Tag: law

Obama’s murderous legacy

Even black left-liberals are troubled by what they realize is likely the chief legacy of Barack Obama’s term of misrule:

Let us grant that the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki, said to be the mastermind behind the foiled underwear bomb plot, should not much trouble us. But surely the killing of his 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and the secrecy around both acts, should.

I like to think that the junior Awlaki’s (reportedly accidental) death weighs heavy on the president’s conscience. In fact that weight does nothing to change the net result — from this point forward the presidency means the right to unilaterally declare American citizens to be American enemies, and then kill them.

It seems America’s liberals and conservatives – both of whom are largely misnamed – share a common inability to grasp the obvious consequences of the actions of the politicians they support. Ta-Nehesi Coates is a rare exception to this, as he clearly sees how the precedent set by the Obama administration can easily be used against them.

The “creeper” debacle was usefully informative in this regard. John Scalzi and his fans illustrated they simply could not recognize that the ability to socially ostracize a “creep” necessarily entails the ability to ostracize any other behavior-based group, and in most cases, any identity-based group as well. In precisely the same manner, most Democrats and many Republicans presently fail to grasp that the ability to legally assassinate a Muslim who is an American citizen on the sole basis of being a President-declared enemy necessarily entails the ability to legally assassinate any American citizen, for any reason, without oversight.

No doubt everyone will belatedly begin to realize this should a future president begin exercising his power to legally assassinate SWPLs. Or church-goers. Or Jews.

This isn’t a Democrat-Republican issue, it is a totalitarian-libertarian one. Coates is astute enough to understand that even if Obama is extremely unlikely to decide to assassinate him, he might not be so fortunate with the next president. Or the one after that. The murderous precedent has been set, and it is the imperial power of the presidency to unilaterally declare death sentences that will be the chief legacy of Barack Obama.

The state of the kleptocracy

Barry Ritholtz provides a useful summary of the crimes committed by the financial sector, complete with links and sources:

Laundering money for drug cartels. See this, this, this and this (indeed, drug dealers kept the banking system afloat during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis)

Laundering money for terrorists

Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments.

Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide.

Charging “storage fees” to store gold bullion … without even buying or storing any gold . And raiding allocated gold accounts

Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them.

If it is not eminently clear that there is no rule of law whatsoever in the USA, this should suffice to prove it. It should come as no surprise that financial crime and corruption are on the upswing, as it has become increasingly obvious, even to those who don’t pay any attention to the financial sector, that the entire system is a criminal enterprise run by short-sighted financial gangsters. However, since they’re fast running out of other people’s cows to milk, as exhibited by the fact that less than one-third of the people who owe $1 trillion in school loans are repaying anything, the whole structure appears to be rapidly approaching collapse.

Some say it will end in fire (inflation), others in ice (deflation). But either way, it will end.

In the meantime, be sure to start a corporation and hire yourself before committing any crimes. Then fire yourself, and tell the police that you are no longer with the company when they come to investigate. They will then turn the matter over to the appropriate regulatory agency, which will fine the corporation about five percent of the profit you made from your illegal acts. This is what passes for criminal justice in America circa 2012.

WND column

Conservatives and Forced Consumption

It is said that hope springs eternal in the human breast. This is certainly true when it comes to Republicans, as no sooner had Chief Justice Roberts exploded all of the expectations that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would be overturned due to the mandate that requires Americans to make certain purchases or face a financial penalty than various Republican commentators were attempting to manufacture a silver lining from the unadulterated equine ejectus of Roberts’ opinion.

Supreme Court stimulus

Or how Judge Roberts fixed the housing market. I think one of the more interesting aspects of the surprise decision by the Supreme Court to declare forced consumption constitutional by virtue of the federal taxing power is its potential use as a device for economic intervention. Since savings is the bane of the neo-Keynesians, the newfound ability of the federal government to dictate consumption means that there need never again be a savings glut, a demand gap, or what Paul Krugman decries as insufficient inflation.

For example, since there is presently insufficient demand in the housing market, the Congress can address this by simply passing a law requiring everyone with an annual income of more than $75,000 who does not presently have a mortgage to purchase a house with a price of at least $250,000 or face paying a tax of $15,000. Because the annual cost of the mortgage payments would only come to around $11,500 at current low interest rates, most people would choose to purchase a house rather than pay the tax, especially since there would be an implied “Roberts Put” providing a reasonable expectation of decent profits on the forced investment. Such a law would be perfectly constitutional, as per the court’s recent decision, and it would have an undeniably inflationary effect on home prices, bank assets, and national wealth while reducing those pernicious savings rates and ending debt-deflation in the household sector.

Surely permanent economic prosperity is nigh!

Supreme Court: Obamacare is constitutional

This is the first Scotusblog take: “So the mandate is constitutional. Chief Justice Roberts joins the left of the Court…. The bottom line: the entire ACA is upheld, with the exception that the federal government’s power to terminate states’ Medicaid funds is narrowly read.”

People are still reading the opinion, but it would appear that the Court did its usual trick of admitting that the law is unconstitutional on its face, but finding a way of allowing it to come into force anyhow. And the support of the Bush-appointed Roberts for Obamacare demonstrates the complete absurdity of appealing to the Supreme Court to justify voting for Republican presidents. After nearly 40 years of this, you’d think Charlie Brown would realize that Lucy is never going to hold the football no matter what she says.

UPDATE: Bingo. “The Court holds that the mandate violates the Commerce Clause, but that doesn’t matter b/c there are five votes for the mandate to be constitutional under the taxing power.”

UPDATE 2: In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn’t comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding…. to answer a common question, the whole ACA is constitutional, so the provision requiring insurers to cover young adults until they are 26 survives as well.

MMR caused this case of autism

Ever notice that science fetishists love to point to the courts when it suits them, then quickly reverse course and point out that that the law isn’t science when it doesn’t?

At nine months old, Valentino Bocca was as bright as a button. In a favourite family photo, taken by his father, the baby boy wriggles in his mother’s arms and laughs for the camera. His parents look at the precious picture often these days. It is a reminder of their only son before they took him on a sunny morning to the local public health clinic for a routine childhood vaccination.

Valentino was never the same child after the jab in his arm. He developed autism and, in a landmark judgment, a judge has ruled that his devastating disability was provoked by the inoculation against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR).
The case of Valentino Bocca age nine from Rimini Italy has reignited the debate over a possible link between the MMR and autism after a judge ruled his disability was provoked by the jab.

The judgment in a provincial Italian court challenges the settled view of the majority of the medical profession — and could have profound implications in Britain and across the world. Valentino’s parents, Antonella, 44, and Maurizio, 43, have been awarded £140,000, to be paid by Italy’s Ministry of Health and they plan a civil action against the Italian government that may get them £800,000 more…. The judge’s view has since been endorsed by Italy’s High Court of Law (the equivalent of our Supreme Court) which ruled that the Italian government must pay compensation to children damaged by any jabs given under the Ministry of Health auspices — even if they are not compulsory ones.

The problem faced by the pro-vaccine camp is twofold. First, what passes for the science on this issue is dreadful and really should not be described as science. The same scientific community that didn’t hesitate to give syphilis to black men and performed experiments on Jewish concentration camp internees is suddenly claiming that it would be terribly unethical to allow children to remain unvaccinated or even push back the vaccine schedule a few months in order to gather meaningful scientific evidence on the safety of vaccines and the vaccine schedule. Statistical surveys of populations are not proper science, and furthermore, have absolutely nothing to do with whether one individual will be negatively affected by a vaccine or not.

The constant bleating that “no scientific evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism” has been found is so irrelevant and misleading as to be dishonest. I doubt there is any scientific evidence between a punch in the nose and death either, but there is no question that people have been killed by a single punch before because people have seen it happen. For some reason, the process of simple observation that everyone believes is perfectly reliable when one person punches another in the face suddenly becomes not only unreliable, but downright anti-scientific when one person injects various foreign substances into a child. I have personally witnessed an infant scream and immediately collapse into unconsciousness when given a shot, and I absolutely defy any moronic scientist to claim it was not the result of the vaccine being administered. Fortunately, there were no ill effects apparent after the infant regained consciousness, but after witnessing that, I would no sooner permit any child of mine to be vaccinated at such a young age than I would permit someone to hit me in the head with a hammer… no matter how many statistical surveys are presented by scientists claiming that there is no scientific evidence showing any link between being hit in the head with a hammer and autism.

Second, the legal standard is “beyond a reasonable degree of doubt”. And it is well beyond a reasonable degree of doubt that certain vaccines have caused autism in some children. Very few vaccine skeptics are saying that no children can be vaccinated against anything or that all vaccines are intrinsically evil – although the whole fetal tissue thing on which some vaccines are based is, quite clearly, evil on its face – but most parents are not complete idiots incapable of recognizing when their normal child suddenly loses speech and motor abilities that it previously possessed, or linking it to probable causes. In fact, the awareness that vaccines are, beyond any reasonable degree of doubt, responsible for autism and other damage is precisely why Congress passed a law removing vaccine makers and administrators from legal liability.

It is far beyond the current state of biological science to claim one particular administration of a vaccine did not cause one specific case of autism and any honest scientist would admit it. Can you imagine if other culpable parties began to try defending themselves using the “no scientific link” defense? Science simply doesn’t work that way, especially “science” that is nothing more than statistical analysis, and those who attempt to appeal to science in such fashion are guilty of dishonesty, empty propaganda, and the abuse of science.

Anyhow, this is a welcome outcome and I hope that the threat of being financially ruined by their victims will force Big Pharma to spend more effort in improving the safety of their products than in lobbying the various governments to mandate more vaccines and providing them with additional protection from liability. Science is not the law, nor should it ever be confused for it. We don’t need scientists to determine if a specific vaccine has harmed a specific individual any more than we need them to determine if a specific individual has robbed a specific bank, in fact, scientists should not be involved in the legal discussion at all given their shoddy faux-science and oft-demonstrated biases on the matter.

Egyptian spring!

Fortunately, Facebook and other social media are far more powerful than mere militaries. Right?

Egypt’s highest court declared the parliament invalid Thursday, and the country’s interim military rulers promptly declared full legislative authority, triggering a new level of chaos and confusion in the country’s leadership. The Supreme Constitutional Court found that all articles making up the law that regulated parliamentary elections are invalid, said Showee Elsayed, a constitutional lawyer.

It’s not as if the USA is in a position to throw any stones here. The new Egyptian military government is no less illegitimate than Mr. Soetoro. Regardless of whether they decided it rightly or wrongly, at least Egypt’s Supreme Court is willing to consider the question of whether the elected officials are valid or not.

Inequality before the law

As with homogamy, one of the real purposes behind eliminating the statute of limitations for child abuse has nothing to do with the purported ones, as it is intended to specifically target and damage the Church.

While the first criminal trial of a Roman Catholic church official accused of covering up child sexual abuse has drawn national attention to Philadelphia, the church has been quietly engaged in equally consequential battles over abuse, not in courtrooms but in state legislatures around the country.

The fights concern proposals to loosen statutes of limitations, which impose deadlines on when victims can bring civil suits or prosecutors can press charges. These time limits, set state by state, have held down the number of criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits against all kinds of people accused of child abuse — not just clergy members, but also teachers, youth counselors and family members accused of incest.

Victims and their advocates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York are pushing legislators to lengthen the limits or abolish them altogether, and to open temporary “windows” during which victims can file lawsuits no matter how long after the alleged abuse occurred….

In New York, the Catholic bishops said they would support a modest increase in the age of victims in criminal or civil cases, to 28. But their lobbying, along with that of ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders, has so far halted proposals that would allow a one-year window for civil suits for abuses from the past. The bishops say the provision unfairly targets the church because public schools, the site of much abuse, and municipalities have fought successfully to be exempted.

Now, I don’t have any problem with making it easier for genuine victims of child abuse to confront those who victimized them and receive reparations, but it is reprehensible to do so on the basis of the employer of the criminally culpable individual. This is a gross violation of the increasingly nonexistent concept of equality before the law; why should teachers and government employees be provided a free pass on molesting children?

It would appear this is because the state governments don’t want to be held financially responsible for the actions of their employees, and while they can often get away with excusing criminal behavior under the guise of it being committed in the exercise of the state employee’s duties, it’s not presently credible to claim that anyone’s occupational duties require the commission of sexual abuse. So, the Church is expected to pay for the misdeeds of its priests, but the state intends to exempt itself from paying for the misdeeds of its teachers and other employees.

The potential problem in this is that if the state governments are permitted to get away with this two-tiered law concerning past crimes, there is no reason they cannot extend it to cover present ones as well. After all, the logic is identical, as exempting teachers and state employees from responsibility for the sexual abuse of children would also reduce the financial liability of the state and local governments.

WND column

De Facto Marriage

It is no secret that marriage has been on the decline in the United States even as illegitimacy is on the rise. The problem is obvious: No-fault divorce combined with abusive child support and post-marital support laws has increased the incentive for women to end marriages while simultaneously driving up the cost of ending them to men. As economics would predict, providing incentives for ending marriages to women has increased the percentage of women ending them, while increasing the potential cost of marriage has decreased the number of men willing to take the risk. As is the case with so many government actions, the laws intended to revise marriage, beginning with the California Family Law Act of 1969, were predicated on static human behavior and failed to take into account their own influence on how men and women would subsequently behave

No-Limit, No-Case Nigga

Upon perusing the evidence, Alan Dershowitz concludes Trayvon Martin already received his due justice:

A medical report by George Zimmerman’s doctor has disclosed that Zimmerman had a fractured nose, two black eyes, two lacerations on the back of his head and a back injury on the day after the fatal shooting. Moreover, the New York Times has reported that traces of marijuana were found in Trayvon Martin’s body and that Martin’s father initially said that the voice crying for help was not that of his son. It is also been reported that a bruise was found on Martin’s ring finger that would be consistent with Martin having punched Zimmerman. No other wounds, aside of course from the fatal bullet hole in the front of Martin’s body, were found.

If this evidence turns out to be valid, the prosecutor will have no choice but to drop the second-degree murder charge against Zimmerman — if she wants to act ethically, lawfully and professionally.

This is hardly a surprise. I haven’t written much about this since I didn’t see any reason to doubt, from the beginning, that given a choice between a white guy who wasn’t a white guy doing Neighborhood Watch in a relatively high crime neighborhood and an innocent Skittles-bearing African child who referred to himself as “NO_LIMIT_NIGGA”, the core situation was anything more than a simple matter of a predatory African attacking someone. The only genuinely unusual thing about it is that in the interests of self-preservation, most predatory Africans have the good sense to limit their attacks to Europeans, Hispanics, and other Africans who are incapable of self-defense. Like all predators who wish to survive, they focus on the sick and the weak. The No-Limit Nigga didn’t abide by those sensible limits of predation and that is why his case, such as it is, has been presented post-mortem.

The African community in America, abetted by the mainstream media, has completely missed a potentially important teachable moment. Instead of attempting to media-lynch a decent Hispanic man who was merely attempting to protect his neighborhood, they would have done much better to teach their young men that in a nation with millions of concealed-carry permit holders, and millions more who carry without bothering with permits, it is not merely criminal, but criminally stupid, to attack even the most apparently indefensible individual. Instead, the well-publicized violence of the idiotic “Justice for Trayvon” attacks has only ensured that even more people will be carrying weapons and they will show even less hesitation about using them when attacked in the future.

In fact, the one thing I did find surprising about Zimmerman is that he only shot Martin once. That alone should have sufficed to prove that he had no intention of killing Martin. I was always taught to fire an automatic three times, starting low and progressing upwards with the muzzle rise, which technique I will confess did not render me popular on the few occasions I played paintball.