Month: December 2011

Everybody’s a Terrorist

You’re a terrorist, I’m a terrorist, we’re all terrorists! Hell, 16 year-old girls are terrorists:

An Ottumwa High School student has been charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism.

Police arrested Emily Kay Six, 16, Ottumwa, on Thursday. Officials said they began investigating after Six allegedly began trying to recruit students for what police called “a plan to harm a number of students.”

The charge is a Class D felony. Six was taken to a juvenile detention facility following her arrest.

Things certainly have changed in the decade since I graduated high school. Back in my day this would be called trying to start a fight. Nowadays is known as conspiracy to commit terrorism. As is common with cases involving children or teenagers the accusations are being vehemently denied by the parents. Ultimately it matters not until the police release their evidence but no matter how you swing it, short of plotting to detonate a bomb in the school, there is no grounds for accusing the girl of terrorism.

Terrorists are the new communists. What I mean by that is we use the label terrorist on anybody who disagrees with us instead of a specific group of people, much like people would accuse somebody they hated of being a communist during the Cold War. The shooters at Columbine would fit the definition of terrorists but a 16 year-old girl trying to get a gang together to beat the snot out of a fellow student is far from being a terrorist.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Joyous Festivus, or whatever else you celebrate on this day. Hell have a good Sunday if you’re entirely atheist. Frankly I don’t care, it’s that day of the year where people at least pretend they like their family and wish to spread joy and peace throughout the world. For the kids out there I hope Odin graces you with presents and for the adults I hope you survive the yearly get together with your family.

Either way have a great day!

Never Let the Police Search Your Vehicle

Everybody repeat after me, “I will never, ever give a police officer permission to search my vehicle. If he wants to search it he can come back with a fucking warrant.” Even if you have nothing to hide the police will plant evidence in your vehicle if they want to nail you. Don’t believe me? Why don’t we ask Officer Bill Glass:

A former Haskell police officer was found guilty after pleading no contest to fabrication of physical evidence charges.

Bill Glass resigned from the Haskell Police Department in March of 2010, saying allegations he’d planted methamphetamine in a car during a traffic stop were “baseless.” When the drugs were sent off for testing, a chemist at the lab traced them back to the officer.

When you give an officer permission to search your vehicle your are giving them an ample opportunity to boost their arrest numbers by fabricating evidence. Unless the officer has a warrant or probably cause (which basically means any poor excuse an officer can fabricate, but at least it’s something) they can not search your property without express permission.

If you’re asked to step out of your vehicle during a traffic stop do so but make sure you lock your car doors and put your keys into your pocket before exiting the vehicle. At any point during the traffic stop if an officer asks, “May I have a look inside the vehicle?” you should only responsd by saying, “No.” Ignore anything they say after that because they’re going to try guilting or threatening you into giving them permission. Do not say anything further because the officer will try to hang you with it. In fact it would be a very good idea to get your lawyer on the horn at that point in time.

If You Vote to Reelect Obama This is What You’re Supporting

Many of my progressive friends are still jumping on board the SS Reelect Obama. While their ship is most likely already sunk I have been informing them, in no uncertain details, that by reelect Obama they’re supporting this:

Shakira was one year old when Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama ordered the 2009 drone strike in Pakistan’s Taliban-infested Swat valley that nearly killed her. With two other burned little girls, she was put in a trash bin to die. A volunteer doctor with House of Charity discovered the three babies and attempted to save them. Two of the little girls died from their injuries, but Shakira, who is now four, lived to be disfigured.

CNN reports that Shakira arrived in Houston last week with her caretaker for a series of surgeries that “will make it easier for Shakira to grow older.” (“She will never look fully normal,” CNN adds.)

Thanks to drone strikes ordered by Obama Shakira will live the rest of her life disfigured. Obama is a warmonger who is more than happy to send a drone off to blow up a tent full of people to nail one man. He even went so far as to assassinate Anwar al-Awalki, an American citizen, and his 16 year-old son without giving either so much as the benefit of a trial. I don’t think the previous Warmonger in Chief even went so far as to actually order the assassination of an American citizen (I won’t be surprised if I’m wrong about this though).

If you reelect Obama you’re saying, “I want four more years of innocent people being killed or permanently disfigured by hellfire missiles launched from automated drones.” With the exception of Ron Paul, the other options don’t looks much better but I can at least say they haven’t ordered the death of anybody yet (not because they don’t want to, but merely because they haven’t had the chance). Granted the first act Rick Santorum wouldn’t probably make as president is to launch a nuclear strike on the Middle East, which would be followed up by his second act, the rounding up and execution of every homosexual in the United States.

Unless Ron Paul wins we’re all fucked (while I don’t think he can save this sinking ship we call the United States, at least he wouldn’t be warring with other nations needlessly), but if Obama wins we know for a fact more innocent people will be murdered and disfigured because he has a pretty nasty track record of making such orders.

Judge Unable to Find Jurors to Convict Man of Marijuana Possession

This news report is a perfect example of the powers juries have:

For those who don’t want to watch the video a Montana judge was unable to convict a man of marijuana possession because he couldn’t actually create a jury. The reason for this is because nobody in the jury selection pool was even willing to sit in on the case. Many people don’t understand that being unable to create a jury results in a de factor innocent ruling because without a jury to judge no trial can take place.

I wish more people would have the guts to refuse sitting on a jury for a non-violent crime. In a way this is a form of jury nullification although slightly different than usual. Instead of nullifying the law by ruling innocence on grounds the violate law is unjust potential jurors simply refused to hear the case at all.

Firearm Related Accident Rate Falls Again

Anti-gunners try to scare people by claiming owing a gun increases your risk of having a firearm related accident or committing suicide with a gun. They like this argument because technically it’s true, one can’t have a firearm related accident if they are never around a firearm, nor can they commit suicide with something they don’t have. What the anti-gunners leave out in their fear mongering is the fact that accidents and suicides involving firearms is very low:

Data recently released by the National Center for Health Statistics shows that in 2008, the number and per capita rate of firearm accident deaths fell to an all-time low. There were 592 firearm accident deaths (0.19 such accidents per 100,000 population) in 2008, as compared to 613 accidents (.20 per 100,000) in 2007. In 2008, the chance of a child dying in a firearm accident was roughly one in a million.

Firearm accidents accounted for 0.5% of all accidental deaths; well below the percentages accounted for by motor vehicle accidents, falls, fires, poisonings, and several other more common types of mishaps.

Firearm suicides rose in 2008 because total suicides rose, but the percentage of suicides accounted for by those misusing firearms remained steady, at just barely over half. This is down from about 60% during the 1980s and early 1990s. The firearm suicide rate remained at just under 6 per 100,000, as it has been every year from 1999 forward. Contrary to claims made recently by some gun control advocates, firearm suicides among children are extremely uncommon, and in 2008, fell to an all-time low.

It must really piss the anti-gunners off knowing trends do not support their message of fear. One half of one percent of accidents involve a firearm, that’s insanely low. Likewise removing firearms from a suicide would only result in the use of another means of suicide. When somebody has been pushed to the point of suicide little is going to stop them besides immediate intervention.

Democratic Political Action Committee Buys newtgingrich.com

I don’t care who you are this is funny:

The campaign of Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has seen the domain name newtgingrich.com fall into enemy hands: a Democratic political action committee called American Bridge 21st Century.

The results are either amusing or not, depending on your politics and opinion of Gingrich. But in either case they are a cautionary tale about the importance of controlling your brand online, a task that’s about to get more difficult for everyone thanks to the impending expansion of generic top-level domains.

I’m pretty sure they stole this idea from us over in the Ron Paul camp, but kudos regardless. The last person I want as president it a person who openly advocates letting terrorist attacks succeed to scare the American people into obedience and charging judges who don’t rule in the way Gingrich wants them to.

Papers Please

Remember when our “representatives” established the Transportation Sexual Assaulter Security Administration (TSA) and claimed they would only be used for airports? Remember when TSA agents were caught harassing Amtrak passengers and later truck drivers in Tennessee? That’s what we call mission creep and anytime the government establishes a new agency with limited powers you can guarantee mission creep will follow. In fact I would say this law of mission creep is more stable and provable than the law of gravity. Well fellows denizens of the United States, the TSA’s mission creep shows no signs of stopping:

Rick Vetter was rushing to board the Amtrak train in Charlotte, N.C., on a recent Sunday afternoon when a canine officer suddenly blocked the way.

Three federal air marshals in bulletproof vests and two officers trained to spot suspicious behavior watched closely as Seiko, a German shepherd, nosed Vetter’s trousers for chemical traces of a bomb. Radiation detectors carried by the marshals scanned the 57-year-old lawyer for concealed nuclear materials.

When Seiko indicated a scent, his handler, Julian Swaringen, asked Vetter whether he had pets at home in Garner, N.C. Two mutts, Vetter replied. “You can go ahead,” Swaringen said.

Let me just say I’m getting sick of state agents using dogs to do whatever the fuck they want. The only person who knows if a dog “alerts” or “indicates a scent” is the handler and they can claim any reaction made by the dog is an “alert” or “indicator.” Thus dogs are incredibly brought in to create phony probably cause as nobody can really argue against the handler’s word, especially since dogs can’t speak. I would bet money the case mentioned above was merely a case of profiling, put the target in a situation where he would feel nervous and watch for his physical reactions. If the target doesn’t break out into a sweat or studded his speech you let him go, otherwise you harass him without cause some more.

The Transportation Security Administration isn’t just in airports anymore. TSA teams are increasingly conducting searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and other mass transit locations around the country.

“We are not the Airport Security Administration,” said Ray Dineen, the air marshal in charge of the TSA office in Charlotte. “We take that transportation part seriously.”

The TSA’s 25 “viper” teams — for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response — have run more than 9,300 unannounced checkpoints and other search operations in the last year. Department of Homeland Security officials have asked Congress for funding to add 12 more teams next year.

How much money to you think somebody got paid to come up with the tacticool acronym VIPR? Still this excuse by the TSA to expand its powers shows why you need to give agencies very narrow names. Instead of calling the agency the Transportation Security Administration they should have been given the name Airport Restricted Security Agency Guarding the Gateway Between the Secure Area of the Airport and the Insecure Area of the Airport using Metal Detectors (ARSAGGBSAAIAAMD). Sure it’s a mouthful but they at least have to perform an agency name change before expanding their powers a terrible amount.

Let the TSA be a lesson to you, if the government asks for powers in one market they will always use that new power to justify the expansion of their power. At the rate we’re going there will be TSA checkpoints on the border of individual states and we’ll be required to provide our papers in order to traverse from one state to another.

Gun Control and Racism

Anti-gunners often accuse gun rights activists of being middle-aged white racists. Unless you actually are one of the rare middle-aged white racists you laugh and call the anti-gunner a hypocrite. Why? Because the history of gun control has been almost entirely driven by racism and fear of minorities having the same rights of self-defense as whites:

As an adult I continued to fear and hate guns and to generally align myself with the gun control cause, but Jeff’s suggestion that the regulation of people’s access to guns is essentially conservative nagged at me, unresolved, until I read UCLA law professor Adam Winkler’s stunning new book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. At the heart of his narrative, Winkler convincingly argues that the people who began the movement against gun control operated not out of the National Rifle Association’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C., but out of a nondescript two-story brick building three blocks from where I sat staring at that pistol: 3106 Shattuck Avenue, in the heart of radical Berkeley. It was there, in 1967, at the headquarters of the Black Panther Party, that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale planned an armed march into the California State Capitol that “launched the modern gun-rights movement.”

Despite my feelings about guns, even as a child I admired that the Panthers made their name shortly after their founding in 1966 by patrolling West Oakland streets with rifles and shotguns and confronting police officers who were detaining blacks. It seemed to me that there was no more effective means of curbing the daily police brutality being meted out to the residents of Oakland’s ghetto. But I did not know until reading Gunfight that the Panthers’ armed patrols provoked the drafting of legislation that established today’s gun regulation apparatus, or that the champions of that legislation were as conservative as apple pie.

Whether your like or dislike the early actions of the Black Panthers it must be noted that their rise was a direct result of police brutalizing members of the black community. In other words if they didn’t come together as a community and fight against the state’s monopoly on initiating violence they would be subject to acts of violence without recourse. The Second Amendment was drafted for this exact reason, when the state becomes overly tyrannical an armed citizenry maintains the option of defending themselves from state actors. Members of the Black Panthers originally armed themselves to resist tyranny as all other options including the courts were entirely against them. Sadly the need for self-defense gave the state an excuse to advance gun control in the hopes of disarming blacks and rendering them easier to subjugate:

In 1967 Don Mulford, the Republican state assemblyman who represented the Panthers’ patrol zone and who had once famously denounced the Free Speech Movement and anti-war demonstrations at the University of California at Berkeley, introduced a bill inspired by the Panthers that prohibited the public carrying of loaded firearms, open and concealed.

[…]

Two months after the invasion of Sacramento, riots erupted in response to instances of police brutality in the black sections of Detroit and Newark. From rooftops, windows, and doorways, gunmen fired on police, National Guardsmen, and Army troops sent to quash the rebellions. Congress responded by passing the Gun Control Act of 1968 and its companion bill, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. Although Winkler chastises “extremists” on both sides of the current gun control debate who characterize their opponents as totalitarians, he does note that while drafting the 1968 bills, Sen. Thomas Dodd (D-Conn.) had the Library of Congress provide him with an English translation of the gun control regulations that the Nazis used to disarm Jews and political dissidents.

Yes the 1968 Gun Control Act is basically an English translation of the Nazi Gun Control Act. Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership published an excellent book that compares our 1968 Gun Control Act with the Nazi equivalent and they are almost the same (minus the fact our version doesn’t overtly target a minority group).

I think I’ll throw Gun Fight onto my reading list and, whenever I get around to actually reading and finishing it, I’ll post up my thoughts.