Tag: law

Inventing executive powers

The Obama administration exposes its fascist side:

The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy. That assertion was revealed — perhaps inadvertently — by the department in its response to a McClatchy request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo.

It’s amazing how even the simple act of obtaining a warrant is too much work for the executive branch to bother with anymore. Can there be any doubt that they expect to eventually discover the power to try and sentence “criminals” without any any formal legal process or court oversight?

One also notes that this appears to be a rather belated discovery of this executive power, considering that international telephone calls weren’t just invented yesterday.

Dynamic government, mutating law

It’s ultimately a fool’s game to put any trust in a government program because the law, especially when created and enforced by an interventionist government, is necessarily dynamic. That means that you can’t count on the rules which presently influence your decisions remaining static since the rulemakers will change them any time they believe it will benefit them to do so:

People’s retirement savings are a convenient source of revenue for governments that don’t want to reduce spending or make privatizations. As most pension schemes in Europe are organised by the state, European ministers of finance have a facilitated access to the savings accumulated there, and it is only logical that they try to get a hold of this money for their own ends. In recent weeks I have noted five such attempts: Three situations concern private personal savings; two others refer to national funds.

The most striking example is Hungary, where last month the government made the citizens an offer they could not refuse. They could either remit their individual retirement savings to the state, or lose the right to the basic state pension (but still have an obligation to pay contributions for it). In this extortionate way, the government wants to gain control over $14bn of individual retirement savings.

The Bulgarian government has come up with a similar idea. $300m of private early retirement savings was supposed to be transferred to the state pension scheme. The government gave way after trade unions protested and finally only about 20% of the original plans were implemented.

A slightly less drastic situation is developing in Poland. The government wants to transfer of 1/3 of future contributions from individual retirement accounts to the state-run social security system. Since this system does not back its liabilities with stocks or even bonds, the money taken away from the savers will go directly to the state treasury and savers will lose about $2.3bn a year. The Polish government is more generous than the Hungarian one, but only because it wants to seize just 1/3 of the future savings and also allows the citizens to keep the money accumulated so far.

The fourth example is Ireland. In 2001, the National Pension Reserve Fund was brought into existence for the purpose of supporting pensions of the Irish people in the years 2025-2050. The scheme was also supposed to provide for the pensions of some public sector employees (mainly university staff). However, in March 2009, the Irish government earmarked €4bn from this fund for rescuing banks. In November 2010, the remaining savings of €2.5bn was seized to support the bailout of the rest of the country.

The final example is France. In November, the French parliament decided to earmark €33bn from the national reserve pension fund FRR to reduce the short-term pension scheme deficit. In this way, the retirement savings intended for the years 2020-2040 will be used earlier, that is in the years 2011-2024, and the government will spend the saved up resources on other purposes.

How many more places does this have to happen before Americans begin to realize that the same thing is absolutely going to happen with their local, state, and federal pensions, as well as their entitlement programs. The fact that government officials often refer to pensions and entitlements as “sacred obligations” doesn’t mean that they won’t eliminate the payouts or grab the funds, in fact, the need to place a legally meaningless adjective in front of the noun underlines the fact that they do not consider the legal obligations to bind them in any way.

Dogs are not people

Tucker Carlson goes flying wildly off the rails:

“I’m a Christian, I’ve made mistakes myself, I believe fervently in second chances,” Carlson said. “But Michael Vick killed dogs, and he did in a heartless and cruel way. And I think, personally, he should’ve been executed for that. He wasn’t, but the idea that the President of the United States would be getting behind someone who murdered dogs?”

Killing dogs is not called “homicide” for a reason. It’s not murder anymore than killing a cow for its beef is murder. Now, I love dogs considerably more than most people do – Spacebunny laughs at how I carry the Viszla puppy around the house with me and he watched the entire Vikings game on my lap – but I didn’t even think Vick merited the legal punishment he received.

(That being said, Vick probably needed the slap to the head that the bankruptcy and jail sentence provided him.)

Now, I would no sooner want to be around a person who mistreats a dog than one who is prone to defecating in public. But if Vick deserves execution for killing his own dogs, then the people at the Humane Society are clearly worse than the Nazis and Soviets combined. And should the police investigate every suspicious canine death? Tucker clearly needs to take control his emotions on the subject; he is normally sharper than this.

Living on sufferance

And at the will of your own government. Nat Hentoff rightly decries the federal government’s assertion of its Constitutional license to freely and legally murder American citizens:

On Dec. 7, the case before U.S. District Court Judge John Bates in Washington was described by him as presenting “stark and perplexing questions.” Can the president, the judge continued, “order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization?”

What did Judge Bates decide? He dismissed the case!

Thereby he greatly pleased the defendants: “Barack Obama, in his official capacity as President of the United States; Robert Gates, in his official capacity as Secretary of Defense; and Leon Panetta, in his official capacity as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Now, MPAI is no secret. But I am increasingly convinced that so long as the mainstream media uniformly pushed the idea that it was necessary for national security or good for the economy, it would be possible to sell the American people on anything from gassing Jews to gang-raping schoolchildren.

And for a judge to declare that it is a purely political matter – not a Constitutional one – for the Executive branch to unilaterally decide to execute an American citizen without so much as an arrest, let alone a trial, means that the Constitution, especially the Fifth Amendment which declares that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, is de facto defunct. And liberals, how can sodomy, homogamy and abortion possibly be considered Constitutional rights when not being murdered by the federal government without due process of law isn’t?

I guess they had better hope Americans never elect a president who really dislikes gays or women who murder unborn children. Or anything else, for that matter. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law… with due regard for the man giving orders to the guy controlling the Hellfire-armed Predator circling over your house.

When society is silent

Vigilantes have little choice but to act if they are to do anything other than accept what they deem unacceptable:

An enraged father who disapproved of his daughter’s older boyfriend went to his home and castrated him with a bread knife…. He told police: “I received a phone call anonymously that my daughter was involved with a guy 40 years older than her. You said you couldn’t stop him – so I did.

Those who would condemn his actions as the behavior of a prehistoric father should probably keep in mind that the actions of the overly affectionate Prof. Epstein are the behavior of a post-modern one. If the law is not reasonable, the behavior of those who reject it often will not be either. And neither “the law” nor “the police” are some sort of state deity possessing magical power to dictate human behavior. Their ability to exert control over human behavior is entirely retroactive, so they can do nothing to stop one who has determined that the likely punishment is not as bad as permitting the status quo to remain. This is why the elimination of social stigma in favor of legal criminalization has been so disastrous for civilization.

Of course, one does have to wonder why the young woman would have been so attracted to a man 40 years older as well as why Herr Siefert was inspired to respond in so drastic a manner. It is not impossible to imagine that the pre-modern and the post-modern father have more in common than might ordinarily be supposed.

The Wikileaks rape-criers

In Male Fide posts the pictures and identities of Julian Assange’s two accusers, Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén.

A few people have sent me the home addresses and phone numbers of Julian Assange’s lying rape accusers. My traffic has ballooned from Googlers seeking info and pictures of Anna Ardin and Sofia Wilén in the past 48 hours, and my posts are being linked all over the place from sites as diverse as Indymedia and Democratic Underground to Pajamas Media and Stormfront….

These two women are accessories to a great evil, an evil that will continue to perpetuate unless someone stands up and does something. They are arguably evil themselves for trying to destroy a man’s life over their feeeeelings. If there’s a part of me that would feel bad for releasing the info, there’s another part of me that would feel bad for not using my power to fight this evil when I am uniquely positioned to do so.

So, guilt or not, I’m posting the info.

I don’t see why Ferdinand should feel any guilt over making available information that should be available given the criminal accusations. Anyone who accuses someone of rape should be considered a public figure in precisely the same manner that the accused rapist is. Crime is a matter of public record, so if you are not willing to go public when pressing charges you should not be permitted to participate in the judicial system. It is a fundamental aspect of justice that it not be hidden in any way. This is why it is important that women who claim to have been raped are not permitted to hide behind the so-called “rape shield” laws because it is readily apparent they find it far too easy to use it to get away with making false criminal accusations without being held accountable for them in any way.

And since female activists have successfully lobbied to impose some form of restriction of public information regarding activity within the judicial systems of many countries, they leave the public with no choice but to identify secret accusers outside the justice system in order to prevent miscarriages of justice from taking place within it.