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Category: Official thuggery, bad prosecutions, and bad law

One big dysfunctional family

Dysfunctional families come in all shapes, sizes, and all manner of chaos. But they all have one thing in common: When some truthteller finally gets fed up enough to name the core problem (whether it be Daddy’s drinking or Mom’s kleptomania or Auntie’s chronic lying or all of the above) — the entire clan will turn on the hapless truthteller, en masse, and blame that person for causing the problem. A long-ago neighbor woman once came to my house raging because her husband had been caught committing incest with their daughter and her teenage son had been accused of molesting…

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Cheyenne Irish returned to her parents

I haven’t done more than blog a mention of the Cheyenne Irish case because facts seemed too thin. But obviously it was malicious and outrageous to cite the parents’ involvement with Oath Keepers as one reason to grab the newborn. That was just plain creepy. Well, after a rousing few days on the Internet and an eloquent response from Oath Keepers, baby Cheyenne is home. Thank you, -T for the word and the link to this good (if sometimes acrimonious) discussion. Will Grigg as usual, has some tragically good things to say about this case and similar ones. What were…

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“We’re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don’t cooperate.”

Maybe you remember seeing the strange query and the photo via Reddit.com. The story of the California student who found a tracking device on his vehicle. Well, faithful blog reader Sam just found the follow-up. The FBI fetched back their device and, even though the young man was reportedly completely cooperative already, an agent told him, “We’re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don’t cooperate.” I know that any empathetic person, especially one who’s been observing the onward march of the jackbooterie, can imagine how it feels to be on the receiving end of those…

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Chortle

According to a Rasmussen poll: “62% of Likely U.S. Voters believe that no matter how bad things are, Congress can always make them worse.” OMG, ain’t that the truth? And ain’t that an example of uncommon sense from the v*ters? And in the weird news of the day … faux “FBI agents” take the law into their own hands. And get arrested. Nice try, boys & girl. Nice try.

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Non-news: Nobody shot my dogs

The dogs and I are getting to know the logging roads near my new house. Logging roads are familiar territory, even though these specific roads aren’t, and we have an established routine with them. If a road is gated but open to walk-ins, we never enter if somebody else’s vehicle is parked near the gate. If a road is open to vehicles, I cruise it in the truck to see if anyone else is around before settling on a place to walk. Don’t want to disturb any hunters or other dog walkers — and don’t want to disturb my own…

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Testing the “Internet kill switch”

If you read tech blogs — and only if you read tech blogs (or a handful of online techzines) — you already know that, on July 9, some unnamed government agency, for unnamed reasons, ordered BurstNET to take 73,000 blogs permanently offline. All were part of the same WordPress platform called Blogetery. A week later, a forum-creating service was shut down just as mysteriously. If you rely on mainstream sources for your news — or even online mainstream alternatives — you haven’t heard a peep about any of this. Why did some unnamed government agency order the death of 73,000…

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Monday miscellany

Common sense comes to a public school near you. Can’t possibly last. You heard the tut-tutting because more than a quarter of Americans recently polled didn’t know what country the famous forefathers won independence from. But what if respondents were just funnin’? C’mon. Everybody knows it was the Soviet Union. Which brings back fond memories of the witty (and now retired from writing) Patty Neill and her hysterical take on “How We Got the Data for the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse” Old. But timeless. On the more serious side, here’s an excellent Forbes piece from Michael Pento on…

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A duty to disobey?

I don’t know Larken Rose but I have a lot of respect for him. He’s a fine writer and a hardcore thinker, and he’s clearly a man who lays his own life on the line for what he believes. I don’t agree with everything he says here. But he asks some damnfine questions. Do good, upstanding citizens have a moral obligation to allow themselves to be oppressed, harassed, terrorized, assaulted, and wrongfully detained or imprisoned? Most people would say “no.” But would most people actually mean it? There are many examples of “law enforcers” treating innocent people like dirt. Random…

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Daryl Gates

Ding-dong, the Wicked Witch is dead. Daryl Gates, the man who created the modern SWAT team, invented the Big Brotherish D.A.R.E. program, and who said that casual drug users should be shot as “traitors” in the war on drugs, has died at 83. Too bad it wasn’t decades sooner, before he had a chance to do so much damage, and too bad he left so many like-minded thugs to carry out his sick vision of law enforcement. The SWAT team was a good concept for handling extreme emergencies. But being born in the mind of a violent, lying, racist, piggish…

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10 Rules for dealing with police

Tip o’ hat to Radley Balko, the Flex Your Rights video 10 Rules for Dealing with Police is now on YouTube in four 10-minute segments. I haven’t yet seen this and I understand it’s directed primarily at urban minorities who so often find themselves profiled and stopped on flimsy pretexts. But the earlier Flex Your Rights video, Busted: A Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters, is excellent and we all need to know the things FYR teaches. How to: Deal with traffic stops, street stops & police at your door Know your rights & maintain your cool Avoid common police…

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