Prosecution drives former professor to suicide.

Brandy Britton, 43, had been a professor at the University of Maryland. She taught in the fields of sociology and anthropology at the University of Maryland until 1999 when she lost her job.

There isn’t a high demand in those fields. You rarely hear anyone saying, “Gee, I was looking for a good anthropologist. Can you recommend anyone?” So Britton turned to the oldest profession in the books, so old in fact that anthropologists study it. She became a prostitute.

And things must have gone well enough for her since she continued in the profession for some years. One year ago the local police, having run out of real criminals to pursue, turned their attention to Britton and arrested her. The local prosecutor also lacking any other activity of value worth doing was taking her to court in a few days times.

Britton faced four charges and each carried a potential of one year in prison. Britton, however hung herself.

Christopher Flohr was her attorney. He said she was “kind and generous”. And he noted: “Her death underscores an important question: Was the public benefited at all by the resources spent on her arrest and prosecution?”

Busybody neighbors bare some of the responsibility. They noticed “men pulling up in fancy cars and staying only briefly”. What is missing? They didn’t notice any deterioration of the upscale neighborhood. They didn’t find drug dealers or other prostitutes hanging around outside the door. In fact they didn’t see anything except men periodically driving up to Britton’s home. But they suspected she was having sex and in America that’s practically considered tantamount to genocide. One can have sex, of course, provided they hide the fact and feel guilty about it.

With the nosey neighbors peering over the fence, hoping to catch a glimpse of something salacious, the police decided to investigate. Now one news article I read said: “According to Baltimore Crime Statistics and Crime Data, Baltimore’s crime level rates ‘worse’ than the national average in every category except the ‘Rape” category.”

Or take this little tidbit from WJZ television: “In Maryland, there were 407 black homicide victims in 2004, meaning 25 of every 100,000 African-Americans were murdered. Maryland ranks seventh when it comes to this problem.” The station notes that the mayor of Baltimore says most of these killings take place in Baltimore.

The Baltimore Examiner had a headline that screamed: “In Baltimore, not even police officers are safe from random crime.” They write: “Two visiting law enforcement officers were robbed at gunpoint outside a bar in a trendy section of Baltimore, hours before they were to attend the funeral of a Baltimore detective who was shot to death during a robbery attempt at the end of his shift.”

Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm said: “We’re hurting as a city.” After this attack one of the police officers said: “I’m upset that stuff like this is happening in Baltimore and in areas that are fairly decent. I could have been dead. This is terrible. This city has been horrible lately.” Horrible lately? Perhaps true but the city is sending a message to women who engage in prostitution.

So they don’t have the resources to fight robbers and murderers. But the police and the prosecutors and the courts can spend hours going after woman like Britton. They can put them under surveillance and troll the internet to see if they are advertising prices for their services -- which is what they did in Britton’s case. And real criminals are dangerous! They sometimes do nasty things to officers who arrest them. It’s safer to arrest someone who is harmless, someone like Britton. So that’s what they did while Baltimore goes to hell in a handcart.

Brandy Britton’s arrest made life difficult for her. She had to hire an attorney and attorneys are not cheap in America. To make things worse she had to stop working since the police were watching her. With her trial only days away she would have been despondent. With no income she was desperate. And then she found the piece of paper on the front door of her home. It was being repossessed. The only glimmer of hope she had was that a conviction could mean she wouldn’t need a home for four home -- the state of Maryland would provide one at great expense to the taxpayers.

The eviction notice, coming on top of the arrest and pending trial, was obviously more than she could take. So she hung herself.

That must give some comfort to the people of Baltimore and the nosey neighbors with nothing better to do. An obviously dangerous criminal is now off the streets -- permanently. She may have been kind. She may have been generous. She may have done nothing to harm another person. But the good Christian people of Baltimore can sleep knowing that one less prostitute threatens their safety. But if I were them I’d sleep with one eye open. While the police and prosecutor were chasing Britton they were ignoring murderers, rapists, thieves, and sundry other violent individuals who actually violate the rights of others. But in a decent society you have to have priorities. After all this horrible woman was having sex! For money!!!!

A visit to Baltimore might mean that you get mugged, your wife is murdered and your daughter is raped. But joy of all joy, Brandy Britton isn’t around to solicit you anymore. Don’t you feel better already?

Why they are smashing online gambling.

As long as we know people have enjoyed a game of chance. They like to gamble. Some people prefer a game of skill like poker or a game of chance like roulette or the slot machines. All around the world there are casinos to attract gamers. And with the advent of the internet there is online gambling as well. I suppose there is online poker, online black jack, etc. I imagine that any gambling one can do in a casino now has a similar version online as well.

There is an assumption made by the moralistic that such activities are sinful. They waste resources. Well, so does government but the moralistic crowd seems to want it around -- in spades.

At the worst you can say that gambling is a vice. As Lysander Spooner wrote: “Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime --- that is, the design to injure the person or property of another --- is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without a criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practises a vice with any such criminal intent. He practises his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others.”

So what is behind the US governments attempt to police the world when it comes to internet gambling? Is is moralistic vice hunting? To some degree it probably is. The Bush regime is riddled with religious fanatics besotted with regulating man’s private morality. They don’t care whether an action is criminal or not. The mere fact that it is a vice is sufficient for them.

But that is not the major inspiration for this crackdown. Consider this; there are lotteries conducted by government across the United States. State governments promote gambling. They encourage people to take risks and they restrict competition so that they can give lousy returns on the investment. One’s chance of winning a lottery depends on how many prizes are given out. A lack of competition means less pressure to give out more prizes. It raises costs for consumers and reduces their chances of winning. And greedy politicians love it.

The government sells you a ticket for $2. They keep the $2. Out of the income from ticket sales they give out a fraction of the money in the form of prizes. And then they tax you for winning back from them. If you win $2 it is income worthy of taxation. If you lose $2, as you normally will, it is not a business expense. Your loses are entirely your own but your winnings you share with them. So they encourage gambling. To a large degree greedy politicians want to limit your ability to gamble because online gambling is unwanted competition for them.

But there are casinos all around the United States. So doesn’t that undermine that theory? No. First, why are their casinos all over the US. Only a few years ago they were few and far between even while lottery games run by government were all over the place. The competition arose when Indian reservations discovered they had the legal right to regulate gambling on their own land. They were immune from the anti-competition laws that governments set up to protect their monopolies on gambling.

And once the reservations had casinos it became absurd to continue restricting casinos elsewhere. The dam was cracked and water was escaping so better to allow them and tax them. The demise of gambling laws was a reluctant concession by politicians who found they really had no choice.

But if there are casinos all over the United States and if government itself is in the gambling business then why this fanatical drive to wipe out online gambling?

If you look at our previous post “The power to destroy” I make the point that government loves to tax. Politicians are greedy bastards even when they pretend to be generous. (Note that is always easy to be generous with stolen money and much harder to be generous with one’s own salary.) They want to get their hands on a good portion of even dollar that is ever spent.

It is their ability to grab other people’s money that gives them power and prestige. If you win a big sum at the casino it is reported to the greedy politicians. If you win the lottery your earnings are partially confiscated by them. What you spend within the borders of the United States belongs to them. If you spend $1 they may keep 10¢ of it for themselves. The recipient of the remaining 90¢ spends it and finds that the government now takes another 9¢ and so on and so on until the politicians are taken the full dollar.

Government taxes your winnings at the casino and it taxes the profits of the casino. If you win the governments gets some. If the casino wins the government gets some. They are the protection racket of the Mafia writ large with one difference -- the Mafia took less. But online gambling is another matter entirely.

The damn casino doesn’t physically exist anywhere. It is an online entity. It may be a company registered in some primitive place with low taxes like Switzerland. The people who provide the service of gambling are being allowed to keep most of what they earn. And that is what drives greedy politicians into such a frenzy.

The entire reason for smashing online gambling is greed. Politicians want to protect their revenue sources and online commerce is a threat to that.

The power to destroy.

Man has long dreamed of traveling to the stars. And Brian Emmett was one of those men. He is a space buff. Space tourism is still in its infancy and well beyond the price of most people. So it just didn’t seem possible.

But Oracle Corp. is moving into this field and they had an on-line contest. Emmett entered the contest which required answering some questions about the Java computer code. And he was absolutely thrilled when he found out that he won. His lifelong dream of traveling into space seemed one very giant step closer to reality.

And then the dream smashers stepped in. US tax codes require that a prize like this be taxed as income. And the normal cost of the flight was $138,000. Even though Emmett would never see the cash the greedy government has to grab a share of everything. If Emmett took his prize he would still have to pay the government $25,000 in taxes. And Emmett just can’t afford that.

He had to turn down his dream, it was smashed to tiny pieces by the voracious appetite of big government. He said: “There was definitely a period of mourning. I was totally crestfallen. Everything you had hoped for as a kid sort of evaporates in front of you.”

Two other winners are still planning on collecting their prize but they don’t live in the United States -- formerly known as the “land of the free”. Odd that a country that kicked off its independence by a revolt over a small tax on tea is so oppressed by the heavy hand of taxation today.

Emmett’s misfortune is compounded daily. US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall once said: “The power to tax involves the power to destroy.” Government taxed Emmett’s dream and they destroyed his dream.

Every day taxes destroy dreams, reduce the standard of living people but the subsidies make major corporations wealthier, they pay for useless studies, subsidize dysfunctional lifestyles, pay for “bridges to nowhere” and the like. Every single tax is destructive. No tax does more good than harm. It can’t.

Whether or not they are necessary can be debated. That they are destructive can not. At the very least they need to be cut.

Government knows taxes inhibit and destroy. They tax cigarettes highly because they know it will reduce the activity that is taxed. And then they pretend that in other fields it won’t inhibit at all. Taxes on labor destroy jobs but government pretends that is not the case. Taxes on housing destroys housing reducing the quality of living of citizens. The capital gains tax punishes people for investing their money thus reducing investment -- reducing innovation and job creation.

An income tax and sale tax inhibits everything! People buy less food because it is taxed. They buy fewer books because they are taxed and hence learn less. To the degree that medicine and health care is taxed people are forced to forgo some treatment. Taxes on income reduces an individuals ability to plan for his own retirement, or find quality education for his children outside the state asylums called “public schools”. Taxation is everywhere the enemy of progress and human well being. Taxes smash dreams.

Why the election spending scandal?

Unfortunately the United States is already moving into silly season. The next presidential campaign has already begun. Democrats are lining up for the nomination. No surprise really since they all think the Republicans are in deep trouble. George Bush has destroyed the credibility of his own party.

Already millions of dollars are pouring into the campaign accounts of prospective candidates. And in the November elections we saw candidates for the House of Representatives spending vast sums of money to win office. Over a billion dollars was spent in the last presidential election.

Now consider that the president is paid a salary of $400,000 per year. A member of the US Congress is paid $162,100 per year. So billions of dollars are spent by individuals seeking jobs that pay only a fraction of the cost of winning the position.

Now there are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the money they spend is other people’s money -- money donated to the campaigns. And the salary is their own. For some that is motivation. Others give up incomes greater than what they receive in office. Power, prestige and perks no doubt inspire many of them. And there actually might be a couple inspired by some idea of community service but they would be hard to find.

Now why is it that billions are spent by other people in order for these individuals to secure office? And why is it that the amount of money spent for election is increasing year after year?

There are a lot of complaints on the Left as to increased spending on elections. And while their solution is the same solution they offer for every other problem in life -- give control to the State to run things -- they never ask why it is that spending is constantly increasing?

The issue is not that hard to understand. People spend millions because the office is worth far more than that. It is not the value which determines the office. It is the power which determines the value of the office.

In modern day America most legislation has nothing to do with protecting people from violations of their rights. Most legislation is not a measure to protect but to redistribute rights and wealth from one group to another. Modern day politics is almost entirely about transfers.

There are two ways this is done. For instance one kind of business may wish to approach government and have them use force against competitors from overseas. They may lobby for restrictions on trade which will drive up the price of their goods. The net result will be a redistribution of wealth from consumers to wealth businessmen and from overseas producers to local producers. Most protectionist measures do precisely this.

Another means wealth businessmen transfer wealth to themselves is that they lobby for various regulations over their own industry. For instance you will often find that Big Business in particular loves such regulations since the cost of regulations impact smaller and medium size competitors the most.

Consider three companies: one has income of $5 million, one has income of $1 million and the third has income of $200,000. The big boy in the field has access to his congressman since he is a reliable contributor to the campaign and the party. Some well-meaning but naive consumer or environmental group comes along and proposes regulations which will add $100,000 to the cost of operating in this field. Big Boy enthusiastically supports the new regulations with slogans about “responsibility” and “community service” and slogans. The measure passes.

What are the results? Well the smallest business can’t face an increased cost of $100,000 and goes out of business. The medium size business is also having problems when costs go up by 10% over night. They can limp along but they have to raise their prices. Big Boy, having a much bigger income, spreads the increased cost out over more customers. So while his prices increase a bit they increase minimally compared to the one competitor they have left. The net result is that they pick up most the $200,000 in business from the smaller company that has gone under. And they start attracting business from the medium sized competitor who has trouble competing on prices.

They realized that regulations reduces competition which is conducive to higher profits for themselves. The big boys can spread the higher costs over more customers and their competitors are thus at a disadvantage. The increased profits often easily pay for the increased costs of regulations. And if they are lucky then some foolish consumer group will point out that average profits have increased (true since the smaller guy went under) and this indicates that more regulations are required.

And if the regulations reach a stage where they impeded on the industry severely it would mean that the medium sized business may go under. Then the same groups would lobby for subsidies and tax breaks to save the “endangered” business especially from foreign competition.

Special interest groups, be they big business or not, find it worthwhile to purchase the good will of politicians. Election costs reflect the potential profits that can be gained through political means. As politicians accumulate more powers the cost of elections will rise further.

What solution does the Left offer? Why, state financing of elections of course. But who benefits from that? Incumbents. The ability that politicians have to hand out favors and redistribute wealth give them a huge amount of “campaigning” ability which challengers do not possess. Incumbents are already receiving public financing by the billions. Every highway they build in their district wins them votes. Every grant they can hand out to some group wins them votes. They spend their entire term of office campaigning with funds from the public treasury. With that advantage it is very difficult for a challenger to win an election against the incumbent. About the only way to do it is to outspend them in the campaign itself.

But what does public financing do? It sets limits on spending thus making it impossible to outspend the incumbent. Public financing is a protection scheme benefiting incumbents.

Is there a real means of solving these problems? There is! The solution is to restrict the powers of politicians. If you reduce the ability of political hacks to hand out favors from the public treasury you will reduce the demand for electing such hacks. The net result would be a reduction in campaign spending.

The corruption, the massive spending, the promises, are all the result of amassing unconstitutional powers in the hands of the political elite. Reduce their powers and the value of electing them will drop dramatically along with all the problems associated with this scandal.

Julie Amero was the scapegoat.

Here is an update on the case of Julie Amero the 7th grade substitute teacher facing 40 years in jail because the local police have zero idea how to investigate her crime: she was alleged to have allowed students to see images of nudity on her classroom computer. She contends that she went to a site on hair styling and that porn pop-up ads starting appearing and she couldn’t shut them down. She is now awaiting sentencing.

In the meantime the school admits that they screwed up. According to one Connecticut paper Robert Hartz, the school district’s information systems director, “blamed himself for the computer pornography incident, saying he may have overlooked an invoice for the update.” That would be the invoice for the update for the software which would have blocked the pop-ups. The school was still running Widows 98, the firewall license expired, and they had no anti-virus or anti-spyware software.

If the school district had done its job the incident couldn’t have happened and Julie Amero wouldn’t be facing 40 years in prison, she would be 80 years old when she got out!

It also appears that the prosecutors didn’t really think they had a case against the teacher since they were very quick to offer her no prison time if she admitted guilt. Normally this sort of plea bargain, with no prison time, is offered when prosecutors are not very sure of the guilt of the person they are prosecuting. Perhaps a good sign they ought to drop the case instead!

Amero, however, apparently held a naive view of justice and thought that if she was innocent she ought to turn down the deal and fight it out in court. She did and the jury apparently didn’t grasp the complexity of the issue and an computer expert who came to testify on her behalf says he was prevented from by the court from doing so adequately.

What is more disturbing, and something I have not seen mentioned elsewhere, is that the school had a problem with porn on the computers before Julie Amero was asked to substitute in the English class. Here is some information from a blog dedicated to education. The author claims:

In June and July of 2004, before Julie's experience, the Griswold Middle School had an infestation of pornography that caused local authorities to seize a computer and hard drives. A student printed a nude image to take home in their backpack! Funny how no prosecution took place in those cases.

It is inexcusable that no action was taken to upgrade the protective software at that time (they had the summer to do it). And it explains why nobody thought much of Amero's experience at the time, essentially telling her "not to worry about it."

What this adds up to however is grounds for a mistrial since the community responsible was well aware of computer pornography being present on school district computers yet prosecuted Amero under the pretense that she was the menace to society.

This woman has been cruelly maligned because of the lack of honesty and integrity on the part of everyone involved with the prosecution of this case. Everybody apparently KNEW BETTER than to believe this woman intentionally accessed those sites or that such an incident was unusual in the school setting.

More and more it is looking like Julie Amero was a scapegoat for the inept policy of the school district. They let the blocking software lapse. Amero says she told others about problems of porn on the computer and nothing was done about it. And now we are told that the computers at the school had this very problem before she worked there.

The entire rebuttal of the prosecution about all of this is that she is guilty because she didn’t simply pull the plug. First, if the images are popping up your first instinct is to try to close the screens. Second, you try to quit the program. The very last thing you do is simply pull the plug as this can cause damage to your system. And one would be particularly reticent of pulling the plug on a computer that you don’t own!

Julie Amero is the victim of inept police and bad laws which were passed by idiots who don’t understand the actual problem they were trying to solve. It is also a good time to remember what Mark Twain said: “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

Anatomy of a Smear

Someone is trying to smear Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois. An anonymous smear, being spread by Theopublican outlets, claims that Obama was trained as a youth at a Muslim madrassa, or religious school. It is an intentional distortion of the facts meant to harm the Democrat.

We know who first published this smear. It is Insight magazine, a publication connected to the Unification Church cult of Rev. Moon,, a man who claims he is the new Jesus. This cult has poured millions into the extreme Right in the United States and is closely connected to the far Right in the Republican Party.

This publication says that Obama “has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage”. Perhaps because he doesn’t have one. The publication attributes the smear to anonymous sources supposedly within the camp of Hiliary Clinton. Clinton’s campaign denies it. But since Insight doesn’t name any names I suggest they be treated as if they invented the story out of whole cloth.

Here is the lie as printed by Insight: “Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. ...[He] spent at least four years in a so-called Madrass, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.” They quote an unnamed source saying “He was a Muslim, but he concealed it. His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign.” They say that in his autobiography Obama “mentions but does not expand on his Muslim background, alluding only to his attendance at a ‘predominantly Muslim school.’” The Right-wing rag says “the U.S. intelligence community has determined that today mos of these schools are financed by the Saudi Arabian government and they teach a Wahhabi doctrine that denies the rights of non-Muslims.”

Now for some facts before we go further with how the extreme Right is spreading this lie.

First, Obama says he was not raised as a Muslim. He says his father, who divorced his mother when Obama was two years old, had been raised a Muslim but was an atheist when he married his mother. His mother, from Kansas, he says was secular. He is a member of the United Church of Christ himself. His mother meet and remarried an Indonesian and moved to Indonesia with the young Obama.

And what is this “predominantly Muslim school” he mentions? Is this a madrassa? No, it was a public school in Indonesia. Why is it predominantly Muslim? For the same reason any public school in the U.S. is predominantly Christian. The vast majority of Indonesians are Muslims. Insight uses the quote to imply that it is a madrassa but the quote itself proves it wasn’t. A madrassa would not be “predominantly” Muslim but exclusively Muslim.

Numerous news outlets investigated the school and all of them came to the same conclusion. The school is a public school. Like all public schools in Indonesia it has religious classes but the classes on Islam are for Muslims and Christian students go to Christian classes. Indonesia doesn’t practice separation of church and state -- something you would think the Theopublicans would be applauding. The assistant headmaster of the school, Akhmad Solihim told ABC News, who went to the school to actually check the facts, “We are a regular public school.”

So it was not a madrassa, not funded by the Saudis and not an exponent of Wahhabism. That was all invented. Insight said he attended for four years. In reality he attended for two years and then transferred to a Catholic school, where they worship Jesus not Rev. Moon. Obama moved back to his birth country, the United States, when he was ten years old. So for a total of four years he was living outside the U.S. as a child, was not raised Muslim and did not attend a madrassa and only attended the "predominantly Muslim" school for two years, from the ages of six to eight.

But the radical Right Insight got the story out using their “anonymous” sources. And when pressed to defend the story insist that the information did come from the Clinton camp but offer zero proof that is the case. I have little doubt that Hilary and her people could do something like this but there is no evidence that they did.



Once Insight reported on the story Fox News picked up the smear and added new invented material to the accusation. (Play the Fox News distortion above.) On the abominably bad Fox and Friends show host Steve Doocy said that Obama spent “the first decade of his life raised by his Muslim father as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa.” So much for objective reporting! Count the falsehoods in that one sentence.

1. Obama lived with his father from birth to two years of age not for the “first decade of his life”.
2. His father was an atheist by the time Obama was born and no longer Muslim.
3. Obama was not raised a Muslim.
4. He was not educated in a madrassa.

That has to be a new record of some sort. To pack four falsehoods into one sentence is not easy. It takes effort. While they attribute the story to Insight they also expand the story. Insight falsely claimed Obama attended a madrassa for four years. Fox has this expanded to the first decade of his life. Remember Obama lived in the US until he was six and was only in Indonesia for four years.

Notice that Fox made zero effort to confirm any of these claims. They simply repeat the lies over and over and over in this report. And they have the audacity to question the veracity of the New York Times in this report!

In another segment on Fox John Gibson, who wrote a distorted book on the alleged war on Christmas, reported that Obama smoked and wanted viewers to consider, “would you vote for a smoker as President?” Now there is a, pardon the pun, burning issue of the day. I’d take a smoker over a liar any day!

Gibson has no shame and no scruples. After this attack on Obama for smoking he tried to justify it. He brought up the old theory that smokers lack character! And then he brought in the madrassa smear saying: “That, my friends, is way, way worse than saying he smokes Marlboros.” Gibson is disgusting. He says Obama, "attended a predominantly Muslim school as a youngster in Indonesia -- translation: madrassa.” What a prick! It doesn’t translate into a madrassa at all. Every public high school in the US is predominantly Christian when it comes to the student body but that doesn’t make them Bible schools. Most publis schools in Indonesia are predominantly Muslim but the schools are madrassas.

Gibson, then makes fun of a potential Obama television commercial: “Hi, I'm Barack Obama. Funny thing happened to me on my way to the White House. Somebody discovered I didn't go to a kindergarten. I went to a madrassa.” Talk about dirty reporting. We should note that even if this were true, and it is NOT, how can anyone hold Obama responsible for the school he was sent to as a six year old?

And to cap off how reliable Fox News can be look at this report. Watch carefully. Here is a report about a man being arrested for child molestation. So what do they show as the film clip, in an almost subliminal way, to illustrate a child molester? They show Obama supporters carrying signs for the candidate including one sign that was a photo of the candidate! Anyone else think that Fox News is out to get Obama any way they can? See this clip below.



Disclosure: I have no intention of supporting Obama or Clinton for president. I see no likely candidate worth supporting. The likely Republican candidates turn my stomach and the Democrats seem intent on trying to find someone who is even worse.

Now that's what they call "term limits".

The people of the town of Fago, Spain seem to know how to take care of a politician who tries to micromanage the lives of the entire village. They killed him. To be precise police aren’t sure who killed Miguel Grima but the entire population of this mountain village is a suspect.

The town has only a few dozen citizens but Grima pissed them all off. The only bar was forbidden by this bureaucrat from putting tables out during the summer. So they were pissed off. He refused to issue any hunting licenses so that pissed off hunters. Farmers, for centuries were allowed to drive livestock through the tiny town but the mayor stopped that. So the farmers were pissed off.

Grima has been involved in court cases with most the residents of the village at one point or another. The Telegraph says “He had taken out injunctions to prevent people making home improvements and closed down a bed and breakfast because it competed for business with his own establishment.” And when the only two children in the village tried to play basketball in the only flat spot in the village he banned that as well.

Only one villager would comment on the killing. Santiago Miramar said: “He was an unpleasant man who ran this place like his personal kingdom. He made life difficult for most of us but for a select few he made life impossible.”

According to police at least 3 people participated in the ambush attack on this interfering politician. Well, it’s certainly quicker and cheaper than a recall election. Is this what they mean by term limits.

And, we're here to help you!

The Indianapolis Star ran a story about a 93-year-old man, Thelmon Green. A veteran of World War II he had made a living as a handy man. He can’t collect Social Security as he worked his entire life in the underground economy -- not that he ever made that much money to begin with. And at his age he is able to work very much.

The newspaper told the story of how people in the neighborhood help this man.

People in the neighborhood -- many have known Green since they were children -- bring him food. They slip him fives and tens. They visit him. There are the Hall brothers, Philip and William, who bring him meals; there's Joe "Red" Long, the Red of Big Red Discount Towing, who gives Green not just a parking space but access to the bathroom, and an electrical outlet so Green can heat the van, listen to the radio and cook on a small electric stove; there's a Jehovah's Witness who comes by with Watchtower magazines -- "retired post office, helluva nice guy," Green says. Some charity is at work here, obviously, but it's more than that. "Mr. Green is just a good guy to be around," says Philip Hall, 57. "He says, 'The Good Master woke me up again today -- I'm doing great.' I learn from him. If you sit down and talk to him, you can learn a lot from that old codger."

With the help of the neighborhood Mr. Green was surviving. And he was happy. So he said. One of the businesses in the area had a broken down mini van on their lot and allowed him to live there. They ran an extension plug out to the van to run a space heater and a cooler for the food that people would bring Green. In the summer he’d fish.

And while not the lifestyle that most of us would want he liked it. He wanted to live on his own and without any income he truly relied on the kindness of strangers. But then these people aren’t strangers. Many of them have known Green since they were children. And they made sure he got by.

The Green story is sad but also heartening. He doesn’t have much but he has enough to survive -- after all he made it 93! He had a roof over his head, though not much of one. It was heated, he had friends and he had food. He had everything he wanted. Until someone from the government showed up to help him!

The evil cow is Sherly Crum, a petty bureaucrat from the Marion County Health Department who decided that Green has the right to be homeless and ought to exercise it. She had him evicted from the van because it didn’t have running water and electricity (the extension cord doesn’t count). Nor does it matter that just a few feet away are the bathroom facilities of Big Red Discount Towing which the owners happily made available to Green.

Readers of the Indianapolis Star are furious, if you go by the comments. One expressed my sentiments: “Crum you are a pig and may you rot in hell.” I’m not so sure I’d have been that nice myself! One woman addressed her remarks to the Crum-my people at the Health Department: “If this man is happy in his home, what business is it of yours?” Another: “He’s not hurting anyone. They should let the old man live how he’s happy.”

Another writer found the original story of a neighborhood helping one of it’s own touching but notes “now this guy gets the shaft”. Another: “Government at it’s best, the person who evicted him went home to a nice warm bed and put an old man out in the cold... What a shame... Did they drown any kittens that day also?” Or: “I hope Mrs. Crum finds herself in a tough situation one day that will make her realize she should stay out of people’s business that is not hurting one other soul on this earth.”

I didn’t read all the comments left with the Star, after all there are well over 300 of them. But I did read the last 40. And only one person seemed to think that the Crummy bureaucrat should have done what she did. And even they weren’t enthusiastic about it -- they just said she was doing her job.

Dennis Ryerson, editor of the Star, said the original story was “touching”. The journalist who wrote it said “It was a story of a guy living in a van happily, and a story of how a village can look after folks, as well as a bureaucracy.” (Actually, it turns out they looked after him better since they didn’t evict him into the cold!)

The paper says they never considered that the heavy hand of the “were here to help you” bureaucrats would step in and ruin this man’s life. They “thought of the many other people in Marion Country who are left to live in even worse situations. Surely, they reasoned, Green would be left alone.”

People came to Green’s defense. A former car dealer offered him a camper van but it was unknown whether that would satisfy the morons at the Health Department. A daughter who had been out of touch for 40 years heard the story and is back in touch. And the Star, stupidly in my view, wrote that “Thanks to all the attention, government promises to the indomitable Mr. Green should stand a better-than-average chance of being honored.”

Green doesn’t want to move. His wishes will be denied him. His own choice will be over rode by the bureaucracy that knows best. The publicity may mean he will end up better off. But that is not how it works for most people subjected to the help of Mrs. Crum and her kind.

Consider what would have happened without the accompanying publicity. An elderly man is living in a van happily. He seems to thrive for his age -- much better than most people his age. He’s evicted because there is no running water or electricity (ignoring that he does have electricity in fact and water a few feet away). Imagine no publicity at all. He’s evicted. He now can exercise his right to sleep in the outside cold with nothing to keep him warm -- no space heater, no cooler for his food, no shelter whatsoever.

Green would have discovered that the government was quite happy to tell him that either he have a shelter they approved of or no shelter at all. This is like forbidding someone food because what they have isn’t nutritious enough. Better they starve than eat junk! Better to be entirely homeless than to live in a van.

Remember the old joke about the three big lies: “Yes, I’ll respect you in the morning. The cheque is in the mail. And, I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” The worst of the lies is that last one. It does far more harm to people than the other two. Sheryl Crum wins our Moron of the Week award. And to quote a reader of the Indianapolis Star, may she rot in hell.

The bureaucrats were caught by the backlash and rushed off to put a spin on the move to make themselves look good. Apparently when their action became public they were flooded with phone calls. Collette Duvalle, a spokesmoron for the Health Department claimed: “It’s in the spirit of compassion from the health department that we’re working with Mr. Gree to make sure he is happy with whatever he decides to at the very end.” Duh! He was already happy until they stepped in. She claimed it was all a misunderstanding -- they never told Green he had to leave. Right! They claim that Green has lots of options but won’t reveal what they are because it might violate his “privacy”. Green says he just wants to be left alone.

The Health Department is not happy with the publicity. And one local television station reports they say “if Mr. Green chooses to live in his van the issue may be taken up by the city. Residing in a van or camper may violate zoning laws.” (Sleeping on the street doesn’t.) So it looks like the bureaucrats at Health are afraid of the bad publicity so they will pass the buck to another department to do the actual eviction! Ah, that government spirit of compassion.

The good old days. Before Bush!

Here is a video clip of a segment from The Andy Griffith Show. The boy is film producer Ron Howard who plays Opie Taylor, the son of the sheriff. Based on my best guess of his age (he's 52 now) this would be circa 1966. It illustrates quite nicely what the attitude about bugging people was at the time and a thing called due process. But hey, it's George Bush's America and that Constitution, to quote the imperial president, is "just a damn piece of paper."

Spanish justice minister stands up Islamists.

While Bush focuses on the “tearists” in Iraq he is constantly sucking up to the Saudis. But some of the most persistent organizers of radical Islam in the world are Saudi Wahhabis or Salafists. Salafism was a minor sect in Islam until two things happened. One was the Salafist Saudi family took over in Saudi Arabia and two was that oil was discovered giving them billions of dollars to spread their extremist ideas. Today the Saudi regime is pouring billions into spread of Salafist extremism to mosques around the world. It is no accident that 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists were Saudi.

Considering the role Saudi Salafism has had in radicalizing modern Islam you would think that the great (sic) opponent of Islamist terrorism, George Bush, would stand up to these people. Of course not! Instead he was seen literally walking hand in hand, like lovers, with a Saudi official.

In light of Bush’s constant appeasement to the true funders of Islamic extremism it was nice to see a Western official stand up to the Saudi puritans. Spain’s justice minister was to speak on the globalisation of terrorism at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, which Al-Jazeera describes as “the academic heart of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi Islam.”

Female journalists from Spain wanted to cover the event but being inferior woman, as the Wahhabis would see it, they were banned. They were even wearing the black abaya and veil so as not to offend the Puritanical obsession of the Wahhabis. But nothing could change their gender and the problem is that women are simply inferior according to Wahhabis and banned for the university.

The Spanish delegation was only told on Sunday night that women would be prevented from entering the meeting on Monday. Spain’s justice minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar was told that females would be banned so he packed his bags and left. He left printed copies of his speech but he went home. Gee, a justice minister who stands up for justice. How refreshing to Americans who are used to an Attorney General who destroys Constitutional rights.

No doubt Dinesh D’Souza will be outraged that the moral values of Islamists were insulted and that the Lopez Aquilar was engaging in “cultural imperialism”. This is another example of how “the cultural Left” is working to destroy D’Souza’s much desired alliance between the Religious Right and the Islamists. Yes, folks, Dinesh gets to be an enter season of The Twilight Zone all by himself. No doubt Dinesh the Appeaser will use this to promote his book -- somebody has to pay that massive house.

Write a letter, win a visit from the Secret Service.

An 81-year-old man was questioned by Secret Service agents because he wrote a letter to the editor that was critical of President Bush. Dan Till, of Bethlehem, PA wrote a letter about the execution of Saddam Hussein. He wrote: I still believe they hanged the wrong man.” That was all it took for him to be visited by the Feds.

Till was at home when he received a phone call from the Secret Service asking him if he was home. When he said yes he was told the agents were in his parking lot waiting for him. The immediately came up and started questioning him. The agents also searched his home and took photographs of him. Last year he was visited by the FBI over another letter to the editor.

It should be noted what this means. Even if the vague statement in the letter could be taken as some round about threat on Bush what this means is that federal agents are checking out the letters to the editors of newspapers. The mere knowledge that federal agents are checking out who writes letters to the newspaper and what they say stifles free speech in America.

Write those letters if you wish but remember Big Brother is watching. Welcome to the land of the free. Right!

Bush and his new world government. Be very afraid.

The arrogance of the out-of-control American government knows no bounds. While gambling is legal, in one form or another, in most US states the theocrats in the Bush administration have been pushing through antigambling legislation in regards to the internet and doing so with businesses that are not located in the United States.

Recently two executives with internet payment service NETeller made the mistake of changing planes in the United States. They were arrested because their company, or more precisely, their former company, had taken payments from US citizens to pay for on-line gambling.

It used to be that when you changed planes on an international flight you were not considered within US territory. But the Bush authoritarians changed the rules requiring every person changing planes to go through passport control so that the US could get fingerprints on everyone and assert it’s sovereignty. The two NETeller officials were arrested because their former company transferred funds at the request of American clients.

Now the US federal thugs have issued subpoenas to major European banks demanding they turn over all “business records, correspondence, and e-mails related to internet gambling transactions.” The Register reports this “raises the possibility of widespread American criminal charges against everyone who has ever been involved with the online gaming industry, even if in a peripheral way.”

The US government is now acting like a global government entitled to make law for the entire world. It has unilaterally, and hypocritically, said that internet gambling is a “massive criminal enterprise” and on that premise they are assert extraterritorial rights to destroy legitimate businesses. The US is acting like a bully, rogue nation and it needs to be reigned it. The US is the biggest threat to the sovereignty of other nations currently in existence. And unless other nations get the guts to stand up to these bullies it will get worse and worse.

How long will it be before the anti-law criminals in the US Justice Department start arguing that once they arrest these criminals that they can hold them indefinitely in a concentration camp at Guantanimo while refusing them access to an attorney. The US Attorney General has just made it clear that he believes that the selective violation of writ of habeas corpus is constitutional.

The Register reports: “Since indictments may remain sealed under American law, anyone in a decision-making capacity with any investment bank that has involved itself” with gambling “should be particularly careful about traveling in any American jurisdiction, including places such as the American Virgin Islands or American Samoa that are involved with offshore banking.”

The federal thugs are not just after gambling. They are after the financial affairs of every American citizen in their obsessive drive to assert absolute control. After the former officers of NETeller were arrested the company “ceased accepting payments from American citizens”. And this is a another goal. The US Fed do not want financial transactions involving Americans unless they can trace them, track them, record, and tax them. This is why it is nigh unto impossible for Americans to open bank accounts in Europe anymore. Even the Swiss are terrified to open accounts for Americans because of US laws which threaten the banks with the confiscation of all assets they hold in the United States.

Even more incredibly the US thugs issued a press release stating that NETeller knew that these transactions could be “illegal under current or future US law”. Get that! It might be illegal under future laws!

The Bush doctrine is that there are no limits to the power of the US federal government. It has thrown out Constitutional protections of the individual. It has consistently asserted the right to put under federal jurisdiction matters which are reserved to the domain of the states. It has asserted its right to dominate and control the internal affairs of other nations. And now it says that American style Puritanical laws can be imposed on the rest of the world.

Conservatives have long warned that if the world doesn’t stand up to a bully the bully will get worse and worse. Will they now admit that the US federal government is a bully?

Trigger happy with deadly Tasers as well.

First, we have a video of man who is in police custody. Watch it carefully. The man appears drunk to me. He is standing and then goes to sit down. He is not threatening a police officer. He is not violent. He is not verbally aggressive. The officer orders him to stand. The man stands up but then goes back to sit down. He is then shot with the Taser while sitting peacefully several feet away from the police officer. While he was not obeying the order to stand up he was not violent either. This video clearly shows a police officer using the Taser merely to discipline people and not to prevent violence. And what happens after the officer Tasers the man for the sin of sitting down? He then orders the man to sit down.




T.J. McNally of Sarasota, Florida was having a good time before a police officer showed up and used a Taser on him. McNally had friends over for a Independence Day pool party. A swaggering police officer from the local sheriff’s department, Deputy Mark Eve, turned up at the front door and said the music was too loud. The music was then turned down. That ought to be the end of the story. But it wasn’t. The cop wasn’t finished.

No criminal action was implied by the officer against McNally. His own report lays out his case for using a lethal taser (yes, they are lethal as we shall see shortly) against McNally. First, he says he smelled alcohol on McNally’s breath. Now there’s a shocker! It was a party at the man’s own home. That he had some drinks is no surprise but neither is it criminal. He says McNally yelled at him. Oh, poor baby had his ego bruised. And then the clincher, when Barney Fife demanded that McNally provide the officer with his birth date the man walked away from him.

Police officers have the false impression that they are allowed to demand information from people who are not guilty of any crime nor charged with committing a crime. Barney says: “I asked the defendant for his home address, and he again attempted to walk away.” Okay, so Officer Eve is about a dense as they come. He gets a report about loud music at a specific residence. He goes to that residence and then demands that the resident tell him the address. If he didn’t know the address how did he get there in the first place?

Old Barney here says that McNally refused to answer him, was walking away and took “a fighting stance”. Was McNally taking a fighting stance as he was walking away? Or did he walk away and then when he was away from the officer did he stop and take a “fighting stance”. And if he had walked away, even if he had taken a fighting stance, could he have been a threat to the officer. Now if the officer claimed that McNally had walked toward the officer while taking a fighting stance that might be believable. But the officer claims that McNally walked away from him. Walking away from Barney means the man is no threat to the officer. So a man who was no threat, was walking away from the officer, and who had not committed a crime was attacked with a taser by an officer who had a bruised ego.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune says that experts on the law they spoke said that “once the music was turned down, the officer’s investigation should have ended, leaving no reason for the deputy to keep McNally from rejoining the party.” And while Barney Fife tried to file charges against McNally they were dropped. According to McNally’s attorney they were dropped because McNally had no legal obligation to answer the officer’s questions. W.T. Gaut, an expert on the matter, told the paper: “You can’t just issue an order to a citizen and then if the citizen doesn’t comply, use the Taser on them.” Gaut said many police officers are using Tasers like a “cattle prod”.

McNally is now suing the Sheriff’s department and it sounds like he has a good case. He was not under arrest, he complied with the request to turn down the music, he was walking away from the deputy and he was under no legal obligation to undergo questioning about a very minor issue which had already been resolved. Of course the internal sheriff’s investigation said that Deputy Eve the use of force was justified. But they always say that. In the eyes of police departments there is no such thing as copy who gets his jollies inflicting pain on others.

Not even children are immune from trigger happy cops with Tasers. Three police officers in Miami approached a six-year-old child in an elementary school. They said the boy had a piece of glass and threatened to cut his leg. So the officers shot him with a Taser. In another case a 12-year-old girl skipped school. A police officer found her at a swimming pool where she was, hold your hats, smoking. He told her he was taking her to school. She ran away so he shot her with a Taser. He said he was protecting himself and the girl -- she might have run into traffic. In another case police Tasered an 11-year-old child who was fighting with another student. Apparently police officers are too fragile to pull two fighting children apart without shocking them with 50,000 volts of electricity.

Two arguments have been used to justify Taser usage. One is that they are not deadly and two is that they reduce the likelihood of police officers shooting and killing people. Both arguments are defective.

Andrew Athetis was 18 years old. He was not in frail health. According to the Arizona Republic the man had no criminal history. He began acting “erratically” and told a woman his name and told her to call the police. He then hit her and took her keys and ran away. Athetis ignored orders by the police and they used the Taser on him. They say he struggled a bit then went into “medical distress”. He was taken to hospital and died. Since 1999 to 2005 there were 167 deaths attributed to the “non-deadly” weapon. And the company that produces the weapon is currently facing 50 wrongful death law suits.

In early January a former school teacher, Blondel Lassegue, 38, died after police used a Taser on him. Lasseque had mental problems and had stopped taking his medicines. In Fort Pierce, Florida, also in early January, Douglas Ilten of Nashville, Tenn, was supposedly acting erratically and threw some musical instruments out of a rental truck. Police arrested him and tried to put leg restraints on him which he resisted. So they used the non-deadly Taser on the man who then died.

A few days before those incidents in Gastonia, North Carolina a 42-year-old man, Calvin Thompson was seen running down the street nude. He didn’t obey police orders to stop so they used the non-lethal Taser on him. He became unconscious and then died a few minutes later. In Paradise, California, according to the Mercury-Register a man was shot with a Taser on January 2 and then died as a result.

Pete Madrid, 44, was stopped by police because they said he was walking barefoot and carrying his shoes. So they interrogated him over this heinous crime and said he appeared to be under the influence of narcotics (hmm, notice that cops are under the influence of power). Madrid walked away from them and other police officers grabbed him. He struggled so they used the Taser. He went unconscious, was rushed to the hospital and then died.

With a very limited search on my part that is six incidents of people who died as the result of police using the “non-lethal” Taser on them in just the last three weeks.

Houston, Texas has a problem in that their police officers are infamous for killing unarmed citizens. So in 2004 they spent $4.7 million to purchase Tasers. (Good lord, how much does these non-lethal deadly weapons cost?) The explanation for the purchase was that by giving police officers Tasers to play with they would be less likely to kill civilians. Tasers will save lives!

The Houston Chronicle said that in Houston this has not been the case.

Since the Houston Police Department armed itself with Tasers, touted as a way to reduce deadly police shootings, officers have shot, wounded and killed as many people as before the widespread use of the stun guns, a Houston Chronicle analysis shows.

The paper reports that in the last two years the police have used the Tasers more than 1,000 times, “but in 95 percent of those cases they were not used to defuse situations in which suspects wielded weapons and deadly force clearly would have been justified.” Instead more than half such incidents “escalated from relatively common police calls, such as traffic stops, disturbances and nuisance complaints, and reports of suspicious cases.” What is very, very scary is that” In more than 350 cases, no crime was committed.

In Houston that would mean that about one out every three victims of police Tasers was completely innocent of any crime whatsoever! And the newspaper found that of those charged with a crime “most were accused of misdemeanours or non-violent felonies.”

In the most stunning display of “police reasoning” Police Chief Hurtt says: “When people are charged with minor crimes or non-violent crimes, maybe the reason is because they were stopped before they committed a much more serious offense.” Hurtt wins this weeks Moron of the Week award. Hurtt is the first police chief to arm all police officers with Tasers.

Look at the wonder of his irrational “logic”. Police use Tasers on non-violent people by using the Tasers they are preventing violence. I guess by the same logic he would say that the 350 innocent people Tasered by his cops were innocent because the Taser stopped them before they committed a crime.

With no reduction in police killings of unarmed citizens it appears that the police are using Tasers on top of the use of their guns not as a replacement for them. Where a police officer is reluctant to shot someone, for instance when no crime was committed, they aren’t so reluctant to Taser them.

It appears that cops who are trigger happy with guns are also trigger happy with Tasers. Is anyone surprised? Tasers are like taxes. Government may introduce a tax saying it is to replace a more onerous tax but in the end they end up using both. Tasers in Houstin, at least, aren’t replacing the over use of deadly force. They are being used in addition to deadly force and used in cases where they are rarely justified.

Note: For those not familiar with the old TV show Mayberry, R.F.D, Deputy Barney Fife was the bungling deputy sheriff enamoured with his own authority but lacking the brains to wield that authority.

The dishonesty of Dinesh D'Souza.

The insane suggestion by Dinesh D’Souza that the Religious Right and the Islamists forge an alliance to stamp out social freedom is one of the most absurd ideas to come out of the extreme Right in decades. Of course it has attracted some attention and it wasn’t favorable.

D’Souza has become a lazy writer. Some of his earlier work was well researched. Agree with him or not he did bring forth evidence. Now he has theories and then cherry picks the evidence to fit the theories. His critics have had a good time pointing out that D’Souza gets his facts wrong. He writes about Islamism without actually knowing much about it.

In the New York Times Alan Wolfe dissects the book and notes that it “like the Stalinist apologetics of the popular front period, contain such a soft spot for radical evil.” Wolfe says the books “is filled with factual errors” and said D’Souza is “a childish thinker and writing tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism.” Ouch! That has to hurt. Of course one reason it hurts is that it is so true.

For instance D’Souza makes mention of US troops in Mecca -- there are no US troops in Mecca and never have been. And he has several times claimed that a US air strike in 1986 on Qadafi caused him to stop his terrorist activities. Of course it was in 1988 that Libya blew up Pan Am 103 -- some retirement!

Conservative writer Dean Barnet is just as scathing. He said that D’Souza is “poorly informed” and that is about the nicest thing he has to say.

Remember D’Souza’s argument is that it is social freedom, especially in regards to sexuality, that is what driving the jihad against the West. Barnet notes that to “give us insight into the Jihadist loathing for American culture, D’Souza relies on the writings of the father of modern Radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb spent two years in America and then returned to the Middle East thoroughly disgusted by American culture. He spent the rest of his life chronicling his hatred for America’s decadent society in assorted writings.”

This fact is what causes Barnet to say D’Souza is either “dishonest or careless”. He is using material attacking the moral liberalism of America based on one Islamist’s two years in the US. You might think this bolsters D’Souza’s case. No doubt that is what he’d want you to think. But the two years in question were between 1948 and 1950. Barnet writes:

Since D’Souza blames our culture for much of the Islamic world’s animus towards America, this is no small matter. The culture of the 1940’s wasn’t what it is today. Perhaps Qutb was scandalized by pop culture products of the time like the overt raciness of “The Best Years of Our Lives” or the raw sexuality contained on the typical Bing Crosby record; the man was after all a lunatic. But the culture of the late 1940’s contained none of the things that D’Souza so obviously deplores and that he postulates are inflaming the Muslim world. The 1940’s had no filthy hippies, no gangsta rap, no gay weddings. D’Souza may think it would be a swell thing for us to turn our cultural clock back to 1949. No big deal there – to each his own. The point is that even if D’Souza were able to wave a wand and pull off such a trick, the Jihadists wouldn’t care. Qutb briefly immersed himself in our late 1940’s incarnation and emerged full of hatred.

D’Souza seems to be using Qutb as a main support for his thesis. But radical Islamists have laid out repeatedly what inspires them to fight and die. They speak of many issues but the issues that D’Souza is worked up over aren’t among them. You don’t find them complaining about gay marriage but about US support for Israel. You don’t find messages from bin Laden condemning Hollywood but he does speak about US intervention in the Middle East.

The reality is that D’Souza doesn’t know what the Islamists worry about. And he doesn’t care. His books is an attempt to appeal to the “base” of the Religious Right. It appeals to those fundamentalists and extremists who already hate gays, “liberals”, feminists and social liberalism. It is meant to give the bigots just another excuse for being bigots and to do that it doesn’t have to be accurate, informed or true. In fact it could not do that if it were accurate, informed and true. For D’Souza I suspect it fills another function. It was no doubt intended to make him some money.

Warren Bass of the Washington Post writes:

Either D'Souza is blaming liberals for Sept. 11 because he truly believes that they're culpable, or he's cynically calculating that an incendiary polemic will sell books. I just don't know which is scarier. One has to wonder why his publisher, agent, editors and publicists went along for the ride, and it's hard not to conclude that they thought the thing would cause a cable-news and blogosphere sensation that would spike sales — a ruckus triggered not despite the book's silliness but because of it. This sort of scam has worked before (think of the calculated slurs of Ann Coulter), but rarely has the gap between the seriousness of the issues and the quality of the book yawned as wide. This time, let's just not bother with the flap; this dim, dishonorable book isn't worth it.

I have to wonder if D’Souza and those hoping to get rich off his antics have not made a serious miscalculation. Sure the modern Right is no longer inspired by a belief in anything but more inspired by it’s hatred for other things. But does he think that they hate gays and Hollywood so much that they are willing to embrace the Islamists? I suspect not but only time will tell. But I did check to see how well the book is selling at Bake and Taylor, one of the largest wholesalers in the US of books. In it’s first week of release they shipped out 156 copies. And it’s not even in the top 100 selling books at Amazon. D’Souza has lost all touch with reality. I just hope that conservatives have not sunk so low as to embrace his lunacy.

PS: One thing D'Souza no doubt wanted has happened. His extremism has brought him some attention. And it is all due to this silly book. His own website was running around 100 hits per day. But on the 16th, when his "I hate American freedom" book came out hits on his website rose to between 1,000 and 2,000 per day.

Group think, fear of debate and Al Gore.

Here is an excellent example of what is wrong with the political Left -- they don’t want individuals to think for themselves. Here is the context.

Science writer Ron Bailey was a skeptic on global warming questioning whether or not it was happening. He changed his mind and said it is happening (which doesn’t answer many other questions yet but puts him on record saying that it is happening whatever the cause).

Over at the Left-wing green Grist web site staff writer David Roberts wrote that “I think Bailey was obviously wrong to rely so heavily on satellite and other direct temperature measurements.” Okay. But Roberts says Bailey was also wrong to “substitute his own judgement” “for the collective judgement of the IPCC.”

How dare anyone substitute individual judgement for collective judgement!

Here though is the problem. Every single advancement in science has taken place precisely because someone substituted individual judgement for collective judgement. In fact even the favourite Green scare story of global warming started its journey as the crank theory of a small minority. Right or wrong they substituted their individual judgement for collective judgement.

And what is collective judgement? There is no collective brain that makes decisions. There are only individuals who draw conclusions. One might say that there is a consensus of some sort but not that there is such a thing as a collective judgement.

Not only was Bailey attacked for using individual judgement over collective judgement it was a very specific collective that was mentioned. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The IPCC is primarily a political body not a scientific one. It is the politicians who write the final report. Scientists get appointed to the body but it is not a scientific body open to all people in the profession. There is a selective process. The body was set up by the United Nations and as the name implies it is an “Intergovernmental” body which means that governments make the appointments. That is politicians with political agendas appoint who is on it.

Neither does the IPCC do any research at all. They don’t even monitor actual data. These political appointees merely review reports issued by others. The reviewers merely write about what other people write. They pick and choose which papers to review after they them self were picked and chosen by the politicians. They write their report and submit it to their political masters who then write a synopsis. The IPCC has been crticized because often the scientific provisos are removed and worst case scenarios are intentionally highlighted by the politicians who who approve the final press statement.

The reason this Green wants the IPCC “collective judgement” used is because it is a heavily political body which is pretty much guaranteed to give them much of what they want.

But truth is not a collective thing. The idea of collective judgement is ludicrous on the face of it. Many of the worst ideas in history were ideas held very widely at the time. There was a time when a large number of intellectuals supported eugenics. The most tyrannical movements in history often represented the collective judgement of the society and culture that surrounded them.

The very idea of group think is dangerous on the face of it. As much of the Left likes to talk about “diversity” they are some of the most conservative folks around demanding conformity. And they are most vitriolic about such conformity when there political agenda is under attack. So much of their drive for central economic planning on global scale is based on environmental scare mongering that they wish to stifle all discussion or dissent from their agenda. That is dangerous to everyone.

We need to understand what is happening in regards to climate change. And we need to understand what the real ramifications are -- not just the most extreme scary scenarios that someone with an agenda can invent. And then we need to understand how best to address these issues. We can’t do that without discussion and debate.

But it is discussion and debate that the Left is trying to shut down. Bjorn Lomborg is a well known skeptic on certain points of the environmental agenda but he is a believer in the reality of global warming. He does question the solutions offered but not the problem. Yet a global warming fundamentalist like Al Gore refuses to meet Lomborg.

Gore has been promoting his apocalyptic psuedo-documentary “The Inconvenient Truth” around the world. The film is no doubt filling his pockets nicely. No oddity there after all end time prophets often do quite well off the destruction of the planet. Denmark’s largest newspaper had an interview schedule with Mr. Gore to discuss his film. And they had arranged to have Lomborg participate in this interview/discussion.

All this was known to Gore and had been arranged months in advance. The day before the meeting Gore’s agent called. According to a column written by Lomborg and an editor from the paper, Flemming Rose, the agent “came back to tell us that Bjorn Lomborg should be excluded from the interview because he’s been very critical of Mr. Gore’s message about global warming and has questioned Mr. Gore’s even-handedness. Mr. Gore only wanted to have questions about his book and documentary, and only asked by a reporter.” Of course a reporter wouldn’t be as knowledgeable as Lomborg and wouldn’t be able to ask the hard questions. In other words his thesis would be safe from any real inspection.

The paper agreed to the new terms. But one hour later Gore pulled out of the interview completely. I suggest the reason for that would be fear that Lomborg would give the reporter some questions for Gore. And if the column by Flemming and Lomborg are any indication it was wise of Gore to cancel. He would have had a hard time standing up to scrutiny.

They point out his film speaks of sea levels rising by 20 feet over the next century. Yet the IPCC has said they expect a rise of one foot over the next century. Sea levels rose 1 foot over the last 150 years already apparently without anyone panicking. Why say 20 feet when the best estimate is 1 foot?

Flemming and Lomborg note that Gore’s film blames global warming for the spread of malaria to Nairobi. But they reveal that the World Health Organization says Nairobi is malaria free today. However some 80 years ago, before the recent warming trend, it faced regular malaria epidemics. OOPS, another very inconvenient “truth”. Flemming and Lomborg write:

He considers Antarctica the canary in the mine, but again doesn’t tell the full story. He presents pictures from the 2% of Antarctica that is dramatically warming and ignores the 98% that has largely cooled over the past 35 years. The U.N. panel estimates that Antarctica will actually increase its snow mass this century. Similarly, Mr. Gore points to shrinking sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, but don’t mention that sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere is increasing. Shouldn’t we hear those facts? Mr. Gore talks about how the higher temperatures of global warming kill people. He specifically mentions how the European heat wave of 2003 killed 35,000. But he entirely leaves out how global warming also means less cold and saves lives. Moreover, the avoided cold deaths far outweigh the number of heat deaths. For the U.K. it is estimated that 2,000 more will die from global warming. But at the same time 20,000 fewer will die of cold. Why does Mr. Gore tell only one side of the story?

Debate and discussion is mandatory in any quest for the truth (except to fundamentalists who insist they have all the truth already). And if we ever embrace the idea that it is wrong to use individual judgement in place of collective judgement then all progress will stop. But then maybe that’s what they want?

HL Mencken's Creed

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...

I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.

I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...

I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.

I believe in the reality of progress.

I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

I have always had a soft spot for HL Mencken and his writings. Unfortunately he is being forgotten. Here is another gem he wrote which is my unofficial motto:

The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe -- that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.

Save the children. Right!

A few days ago I blogged about the case of Julie Amero a substitute teacher in Connecticut. She says she was on the school computer in the classroom viewing a web page on hair styling when there was an explosion of pop-ups with sexual images. She said the more she tried to stop them the more they appeared. Millions and millions of people have experienced the same thing.

But some of Julie’s students saw the images and she was prosecuted with four counts of risk of injury to a minor or impairing the morals of a child. For this she faces up to 40 years in prison. It is believed that maybe 10 students saw these images which they described as “naked men and women”.

Now this got my imagination working overtime -- the prosecution not the naked images. Obviously the prosecutor, our Moron of the Week, David Smith, no doubt had to paint a picture of how these students were horribly scarred by having glimpsed images of naked people.

He brought the students to court to testify what they saw but I doubt he spent any time asking them of the trauma they no doubt experienced. I was thinking of a little scene where these students are sitting in a room together waiting to testify. Mr. Smith is in the court room telling everyone how horrible it must have been for these students to have seen some nudity or worse -- they might have seen human copulation. God forbid!

As he pontificates on the destruction that this poor teacher inflicted accidentally on these students the pupils themselves are sitting around waiting to testify and chatting among themselves. Here is how I imagined it.

Billy yawns and turns to his schoolmate Ted who is sitting next to him. “Did you see that shit on the computer?”

“Sure I did”, Ted smiled, “but she pushed me away before I got to see much.” Now he frowned.

“Well, when she was pushing you away I got a pretty good look but it wasn’t easy,” bragged Billy.

“Hell, Billy, you sure were lucky” said Ted with a touch of envy in his voice.

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Billy, “but it wasn’t that good.
My dad’s got better stuff than that in the garage.”

John who is sitting across from them pulls out his cellphone and accesses the internet with it. He smiles and hands it to Billy and Ted. The boys look down and smile. “Hey, that’s neat. I’ve seen that site. I downloaded some pictures from there and keep them on my hard drive,” said Ted. “I had to put them in a locked file to keep my mom from finding them.”

Billy is really thrilled to hear about the collection. “Put them on CD for me and I’ll give you a CD of the stuff I’ve got.”

Ted looked a bit perturbed. Billy implored, “Why not? I’m your bud.”

“Yeah, sure but you never gave me back those copies of Playboy.”

“Oh, that, I, I, just forgot. I promise you I will. You could have said something. I just forgot is all. I’ll bring them back and lend you a few I sneaked out from my brother’s room. But I need to get them back next week or my brother will notice them missing. Every time he notices one gone he comes and gives me grief until I give it back.”

John leans over to them and has a suggestion: “Hey, you guys. Come for a sleep overthis weekend. We’ll sneak down to the TV room when my folks are asleep. We get the Playboy channel and I know the code to unlock the parental code.”

“How’d you get that?” asked Billy.

“Easy, I had to show my parents how to set it up. They couldn’t figure it out. Anyway that stuff is tame compared to some of the DVDs my folks have on the top shelf in the closet. They’ll be gone some on Saturday and we can watch those then.”

“Sounds great,” said Ted.

“I’m in,” said Billy. A court employee walked by the room and the boys sat back quietly. Down the hall the prosecution was talking about how those fleeting glimpses of nudity stripped these “innocent children” of their childhood. He pointed a skinny finger at the sad looking teacher and intoned about the trauma inflicted on the young by her carelessness. He implored the jury to find her guilty for the sake of the children. They complied.

The illusion of socialized health care.

Americans spend more per capita on automobiles than do Nigerians. Is there an American car crisis? Americans spend more per capita on houses than do Chinese? Is there an American house crisis? If you look at American per capita spending on various goods you will often find that Americans spend more per capita than many other nations, if not more per capita than most nations.

Films, cosmetics, computers, cars, houses, pets, magazines, chocolate, the list is almost endless. If you take these items and compare per capita spending on them to the spending in other nations you will regularly find America in the lead.

But you don’t hear people talking about the chocolate crisis, the pet food crisis, the lipstick crisis, etc. We don’t do that because spending more is not necessarily a bad thing. If individual B spends $500 a year on cosmetics while individual C spends $0 that doesn’t mean that C is better off. It may mean that C can’t afford any cosmetics while B is well off. This is true for every consumer good you can think of including health care.

But when it comes to health care the advocates of socialist systems of care immediately reverse things. Americans are worse off because they spend more. And that is true. Americans spend more because they purchase more. The average American receives more health care than the average European.

The assumption in much of the world is that American health care is significantly inferior because Americans spend more per person than do people in other wealthy nations.

But no health care system anywhere in the world has been able to make health care available to everyone. Every state provider of care restricts services, often through the use of queuing. Canada’s health care is lauded by advocates of state systems yet Canadians wait significant periods of time for what care is available. One factor often ignored is that most Canadians live along the US border and that some of the for Canadians is provided privately in the United States.

There is little argument that American health care is among the best in the world when it comes to technologies and innovation. What is targeted for criticism is that costs are high and this restricts access.

Economist Arnold Kling points out in his book Crisis of Abundance that in the last 30 years very highly sophisticated new medical procedures have been developed. And these are extremely expensive in themselves. Health care costs in the American government’s budget are a problem. But Kling notes, that if the same sort of care available in 1975 were what was available today, the budget would be safe. New technologies have driven up cost considerably. Costs have gone up because more expensive new technologies push up those costs. Many socialist systems don't have that problem because they decline to use the technology or severely restrict access to it.

Other nations ration these expensive technologies in ways that American consumers find unacceptable. And Klin suggests that this rationing has “also slowed the adoption of premium medicine” where practised.

These premium services do raise the cost of health care. And, as Kling notes, health care is not an exact science. Often a physician looks at a problem, tries his best to determine causes and takes actions which may, or may not, help. He has to make educated guesses but often still guesses none the less. With so many people ready to sue physicians for making the wrong educated guess it is in the benefit of physicians to take all reasonable precautions regardless of cost. A headache could be just a headache solved by a few cents worth of aspirin, or it could be something far more serious requiring tests costing hundreds of dollars just to rule out that possibility. Before the invention of such techniques the recommendation may well have been “Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.” Physicians may well be penalized today if they don’t over test.

Care is often provided by ruling out problems. A patient has specific symptoms which may indicate a number of problems. The physician begins to narrow down the options. Different problems require different solutions and what may work for one problem may make another worse. But imagine if no tests were available for this winnowing process. More patients would suffer from having their problems continue but health care costs would be significantly lower.

Today in the US there are about 25 million MRI scans performed per year. In 1990 it was 1.8 million and none were performed in 1980. This cost didn’t exist in the 80s because the technology didn’t exist. Abolishing new technologies would lower health care costs significantly. But people would suffer and there would be more deaths -- but it would be cheaper.

Today people want the best care that money can buy. That is the problem. New technologies come onto the market daily. These are often capital intensive services requiring highly skilled care givers. The physician of the old days, that some yearn for, could still exist provided patients are willing to accept the care provided in the old days. But they can’t have it both ways.

American consumers are facing higher medical costs due to procedures that are not as available in state-care systems. Kling notes: “Heart bypass surgery is about three times as prevalent [in the US] as in France and about twice as prevalent as in the U.K. Angioplasty is more than twice as prevalent... as in France and about seven times as prevalent as in the U.K.” And what is true for technology is true for personnel. America has the highest rate of medical specialists in the world. All this premium health care does make health care in total more expensive in the US than elsewhere. This is what Kling calls the “Crisis of Abundance.”

Is America overspending on health care? No doubt. But it is also likely that state systems are under spending as well. The extra money that Americans spend is one reason there aren’t queues for surgery. Clearly the third party payment system in the US has driven up costs through the use of premium care. But equally clear is that state systems attempt to reduce this tendency to over consume by rationing care. No central planner can ration health care in a way that optimizes care for all patients. They paint with a wide brush and that means needed care is not given and what is given often is in such short supply that patients die before they move to the top of the waiting list.

America is said to have a health care crisis because it spends more than any other nation per capita. But Americans also lead the world in spending on food, entertainment and automobiles. Yet no one speaks of the food crisis, entertainment crisis or automobile crisis. Of course the big difference is that Americans don’t have their food, cars or entertainment paid for by a third party such as insurance or government.

Some health costs were due to the explosion in demand for services, not due to increased illness. They were the result of the rise of new methods of paying for services.

Mostly the patient was put into a situation where he did not pay directly for the costs of his visit. Approximately 86% of health care costs for Americans is paid for by either government or insurance. This is actually higher than the coverage given under Canada’s state system.

One result of such high third party payments is that demand for care goes up which increases per capita costs as well..

Now patients are starting to pay a fairer share of these costs themselves. One result has been increased competition in health care and improved health services. The New York Times recently reported that in the US a “growing number of physicians... have streamlined their schedules and added Internet services, among other steps, to better meet the needs of patients. For physicians... it is simply good business.”

The reason for the improved services is that in recent years walk-in medical clinics and retail-store clinics have dramatically increased and “pose new competition, and as shrinking insurance benefits mean patients are paying more of their own bills, family care medicine is more than ever a consumer-service business. And it pays to keep the customer satisfied.”

Yes, it is true that Americans spend more per capita for health care and that is because they get more health care per capita. Socialist systems routinely forbid expensive health care to patients. And entire classes of patients are told they must suffer, or die, because the state refuses to provide the care they need.

In South Africa the government announced “free” health care for children under a certain age. How as that provided? One was by neglecting other patients who needed care. A second thing they did was arbitrarily limit that care to certain infants only. For instance if the birth weight was below a certain weight the child was denied life saving care even if it were available.

In one case a mother was told that the hospital would not save her infant’s life even though it had the ability to do so. It was a few grams below the weight limit set by the state. Press reports on the case brought in private donations; the mother and infant moved to a private hospital and the baby lived.

In England a winner of the Big Brother reality show was asked what he planned to do with his large cash winning. He said that a big chunk of it was earmarked to fly a friend to the United States for badly needed surgery. The surgery could be done in England but the socialist system refused to do it because it cost too much. Britain spends less per capita on health care than America does and denying needed surgeries like this is one reason. Deny people needed health care by bureaucratic edict and you can lower the costs per capita.

There is no denying that Americans consume more health care than they need. That is what third party payment schemes do. Nor can anyone deny that some Americans get less health care than they need. But the same is true in socialist systems. There are many people who over consume on small issues because the state covers the costs but who under consume on big issues because the state won’t provide the care at all.

America could match the other developed nations in per capita spending tomorrow but to do so it would have to do what they have done -- deny certain expensive treatments across the board.

India tries to censor British television in England.

The government of India is sticking its unwanted nose into internal British affairs and demanding censorship of the reality TV show Big Brother. The current edition is the celebrity edition.

Indian bureaucrats, apparently having nothing better to do, have demanded that the British government consider using hate crime laws against contestants on the show. The Indian Foreign Ministry released a statement saying: “The government of India has taken up the matter with the British government.” So exactly why should anyone care what the Indian government wants? The indian government is incompetent and destructive of the best interests of the Indian people -- on par with most governments actually.

What is worrisome is that the Blair regime is just as authoritarian as the Bush regime. Tony is always looking for any excuse to trample on long honored rights. So it possible that Blair, one of the worst prime ministers in British history, will send in the cops.

So what is the entire ruckus about? One of the celebrities on the show, Shilpa Shetty, is Indian. Other residents of the Big Brother house has supposedly joked about her accent. It should be noted that the woman who the butt of the joke has not complained herself. It is the Indian government protesting (they must want another hand out for something).

The show is not scripted as normal for the series. Residents are free to say what they want. But the Indian government thinks people should lose the right to say anything the Indian government finds troublesome. And since the British are still atoning for the sins of colonialism they will no doubt cave into reverse colonialism, where incompetent governments of former colonies get to tell the former colonial masters how to conduct their affairs. It’s reciprocity: if you governed up badly we can push bad policies down your throat while doing a worse job in our country than you did.

Here is the kicker: the show isn’t even available for viewing in India. So the Indian officials are interfering in a matter which is of none of their concern and is an internal British affair. Second, censorship is very unbecoming them. But then this is a government that censors people from kissing in a film. People may live in abject poverty, mostly as the result of government policies themselves, but the bureaucrats at least let them die knowing that if someone jokes about their accent (which I prefer to lower-class British accents) they will be punished.

Another government with their priorities straight.

UPDATE: Typical of such attempts to stifle views the Indian government has only managed to increase the audience for the show. According to the BBC audience figures went from 3.5 million on Monday to 4.5 million on Tuesday and 5.2 million on Wednesday. When will censors learn? But those who want to stifle speech usually don't learn since learning requires listening and listening requires allowing others to speak. Seeking publicity the largest trade union in the UK has attacked the show saying it gives publicity to "louts". If that isn't the pot calling the kettle black I don't know what is.

Photo: One of India’s problems which was not as important as bitching about a TV show that isn’t even shown in India.

Prominent conservative wants alliance with Islamists against the West.

How morally bankrupt has the modern American conservative movement become? More than I ever dreamed. Since the rise of shrill, non-intellectuals like Ann Coulter the American Right has become shriller and shriller and ever more incoherent. The love for liberty that one found in Goldwater and Reagan has vanished. Today’s Right is inspired more by an intense hatred for “the Left” even on those few issues where the Left is pro-freedom.

The American Right has become the caricature that the far Left painted of them. If the Left is for something then they are against it. Certainly the Left has used this insulting reactionary label for decades and most of the time it was false. Now it is true. And one of the best cases for it is the insanity of Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza wasn’t always insane. In fact some of his early writing was fairly good and worthwhile. But he has also penned some crap. But the pile of crap got much bigger and deeper with his newest book The Enemy Within.

Now imagine a Leftist arguing the following case in 1955. “The Communists hate America. They hate America because of economic inequality, poverty, etc.” Fairly typical Left-wing rhetoric. But if they then said: “The best response to these attacks on America is for us to abandon economic freedom and impose socialist redistribution of wealth. If what offends the communists is economic freedom then we can end this Cold War easily. All we have to do is give up economic freedom” Well you can imagine what the Right would have to say about that.

They would attack this as pure insanity. It would be deemed treasonous and surrendering to the worst aspects of the Communists. But that would appear to be the D’Souza strategy.

What I mean is that in his newest Coulteresque book (they supposedly used to date so perhaps she infected him) D’Souza says that America can defeat Islamic extremism by giving up social freedom. And he thinks we ought to do this since Christian conservatives don’t like social freedom anyway.

D’Souza gave an interview to National Review Online where he outlined his theory of surrendering to Islamic fundamentalism. He first dismisses what he calls “illusions” such as “radical Muslims are against modernity and science and democracy” or that they “are upset because of colonialism and the Crusades.” These views, says D’Souza, are “all rubbish”. See they aren’t upset about American support for Israel -- what upsets them is that we don’t stone homosexuals to death.


American social freedom means, “Muslims must rise up in a defensive jihad against America because their religion and their values are under attack.” What does he mean by “under attack”. He means that the Western countries don’t embrace fundamentalist Islamic moral values, values shared by the fundamentalist Christians for the most part. But how is that an attack?

To D’Souza the fact that films, books, and American culture embrace social freedom is the same thing as attacking Muslims. I eat pork. Orthodox Jews don’t eat pork. Am I attacking their values because I eat a ham sandwich? By D’Souza’s insane logic I would be. Now most orthodox Jews recognize I’m not a Jew. I’m not forcing them to eat ham and they won’t force me to shun ham. We respect one another’s rights. The Islamist fundamentalists however does not embrace that central Western value -- tolerance for the equal liberty and rights of others. So he is offended when I don’t follow his moral code.

Because our women wear bathing suits on the beach, we let homosexuals live together, we don’t burn books (or heretics), outlaw alcohol, etc. we are “attacking” Islam. This is a complete distortion of the concept. Leaving them alone is not attacking them. If we are socially free that is some sort of cultural imperialism but if we give in to their moral values that isn’t. Do American films promote American social values? Of course. But I’ve not heard of anyone dragged into a cinema and forced to watch Brokeback Mountain. No one is imprisoning Muslims and making them listen to Western music or imposing Playboy on them at the point of the gun. If they listen to the music it is because they choose to do so. If they go to our movies or read Playboy or the Bible it is because they make that choice. It's called freedom.

This is the core hoax of D’Souza entire demand for America to join jihad. What upsets the Islamists is that many Muslims are adopting Western values. Hollywood can’t force cinemas to show their films. D’Souza and other theocrats might hate Will and Grace but no Islamic televisions station is forced at gunpoint to air the show. No one is forcing American books on Muslims. What upsets the Islamists is that Muslims around the world have been embracing Western values -- and with good reason. Like it or not Western values are better values. (You’d think that I wouldn’t have to preach that message to conservatives but then today’s conservatives are a rather disgusting lot at war with conservative history.) It is this voluntary acceptance of Western values among Muslims that upset Islamists.

D’Souza says he is not attacking classical liberalism. Rubbish, he is doing precisely that. He wants to form an alliance to strip people of the freedom to choose their own values. He thinks the old Tribal values should be imposed from the top down. He calls that freedom. Real freedom he calls force. Things are really distorted on the Right these days.

D’Souza wants us to surrender to the worst aspects of Islam. It is our fault, he says, that the Islamists hate America. We do terrible things. We don’t generally impose censorship so things get published which offend Muslims. We don’t jail homosexuals but give them rights. They can hold hands. That offends the Muslims. Our women are “loose” and immoral and that offends the Muslims. By being free we attack the Muslims. It’s our fault. If we had just embraced the Christianists values of Jerry Falwell then 9/11 would never have happened. We insulted Muslims by being socially liberal so we started the problem. We ought to surrender to the Islamists and stamp out social freedom.

D’Souza says that the Islamists “see the dimension of America that in their view corrupts the innocence of children, and undermines the family, and promotes homosexuality as a normal way of life. In fact this is the America of the cultural Left. What the Left considers ‘liberating,’ much of the world considers a scandalous assault on modesty and decency.”

Rhetorical overkill. In fact it’s bullshit. The Islamist world may feel this way. But throughout much of the world the same socially liberal views are being adopted. America is still having epileptic fits over gay marriage. But recently two regions of Mexico adopted civil unions for gays, South Africa legalized gay marriage and most of the rest of Western nations are not on an anti-gay jihad. In Asia the trends are all in a socially liberal direction for the most part. Western freedom, social and economic, has been embraced because people want the right to control their own lives.

The fundamentalists, Christian and Islamic, want to control the lives of people for them. They are socialists of the soul. The believe that man’s private morals belong to the collective and the State must intervene to punish sins as a well as crimes. All D’Souza is doing is advocating a form of Statism -- he wants a moralistic Big Brother regulating the private lives of everyone.

The hold outs on social freedom are Islamic nations and the core supporters of George Bush -- the American fundamentalist. Most the world is not scandalized by American social values. Only Theopublicans and Islamists. Even the British Conservative Party endorses civil unions for gays. D’Souza is wrong.

D’Souza wants the Christian Right in America to forge an alliance with the Islamists. “Our concerns should be the traditional Muslims, who are the majority in the Muslim world. These people are also religious and socially conservative, and they are our natural allies. ...we as conservatives have no choice but to ally with the traditional Muslims. ...Our values are quite similar to those of traditional Muslims. ...The traditional Muslims are our best bet.”

If that doesn’t make you want to throw up what will? Here is a prominent conservative in the American Right (though D’Souza is an immigrant from India) literally arguing that Islamism and the Bushite conservatives are natural allies and ought to gang up to stamp out social freedom and those damn homosexuals. When people argue that allowing immigration dilutes American values I generally think they are wrong. But thinking of D’Souza I have to wonder if they weren’t right -- at least in this one case.

D’Souza claims that all the Muslims want is for “us not to attack their religion... They’re asking us not force secularism and separation of church and state on their society, another foolish cause to which some conservatives subscribe.” Separation of church and state, something Thomas Jefferson championed, is “a foolish cause” according to D’Souza.

Some years ago I wrote a university paper defending free markets. My professor was a Marxist who hated my views. He scribbled across the front page: “You just want to force people to be free.” D’Souza is even more daft than that. In his mind we are forcing Muslims to adopt secular, liberal values because we are not adopting their values.

The only person I know of who has attempted to force any sort of American values on Muslims is George Bush who invaded two Muslim nations in order to impose our “values” on them. No one has launched an armed attack on a Muslim state forcing them to respect freedom of the press, freedom of religion, honor the rights of gays, emancipate women or act in a civilzed way. They have been crticized and rightfully so. But criticism is not force. They are still free to act like barbaric tribalists and D’Souza is free to drool over their “traditional morality” when they do.

D’Souza says he wants “American conservatives [to] join the Muslims and others in condemning the global moral degeneracy that is produced by liberal values.” Liberal values? Those would be things like freedom of speech, freedom of association, equal rights before the law, respecting the rights of others, leaving people alone. Those values go right back to Jefferson and the Founding Fathers. What D’Souza wants is to dewesternize the West and instead adopt the value system of primitive Middle Eastern tribal cults.

D’Souza wants is a Christianist society. And he is using the Islamic terrorist threat to try to create it. He basically says that most Muslims are not terrorists they just hate Western social freedom. It is this intense hatred for such values which gets so many of them to blow up buildings and kill people. Therefore social freedom causes terrorism.

If we abandon social freedom and adopt Right-wing moral values, i.e. use the coercive powers of the state to force them on the American people, then the terrorists would not be able to recruit the typical Muslim. So if Theopublicans form an alliance with Muslims and destroy Western social freedom the terrorists won’t be able to recruit most Muslims and the West will win!

See, when we surrender our long held values of social freedom and adopt the values of Muslim tribalists then they won’t bomb us. So we win! What D’Souza is advocating is appeasement and surrender not victory. The American voters wisely turned their backs on the Theopublicans. They are getting sick of the theocrats and moral busybodies, the socialists of the soul. D’Souza is a walking case for abandoning the Republicans. Many libertarians and classical liberals are already disgusted by the authoritarianism of the Republicans but are unhappy with the Nanny-statism and socialism of the Democrats. D’Souza is a walking promotion for why libertarians have to totally abandon their alliance with the American conservative movement.

I will admit I appreciate what D'Souza has done. I've been arguing that libertarians need to end their alliance with conservatives immediately and completely. D'Souza's views will make that far more likely. I've been hoping that Americans will continue to turn away from the extremism that has gripped the Republican Party. D'Souza's call for jihad in America will speed up the decay of the Republican Party. If I didn't know better I'd almost think he was paid to write this sort of rubbish by the Democrats as a means of destorying the Republican Party. But then the Democrats don't have to destroy the Republicans. The Republicans are destroying themselves.

Imagine the Pied Piper playing his tune. But instead of rats the elephants start marching to his music. And the plays his song and leads them to a cliff where in some mass suicide the elephants dance off the edge to their oblivion. The Pied Piper leading the suicide march of Republicans is D'Souza. Dinesh: Keep up the good work.

A message from Matt's mom.

Hi, this is Jeanne Bandy, Matt's mom. This is a fabulous report you've posted! I'm a complete amateur at blogging, just learning how to do this, but on behalf of Matt and our whole family, I want to thank all of you who have expressed support for us and outrage about what happened. Matt, as you may know, is restricted from using the computer for anything but school or work by the terms of the probation he got stuck with. I hope all of you will visit our website, www.justice4matt.com, and write to the legislators and other people listed on our "How You Can Help page." If you want to write to me or Matt, the best way to do that is the Contact Us form at our site, because we're trying to avoid spam as much as we can. And keep on blogging about us please, I'm told it really helps to put pressure on lawmakers and law enforcers to make change in the system, and it educates people who don't know how easily the same thing could happen to them. Finally, my apology for having to send out somewhat of a "form message" to bloggers - we're swamped (thank God) in supportive response and I'm just trying to keep up. I'm having to borrow a friend's computer and his Internet access because we cut ours off some time ago - but we're going to go online again soon, with MAXIMUM security. I'll try to respond more personally soon. THANK YOU AGAIN!

Classically Liberal tries to investigate most stories we blog about more deeply than the average blog. Hence the numerous stories on similar nature here on different aspects of this case and this issue. Yes, our opinions are strong but we try to make sure the facts back us up and we are particularly concerned when the massive power of government is used to attack people. I am glad that numerous blogs have picked up our report and is spreading it around. I urge other bloggers to do the same. And Jeanne, if this helps, you should know that this story is generating more interest than any other we have ever run. I monitor traffic on the blog constantly and our traffic increased three to six fold over the last few days (depending on the day) and half the entries to the site are coming in to particularly read Matt's story. Good luck.

Bandy case was actually worse than first reported.

Here are some additional facts regarding the case of Matthew Bandy. These update the information I have posted to date and give you a fuller understanding of exactly what happened. The ABC report, on which my first remarks were based, was not good but left out some information. All the additional information adds to the conclusion that what happened to Matt was a perversion of justice.

The images which police alleged were child porn were supposedly uploaded from the Bandy computer and not downloaded as many people assume. That is the images were put on the computer and then sent out from there. This strengthens the defense claim that the images were placed on the computer by malware so that they could be later distributed in some fashion.

A teenage boy might download porn but it is less likely he would be in business of uploading it to various sites. A police officer with no formal certification in forensic examination of computers sat down at the family computers and started looking through things. He claimed to find the images but never showed the family any of them. And he claimed that he could see activity on regarding the photos on a specific date. Jeanne Bandy, Matt’s mother, said the date in question couldn’t be anyone in the family as they were away from home then. She says he appeared “flustered” by that and then concocted a claim that the dates could have been changed later.

An investigator for the police later said that the images had been uploaded to Yahoo by someone with the user name “mrbob1980hoopdu” which was not the user name of Matt. There was also evidence on the computer that the file had been put on the computer by the same user. Nor could police who was using the computer when the photos were uploaded. So far so good for Matt, or so they thought. Instead they learned he was charged with nine counts of class 2 felonies -- a crime level just below murder!

The judge would have had no discretion in sentencing here. He could not sentence to less than 10 years imprisonment for each image.

Intent on a win at any cost the Maricopa County Attorney’s office offered Matt a plea bargain. He would spend 5 to 15 years in prison and be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life. Meanwhile the defense attorney Ed Novak was trying to get a copy of the hard drive so it could be properly investigated -- something the DA was opposing. Then the DA came back with another offer: one year in prison and register as sex offender for life.

The prosecutors fought every effort to allow the family access to the computer. They ignored court orders to allow it and the family actually had to take the matter to the Arizona Supreme Court. Only after months of trying did the state relent and allow an independent investigation of the computer. That investigation found 200 viruses, that anti-virus software had been disabled, one virus renamed hundreds of files to make activity difficult to trace and that “executable” files started operating at the time the images were being transmitted, which indicates that the order of transmission was being carried out for someone controlling the computer remotely.

Also what was not mentioned in the ABC report is that not only did Matt pass a lie detector test twice but both his parents also voluntarily submitted to the test to show that neither one of them could have been responsible either. All three of them passed this test as well. Now with an independent forensics report to back up the family along with the lie detector results and psychiatric examinations of all three family members things weren’t looking good for the government case.

In desperation the prosecutors offered Matt a deal where he would plead guilty to showing a Playboy magazine to some mates at school.

Jeanne Bandy emailed a consultant on the case the following:

"We were totally ready to take our case to trial. We felt that no jury in the country would convict Matt. From the beginning however, we were told we could not risk going to trial, and jeopardize Matt's life and freedom. As it became apparent over the course of the last year, the prosecution didn't care, and disregarded any evidence we presented to them, i.e. polygraph test, psychological evaluations, computer forensic evidence, and expert testimony. From the time they broke into our home they singled out Matt and was convinced he was guilty regardless of the evidence presented to them, and when we ask why they were doing this they said , "Because we can." They were just out to increase their conviction rate, and if some innocent people (children) got in the way too bad.

"Over the last year our belief and faith in the judicial system has eroded. Fundamental beliefs such as innocent until proven guilty, the police are there to serve and protect, they would never lie to you, everyone has a right to a FAIR trial have become no more than fairy tales to us. It slowly dawned on us, what our lawyer and psychologists were telling us was true, we could not win this one in court."

But the family was concerned. Jurors in Maricopa County were a problem. The jury pool included a lot of elderly people, unemployed people and people with low levels of education. These were people who would not understand computers well or how remote access to the family computer was possible. If the went to trail and lost Matt would go to jail for life and a pardon was not possible. The lie detector results were inadmissible as well. The family felt they couldn’t risk rejecting the plea since the risks were so high. So Matt agreed to the admit guilt in showing the Playboy to his friends. That is what he was to be sentenced for.

But Prosecutor Daniel Strange brought up the dropped charges and tried to convince the judge that the state was offering “a generous plea” because “the defendant would have been facing a hundred years minimum in prison.” (Note that a man arrested on similar charges in Arizona was sentenced to 200 years in prison recently.) Strange wanted the court to put Matt on three years probation and require he register as a sex offender so the state could “monitor this young man’s development and make sure that in the future there are no such pictures, pornography, adult or child, in his possession.”

Now think back to my original post on this case. DA Andrew Thomas said he wanted to teach the boy a lesson for “playing around on pornographic sites”. He wants the boy taught a lesson so he doesn’t do it again. As I wrote then:

Do what again? Look at erotica! This is really what Thomas is saying. There is no indication that Matthew Bandy did anything but look at adult erotica and Thomas is saying that he wanted the boy to learn the lesson to never do that again.

What Thomas is doing is trying to find ways to prosecute people for looking at legal images! He is saying that if you look for legal erotica and unintentionally come across illegal erotica that he will prosecute you so that you learn not to look for legal images!

Now look at what the prosecutor in the case said before the judge. He wanted the boy on probation so the state could come in and monitor him and his computer to make sure he never looked at “pornography, adult or child”. I didn’t realize that in their comments to the judge they admitted that they wanted to prevent Matt, who was 18 at the time of the sentencing and thus a legal adult when it comes to erotica, from looking at legal erotica. They really were targeting all erotica even if it was legal and even if Matt were legally allowed to view it. That is precisely what they said to the judge.

The judge found Strange’s remark strange indeed. Here he was bringing up charges that the state had dropped. The judge said, “the reason why this agreement took place is because you couldn’t prove the things you just alleged now, or else we wouldn’t be here.” Strange denied that saying it was not true. The judge said, “Well, that was my memory.”

What is more astounding is that Strange wanted Matt to register as a sex offender -- something that is very dangerous. Yet the Probation Report submitted to the court in this case specifically said: “An assessment indicates that the defendant does not fit the criteria for sex offender status and therefore it will not be recommended as a condition of probation.” But they also did say he should be forced to “make a donation of $2,500.00 to the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse.” In addition he was to pay various fees in order to be monitored and spied upon by the government. He was to be forbidden from consuming any drink that contains alcohol and go to counseling (for what was not specified).

The initial result of this was that the boy was deemed a sex offender. And adviser to the Bandy family Jonathan Bernstein says: “Those terms quickly resulted in Matt being treated very harshly by a probation officer and literally afraid to leave the house for fear he would somehow violate the order, which precluded any contact with children. He couldn’t go to the grocery store, a movie theater or even to church except under certain very stringent and embarrassing conditions (e.g., he was told that his pastor would have to know not merely what he pled guilty to, but what he was indicted for!).”

This is the outrage. They forced Matt into a corner where he accepted a plea bargain and said he showed friends a Playboy. Yet the state was now trying to punish him as if he had been convicted of the very crime they could not prove. Thankfully the court removed that the sex offender requirement bring Matt’s life back to some semblance of normality.

Now there is something important here. Why did Matt finally win something of a victory? There is one reason. His father is a surgeon and had the financial resources to hire the best legal representation and to pay for investigators, polygraph tests, psychological assessments and the multiple appearances in court (remember they went to the Arizona Supreme Court in regards to parts of this case). I would hazard to guess but I suspect they spent well over $100,000 on the defense of Matt.

I am sure that other people trapped between overzealous prosecutors, bad laws, computers that can’t be easily controlled by the average user, and a justice system that automatically throws massive sentences at defendants in such cases, simply can’t afford to mount the kind of defense needed. The prosecutor has access to other people’s money. He spends tax funds and doesn’t care if he spends $100,000 or $300,000 or more. He wants to preserve his reputation and it’s not his money.

Matt’s father, Gregory Bandy says that what was done to his family “could have happened to anyone, and actually will continue to happen at random throughout society until common sense and new laws are both employed and enacted.”

Teacher faces 40 years in prison because she lost control of her classroom computer.

Just in case you still don’t think that Matt Brandy is telling the truth what would you think if I told you that someone else was a victim of the same sort of problem. Julie Amero was a school teacher. On October 19, 2004 Amero was a substitute teacher for the 7th grade at Kelley Middle School.

She was using a computer in the classroom when it started spewing up page after page of hardcore porn. She said: “The pop-ups never went away. They were continuous.” She says she went to a website on hair styling and instead got page after page of porn. Ten of the students in the class claim they saw the images.

To cut to the chase she was found guilty of allowing minors to view sexual images. She is now awaiting sentencing and can face up to 40 years in prison. Forty years in prison because students got a glimpse of sexual images. Only in America.

A defense expert W. Herbert Homer said he did a forensic examination of the computer and claimed that Amero could have been redirected to the porn by malware which allowed the pop-ups. The brains in the prosecutors office responded that she was guilty anyway: “You made the choice to allow this situation to happen as opposed to turning it off.” So because she didn’t pull the plug on the computer was the reason she was guilty.

According to the local press the police admitted “there was no search made for adware, which can generate pop-up advertisements...”

Why the pop ups? As usual follow the money. Websites pay to have their sites promoted. They pay on the basis of clicks to their sites. Now they want real customers who come to the sites because they are interested in purchasing their services. So they are willing to pay for click throughs to their site. With malware a dishonest outlet can generate click throughs to the porn site that appear to originate from them thus earning them revenue. But the click throughs were imposed on unwilling people -- perhaps even teachers sitting in class!

And the more spy-ware on your computer the worse it can get. “When multiple spyware programs interact, they are particularly likely to show sexually-explicit images without a user requesting any such material.” Follow this link for some technical discussions as to how individuals can be dragged into porn pop ups even when it isn’t supposed to happen. It shows how a chain of spyware can redirect viewers and who gets the money.

I must keep making this point. We have insecure computers where we can't easily keep control of the content on our computers. We also have a criminal justice system that assumes images on a hard drive are sufficient evidence to send people away to prison for a very long time. This is placing millions of people at risk and justice is being perverted.

UPDATE: For a follow up on this case you might wish to read our slightly mischievous essay "Save the Children, Right!" For an update of imporant information regarding this case go to this post.

Computer security expert confirms for us on Bandy case.

I sent my report on the Matt Bandy case to a computer security expert asking him about the boy's defense and what he thought about the case. Here is his report to me. This reconfirms just how dangerous the situation is for all of us.

I'm familiar with the case. It's been on all the web new sources. Unfortunately, this is much more common than people realize. The boys defense is 100% reasonable. It is very easy to hack into a computer and leave files on it. People who are into illegal pictures like child porn, beastiality etc... frequently use innocent third party computers to store their collections. I have personally consulted on half a dozen cases where this has happened. A friend of mine discovered a beastiality server running on his 80-year-old mother-in-law's computer. Not only did she not have either the inclination nor the skill to set this up, but the banners were Cyrillic!

Unfortunately the average person is at a fairly high risk of this happening. This is why I never run Microsoft operating systems on my home computers! If you run Windows, you really need to turn on the firewall. You also need to install anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Even then, running a Microsoft operating system is risky.

I've worked in the computer field for over twenty years. In that time, I've been a programmer, database administrator, system administrator and information security architect. My experience in information security includes being responsible for a network of 70,000 computers. I have worked on local, state and federal forensics cases. One of the cases I worked on was the largest child pornography case ever prosecuted.

The real threat here is not that the law does not seem capable of taking reality into account. When you combine the rising police state powers of the government in the U.S. with the incredibly long prison sentences that are handed out for such things together and then add in the ease with which any citizen can be targeted it becomes apparent that this is a very, very dangerous situation indeed. The hackers and Russian gangsters may be annoying but it is Big Brother than makes this a threat to you.

You could be next! What was done to Matthew Bandy can happen to you.

The article we wrote about Matthew Bandy has spread far and wide on the internet. It generates a large number of hits per day and I have found it being debated on numerous web sites. Most people seem to believe Bandy but a few die-hards are pro police on this matter. So I am starting to look into the issues a bit more deeply.

Here are a few points to consider. At no point did the prosecutor describe the images. We don’t know what they contained. Some individuals have thought that since there were only nine images there that they were not of sufficient quantity to have been planted there by a commercial distributor of such images looking for a safe place to hide them. But then we don’t know if the distributor is using a hundred different computers where each stores a few images. Diffusion of inventory means that unless something happens there is no obvious anomalies that the computer’s owner is likely to notice.

It could well be that they sell the photos to a client and then send a message to their hosts computers, each of which send the few images they store to the client. If it detected then only one storage computer is compromised and they can continue to work with the others. And with hundreds of computers infected then police resources are wasted investigating victims of this sort of activity and not perpetrators.

But I have sent my story to an expert on computer security and asked him to appraise it and, if he consents, will post his comments here. But I have done some looking into this issue.

Here is an article from CastleCops on “child porn planting spyware” from 2005. They report that one companies forensics service grew by 70% in one year because of “viruses and spyware which can download pornography and other inappropriate material without users being aware of it.” Such things can change your bookmarks, steal information from your system, or download images onto your hard drive. They claim that 90% of Windows computer “harbour an average of 28 malicious programs” and that an audit of 1.5 million computers found “more than 41 million instances of spyware, Trojans and other malicious programs.”

The article notes that more and more private business is realizing that inappropriate images on a computer may not be the work of an employee at all but because the computer was infected. In other words the private sector is catching on but the police are still light-years behind the times. The tell of a school computer that was found with many such images. And no one was sure who to blame. It could be staff, teachers or students. In the end it turned out to be none of them.

The Criminal Intelligence Service Canada reports that organized criminals “are forming more and larger botnets, or networks of computers with broadband Internet connections that are compromised by malware and are thus “software robots or zombies. ”These remotely-controlled attack networks undertake a variety of crimes: sending spam or phishing e-mails, hosting spoofed web sites for pharming scams, and distributing viruses or trojan horse software to facilitate on-line extortion or compromise more home computers for larger botnets.”

And not even Apple Macs are immune anymore.

Spamhouse has listed the 10 worst spammers around. And what is interesting is that several are involved with using botnets to send out porn spam and child porn spam. They give you names, and in some cases the photos of the culprits. Six of them are in Russia or the Ukraine, one in Hong Kong, one in Israel and two in the US.

Now if there was a child porn spam operation using a botnet going around then it is entirely possible that Matthew Bandy’s computer was hijacked for that purpose. The zombie computers would be told to send the images along with a solicitation to purchase them to the spam list. There would not necessarily be a large number of images required for this. In fact the only images that “subscribers” might ever receive would be those in the spam.

Consider this possibility. A Russian gangster runs a scam with computers. Using malware he hijacks control of thousands of computers. On those computers he stores a few images. He then contacts those computers with a list of names to receive e-mails containing those images. No one computer is given too many names as that triggers spam blocks. Bandy’s computer could have been one of them. It may have sent out the images to 100 names and then stopped sending the message until told to do so again with other names.

Recipients get this e-mail with 9 illicit photos and a solicitation to subscribe by credit card. Most people throw it away fearful that having these images would make them vulnerable to police investigation (and they would be correct). Some of the people would report it. But investigations don’t lead to the original source but to individuals who didn’t know they were involved in the process of spamming.

The few people who subscribe find money being taken out of their account, maybe repeatedly and in sums higher than they agreed upon. They may cancel their card but they won’t go to the police. They can’t without incriminating themselves. The Russian gangster is able to pull in money, delivers no product at all, and used a network of zombie computers to send out his solicitations. The funds vanish quickly. Accounts used for this purpose get closed. Names turn out to be bogus. And the operation continues under a different name with a different account. In Russia violence and bribery are a very powerful force (just ask Putin) and the gangster now control the country.

One expert on the subject, James Coombs, says that anyone convicted of child pornography solely on the presence of items on their computer hard drive should be released from jail immediately. He says: “There is simply no way for law enforcement to know the difference between innocent and guilty persons based on hard drive data circumstantial evidence."

One botnet operator can control hundred of thousands of computers without the knowledge of the owners. Jeanson Ancheta was just 20 years old but in his first year of operating a botnet he pulled in over $60,000. The U.S. Attorneys office said: “Ancheta admitted... directing more than 400,000 infected computers that were part of his botnet armies to other computer servers he controlled where adware he had modified would surreptitiously download onto the zombies.” Included in Ancheta’s army of zombies were computers owned by the US military.

Others have been able to do the same thing for their own personal use. Adrian Ringland would hang out in chat rooms and text teenage girls while pretending to be a boy of a similar age. He would then trick them into downloading some malware, “which surrendered their PCs to his control. He subsequently swiped personal information from compromised PCs. Ringland then attempted to intimidate the youngsters into sending revealing pictures by exercising his control over their PCs to perform functions such as opening and closing disc drive. Using threats that he'd send this embarrassing material to girls' parents or friends, Ringland blackmailed his victims into sending more and more explicit pictures of themselves.”

He was caught. But this also seems to indicate another way in which Matthew Bandy could have been used. There may be no criminal gang selling or pretending to sell child porn. There could be one individual who managed to get control of the Bandy computer and used it to store the nine images he actually owned. Now and then the actual owner might view the images and then put them back into storage removing them from his system. It could be one individual wanting to find a safe place to store illegal images where he would not be directly implicated.

I don’t pretend to be an expert but it seems to me that there are many legitimate reasons why Matthew Bandy may have had no knowledge of the nine images found on his computer. Most of us who use computers are not knowledgeable enough to prevent having our system hijacked and turned into a zombie. And few of us would notice if this happened.

That your hard drive can so easily be hijacked, and that millions have been, seems to indicate that the laws on possession of illicit images turn innocent people into criminals without their knowledge. Instead of concentrating on possession, which is what law enforcement is doing -- because it is easier -- their emphasis ought to be on production. The criminals who produce the material ought to be the targets here. Possession on a hard drive indicates very little. Yet in many places, especially the United States where many Constitutional protections have been eroded, possession is flimsy evidence on which to hang a conviction especially when so many U.S. states send people to prison for such long terms. Remember Matthew Bandy was being charged with nine counts each worth a 10 years consecutive sentence. Had he been convicted he could be held in prison until he was 106 years old.

There is also something worrisome unless you are someone who has total trust in the government. It is relatively easy to target individuals who are troublesome to you, plant images on their computer without their knowledge, then arrest them and send them to prison based on the contents of their hard drive. And it need not be just the government doing this as part of some campaign against dissidents. Anyone who might have access to your computer for more than a minute or two could do the same thing. One anonymous phone call later and you could find yourself facing life in prison.

UPDATE: A computer security expert has confirmed for us the reasonableness of Matt Bandy's defense. You can read his report to us here.

Trade unionists try to impose monopoly.

In their attempt to secure a monopoly trade unions attack and intimidate workers who are don’t pay them protection money. Sofia Appelgren and some of her staff are learning this first hand.

Sofia opened a salad bar in Gothenburg, Sweden named Wild n’ Fresh. The Times reports that her small business has attracted “the wrath of union militants who have picketing the place for the past month.”

As the union sees it the employees here must be forced to pay them monthly protection. Sofia has two and sometimes three staff members depending on how busy things get. The workers have no desire to join a union and are all paid above union wages anyway.

Sofia says the union has said “if I don’t sign, they will bankrupt me. But my employees are not union members and don’t want to be.” She wants to know, “Why can’t the unions just leave us alone?”

Of course the union thugs pretend that they are doing this for the benefit of the workers. Rubbish. More oppression has been done in the name of “helping people” than for any other reason. A trade unionist who was passing out literature urging people to boycott the restaurant claimed that Sofia was abusing her staff, something the staff apparently is unaware of. He said: “Unless we stand up for the workers our system of security and solidarity will be swept away.” Gee, that sounds tempting.

But according to Times the attempt by the union to intimidate people is having a backlash. The paper reports “a surge of public sympathy” which has “produced a new word, studata, meaning ‘to eat out of solidarity’, an activity that is boosting Appelgren’s sales.”

With her staff not wishing to join the unionist monopoly and with public support Sofia says she will not cave in though she is considering leaving Sweden with her boyfriend to set up a company someplace where it is not so regulated. The Times reports that Swedes are the least likely people in Europe to even try to establish their own business.

Sweden's economic standing in the OECD has been dropping steadily. And if the country were an American state it would have one of the lowest average incomes of any state.

Prosecutor tries to force teenage boy to register as sex offender for showing Playboy magazine to a friend.

ABC News tells the horrifying story of the legal assault on the life of 16-year-old Matthew Bandy.

He is described as a pretty typical 16-year-old who never got into trouble -- well maybe not so typical after all. Maybe above average.

Police burst into the Bandy home accusing the boy of possessing child pornography. If found guilty he could have been sentenced to prison for life! Each image in one’s possession could lead to 10 years in prison consecutively. In most Western countries owning 10 images are considered one offense but in the U.S. it is 10 separate crimes.

Matthew’s mother, Jeannie, says when the police first attacked the house she thought “someone’s trying to break in our house. And then there were police officers with guns pointed at me, telling me to get downstairs.” This is exactly how innocent people, and not so innocent cops, get killed.

We have made this point repeatedly. The police are not going out to arrest people anymore. They are acting like an invading military force. They don’t announced who they are. Jeanne Bandy didn’t know. She thought they were burglars breaking in. In other words she never heard them identify themselves. They could have been rapists or killers (that wouldn’t have been far off the mark unfortunately). And if she did what any sane person would do -- defend herself she or a police officer, or both, could have ended up dead.

Maricopa district attorney Andrew Thomas, who was behind this arrest, gave evasive answers as to why the police broke into the house at 6 am with guns drawn. He said it was a police action and his office “wouldn’t have had control over that” and that “I frankly don’t know the exact facts...”

The police insisted that the boy had downloaded erotic images of minors. He said he hadn’t. Like many other adolescents he admitted he had viewed some adult porn.

Police walked off with the family computer. Police claimed that nine images were found and each image meant a 10 year prison sentence for the boy. They say it was to stop pedophilia yet there is no indication the boy was a pedophile. In fact by a clinical definition, and pedophilia is a clinical term, the boy wouldn’t qualify as a pedophile at all.

Matthew was placed under home arrest and forced to wear a monitor so the government could pinpoint his location 24 hours a day. He told ABC: “It was terrifying. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know why it was happening.”

He found it difficult to go to school. He was under severe stress. It was only fortitude that kept him alive as many people placed in this situation just end their own lives due to the trauma. ABC reports: “Matt’s dreams had been destroyed and his mother was crushed. And even though there was no proof that Matthew personally downloaded those nine pictures, it would be difficult to prove his innocence. Novak said that the pictures alone were practically all the evidence the police needed.”

The entire case that would send the young boy to prison for life was built on the claim that he had accessed a Yahoo account and the account supposedly contained child porn. Grand Inquisitor Thomas said that there was evidence “linking that computer to a yahoo web site “ and that the his office got search warrants: “And uh, they in and uh, conducted that, uh, uh...that investigation.” Articulate bastard isn’t he?

Thomas said: “The juvenile admitted that uh, while he…or he said…the juvenile said that uh, while he did not access child pornography, he did uh, access adult pornography as…as part of uh, a…a group…a web site that he uh, went onto on the Internet. So you have all of that evidence plus some incriminating statements. And as a result of that, the…the case was brought. But as is…” The “incriminating statements” which the district attorney is throwing about were the boy’s admission that he had looked at adult erotica and nothing more. Apparently in the warped mind of Thomas looking at a Playboy is the equivalent of being a child molester. The boy had made no statements that were incriminating in regards to the crime that Thomas was trying to charge him with.

ABC could see the holes in the prosecutors logic and pushed him to explain exactly what were the incriminating statements that indicated the boy’s guilt. Thomas lamely replied that the boy admitted it was his computer, that he was on the internet, and that he accessed some adult porn. In one statement Thomas repeated the “evidence” that it was the boy’s computer three different times as if each rewording of that claim was a new piece of evidence.

But police would not identify a specific user. The question is not if the boy ever looked at erotic photos. The question was whether he downloaded the photos in questions. And for that there was no evidence whatsoever. When Thomas was asked about this he gave another incoherent, evasive answer: “Well, the…there…there may have been other people in the family who used it, but here…here's the thing. Uh, the…and I…I began…or at some point, I started to talk about the individ…the need for individualized justice.” Well, that certainly clears things up!

ABC says “prosecutors were determined to send Matt away.” That is frightening. The idea that prosecutors were “determined” to incarcerate a young teenage boy for the rest of life for nine images is beyond belief.

Matthew said: “"They didn't care that I denied it, they just kept on asking me and kept on thinking that I did it,. They just had it built in their mind that this kid is guilty, and we're going to make sure that he's convicted. No matter what the means are."

The family says that the prosecutor “was on a mission” and didn’t care about facts. He ignored the boy’s stellar record as an upstanding young man. He ignored the fact that Matthew voluntarily took, and passed a lie detector test, he voluntarily underwent psychiatric evaluations which also cleared him any “perverted tendencies”.

But Thomas only had images of sending the boy to prison dancing in his head. Apparently he didn’t care what happens to young teens sent to prison. Of course the rapes would end after a few years, perhaps Matthew would get lucky and a violent inmate would have killed him putting an end to the life sentence that Thomas was seeking.

The family finally turned to a computer expert to explain the images. Tammi Loehrs told them something that ought to worry every computer user in the United States. “If you have an Internet connection, high speed, through, let’s say, your cable company, or through the phone company, that computer is always on, and basically you have an open doorway to the outside. So the home user has no idea who’s coming into their computer.” When Loehr looked at the Bandy computer she found 200 infect files “so-called backdoors that allowed hackers to access the family computer from remote locations.”

It is possible for such bugs to be placed on a computer and there are some unscrupulous web sites that do this. Once this is done they can store images or files on your computer without your knowledge. And if they wish to send the images to someone else they can use your computer to do it. And you may never know it is happening. But if police search your hard drive you will be the one who will go to jail as a convicted pedophile, perhaps for life.

ABC pressed Thomas again. They noted the boy’s clean record, the lie detector tests, the psychiatric reports and now the evidence from the computer expert. They wanted to know what Thomas “put him [Matthew] through two years of hell” in spite of all of this. Thomas stuttered and stammered and evaded the question. At one point he started laughing and referred to the expert he used. But the expert he used only said that the images were there. He made no statement as to how they turned up on the computer.

Thomas tried to justify his actions saying “You’ve gotta look at all the evidence” and then the only evidence he pointed to was that the computer, not necessarily Matthew, accessed a “yahoo account where there was child pornography.” Note the account had the pornography. It is not claimed that the handful of images fond on the Bandy computer was downloaded from this account only that the other account had them.

If you access a web page, and unbeknownst to you that web site contains, elsewhere, perhaps even hidden, images of children that can be enough for the police to conduct a military-like dawn raid on your home. And if you have the bugs on your computer allowing others to access it, which is highly likely as well, then someone else could use your computer to store illegal images. And then morons like Thomas will send you to prison for life and feel good about himself for doing so.

ABC kept pressing Thomas to give them something of substance. He couldn’t. Instead he distorted the facts, that is when he could get a coherent sentence out. thomas said the evidence was that Matthew “admitted at least partially the substance of the crime, which was yes, he used the computer to go on the internet to access pornographic sites.” NO! It is not a crime to access porn via the Internet Mr. Thomas. Matthew admitted he accessed legal porn he did not partially admit “the substance of the crime” which was that he downloaded child porn. Thomas is lying.

With the evidence of the bugs on the computer allowing remote access persecutor Thomas had no way of showing the boy had done anything illegal. But he was reluctant to admit that he put a young teenage through hell for two years for nothing. Instead they dropped the child porn charges in return for demanding the boy admit he had shown a copy of Playboy magazine to another teen. (A crime that is no doubt committed millions of times by teens across America every year!)

As Thomas so eloquently put it, Matthew “was charged with solicitation to furnish uh... to furnish...sexual exploitation.” To furnish sexual exploitation???? ABC noted that meant he had a copy of Playboy and showed it to another boy. Thomas had a clear cut explanation, if you can make any sense out of it.

“And what you have to find is an appropriate uh, offense at that level of felony so that you can …can enter into the plea agreement. That's typically how the…the decision making process is done. So um, although I wasn't privy to that decision making process, it was a…a line prosecutor who handled tip…I've done that. And typically, what you do is you would find in this case, a classics on designated felony where there's a factual basis so that … I mean, you can't just pick any…uh, any classic felony."

"It has to be something that relates to the crime as alleged so that the defendant can go forward and admit guilt in court. And…and I should note, not to put too fine a point on this, but this defendant did plead guilty in a court of law.”

Note what Thomas was doing to the teen. He threatened the teen with life in prison. Instead he tells the boy to admit that he took a Playboy magazine and showed it to another teen. If the boy admits to that “crime” he wouldn’t go to prison at all. So the prosecutor offers him either life in prison or no jail time. Even the most innocent person would be a fool not to take the no jail time. But Thomas wanted this so he could do precisely what he did in this interview with ABC, claim “this defendant did plead guilty in a court of law.” Of course Thomas is again distorting reality by leaving out what it was he was guilty of doing.

And Thomas refuses to describe the actual crime. He keeps referring to it as a “solicitation charge” and an “class six undesignated felony”. That is a way to make it sound serious when it was not serious at all. In fact it is questionable whether it ought to be a crime.

So the guilty plea had nothing to do with child pornography. Instead it was the relatively innocuous act of showing another teenage boy a copy of Playboy magazine.

ABC noted that even the judge said the plea agreement was pushed through because Thomas couldn’t prove his charges. Thomas kept trying to slip around the facts in the interview and kept referring to the guilty plea by the boy. ABC reporter Jim Avila, who did a brilliant interview, said that: “What he [the judge] didn’t accept was exactly what you’re doing now... trying to stain the boy with child pornography charges.”

Thomas again distorted the facts saying: “I disagree. Well, with all due respect to the judge it’s his job not to accept a guilty plea if he really thinks that the person is innocent.” This is pure dishonesty on the part of Thomas. He is intentionally mixing too different issues. The guilty plea was of showing a Playboy magazine to another teen not about anything else. Thomas implies the boy is guilty of child porn charges as his “guilty plea” supposedly proves even though the guilty plea was forced on a boy facing life in prison. Read the entire interview yourself to see how Thomas constantly distorts the facts and how many times he find it a laughing matter to discuss how he tried to ruin the life of this young boy.

Thomas said something that ought to be scare the hell out of people in the interview. “But the ultimate outcome was what it was. And the defendant accepts that, the state accepts that, and I'm content that the appropriate sanction was imposed to hold him accountable, teach him a lesson, teach him that this isn't fun and games. If you're goin' to start playing around on pornographic sites, and you come across child pornography then, you know, you better accept the consequences of that.”

Thomas is saying this. If an adult looks at adult erotica and is not looking for child porn, but in the process they come across child porn by accident they “better accept the consequences of that.” So if they access a website that says “all images are of adults” and then open it to find a photo of a 17 year old (who is legally a child under US porn laws though above the age of sexual consent in most states) then Thomas feels that he is duty bound to send that person to prison. Thomas gloated about the “hard lesson” he taught this teen (not the obvious lesson that prosecutors can be assholes). Thomas said his actions would teach Matt “a good, hard lesson so he doesn’t do it again.” Do what again? Look at erotica! This is really what Thomas is saying. There is no indication that Matthew Bandy did anything but look at adult erotica and Thomas is saying that he wanted the boy to learn the lesson to never do that again.

What Thomas is doing is trying to find ways to prosecute people for looking at legal images! He is saying that if you look for legal erotica and unintentionally come across illegal erotica that he will prosecute you so that you learn not to look for legal images!

Thomas says the law on the books penalizing Matthew for showing a Playboy to a school mate is rarely enforced. ABC says they have not been able to find a case where anyone was ever prosecuted for such an offense. Thomas then says something chilling: “Maybe it’s on the books if only to allow us, in cases like this, to properly dispose of the case.”

What he means is that he had bogus charges against a young teen. It is embarrassing to Inquisitors to not find heresy in a victim. So they need laws that are not enforced in order to find some charge they can bring. They need to save their ego and be able to crow to the press that the defendeant accepted “guilt” even if the guilt had nothing to do with the actual crime that got the whole Holy Inquisition into full gear.

At this point the issue was over for Thomas but not for Matthew. In sex obsessed America the teen was now required by law to register as a sex offender! As ABC noted: “Under Arizona law and in most states around the country, sex crimes carry with them a life of branding. Matthew would be forced to register as a sex offender everywhere he lived, for the rest of his life.” One gets the impression that if every American who ever broke a law related to sex was listed on the offender’s registry that one could simple chuck out the registry and in it’s place write: “Please see census data.”

Matthew explained what this registration would mean: “"I have to stay away from children, I cannot be around any area where there might be minors, including the mall, or the movies, or restaurants or even church. To go to church I have to have written consent from our priest, I have to sit in a different pew, one that doesn't have a child sitting in it." In fact it is much worse than that. He would also be forbidden to live in certain areas including entire towns. He would be restricted from having certain jobs. His name and address could be put on the internet so any crazy could hunt him down and kill him (as has happened in several cases in the US). In some towns on Halloween individuals on the sex registry are rounded up by the police and held so that they wouldn’t be home in case children come trick or treating to their house! Every time a sex offense is committed in the area where Matthew lived he would be a suspect and subjected to police questioning. And the registry, while making his name and address public information, would only list that he had committed a felony of solicitation. It would not say that what he really did was show another 16-year-old a copy of Playboy!

The judge in the case accepted the plea bargain that Matthew had shown the Playboy. But he invited him to appeal. Thomas claims this was proof that judge was wrong. In fact it wasn’t. It was proof the judge thought what Thomas and his office had done was a miscarriage of justice. The judge couldn’t believe that Thomas’ office wanted Matthew to register as a sex offender. In the appeal the judge threw out that requirement. So Matthew barely escaped the heavy hand of the crusading prosecutor.

ABC reports that the family has disconnected their computer and no longer use it. Jeanne Bandy says: “I don’t want to have one in my house. Under, even under, the strictest rules and strictest security,, your computer is vulnerable.” ABC said, “the Web is simply too dangerous.” Here is the one mistake ABC made.

It was not the web that raided the Bandy home in a military style attack at 6 am. It was not the web that arrested this young boy. It was not the web that dragged him through court and made his life a living hell. It was not the web which forced hm to plead guilty to the “crime” of having a Playboy magazine. It was the web that tried to force him to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. It was Andrew Thomas. Parents can monitor web use but there is little they can do to keep a someone like Andrew Thomas from legally abusing their children.

For the record Thomas is a hard Right Theopublican who is making a name for himself by attacking illegal immigrants, when he isn’t trying to jail children for looking at Playboy. Personally I would enjoy seeing someone raid the house and office of Mr. Thomas and confiscate his computers and do the same thorough search on them that he had done on Matthew Bandy. It wouldn’t surprise me to find something on his computer that he didn’t know was there.

Anyone who has used the internet knows how easy it is to have things like this happen. I have gone to open one page and suddenly find the link takes me someplace else entirely and suddenly page after page starts opening. I find pages listed in my browser, some rather innocuous, that I know I have never visited in my life. For instance just now I see that I supposedly visited “billboard.com”. I know I’ve never done that. Nor have I ever been to Disney.go.com. I have no idea why they are listed in my browser as sites I’ve visited recently.

There have been times when a visit to one page suddenly turns up several dozen pages all opening simultaneously. The only way I knew how to stop it was to crash the system. I don’t know what was on all those pages. I lost control of my own computer when this happened. And I know the computer stays linked to net even when I close it for the night. I know this because I often find when I open it up in the morning that it has downloaded emails throughout the night.

What we have here is a technology which is not entirely under the control of the user. That in itself is not a major issue. But when morons like Andrew Thomas go on their crusades it becomes an issue. People like Thomas have the legal authority to emotionally torture people for not controlling a technology which they can’t control entirely. It isn’t that the net is too power that causes the problem. It is that men like Thomas are too powerful. The problem is that the law requires people to do the impossible and then holds them legally responsible if they don’t. That is a perscription for power for mediocrities like Thomas. Thomas is our Moron of the Week.

Photo: The photo is of Andrew Thomas.

UPDATE: The response to this post has been incredible. I have now located an ABC video regarding this story. You can watch it here. If that link does not work (and it might not) then go to www.abcnews.go.com/2020/ and look under "20/20 IN TOUCH Webcasts and open up "Crimes Committed on Your Computer". That should open up the video. Thanks for all the links guys. Just remember this is what government power looks like! You may think giving the state more power can be done for good but once they have the power they, not you, determine how it will be used. Limit the state.

WARNING: If you want to see how easily this can happen to you then read our update here.

Olbermann bitch-slaps King George

Keith Olbermann's commentary on the Bush surge in Vietnam, I mean Iraq, was perfect. No one could have said it better. Watch the whole thing here. Just remember how contemptable is this petty little man in the White House.

Atlanta cops lied and Kathryn Johnston died.

This blog previously reported on how drug cops in Atlanta murdered an elderly grandmother. According to their “official” story drugs had been purchased at the home of 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston and then returned later that day to raid the home and arrest the alleged drug dealer, a young man.

But neighbors said that Johnston lived alone and that she never let anyone into her home because of her fear of crime. Police started breaking down the doors of the terrified woman, who no doubt thinking herself under attack, shot in self-defense. Her aim was good too. She got them but they lived. She didn’t. Of course the police fired back and killed the old woman.

The apparent truth at the time was that the police were lying. But the truth is coming to light.

The Atlanta Constitution reports that one “police narcotics officer has told federal investigators at least one member of his unit lied about making a drug buy at the home of an elderly woman killed in a subsequent raid...”

Police officer Jason Smith obtained a search warrant by claiming that a “confidential informant” bought “$50 worth of crack...from a man named ‘Sam’.” But narcotics officer Gregg Junnier “has since told federal investigators that did not happen”.

Here is the situation. Police narcotics officers lied in order to get a search warrant. They attacked the home of an elderly woman who was entirely innocent. She defended herself and they killed her. The warrant they had was based on what they knew to be a lie. If this proves to be the case, as I suspect it will, then the warrant was illegal and so was the raid. And if illegal the attack on this woman was illegal and the officers are criminally liable for the murder.

The facts appear to be that the police arrested a drug dealer who claimed he saw cocaine in this home (none was found). With nothing more than this they made up the story they fed the judge in order to obtain the warrant. And Mrs. Johnston died because the cops lie.

As we reported some time ago the drug cops then went to an informant and begged him to concoct a story claiming that the had purchased drugs at this home so that they would have “proof” that the story they invented would appear true.

The officers in this case need to be on trial for murder. And while I don’t support the death penalty I know many cops do so I won’t be upset in this case if they get the punishment they promote imposed on themselves.

Mexico starts moving toward marriage equality.

It must be disappointing and horrifying to be a Theopublican these days. Not only has the GOP suffered seriously at the polls but they are losing their moralistic crusade as well. They have made, as their symbol of their intolerance and fundamentalism, gay equality their primary issue. And at best they are holding the flood back on a limited basis and watching it move through other areas. They recently lost a vote in Arizona and New Jersey has passed civil unions. South Africa recently passed civil unions as well. Canada has had gay marriage for sometime and the United Kingdom has civil unions -- even the Conservative Party there is supportive of the move.

And now they are finding the flood coming in from the south as well. Last November Mexico City passed new legislation dramatically increasing the equality rights of gay couples. Now the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, just south of the Theocratic State of Texas, has passed the same legislation.

The vote was 20 to 13 in favor of the new legislation. Other South American areas have recently passed similar civil unions legislation including Buenos Aires and Rio Grande do Sul in the south of Brazil. Coahuila is mainly a ranching and mining areas.

Houston cops kill two men in disputed incidents.

In Houston a police officer is alleged to have executed a man after handcuffing him. The police department, as would be expected, claims otherwise. But two witnesses to the incident dispute the police.

The police version ("that’s my story and I’m sticking to it") is that a police officer pulled over a car for a defective tail light. The dead man, Robert McIntosh, was a passenger in the car. His girlfriend was the driver of the vehicle. Police were supposedly interested in her not McInstosh. She was taken and placed under arrest and was in the back of the police vehicle.

McIntosh, according to the official account was still sitting in the passenger seat and made no move toward the police officer. But the police officer claims he appeared “nervous and agitated” and claims he detected, as the newspaper put it, “a strong odor of narcotics”.

Police officers know what lies they need to tell to justify their actions. And the best lies are those that indicate a subjective evaluation. No one can dispute that the man appeared nervous since the police officer was alone. No one can claim the police officer didn’t smell what I assume to be marijuana. After all you can’t prove a negative. Of course the officer can’t prove it was true either but they have a presumption from the courts to be hones -- a presumption not deserved in my opinion.

Now with these non-objective claims made the officer then claims he is worried the man may be armed. Remember McIntosh is not wanted here. He has done nothing which is aggressive against the officer except look nervous and supposedly give off an odor. The “nervous” claim is made in order to try to justify an illegal search of the man. The police don’t have a right to search a person without reasonable cause. The police believe that wanting to search someone is reasonable cause and will lie in order to justify it. The officer claims he was searching for a weapon. Please note that the officer had no reason to assume the man had a weapon nor any reason to assume that if he did have one it was not legal to do so.

Now perhaps the man was smoking pot. We don’t know. He’s dead! Maybe he had pot on him and he knew the police officer was about to inflict on him an illegal search of his person. We don’t know for sure but press reports don’t indicate that any narcotics or weapons were found.

The Houston Chronicle reports that McIntosh “pushed and fought when the officer attempted to put him in the patrol car.” Hold on there for a second! McIntosh was sitting in the front seat of the girlfriend’s car. The officer claims he looked nervous and smelled and thinks that justifies an illegal search. Let us assume it did just for arguments sake. Now why is McIntosh being pushed into the police vehicle? If you are attempting to search someone you don’t have them sitting in the back of a police vehicle. You do it with them standing hands against the car or lying flat on the ground. You can’t properly search a suspect if they are sitting down in a car.

So the man is supposedly removed from a car to be searched. Yet apparently he is not searched. Instead he is put into the back of the police car as if he is under arrest as well although, to this point, he has done nothing illegal or aggressive. It is only as the officer attempts to incarcerate the man in the police vehicle that the man attempts to bolt. The officer supposedly then uses a Taser, a lethal weapon, on the man.

Now this stinks to high heaven. If the man was being searched for a weapon as the police officer alleges it would be done prior to placing him in the back of the police vehicle. You don’t put an armed man in the back of a police car under police custody. So any search would have to be conducted prior to placing him in the car. If a search was done the police don’t mention it. It is the justification for taking the peaceful man from the car but apparently doesn’t happen. If it did happen then what did the police find? They mention nothing.

So the reason for removing the man is to search him. It would make sense that he is then searched prior to placing him in the police car. The police neither mention finding a weapon nor narcotics. Trust me, if they found either, they would be mentioning that quite loudly now. They aren’t. The police officer is lying about something. If he searched the man and found nothing why was he being placed in custody? If the man was not searched then why was he removed from the car and being placed in custody? The police have no consistent justification for the officers actions.

According to the cops McIntosh tried to get away when being placed in the police car. A Taser was then used against him. He continued to run. Again note that McIntosh is not aggressing against the cop but trying to get away from him. Considering how often cops in America kill innocent civilians, and how rare it is for them to ever be found guilty of doing so by their own “internal investigations” I don’t blame McIntosh for running. But running is not aggressing. McIntosh was not posing a threat to the officer. He was not the object of the arrest. He was not driving the car with the defective tail light. He apparently had no weapon or narcotics -- at least the police never mention finding either. Yet for reasons not given he is being placed in custody illegally. At this point and only at this point does he try to run. But still he makes no attempts to harm the officer.

McIntosh falls in a ditch and the officer is on him and tries to use the Taser again. Tasers are often lethal and are over used by the cops. In fact they should be illegal for police officers to use them because of their high risk. According to police “The suspect was able to grab the officers and hand with the stun gun and turned it on” him. Again what makes McIntosh a suspect? He was not the object of the arrest and had done nothing illegal by the official account given by the police. Now he is suddenly referred to as a “suspect”. I guess anyone the police don’t like is a “suspect”.

From what is said here it appears McIntosh tried to point the stun gun, which is very painful under the best of conditions, away from himself. That makes sense. The officer claims the stun gun went off hitting the officer. It apparently had no impact on him either. He now steps back and draws his gun. No claim that McIntosh was coming at the police officer is made please note. So far the only claims are that he tried to get away from a police officer who was 1) conducting an illegal search 2) trying to place him into custody for no apparent reason 3) had once used a Taser on the man, 4) had tried to Taser him a second time. All McIntosh has done, in the official account, was to avoid these aggressive acts by the police officer. And so far, other than fleeing the police officer, there is no allegation that he had acted illegally, no claim that he actually had a weapon, and no claim that narcotics were found.

McIntosh is now on the ground. The office’s official account is that he steps back away from the prone victim and shoots him. McIntosh is pronounced dead on the scene.

But Yolanda Perry witnessed the incident. She was standing outside the Greater Lighthouse Church where her husband is the minister. So she is a preacher’s wife -- not exactly someone prone to being a criminal. She says the officer used the Taser on the man and that McIntosh tried to run when this happened. McIntosh then trips.

She says that when McIntosh fell down the officer jumped on him and started hitting him in the face with something she said looked like a flashlight. Police say they don’t know if the killer had a flashlight but doubt it. However, it is not critical that the witness accurately describe the weapon used to assault McIntosh in the face only that this was being done. It could have been the Taser, a flashlight, or something else.

Mrs. Perry says the officer handcuffed McIntosh first and then only pulled his weapon. She says, “he shot him the first time, one time. And then he was, like, hesitant and the shot him... two additional times.” According to the Chronicle the police claim, “Its not uncommon for police officers to handcuff suspects after shooting them.” Paramedics arrived at the scene and then the handcuffs were removed.

This sounds like an execution to me. A witness, who while perhaps unreliable on small details is not prone to lying, says she sees the police officer handcuff the man and then shoot him. Handcuffs are on the dead man when paramedics arrive and then are removed. Supposedly the police routinely handcuff corpses. Right!

The police spokesman “said at least one other witness, a man, had told reporters that the man was handcuffed during the shooting” but as expected he “disputed that witness’s account.”

So we have two different witnesses both of whom say they saw the police officer handcuff McIntosh and then execute him. But the police dispute both accounts. The spokesman was not there. His only reason for disputing this account is that the police officer has a different story. But then police officers always have different stories when they act illegally. Innocent until proven guilty, in the mind of the police, does not apply to civilians only to cops.

But on the surface this looks like an execution. It looks like the cop, Leonard Smith, acted rashly and illegally. He goes after McIntosh who merely looked nervous. Anyone who is not nervous around police officers is woefully uninformed as to how deadly and dangerous cops can be to innocent people. This incident stinks. If this isn’t another killer cop then it’s another cop overstepping the law and behaving badly. And his aggressive, illegal actions escalated the incident. We know this because even by the officer’s account McIntosh remained sitting in the car peacefully until the officer supposedly attempted his illegal search of his person and/or tried to place him in custody for no apparent reason (at least none has been given by the police).

The FBI is now involved and has said it is "highly likely" that they will investigate the case as a a "civil rights" violation of the dead man. An FBI representative said: "Agents have been looking into the matter, and it looks likely that we will open a civil rights investigation to monitor the progress of the district attorney's investigation and the Houston Police Departments internal affairs investigation."

This is the second killing incident involving Houston police in recent days. In the previous case a mentally ill/mentally challenged young man was locked inside his house. The young man, Omar Esparza, was ill. His family had an appointment for him at the Neuropsychiatric Center at Ben Taub General Hospital but apparently the young man was reluctant or afraid to go. He locked his family outside in an attempt to avoid the hospital appointment. The family, not knowing what to do, called the police hoping they would come and help them get back into the house so they could take Omar to the hospital. A friend of Jose Valle, the man's father said that Valle "just wanted help from them to take him to the hospital."

According to police the young man was sitting in the house with a hammer and had assaulted his sister and was "destroying the house" with the hammer. Police claim this is what they were told by the family. The family says that they never said this. They say that while the young man was sitting with a hammer he never assaulted anyone and had not tried to damage the house. He had just locked the family outside and was upset about the hospital appointment.

The family became concerned as police tried to handle the situation. They reminded the officers that their son had mental problems. Esparza remained in the house and did not attempt to come out toward the police or the family. Police officers entered the house and the family heard five gun shots. For five hours after the shots were fired the family was kept outside and police refused to tell them what happened. An ambulance was only brought to the scene three hours later. According to police they fired "beanbags" at Esparza but they had no effect on him. Then they supposedly shot a Taser at him but missed. And they they shot him with a regular gun.

Police originally said they arrived on the scene and "managed" to get the family safely out of the house. They later admitted this was false and that the family was never in the house and never under threat but outside the entire time. Orignally police claimed that the police officers entered the house while a SWAT team was en route to the scene. They later admitted the SWAT team was never called.

The family of the dead man say they are sorry they ever turned to the police for help and that police are lying about the situation in order to justify what they did. It appears the Houston Police Department has a problem. But like most police departments they are in denial about the extent of the problem and try to cover it up and justify it when it becomes apparent.

In an editorial the Houston Chronicle says that Houston brought in former Phoenix police chief Harold Hurtt to head the department and "one of his mandates was to reduce the high number of fatal shootings by police of suspects, many of whom were unarmed." The editorial noted "inconsistencies in initial police reports of the incidents and later official statements raise doubts about basic facts that need to be convincingly explained." They ask: "In a standoff with a mentally illman who did not have a hostage, why couldn't officers have taken the time to summon mental health professionals and devise nonfatal tactics to deal with someone armed only with a hammer?"

But things are set to get worse not better. Police Chief Hurtt says that in the future, when dealling with mentally ill individuals, "his department will likely use its SWAT team and hostage-negotiation tems more frequently". The use of paramilitary SWAT teams is on the rise in America for routine policing and the results have been deadly. Minor encounters lead to deaths of civilians who are unarmed. SWAT teams don't act like cops but like soldiers attacking an enemy. Instead of being used more they ought to be abolished. Read Raldey Balko's book Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, available here in pdf format at no cost.

Photo: The photo is of Omar Esparza.

Democrats prepared to betray antiwar voters.

It was no secret that this blog, in the November election, was wishing the Republicans a major defeat. But at no point did I assume the Democrats would be worthy of support -- they are not. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are pro big government, both have contempt for the American people, both are infested with greedy politicians yearning for power.

I just hope the American people are prepared for the Democrats to stab them in the backs. Every single opinion poll showed that the voters rejected the Republicans over the war in particular. At no point did any significant portion of voters switch parties in order to vote for the Democratic agenda. They were voting against the President’s Iraqi policy.

Bush has now made it clear that he doesn’t give a damn what the voters want. He is going to push America deeper into the war by sending even more Americans to Iraq to die. So what will the Democrats do about this? And here is where I suspect they will do damn little. Worse yet they may well endorse the proposal. But I suspect that they will simply let it happen -- that they will claim they are impotent to do anything about this matter.

Their big proposal will be a non-binding resolution saying they don’t want more troops in Iraq. That’s it! They call this a bipartisan approach. The New York Times reports that the Democratic resolutions "would do nothing in practical terms to block Mr. Bush's intention to increase the United States military presence in Iraq".


CNN reports that Democrats “said it may be impossible to block funding for only the additional troops, and others questioned the extent of Congress’ constitutional authority to challenge the president on military matters.”

First, only Congress has the constitutional authority to declare war. The president has no such authority. If war is declared the president has the authority to conduct it. But permission must be granted by Congress and Congress holds the purse strings. “Most Democrats have vowed not to curtail funding -- considering the move risky both for the troops and for their own political fortunes.”

Don’t you love it? The Democrats are worried about their “own political fortunes” not the good of the country. Surprised? Well, don’t be. The politicians who infest the Democratic party are as unprincipled and greedy as the Republicans. As for imposing risk on the troops -- doesn’t war impose risks? Aren’t they already risking everything being stuck in this re-enactment of Vietnam (but with sand)?

I should remind people that Vietnam was a Democratic fiasco. It was the Democrats who pushed American into that war and they still believe in their own inherent ability to remake the world.

At the heart of the disaster in Iraq is the disease of central planning -- the belief that a political elite are wise enough and knowledgeable enough to plan the lives of other people and remake entire nations. They can’t. No matter who is running things they will screw things up.

Consider the “greatest victory” in war that the American people supposedly ever enjoyed -- World War II. It is constantly pointed to as a great victory for central planners in Washington. But was it? Exactly what did America win?

Victory is defined in a very limited way in World War II. It was defined as the Germans and Japanese surrendered. And nothing more. Beyond that consequences were totally ignored.

What were the consequences? First, the dictatorship of Stalin was strengthened. Not only was Stalin more powerful after the war but he now was the actual dictator for a greater number of countries than before. He enslaved eastern Europe putting hundreds of millions of people under his thumb for the first time. And in Asia the result of the war was the creation of the Maoist/communist dictatorship in China and communist domination of Asia.

The net results of this were the Cold War and the hot wars in Korea and Vietnam. In additions it resulted in the extermination of hundreds of millions of people. If Hitler had run his extermination camps for decades more he would have found it impossible to compete with the millions killed by the communists. When you add up the number of deaths attributed to Stalin, the deaths attributed to Mao and his policies, the genocide of Pol Pot, etc., you will find that Hitler, as awful as he was, paled in comparison.

There was no victory in World War II. It is one of the biggest illusions around. But it is an illusion that is propagated by politicians because it serves their real goal -- the aggrandizement of power in their own hands. The quagmire in Iraq is not contrary to the policies of the Democrats. It is the policy of the Democrats.

American interventionism in the affairs of other nations has been a disaster. But it is FDR’s foreign policy! The only people to oppose such meddling were the Republicans. But in the 1950s the Republican Party jettisoned the non-interventionists and embraced fully the foreign policy of the Democrats. For the last 60 plus years America has continued to follow the interventionism of Roosevelt. It was Rooseveltian policy that created Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.

And at the heart of that policy is this corrupting disease of central planning. Arrogant politicians want power for themselves. They want to leave their mark on the world. They have visions of grand schemes that bring about peace and prosperity. But such plans usually result in war and poverty.

And the Democrats under the “leadership” of Nancy Pelosi in the House are the firmest believers in central planning. George Bush has ruled as a Democrat when it comes to foreign policy and federalism. His one sop to the conservatives was his moral authoritarianism and antigay scapegoating. But in practice Bush took his lesson on governing straight out of FDR’s rule book.

So here is the dilemma that the American people face. They oppose the war in Iraq. But they have yet to repudiate that which makes such wars possible -- state interventionism. They think that the Democrats offer an alternative when in fact they originated the foreign policy Bush is following.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will repudiate central planning under their own steam. The politicians have too much to gain from promoting it. They will only vote for less intervention when their political careers are at stake. The reason to vote for the Democrats was the hope that a major defeat for the Republicans would cause the GOP to rethink their disastrous policies. But at the same time it emboldened the central planners like Pelosi.

So here is my guess. Don’t expect the Democrats to do much to put an end to this disaster in Iraq. First, they embrace interventionism. It is their policy. They will not do anything to repudiate the idea that they are able to remake the world. If anything they are running around telling everyone that the voters in November gave them a mandate to remake America. It’s a lie. They know it’s a lie but then the Democratic politicians are no more truthful than Republicans.

So they won’t challenge the fundamental premise of Bushian foreign policy. It is their premise as well. As for the consequences? Well, they don’t give a damn about consequences unless it means losing office for themselves. And the disaster in Iraq can be blamed on the Republicans. So they figure that if Bush is allowed to continue blundering on in Iraq for another two years it will only help the Democrats win more seats in the next election.

So I fully expect the Democrats to do almost nothing about Iraq but to allow it continue on. It will do more damage to the Republicans long term and come the next national election the Democrats will take advantage of the disgust of the American people. They will increase their seats in the Senate and the House and perhaps take the presidency as well. And then what? Well, then they will announce that their victory was a mandate from the American people to engage in more central planning and more interventionism.

In other words dear voter -- they plan to screw you over and they will enjoy every minute of it. Antiwar voters will continued to get screwed by the Democrats for one simple reason -- they still don't realize that war is just another version of central plannning. And as long as they are prepared to put into office would-be planners they will get disasters like Iraq. If anything they will get more such disasters. Nancy Pelosi already has the plan to do to American health care what Bush has done to Iraq.

Cops execute another family pet.

A group of children witnessed a police officer in Wilmington, Delaware execute a dog with which the children were playing.

Officer B.P. Jensen went to the home on the claim that the police received a call that the children may have been left unattended. The officer entered the yard where the children and the dog were playing. He claimed the dog tried to bite him -- typical claim made by the police to justify executing family pets. But the children who witnessed the execution say the police officer is lying. Gee, a lying police officer! Who would have thought?

One twelve-year-old child who witnessed the killing “sat on a curb hunched over and crying” and told the press that the dog had “sniffing and he rolled over” on the ground when the cop “shot him two times in the head”. This girl ran in terror to her home when she saw this and called 911 for help. The girl’s mother said of the killed dog: “That’s the neighborhood dog. Everybody loved the dog.”

As usual the the so-called internal investigation by the police once again found that the cop did nothing wrong. Another surprise.

Atlanta cops harass historians.

There is something about giving a man a badge, a uniform and a gun which turns him into a thug. Or maybe those things merely attract people who are already thugs. There is a nice concept that the police exist to protect our rights, to stop people from hurting us, to keep the peace. Those notions are long outdated. They stopped being peace officers and became law officers.

And once they become law officers they become, in spirit, brownshirts. We have seen it over and over. And now they have taken to harassing historians! Here is the scenario. The American Historians Association was holding their conference in Atlanta. Delegates had to cross between the Hilton and the Marriott hotels. The hotels are directly across the street from one another and in the middle of the street.

And like most of the world people would look for traffic and, if safe, cross in the middle of the block. But some petty law enforcement officer showed up. Rick Shenkman describes what happened: “Today it rained. Crossing between the Hilton and the Marriott was treacherous at times. Making matters worse, a local cop stopped people from crossing in the middle of the street even though that's where the entrances to both hotels are. Laboriously we had to walk to the corner and wait for the light in the rain. One historian who tried a mad dash through the empty street got yelled at. "Hey, didn't you hear me," said the cop. "I said to walk at the corner." He was only doing his job. But the determination with which he protected us from ourselves went mostly unappreciated.”

So we have a cop with attitude problems. And that came to a head the next day.

One of the most prominent historians in the world is Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Again Shenkman describes what happened.

On Friday the Tufts historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto was arrested by Atlanta police as he crossed the middle of the street between the Hilton and Hyatt hotels. After being thrown on the ground and handcuffed, the former Oxford don was formally arrested, his hands cuffed behind his back. Several policemen pressed hard on his neck and chest, leaving the mild-mannered scholar, who's never gotten so much as a parking ticket, bruised and in pain. He was then taken to the city detention center along with other accused felons and thrown into a filthy jail cell filled with prisoners. He remained incarcerated for eight hours. Officials demanded bail of over a thousand dollars. To come up up with the money Fernandez-Armesto, the author of nineteen books, had to make an arrangement with a bail bondsman. In court even the prosecutors seemed embarrassed by the incident, which got out of hand when Fernandez-Armesto requested to see the policeman's identification (the policeman was wearing a bomber jacket; to Fernandez-Armesto, a foreigner unfamiliar with American culture, the officer did not look like an officer). The prosecutors asked the professor to plead nolo contendere. He refused, concerned that the stain on his record might put his green card status in jeopardy. Officials finally agreed to drop all charges. The judge expressed his approval. The professor says he has no plans to sue. But the AHA council is considering lodging a complaint with the city.

Apparently the police had nothing better to do but to do. Now this may be out of line but I wonder if this was intentional. The AHA is mainly very anti-war and that doesn’t sit well with many of the authoritarian types in the police in the deep South. I’ve certainly seen this type of thing done in the past by police elsewhere.

During the dying days of apartheid I attended a conference on censorship at the University of the Witswatersrand. The police faked a bomb scare to order everyone out of the conference center. And as people were leaving the building we found groups of police officers outside waiting with video cameras to record the identities of people attending. They also tried to randomly arrest attendees of the conference who were black but had a little less luck with that as the dozens of people would intervene in each case to stop the arrests --- remember those arrested could have “accidents” and die.

The police kept us outside the main hall for well over an hour as they harassed people. On one occasion I was standing next to a police officer who started punching a woman in the face quite violently. I reacted and grabbed his one arm and another participant jumped on him from the other side while others rushed in to help us pull him away. To say the least he was threatening us with rather dire consequences.

So I’ve seen how police can use the law to harass people intentionally. And I just wonder if there was any of this happening in Atlanta since the police are notorious about hating “liberals” and the AHA is a well-known liberal group. Below are three videos with interviews with Fernandez-Armesto regarding this absurd action by the cops.

Killers walk free police reluctant to tell public.

Often critics of certain ideologies refer to the PC Police arguing that a particular concept of political correctness is being policed by the state. But in this case the PC police are literally the PC POLICE.

Consider this incident with two escaped murderers. Now remember these men are not wanted for traffic violations. They both killed people. And for some reason which escapes human logic the two were held in an “open prison”. Surely that is oxymoron if I ever heard one. And apparently the men didn’t think the “open prison” in the United Kingdom was much of a prison either. They both walked away from the prison.

Isn’t it nice to know that violent killers can be treated so loosely that they can just up and walk away from prison. Now you figure there are two escaped murderers on the loose that the police would worry about this. Not in the UK. The Chief constable for Derbyshire, where this happened, was asked by the media for photos of the killers so that they could warn the public who these men are and perhaps even help recapture them.

But Chief constable David Coleman refused to release the photos. He said that he was concerned that the release of their photos would violate their human rights. He said this might violate the Human Rights Act and “data protection laws”.

The latter comment is ironic. The Blair government has maliciously and consistently done more to accumulate date on law abiding citizens than any other “free” nation around including the United States. Blair has been far more energetic on this assault on individual freedom than even his partner his crime, Bush.

Apparently all this data they collect on people can be used to watch innocent people but none of it can be used to track down actual criminals. This is not political correctness this is a police state.

Coleman refused to release the photos. He promised that these violent killers were no threat to the public. And he suggested that they probably left the country anyway. Apparently Coleman is a psychic as well as an idiot.

Here is another lunacy regarding the state of affairs in Blair’s England. The press reports that both men were “being held at the category D Sudbury open prison to finish their life sentences, which were both imposed in 1996.” So ten years ago they were sentenced to life in prison and now they were finishing those sentences! In other words life sentence does not mean life sentence. But then apparently prison doesn’t mean prison either as the men “had been allowed periods of home leave and work placements” as well.

Thirteen prisoners have walked away from this “open prison” in just the last two months and 660 have done so in the last 10 years, which is just over one per week.

Of course there was an outcry over this. The Derbyshire police released two contradictory statements. In the one they said they said they take into account public interest, local policing purposes and “the Human Rights and Data Protection acts.” In a second statement they said “that the human rights of the individuals in question had no bearing and were not the reason the pictures were not released.” They can’t even lie convincingly.

The problem with left-wing concepts of human rights is that they ignore real human rights such as the right to life, liberty and property in favor of pseudo-rights such as “equality”. To enforce their category of equality rights they have to violate real rights. And now they have reached the stage where the crimes that are thought serious are those which violate the Nanny state and not the rights of others.

For instance an elderly driver in the UK was jailed for driving 8 miles an hour over the speed limit. Nor should we forget some of the other incidents regarding the English police. They arrested a group of children for climbing trees. The children had their DNA taken and added to Blair’s Big Brother data base. They were locked in cells from which they couldn’t just walk away. But then they were kids climbing a tree and not convicted killers.

Or take the case of 77 year old Jean Grove. Her husband put up a joke sign 32 years ago on their front gate which said “Our dogs are fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses”. Not even the annoying Witnesses said they found the sign offensive but an amusing way to tell them not to bother these people. But British police went to the house and had a talk with Grove informing her that the sign was offensive and inappropriate (not illegal) and that she must remove it.

Then there was the case of Donald Reynolds, who owns a small shop in the UK. One day, when his shop was closed, he received an urgent call from the police saying he must come down to his shop immediately. Fearing the worse he did. When he arrived at his Bromyard shop the police were standing outside and they ordered him to unlock the shop immediately so that they could arrest three toy “gollywogs” that were on sale. Now nothing about the sale of the toys is illegal but the police said they neglected the sensitivities of others.

So real rights are ignored while the pseudo-right of not being offended is preserved.

Let me recount something that happened only a week or two ago in a small English town. A loud, abrasive, obnoxious and large young man in his early 20s comes into a fast food restaurant. He pushes his way past the line of customers waiting to be served so he can go to the front of the line. He starts yelling at the top of his voice to his “mates” working in the shop. He was very disruptive. One older woman said something and the next thing he was in her face physically intimidating her and screaming at her.

The restaurant staff pretended they didn’t see what was happening. Even after I protested to the manager he pretended he saw nothing. I protested again and he said: “Well, if he keeps it up I’ll say something.” Of course this woman had been harassed for several minutes already. Finally the woman turned and fled the restaurant while this thug again pushed his way back to the front of the line. He spent about 15 minutes in the shop intimidating numerous people intentionally.

Finally he leaves and five minutes later the police walk in. They come in and speak to the manager and then go stand in front of the restaurant. I assume the woman called them but I’m not sure. I finished eating and then walk outside past the police. I started down the main street when I see this thug standing on the corner with his friends. The police are still standing in front of the restaurant so I turn and walk back them.

“The man who was intimidating the woman inside the restaurant,” I said to them, “is standing right there.” I point him out to them. The police responded: “Yes, we know. We’ll talk to him when he’s not with his friends.”

How nice of them. They didn’t want to embarrass the thug in front of his friends. But then if murderers in Blair’s England have “life sentences” that last just over ten years and they run prisons were killers can go home on visits and walk away when they feel like it then something like harassing an elderly woman is obviously well down the list when it comes to seriousness.

Crimes against Nanny are strictly enforced. Real crimes are ignored. The DNA of children can be taken for the crime of climbing a tree but the police are reluctant to release the photos of murderers over their privacy! All of this are indications that the British state is out of control. Blair must go and go now. And the British voters ought to punish Labour good and hard in the next election so that they learn their lesson. Tyrants, even Nanny tyrants like Blair, ought to be in jail not in parliament.

Communists denounce gays.

The Religious Right and the Communists have a lot more in common than is usually assumed. The "moral majority" issues of Falwell have often been taken up by authoritarians on the Left as well. Castro did what the fundamentalists dreamed about -- rounded up homosexuals and put them in prison. Now the Maoist guerrillas who are about to completely take over the poor nation of Nepal have started to focus their attention on issues such as "social pollution".

The guerrillas are attacking polygamy, drunkenness, pornography and gays. Communist cadres that patrol the streets have told home owners that they must not rent rooms to gay men or lesbians. A gay rights group met with the Maoist leader Dev Gurung who told them that "homosexuality is a product of capitalism. Under socialism this kind of problem does nto exist." This is not unsimilar to the position taken by socialist dictator Robert Mugabe who has repeatedly attacked homosexuals.

Under the previous dictatorship homosexuals were targeted as well and many of them hoped the Maoists would be better. Obviously not. But historically the Far Left has been very antigay when in power and progay when seeking power.

The Far Left and the Theocratic Right are both enemies of a free society where individual rights are respected. Every would be dictator knows how convenient it is to scapegoat gays. Just ask George.

Girl arrested for wetting her pants.

It is hard to believe this story. I have long argued that cops are out of control and the schools are run by morons. This story contains both elements. A 12-year-old special education student was arrested by police for wetting her pants. There are numerous elements here that simply don't make sense.

According to reports the girl was told by the taskmasters at the school to go into the kitchen and help wash dishes. What the hell! Are children now slave labor for schools? What is going on in Danville, Pennsylvania where this took place?

The girl has obvious problems, hence the special education classes. She is not a servant sent to school to wish dishes at the orders of the school slavers. The girl refused to be a servant for the school official and I say good for her. When she refused teachers called the principal, another moron named Kevin Duckworth. According to the girl's mother when the principal yelled at the girl she became frightened and wet herself. At this the school called the police who stupidly and maliciously arrested her for disorderly conduct. What is disorderly is the entire system of state indoctrination under the pretext of education.

The school superintendent Steve Keifer, who is thus the moron who in charge of the other morons, said: "I think the situation was one where the parents and school officials were frustrated..." Nothing in the press reports indicated the parents where involved. In fact they come across as very unhappy about the incident. This sounds like the top moron trying to come up with excuses to spread the blame around to try and get the lower level morons off the hook.

One of the great tragedies in America is that state schools are run for the benefit of teachers and lackluster bureaucrats above them. The teacher's unions have destroyed the schools and turned them into cash cows for pathetic teachers and even worse principals. Most these people shouldn't be let anywhere near children. If you feel like venting about this kind of stupidity you can call the Danville Middle School at 570-271-3268 extension 3000. You can email this piece of Principal Moron at kduckworth@danville.k12.pa.us. And Keifer can be reached here: skeifer@danville.k12.pa.us.

In such an incident it appears that our Moron of the Week award is a tie and goes to Kevin Duckworth, the Danville PA police department, and Superintendent Steve Keifer. PS: I hope the school board in the Greencastle-Antrim School District now drip Keifer from their list as a finalist to run their school district. Surely after an incident like this they ought not want the man.

The prosecutor wisely decided not to pursue the case. School officials, as usual, are watching put the well being of each other ahead of the well being of the students.

Where are the anti-immigrant bigots now?

If you read the trash put out by the anti-immigration Nativist Know-Nothings on the Right and the Left you will see a common thread. They are collectivists. From faux libertarians, to outright bigots they engage in crude collective images to bolster they case for hate.

I've read enough of their crap to know how they operate. They engage in crude generalities. If one immigrant, legal or illegal, acts criminally they imply that all immigrants are criminals. That is raw collectivism at its ugliest. And they go further.

They love to scapegoat Mexican immigrants who come to America seeking out jobs and ways of improving their lives. They lie about them. They will point to any criminal activity by any Hispanic as proof that Hispanics as a class are bad people worthy of explusion. The really stupid ones will make economic claims that are just falses -- such as immigrants "take" jobs, destroy jobs, etc. Of course they do their bigoted best to intervene in the marketplace through the force of political hacks to screw up the market in order to prevent these people from working.

But the main point here is that they engaged in crude collective comments. Anyone who is Hispanic, no matter how long they've lived in the US is under suspicion by these low-class failures. If the Hispanic is born in the US he or she is called an "anchor" baby. And if you believe these morons the only things these people do is commit crimes and collect welfare.

So what are they saying now? By now you've no doubt heard of what Julio Gonzalex and Pedro Navarez did the other day. You may not remember their names but if you pay any attention to the news you remember their deed.

The two men, 43 and 40, have been friends for a long time. They heard people screaming for help. What they saw horrified them. Three-year-old Timothy Addo was home with a baby sitter, a woman neighbors described as reliable. The boys mother was at work. The sitter went to the toilet and the baby used this opportunity to climb on top of a radiator and crawl out a window onto a fire escape five floors up. As people watched the infant started climbing down the stairs of the fire escape until he reached the fourth floor.

At first Navarez and Gonzalez tried to get into the building in hopes of finding a way to pull the child back inside. But the doors were locked. Then they tried to climb the fire esecape but it was too far off the ground to reach. Working together the two men placed themselves under the child. The infant was afraid and was slipping. He gripped the fire escape as long as he could but he lost that battle and was soon plummeting toward the ground and certain death.

Between the two of the men hoped against hope to catch the child. But a 45 pound infant plummeting four floors is heavy. In fact the men were risking their own lives since being hit by that much weight falling that distance can be deadly. The child fell toward Nevarez who tried to catch him. The infant hit the man with full force knocking the man to the ground. The child bounced off the man's chest. Navarez was now on the ground with the wind knocked out of him. Gonzalez was stil there trying to help and he reached out and caught the infant.

They wrapped the child in a jacket and waited for the ambulance to arrive. The child was in almost perfect condition. The fall, which would normally kill a grown adult, would have been fatal had not these two men, working together, risked their own lives to try to catch the child. Their actions saved the child.

I don't know if they are immigrants or not. It is likely that if they themselves were not immigrants that their parents were. But the crude collectivism of the anti-immigrant bigots doesn't normally take such things into consideration. In those circles a Hispanic name means immigrant and all immigrants are blamed for the actions of any immigrant. Just having a Hispanic name has been enough to tar an individual with these bigots.

So what are they saying about the two men with Hispanic names who saved the life of this three year old child?

Nothing, of course. It doesn't fit into their crude logic and irrational way of thinking. So they will ignore the incident. Now had the men robbed a bank, well that would be different. Then the moronic Minutemen and sheet-wearing bigots would have lots to say. Now I'm not stupid to argue that this proves all immigrants are wonderful people. You can't take the actions of two men, good or bad, and then generalize to an entire group. Individualists don't think that way -- collectivists do. But what these men did does prove one thing. It shows that the crude collecivism of the racists is wrong. People ought to be judged as individuals and in my book these men deserve praise for what they did. No, immigrants or Hispanics as a class, don't deserve praise for the actions of two good men. Neither do immigrants or Hispanics as a class deserve condemnation when individuals act badly.

Another assault on your freedom.

The contempt for Constitutional rights exhibited by the imperial presidency is without parallel in American history. Whatever criticism the Right had of F.D.R. applies to Dubya several times over. The criticism of Roosevelt was justified and criticm of Bush is even more justified.

Consider some recent legislation which was passed by Congress and signed into law by King George the Lesser. The law itself reiterates that an government snooping into your first class mail requires a search warrant. King George does give a damn what the law says or what the Constitution says.

While he signed the law he attached another one of his notorious "signing statements" which states that he will interpret the law any way he damn pleases. His statement said he would interpret the requirement "in a manner consisten. to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to construct searches in exigent circumstances."

Apologists for His Majesty argue that nothing is changing. Yet this raises an obvious question. If nothing is changing why did King George feel it necessary to add a signing statement? Ann Beeson of the ACLU notes exactly this: "The signing statement raises serious questions whether he is authorizing opening mail contrary to the Constitution and to the laws enacted by Congress. What is the purpose of the signing statement if it isn't that?"

If the United States Constitution meant anything at all then President Bush would be on trial for treason.

Jefferson's Qu'ran

We've reported in the past about the ranting, foaming-at-the-mouth claims of Theopublican Congressmoran Virgil Goode. Goode was upset because a newly elected Democrat, who is Muslim, was planning to use the Qu'ran as part of the private swearing-in ceremony he would have. In the public swearing-in ceremony no book of any kind is used and the private swearing-in is not official. Goode wanted a law forcing everyone to swear in on the Bible -- as if that will improve the lot of idiots in Washington any.

Well the newly elected Muslim member of Congress didn't intend to use the Goode book but he did want to use a special book for his ceremony. The Library of Congress will supply him with a Qu'ran that once belonged to President Thomas Jefferson. A spokesman for the Congressman says he "is paying respect not only to the founding fathers' belief in relgious freedom but the Constitution itself."

Congressmoran Goode had no comments. Too bad he didn't have no comments a few weeks when he stuck his oversized foot in his overly large mouth.

Kiwi scientists pour cold water on warming.

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition is a group of Kiwi scientists. They wrote the parliament asking for a Royal Commission to look at climate change because “the public was being given incomplete, inaccurate and biased information about the effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

Now they are pointing to the most recent statistics from the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research as further evidence of what they are claiming. They say these most recent data confirms what they pointed out last year that there is “little evidence of warming, and no evidence that humans are affecting the temperature.”

New Zealand weather data shows very little change. According to the New Zealand Herald: “Temperature records for Christchurch showed a peak in 1915 greater than 1998, a cooler period from 1925 to 1955, but no overall change since 1905. The Wellington records available only up to 1989, showed a high peak in 1918 and 1922, a cooler period between 1925 and 1955, but no overall change since 1880.”

New Zealand is currently experiencing one of the coldest summers in the last six decades.

Theopublicans push antifamily initiative.

There is no fool like an old fool. It takes years of practice. Just ask Kris Mineau, a Theopublican bigot who is funded by the extreme Right. Kris, who is spite of the more feminine spelling of the name is a man, wants to strip gay couples and their families of equal protection under the law in Massachusetts.

Fundamentalists have pumped millions into the state in an attempt to repeal gay marriage. But still had to resort to fraud in order to gather the signatures necessary for their petition drive. The “moral” minority of theocrats hired people from outside Massachusetts to collection petition signatures for the initiative. Each petitioner was paid on a per signature basis. This gives them the incentive to forge signatures and forge signatures they did.

One young woman who gathered the signatures, Angela McElroy said that the petitioners were also circulating another petition on to allow the sale of wine in stores. When people happily signed that petition their name and address was later copied onto the antifamily petition of the Fundamentalists. According to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, petitioners “were paid $1 per signature they obtained if the number was less than 500 names. The amount rose to $1.50 a signature if the gatherer produced 500 or more names.”

With the massive sums of cash poured into the state by outside Right-wing fundamentalist groups petitioners had their air fare paid to fly to Massachusetts, their motel costs were covered and they were given $20 per day for food.

Another tactic used by the petitioners was to take the wine petition and put it on top with the anti-marriage petition underneath. After a person signed the first petition they were told they needed two copies and would turn the page where the signature section of the second petition wad displayed for them to sign. It is quite easy to arrange things so that the person doesn’t see the second petition is actually a very different from the one they agreed to sign.

The Massachusetts Food Association, sponsors of the drive to allow the sale of beer and wine in supermarkets, actually “refused to accept hundreds of signatures gathered by individuals who were also collecting signatures for the gay-marriage question.” They did so because they had “received several complaints from supermarket customers that they were the targets of bait-and-switch tactics by signature gatherers.” The president of the association said: “We don’t condone these bait-and-switch tactics. What happened was illegal.” The Attorney General for the state said they received at least a dozen complaints regarding this tactic.

Mineau’s misnamed Massachusetts Family Institute is a front group for theocrats. Not only do they wish to force children with gay parents to live in families where the parents are not allowed to marry but they want to ban stem cell research, outlaw gambling, and push for state censorship. In other words they are advocates of big government who want to strip away freedom on many levels.

Mineau’s group brags about collecting a “record 170,000 petition signatures to get the amendment before the legislature”. But this is no surprise considering the tactics they used and the vast resources made available to them by fundamentalist front groups.

The state legislature had voted to recess without considering the matter but Gov. Mitt Romney was pushing for a vote on the issue. The legislature has to vote on the matter one each year for two years before having a referendum on the matter. And they just voted 134 against and 62 in favor of putting the antifamily initiative to a public vote. But under state law only 50 legislators need support the measure to force the vote.

Romney first ran for office as a pro-gay Republican. But two things have changed. One is that the Republican Party is now under the control of theocrats and the second is that Romney wants to be president. So Romney flip-flopped his positions totally and is running as an antigay Republican in order to try and secure the GOP nomination for Fuhrer, I mean president. What is amusing is that Romney is a Mormon and Mineau's church links to a site which sells dozens of anti-Mormon books. Mineau's church would also believe that faithful Catholics are also going to hell. A fact which no doubt is not being discussed since Mineau needs Catholic support to win his hate campaign.

Several anti-marriage legislators have lost their seats so the new legislature will have more support for marriage rights for gay couples than the outgoing one. But whether there is enough support to knock support for the initiative below the 50 mark remains to be seen. Romney is out of office and the new governor is a vocal opponent of the antifamily initiative proposed by the Theopublicans.

If the matter gains more than 50 votes in the next legislative session the antifamily initiative will go to a public vote. If that happens the fundamentalist Right will pour millions of dollars into the state to repeal marriage and deny children the right to married parents.

Mineau, a fundamentalist elder at the Trinity Evangelical Church, is happy that a tiny minority of legislators supported his measure since he only needs a tiny minority in order to force a vote. He called the measure “democracy in action”. Of course there is a reason the US was founded as a Republican and not a democracy. And one was that the rights of minorities should never be subjected to majority approval.

Individual rights should never be subjected to majority approval. Black Americans in the South would not have been given the vote if majority approval was required first. Minorities in a society should not be at the mercy of the majority.

Thomas Jefferson wrote: “It is ridiculous to suppose that a man had less rights in himself than one of his neighbours, or, indeed, than all of them put together." But a referendum on rights assumes that "all of them put together" can deny a man his rights.

Oscar Wilde once quipped that direct democracy "is the bludgeoning of the people, for the people, by the people." He wasn't far off in his observation especially if we consider how majorities throughout history were likely to treat minorities.

Photo: The photo is of Kris Mineau.

Political elite snub Ford ceremonies so far.

America’s political elite are acting like arrogant pricks. They snubbed ceremonies for President Gerald Ford. The Idiot in Chief, George Bush “was too busy cutting wood and riding his bike” to attend. Stinging from criticism the White House says Bush will attend another ceremony.

Less than ten percent of the Congress bothered to show up. The Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went off to visit Inca ruins in South America instead. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t show up. Only two members of the Presidential cabinet bothered to attend. No doubt such criticism will bring them out in droves for the end of the funeral on Tuesday. But there was no need for so many of them to absent themselves from the start of the ceremony when Ford's body was brought to the Rotunda of the Capitol Building.

The Washington Times reports that thousands of “ordinary people, dressed in NASCAR jackets, jeans or sneakers” “came to pay their respect”. Estimates were that 2,000 to 2,500 people per hour filed past the casket of the former president.

Is there a reason for the difference? Some have postulated that the Bushites have, for the most part, remained away because Ford was a critic of the blundering foreign policy of the interventionists in control of the White House. But I think it goes much further.

As I have said previously President Ford was a man who made no attempt to impose a grand vision on America. Since he was never elected to the office he felt he had no mandate to reshape the country. For the most part he did what a good president ought to do: administer and leave the country alone. As one mourner told the New York Times, Ford "did what the country needed, not what would further his political career. I don't think we have presidents that do that any more."

America’s political elite, Republican and Democrat, are made of egotistical SOBs who believe that their “grand vision” for the country is the “one” that will usher in the the Kingdom of God on Earth. In their hearts they are central planners who firmly believe they are endowed with the superior ability to take control of the lives of the hundreds of millions of people and mold them into better people.

The average politician at heart is a tyrant seeking to impose his or her will on others. They all play political games. They use deceit, distortion, and fear to manipulate the populace while accumulating power for themselves and stripping people of more and more freedom. Few have been so blatant in pursuing the politics of power as the inferior little minds that now control the Republican Party. But the Democrats are only faintly better. Hillary Clinton might be smarter than Bush (as if that takes much effort) but she is just as manipulative and power hungry. She is driven by the same overwhelming need to impose her plans on the rest of us as is King George.

And in the middle of the political circus, with second rate individuals lining up to grab the White House in the next election, Gerald Ford goes and dies. And his death focuses people’s attention on what it was that made him unique. It was his lack of a grand vision, his willingness to hold office instead of molding people that made him unique. Another mourner said: "He didn't ask to be president. He didn't have an agenda."

Of course the power hungry would shun such a man. His time in office was an indictment of their visions. He showed that one could be a good president without trying to run, and ruin, the lives of others. In other words his term in office was the antithesis of what America’s political elite dream about.