Category Archives: The Land of the Free

Drug war idiocy, Tennessesee edition.

A couple driving through Tennessee on their way home from a funeral in Ohio were stopped by police. According to the Columbus Dispatch:

They were in the westbound lanes of I-40, a few miles east of Memphis, when a black police SUV with flashing lights pulled them over, [Mrs] Jonas-Boggioni said.A second black SUV soon pulled up behind the first one.

[…]

“They were very serious,” she said. “They had the body armor and the guns.”

Black SUVs are becoming the vehicle of choice for official government business these days sort of like white Toyota pickup trucks have become a favorite of the Taliban.

“What are you doing with a marijuana sticker on your bumper?” he asked her.

She explained that it is actually a Buckeye leaf decal, just like the ones that Ohio State players are given to put on their helmets to mark good plays.

“He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language,” she said.

buckeyes-pot

Marijuana has seven leaflets, which should be required knowledge for anyone charged with the task of destroying the lives of people caught with it.

Ideally, the 65 year old woman should have said,“It’s not a marijuana sticker you dumbass moron and even if it were, how does that justify your pulling me over?  This was once referred to as ‘The Land of the Free’ until you idiot drug nazis turned it into a police state.”   At that point, ideally, the cops would have apologized profusely for being dunbasses and promised to never do something so stupid again.  But, it’s not an ideal world, so cops are completely free to harass people with essentially zero probable cause and if you get angry about it, they will arrest you, make your life miserable, and the entire law enforcement and judicial apparatus will back them up when they do so.

Before they let her go on her way, the officers advised Jonas-Boggioni to remove the decal from her car.

“I said, ‘You mean in Tennessee?’ and he said, ‘No, permanently.’

“I didn’t take it off. . . . This little old lady is no drug dealer.”

Cops inevitably compound their ignorance with even more displays of ignorance.  They mistake the citizen’s self control in the face of such harassment as a sign of respect when all the citizen is doing is desperately trying not to bruise the fragile ego of today’s neanderthal drag warriors which would almost certainly result in immediate arrest, if not a beating.

Where, oh where, would we be if not for the gallant front line troops protecting our safety, heritage, and freedom by relentlessly pursuing marijuana monsters (real or imagined)?  Well, we’d all be a lot better off, that’s for damn sure.

 

North Carolina considers criminalizing nipple exposure

There is probably no better example of the utter irrationality of the political class than laws banning mere nudity. Allow me to put this in the simplest possible terms.  Requiring that someone wear clothes that meet a particular set of rules is called a dress code.  Many cities (probably most) in the so-called “land of the free” will arrest you for not following their dress code.  Even San Francisco recently outlawed nudity.

North Carolina state representative Rayne Brown has introduced a bill that would make nipple exposure a felony.  Existing North Carolina law already outlaws nudity, but uses the laughably juvenile term “private parts” leading to some confusion about whether nipples are included under that heading.

[Brown] told members of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that her constituents are concerned about topless rallies promoting women’s equality held the past two years in Asheville, which is located about 130 miles west of Brown’s district.

That reminds me of Sarah Palin’s Tina Fey’s comment about being able to see Russia from her back door.

Many cities have local ordinances barring women from going topless, but Asheville does not.

Brown said a blanket solution is needed to give law enforcement officers statewide the clear authority to make arrests when nipples are exposed.

Maybe it’s time to start a Reality Thinking Hall of Shame for busy body morons like Brown.

It gets worse.  According to the Naturist Action Committee:

In thirteen U.S. states, however, lawmakers have decreed that those convicted of mere nudity must register as sex offenders.

When we include strip clubs and brothels, state governments claim the power to outlaw nudity among consenting adults even on private property behind closed doors.  Nudity for entertainment purposes is far worse than ordinary nudity.  Heaven forbid that anyone anywhere should be having a good time.

And the absolute worst part of it?  Most of your neighbors think throwing someone in prison for nudity is just fine.  Most of your neighbors think that children are traumatized by mere sight of the naked adult body.  Protecting children from harm, real or imagined, always trumps freedom.  And most of your neighbors think that this is a completely healthy rational attitude.  Think about that next time you bump into them when you’re out mowing the lawn.

When you think about it, what’s surprising is not that “the land of the free” throws more of its citizens in prison than any other country.  No.  What’s really surprising, given the willingness of Americans to criminalize everything,  is that there are still so many people not in prison.

The internet: Soon to be part of the military industrial complex

This piece by Glenn Greenwald explores how the government is taking over the internet using the same tactics it used to grow the U.S. military into the largest and most aggressive force on the planet.

What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has been feeding itself on fear campaigns since it was born. A never-ending carousel of Menacing Enemies – Communists, Terrorists, Latin American Tyrants, Saddam’s chemical weapons, Iranian mullahs – has sustained it, and Cyber-Threats are but the latest.

Step 1 is fear mongering. This has been in full swing since 2010 and continuously ramping up.

Step 2 is for the government  to saturate the media with reports about how the U.S. must defend itself from the cyber warfare programs of other states even though the U.S. is easily the biggest cyber warfare aggressor.

Step 3 is to get legislation passed that grants the executive branch the powers it needs to exert command control.

Step 4 is to grow the budget for the divisions within the NSA and Pentagon in charge of cyber warfare.

Step 5 is to make sure the government methods, rules, and involvement are secret so it cannot be challenged.

Step 6 is to bring in private sector partners, who have already proven their willingness to sell out their customers for the promise of a big government contract.

All of these steps are already in full swing, ensuring that the kind of popular uprisings we’re seeing in other police states will never happen in this one.

Cigarettes by prescrition only

Portland, Oregon, State Rep. Mitch Greenlick sponsored a bill that would make cigarettes a Schedule III drug and thus illegal to possess or distribute without a prescription under penalty of a $6000 fine or a year in prison.  This is, of course, just another attack on smokers by some political parasite who wants to get his name in the headlines.  Smokers are like strippers, prostitutes, and gamblers in the sense that no one is likely to come to their defense if they are attacked by self-serving public figures in the government and news media.  If you recall, that used to be the case with gays and blacks as well.

I first heard this story on a local news broadcast.  One of the WHNT-TV morning news anchors quickly chimed in that she thought the law sounded like a good idea.  Because, you know, there ain’t no such thing as too many ways to throw people you don’t like in prison.  This is true, folks.  No one is more willing to piss away your liberty and dictate how you should live than folks in your own community.  WHNT is an ardent supporter of the failed drug war, encouraging people to become  anonymous informants through a program called See Meth, Stop Meth.  It is this kind of dedication to locking people up that has placed “The Land of the Free” in the top spot worldwide when it comes to imprisoning its citizens.  Keep up the good work, WHNT!

Obama on gun control

“…if there is a step we can take that will save even one child from what happened in Newtown, we should take that step…”

–Barack Obama, Jan. 14, 2013–.

Whenever someone claims that “saving even one child” justifies some legislation, you can be certain that you are about to become less free.  And, because this happens so frequently,  the child that is supposedly being saved, is going to grow up in a world much different from the one you enjoyed as a child.

Claims like this are intentionally designed to elicit an emotional reaction that trumps rational deliberation.   Not only does it work, but the public never seems to tire of it or see through the manipulation, which is why it is almost always used to justify bad legislation.  It’s has the effect of making people instantly stupid.

According to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, U.S. drone attacks have killed at least 204 children in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia over the last seven years.

You want to save some children, Mr President?  How about you clean your own house before laying the blame at the feet of the American public.  Stop your drone strikes. Don’t do it to save a bunch of Pakistani and Yemeni children.  We already know you don’t give a shit about them.  Do it to save American children who are likely to be the victims of the next 9/11-style attack that will inevitably come if we keep making enemies of the entire Muslim world by continuously and callously killing their children.

The war on pinball

Theverge.com has a nice little history of pinball and video arcades wherein we learn that New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia took special interest in outlawing and smashing pinball machines back in 1942 for their connection to organized crime which was forced to diversify after prohibition ended.

He ordered the city’s police to make Prohibition-style pinball raids and seizures its “top priority,” and was photographed with a sledgehammer, triumphantly smashing the seized machines. On the first day of the ban, the city police confiscated more than 2,000 pinball machines and issued nearly 1,500 summons.

Opponents of pinball based their argument on the claim that it was a form of gambling rather than a game of skill.

…but under the surface was a much more temperance-fueled, nearly religious belief that pinball was a tool “from the devil,” which corrupted youths. Newspapers across the country essentially nodded their heads in agreement as games of all sorts — billiards, and even “old ladies’ bridge clubs” — were held up to scrutiny. At the time, it was easy to make the case that pinball was morally corrupting, at least insofar as it was a gateway to gambling, as well as a complete waste of time. Many large cities followed in New York’s footsteps, including Los Angeles and Chicago (San Francisco is one of the only major cities to have never banned the game), and pinball bans became fairly commonplace across the United States.

Yeah, it always starts as a crusade to save the children, but eventually the facade is dispensed with and it becomes just another crusade to dictate how everyone should live.  I guess today’s New Yorkers would recognize the same mentality in their current mayor with his special capacity to see evil in everything from soft drinks, to food for the homeless, to baby formula.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Balko’s Morning Links

Check out Radley Balko’s Morning Links.  Highlights include:

  • How the American war on drugs is “one of the most catastrophic foreign policy mistakes in American history”.   I agree.  Whatever it started as, the drug war is now nothing more than a jobs program for testosterone-flooded neanderthals and it’s only accomplishment is bringing misery and destruction to people who engage in an activity that should never have been illegal in the first place.  The fact that it has now enveloped the entire Western Hemisphere in an unstoppable and ever escalating cycle of corruption and violence fits well with a foreign policy whose main goal seems to be pissing the rest of the world off.
  • Mother Jones inadvertently makes the case that banning assault weapons would probably have zero effect in reducing mass shootings.  Not that reasoning or  effectiveness actually play much of a role in any conflict between team left and team right.
  • The DEA (those folks who, as a condition for employment, are required to swear an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution) thinks it can come onto your property and set up surveillance cameras to record your activities in order to catch you in a crime, all without a warrant, of course.  Folks, this goes right to that stunningly ignorant belief (and you hear this a lot from libertarians) that it’s the government’s job to protect the rights of citizens.  It is not.  The government is, in fact, the biggest threat to citizens’ rights.  Government serves government.  Only the public, in large enough numbers, can protect citizens from abuses of power by the government.  And, I might point out that the public is notoriously incompetent in this mission.

Prosecutors: Judge, Jury, and Executioner

If you read the news at all, you have probably read about the death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.who committed suicide after an overzealous federal prosecutor targeted with a crusade of arbitrary intimidation and prosecutorial recklessness. Why do prosecutors do this?  The answer is simple: Because they can.

Radley Balko explains why:

Prosecutors have enormous power. Even investigations that don’t result in any charges can ruin lives, ruin reputations, and drive their targets into bankruptcy. It has become an overtly political position — in general, but particularly at the federal level. If a prosecutor wants to ruin your life, he or she can. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it.

Balko goes on to list, item by item, the circumstances in our justice system that make this kind of abuse not only possible, but inevitable.  And brace yourselves, because it is going to continue to get worse.   Unfortunately most people don’t care about it until it happens to them and they are suddenly  confronted by the fact that they are all alone, because no one cares until it happens to them.

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Glenn Greenwald comes down hard on these prosecutors today as well with this concise characterization of the Federal government’s twisted sense of justice:

The US has become a society in which political and financial elites systematically evade accountability for their bad acts, no matter how destructive. Those who torture, illegally eavesdrop, commit systemic financial fraud, even launder money for designated terrorists and drug dealers are all protected from criminal liability, while those who are powerless – or especially, as in Swartz’s case, those who challenge power – are mercilessly punished for trivial transgressions.

It’s not always the federal government.  There is probably no better example of prosecutors whose ambition for political fame and fortune have left a swath of destroyed lives in their wake than the daycare sex abuse debacle  of the 80s and 90s.  The state attorneys leveraged off of people’s natural emotion toward children to create a panic that they then used to catapult their careers into positions at the highest levels of the state and federal justice system.  Unfortunately, many of the victims of their self-serving campaign still languish in prison. While many of the convictions were ultimately over-turned or commuted, there were never any serious repercussions for the calamitous abuse of power by the prosecutors.

NY Mayor Bloomberg wants to tell your doctor how to treat you

From The Agitator:

Under the new city policy, most public hospital patients will no longer be able to get more than three days’ worth of narcotic painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet. Long-acting painkillers, including OxyContin, a familiar remedy for chronic backache and arthritis, as well as Fentanyl patches and methadone, will not be dispensed at all.

The Federal government has been dictating treatment policies with regard to painkillers for years, so the fact that America’s most self-serving authoritarian mayor wants to get in on the act is not exactly a stunning surprise. What’s really funny is when you hear people declaring that Obama care won’t come between you and your doctor.

Like almost all government regulation, the people most affected and the people who pay the biggest price as a result of it, are ordinary citizens.  If you don’t have a lobbyist in Washington, you don’t matter.

This, like most drug war policy, is sold as being preventative. The real truth is that it punishes people who haven’t done anything wrong because they might do something wrong in the future. If you’ve ever seen the movie, Minority Report, you’re already familiar with the concept of arresting someone for precrime. Of course, in the movie, they only came after you if the precogs identified you personally as planning a crime. In “the land of the free”, the government dispenses with that step and arrests you simply for being in a position to commit a crime. Drug use is outlawed, because you might do something irresponsible if you use drugs. The exact same logic is used to outlaw or restrict gun ownership. Oddly (or not), conservative advocates of the drug war never see that the very same argument they use to outlaw drugs can easily be used against gun ownership.