The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a police officer who opened fire on a woman from a distance while she stood on her property, claiming he feared for his safety.
The post Supreme Court Rules Cops Can Kill Non-Threatening People As Long As They Say They Were Scared appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Truth be known,every one of these people has a right to keep and bear arms and if the government was doing its job it would honor and protect that. (Supreme Court website photo)
News of a gun-related Supreme Court opinion from last month is making the rounds via emails and forums with gun owners making breathless assumptions about the scope and significance of the decision. The case is Class v. United States, in which “A federal grand jury indicted petitioner, Rodney Class, for possessing firearms in his locked jeep, which was parked on the grounds of the United States Capitol in Washington, D. C.”
The way the decision is being presented can lead to the assumption that the case is won, victory is complete and gun owners can now ignore such statutes.
“Rod Class Just WON His Supreme Court Case (Federal District Court Gun Case was Richard W. Roberts who decided to ‘retire’ after his frustrating time presiding over Rod’s Gun Case),” a typical summation declares. There are some significant concerns raised in that brief assertion.
First, Justice Roberts has been on “inactive senior status” on the DC District Court since Marc h, 2016, “citing unspecified health issues.” He has since been battling sexual assault allegations.
Second, let’s look at the legal question SCOTUS actually considered:
“Does a guilty plea bar a criminal defendant from later appealing his conviction on the ground that the statute of conviction violates the Constitution?”
It concluded 6 -3 “a guilty plea by itself does not bar that appeal,” with Thomas, Kennedy and Alito dissenting. The order specifically states:
“[W]e hold that Rodney Class may pursue his constitutional claims on direct appeal. The contrary judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
That’s it.
This is not an end. This is a continuation.
Admittedly, pulling threads on Mr. Class and his legal theories can lead down many divergent paths, some with unequivocal detractors and others with supporters passionately behind him. Going down them and taking “sides” is not the purpose of this piece, which is merely to emphasize what the Supreme Court actually said.
Me, I’m on the “shall not be infringed” side, and pretty much think anyone not threatening others with a gun should have never been arrested in the first place, let alone prosecuted.
We interested gun owners can be excused in many cases for making assumptions and coming to hopeful conclusions. Most of us aren’t lawyers. I’m not, and don’t claim any particular legal acumen or insight aside from being able to read. So we owe it to ourselves — and especially to those we hope to inform — to do some basic fact-checking before passing information on as Gospel.
You can find out more about the case on SCOTUSblog and via a Google “News” search.
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David Codrea’s opinions are his own. See “Who speaks for Oath Keepers?”
The post Class ‘Victory’ Not the End of Gun Owner’s Case appeared first on Oath Keepers.
The Supreme court has repeatedly affirmed that American police have zero constitutional duty to protect anyone and the way they reacted to the Parkland shooting proves it.
The post Supreme Court Has Affirmed Cops Have No Duty to Protect Citizens and Parkland Proves It appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
An LA County psychologist who thinks President Trump’s tax bill stinks to high heaven, compared himself to Jesus after admitting he delivered a gift-wrapped box of horseshit as a Christmas present to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Robby Strong told AL.com he dropped off the box of horse manure at Mnuchin’s house as an “act of political theater” to hammer home the point that “Republicans have done nothing for the American worker.”
Boldly taking the Christ-analogy to a place it has never gone before, Strong told SoCal radio station 89.3 KPCC that "what I did, I would like to compare to what Jesus did when he went into the temple and overturned the tables of the money-changers, who were exploiting the people financially in the name of religion."
“In the long run, if we don’t do stuff like this, what are we going to have left?” Robby told KPCC. “I feel like that’s what the GOP has done to the American people,” added the man who, bizarrely, is a psychologist with the LA Department of Mental Health.
Things start to make much more sense, however, once we learn that Strong claims he was an organizer for the Occupy LA movement; predictably he sides with critics of the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul who say it favors corporations and the wealthy, CBS Los Angeles reported.
He told KPCC that he “borrowed” some manure from a pal who owns horses and gift-wrapped it in a festive box. Strong then added a card addressed to Mnuchin and Trump. “We’re returning the ‘gift’ of the Christmas tax bill. It’s bullshit. Warmest wishes, The American People. P.S. – Kiss Donald for me,” he wrote.
On Saturday, the bearded "psychologist" also posted several images on Facebook, one of which shows him posing with a shovel next to the box, and another that shows the box full of what appears to be dung.
Robby Strong, source: facebook
“I need someone to ride along and document my Secret Santa project. I’m going to hand deliver boxes of horse shit to Steve Mnuchin over in Beverly Hills,” he added in a message. “No disguises, no fake names. Totally owning this one. You’re only powerless if you do nothing!!!” he wrote.
Strong then said he delivered one box to a home Mnuchin owns in Beverly Hills, and another to his mansion in Bel Air. Mnuchin was not in Los Angeles when he received the stinking presents, CBS reported. Authorities, including the Secret Service and a Los Angeles bomb squad, responded and police discovered the package contained horse manure after unwrapping it.
In a Facebook comment, he wrote that the package was "pure organic horseshit, just like everything that administration’s done so far."
"Bomb scares certainly were not my intention, but maybe they should be a little scared, eh," he wrote.
After the stung bought him 15 minutes of fame, Strong said he realizes he might have put his job at risk – and that he was surprised he has not been arrested by the Secret Service, which questioned him at his home.
“I just got interviewed by the Secret Service and I’ve now joined some of my heroes like Timothy Leary and Martin Luther King,” he told AL.com. “[The agents] just showed up in my yard.”
Meanwhile, Strong mocked suggestions the prank could have alarmed Mnuchin or his family, and insisted that he was merely exercising his First Amendment rights. “A few years ago when [a Supreme Court ruling] said that corporations are persons and money equals free speech, that is so absurd and my rule of thumb is now that if corporations are free speech, then so is horseshitt.”
According to the Post, the Secret Service interviewed the main who claimed to have sent the package, but Strong was not arrested. Strong also said he didn’t violate laws about mailing hazardous waste. “It was a gift-wrapped package of poo,” Strong told AL.com. “Is there a law that you can’t drop off a box of poo? Not really.”
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon papers which exposed the government’s lies during the Vietnam war is vocalizing a warning. He says the United States is really close to a nuclear Armageddon.
Ellsberg, now 86-years-old, leaked the Pentagon papers back in 1969 and he’s now got a new book out which serves a warning to those who care to listen.
According to the Daily Mail, Ellsberg’s 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon’s presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that was supposed to advance press freedom.
In his new book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Ellsberg details how easy nuclear bombs can be triggered and shot off on a false alarm – and that the president isn’t the only who can launch the nukes, as we are often told.
Low-level military commanders are capable of launching nuclear weapons too...
“All out-nuclear war - an irreversible, unprecedented and almost unimaginable calamity for civilization and most life on earth - has been, like the disasters of Chernobyl, Katrina, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima Daiichi, and before these, World War I, a catastrophe waiting to happen, on a scale infinitely greater than any of these,” writes Ellsberg in his new book.
Adding to fears of a nuclear armageddon is North Korea’s insistence on building a nuclear weapon. This has created a mass panic in nations all around the globe. Not to mention, last month, President Donald Trump put North Korea back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation that allows the US to impose more sanctions and risks inflaming tension over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.
North Korea then denounced Trump’s decision to relist it as a state sponsor of terrorism, calling the move a “serious provocation and violent infringement,” as the rogue nation sentenced the US president to death, saying he “hurt the dignity” of the “supreme leadership.” All of this is alarming, according to Ellsberg, who believes a nuclear war can be started simply by a false alarm.
Nuclear bombs “are susceptible to being triggered on a false alarm, a terrorist action, unauthorized launch or a desperate decision to escalate,” Ellsberg wrote in his book.
“They would kill billions of humans, perhaps ending complex life on earth. This is true even though the Cold War that rationalized their existence and hair-trigger status - and their supposed necessity to national security - ended 30 years ago.”
Many US citizens falsely believe that only the US president, in this case, Donald Trump can order the use of nuclear weapons. But Trump isn’t the only military commander authorized to launch nuclear weapons, according to the New York Post.
“There has to be a delegation of authority and capability to launch retaliatory strikes, not only to officials outside the Oval Office but outside Washington too,” Ellsberg wrote.
Ellsberg says that the only way to avoid a nuclear holocaust is full disarmament by the United States and Russia.
“The risk that one city will be destroyed by a single (perhaps terrorist) weapon in the next year or the next decade cannot, unfortunately, be reduced to zero,” Ellsberg writes.
“But the danger of near-extinction of humanity - a continuous possibility for the past 65 years - can be reduced to zero by the dismantlement of most existing weapons in both the United States and Russia.”
When it comes to the Second Amendment, their hands are on the other side. Why? (Franz Jantzen, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)
“The Supreme Court turned away an appeal from Maryland gun owners who challenged the state’s ban on assault weapons, which were used in recent mass shootings in a south Texas church and at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas,” the Associated Press reported Monday. “The justices left in place a federal appeals court ruling that upheld the Maryland law that does not permit the sale of a range of semi-automatic weapons and large-capacity magazines.”
That was not the only case the court turned away.
“Perhaps the most noteworthy denials came in two cases involving gun rights: Kolbe v. Hogan, a challenge to Maryland’s ban on semi-automatic rifles and large-capacity magazines, passed in the wake of the mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school; and Norman v. Florida, a challenge to the state’s ban on the open carrying of guns in public,” SCOTUS Blog explained. “In both cases, the lower courts had upheld the states’ bans, so today’s rulings leave those decisions in place.”
The denials came with no comments from the justices. One prominent oath-breaking gun-grabber in particular was happy to provide one which the media was happy to repeat.
“It ought to be a lesson to all states, and I would hope that they would look at the 4th Circuit’s decision and the tragic events around the country and come to the conclusion that this is a common-sense law,” Maryland’s Democrat Attorney General Brian Frosh crowed. And that decision in a nutshell?
“[W]e have not power to extend Second Amendment protections to weapons of war,” Bill Clinton nominee and 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert King wrote.
Weapons of war are precisely what “We the People” are entitled to have. That’s why the militia was deemed “necessary to the security of a free State” by the Founders. And King wouldn’t have needed to extend anything. U.S. v Miller, a case from 1939 already observed a weapon would have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia [or] that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense.”
As for the Florida case, falling back on the manner of bearing arms (openly vs. concealed) as an excuse to tolerate infringements flies in the face of both historical customs as well as the “shall not be infringed” proscription. That seems to be a pretty clear mandate to everyone except to those who would deny rights to their countrymen under color of authority.
The absence of further High Court action since 2010 and the lack of any explanation for declining to hear these cases mean we can only speculate on the reasons. Are judges who favor easing up on infringements waiting for a retirement or two from their ranks before they’ll deem it safe to move forward, or does this mean the majority owes its first and foremost loyalties to an establishment that thinks this business of an armed populace has gone far enough?
In either case, infringements with the force of law behind them are being allowed to continue now, and as Dr. King observed, a right delayed is a right denied.
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David Codrea’s opinions are his own. See “Who speaks for Oath Keepers?”
The post Supreme Court Again Ducks Second Amendment by Refusing to Hear Gun Cases appeared first on Oath Keepers.
While Venezuela’s embattled government struggles with the fallout from being declared officially in default by ISDA after delaying a principal payment on the Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, bond that matured Nov. 2, its Supreme Court has been busy robbing the country’s downtrodden public one of the few small pleasures still available in a country that has been deprived of seemingly every necessity, from food to medicine.
Local media reported that Venezuela’s Supreme Court on Friday ruled that magazines that circulate to the general public can no longer feature images of scantily clad women on their covers.
The decree specifically mentions “pornographic” content, yet includes many mainstream magazines: According to the court, “images of nude or partially nude women in compromising and suggestive poses that stimulate sexual arousal for commercial ends” are now banned from magazines, regardless of whether the photos are editorial content, or found in advertisements.
Foto contraportada diario Meridiano hoy 16 de agosto. Mil gracias a Edgar Àlfaro por la deferencia. Es para ustedes pic.twitter.com/rXBQOtct5o
— Merineth Vegas (@MerinethVegas) August 16, 2013
The decision was a response to a complaint filed by a citizen against weekly sports publication El Heraldo, a subsidiary of 6° Poder. The complaint requested that the government prohibit the “publication of any example, be it digital or printed, including private subscriptions, of images with sexual content … whether it be by way of a photograph, other image, advertisements or links that could be accessed by children and young people."
The court claimed that when such images go public, the publishers aren’t aware of their responsibilities as “media outlets in society to transmit appropriate content” seen by both adults and children.
This ruling directly affects the country’s primary publications Meridiano and Líder, both of which make use of images of women in bathing suits on their covers.
“These types of sexual images don’t come with a warning, which could bring about negative consequences with respect to people’s baser instincts, and thereby put at risk the constitutional rights of the most vulnerable, namely children and young people,” the court’s ruling continues.
Venezuela’s Supreme Court has regularly kowtowed to the whims of the Maduro government, most famously when it certified a Maduro-approved directive to disband the country’s Congress, a ruling that led to the successful (if rigged) referendum vote to create a new National Assembly to help Maduro change the country’s Constitution to cement his long-term grip on power - and marginalize political dissidents who have been rallying in the streets of the country’s cities for months.
Venezuela’s economy has been locked in a vicious downward spiral after falling oil prices and years of mismanagement by Maduro and his predecessor, President Hugo Chavez have spurred inflation rates above 2,000%.
Given these endemic economic troubles, it would appear women in bikinis are the least of the societal ills plaguing Latin America’s favorite Socialist Paradise.
If the Supreme Court had acknowledged Dred Scott to be a citizen, they would have had to acknowledge his right “to keep and carry arms wherever [he] went.” (Dred Scott. Oil on canvas by Louis Schultze, 1888. Acc. # 1897.9.1. Missouri Historical Society Museum Collections. Photograph by David Schultz, 1999. NS 23864. Photograph and scan (c) 1999-2006, Missouri Historical Society.)
“[T]he Second Amendment is simply not relevant to the US gun debate. None of the proposals to limit gun purchases, to limit (or even ban) carrying weapons in public, to require background checks, to forbid gun ownership by domestic abusers, to limit magazine capacities, or any other proposal on the horizon even comes close to bumping up against the Second Amendment.”
In exposing all the kinds of misinformation Prof. Buchanan was spewing to a readership that won’t know they’re being had, I missed one important point. Fortunately, there was a knowledgeable reader providing feedback who reminded me of something I should have remembered: The opinion in the Dred Scott case as it relates to the right to bear arms.
The infamous decision that held that “a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves,” even if freed, could not be an American citizen and thus could not sue in federal court? What, so now “racist gun nuts” are reduced to supporting slavery?
Of course not, and anyone leveling that accusation will be attempting to use it in a lying smear to keep a truth they don’t want people to know about from being shared.
I should have remembered, though, because I referenced the case in a letter I wrote to then-Mayor of Cleveland Michael R. White back in 1999, when challenging his embracing of “gun control” while refusing to acknowledge its racist roots.
Here’s the relevant passage from Supreme Court majority rationale:
“It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”
A subsequent observation from Cruikshank and cited in Heller clears up that bit about rights being “given”:
“This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence…”
The bottom line though, particularly for those who would rewrite keeping and bearing arms out of American history, is that doing so by free men was considered non-controversial back in the day, to where even the Supreme Court considered it as something taken for granted. Noting the circumstances of Dred Scott and his family moving between states and the Court’s considered use of the qualifier “wherever they went,” it’s apparent no one back then thought it a big deal or otherwise illegal for a free man to cross state lines armed.
And while some states enacted edicts against concealed carry, those were not put to a Second Amendment challenge, meaning the Dred Scott acknowledgement is something proponents of nationwide concealed carry reciprocity might want to use. They also might want to keep in mind that obtaining permission was once an alien concept to most Americans.
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If you believe in the mission of Oath Keepers, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, please make a donation to support our work. You can donate HERE.
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David Codrea’s opinions are his own. See “Who speaks for Oath Keepers?”
The post Prior Supreme Court View Took Right of Citizens to Carry Arms across State Lines for Granted appeared first on Oath Keepers.
Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war has just been given a violent and deadly shove into overdrive. Local volunteers are now going door-to-door and marking homes of suspected drug dealers with red X’s.
The tyrannical leader of the Philippines has already slaughtered 10,000 people in his quest to crack down on drugs. Local administrative districts were given the orders to collect the data this spring and to provide lists of suspected drug offenders to the Philippine National Police. But these records are spreading new fear throughout poor communities already plagued by vigilantes and extrajudicial police killings in President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs.
VICE News followed along as community volunteers in Payatas, on the outskirts of Metro Manila, spent their Sunday morning rounding up neighbors on the watch list to deliver them to local authorities. There’s been no word on whether the lists are accurate or not. Yet fears that this could lead to vengeful people simply adding their neighbors they dislike in an attempt to “get rid of them” have surfaced.
On Wednesday, lawyers in the Philippines filed an injunction with the Supreme Court to try to stop President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs. The injunction called the drug war an illegal campaign that lets police kill indiscriminately and circumvent legal procedures. The government’s directive for the fierce 15-month-old crackdown permits police to “negate” and “neutralize” targets, effectively granting them a license to kill suspected users and dealers, without gathering evidence or building a case, the lawyers said.
A practice of compiling lists of “drug personalities” and encouraging citizens to anonymously provide names was tantamount to drawing up a hit list, the petition said. It called for judicial intervention in thousands of cases where Filipinos were killed by police.
“The present war on drugs being waged by the government is not going to stop illegal drugs, crime and corruption,” Jose Manuel Diokno, chairman of the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG), told a news conference.
“(It) will only result in the killing of more and more people especially the poor.” -Business Insider
The latest petition seeks to compel the Philippine National Police and the interior ministry to halt the campaign and wants killings to be examined by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), which would take charge of evidence, including guns that police say were used by victims.
It said house-to-house visits by anti-drugs police are often “unverified tip-offs from unknown informants” and were not ever based on any actual evidence. It also argues that police had no intent to persuade suspects to surrender and would kill anyone who refused to cooperate or denied involvement.
“The government’s war on drugs is short-cutting the justice system by dispensing justice from the barrels of guns,” the petition said.
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Author: Mac Slavo
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Date: October 11th, 2017
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(RT) — Sexting minors is illegal, but having sex with them is okay, an Indiana Supreme Court has ruled.
Indiana high school teacher Sameer Thakar faces three years in prison for sending nude photographs to a 16-year old girl after the Supreme Court ruled earlier this week to reverse a lower court’s decision to throw out the case.
Thakar began texting the teenager in 2014, when he was 38. After a short period in which the girl told him she was underage, he then sent her images of his erect penis, court documents reveal.
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The State charged then-38-year-old Sameer Girish Thakar with Class D felony dissemination of matter harmful to minors under Indiana Code section 35-49-3-3(a)(1) (2008) (“the Dissemination Statute”), after Thakar sent a photograph of his erect penis to a 16-year-old girl. The trial court dismissed the charges, relying upon Salter v. State, 906 N.E.2d 212 (Ind. Ct. App. 2009), trans. not sought, which found the Dissemination Statute void for vagueness as applied, because the intended recipient met Indiana’s age of consent to sexual activity. We now overrule Salter, hold that the Dissemination Statute is not unconstitutionally vague, and reverse.
He was charged with one count of felony dissemination of matter harmful to minors, but argued in court that the charge doesn’t make sense.
In Indiana, it is legal for adults to have consensual sex with 16 year olds. It is illegal, however, for a person to knowingly send sexually explicit photographs to someone under 18, which is classed as disseminating material harmful to minors.
READ MORE: Ferguson Police Chief Attempts to Join Michael Brown Protest, Chaos Ensues
The court originally threw out the charges, explaining it was “patently illogical” that a man could have sex with a teenager, but not send them images. The case was appealed and ended up in Indiana’s Supreme Court.
Believing that it was patently illogical that an adult man could legally show his penis to a 16-year-old through consensual activity in person, but not through photography, the Salter court held the statute was unconstitutionally vague as applied because the activity in question would not be understood by a person of ordinary intelligence as “‘patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable matter for or performance before minors,’” which is a necessary element of the statutory definition of “harmful to minors” contained in Indiana Code section 35-49-2-2 (2008).
The Supreme Court found the charges should be upheld, despite the “inconsistent” law. It found no conflict between the two rules, as both can be complied with at the same time.
“With respect to a 16-year-old, consensual sexual activity in person is permitted, the dissemination of a sexually explicit photograph (consensually or otherwise) is not,” Justice Mark Massa wrote.
Massa said the court interprets the text of the law, and that it’s up to state lawmakers to sort out the inconsistency.
And the award for most misleading headline goes to the Wall Street Journal.
What do you think an article entitled, Unlike Most Industries, Drone Makers and Operators Clamor for Federal Regulation, is all about?
If you guessed it is about drone makers and operators clamoring for more regulations, you are wrong.
Exactly the opposite is true. The drone industry is being stifled by overbearing regulation. Because of one size fits all federal regulations, all across America, it is almost impossible to use drones for commercial purposes.
That is why drone makers, operators and many of their would-be customers are bucking the governmentwide trend toward looser oversight. Additional regulations are their sole means of getting a green light for a much broader array of promising uses.
…these contrarian voices argue that swift federal action is essential for the technology to flourish.
They want a green light. Who put up the red light?
…the Federal Aviation Administration has given limited approvals for small, remotely piloted aircraft weighing up to 55 pounds.
With some exceptions, the initial package of rules permits operations only during daylight hours, up to an altitude of 400 feet and within sight of operators on the ground.
Clearly trying to get rid of those regulations is still trending towards looser oversight. The swift federal action they are clamoring for is to undo previous federal action!
The Wall Street Journal says drone operators see more federal regulations as the only way to get rid of tough federal regulations.
That’s like reporting that the marijuana industry needs federal regulations in order to grow. Marijuana growers see federal regulation as the only way to move their industry forward! Yes, because the government made their industry illegal!
A more honest assessment would say that drone operators would prefer a higher number of less stringent regulations, to a handful of all-encompassing terrible regulations.
While the FAA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies struggle with legal, technical and public safety challenges unlike any in the past, industry officials increasingly are frustrated. They worry that a prolonged regulatory stalemate threatens to stifle innovation, sacrifice potential American jobs and hand other countries the lead in evolving market segments.
The real story: federal regulations are so draconian that they are destroying an entire sector of business. People in the industry would likely prefer no regulations. That is clearly not a very likely reality, so instead, they prefer less strict regulations. The government is dragging its feet on repealing their old regulations and replacing them. Annoyed, people in the industry are putting pressure on the government to stop ruining their business.
The Wall Street Journal casts this as an industry excited to work with the government! They are just tickled pink to get more regulations, and that is why they are lobbying so hard!
It is absurd. Why are they framing this in a way that casts federal regulations as a solution when they are so clearly the problem?
It almost seems like the WSJ are trying to trick people into thinking more regulations mean more freedom.
What will people assume from this reputable news source if they only read the headline? It took some great journalist-gymnastics to frame an entire article about how regulations are stifling the drone industry as the drone industry being pro-regulation.
But this is the classic way that government operates.
They ban something, and then as they slowly loosen their restrictions, it seems like the government is handing out freedoms left and right.
A couple years ago gays across the country celebrated the Supreme Court decision which struck down gay marriage bans. The government was the only entity restricting them! And marriage wouldn’t even matter if the government didn’t give special privileges and tax incentives to married couples. The whole thing was a non-issue until the government made laws about marriage, and laws banning marriage, regulations about hospital visits, and regulations about financial partnerships.
It was the same thing with black slaves being freed. Then it was repeated with Jim Crow Laws. Is the government the great freer of slaves? No! The government simply reversed their own policy of giving legal protection to people to enslaved certain other people. Did the government give blacks more rights by repealing Jim Crow Laws? Nope! They simply undid the harm that was previously legally enforced.
Basically, all the “progress” society makes is simply undoing stupid things the government has implemented in the past. And they say we need government in order to move society forward. The only good thing government does is undo previous bad things the government has done!
Don’t get me wrong, it is great when the government reverses their terrible policies. But why are they given credit for moving society forward? All they do is reverse their own terrible policies!
Instead, the fact that governments so often have to undo their terrible laws and regulations should make us clamor for them to stop making them in the first place! We should be taking power away from the government to make sure they can never again legally protect slaveholders. We should be making sure the government cannot outlaw or incentivize certain types of consensual adult relationships.
Comparably, drones are a small issue. But the way the Wall Street Journal words the headline and makes their arguments is ridiculous.
Regulations are the problem, not the solution.
In a world where people can’t do their own thinking, the WSJ is handing them a thought pattern. Did you hear that more regulations are required in order to make drones more popular? Oh yes, if we want widespread drone usage, we need the government to regulate the hell out of the industry. Yay government! They are so progressive.
Don’t trust the media to give it to you straight. Even The Daily Bell should not be considered the final word on anything. We certainly hope to present a worthwhile perspective and useful information. But if an individual is not adding their own analysis they are better off not reading the news at all.
News can help you get information about the world outside your immediate knowledge. News can help give you another perspective to consider. It can provide intellectual exercise.
But it seems like too many people these days are simply taking in the unfiltered news–or headlines–as truth. The Wall Street Journal is a big respected name in news. But all they are doing with articles like this is serving up propaganda for the government.
In China, Foreigners Can Buy a Marriage
China is a dystopian nightmare for many who live there. Yet even the hardcore communist regime cannot keep a little freedom off the black market.
For many immigrants and foreign workers in China, they are even lower on the social ladder than the peasants. These people cannot own property, and often their children are not allowed to attend school.
But someone found a solution. Fake marriages. Foreigners in China are “marrying” Chinese citizens, even when the foreigner is sometimes already married. This helps foreigners living in Beijing buy property there. It also helps migrant workers send their kids to school and meld into a normal life.
This arrangement has increased since China responded to crowded conditions with more restrictions on foreigners. It sounds a lot like foreigners in America who get married in order to obtain a green card.
Governments just can’t keep creative black market businesses from flourishing when their restrictions leave no other choice.
We’ve even heard of straight men in the military marrying other men to take advantage of the benefits.
Prison Time for Thwarting Emissions Regulations
Volkswagen found that they could not design a diesel engine that would meet federal pollution requirements. So instead, they created software that would cheat the regulations.
Now, a Volkswagon engineer has been sentenced to 40 months in prison for his role in faking the emissions standards.
His crime is basically trying to continue doing business while being obstructed by the government. Is America a free country? They arbitrarily limit the products companies can create. Then they throw a man in prison for breaking their stupid rules.
Courts Actually Holding Police Accountable
Let’s end on a positive note. An appeals court has issued a ruling that protects two important ways of holding police accountable.
First, it should be a little harder for police to charge everything that moves with “obstruction.” The court ruling that says the First Amendment protects speech critical of police officers.
The case stemmed from a man who stepped onto his porch while the police arrested his wife in their driveway. He came outside to yell to them that they were overreacting to her failure to obey orders to walk backwards towards them. She was partially handicapped and could not easily comply.
When the man did not go back into his house he was arrested. He never even moved towards the police. He simply spoke to them while they were trying to arrest his wife. That was enough for them to charge him with obstruction.
Turns out they didn’t even have cause to arrest the wife either. She was the passenger in a car which crossed the center line of the road, and then drove for 40 whole seconds before pulling over, into the woman’s driveway.
So the courts said the lawsuit against the officers on Constitutional rights violations may move forward. The court found no reason for them to be granted sovereign immunity, and be shielded from lawsuits.
Unfortunately, the decision was not unanimous. A dissenting judge said he thinks holding police accountable for their actions will make it harder for them to do their jobs.
More bad news: this judge was considered by Trump for the Supreme Court.
Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Townhall.com,
"They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee -- and what a leader! ... No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller."
So wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial "The Oxford History of the American People" in 1965.
First in his class at West Point, hero of the Mexican War, Lee was the man to whom President Lincoln turned to lead his army. But when Virginia seceded, Lee would not lift up his sword against his own people, and chose to defend his home state rather than wage war upon her.
This veneration of Lee, wrote Richard Weaver, "appears in the saying attributed to a Confederate soldier, "The rest of us may have ... descended from monkeys, but it took a God to make Marse Robert.""
Growing up after World War II, this was accepted history.
Yet, on the militant left today, the name Lee evokes raw hatred and howls of "racist and traitor." A clamor has arisen to have all statues of him and all Confederate soldiers and statesmen pulled down from their pedestals and put in museums or tossed onto trash piles.
What has changed since 1965?
It is not history. There have been no great new discoveries about Lee.
What has changed is America herself. She is not the same country. We have passed through a great social, cultural and moral revolution that has left us irretrievably divided on separate shores.
And the politicians are in panic.
Two years ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe called the giant statues of Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson on Richmond"s Monument Avenue "parts of our heritage."
After Charlottesville, New York-born-and-bred McAuliffe, entertaining higher ambitions, went full scalawag, demanding the statues be pulled down as "flashpoints for hatred, division, and violence."
Who hates the statues, Terry? Who"s going to cause the violence?
Answer: The Democratic left whom Terry must now appease.
McAuliffe is echoed by Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate in November to succeed McAuliffe. GOP nominee Ed Gillespie wants Monument Avenue left alone.
The election is the place to decide this, but the left will not wait.
In Durham, North Carolina, our Taliban smashed the statue of a Confederate soldier. Near the entrance of Duke University Chapel, a statue of Lee has been defaced, the nose broken off.
Wednesday at dawn, Baltimore carried out a cultural cleansing by taking down statues of Lee and Maryland Chief Justice Roger Taney who wrote the Dred Scott decision and opposed Lincoln"s suspension of the right of habeas corpus.
Like ISIS, which smashed the storied ruins of Palmyra, and the al-Qaida rebels who ravaged the fabled Saharan city of Timbuktu, the new barbarism has come to America. This is going to become a blazing issue, not only between but within the parties.
For there are 10 Confederates in Statuary Hall in the Capitol, among them Lee, Georgia"s Alexander Stephens, vice president to Jefferson Davis, and Davis himself. The Black Caucus wants them gone.
Mount Rushmore-sized carvings of Lee, Jackson and Davis are on Stone Mountain, Georgia. Are they to be blasted off?
There are countless universities, colleges and high schools like Washington & Lee named for Confederate statesmen and soldiers. Across the Potomac from D.C. are Jefferson Davis Highway and Leesburg Pike to Leesburg itself, 25 miles north. Are all highways, streets, towns and counties named for Confederates to be renamed? What about Fort Bragg?
On every Civil War battlefield, there are monuments to the Southern fallen. Gettysburg has hundreds of memorials, statues and markers. But if, as the left insists we accept, the Confederates were traitors trying to tear America apart to preserve an evil system, upon what ground do Democrats stand to resist the radical left"s demands?
What do we do with those battlefields where Confederates were victorious: Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville?
"Where does this all end?" President Trump asked.
It doesn"t.
Not until America"s histories and biographies are burned and new texts written to Nazify Lee, Jackson, Davis and all the rest, will a newly indoctrinated generation of Americans accede to this demand to tear down and destroy what their fathers cherished.
And once all the Confederates are gone, one must begin with the explorers, and then the slave owners like Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Madison, who seceded from slave-free Britain. White supremacists all.
Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun must swiftly follow.
Then there are all those segregationists. From 1865 to 1965, virtually all of the great Southern senators were white supremacists.
In the first half of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and FDR carried all 11 states of a rigidly segregationist South all six times they ran, and FDR rewarded Dixie by putting a Klansman on the Supreme Court.
While easy for Republicans to wash their hands of such odious elements as Nazis in Charlottesville, will they take up the defense of the monuments and statues that have defined our history, or capitulate to the icon-smashers?
In this Second American Civil War, whose side are you on?
Authored by Scott Adams via Dilbert blog,
History is full of examples of Mass Hysterias. They happen fairly often. The cool thing about mass hysterias is that you don’t know when you are in one. But sometimes the people who are not experiencing the mass hysteria can recognize when others are experiencing one, if they know what to look for.
I’ll teach you what to look for.
A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies. We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight. The curious lack of solid evidence for Russian collusion is a red flag. But we’ll see how that plays out.
The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.
If you’re in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the symptoms of hysteria won’t help you be aware you are in it. That’s not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that conflicts with its illusions.
But if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.
The reason you can’t easily identify what-the-hell is going on in the country right now is that a powerful mass hysteria is in play.
If you see the signs after I point them out, you’re probably not in the hysteria bubble.
If you read this and do NOT see the signs, it probably means you’re trapped inside the mass hysteria bubble.
Here are some signs of mass hysteria. This is my own take on it, but I welcome you to fact-check it with experts on mass hysteria.
On November 8th of 2016, half the country learned that everything they believed to be both true and obvious turned out to be wrong. The people who thought Trump had no chance of winning were under the impression they were smart people who understood their country, and politics, and how things work in general. When Trump won, they learned they were wrong. They were so very wrong that they reflexively (because this is how all brains work) rewrote the scripts they were seeing in their minds until it all made sense again. The wrong-about-everything crowd decided that the only way their world made sense, with their egos intact, is that either the Russians helped Trump win or there are far more racists in the country than they imagined, and he is their king. Those were the seeds of the two mass hysterias we witness today.
Trump supporters experienced no trigger event for cognitive dissonance when Trump won. Their worldview was confirmed by observed events.
One sign of a good mass hysteria is that it sounds bonkers to anyone who is not experiencing it. Imagine your neighbor telling you he thinks the other neighbor is a witch. Or imagine someone saying the local daycare provider is a satanic temple in disguise. Or imagine someone telling you tulip bulbs are more valuable than gold. Crazy stuff.
Compare that to the idea that our president is a Russian puppet. Or that the country accidentally elected a racist who thinks the KKK and Nazis are “fine people.” Crazy stuff.
If you think those examples don’t sound crazy – regardless of the reality – you are probably inside the mass hysteria bubble.
If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, you probably interpreted President Trump’s initial statement on Charlottesville – which was politically imperfect to say the least – as proof-positive he is a damned racist.
If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble you might have noticed that President Trump never campaigned to be our moral leader. He presented himself as – in his own words “no angel” – with a set of skills he offered to use in the public’s interest. He was big on law and order, and equal justice under the law. But he never offered moral leadership. Voters elected him with that knowledge. Evidently, Republicans don’t depend on politicians for moral leadership. That’s probably a good call.
When the horror in Charlottesville shocked the country, citizens instinctively looked to their president for moral leadership. The president instead provided a generic law and order statement. Under pressure, he later named specific groups and disavowed the racists. He was clearly uncomfortable being our moral lighthouse. That’s probably why he never described his moral leadership as an asset when running for office. We observe that he has never been shy about any other skill he brings to the job, so it probably isn’t an accident when he avoids mentioning any ambitions for moral leadership. If he wanted us to know he would provide that service, I think he would have mentioned it by now.
If you already believed President Trump is a racist, his weak statement about Charlottesville seems like confirmation. But if you believe he never offered moral leadership, only equal treatment under the law, that’s what you saw instead. And you made up your own mind about the morality.
The tricky part here is that any interpretation of what happened could be confirmation bias. But ask yourself which one of these versions sounds less crazy:
1. A sitting president, who is a branding expert, thought it would be a good idea to go easy on murderous Nazis as a way to improve his popularity.
or…
2. The country elected a racist leader who is winking to the KKK and White Supremacists that they have a free pass to start a race war now.
or…
3. A mentally unstable racist clown with conman skills (mostly just lying) eviscerated the Republican primary field and won the presidency. He keeps doing crazy, impulsive racist stuff. But for some reason, the economy is going well, jobs are looking good, North Korea blinked, ISIS is on the ropes, and the Supreme Court got a qualified judge. It was mostly luck.
or…
4. The guy who didn’t offer to be your moral leader didn’t offer any moral leadership, just law and order, applied equally. His critics cleverly and predictably framed it as being soft on Nazis.
One of those narratives is less crazy-sounding than the others. That doesn’t mean the less-crazy one has to be true. But normal stuff happens far more often than crazy stuff. And critics will frame normal stuff as crazy whenever they get a chance.
It would be hard to overreact to a Nazi murder, or to racists marching in the streets with torches. That stuff demands a strong reaction. But if a Republican agrees with you that Nazis are the worst, and you threaten to punch that Republican for not agreeing with you exactly the right way, that might be an oversized reaction.
When people have actual reasons for disagreeing with you, they offer those reasons without hesitation. Strangers on social media will cheerfully check your facts, your logic, and your assumptions. But when you start seeing ad hominem attacks that offer no reasons at all, that might be a sign that people in the mass hysteria bubble don’t understand what is wrong with your point of view except that it sounds more sensible than their own.
For the past two days I have been disavowing Nazis on Twitter. The most common response from the people who agree with me is that my comic strip sucks and I am ugly.
* * *
The mass hysteria signals I described here are not settled science, or anything like it. This is only my take on the topic, based on personal observation and years of experience with hypnosis and other forms of persuasion.
I present this filter on the situation as the first step in dissolving the mass hysteria. It isn’t enough, but more persuasion is coming.
If you are outside the mass hysteria bubble, you might see what I am doing in this blog as a valuable public service.
If you are inside the mass hysteria bubble, I look like a Nazi collaborator.
How do I look to you?
* * *
Adams wrote a book about how to persuade yourself to success. Based on reader comments, it is working. His upcoming book, Win Bigly, tells you how to persuade others. (For good.) That comes out October 31st.
In 2005, one of the most intriguing advertising stunts of the internet age was hatched.
As Visual Capitalist"s Nick Routley explains, Alex Tew launched the The Million Dollar Homepage, where anyone could “own a piece of internet history” by purchasing pixels-plots (minimum of 10×10) on a massive digital canvas. At the price of just one dollar per pixel, everyone from individual internet users to well-known companies like Yahoo! raced to claim a space on the giant digital canvas.
Today, The Million Dollar Homepage lives on as a perfect record of that wacky time in internet history – or so it seems. However, the reality is that many of the hyperlinks on the canvas are now redirects that send incoming users to other sites, while over 20% of them are simply dead.
Here are the links that still work on the Million Dollar Homepage today:
The revealing graphic above, via John Bowers, raises the question – how do hyperlinks disappear, and what implications does this “digital decay” have?
The internet is stitched together by an incalculable number of hyperlinks, but much like cells in an organism, the sources and destinations have a finite lifespan. Essentially, links can and do die.
Most “link rot” is the result of website restructuring, or entities going out of business and pulling their website offline.
A high-impact example of this is when Yahoo! pulled the plug on GeoCities, one of the first popular web hosting services. In one fell swoop, roughly 7 million websites (containing a plethora of animated gifs, auto-playing midi files, and traffic counters) went dark forever.
Links can also die because of more deliberate reasons, as well. In 2015, the editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed, Ben Smith, came under fire for deleting thousands of posts from the site (including content that was critical of Buzzfeed advertisers). Journalism has traditionally acted as a public record, so this type of “decay” has serious implications on the credibility of media brands.
This idea of a public record is at the heart of why digital decay is an issue worth addressing. Once millions of links simply burn out, what will people in the future know about society in the early-ish days of the internet? What record will remain of people’s thoughts and feelings in that era?
I worry that the twenty-first century will become an informational black hole.
– Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer
Perhaps more urgent are public records that live in the digital realm. Supreme Court decisions and academia lean heavily on citations to build their arguments. What happens when those citations simply vanish? A Harvard study found that 49% of the hyperlinks in Supreme Court decisions are now broken.
Even that ubiquitous resource, Wikipedia, has serious issues caused by digital decay. Over 130,000 entries link to dead pages – a troubling development, as linked citations are what lend entries their credibility.
A handful of people are taking steps to archive the internet.
The most well-known solution is Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which has archived hundreds of billions webpages over the past 20 years. Even the The Library of Congress – which is well known for archiving digital information such as tweets – contracts Internet Archive to do its web crawling.
The academia-focused Perma is another example of a company looking to create permanent records of the web sources (particularly citations).
Many of the weird and wonderful forums and hand-coded homepages of early internet lore may be gone, but we’re finally taking steps to combat digital decay. As awareness grows, avoiding an “informational black hole” may be possible.
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
You may recall this bizarre incident that occurred last month in Venezuela. A rogue police officer by the name of Oscar Perez, who is also well known in Venezuela for starring in several B-rated action movies, commandeered a helicopter, before dropping grenades on the nation’s Supreme Court building and strafing the Interior Ministry with gunfire. It was without a doubt, the strangest moment to come out of that nation’s ongoing civil unrest.
But this brazen attack isn’t just odd. In fact, it may portend something much more serious that is simmering under the surface of Venezuela’s slow motion social collapse.
It’s a sign that Venezuela is very close to erupting into a full-blown civil war.
Recently, a stolen police helicopter attacked the Venezuelan Supreme Court with grenades and automatic weapons.
While no one was hurt, the incident should serve as a wake-up call for the entire Western Hemisphere, including the United States.
The attack demonstrates a quantum escalation of the hunger-fueled conflict that has consumed the country for close to a year. Hunger is the key word. Hunger is the most basic of human suffering. Remember that rising food prices helped fuel the Arab Spring, which has left the world with a chaotic, fractured, refugee-hemorrhaging Middle East.
Obviously, the lack of food in Venezuela is a key factor in that nation’s unrest. Multiple studies have shown in the past that when food prices escalate to a certain point, riots and revolutions become very likely, even in cases where the population isn’t specifically revolting over the price of food. But in any case the lack of food, skyrocketing crime, rampant corruption, and flippant tyranny that are all fueling the unrest, and giving people like Oscar Perez lots of support in both high and low places.
Is Venezuela in danger of becoming another Syria? Maybe.
The helicopter pilot, Oscar Perez, posted a bare-faced declaration online describing himself as representative of a group of “nationalists, patriots, and institutionalists.” The fact that he has been allowed to slip quietly back into the shadows illustrates how much of the population is willing to hide him. Even more distressing is the fact that his group even had access to a helicopter, a fact illustrating how much support they may have within Venezuela’s government institutions.
We can deduce from Perez’s attack that there are battle lines being drawn in Venezuela right now, and those lines run right through the middle of the civilian population, the military, the police, and the political class (and yes, that line does run through the middle of society, because there are still millions of people who support President Maduro).
And that’s what makes civil wars possible. They don’t usually occur in countries where millions of unarmed civilians hate the government, and the government is staffed by plenty of loyalists. These wars tend to happen in places where the soldiers and cops are also divided along partisan lines. That way, you have a lot of people armed to the teeth with the best weapons government tax dollars can buy, and those people become two separate armed camps with divergent views and political goals.
You can’t have a war unless there are two sides with a lot of firepower, and that’s what we see in Venezuela right now. That nation is a powder keg, and it could blow at any time.
Within days of taking office President Trump issued an Executive Order that would, among other actions temporarily, suspend the entry into the United States, of citizens of seven countries that are associated with terrorism and/or are unwilling or unable to verify the identities and backgrounds of their citizens.
Those countries were: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
In this dangerous era it is difficult to prevent the entry of foreign terrorists from many countries. However, when it is impossible ascertain the true identities or previous affiliations with criminal or terrorist organizations for aliens seeking entry, our government is forced to “fly blind” in a storm.
Trump’s Executive Order was issued to provide the U.S. government with an opportunity to attempt to develop a means of properly vetting aliens from these countries and was entirely consistent with long-standing immigration laws, specifically with Section (f) of 8 U.S. Code § 1182 – Inadmissible aliens).
This statute has been used by previous presidents to prevent the entry of aliens whose presence would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
Terrorists certainly fall into that category.
Here is the relevant paragraph:
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.
Subsequently the Trump administration eliminated Iraq from the list of countries and “tweaked” his executive order that has been largely described in the media as a “Travel Ban” for the citizens of “Six Muslim Majority Countries.” The media, out of an apparent desire to obfuscate the purpose of this Executive Order, has assiduously ignored the actual title of the Executive Order, Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States which concisely articulates the purpose of that Executive Order, a purpose that is now blithely being ignored by the media and some federal judges.
Nevertheless on June 26, 2017 the Supreme Court decision inexplicably exempted aliens from the Executive Order who had “bona fide relationships” with close family members or entities in the United States. Here are two relevant paragraphs from the Supreme Court decision:
For individuals, a close familial relationship is required. A foreign national who wishes to enter the United States to live with or visit a family member, like Doe’s wife or Dr. Elshikh’s mother-in-law, clearly has such a relationship. As for entities, the relationship must be formal, documented, and formed in the ordinary course, rather than for the purpose of evading EO-2. The students from the designated countries who have been admitted to the University of Hawaii have such a relationship with an American entity. So too would a worker who accepted an offer of employment from an American company or a lecturer invited to address an American audience.
An American individual or entity that has a bona fide relationship with a particular person seeking to enter the country as a refugee can legitimately claim concrete hardship if that person is excluded. As to these individuals and entities, we do not disturb the injunction. But when it comes to refugees who lack any such connection to the United States, for the reasons we have set out, the balance tips in favor of the Government’s compelling need to provide for the Nation’s security.
Begrudgingly the Supreme Court noted “the balance tips in favor of the Government’s compelling need to provide for the Nation’s security” when aliens have no connection to the U.S.
Does that mean terrorists who have relationships in the U.S. are welcome to enter?
“…the Government’s compelling need to provide for the Nation’s security” is not a suggestion or an option but an absolute mandate.
The legal attack Presidential authority to safeguard national security did not end there.
Hawaii Federal Judge Derrick Watson decided that the notion of “familial relationships” should be expanded, as was reported on July 14th by NBC News: Federal Judge Loosens ‘Travel Ban’ Restrictions to Exempt Grandparents, Others. Here is the relevant excerpt from that report:
U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson wrote in a ruling that the government’s interpretation of those qualifying for an exemption to the travel restrictions is too narrow.
“The Government’s definition represents the antithesis of common sense,” Watson said in his ruling. “Common sense, for instance, dictates that close family members be defined to include grandparents.”
Watson ruled the government cannot use a main provision of the travel ban to exclude “grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins of persons in the United States.”
Unbelievably the Supreme Court, in a five to three decision, agreed with Judge Derrick Watson to expand the familial relationships with persons already in the United States.
Here are the true issues ignored by the media and some judges:
First and foremost, by focusing on the issue of “bona fide relationships” with persons and entities, an irrelevant issue, the true issue, national security, the sole purpose behind the Executive Order, is purposefully and blatantly ignored.
Most terrorists have relatives. Brothers have convinced their siblings to engage in terror attacks. Consider the infamous Tsarnaevbrothers who carried out the deadly terror attack at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013.
Sometimes entire families have close relationships with terrorist organizations.
On April 28, 2016 ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) issued a press release about the San Bernardino terror attack, “3 people tied to shooter in San Bernardino terrorist attack arrested on federal conspiracy, marriage fraud and false statement charges.”
The terminology “Persons already in the United States” would apparently not limit this exemption to claimedfamily members of America citizens but to aliens who managed to enter the Untied States previously.
Without a reliable means of vetting these aliens to determine their true identitied, there would be no reliable way to know if they truly have relatives in the United States.
Even DNA testing would be worthless when dealing with in-laws and purported members of the extended family members.
Furthermore, the Supreme Court ruling that provided exclusions for aliens with “bona fide relationships” with entities that include schools and employers ignores that a significant number of terrorists have attended school in the United States and/or had jobs that enabled them to effectively embed themselves as they went about their deadly preparations.
The day before a terrorist participates in an attack he/she is likely to hide in plain sight by going to his job or by attending classes.
This paragraph is found on page 98 under the title “Immigration Benefits” of the official report 9/11 and Terrorist Travel – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States:
Terrorists in the 1990s, as well as the September 11 hijackers, needed to find a way to stay in or embed themselves in the United States if their operational plans were to come to fruition. As already discussed, this could be accomplished legally by marrying an American citizen, achieving temporary worker status, or applying for asylum after entering. In many cases, the act of filing for an immigration benefit sufficed to permit the alien to remain in the country until the petition was adjudicated. Terrorists were free to conduct surveillance, coordinate operations, obtain and receive funding, go to school and learn English, make contacts in the United States, acquire necessary materials, and execute an attack.
On March 19, 2002 I testified at a Congressional hearing on the topic, “INS’S March 2002 Notification Of Approval Of Change Of Status For Pilot Training For Terrorist Hijackers Mohammed Atta And Marwan Al-Shehhi.” Back then members of Congress, from both parties, demanded our immigration laws be enforced to prevent future attacks.
That was then, this is now:
The July 13, 2017 Breitbart article, Indian Student Pleads Guilty to Federal Judge Murder Plot, included these paragraphs:
Yahya Farooq Mohammad, 39, came to the U.S. originally on a student visa. Mohammad was attending Ohio State University when he and three other Muslim men, all of which are foreign nationals, were charged with attempting to send money to a leader of the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda, Breitbart News previously reported.
While in prison and awaiting trial, Mohammad told another inmate of his plans to murder U.S. Federal Judge James Knepp, the man overseeing his court case, according to the Associated Press.
“Family reunification” has been one of the emotional arguments exploited by the open-borders immigration anarchists and now it is being exploited by federal judges and even the U.S. Supreme Court.
It is time to contemplate the suffering of American families who will never be re-united with their loved ones – the families ripped apart by the deaths of their loved ones at the hands of international terrorists and transnational criminals whose presence in the United States ultimately cost their family members their lives.
These families will never be “reunited.”
The famed playwright, George Bernard Shaw’s lamented, “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”
Our government must, for once and for all, learn the lessons of the past to prevent tragedies, atrocities and carnage in the future.
FRONTPAGEMAG: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267361/courting-disaster-supreme-court-decides-against-michael-cutler
