Back Once More

Back Once More

The anonymous place I was blogging from is no longer accessible. Given my fear of McCain-Feingold, I stopped posting for a while. However, with the advent of my laptop going wireless here, I've decided I'd rather get the midnight knock for doing something the majority of the public approves of rather than something they don't. Don't know how often I'll be logging in, but it'll be occasionally.

Dates to remember

I think...May 20th, June 22nd.

Employment

Given than Radioshack needed a 2key manager more than they needed me, I've been cut in hours to the point where the boss said "You might want to think about quitting." Gander Mtn is hiring - that'd be awesome.

They're Changing The Language On Us, reposted from elswhere

We start off this time with a reading from the First Amendment, which still states (last time I checked) that:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

What I'd like to focus most on at this moment is that inconvinient "abridging the freedom of speech" portion, and possibly the "peaceably to assemble" bit. We'll get to the recent abomination put forth by the Supreme Court in a few moments.

Within the last eight years, a disturbing trend has taken root, a use of double-speak that has Orwell spinning in his grave so fast we might as well wrap him in wire, set a magnet nearby, and power America forever, and for free. The trend I'm talking about is to call something incredibly horrible by a benign name. For example:Free Speech Zones. Golly, that sounds like a good idea, don't it? I mean, who wouldn't want a place where you could speak as freely as you want?

On the other hand, what exists outside of a free speech zone?

Michael Badnarik continuously talked about these abominations during his 2004 presidential campaign. Free speech zones are, essentially, cordoned off areas where protestors can demonstrate freely, blocks or miles away from cameras and media coverage - precisely where they will not be heard, seen, or noticed.

What good is the right to free speech if you are only allowed to practice it in your home? Do you reallypossess the right to keep and bear arms if you're only allowed to own 60 year old single-shot Liberator pistols? Does the right to publish freely truly exist if you can write as prolifically as you want, but only to people with your last name?

Mr. Badnarik spoke of a high school where he was scheduled to address the students - he was to make his presentation in the auditorium, to the student body. Unfortunately, the auditorium held only about two hundred students (far fewer than the number of students in the school), and it was far enough out of the way that it was hard to find, and poorly lit to boot. So, in the tradition of those old -movie actors who exclaimed "We'll just do the show right here in the barn!" Mr. Badnarik decided to move his equipment to the cafeteria. After all, the whole point of his trip was to address the students...why talk to only five or so when you can reach so many more?

Moving to the cafeteria, he was told, was not possible. Why, he inquired. Because, the auditorium was a free speech zone.

As I watched him recount this story, several months later, the outrage was so fresh in his mind he just about burst an artery. Anywhere he stands, he said, is a free speech zone. The hallway outside the auditorium. The cafeteria. If you are in America, and you are breathing, wherever you are is a FREE SPEECH zone. That is your inalienable, God/Nature/Other given right as a member of the human race. You cannot mark off the boundaries of a "free speech zone" with chainlink and razorwire and jackboots as has been the practice recently - and that's what the "free speech zones" are:Chainlink barriers topped with razor wire. That's what Mr. Badnarik and the Green Party candidate were arrested for crossing, when, during a presidential debate between Boot-On-Your-Neck-Party Candidate One and Boot-On-Your-Neck-Party Candidate Two, they attempted to serve the president with papers requiring him to show his reasoning for keeping third party candidates out of the debate.

So, how does this pertain to the recent Supreme Court abomina...er...decision that further strips us of our constitutional rights and gives police the ability to break into our house with no notice?Wait, there was a recent Supreme Court decision like that? Why hasn't the Mainstream Media picked up on this? This is big news! Why are we hearing 24/7 coverage of every detail of Angelina Jolie's out-of-wedlock birth in Nambia or Kinshasa or some other place calculated to show her "solidarity" with the non-millionaire peoples of the world instead? Why aren't the non-stop commercials for "Hell's Kitchen" being interrupted for the breaking news that the Fourth Amendment has been trashed? And how does this relate to free-speech zones and the cheapening of our language?

I guess I went off on a tangent there. Sorry.

In case you haven't been digging through obscure news-service articles online, or missed the five second blurbs on NPR news, the Supreme Court just rewove thefabric of America, butchered the Fourth Amendment, anddidn't bother to tell anyone.

Again, last time I checked, this is the Fourth Amendment in its entirety:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In a typical search-and-seizure, the police go to a judge to get a warrant, serve it to the person who's under suspicion, allow them time to verify the warrant is real,and then carry out their Constitutionally-allowed duty of collecting the evidence necessary to continue the criminalinvestigation.

Somewhere in the last half of the last century, right around the time that the drug problem/crisis we've manufactured started to get serious, police started asking for "no-knock" warrants. The reasoning goes thusly: If we don't have the power to kick in someone's door at four in the morning without screaming "Police" at the top of our lungs, the man injecting all those innocent, captive toddlers with drugs against their will is going to flush his nickel-sack down the toilet and boom, there's goes all those dynamic entry bonuses. Something like that.

That drug use was practically non-existant in the early 20th century, despite the fact that any 12 year old could order up a pound of heroin at the local drug store is not something that is discussed in polite conversation. Don't want to offend anyone you see.

Historically, no-knocks have been hard to get. It has something to do with not wanting America to turn into a police state, a concern that seems to be vanishing. Many times, they wind up with people bleeding, a hopped up SWAT team having busted through the front door of the apartment next door to or above or below their intended target, and some poor homeowner is shot coming out of the bedroom with a gun in his hand.

In the late eighties/early nineties, the Supreme Court OfThe United States (referred to hereinafter as SCOTUS) declared that officers serving regular warrants had to announce their presense and wait (at most) ten seconds before beginning the midnight-knock routine so familiar in movies dealing with Nazi Germany. So nice of them - give me a whole ten seconds to get from dead-sleep to my front door before going the whole battering ram/boilingoil/catapult route.

What a bunch of pals. I stuck a few more candy canes inmy Christmas cards that year, I'm here to tell you.

Recently, a group of police (not identified) were sued when they pulled a midnight knock, announced their presense, and then broke in with a battering ram after three seconds. Writing for the majority, the supposedly pro-freedom, pro-constitution, conservative Antonin Scalia said that the outcome would've been the same whether or not the police waited for any sign of acknowledgement of their presense, therefore suppressing the evidence they gathered to "punish" the police department (one of the last deterents of jackbooted action) was too high a price for them to pay for their "preliminary misstep."

Why bother going the no-knock route when you can knock and kick in the door two seconds later?

That if we were to summarily hang the majority of the court that voted for this as is the punishment for treason, we'd be left with a court of near-socialists is not a topic we'll discuss presently.

What is scary is that police officers executing a regular warrant, for, say, bookkeeping records, may now behave in exactly the same manner as a company of Rangers in Kabul.

A company in Virginia that makes solid steel doors reminiscent of those seen on a submarine saw their stock price double the day Bush-appointee Alito broke the 4-4 tie. Could be a connection there...

Doors are really only half the battle. Booby traps, flashbangs, and mid-caliber rifle-fire directed at these bottlenecks by homeowners are the other half. However morally right and laudable mowing down a gaggle of masked men as they break into your house without identification is, shooting at the police with or without justification usually ends with the shootee and/or their family members dying. Ask Sammy Weaver, or David Koresh. Wait, you can't...oh never mind.

So, presently, we have two options if the whole of the police force descends on our patios at three in the morning and kicks in our door without making their identities known, as they have now been empowered to do by a rogue SCOTUS: The first option is to (try to) kill them. Perfectly appropriate and justified. Look up ballistics tables - if it flies faster than 1750fps, you're looking at vest penetration. This is, as Martha Stewart would say, A Good Thing. I should warn you first though, your life-expectancy shrinks to minutes at this point, and as far as I know, no one really wants to make the ultimate statement of freedom followed by a one-way trip to that great theme-park in the sky.

The second option is to let everyone who breaks into your house in the middle of the night have their way with you, your loved ones, and property, in hopes that they don't have thousands of Officer Friendly's behind them, all pointing machine guns at your back. Meanwhile, police departments across the country get the idea that since they don't lose officers to home-invasions, they should try this more often.

This is officially called a "Slippery Slope."

What you don't punish, you subsidize.

What you subsidize, you encourage.

Those are the options.

There is a half-step, something that gives you a reasonable life expectancy while giving the forces of darkness considerable pause. The humble camera, in both digital and video configurations, currently available on cell phones that everyone seems to have (or in hand-held units), is the SWAT team equivalent of Holy Water and garlic for vampires.

BATFE stomps your kitten's head? Smile! You're on candid camera!
FBI "suicides" a guy who misplaced his yellowforms? Get a picture of our couragous police force at work.
Law enforcement trashes your gunstore while you're out of town, torching your safes and leaving food and food containers all over? Won't they be surprised when the photos those hidden video cameras took show up on the internet. In the newspaper. In their church. Taped to the halls of the school their children attend.

We're coming up on a surveillance society presently, and they really hate it when we turn the tables. Watch them crawl for the safety of the shade when the cameras flash and their antics and murders and foibles and thefts turn up as the water-cooler conversation of thousands. It's not great, but those who would do us harm shrink from being exposed as the power-hungry murderers and thieves and pedophiles that they are.

So, how does this come back to the cheapening of our language? Language is how we communicate with each other. It is how we express essential information and derive pleasure from human interaction. When you change the practical meaning of words, the truths behind the air that our vocal cords vibrate, you cheapen the language. A Free-Speech Zone should be a desirable place. Its borders should extend from sea to shining sea, as the song goes. But it doesn't. It means chainlink and razorwire and shouting our messages at jackbooted thugs who standby with batons to make sure we don't tip the fences over and exercize our God/Nature/Other given rights over there. The right to keep and bear arms should mean just that - that EVERYONE be armed with militarily effective weapons. It doesn't. It now means we may only own arms deamed appropriate for sporting. Serving a warrant should mean cops showing up at the door with a piece of paper and twiddling their thumbs while you call the police department to verify that they're actually employed by legitimate law enforcement and that the person that signed off on this is really a judge and not the grave-yard shift janitor.

I recently spoke of this to my father. I said it's too bad that too much of government, of human nature comes down to a little evil versus a great evil. We either allow people the freedom to choose to harm themselves with whatever plants they wish, at the price of some addictions and broken homes, or we have no-knock warrants and Waco. Those are the options. We allow people the freedom to defend themselves in their homes or in public, at the price of a hundred dead children 12 and under every year, or we have crime rates like Glasgow and situations like Darfur and Dachau. Those are the options. We give a known murderer a chance to go free or we give the police unlimited authority to abuse our freedom. Those are the options.

The other side knows this, about a little evil versus a great evil. It hopes we don't know. The other side knows what its done. It knows about Nazism. It knows about the trains that ran on time. It knows about the Armenian genocide. It knows about Pol Pot, about political dissidents in China shot in the neck and their families billed for the bullet, it knows about taxes for non-muslims to continue to live and gulags in Siberia and the MOVE firebombing and every other ugly thing done by those who have power over their fellow man. I speak now, not of Communism, or radical Islam, or the United States government. I speak of anyone who controls the power of life and death through the apperatus of the state. And because they know this, they give us promises. They promise not to infringe on our religion or speech. They promise to let us bear militarily effective weapons as a governmental failsafe device. They promise not to break into our houses on a whim, or torture us or secretly arrest us. Whatever country, whatever promise, whatever their intent to do us good, all these are are words. Words. Ink on paper, vibrations of air.

We have all these words protecting us: We have the right to speak freely. We have the right to keep and bear arms. We have the right to be secure in our houses and persons against unreasonable searches and seizures. But these words, they aren't worth a damn anymore. They're changing the language on us. They're changing the country on us. And when all of it, the country, the government, the police, the language, our rights, has been mutated beyond the original intent and design, none of it will matter anymore.

We won't have any options anymore.

More on the death of common sense, respect, ad nauseum...

I posit this scenario: Suppose the kid up the street is having a party on the last real weekend before the 4th Of July. Suppose he wants to light off some bottlerockets, with the blessing and encouragement of EVERY adult on the property. Suppose you find the sound of bottlerockets to be irritating. What do you do?

Walk down and talk to the offending parties about how their arial celebration is disturbing your nap/baby/dog/Lesser Crested Pufferfish? Nah. Stick your head out your back door and yell "SHUT UP!" Wrong again!

Call the alderman, who happens to occupy the slum behind offending persons's property. Now, supposing you were the alderman, what do you do? Walk a hundred and twenty feet to tell your constituents that other constituents are happy for the graduatee, but could you tone down the pyrotechnics? Give them a call with the same message? Again, wrong answer.

Call the cops. Now, supposing you're the person making the calls, and that you have a higher IQ than most garden implements, what do you suppose the logical thing to do is? Yup, send an off-duty cop out, have him tell the enthusiastic partiers to cut the fireworks. Strike four! Two black and whites, and an unmarked show up. They confiscate everything on the driveway AND issue both offenders a COURT SUMMONS and nearly $750 in fines. Now, how much do you suppose the city paid to send four officers in three cars to bust two highschool kids for fireworks, ten days before the FOURTH OF JULY! How much is the court date and judge-time and all the related sh*t that goes into prosecuting them going to cost the city? Were none of these pigs teens at one point in time - that they could shake their heads and say "boys will be boys" and tell them to knock it off? Where'd Barney Fife go?

On the other hand, I got to see precisely the effect of cameras on fuzz. Like vampires and crosses, I tell you, and dang, if that' ain't an apt analogy. It was hi-larious seeing them get uncomfortable - you'd think for guys with a Glock 21 on their hips, they wouldn't be so scared of a camera. Turning away, holding up their arms, closing their eyes...my mom and her digital verified my hypothesis - those in authority DON'T like an audience when they work. Thus, they should have as big an audience as possible. Now, how to disseminate those pictures...

PS I wasn't one of the ones busted.