… is becoming Turkey’s Tienanmen “tank man.” (Click for larger image. You may have to click twice. Or go here.) Who is she, this lady dressed for a garden party? Does anybody know? I imagine her tossing an irreverent comment at the riot cops. Obviously, that’s the only thing she could be tossing — words of disrespect for Authoritah. Or who knows? Maybe they just didn’t think she said, “Hello” or “Good day” with proper deference. The second (upper right) image is the one becoming an icon. But damn, it’s the fourth one (lower right) that gets me; the cop…
Category: Official thuggery, bad prosecutions, and bad law
Anybody who grew up in a dysfunctional family knows one of the cardinal rules: The person who mentions a problem is the person who caused the problem. Let some low-on-the-family-totem-pole person raise a destructive issue that’s hidden in plain sight and all hell breaks loose. No, the family doesn’t suddenly wake up and say, “OMG, you’re right. We have to do something about that!” Instead, everyone within earshot rounds on the poor sap who dared mention the family secret and the bullying begins: “Why are you always such a troublemaker?” “If you’d just learn to keep your mouth shut, everything…
Jeff Berwick’s take on the strange public “disappearing” of Adam Kokesh. You’d think that, with every public thing now being videotaped, the thug class would, at minimum, become more careful and cagey. Instead, they’re ramping up their violence and their sheer, bloody brazenness. Good. This means they’re scared. (And scared of activists who are, after all, people who are still hopeful enough to ask Massah to relent just a tiny bit.) Bad. For the reasons expressed in Berwick’s headline. Anybody hereabouts in contact with Kokesh?
Dan Brown’s got a new potboiler coming out. I like Dan Brown. I wish I could boil the pot like he does. Critics disagree. One says so in a familiar voice. 🙂 Almost a neighbor. Glad he’s not quite. Yet another judge fails to grasp the Fourth Amendment. (H/T JJ) Travis (TJIC) Corcoran’s upcoming novel sounds intriguing. I’d think so even if he didn’t take my name in vain in his trendy self-interview thingie. The Escherian stairwell 😉 Okay, so we’ve all heard about how the IRS illegally targeted tea party and related groups around the 2012 election. And they…
Well, now we know what happens when police cordon off a neighborhood, declare it a Fourth-Amendment-free zone, send SWAT teams house-to-house, and hover helicopters overhead. People cheer and applaud. They turn out in the streets to wave little American flags. And next we can watch as they condone demand and slaver over illegal treatment of Suspect #2 (an American citizen). We can “enjoy” a new round of anti-immigrant and anti-Islam hatred. We can observe bobbleheads nodding from Los Angeles to Hartford as Good Citizens agree with all the new promises politicians and the state-security apparatus make as they concoct onerous…
The “scariest search engine on the Internet” could be ripe for some mayhem in the right wrong hands. Borepatch has more. Hey, if our children really belong to the state, or the “community” or whatever, doesn’t that mean everybody else ought to have to buy them their expensive sneakers and put up with them when they’re having a case of the raging hormones? Just — boom! — hand ’em off to some random bureaucrat or neighbor for a while whenever they get a little out of hand. “Whaddaya mean, you won’t take Maddie Mae and Jacob? They’re your kids as…
I really hope this is an April Fools joke, too. Though of course even if it were, it’s only a matter of time …
You’d think — you really would — that if you were in a place where a man had just shot a cop and the cops were setting up a siege (which would ultimately end with more shooting and a house going up in flames), you’d see immediately that something dangerous was going on. And you might logically take action to avoid the area. But nope. Happens that a friend and I were driving down a street yesterday where a cop had just been shot. Squad cars were zooming in. Lights were flashing. Yada yada. When my friend remarked, “Something big…
The following is a question I know we’ve all pondered. Yet in a way it’s imponderable. So we tend to come up with glib, macho, chest-thumping answers. Or we don’t answer at all because silence is the wiser choice. Still, it’s on a lot of minds. UnReconstructed asked the question in its fullest, most individual (and most ironic) form. I’ll try to paraphrase it into more mundane, more cautious, reality. Fourth question: At some point, political Intolerable Acts become truly, personally intolerable. The long train of abuses has to halt. We’ve already seen people (including perhaps ourselves) submit to more…
Even as the armed individual remains the key to self and community defense, sophisticated societies inevitably develop specialization. It seems likely that even Libertopia would end up with a professional class of protectors, bounty hunters, or armed “insurance agents” (ala L. Neil Smith’s North American Confederacy). Which brings us to the ancient dilemma, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Third question: In this or any other society, is it possible to ensure that armed, organized enforcers respect the rights of individuals and hold themselves to the fundamental rules of civil society? If so, what would put such a check on their behavior…