A Geek With Guns

With the imminent hearing on HR 1467, the bill that would bring “stand your ground” to Minnesota, tomorrow I think we need an example of how important such legislation is. For an example we need look no further than Iowa:

One couldn’t blame him. Lewis had just finished 112 days in jail because he didn’t have the cash to make bail. When jurors finally freed him on Feb. 9, Lewis walked out homeless, unemployed and minus most of his possessions.

[...]

Ludwick, a former soldier and convicted felon, was driving four people home from a Halloween party. Documents say Ludwick slowed; Lewis passed him. Ludwick sped up, and the cars raced down 11th Street until they came to Regency Woods. They collided when Lewis, in front and on the right, started to turn left.

Lewis said Ludwick and a passenger, Justin Lossner, got out of the Taurus and began punching the Mustang’s windows.

They backed off when Lewis pulled out his .380-caliber pistol. But they came back.

Lewis said he was outside his car, evaluating its damage, when he caught Ludwick and Lossner trying to sneak up on him from two different directions.

The recording of a 911 call made by Lewis begins with Lewis yelling at the two to “just stay where you are. Get back! Get back! I’m going to start shooting!”

There are exchanges of profanities while Lewis explains the situation to a police dispatcher. Then, “Get away from me. Get away from me!” And a bang.

You read that correctly, Mr. Lewis was found innocent of any crime was greeted with a loss of his property and months of his lives stolen as he rotted in prison awaiting his trial. What’s most egregious about this story is the fact that Mr. Lewis would have been legally protected from all of this if Iowa had a stand your ground law as it gives the defender the benefit of the doubt. Without such legislation the state gets to assume guilt until innocence is proven, and in such cases those forced into a self-defense situation may lose everything even if a jury acquits them.

As I stated yesterday the other problem when a stand your ground law isn’t on the books is the fact that any action taken in self-defense can be argued to be “unreasonable.” One person looking at Mr. Lewis’s situation may claim his use of a firearm wasn’t reasonable because his attackers were, apparently, unarmed. Another person would point out the fact that Mr. Lewis was outnumbered, a fact that makes a self-defense situation far more dangerous. Mr. Lewis had every right to be where he was and therefore should have the right to defend himself at that location. Stand your ground laws benefit those who find themselves having to defend themselves against initiators of violence.

I have further commentary about this story that I’ll post up tomorrow. Considering that the “stand your ground” bill is being debated tomorrow I wanted to get this out so people could read it and understand the importance that this law holds.

If you want to get any medicine that contains pseudoephedrine you’re in for a lot of fun. Because pseudoephedrine is used to manufacture meth and meth has been declared verboten by the state pseudoephedrine has become a controlled substance. In order to pick up even basic cold or allergy medicine you must go to the counter, present ID, get the purchase recorded, and make sure you don’t accidentally buy more than you’re allowed. Bruce Schneier, being a security minded bloke, found an article that talks about the cost of enforcing these controls:

Now, personally, I sincerely doubt that the pharmaceutical industry has reliable estimates of how many of their purchasers actually have colds–or that they would share data indicating that half of their revenues came from meth cooks. But let’s say this is accurate: half of all pseudoephedrine is sold to meth labs. That still wouldn’t mean that manufacturers of cold medicines are making “hundreds of millions of dollars a year” off of the stuff–not in the sense that they end up hundreds of millions of dollars richer. The margins on off-patent medicines are not high, and in retail, 50% or more of the cost of the product is retailer and distributor markup*. Then there’s the costs of manufacturing.

But this is sort of a side issue. What really bothers me is the way that Humphreys–and others who show up in the comments–regard the rather extraordinary cost of making PSE prescription-only as too trivial to mention.

Let’s return to those 15 million cold sufferers. Assume that on average, they want one box a year. That’s going to require a visit to the doctor. At an average copay of $20, their costs alone would be $300 million a year, but of course, the health care system is also paying a substantial amount for the doctor’s visit. The average reimbursement from private insurance is $130; for Medicare, it’s about $60. Medicaid pays less, but that’s why people on Medicaid have such a hard time finding a doctor. So average those two together, and add the copays, and you’ve got at least $1.5 billion in direct costs to obtain a simple decongestant. But that doesn’t include the hassle and possibly lost wages for the doctor’s visits. Nor the possible secondary effects of putting more demands on an already none-too-plentiful supply of primary care physicians.

$1.5 billion of additional costs just to enforce the government’s desire on prohibiting the possession and use of a specific substance. As with any government prohibition the cost is not merely financial but in the reduction of quality of life:

Of course, those wouldn’t be the real costs, because lots of people wouldn’t be able to take the time for a doctor’s visit. So they’d just be more miserable while their colds last. What’s the cost of that–in suffering, in lost productivity?

Many substances made illegal by the federal government have medicinal, or other, uses. Cannabis has been shown to help in the fight against cancer but has been declared illegal so billions of dollars have to be spent in order to research alternative methods of providing the same affects. Between the costs in enforcing the prohibition, finding alternatives, and the cost to consumers tacked on to recover the costs of researching alternatives the government has pissed away money that could have been used for far more productive uses. Instead people are forced to pay additional taxes to fund the war on drugs, which means each person has less money to use in improving their quality of life.

In the case of pseudoephedrine controls people could be forced to simply suffer symptoms that we’ve been able to mitigate for a reasonable price because the additional costs required to enforce these government controls are simply too much for most people to bear (compared to dealing with their cold symptoms). Doctors will also have less time to treat the truly sick as they’ll have their time taken up by those suffering minor ailments that need prescriptions to get medicine that was previously easy to obtain (and thus cheaper).

Let’s stop this constant attack on our quality of life by getting the government out.

The Stasi are going to be working overtime in formerly Great Britain now that they’ll have records of every phone call, e-mail, and text message sent in the country:

Details of every phone call and text message, email traffic and websites visited online are to be stored in a series of vast databases under new Government anti-terror plans.

Landline and mobile phone companies and broadband providers will be ordered to store the data for a year and make it available to the security services under the scheme.

If you live in that forsaken realm of the damned it would be wise to personally run your own e-mail server that only accepts SSL-secured connections. While the Stasi are claiming they won’t store the contents of intercepted messages that matters not because once they know messages exist they can obtain records of them through glorious court orders (or if they have the equivalent to the United States National Security Letters they don’t even have to putz around with that). Remember that deleted e-mails may no longer be accessible to you but they’re likely accessible on some backup somewhere.

I would say denizens of Britain should attempt to flee to free America but we’re no longer free either. The best hope of not being spied on by your government is to live in a region controlled by a government that is too poor to implement a police state.

It’s a good thing we have the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) out there creating terrorists to fight, otherwise the American populace wouldn’t have fear stricken into their hearts. Last week the FBI “stopped” a plot that could have ended with nobody being hurt:

A man has been arrested near the US Capitol building as part of an anti-terror investigation, US officials say.

Amine El Khalifi, 29, of Alexandria, Virginia was taken into custody by the FBI.

Officials told US media the man thought he was heading to carry out a suicide attack on the Washington DC building, home to the US Congress.

Why do I say nobody would have been hurt? Because the FBI supplied “explosives” were inactive:

He carried a vest he thought was packed with explosives, reports said, but had in fact been supplied and made harmless by undercover agents.

“Explosives the suspect allegedly sought to use in connection with the plot had been rendered inoperable by law enforcement and posed no threat to the public,” a spokesman for the US Justice Department said.

Hell the FBI didn’t even let him get as far as the Capitol grounds:

Mr Khalifi was not arrested on the Capitol grounds and had been under surveillance for several weeks, AP reported.

This is the new strategy of the FBI. First they find somebody who is, for all intents and purposes, harmless but also fairly gullible. An agent will make contact and begin encouraging the non-violent individual to perform acts of violence. After enough goading the person finally agrees and the FBI agent supplies the sucker with a device that is claimed to be an explosive. With the fake explosive in hand the man is arrest and charged with attempting to commit and act of terror. Had the FBI never been involve, had they never approach, goaded, and provided weapons to the man it is almost certain that man would have never caused harm to anybody. Yet this is how the FBI is able to drum of fear and justify their ever expanding budgets and enforcement powers to the American people.

Don’t fall for this kind of shit.

Nigel Farage is hands down one of my favorite government actors in Europe. He’s always quick to bring up the sham that is the European Union (EU) and comes up with some stellar one-liners. His speech on the recent happenings in Greece was great:

Being good blokes the people who uploaded the video to YouTube also provided a handy transcript. One of the biggest hypocrisies in the EU is the constant use of the word democracy while the governing body of the EU is composed of appointed officials. After listening to his speech it’s pretty easy to see why the people of Greece are pissed off:

Well Commissioner, you picked the right man. Puppet Papademos is in place and as Athens caught fire on Sunday night he rather took my breath away. He said, ‘Violence and destruction have no place in a democratic country.’

What democratic country?

He’s not even a democratically elected prime minister. He’s been appointed by you guys. Greece is not run through democracy now, it is run through a Troika. Three foreign officials that fly into Athens airport and tell the Greeks what they can and cannot do.

The violence and destruction that you saw on Sunday is being caused directly because people are having their democratic rights taken from them – What else can they do?

Greece has basically been turned into a dictatorship with the rulers being appointed by the governing body of the EU. Obviously the people of Greece, whom believed they had a say in the happenings of their government (a mistake many people make), are unhappy that their democratic process has been tossed out the window and replaced with a puppet government likened to something American would put in a country that was looking to turn communist.

And I must say, if I was a Greek citizen I would’ve been out there, joining those protests on Sunday. I’d be out there trying to bring down this monstrosity that has been put upon those people.

This is why I like Farage, he’s willing to say things most politicians would never conceive of.

And in his efforts, in the Puppet’s efforts to get the MPs to vote for the bailout package, he warned them, that if they didn’t do so there would be a dramatic decline in living standards.

Well, has he looked out the front door?

Has he seen the fact that 50 per cent of the young people are unemployed already. Has he seen the fact, that the economy, far from stalling has contracted for five years in a row, and is now accelerating on a downward death spiral – a contraction of 7 per cent per annum.

Greece is being driven into the ground, and I think, frankly, when it comes to chaos, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

These policies are driving Greece towards a revolution. They need to be set free. If they don’t get the Drachma back you will be responsible for something truly, truly horrible.”

I’ve mentioned the economic issues in Greece and how the state promised the people everything but delivered nothing, while still taking everything. Unemployment is rampant, taxes are high, and the only thing that appears to be on the horizon is even higher unemployment as public employees, who makes up 22% of the employed people of Greece, are let go.

The government of Greece has broken its promise the the people and the people are not happy about it. Honestly I would love to see the people of Greece walk into Athens, toss the current bums that call themselves government out on the street, and be an example to every other state in the world of who has the true power. The attitude many of the founding fathers of this country held regarding revolution were correct, it’s the right of the people to overthrow their government when they feel the government no longer serves a legitimate purpose. The government of Greece no longer serves a legitimate purpose and the people are well within their rights to overthrow the current tyrants.

Today, February 19^th, 2012 marks 70 years since Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed military personnel to round up Americans of Japanese Decent and place them in concentration camps. Well known actor George Takei was placed in one of these camps as a child and was later interviewed about it:

Without so much as charges Americans of Japanese decent were rounded up, put onto trains, and hauled to concentration camps where they spent years behind barbed wire under the watchful eyes of machine gunners standing in surrounding guard towers.

What’s even more disgusting is what Takei explains regarding the questionnaires prisoners were required to fill out when it became apparent a labor shortage existed in the United States. After being imprisoned for a year the prisoners were asked if they would take up arms in defense of the United States and if they would swear allegiance to the United States while forswearing allegiance to the Japanese Emperor. The second question was a catch-22 because it insinuated that the prisoners, many of whom were born in the United States, had sworn an other to the Japanese Emperor and thus justifying their detention. I’m glad to hear Takei’s parents refused to take up arms in defense of the United States or swear allegiance to this country. Nobody should take up arms in support of tyrants and those held in the concentration camps were getting a front row seat to tyranny in action.

Uncle has more proof that Fast and Furious was about gun control, not curbing the supply of weapons to Mexican drug cartels:

In the Fronteras interview, Coulson also claimed ATF knew that what has come to be known as the “90% lie” was a myth. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others had been pushing the line that 90% of guns seized in Mexico came from the U.S.

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“Among federal law enforcement, that became somewhat of a joke,” Coulson said. “We all knew that was whatever weapons the Mexican government decided to follow or trace back to the U.S. and never took into account the weapons that came in from Central America, from other countries around the world.”

This myth was behind the Justice Department announcement last April 25 that it was making 8,500 gun stores in Arizona, California, Texas and New Mexico report individual purchases of multiple rifles of greater than .22 caliber by law-abiding American citizens to the ATF because — get this — such guns are “frequently recovered at violent crime scenes near the Southwest border.”

This corroborates previous evidence demonstrating that Fast and Furious was nothing more than a sham operation meant to create an excuse to enact more gun control in this country.

Americans seem to believe that they can hold the government responsible through voting, protesting, petitioning, and writing their “representatives.” These beliefs are false because if the populace make too much of a fuss about something the government simple goes from using overt tactics to covert tactics. Passing gun control laws in this country has become far more difficult today than it was back in the heydays of the 1990s. Members of the government, still wanting to disarm the populace, know passing gun control laws is akin to political suicide so they’ve changed their tactics. Instead of passing bills that decree further restrictions on gun ownership they are using their already possessed regulatory power and creating false flag incidents to justify the new regulations.

I realize many people will simply label me a conspiracy theorist (something I’m not, in general I’m very skeptical) for the claims I’ve just made but the proof supports Fast and Furious being a false flag operation so, at the very least, I’m vindicated on this issue.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has been illegally arresting people under laws that were deemed unconstitutional far in advance of the arrests:

For almost 30 years — from 1983 to 2012 — the New York Police Department went about arresting people under laws that state and federal courts had long declared unconstitutional, cuffing and booking almost 22,000 people. In 2010, federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin finally held them in contempt of court. Yesterday, she signed an order approving what is effectively their punishment: a $15 million class-action settlement that could generate individual payments of as much as $5,000.

Those arrested were forced to defend themselves in court and even served jail time for completely lawful behavior. The class action settlement also requires the city to help the courts vacate and seal all convictions stemming from the illegal arrests.

This story doesn’t surprise me, especially coming from New York City. Perhaps this is the reason Mayor Bloomberg wants to prohibit guns so desperately, he need to keep the denizens of his city disarmed less they rise up and refuse to comply with the police making illegal arrests.

What’s really sad is the fact our country has reached a point where police officers not only arrest people for perfectly lawful activity but juries are more than happy to hand out a guilty verdict. Once again we come to the fact that jury nullification is one of the few options we have left in our toolbox to prevent tyranny and most people absolutely refuse to use it (likewise potential jurors who know about their powers are disallowed from sitting on a jury).

Over the years I’ve changed my outlook on prisons and people who have been in prison. Previously if I heard somebody was pronounced guilty of a crime and went t prison because of it I offered no protest. Now I give prisoners the benefit of the doubt because a huge majority of them are in prison for victimless crimes. When somebody gets thrown into prison their life is often destroyed as future employment because difficult, if not impossible. Without the prospect of obtaining work many former prisoners end up becoming repeat offenders because no legal means of survival is available to them. After being released from prison your slate should be considered clean as your punishment has been completed; instead our government continues the punishment for the entirety of many former prisoner’s lives. The people wrongfully arrested in New York have lost years of their life because they violated laws that weren’t even laws at the time. We live in a police state and the fact things like this happen prove it.

Well if I wasn’t on the terrorist watch list before I certainly am now:

Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.

These extremists, sometimes known as “sovereign citizens,” believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.

The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard.

As a sovereign individual who does not submit to the authority of the state I guess I’m the primary target. There is something that is in desperate need of being cleared up though. Sovereign citizen is a contradiction of terms. A sovereign is a supreme ruler while a citizen is a subject of a state. You can not be a supreme ruler and a subject at the same time. On the other hand a sovereign individual is a supreme ruler of an individual, him or herself. If you’re going to make us appear as a threat please get the terminology right at the very least.

And while the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) try to smear voluntaryists such as myself let me explain something. Most people who refer to themselves as sovereign citizens also abide by the non-aggression principle meaning they have a moral objection with initiating violence. I will not initiate an attack and will use violence only in the act of self-defense. Somehow this fact makes me dangerous according to the FBI.

“We are being inundated right now with requests for training from state and local law enforcement on sovereign-related matters,” said Casey Carty, an FBI supervisory special agent.

FBI agents said they do not have a tally of people who consider themselves “sovereign citizens.”

If any FBI agents are monitoring reading this blog let me inform you that I am a sovereign individual so you can just put me down on the little list you’re writing up. Please update your terminology and replace “sovereign citizen” with “sovereign individual” so you don’t look like completely idiots. Also go fuck yourselves. You don’t have to do those things in that order though.