Yep.

Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter believes that the United States would benefit if the debate about what laws ought to be passed acknowledged the violence inherent in enforcing them.

Enforcing the Law Is Inherently Violent

Is it really so difficult to believe that there is widespread wrongdoing, and widespread lying about it, among U.S. law-enforcement agencies, particularly those in big, Democrat-run cities infamous for the corruption of their other municipal institutions? Why do conservatives find it so plausible — obvious, even — that the IRS and the EPA and the Atlanta public schools are corrupt and self-serving, but somehow believe that the Baltimore police department isn’t?

It is possible that what is really at play here is an emotional response to protest culture. Seeing the Black Lives Matters miscreants and Baltimore rioters on one side of the line, conservatives instinctively want to be on the other side of the line. The same thing happened with the Iraq-war protests: When the dirty hippies take to the barricades, conservatives are drawn to the other side. That led to some bad thinking and poor decision-making about Iraq. Are we making the same mistake with regard to police misconduct and allegations of police misconduct?

Let him with eyes see.

Why conservatives and Republicans should be defensive about the fact that Baltimore, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Honolulu are misgoverned to various degrees of criminality is a mystery. Conservatives with real political power in those cities are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Could it really be something so simple as the fact that we do not feel comfortable standing on the same side of a bright red line as the malefactors in Ferguson and such opportunists as DeRay Mckesson, now a Baltimore mayoral candidate, and Al Sharpton? Sharpton is a grotesque and one of the most dishonest men in American public life, but that does not mean that the people running Baltimore and its police department aren’t also crooked. Some police officers are indeed heroes. Some are villains. Most are ordinary, time-serving municipal employees like any other, and telling ourselves otherwise is sentimental rubbish.

These Are Not the Good Guys: The Right is deluding itself about law enforcement. By Kevin Williamson

See Radley Balko’s column for more examples.

Police Misconduct

“Why do you people love the state so much? It doesn’t love you.”
Michael Munger

In Habersham County, Ga., police looking for a drug dealer — at a home in which he did not reside — broke down the doors thinking they’d find drugs and guns, which of course they didn’t. But they did manage to toss a flash grenade into a baby’s playpen, burning part of the child’s face off. The family was left with nearly $1 million in medical bills, and the kid will need surgery every few years until he stops growing. The police insist they did nothing wrong. And as in New Haven, when they found the drug dealer for whom they were searching, the Georgia authorities brought him in without incident, without kicking down any doors or throwing any stun grenades.
. . .
Even in medieval times, the distinction between lords and serfs was not so pronounced.

Meet the New Serfs: You

The Police State, cheered on by the Clerisy

Continue reading ‘Meet the New Serfs: You’ »

Five rules I learned from 7 years of coaching Launch Festival & TechCrunch50

Dormi Turns Old Android Phones into Internet-Connected Baby Monitors

Rand Paul’s Republican revolution

Oh yeah, this will work out well….

The “War on Drugs” has attracted numerous rent seekers, including the DEA, police, prosecutors, brewers, distillers, prison guards, and more. Prohibition didn’t work in the 1920s and 30s, and it isn’t working today.

Federalism appears to be on the rise. About time.

But in the meantime, we just don’t have enough no-knock raids.

Continue reading ‘Misc Stuff’ »

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

— Frederic Bastiat

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

— H.L. Mencken, Bayard vs Lionheart, July 26,1920

I reject the argument that the government is empowered to take our liberties — here, the right to privacy — by majority vote or by secret fiat as part of an involuntary collective bargain that it needs to monitor us in private in order to protect us in public. The government’s job is to keep us free and safe. If it keeps us safe but not free, it is not doing its job.

. . .

And, if all of this is not enough to induce one to realize that the Orwellian future is here thanks to the secret governments of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Snowden also revealed that the NSA can hack into anyone’s mobile phone, even when it is turned off, and use each phone as a listening device and as a GPS to track whoever possesses it.

All of this — which is essentially undisputed — leads me to the question: Where is the outrage? I think the government has succeeded in so terrifying us at the prospect of another 9/11 that we are afraid to be outraged at the government when it claims to be protecting us, no matter what it does. C.S. Lewis once remarked that the greatest trick the devil has pulled off is convincing us that he does not exist. The government’s greatest trick has been persuading us to surrender our freedoms.

Will we ever get them back? The answer to that depends upon the fidelity to freedom of those in whose hands we have reposed the Constitution for safekeeping. At present, those hands are soiled with the filth of totalitarianism and preoccupied with the grasp of power. And they seem to be getting dirtier and their grip tighter every day.

A Government of Secrecy and Fear

A veteran Washington D.C. investigative journalist says the Department of Homeland Security confiscated a stack of her confidential files during a raid of her home in August — leading her to fear that a number of her sources inside the federal government have now been exposed.

In an interview with The Daily Caller, journalist Audrey Hudson revealed that the Department of Homeland Security and Maryland State Police were involved in a predawn raid of her Shady Side, Md. home on Aug. 6. Hudson is a former Washington Times reporter and current freelance reporter.

A search warrant obtained by TheDC indicates that the August raid allowed law enforcement to search for firearms inside her home.

The document notes that her husband, Paul Flanagan, was found guilty in 1986 to resisting arrest in Prince George’s County. The warrant called for police to search the residence they share and seize all weapons and ammunition because he is prohibited under the law from possessing firearms.

But without Hudson’s knowledge, the agents also confiscated a batch of documents that contained information about sources inside the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, she said.

Feds confiscate investigative reporter’s confidential files during raid

This law [Obamacare] only passed because of a profound violation of democratic principles.

The Obamacare website doesn’t show which plans cover abortion.

Obamacare, Benghazi, IRS, NSA, race baiting, Solyndra, moral preening, Fast and Furious, Pigford, etc., ad nauseum. Thank you to the rubes who voted for a 3rd and 4th W. Bush term.

And on the local level: National Police Misconduct NewsFeed Daily Recap 10-23-13

Continue reading ‘A Government of Lies and Mediocrity’ »

Before you rejoice that the government has seized an alleged terrorist in Libya who was indicted for planning the notorious 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, before you join the House of Representatives in a standing ovation for the Capitol Hill Police who killed a woman whose car struck a White House fence and who then drove away at a high speed, and before you commend the New York Police Department for quickly getting to the bottom of an alleged assault by a motorcycle gang that tormented a young family on a city street, please give some thought to the rule of law.
. . .
What’s going on here?

What’s going on is the flow of government lawlessness down from the feds to the cops in the streets. Like children observing and imitating their parents’ unsanctioned, inappropriate, yet repeated behavior, when cops see the use of the military today to pull off government crimes, to shortcut the law and to evade the Constitution, they arm themselves with military-grade hardware and do the same.

In America today, to paraphrase Voltaire, criminals are punished for their crimes, except when they commit them to the sounds of official rejoicing.

America the Lawless

what is required from citizens is unthinking, blind obedience to the rules at all times, even if following the rules conflicts with the intended goal of the rules.

Schools Have Rules: Drunk and Stupid Edition

Continue reading ‘Government Lawlessness’ »

It’s Sunny at the White House! But not in Egypt, if you are a Christian or a Franciscan nun. All over the country, Christian churches are being burned, Christians murdered, and nuns paraded in the streets as “prisoners of war.”

The “war”: this can only mean a war of Islam vs. Christianity, right? What other “war” could they be prisoners of? (Their words, not mine.) The Muslim Brotherhood and their thug adherents are conducting a war of genocide against Christians, trying to erase the Copts – one of the oldest Christian groups in the world – from the land.

Once upon a time in America, the American president would have stood before the world, over and over again, and provided a moral counterweight to this evil. The great figures of the 20th Century became great by denouncing evil and condemning genocidal and religious persecution: Reagan, Churchill, Wojtyla.

But Obama is no Wojtyla. He has remained nearly silent on the Muslim Brotherhood’s bloody war on Egypt’s Christians. The martyrs pile up; he plays golf.

Christians Murdered All Over Egypt, New Puppy at White House

The Muslim Brotherhood have paraded three nuns through the streets like prisoners of war and sexually assaulted their lay colleagues after attacking and burning a Franciscan school. One of the Franciscan sisters said:

“We are nuns. We rely on God and the angels to protect us. At the end, they paraded us like prisoners of war and hurled abuse at us as they led us from one alley to another without telling us where they were taking us.”

Continue reading ‘Muslim Brotherhood parade nuns through the streets – Oh! Look! Squirrel!’ »

The problems purportedly addressed by stop-and-frisk and mandatory minimums are of the government’s own making. Thus, if we got to the root, the “need” for these bad policies would disappear.

Stop-and-frisk is largely aimed at finding youths who are carrying guns and drugs. Mandatory minimums are directed at drug sellers. It’s not hard to see what is at the root: drug prohibition. When government declares (certain) drugs illegal, those drugs don’t disappear; instead they move to the black market, which tends to be dominated by people skilled in the use of violence. Because the trade is illegal and the courts are off-limits for dispute resolution, contracts and turf will be protected by force. Those who operate on the street will find it wise to be armed.

So, as a result of prohibition and its attendant violence-prone black market, in some parts of town a percentage of young men will likely be walking around with guns and drugs. Seeing this, politicians and law-enforcement bureaucrats turn to stop-and-frisk and mandatory minimum sentences. But the only real solution is to repeal prohibition. There’s no need for intrusive police tactics or prison terms.

In a free society, government has no business telling us what we can and can’t ingest or inject. Before drug prohibition, America had no drug problem. It’s prohibition that created the problem, just as alcohol prohibition gave America organized crime on a large scale. As we’ve seen, when government tries to ban drugs, it creates bigger problems by putting drugs in the streets and gangs in control.

Stop-and-Frisk: How Government Creates Problems, Then Makes Them Worse

Continue reading ‘Stop and Frisk – End the Fantasy “War” on Drugs’ »

Contemporary police are increasingly an armed gang enforcing the many rules of the omniscient regulatory state, i.e., Big Brother. Easy to do in the time of Three Felonies a Day.

The so-called war on drugs was the casus belli for the militarization of the local police forces in the U.S., although it took time to effect the evolution far and wide. Near the end of the campaign in Iraq, the favorite think tank of the left, the RAND Corporation, published a report in 2009 entitled Does The United States Need A New Police Force For Stability Operations?

Continue reading ‘Police State, Part 4 – Keystone Kops and Big Brother’ »

Too much law enforcement in America has lost all sense of proportion: If you need six armed officers to police a nonagenarian in an old folks’ home, seven armed officers to police a 20-year-old female you suspect might have a beer in her shopping bag, thirteen armed officers to terminate Giggles the baby doe, you’re doing it wrong — and you’re the real threat to public order.

Death Panel

A resident in DeKalb County, Georgia decided to grab his camera when police started banging on his door at 1:30 in the morning. He says he even called 911 to find out what the cops wanted but they didn’t tell him. Police say they had a warrant to enter the home based on a civil fine.
. . .
Forget A-Rod, maybe it’s time to start testing cops for steroids? [Ed. Or at least testing for a minimum IQ, like 80 or 90?]

Cops Caught on Camera in Late Night Home Entry: “Imma tase the shit out your big ass”

Forward!

Rise of the Warrior Cop – Forward!

Continue reading ‘Police State, Cont’d’ »