Caturday Night Special, Episode XXVIII

I can't claim credit for this one, but it deserves exposure for the genius that it is.

When in doubt, empty the clip

- One more tragic reason to be energy-independent, even within the boundaries of one's property.

- In which I am tempted once again to add a "Chicago" tag to this blog.

- They finally killed it.

- It is on the agenda, despite the claims that firearm-owning Obama-apologists are making. If you own a firearm and you did the deed, you ought to be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail... And I'm not joking.

- My catalog for the Seed Savers Exchange came in this week, and although I have seeds for this year's garden already (mostly), I'm still enjoying browsing and compiling a new order. (SSE catalogs are free. I have others on the way, and will report in on those at a later date.)

Cultivating a "Condition Yellow" mindset

Arizona v. Johnson, via the Volokh Conspiracy:

This morning the Supreme Court handed down the decision in a unanimous opinion by Justice Ginsburg. The Court limited its opinion to how this power applies in a traffic stop setting. It held first that the Terry v. Ohio power to detain is met in a traffic stop setting "whenever it is lawful for police to detain an automobile and its occupants pending inquiry into a vehicular violation." Second, "To justify a patdown of the driver or a passenger during a traffic stop, however, just as in the case of a pedestrian reasonably suspected of criminal activity, the police must harbor reasonable suspicion that the person subjected to the frisk is armed and dangerous." That is, the police can pat-down the passenger in a lawful traffic stop if the passenger is reasonably suspected of being dangerous regardless of what other crimes are suspected.

The commentary on Orin Kerr's analysis is worth a read, even if just for familiarity with some of the jargon and finer points of application. Although it is uncomfortable to think about, it is likely that having the knowledge will be of practical use sooner rather than later, considering the general mitigation of civil liberties in this forced amalgamation of vassal-states.

Furthermore, even though these have made the rounds on the 'Net more times than Rick Astley, I believe there isn't a bad time to repost them:





I would also recommend picking up a copy of You & The Police. Although the last printing was in 2005, the information is still useful, despite aggressive movement in the interim towards a more restrictive State.

Caturday Night Special, Episode XXVII

Change au jus

In which Chef Obama and his sous-minions serve up a heaping platter of "Bait-and-Switch Surprise":

The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants...

The Obama administration is also siding with the former administration in its legal defense of July legislation that immunizes the nation's telecommunications companies from lawsuits accusing them of complicitity in Bush's eavesdropping program, according to testimony last week by incoming Attorney General Eric Holder.

That immunity legislation, which Obama voted for when he was a U.S. senator from Illinois, was included in a broader spy package that granted the government wide-ranging, warrantless eavesdropping powers on Americans' electronic communications.

The commentary pretty well writes itself here. Perhaps if the Left looks suitably pathetic, Obama will throw them a towel to clean up with, and throw in a few bucks for a cab-ride home.

Don't worry, he still respects you, and he'll call you later.

Reverberating disquietude

Keynesian economic theory failure gave the thread of monetary policy a good jerk (insert Bernanke joke here), and now the whole sweater is starting to unravel:

While Barack Obama was being sworn in to office on Capitol Hill yesterday, the people of Iceland were starting the first revolution in the history of the republic. The word "revolution" might sound a bit of an overstatement, but given the calm temperament that usually prevails in Icelandic politics, the unfolding events represent, at the very least, a revolution in political activism.

Four months after the collapse of Iceland's entire financial system, no one has accepted any responsibility. Our currency has lost more than half its value, rampant inflation has already eaten up most people's savings, property values have dropped by more than a third and unemployment is reaching levels never seen before in the life of our young republic. The fault is clearly shared between the business elite and the government, which failed to regulate the newly privatised financial sector, allowing a few incompetent and egotistical business tycoons to gamble with the nation's fortune. And yet neither the government nor the bankers – who, by the way, seem to have disappeared into the cold thin air – see anything wrong with their own behaviour.

And while Iceland is an excellent microcosmic example of what can be expected as the correction takes its course, it is not alone:

The financial meltdown has become part of the real economy and is now beginning to shape real politics. More and more citizens on the edge of the global crisis are taking to the streets. Bulgaria has been gripped this month by its worst riots since 1997 when street power helped to topple a Socialist government. Now Socialists are at the helm again and are having to fend off popular protests about government incompetence and corruption.

In Latvia – where growth has been in double-digit figures for years – anger is bubbling over at official mismanagement. GDP is expected to contract by 5 per cent this year; salaries will be cut; unemployment will rise. Last week, in a country where demonstrators usually just sing and then go home, 10,000 people besieged parliament.

The United States has avoided the worst of it so far, but that in itself is a small comfort: the damping effect of the Federal government's interventionist policy prevents a swift correction of accumulated mismanaged assets, just as that same interference amplifies existing and/or expanding "bubbles" in the economy. When the good times were good, we enjoyed a level of opulence unseen since the halcyon days of Palatine Hill.

However, to draw on thermodynamic law and popular wisdom, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Predictably, unfortunately, and inevitably, the crash will mirror and match the meteoric rise of the economy pound-for-pound, inch-for-inch, and the very same Statist high-priests that kept the economy from correcting itself will keep the correction from clearing the detritus of failed institutions to make way for new growth.

Strangely enough, it is not all that different from the Federal government's forest-management policy in the western United States: unmitigated growth and fire-suppression until a "critical mass" stage, wherein a devastating, yea, holocaustic inferno consumes the entirety of the diseased and dying forest, causing otherwise healthy trees to explode from the heat and sterilizing entire swathes of wilderness.

I am willing to bet that the recovery will take a similar course: decades.

Irony has a bitter taste

What a miserable day.

I couldn't read the news without feeling my lips curl back over my teeth; at first it was disgust, then anger. Those idiots will still be arguing over the throttle and the steering-wheel when the train has jumped the track into the canyon below.

It's not that I want him to fail; it's only that I know that he can't succeed.

So, I pour myself another coffee, add a few splashes of scotch, then make my way to the washroom for a brief session with an antique razor and a beard-trimmer. Afterwards, I plod back to the kitchen for a helping of the chili verde from last night. Creature-comforts.

The words "hope" and "change" make me want to vomit tequila-flavored rainbows, but they're precisely what I need in my life right now.

Heaven help us if they get lasers

An excerpt from America's Great Depression:

Having warned the Exchange of a Congressional investigation, Hoover induced the Senate to investigate the Stock Exchange, even though he admitted that the Federal Government had no constitutional jurisdiction over a purely New York institution. The President used continual pressure to launch the investigation of what he termed "sinister" "systematic bear raids," "vicious pools... pounding down" security prices, "deliberately making a profit from the losses of other people." Beside such demagogic rhetoric, constitutional limitations seemed pale indeed. Secretary of Commerce Lamont protested against the investigation, as did many New York bankers, but Hoover was not to be dissuaded. In answering the New York bankers, Hoover used some unknown crystal ball to assert that present prices of securities did not represent "true values." The stock market viciously persisted in judging stocks according to their earnings, a useful criterion that Hoover seemed to find vaguely traitorous:

"...the pounding of prices to a basis of earnings by obvious manipulation of the market and propaganda that values should be based on earnings at the bottom of a depression is an injury to the country and to the investing public."

Instead, the public should be "willing to invest on the basis of the future of the United States."

This might sound familiar:

Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2008 — The Securities and Exchange Commission, acting in concert with the U.K. Financial Services Authority, took temporary emergency action to prohibit short selling in financial companies to protect the integrity and quality of the securities market and strengthen investor confidence. The U.K. FSA took similar action yesterday.

One wonders, what original solution to this economic prolapse will they try next?

Caturday Night Special, Episode XXVI

We acknowledge no precedence for "liberty"

By putting our faith in men rather than law, we have descended to new depths:

A divided U.S. Supreme Court gave prosecutors more ability to use evidence obtained in violation of the Constitution, ruling against a man who was arrested and searched only because of a police clerical error...

Herring was arrested when he came to the Coffee County sheriff’s department to retrieve something from an impounded truck. At the time, a neighboring county’s computer system showed an active arrest warrant for Herring’s failure to appear in court on a felony charge. That warrant in reality had been recalled, so Coffee County police lacked any legal basis to arrest Herring.

The Supreme Court in some past cases has applied the so- called exclusionary rule to illegally obtained evidence, barring its use at trial. The court has restricted use of the exclusionary rule under Roberts and his predecessor as chief justice, William Rehnquist.

“As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence,” Roberts wrote. “The error in this case does not rise to that level.”

Oddly enough (considering her usual tack), I agree with Ginsburg's minority opinion:

“Negligent recordkeeping errors by law enforcement threaten individual liberty, are susceptible to deterrence by the exclusionary rule and cannot be remedied effectively through other means,” Ginsburg wrote.

Note the key phrase: "... cannot be remedied effectively through other means."

Coupled with the ridiculous notion of Scalia's "new professionalism" in the ominous ruling for Hudson v. Michigan, the Sturmtruppen may now enter one's home without legal warrant, and anything seized in the process is admissible as evidence in court. More pointedly: "probable cause" isn't. The burden of proof is no longer upon the prosecution.

But that's not all:

In a second criminal case resolved today, the justices ruled that judges, rather than juries, can make the factual determinations necessary for sentences to run consecutively instead of simultaneously. An Oregon man argued unsuccessfully that a jury should have decided whether he was eligible for consecutive sentences on burglary and sexual assault convictions.

The 5-4 ruling marked a step back from a line of sentencing cases that had given new significance to the constitutional jury- trial right. Those earlier decisions had said that jurors, not judges, must make any factual determinations that increase a potential sentence.

Unsurprisingly, the Supremacy Court has elected to reinforce the power of the court over the the rights of the accused. The temptation to circumvent the law is most compelling when the crime is distasteful, but it is precisely the time when we should be most wary for our rights.

While FDR may have attempted to pack the courts to secure the "Constitutional" nature of his sweeping Fascistic reforms, it seems that it will not be necessary for future administrations; the highest court in the land seems determined to rubber-stamp every abridgment of liberty in the name of "justice".

Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.

When in doubt, empty the clip

- Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009.

- "I'll take 'Things That Cost $33' for $100 trillion, Alex."

- I'm hoping this gets here before the incoming administration does something rash. Hubba-hubba.

- "The truth is together with unfunded liabilities and promises to our retirees we're in the hole for over $59 trillion. We need to understand this truth before we can move forward with any new proposals."

Public employees, or privileged aristocracy?

And yet, some people continue to ask why I wrote-in "Ron Paul" for President:

U.S. Reps. Harry Mitchell (D-AZ) and Ron Paul (R-TX) announced yesterday they will continue their bipartisan efforts to block an automatic pay raise for Congress, and have introduced legislation to block the nearly $4,700 raise scheduled to take effect next year.

Paul, whose congressional district includes parts of Fort Bend County and much of Cinco Ranch, said turning down the raise would demonstrate a commitment to fiscal responsibility...

The new legislation, H.R. 156, introduced yesterday has already garnered 57 co-sponsors, including another Katy-area congressman, Republican Michael McCaul.

In 1989, Congress passed a law that provides lawmakers with an automatic pay raise every January unless they vote specifically to reject the raise.

Wow, a guaranteed salary increase every year sounds fantastic, but how much are they making now?

As of January 1, 2008, the annual salary of each Representative is $169,300. The Speaker of the House and the Majority and Minority Leaders earn more. The Speaker earned $212,100 during the 109th Congress (January 4, 2005-January 3, 2007) while the party leaders earned $183,500 (the same as Senate leaders).

A cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) increase takes effect annually unless Congress votes to not accept it. Congress sets members' salaries; however, the Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits a change in salary (but not COLA) from taking effect until after the next general election. Representatives are eligible for lifetime benefits after serving for five years, including a pension, health benefits, and social security benefits.

Now, supposing that Congress performed its Constitutionally-mandated duties for the entirety of its time in-session, a prevailing wage would not be an objectionable thing, in my opinion. However, not only does Congress largely fail at its job, it does so under the assumption that it alone can fool all the people all the time. Unfortunately for them, that just ain't so:

Only 11% of voters give Congress good or excellent ratings, while 54% say the legislature is doing a poor job. Though low, the latest numbers are a slight improvement from December, when just nine percent (9%) gave Congress good or excellent ratings.

Additionally, just 11% say Congress has passed any legislation to improve life in the United States recently, down from 13% last month. Most (59%) take the opposite view. However, another 30% are undecided at this point.

The number of voters who believe members of Congress are corrupt also has increased. While 36% of voters say most members of Congress are corrupt, 41% disagree. Last month, those numbers were 34% and 39% respectively.

As Representative Mitchell put it, the situation (and specifically, the raise) is "unconscionable". Now, if I didn't believe that the majority of the Congress elected to have their consciences surgically-removed years ago, we might have some sort of ethical leverage against them. Instead, they act with the foresight and cunning of a migrating wildebeest-herd, and even though odd member may be savagely disemboweled by angry constituents from time to time, the majority lives to spend another day on the Beltway's lush savannah in a quasi-conscious stupor.

I do not expect the bill to succeed, as Congress has little reason to halt spending for any reason. Even the massive outcry against the first $700 billion bail-out was largely ignored, and the incumbency-rate has not suffered for it, despite the then-imminent election.

Ordinarily, I'd propose a more advanced solution at this point, but it seems that with the frenzy regarding a new "New Deal" from the Obama administration, we are long past the point of graceful recovery. Instead, I propose that one cut their consumption of taxed goods and services as much as possible, substitute goods that may be bought in-state for ones that may be purchased over the Internet without taxation, or barter. Grow a "resistance garden", as is often suggested at the Survival Podcast.

We don't need them, and I think it's about time we showed them the truth of it.

Caturday Night Special, Episode XXV

Stick this in your change-purse

Hope & Change 0, More-of-the-Same 2009:

Obama made both announcements on Monday, saying that his picks "bring the integrity, depth of experience and tenacity that the Department of Justice demands in these uncertain times." The soon-to-be-appointees: Tom Perrelli for associate attorney general and David Ogden for deputy attorney general.

Campaign rhetoric aside, this should be no surprise. Obama's selection of Joe Biden as vice president showed that the presidential hopeful was comfortable with someone with firmly pro-RIAA views. Biden urged the criminal prosecutions of copyright-infringing peer-to-peer users and tried to create a new federal felony involving playing unauthorized music.

Where is your Obamessiah now?

If y'all will excuse me, I need to make some popcorn for the weeping and gnashing of teeth that will presently be heard from the college campi nation-wide.

(Hat-tip: The Agitator)

A brief yet decisive argument

"Abby-someone.""Abby-who?"

In the continuing effort to extricate me and mine from the clutches of nanny-statism (despite some of their voting habits), the last week or so here at the farm has been (between polishing up the leftovers and outside maintenance) spent drawing on napkins, reading articles on the Internet, scratching out cost-benefit analysis and conjuring the spirit of Nikolai Tesla to earth-bound servitude in his skull.

Okay, maybe we didn't conjure the angry spirit of Tesla, but there was copious research and scribbling. Long story short, I'm eyeballs-deep in getting an off-grid minimal-power generation system up.

The reasons for implementing such a system may not be readily apparent for those not already in a preparedness-mindset (or those that have never spent five hours on the phone arguing with Pacific Graft and Extortion), so I'll enumerate whilst I elucidate:

First: Life on the farm ain't exactly pleasant when the water won't pump from our well.

Second: Life on the farm ain't exactly pleasant when the sump-pump won't pump to the leach-field.

Third: I hate PG&E.

Fourth: This system is a working prototype for an eventual off-grid house that is somewhere in my future, albeit that system will likely be larger, but with less conventional watt-usage. Like any other exploratory venture into design, it's best to start small, work out the bugs, expand and repeat.

Fifth: I hate PG&E.

Sixth: Producing one's own power is an option that is better to have than have not. For clarification, ask any of the several-thousand without power recently in the frozen north-east. Furthermore, one can always be sure of the placement in the priority-queue when using an off-grid system, and the resulting independence immediately brightens my day, even if it's a little more work in the interim.

Seventh: I hate PG&E.

Currently, I'm shopping for a hefty modified/pure sine-wave inverter, and a 15-20A charge-regulator for the batteries. The photovoltaic panels are in the living-room, and while they aren't the most massive things, they'll keep the batteries charge relative to the planned usage, including generator use, if necessary.

Naturally, the amount of time spent doodling to time spent doing is about 10:1, the weather being what it is in January. In the course of doodling and doing research on some of the more interesting options involving Stirling-engine co-generation systems (also here), I remembered reading an article some months ago through StumbleUpon about a fascinating wood-burning truck. A quick application of Google-Fu yielded an interesting series of YouTube segments on wood-gasification power applied to a Toyota pickup (the smarmy hippy-speak cuts out with the narrator, hang in there; the entire series is about 47 minutes):



Segments two, three, four and five are here for convenience.

As I see it, this opens up appliances that run on liquid-propane, butane, and other petroleum derivatives for biomass conversion. At the very least, the concept's worth playing with, which is encouraging since I hate paying bills. Especially to PG&E.

Caturday Night Special, Episode XXIV

"Keen" is something of a misnomer

In which Andrew Keen fails to understand the subtle nature of the medium:

The 1930s fascists were expert at using all the most technologically sophisticated communications technologies - the cinema, radio, newspapers, advertising - to spew their destructive, hate-filled message. What they excelled at was removing the the traditional middlemen like religion, media, and politics, and using these modern technologies of mass communications to speak with reassuring familiarity to the disorientated masses.

Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then. Imagine that universal broadband had been available to enable the unemployed to read the latest conspiracy theories about the Great Crash on the blogosphere. Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his "personalized" YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses. Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites which could coordinate local meet-ups to assault Jews and Communists.

Well, gosh, it'd be kinda like Digg, wouldn't it? Or perhaps Fark?

The media from the "Fascist Thirties" share a common element: the distribution of the information is unidirectional, straight from a centrally-controlled source to the general public. Radio and cinema existed independently of each other until the advent of television, which is undoubtedly a more restricted format than its predecessors; broadcasting rights require government approval. What could possibly offer a more insidiously invasive method than to have a government-controlled box in nearly every home for the manipulation of information?

Conversely, as John Gilmore observed, the Internet has the peculiar trait that it "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." This has been show time and time again, through the inability of the MPAA/RIAA to stem the tide of file-sharing amongst peers, the development of GPL software, the several varieties of Linux and Firefox, and the rise of the Blogosphere; each of these formed as a response to a centralized monopolistic entity abusing its position at the expense of John and Jane Q. Public. Each entity responded with attempts to crush the opposition, and in each instance they failed, are failing, and will continue to fail in a miserable fashion.

Keen goes on:

Even before the October crash, Americans had become ever-increasingly suspicious to all institutional forms of authority - from traditional political parties to mainstream media organizations to Wall Street executives, educators, and lawyers.

I have an interesting theory: this bleak opinion did not appear ex-nihilo, but as a response to the ever-increasing similarities in candidates from the Democrat and Republican parties, and the institutionalized complicity in the education, financial and judicial systems. But why now? Why at all?

In truth, the advent of the Internet and the resultant magnitude-of-shift in peer-shared information was the death-knell for the halcyon days of central-programming. The people are talking, sharing, creating, and shaking off the fetters of the State and its mewling quislings, and worse yet, they're loving it.

But soft, what fail through yonder comment breaks?

In 2008, the Internet elected Barack Obama; in 2012, in an America with 15 percent or 20 percent unemployment, I doubt that the digital crowd will be quite as wise.

Wrong again, Keen. The Internet elected Ron Paul by way of fundraising, recognition and even as Time's "Man of the Year".

Finally, the pièce de résistance:

For another sneak preview of digital fascism, it’s worth looking at South Korea, another country with universal broadband infrastructure. In April, the new democratically elected South Korean President, Lee Myung Bak lifted a ban on imported American beef. This resulted in an eruption of anger on the Internet-first amongst teenage girls, then on the popular online portal Daum, and finally through teenage "citizen journalists" on blogs, videocasts, and social networks. The rumor spread that all the American beef was tainted with mad cow disease and an online petition for Lee’s impeachment got 1.3 million signatures in a week. And for an even more real-time example of digital fascism, take a look at the way in which this week’s raging anti government violence in Greece by the young and unemployed (already at over 9% in the Greek economy) has been coordinated by Facebook, Twitter and other viral digital networks.

To paraphrase Vox, it's a pity an educated fellow such as Keen cannot muster the presence of mind to open a dictionary:

fas⋅cism
   /ˈfæʃɪzəm/ [fash-iz-uhm] - noun

1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

2. (sometimes initial capital letter) the philosophy, principles, or methods of fascism.

3. (initial capital letter) a fascist movement, esp. the one established by Mussolini in Italy 1922-43.

Vox has also been kind enough to permanently link this historical reference.

Clearly, a popular movement to recall a politician is in no way a fascist activity. If anything, advocating the restriction of information to media that have been shown to be propaganda-dissemination mechanisms by authoritarian governments is itself a fascist viewpoint, considering the intimate nature of the relationship between the "approved distributors" and said government.

I did not have a high opinion of the Daily Beast before this, and it has not improved.

Meet the New Year, same as the Old Year

Here's to the year 2009 being a better one than 2008; however, I suspect that human behavior being what it is, events will continue to surprise only the inattentive, and that the West will continue to dig its own grave with both hands.

On a more personal note, as I continue and amplify my efforts toward a more self-sufficient lifestyle, I will be posting more regarding projects, information and the long list of unavoidable headaches that come with the process.

May you all have a prosperous and safe New Year; keep your heads down, the pantry full, and your powder dry.