Tag: law

The USAF doesn’t need God anymore

And the long slow decline into military irrelevance continues:

Members of the U.S. Air Force will no longer be required to say “so help me God” during their enlistment oath. A legal review of rules that required the phrase occurred after the American Humanist Association threatened to sue on behalf of an atheist airman. The unnamed airman at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada was denied re-enlistment Aug. 25 after crossing the phrase out of the oath.

It would be interesting to see the USA try to defend itself if Christians simply refuse to serve it any longer. Of course, allegiance to the state is rapidly disappearing as the connection between nation and government becomes increasingly tenuous.

A German knows what Germany is. The Scots, for all their fear of independence, know what Scotland is. What does “America” mean any longer? It’s certainly not “One Nation Under God” anymore.

But the USAF is on the verge of technological irrelevance anyhow. It won’t prioritize the one mission for which it is actually needed, infantry air support, and the combination of anti-aircraft lasers and unmanned drones will supplant its other missions.

Isn’t it amazing how many traditions that have been around for decades, if not centuries, are being belatedly discovered to have been unlawful all along?

Obama betrays the Constitution

What’s remarkable isn’t that Barack Hussein Obama is ignoring the U.S. Constitution and its limits on the powers of his office. What is remarkable is that the New York Times is calling him out on it:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris.

Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written….

But
for now the president seems grimly determined to practice what Mr.
Bush’s lawyers only preached. He is acting on the proposition that the
president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has unilateral
authority to declare war. In
taking this step, Mr. Obama is not only betraying the electoral
majorities who twice voted him into office on his promise to end
Bush-era abuses of executive authority. He is also betraying the
Constitution he swore to uphold.

ISIS in Iraq and Syria is not a problem. Immigrants in the USA are a problem. The complete lack of a southern border is a problem. The expanding credit demand gap and the outstanding debt to GDP ratio is a problem. The decline of Christendom is a problem. The rise of the new Caliphate will likely pose a serious problem for future generations, but there will be no future generation capable of fighting it if the West in general and the USA in particular refuses to provide it with a coherent opposition that is not riven by its sympathizers.

We are waiting for Martel.

It is an appallingly bad idea for Obama to attempt to drag a war-weary, divided nation into a war that has nothing to do with the national interest. It is such a bad idea that even the New York Times is capable of recognizing it.

A non-starter

A good idea doomed to failure by the rapacious US tax bureaucracy:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is slated to introduce legislation next week
that would revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone fighting or providing
support to terrorist groups working to attack the United States. Cruz said he is filing the Expatriate Terrorist Act in reaction to
the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It would
provide another level of protection to prevent foreign fighters from
re-entering the United States, he said.

Prediction: once the IRS realizes that this legislation would provide an cost-efficient means for expatriates to get rid of their US citizenship, it will become a non-starter. In fact, with the recent 400 percent increase in administrative fees, (it now costs about $2,500 to drop your citizenship even though it’s about a two-minute process) it would probably cost less to do it by simply donating to ISIS.

Government against the citizenry

Lest you be under the impression that the U.S. government’s job is to protect the interest of its citizenry, disabuse yourself of the notion:

A Texas catering business will pay the United States $26,400 for engaging in “citizenship-discrimination,” as part of a settlement with the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

Culinaire International unlawfully discriminated against employees based on their citizenship status, the Justice Department claimed, because it required non-citizen employees to provide extra proof of their right to work in the United States.

Culinaire has agreed to pay the United States $20,460 in civil penalties, receive training in anti-discrimination rules of the Immigration and Nationality Act, revise its work eligibility verification process, and create a $40,000 back pay fund for “potential economic victims.”

And this is the institution citizens are relying on to feed hungry Americans, heal sick Americans, educate young Americans, protect vulnerable Americans, defend Americans against foreign invasion, and provide a healthy American economy?

Why would you expect them to do so they don’t even take the side of actual American citizens?

Any faith you might still have in the U.S. government is very sadly, and badly, misplaced.

US women have more legal rights than men

Judgy Bitch punctures an equality myth by simply referring to the law:

I’ve had an opportunity lately to speak to a lot of feminists about why so many young women are rejecting feminism, and one theme that has come up repeatedly is that feminism is interested in equal rights for everyone. I have yet to meet a single feminist who was not completely astonished to discover that not only do women have equal rights to men, they actually have more rights than men. Most feminists will backpedal when confronted with that reality and try to justify why they are deserving of more rights than men, but the stark fact remains that in 2014, women do indeed have more rights than men. Here are five legally enshrined rights that women have and men do not:

1. Women have the right to genital integrity

Regardless of how you personally feel about the practice of circumcision (I personally find it barbaric, cruel and completely unjustifiable), the legal fact is that infant girls are protected against any genital cutting of any kind and infant boys are not.  Many feminists will argue that female genital mutilation (FGM) is a magnitude of brutality beyond male genital mutilation and while that may be true, I do not find the “it’s only a little bit brutal” argument to be very compelling. It’s like saying cutting off a toe is okay because cutting off a foot is much worse. Ultimately, the argument is immaterial to the fact that women have the legal right to be protected from having their body parts sliced off. Men do not

She’s taking the same approach I did to proving that religion doesn’t cause war. The rhetorically minded think that by ceaselessly yapping and conjuring up spurious logics, they can prove the unprovable. They can’t. A little dialectic bomb always suffices to blow away the obscuring fortress of words that they’ve woven, and with which they’ve confused the less insightful. 

The fact, the undeniable fact, is that if women wish to claim they support equality, they need to remove these legal rights granted to women and not granted to men. And there are considerably more. Just to give one more example, women are have the right of due process when accused of rape. Men on college campuses do not, a right that some young men are fighting for even now.

Judgy Bitch has demonstrated the facts. To be pro-equality, you must be anti-feminist, because feminism is observably anti-legal equality.

It’s not a fallacy when it’s real

A former advocate of assisted suicide warns of the consequences:

Legalising assisted suicide is a slippery slope toward widespread killing of the sick, MPs and peers were told yesterday. A former euthanasia supporter warned of a surge in deaths if Parliament allowed doctors to give deadly drugs to their patients. ‘Don’t do it Britain,’ said Theo Boer, a veteran European watchdog in assisted suicide cases. ‘Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not likely ever to go back in again.’

His native Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002, has seen deaths double in just six years and this year’s total may reach a record 6,000…. Professor Boer, who is an academic in the field of ethics, had argued seven years ago that a ‘good euthanasia law’ would produce relatively low numbers of deaths. But, speaking in a personal capacity yesterday, he said he now believed that the very existence of a euthanasia law turns assisted suicide from a last resort into a normal procedure. A ‘slippery slope’ for assisted dying in Britain would mean that euthanasia would follow the same path as abortion, which was legalised in 1967. There are now nearly 200,000 terminations a year.

Note that in Holland, “assisted suicide” rapidly transformed into “doctors killing infants”. Assisted suicide is for cowards anyhow; it is only sought by those who don’t have the courage or the decency to kill themselves, but want to offload the moral burden onto someone else. Not that I don’t understand those who don’t wish to suffer through a lingering and painful death. If I ever had a terminal disease, I’d probably want to end it quickly myself, in a room full of my enemies, surrounded by fifty pounds of high explosive.

But I have a simple and just solution. Just make advocating assisted suicide a capital crime punishable by hanging. That way there is no risk of a slippery slope leading to the murder of innocent children and cowards like that old fraud Terry Pratchett will obtain the death at someone else’s hands they are seeking.

Apparently Mr. Hitler just needed better marketing. Had he simply utilized the term “Unterstütztfreitod” instead of “Endlösung” and been careful to get signatures from each individual boarding a train, he would be a modern hero.

The Japan That Can Invade

So much for the Japanese Peace Constitution. It lasted 72 years, from 1947 to 2014.

On July 1, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe announced that for the first time since the end of World War II, Japan would now be able to fight wars on foreign soil.

In the past, Japan’s military has been reserved strictly for defence – hence its official title, the Self Defence Force (SDF). But thanks to this new reinterpretation of the constitution, the only thing that is necessary for military mobilisation is for one of Japan’s allies to be “attacked”. This is a scary prospect if we consider that Japan’s biggest ally is the US (and when we consider how many enemies the US has made over the past few years).

Perhaps the pros and cons of re-militarisation is a topic worth discussing. Unfortunately for the people of Japan, and of the East Asian region, this discussion has never occurred, as Abe’s administration is making the decision for them.

In response, there has been an unprecedented amount of opposition. Protests are happening every other day, and seem to only be growing in size and intensity.

Some Euro-American press outlets have grazed the surface of this phenomenon, but they seem to be missing the gravity of the situation. Perhaps because reporters are unable to see the Japanese as anything but docile and passive, or because they are attempting to portray the protesters in a “respectable” light, they have overlooked the anger and confusion that is beginning to grip Japan.

Notice how useless constitutions are when they are permitted to be reinterpreted by judges and politicians. It is but a trivial effort to manufacture an emanation or identify a penumbra, or redefine black as white. This would appear to be a preparation for the second War of the Suns, the eventual renewal of hostilities between China and Japan.

What we have here is an opportunity

The politically correct brigade has gotten the USPTO to remove trademark protection from the Washington Redskins for the second time:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has canceled six federal trademark registrations for the name of the Washington Redskins, ruling that the name is “disparaging to Native Americans” and thus cannot be trademarked under federal law that prohibits the protection of offensive or disparaging language.

The U.S. PTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board issued a ruling in the case, brought against the team by plaintiff Amanda Blackhorse, Wednesday morning.

“We decide, based on the evidence properly before us, that these registrations must be cancelled because they were disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered,” the board wrote in its opinion, which is here. A brief explanation of how the Board reached its decision is here.

Setting aside the possibility that this decision will, like the 1992 case, be overturned, it is apparent that the anti-Redskins activists, most of whom appear to be in the media, are counting on Daniel Snyder to behave like the greedy monopolist of their fantasies.

The thing is, the value of Redskins-branded merchandise is relatively trivial compared to the overall value of the teams. Teams only make about $5 million per year from their merchandising and there is already a considerable amount of knockoffs available. For example, I once saw a guy lifting at a gym in Italy wearing a Minnesota Vikings shirt. The only sign that it was a knockoff was that the Vikings running back featured on the shirt was #33, and I knew the Vikes have never had a notable running back with that number.

But there is a very real potential benefit to Snyder and the Redskins in the loss of the trademark, because an increase in the production and distribution of Redskins merchandise could lead to the Redskins truly becoming America’s Team in a way that the Dallas Cowboys are not. And with or without the Redskins trademark, Redskins gear can’t be sold as Official NFL gear by anyone anyhow. But whether the PTO board’s decision stands or not, I think the loss of the trademark is very unlikely to create any significant pressure on Snyder to change the team name, despite the media’s bizarre portrayal of the decision as “a landmark”.

Instapundit goes after the IRS

It is remarkable how quickly the feared agency began acting like frightened gangsters once they found themselves in the investigative crosshairs:

When charges came out that the IRS targeted Tea Party groups for harassment, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto started calling Obama “President Asterisk.” His point was that this illicit assistance tainted the election, the way an athlete’s use of illegal performance-enhancers results in an asterisk on any records he sets.

Now it may be time for another asterisk. As Congress investigates the IRS chicanery, the IRS has responded to a request for emails to and from Lois Lerner, who spearheaded the Tea Party harassment, by saying, basically, that the dog ate its homework. Or, rather, the IRS claims, somewhat dubiously, that “a hard drive crash” on Lerner’s computer led to the loss of emails to outside entities “such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.” You know, the very people she’s accused of coordinating her harassment with….

Targeting Americans is unforgivable; covering it up is worse, and if the
IRS has made it impossible to target the individuals responsible, then
the IRS as a whole should pay the price.

I find it very, very difficult to believe that the “missing emails” defense is going to hold up. Too many people have suffered at the IRS hands for too long for Congress to give Lerner and company a pass.

Legalized fraud

Overturning centuries of English Common Law, false representation is now legal in the United States.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) won dismissal of a suit over $450 million in residential mortgage-backed securities, with a New York judge saying that the firms that bought the bonds should have done more research beforehand.

State Supreme Court Justice Charles Ramos dismissed the claims against Goldman Sachs today, saying the investors only reviewed data presented in offering documents for the securities and never asked to review files for the underlying loans.

“The true nature of the risk being assumed could, admittedly, have been ascertained from reviewing these loan files and plaintiffs never asked for them,” Ramos wrote.

In other words, it’s perfectly legal to present someone with a fraudulent document claiming to be selling them a pig in the poke, because if they don’t actually look in the sack to see that there is a dead rat, and not a live pig in there, it’s their own fault. This is another sign of the continued collapse of the rule of law in the USA.

Congratulations, Justice Ramos. You may have just destroyed the securitization market. Who in their right minds will ever purchase a loan security again? If you were going to review each and every loan and ascertain the risks involved, you would already be a mortgage bank.

Fortunately for Goldman Sachs, there should be enough con artists out there for the apex con artist to continue preying upon. But what sane and honest individual would ever choose to do business with them in light of their behavior here? And can you imagine if this standard were applied across the board? No one would ever dare to buy something in a box or order anything off the Internet ever again.