “safety” and admit it– That’s because of lawyers and politicians (two of the more dangerous kinds of people on Earth if we take them too seriously).

Ultimately, “safety”, to the extent that it exists at all, is between your ears. You’re certainly going to die no matter what though, so cheer up! When people, perfectly well-intended, tell me to “stay safe” as an alternative to “goodbye” or “see you later” it sort of disappoints me. “Have fun” or even “be cool” would be better advice. None of the really fun and memorable, or productive, things I’ve done in life were particularly safe, but they always came off better in a state of coolness.

Here’s another important “safety” rule;
“All lawyers and all politicians are always loaded”

I do like that one. As Cooper said; “It is not a guide of behavior, but rather a statement of condition”, and furthermore it would explain a lot.

Random thought of the day

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I have had the gist of the following in my mind for years but I put it into words and more succulently after reading a comment by Windy Wilson.

A pattern I notice with progressives/totalitarians/communists is they express things in terms of what sort of activities/possessions people should be “allowed”.

Most people think in terms of what sort of activities/possessions should be made illegal.

A liberty orientated person thinks, and our government constitutions is, in terms of what sort of things the government should be allowed to do.

Quote of the day—thewriterinblack

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I’m not saying we should kill all the stupid people. I’m just saying we should remove all the warning labels and let things sort themselves out.

thewriterinblack
June 10, 2014
Comment to The Naive Idiocy of Teaching Rapists Not To Rape
[I can see how a case could be made for this.—Joe]