A delightfully symbolic ceremony

When one appeals to Der Staat to mediate marriage and gives tacit approval to undisciplined brutality, one should not be surprised when they achieve new records in heavy-handed thuggery:

Skowron said Andy Somora had to be restrained by police and was tasered at least twice. His wife also received a shock because she was touching her husband during one of the incidents. Skowron said husband and wife were both arrested, but Chikaming police would not confirm that claim, and no mention of the use of a taser is included in the news release.(Emphasis is mine.)

Aside from the complete incompetence shown by the police in this particular episode, the only things lacking are a fatality from "less-lethal" force-application and perhaps a subsequent promotion for said incompetence.

I understand that the police, like many organizations in the public eye, suffer from the effect that one may define the reputation of the many; however, it seems that the police themselves, when faced with such an egregious instance of stupidity-in-uniform might, might think to distance themselves from such. The only times when they must do so are in rare cases where the act in its entirety is available for immediate inspection in the public domain.

Just in time for Shark Week

Top speculations include a partially-decomposed dog and a turtle without its shell, both of which I find difficult to believe, given the overall stage of preservation and the skeletal structure.

I can't even hazard a guess at this point, and I'm not likely or willing to get closer. If this is Photoshopped, I tip my hat to the artist, as it is both creepy and realistic beyond belief, which actually reminded me of this. Christmas this year ought to be amusing.

Coincidentally, NetFlix delivered the first disc of The X-Files: Season 1 this afternoon. Life's funny that way.

"Stop resisting!"

Oh, the privileges of prosecutorial discretion:

Long's lawyer, David Rankin, said he hopes the Manhattan district attorney's office will drop the charges. The district attorney's office said it was investigating.

When the lawyer for the plaintiff is hoping that the DA will drop charges, that's a sign of something seriously amiss. Frankly, I'm a little more than fatigued with "a badge and a gun" equating to a license for thuggery.

Caturday Night Specials, Episode II

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

"Hello, Feng Changlin? Yes, this is the office of Dr. Moreau, we understand you found his 'son'. We're sending a team to pick him up. Thanks so much."

Thoughts on The Ascent of the Administrative State and the Demise of Mercy

I was browsing the Fully-Informed Jury Association's website and spied a new article posting (see title). I admit, I wasn't totally prepared for a 34-page essay, but I settled in with the last of the bottle of shiraz from Trader Joe's and got to reading.

I'm going to add a little something to this: exposure. The more the populace is aware of the option to use this inviolable right, the more it may be feasibly exercised, driving a stake into the heart of State corruption, one mallet-stroke at a time. While FIJA can provide more astute observations on the practice thereof, this essay (and hopefully the commentary) more clearly outlines the philosophy behind the practice.

Without further eloquence, the salient points au jus:

The birth of administrative agencies posed a dilemma for traditional constitutional and legal analysis. These agencies challenge the nation’s commitment to separation of powers by combining executive, legislative, and judicial power under one roof. Moreover, the scope of agencies’ authority is vast; their decisions have profound consequences for the nation’s economy and for individual rights and liberties. The puzzle for the law has been how to keep this potential Leviathan in check. If the officials at these agencies could exercise their authority without oversight, citizens would become subjects to unelected bureaucrats and democracy would be compromised. (Page 5)

Anyone in the Peoples' Republic of Kalifornia with a political pulse, intact short-term memory and a grade-school education should be able to share in a "moment of clarity" regarding the Public Utilities Commission and their "Flex Your Power" (rolling blackouts in sheeps' clothing) and the Coastal Commission's arbitrary binding edicts regarding property rights in non-coastal areas. I didn't vote for them, and neither did you. And there's still forty-nine states to choose from, not including the federal bureaucracies. Indeed, it's difficult to tell when one is breaking the law in this country, and that's no accident. To the point:

Jury nullification occurs when a jury votes to acquit a defendant despite the fact that the defendant is guilty under the letter of the law. A jury may opt to nullify because it believes the law is generally unfair or unjust, because it believes applying the law in the particular case would be unfair or unjust, or because it believes the punishment is too harsh. The jury’s power to nullify stems from the fact that it does not need to give a reason for its decision and its vote of acquittal is unreviewable. (Page 9)

It's that simple. If the law is unjust, then the authority of that governing body is null and void; hence, you cannot be guilty, and thus must be acquitted of wrongdoing. And it applies for any modifiers of a law as well: mandatory minimum sentencing, for example... Something that prosecutors may decline to mention during the trial for fear of losing emotional momentum.

That said, is it any wonder that the legal machine hates the very notion that the entire courtroom chessboard may, on a very mild amount of effort, be tossed aside? "An Army of One" has never been a more apt description.

However:

In 1895, shortly after the birth of the first major federal agency, the Supreme Court held in Sparf v. United States that juries do not have a right to ignore a court’s instructions on the law. (Page 10)

Juries do not have the right to ignore the court's instruction, but even under the consideration of the facts, the law may yet be deemed unjust. Founding Father Samuel Adams and First Chief Justice John Jay will back me up on this, and while their opinion may not stand as legal precedent, Sparf v. United States does not implicitly or explicitly deny the right to nullify, and rightly so, considering its common-law origins... But don't tell that to the revisionists:

Recently, courts have permitted the removal of a juror during deliberations when the juror has a different view of the law than the judge. Indeed, in extreme cases, jurors who fail to follow a judge’s instructions during deliberations have been prosecuted for contempt. Judges have also pursued charges of contempt, obstruction, or tampering against individuals who have attempted to inform prospective jurors that they have the right to nullify. In addition, courts have rejected attempts to inform juries about the sentencing consequences of their decisions for fear that jurors might use that information to engage in compromise verdicts or base their decision on anything other than their findings of fact.(Page 12)(Emphasis is mine.)

"Fact" in the courtroom deserves the dubiousness of double-quotes, at the very least. With the advent of the various state-sponsored "Wars on (Flavor of the Week)", facts often get thrown out in favor of speedy convictions, the accused accept plea-bargains to hedge against dire sentencing, and the innocent are victims of out-and-out railroading for being nothing more than easy targets. (Check out Radley Balko and his site for more in-depth information.)

The final word: we the people, or as it says in the manual, The People, have the prerogative, the right, and the duty to nullify unjust laws by means of a jury.

The full article is definitely worth the read, as it also outlines the use of pardons and the willingness of prosecutors to not press charges. (This part is very short, understandably, as it is notedly against their interests not to.)

God willing, we may yet someday see this nonsense of "family courts" subject to jury trials. I suspect that it might even initiate some greater degree of community involvement, although that may be a mixed blessing.

Except it's really a series of tubes

"Think of the Internet as a highway."

There it is again. Some clueless fool talking about the "Information Superhighway." They don't know didley about the net. It's nothing like a superhighway. That's a rotten metaphor.

Suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction. Suppose the highways were like the Net. . .

A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with pitfalls for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member vigilante posses with nuclear weapons. A minimum of 237 on ramps at every intersection. No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions. Ad-hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to make use by a single-occupant-vehicle a capital offense on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just shoot you without a trial for talking on a car phone.

AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled at home from kits. Some are built around 2.5 horsepower lawnmower engines with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn nitroglycerin and idle at 120.

No license plates. World War II bomber nose art instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire eagles. Bumper mounted machine guns. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-aircraft missile batteries to shoot down the traffic helicopter. Little kids on tricycles with squirt-guns filled with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning.

NO OFF-RAMPS. None.

Now that's the way to run an Interstate Highway system.

Author: Russell Nelson

Pardon our dust

I'm tinkering with the layout in the attempt to find something that pleases my aesthetic tastes.

It might settle down in about a week, maybe less.

The only constant is change

Apparently, they're thinking about rising again:

UTICA, New York -One in five American adults - 22% - believe that any state or region has the right to "peaceably secede from the United States and become an independent republic," a new Middlebury Institute/Zogby International telephone poll shows.

I'd be interested to see a similar survey done in the next 12-18 months, with a larger sample size and an even geographic distribution.

Personally, I think the impending economic crash, coupled with federal mismanagement of the next major disaster would be enough to push the numbers to the approximate split that existed during the Revolutionary War. Considering the current push towards a more totalitarian state with the various "Wars on (Flavor of the Week)" that our government seems to enjoy at our expense (quite literally), I'm going to stick by my prediction that the United States will see internal conflict within the next century. Some are already telling Der Staat to take a long walk off a short pier.

I don't take any joy in being a storm-crow, but I call 'em like I see 'em. As the tired old tune goes, those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Don't get caught in the rain.

The use of "again" in the headline...

Maybe I should go to hell
But I am doing well
Teacher needs to see me after school

I think of all the education that I've missed
But then my homework was never quite like this!

In court, a judge was told the sex was consensual and that the teacher and her alleged victim care deeply for one another.

Kennedy's lawyers say that she is not guilty of rape. She is supported by her family who are trying to raise the $100,000 bond she was ordered held on.

I'm not holding my breath on the sentencing. Of course, this is the first instance of this kind of behavior, and there's no need for worry:

"Schools are among the safest places for children to be, statistically speaking," said NEA spokesman Michael Pons. "There is a whole network of people there to take care of the children's health. Within that community, there is built-in support to prevent any inappropriate thing."

Pay no attention to that repetitive rustling behind the curtain.

Followup: Olofson vs. BATFE

The JPFO is running a concurrent campaign to hand back a little legal trouble to the BATFE: Give The BATFE The Boot!

When we're afraid to make a purchase at a gun show, own an interesting collection of firearms, or effectively protect our own home and family, then we've already lost most of the right to keep and bear arms.

Notice the key word: afraid. Simple fear of being investigated or prosecuted is enough to deter honest citizens from having, owning, using, or even taking an interest in firearms. When you realize the staggering cost of legal defense against even a bogus federal prosecution, you have every reason to be afraid. And the BATFE has always relied on our fear.

I'm going out of my way here to plug JPFO for a variety of reasons:

- JPFO offers educational swag, purchase of which helps grease the financial treads of the litigation tanks

- Boston T. Party, of whom I am an avid reader, stands by the JPFO as an aggressive protector of firearms rights

- JPFO has a link to FrontSight on the main page, which is currently offering a fantastically-discounted training offer (endorsed by SurvivalBlog)

Personally, I'm tired of this nanny-state mentality. It's totalitarianism in a frumpy dress, with a wooden spoon in one hand and a Taser in the other, and it's past time to put it out to pasture.

Reality-check Bonus: What?

What is their malfunction? Malevolency.

A case of unmitigated unlawful* persecution for the sole purpose of providing grist for the mill of a parasitic bureaucracy:

"It didn't matter the government had repeatedly failed to replicate automatic fire until they replaced the ammunition with a softer primer type. It didn't even matter that the prosecution admitted it was not important to prove the gun would do it again if the test were conducted today," the magazine said. "What mattered was the government's position that none of the above was relevant because '[T]here's no indication it makes any difference under the statute. If you pull the trigger once and it fires more than one round, no matter what the cause it's a machine gun.'

"No matter what the cause."

This is incredibly absurd. It's an abomination. An aggressively cancerous growth on the idea that justice is meted out with any reliability (approximately the same as that of the rifle's automatic capability). The notion that this could even be brought to trial makes my blood boil.

The BATFE is a brutal and sadistic entity, and while I do not expect them to repent, I would hope that our citizenry would eventually wake up to the nature of its behavior, and pursue a course to abolish it in a peaceful but vehemently ruthless manner.

Always the inveterate optimist, I am. And to that effect, if you feel so moved, here is the defense-fund link for David Olofson via Gun Owners of America. (Note, be sure to read all of the print, the charge is recurring.)

Someone, anyone enlighten me to the goodness and worth of this action, if any exists. I see only evil.

Official hat-tip: Triton Unleashed. (Visit, stay a while.)

*Unlawful, as opposed to illegal. Lawful denotes something both right and good. Legality entails none of the above.

Do Want

It's an ugly little beast, but consider this:

According to the designers, it costs less than 50 rupees per 100Km (about a tenth that of a petrol car). Its mileage is about double that of the most advanced electric car (200 to 300 km or 10 hours of driving), a factor which makes a perfect choice in cities where the 80% of motorists drive at less than 60Km. The car has a top speed of 105 kmph. Refilling the car will, once the market develops, take place at adapted petrol stations to administer compressed air. In two or three minutes, and at a cost of approximately 100 rupees, the car will be ready to go another 200-300 kilometers.

Sign me up. Which probably means that there's an impending legal slap-down for owning one in US.

Caturday-Night Specials

Delicious, delicious irony

Gun control really should mean having a firm grip on the firearm.

To Serve and Protect (Our Interests)

Mistakes were made, others will be blamed:

Maria de la Torre, 45, was shocked by a Taser and shot with a gun at least twice in the torso about 4 a.m. Sunday by two police officers who are now on administrative leave, police said. De la Torre died later that day at Natividad Medical Center.

Police reports said the officers fired because they saw De la Torre threatening them with what they believed was an ice pick or knife. Later, they said, they discovered the weapon was a crochet hook. A police spokesman said an unnamed witness confirmed the police officers' accounts.

The emphasis above is mine. Now, consider this:

But Jose Liceo, De la Torre's husband, and Maria Perez, a friend and neighbor, said they saw the confrontation and insist De la Torre had nothing in her hands when officers shot her. Based on descriptions given of the scene, Liceo was standing about 10 feet from the incident, and Perez about 40 feet away.

"She got killed like an animal, a deer," Liceo, 50, said in Spanish. "We had called for help and she got shot as if she were a criminal."

I have a few questions:

- If an emergency call was made with a reasonable expectation of medical aid, why wasn't an ambulance dispatched with law enforcement if there was a concern for safety?

- Why do police departments issue "less-lethal" weapons if they only seem to be used as a prelude to execution?

- Without the addition of medical training to police training, how do the police expect to make an informed decision on a potentially-lethal use of a Taser?

As a community, as a State, as a Nation, we should be expecting more moral and ethical restraint from our police than this. I'm sure the phrase "poor judgment" will appear somewhere in the ensuing fray, but it seems that despite the consistent and aggressive use of "poor judgment" on the part of the police is not only ignored, it is both subsidized and encouraged by our government. (A bit of a naked assertion, but I'll back it up tenfold on challenge.)

Anglophiles: Where is your State now?

I'm not kidding about that "United Kingdom" tag for this blog.

- UK is now 'almost the worst area to live in Europe'.

- "The civil enforcement officer who made the error was the only one offered the extra training."

- "Cops may get three hours to respond to 999s..."

What, precisely, is going to have to happen over there for the people to wake up? (Feel free to speculate.)

"Alert on new horror wasp knife"...

Actually, I'm a little disappointed that the terms "assault" and "cop-killer" weren't used in describing this interesting bit of technology. (StumbleUpon had made me aware of its existence a few weeks ago.)

It's still a knife. You'll be just as dead if someone killed you with a box-cutter (because that's never happened).

My advice: don't bring it to a gunfight. Which shouldn't be an issue, since Britain has long since wished them out of existence inside its borders, sending them to the far-off Fairy Kingdom to be made into horse-shoes for the pink unicorns.

United Kingdom is getting its own tag for this blog.

Pending clever titles

Why so serious?

Lolcats, I have decided, must be a regular feature of this blog. Laughter is the best medicine. And I'm all about strong medicine.

Crossword: '2' Down, 15 letters: "Bedlam; madness"

"Public education.":

Dickey was charged with promoting a suicide attempt and unlawful imprisonment, both felonies, along with two misdemeanors, endangering the welfare of a child and unlawfully dealing with a child.

According to the arrest papers, “she did provide him with alcoholic beverages and Tylenol and Nyquil and did make an agreement whereby [she and the boy] would both commit suicide.”

But get this:

Dickey later was released on $5,000 bail... Both Dickey and the student went missing that afternoon, leading the boy’s family to go public with his name and photo, urging him to return home or contact them.

State Police and Buffalo police found both of them late the next morning, the boy in a Hamburg mall and Dickey sleeping in her vehicle in Springville.

If it were a man in the same situation, I have no doubt in my mind that the bail would be quite a bit higher than $5,000, and the charges would be elevated for the ensuing post-bail shenanigans.

Someone remind me, what precisely is the case in favor of publicly-schooling one's children today?

Maybe this? Or this? Perhaps this. Oh, this isn't going well... Perhaps the high rate of academic achievement?

(Special attention to the 2005 rating in science-related studies for high-school seniors.)

In other news, Titanic "too big to sink".

Looks like their ship has come in.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest buyers of U.S. home loans, are too big for the government to let them fail, leading Republican and Democratic lawmakers said.

The government-chartered companies, which own or guarantee about half the $12 trillion of U.S. mortgages, can count on a federal lifeline, said Republican Senator John McCain, of Arizona, and Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, of New York.

"Everything's cool, guys. We'll just print more money. What could possibly go wr-..."

A step in the right direction...

Past experience makes one suspect a popular movement pressuring Washington D.C. to clarify and affirm the Bill of Rights, Amendment 2, rather than giving credit to those politicians for self-initiative.

This weekend, Congress passed, and sent to the President for his signature, the Homeland Security appropriations bill, H.R. 5441... Also included in the legislation is a ban on gun confiscation during emergencies and natural disasters, to prevent a repeat of the post-Katrina abuses such as law enforcement officers breaking into homes and confiscating firearms from law-abiding citizens.

(Hat tip: JWR at SurvivalBlog.com)

I wasn't impressed that this followed the Heller decision, and I won't be impressed until Congress recognizes that Article 1, Section 8 does not give blanket-authority to legislate contrary to the spirit of the rest of the document; to quote a "reliable source":

"On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."

--Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson, 1823

Which, if the minority opinion of Heller had bothered to read United States v. Miller, would have been of conspicuous import to the Heller decision. Frankly, I don't expect much from that same SCOTUS that gave us the majority opinion on Kelo v. New London.

Furthermore, and especially regarding the market-interference that our federal government regularly enjoys:

"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That "all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people." [10th Amendment] To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition."

--Thomas Jefferson: National Bank Opinion, 1791

(Emphasis added by yours truly.)

Imagine my surpise

Congress has approval ratings that are expressible in single-digit format. Which is surprising, since they ended the war in Iraq, withdrew the troops, fixed Social Security expenditures, stopped overprinting of Federal Reserve notes...

Oh wait. They didn't do any of that. As a matter of fact, what have they done?

I'd like to reserve more anger and vitriol for this sort of thing, but things like this seem to take the lion's share of it.

It's depressing. Deeply depressing. And things are not looking up.

... There's fire.

Here's a nice visual-aid for those seeking to understand the perennially piss-poor performance pertaining to pyroscopic property.

Considering that the federal government can't manage to keep the paperwork together on Iraq, a mere 6.4% the size the federally owned land in the West, what exactly would inspire any sort of confidence that they could effectively manage the same area inside our borders that is over fifteen times larger?

Where there's smoke...

The rash of fires in California is beginning to smell like something other than smoke:

Residents expressed both pride and shock that they mostly had to fend for themselves. "This community of rugged individualists pulling together is part of the reason we love where we live," said Deborah Cahn, who with her family owns Navarro Vineyards. "But isn't this what government is supposed to do?"

On June 21, traffic on CalFire's Web site was so heavy that Boudreaux, the public information officer, could not log on to order equipment. "You got what you got," she said she was told when she called. "Nothing else is coming."

It's not fault of the fire-crews. Forest-management policy in the western United States is horrifically ineffective. It is irresponsible, malevolent and otherwise a nightmare that dumps the entirety of the risk on the residents of the states that dare not interfere, lest they be chastised with extreme prejudice. (Official nod/hat-tip to Radley Balko at TheAgitator.com)

Of course, I'm not surprised that this is the attitude in Monterey County, let alone the opinion of the governing bureaucrats in California. With an official declaration of emergency, it wouldn't take much to forcibly evict residents from their homes, vandalize, and otherwise violate multiple Constitutional amendments.

Not that they'd ever do that sort of thing.

The Course of Human Events

"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

Independence Day: it's a celebration of gambling, rebellion and courage.

To those that chastise the attitude that we should be beholden to a government that knowingly and willfully abuses its citizens' trusts, I say: Fie! Blind faith in the state will earn you a yolk across your shoulders and childrens' shoulders, nothing more.

We implicitly stake the same as our Founding Fathers did for our liberty, and those that do not, that will not, might come to find that they soon cannot, willingly or no.

Something for the Europhiles

Posted in reference to the High Priesthood's opinion that we should look elsewhere for for legal precedence... They're obviously not reading the precedents already established. And if they are, it signifies something worse on the horizon than idiocy infecting the legal system... Which brings us to the horrific harbinger of things to come if we continue to look to the EUSSR for inspiration on how to shape our nation.

Mike Judge: I salute you, for playing Cassandra to our Troy.