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.

Virginia isn’t the only locality refusing to enforce the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a town in Massachusetts is also nullifying the clause:

A small town in Massachusetts says it is “opting out” of a federal law that allows the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial.

The city of Northampton on Thursday passed a strongly worded resolution (PDF) to protest provisions of the federal government’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which even President Barack Obama said he had “serious reservations” about signing.

“WHEREAS, the indefinite detention of any person without trial violates the 5th and 6th amendments of the Constitution of the United States, Article III of the Constitution of the United States, and the Posse Comitatus Act,” the resolution stated.

The document went to request that public agencies “uphold the Constitution… when requested or authorized to infringe upon those Constitutionally guaranteed rights by federal agencies acting under detention powers granted by the NDAA.”

This is the kind of spine more localities in the United States of America need to grow. Instead of bowing obediently to the demands of the tyrannical federal government, local bodies need to stop up and loudly say, “NO!” I sincerely hope that every town, county, and state tell the federal government where to shove it’s indefinite detainment clause. The Bill of Rights was written in an attempt to protect the American people from an overreaching federal government. While many give the Bill of Rights magical powers the truth is those amendments added to the Constitution that supposedly protect our rights are merely words, words that must be backed up with the courage to oppose any violation of them.

Obama has been pretty careful about the topic of gun control, a stance that has left some of his supporters less than impressed. The National Rifle Association (NRA) has been warning the people about a second Obama term without offering any real solution, Obama has been fulfilling his promise of working on gun control under the radar in the form of Fast and Furious. Fast and Furious has been a fiasco, one so severe Congress put a prohibition in the Department of Justice appropriations bill against using funds for another Fast and Furious-esque operation. As Uncle brought to our attention, Obama wants to strip that prohibition from the appropriations bill:

President Obama is using his budget to advance an anti-gun agenda just before the election. One particularly sneaky provision buried deep within his submission to Congress Monday would, if enacted, allow the mistakes of the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal to be repeated.

In November, the president signed the Justice Department appropriations bill, which included language from Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, prohibiting federal agencies from facilitating the transfer of an operable firearm to an individual known or suspected to be in a drug cartel, unless they monitor the weapon at all times.

Now Mr. Obama is proposing to remove that provision from the 2013 spending bill, thus making it legal to revive gun-walking operations in the future. The White House justification is merely that the prohibition is “not necessary.”

Emphasis mine. The prohibitions isn’t necessary? I think the very fact that Fast and Furious exists is enough proof that such a prohibition is necessary. Fast and Furious isn’t a hypothetical operation that has been whispered about in the halls of the Department of Justice, it is an actual operation that went down and cost lives.

Wanting to remove the prohibition from the appropriations bill demonstrates the desire of Obama to enact stronger gun control in this country. The same goes to every member of the legislature that agrees to the removal of the prohibition. Fast and Furious being about gun control isn’t an unsupported conspiracy theory, it’s an accusation backed by strong evidence.

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.

In an attempt to grant a monopoly on counterfeiting to the Federal Reserve the United States government has been working with printer manufacturers. This cooperation, better known as corporatism, has lead to certain printer manufacturers equipping prints to place tiny dots on every page printed in order to trace what printer any document came from. No publicly available list of printer manufacturers who were implementing this system was publicly available until now. Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we now know who these printer manufacturers are:

Canon
Brother
Casio
Hewlett-Packard
Konica
Minolta
Mita
Ricoh
Sharp
Xerox

Basically every major printer manufacturer. Still it’s nice to have a definitive list to reference.

Today is Presidents Day and in honor of the holiday I think we should all take a moment and reflect on what the President really is:

The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It’s not an inspiration; it’s a threat.

The presidency – by which I mean the executive State – is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete devotion and humble submission to its dictates, even while it steals the products of our labor and drives us into economic ruin. It centralizes all power unto itself, and crowds out all competing centers of power in society, including the church, the family, business, charity, and the community.

The presidency is nothing less than a dictator whom wields almost limitless power through the issuance of executive orders. If a president wishes to round up a bunch of people and toss them into concentration camps he must only issue the executive order. Is a citizen of the country giving the state headaches? No problem, just order his execution! What is a president to do with a country he doesn’t like? Go to war without even consulting Congress. Speaking of Congress, what is a president to do if they pass a law he doesn’t approve of? Ignore it.

We shouldn’t be celebrating the presidency, we should be condemning it. This country was founded on the ideas of personal liberty, an idea that has been entirely stomped on by every president that has taken office. Yes, even George Washington.

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.

Periodically I like to cruise sites like GovTrack, OpenCongress, and the Library of Congress THOMAS looking for interesting pieces of legislation. I found a true gem with HR 3784, the Gas Price Spike Act of 2012. What does this bill do? It places a tax on any profits made by oil companies that are beyond “reasonable.” That isn’t the best part though, what defines “reasonable” is whatever the newly established Reasonable Profits Board decides:

`(a) In General- In addition to any other tax imposed under this title, there is hereby imposed an excise tax on the sale in the United States of any crude oil, natural gas, or other taxable product a tax equal to the applicable percentage of the windfall profit on such sale.

`(b) Definitions- For purposes of this section–

`(1) TAXABLE PRODUCT- The term `taxable product’ means any fuel which is a product of crude oil or natural gas.

`(2) WINDFALL PROFIT- The term `windfall profit’ means, with respect to any sale, so much of the profit on such sale as exceeds a reasonable profit.

`(3) APPLICABLE PERCENTAGE- The term `applicable percentage’ means–

`(A) 50 percent to the extent that the profit on the sale exceeds 100 percent of the reasonable profit on the sale but does not exceed 102 percent of the reasonable profit on the sale,

`(B) 75 percent to the extent that the profit on the sale exceeds 102 percent of the reasonable profit on the sale but does not exceed 105 percent of the reasonable profit on the sale, and

`(C) 100 percent to the extent that the profit on the sale exceeds 105 percent of the reasonable profit on the sale.

`(4) REASONABLE PROFIT- The term `reasonable profit’ means the amount determined by the Reasonable Profits Board to be a reasonable profit on the sale.

Emphasis mine. Whatever this Reasonable Profits Board decides becomes the amount that is taxable meaning if they decided profits of $1,000 was “unreasonable” they could begin taxing oil companies that made profits exceeding $1,000. Glorious huh? They get to define any amount of profit as “reasonable” and tax accordingly. If this bill passes I would expect it to take no more than one year before this idea gets applied to other industries.

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.