December 2012

Jack Donovan on "Police State Liberals"
Contra expatriating
Reaping what you sow: SF murals being defaced by taggers
Soviet-era spy tech still spying on ex-satellite states
The long, strange (ego) trip of Anonymous member "Commander X"
Game show host talks about his sensory deprivation chamber experiences
 Obama should jail his opposition "like a third-world dictator"
Making brain cells from urine
Is it time to put a "may be dangerous to your financial future" warning label on graduate school?
 Experimental handcuffs under development can shock, inject drugs as well as restrain
Urban Outfitters buys garage sale clothes and resells them to hipsters
Items found between the pages of second-hand books
NTSB seeking to require black-box recording devices in all new cars
Defending the world, bankrupting ourselves
Small business owners, white collar professionals are today's kulaks
Amsterdam to create "scum town" neighborhood to exile its anti-social residents to
 Obama campaign still asking for contributions a month after winning re-election
Elites prefer to rule an impoverished citizenry to not ruling at all
 Fresh crop of "celebrity victims" making the mainstream media get real about SWATTING
 CA city official tells residents to "lock your doors" and "load your guns" after PD lay-offs

In a brave twist, Microsoft releases an ad for IE 10 that mocks those who hate Internet Explorer

Local guy who antagonized the police on YouTube busted

Once Ypsilanti resident Madison T. Mealing's anti-cop videos showed up on YouTube the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Department started investigating him. Then they raided Mealing's home and he was arrested and charged with illegal weapon possession. Something about glass houses and throwing stone comes to mind here.

Further proof that all that stuff in the constitution about the right to a speedy trial, the prohibition against excessive bail, and the presumption of innocence and all the other safeguards we supposedly have are all just bullshit.

Two years after their arrests the Hutaree Militia defendants finally going to trial says the Detroit News.

I don't have to justify what I "need" to Sarah Brady

...or any of the rest of the nannies, scolds, shrews, harpies, buttinskies, kvetchers, control-freaks, and the rest that ilk. And the Scumfuck Living In Babylon blogger puts it even more bluntly than I do. To wit:

"I'm sick of pretending", says the SFLB, "that there are sporting purposes to my shit. I'm a survivalist and my weapons are for killing motherfuckers in a theoretical Mad Max future, and perhaps most importantly of all I don't have to justify shit to you, god damnit."

Indeed. Μολὼν λαβέ you bastards!

(Via the End the War on Freedom blog of Bill St. Clair)

Small measure of justice for Hutaree Militia defendant

The US Attorney's office in Detroit has decided to drop one firearm-related charge against Hutaree Militia conspiracy defendant David Brian Stone, Jr.

Good news for Mr. Stone of course but the underlying fact is that some 18 months have passed since the Lennawee county rifle club's cum terror plotters dramatic arrests and the accompanying propaganda campaign, media circus & photo-op without ever being brought to trial. So now, even if totally exonerated by a jury, they will have been incarcerated for at least two years by the time their trials even begin.

God bless America.

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Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent [Harvey Slivergate: Paperback ed.]
"In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets."

Head of BATF is likely to be fired over gun smuggling scandal (Perez & Barrett, Wall Street Journal)
And Obama's anti-gun nominee to replace him has yet to be confirmed by the senate after two years.

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Ex-Michigan governor Jim Blanchard advising Enbridge on oil spill PR efforts - MLive.com
I hope his advise is 1 million-gallons-of-crude-in-the-river good. My advice? Enbridge LLC should get it's checkbook out, pronto.

The FBI file of the late historian, activist, and Air Force combat veteran Howard Zinn - The Daily Beast

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Living in the Age of Conspiracy Charges - Infoshop News (crimethinc)

Sign of the Times...

The libertarian oriented Reason magazine is the latest to chime in on the fear of Right-wing Militias hysteria that the Obama administration is trying to spread far and wide. The case against the Hutaree isn't as well-founded as what it first appeared in the headlines two months ago, according to the federal judge overseeing the case. The Sixth U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati is now dragging it's feet about releasing the Hutaree defendants on bail at the behest of the US Atty, and which for them must be quite embarrassing. Or it would be if they had any shame.

But in the larger sense (e.g., the political sense), the damage has already been done. The well is poisoned as far as the Hutarees getting a fair trial and the "Beware of those Dangerous Right-wing Militias" trope has been put out there into the public mind from all headlines and news coverage. So, as with most things, the state wins no matter what the outcome is for the Hutarees.

Sign of the times

A sputtering, fuming and astonished US Attorney vows to appeal a ruling allowing the Hutaree Militia defendants to be released on bail reports the Detroit News. And then AUSA goes on to try and link the Hutaree defendants to a recent murder of a Detroit police officer by convicted drug dealer.

Sheesh. More "well poisoning" on the U.S. Attorney's part. The defense lawyers should go for a court order to prevent any more of these ill-considered and prejudicial comments by the U.S. Attorney. And so the Hutaree defendants get to languish in jail despite their legal victory while the U.S. attorney's office appeal wends it way through the legal system.

Sign of the Times...

Why do militia members, social justice activists, and about everybody else who is alienated from the government hate, fear and loathe the police, feds, courts and the rest of the repression apparatus?

Well, here's why: Remember Mark Koernke? A militia activist from the 1990's AKA "Mark from Michigan". His name came up at the Hutaree Militia bail hearings today and while reading a Detroit News article about the hearing it is mentioned (in re Koernke) that a retired FBI agent made the crack about how Koernke who was near a bank robbery in 2000 (but not involved in the robbery in any way), ended up going to prison for seven years as the result of it. To wit:

"Retired FBI Special Agent Greg Stejskal said he was responding to a Dexter bank robbery in 2000 when Koernke led police on a high-speed chase during which he tried to ram an officer with his vehicle.

Koernke was not involved in the bank robbery, Stejskal said. He was parked outside the bank waiting for his son to make a deposit but when police pulled up to respond to the robbery, he took off. 'He ended up doing more time than the bank robber,' Stejskal said."

Funny huh? Ex-agent Stejskal seems to thinks so.

Just like Randy Weaver, who was also exonerated of all the original charges against him as a result of the Ruby Ridge incident and collected a multi-million damage judgement against the FBI, but who still ended up serving 18 months in prison, got shot through the chest, and had his son and wife shot dead by the FBI. Due Process and other such "protections" as our legal system guarantees doesn't seem to matter that much under those circumstances though do they? That's why most of the folks that wind up in the feds' cross-hairs tend to plead out rather than face a basketball score style prison sentence if they don't. Because life is short and it's better than getting shot.

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How the Left Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the FBI - Independent Institute (Anthony Gregory)
"And so when a progressive like Rachel Maddow cheers that the Michigan militia members can be indicted and imprisoned without having done anything violent, when she reports that the FBI has infiltrated this group for months and stepped in to arrest them just in the nick of time, we should not be too surprised when she fails to make the obvious connection, and fails to be the least bit skeptical of the federal government’s police agents infiltrating a group for months only to discover that that group’s members are saying things about government that amount to “seditious conspiracy.” What kind of Orwellian world is it when the government can arrest people accused only of planning to commit violence against government agents and unleash a “civil war” that we all know is only a fantasy?"

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The feds have launched a series of massive raids on homes throughout Lenawee and Hillsdale counties. An undisclosed number of so-called "Christian Militia" members have been arrested. No names were given nor charges announced. - Detroit News & Ann Arbor.com

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An excellent lecture on Marcuse's One Dimensional Man.