The Militant Libertarian

I'm pissed off and I'm a libertarian. What else you wanna know?

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Pistol-Packing Positivists: Our Enemy in Blue

From: http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/

How would you react if you were waylaid by an armed and bellicose stranger who has the means to kill you and your family and the power to get away with the crime?

Very few of us would react with the self-possession displayed by 28-year-old Jared Massey when his SUV was stopped by John Gardner of the Utah Highway Patrol (UHP) last September 14.

Whether or not Massey was speeding through a construction zone, he was entirely within his rights to demand clarification of his supposed offense before affixing his signature to the traffic ticket. There was no need for Massey's signature.

Had Gardner been interested in enforcing the law rather than asserting his authoritah,* he would simply have scrawled ���refuses to sign��� on the citation in his no-doubt puerile and illegible hand (as a tax feeder of the thug caste, Gardner is marginally literate at best), handed it to the motorist, and gone about his merry way in pursuit of fresh victims.

But Gardner, most likely motivated by the resentments common to steers that wish they were bulls, just had to order Massey out of the car and place him under arrest ��� for doing nothing that constitutes a crime.
It is not a crime for a citizen to demand that a police officer justify a traffic stop. Massey, who admitted to driving 68 mph in what he apparently thought was a 65 mph zone, was reasonably cooperative and genuinely puzzled by Gardner's claim that the driver had missed a sign posting a 40 mph construction zone.

Gardner assumed a hostile posture when Massey made his further cooperation contingent on being shown that he had violated the speed limit. Which is to say that Gardner immediately sized up the motorist as an enemy combatant (no other term is adequate) because Massey refused to behave as a cringing, docile serf.

It is not a crime for a motorist to withhold his signature from a traffic ticket, since the signature is unnecessary (refusing to sign means that you won't be charged with a misdemeanor if you don't show up in court). A UHP spokesman has conceded that Gardner's best option was to put the citation in the vehicle "in a professional manner and leave it at that."

And once again, Massey was making an entirely reasonable request: He wanted to be shown the speed limit sign he had supposedly ignored.

At this point, Gardner needlessly escalated the encounter to one of unalloyed violence, ordering Massey from the car and attempting to place him under arrest. Although the regulations of his professional tribe permit this, Gardner had no right or reason to do this, since the ticket had been written and the matter should have been turned over to a court.

But Gardner, like nearly everybody else in his line of work, believes that his job is not to protect the public, but to make it submit to the supposed authority of the State. Which is why, when Massey quite reasonably decided he was no longer going to play the role in which Gardner had cast him, the UHP officer committed the crime of assault with a deadly weapon by shooting Massey with his Taser.

This was done while Massey was walking away from Gardner. His behavior was non-cooperative, but also non-threatening. The UHP's policy governing the use of a Taser does not permit an officer to use it against someone who is merely non-cooperative; the subject must pose some kind of threat to himself, the officer, or innocent bystanders in order for a Taser attack to be justified.

The problem here is that Gardner, a 14-year veteran of the UHP, was about to lose bladder control (an affliction common to geldings), so frightened had he become by Massey's non-threatening behavior.

As the hero explained to a colleague a few minutes later, Massey was ���making me nervous as hell��� by his insistence on being treated as a reasonable adult, rather than behaving like a timid child. ���I was like, nah, we ain't playing this game,��� Gardner boasted to the second officer by way of justifying the Taser strike.

���Good,��� gloated the second tax-fed parasite. ���Good for you.���

Bear in mind here that it was Gardner who was playing a ���game��� by needlessly escalating an unpleasant situation. If he had been genuinely concerned about his personal safety, why did he order Massey from the car, rather than simply handing him the citation and walking away, when there was no reason for an arrest? Why commit an armed assault on a husband and father in front of his family, and then threatening the wife with arrest for objecting to her husband's treatment?

This was undisguised, needless aggression fueled by an adolescent need on Gardner's part to assert dominance over someone who wasn't part of his club. Which is why his behavior received the immediate and unqualified approval of another member of that gang.

We are incessantly hectored about the supposedly indispensable role played by police in protecting us from the anarchic violence that would prevail in their absence. Yet every single day ��� thanks, in no small measure, to the advent of on-line video ��� we see how police themselves have become the most dangerous predators we face.

Through his literary creation Screwtape, C.S. Lewis once warned (I paraphrase) that one of the Devil's most effective tricks is to rivet the public mind on the danger posed by a vice that is the exact opposite of the one currently in vogue. For example, where gluttony is ubiquitous, the Devil tempts people to condemn the vanity of those who strive to remain thin.

In like manner, we are always and ever admonished about the evils of anarchy at a time when the State and its agents are, with ever-increasing brazenness, imposing unalloyed tyranny on our society. We are treated to pious homilies about the need for citizens to respect the law when those exercising government power are becoming entirely emancipated from any restraints on their discretionary use of lethal violence. We are instructed to ruminate on the manifold hypothetical outrages that could be committed in the name of anarchy, even as the very tangible atrocities committed by State agents accumulate.

In his valuable new book A Nation of Sheep, retired federal Judge Andrew Napolitano describes how our society ��� both the Regime ruling us and far too many of the ruled ��� has succumbed to positivism, a legal perspective in which ���the law is whatever those in power say it is.... Under positivism, whoever or whatever controls the government, whether a majority or a minority, always rules and always gets its way.���

As Napolitano explains, positivism ���is perhaps the most primitive legal theory, having evolved only slightly from the sort of justification that could be offered for following the demands of a tribal chieftain or general-turned-dictator. The theory promotes fear rather than respect.... The problem today in America, the greatest and gravest threat to personal freedom in this country, is that the positivists are carrying the day.���

During the 14 years he has been a State Trooper ��� meaning that he has been cared for at the expense of better people who make an honest living ��� John Gardner has been deeply marinated in positivism. While he's clearly too dim to expatiate the theoretical concepts, Gardner's behavior indicates that he has an instinctive understanding of positivism in practice. As someone clad in a State-issued costume, given a gun and a Taser and expansive discretion in using those implements of violence, Gardner clearly behaves he doesn't have to play any ���games��� with those who aren't part of his tribe.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" exclaimed Massey as Gardner, his face contorted with primal rage, threatened him with a Taser.

That's a useful question. A better one is this: What the hell is wrong with the rest of us, that we are willing to live under a system of the sort that rules us?

*authoritah (n.) -- The conceit that people clad in ridiculous State-issued costumes are owed some kind of reflexive deference by the decent, law-abiding citizenry upon whom such tax-feeders inflict themselves.




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Thursday, November 22, 2007

Ten Steps To Close Down an Open Society

From Naomi Wolf

1- Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After September 11, 2001, we began the War on Terror...

2- Create a gulag
Behold Guantanamo Bay and similar facilities, plus the idea of "Enemy Combatants"

3- Develop a thug caste
"Security Contractors" and militarized police forces are these new thugs...not to mention the foreigners in our military!

4- Set up an internal surveillance system
We continually hear about wire tapping, Internet scanners, and more...

5- Harass citizens’ groups
Lots of reports of infiltrations by government agents and provocateurs have been spreading - they seem to be targeting just about every non-establishment group (esp. anti-war and political groups)!

6- Engage in arbitrary detention and release
The TSA does this regularly, as does the Secret Service and others. Even local police are getting in on this act now, detaining citizens without arrest for hours.

7- Target key individuals
Everyone from academics (who hears about non-global-warming research?) to politicians like Ron Paul are being attacked systematically.

8- Control the press
Notice how much stuff you don't hear on TV broadcasts or in newspapers? Not to mention the constant spin put on things...

9- Dissent equals treason
Witness the current attempts by pundits, sellouts, and others (like Sean Hannity and Limbaugh) to make anyone who doesn't believe the Bush Party Line into a terrorist.

10- Suspend the rule of law
This part is coming very soon. It coul be argued it's already happened, since voting outcomes are now very suspect...


To read this entire article, with a short YouTube video included, go to the original at http://www.nationalexpositor.com/News/703.html

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Police with Dogs: Vaccinating Kids in Maryland

http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Temp/Temp-PSB-VaccinationTyrannyInMaryland-Eli.htm
by Barbara Loe Fisher

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." - Martin Niemueller

I watched them bundled up against the cold winter air on Saturday, November 17, 2007, with their children and the letter from the State of Maryland threatening them with imprisonment or fines of $50 a day for failing to show proof their children had gotten a chickenpox or hepatitis B shot. Confused, angry or scared but mostly resigned, they were working mothers and fathers trudging toward the courthouse to face the Judge ordering them to get vaccinated or go to jail. Patrolling the scene was a SWAT team of policemen with dogs.

There were a few vaccine safety and informed consent advocates who showed up to witness what happened at the Prince George's County Courthouse, among them Washington D.C. Attorney Jim Moody and autism activist Kelli Ann Davis, of SAFEMINDS and Charles Frohman, representing the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) http://www.aapsonline.org/press/nr-11-16-07.php as well as several Moms with children who developed autism after vaccination.

The U.S. media turned out but they were kept behind barricades and denied access into the building, as were the advocates and other members of the general public. There was no public oversight on what was happening to the parents and children inside.

I listened to or spoke with several mothers leaving the building with their children and learned the sad truth about what was happening behind the closely guarded, closed doors of the Courthouse. The parents were not being asked questions about their child's medical history or whether the children had experienced health problems after previous vaccinations. The parents were not being given information about vaccine side effects or how to monitor their children for signs of vaccine reactions. They were not given forms for religious and medical exemptions to vaccination allowed in Maryland (see the video of my debate on CNN the day before with Vanderbilt's Bill Schaffner, M.D. plus a video of a Saturday CNN interview with Jim Moody http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/17/maryland.vaccines/index.html#cnnSTCText)

Apparently, the children were being re-vaccinated with not just hepatitis B and chicken pox vaccines, the two new vaccines added to the Maryland school requirement list, but also with other required vaccines for which the public school system could find no record. One mother told me her children were up-to-date on their shots but the school system lost the records and she had to give her children all the required vaccines on the spot or face jail or fines.

My son, Chris, who became learning disabled after suffering a serious reaction to a fourth DPT shot in 1980, traveled with me to Maryland carrying a camera. After growing up watching his Mom work to change one-size-fits-all vaccine policies that were responsible for his vaccine reaction, Chris recently decided he wants to help NVIC put a face on what it means to be vaccine injured in America and what it means when Americans do not have the right to freely exercise informed consent to vaccination.

Chris set up his camera as I talked with a mother hundreds of yards from the front of the Courthouse door. I was about 12 inches inside a row of large cement balls that apparently were erected as a barrier to prevent terrorist attacks. I did not know I wasn't supposed to be talking with this Mom inside the barrier. She was telling me about how she wasn't given any information about vaccines before her children were injected with three vaccines.

All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye I saw an armed guard with a dog emerge from the Courthouse and walk toward us. I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the dread that any citizen of any country in any century has ever felt when an armed guard with a dog starts advancing. As if we were common criminals or terrorists, he yelled and gestured to us to move behind the stones.

We moved without a word. And the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach told me we were being shown the power of the State wielded by that armed guard with the dog, just as parents inside the Courthouse were being shown the power of the State wielded by doctors with syringes.

There has been talk this past week about whether or not U.S. vaccine laws are, indeed, laws or whether they are simply recommendations that do not have the force of law behind them. Because the enactment of public health laws was not defined in the U.S. Constitution as a federal activity, in 1905 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the power of the states to pass public health laws requiring citizens to be vaccinated or re-vaccinated. http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/vaccines/Jacobson_v_Massachusetts.htm

There is now more than 100 years of case law reinforcing the U.S. Supreme Court decision and the right of states to exercise police power to enforce vaccine laws. The post-911 enactment of the Homeland Security Law, the Model State Health Emergency Powers Act and Bioshield I and II makes it clear that the State will use police power to enforce quarantine or vaccination whenever the State chooses to wield that power. http://www.nvic.org/2005_11-15_NVIC_Sen%20Burr_BioShield%202_v7.pdf

The method of punishment for not obeying U.S. state vaccine laws is up to the state legislatures which make the laws. Today, many state legislatures have turned over vaccine law-making to unelected government health and education officials, who may enlist state attorneys and judges in the court system to enforce punishments. One of the punishments which many states have chosen when children have not received all state mandated vaccines is to bar children from attending school unless they file and the State approves exemptions to vaccination outlined by the State.

Those parents, who do not vaccinate their children and do not either make arrangements with the State to homeschool them or successfully file a state-approved exemption, are in violation of another state law: truancy laws. Failure to send your child to school in Maryland between the ages of 5 and 16 is a misdemeanor punishable by fines and jail time or both. This is the law which the Maryland government officials moved to enforce when they enlisted the help of State's Attorney Glenn Ivey (D) and Judge C. Philip Nichols to turn parents of unvaccinated children into criminals.

In one news report, Judge Nichols was quoted as observing that the children looked unhappy waiting in line for their vaccinations. He is quoted as saying "It's cute. It looks like their parents are dragging them to church."

The big difference between being dragged into a Courthouse to get vaccinated and being dragged to church is that an hour of prayer rarely results in catastrophic brain injury or death. I still wonder how many of those children, who were injected with multiple vaccines in the Courthouse, are having vaccine reactions today. Their parents, many of whom are uninformed about how to recognize vaccine reactions, will never know what happened to their children if they regress into chronic poor health after the shots they were forced to get on Saturday.

We know that attacks on the religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccination in America are on the increase and are being led by vaccine patent holders like Paul Offit, M.D. and others who want to force vaccination. http://vaccineawakening.blogspot.com/search?q=attacks+on+vaccine+exemptions.

In 1996, a sixteen year old Milwaukee boy was handcuffed, stripped and jailed overnight because he hadn't shown public school or county health authorities proof that he had gotten a second MMR shot. In 1997, I made a presentation to the National Vaccine Advisory Committee defending the moral right to exercise a conscientious belief exemption to vaccination and predicting what would happen if Americans did not win that freedom. http://www.nvic.org/Loe_Fisher/blfstmt050297.htm

What happened in Maryland this weekend is a final wake-up call for America.

Dozens of new vaccines are being rushed to market in the next decade and most will target children and adults for mandated use. Limiting the power of the State to force vaccination is all that stands between the people and tyranny.

There is only one way we will be free in the future: the laws must be changed so that every state allows a conscientious belief exemption to vaccination. Parents in Texas, after working with Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education (PROVE) to educate the Texas legislature about the need for a conscientious belief exemption, got that exemption added in 2004 (http://www.vaccineinfo.net/). NVIC provided information and strategic support for PROVE's seven year effort to secure strong informed consent and privacy protections in Texas vaccine laws but it was Dawn Richardson, Rebecca Rex and the people of Texas who got the job done.


If you want to work to educate your community and elected officials about vaccination and informed consent rights, contact the National Vaccine Information Center at NVICinfo@gmail.com. For more information about NVIC's 25 years of advocacy work and to learn more about preventing vaccine reactions go to www.nvic.org. Please donate generously to this non-profit educational public service organization working to protect your freedom to choose the kind of health care you want for yourself and your family, including the freedom to choose which vaccines to use.

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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Turning The Police State Apparatus Against Dissenters

http://infowars.net/articles/november2007/161107terror_hell.htm
by Steve Watson

Second major phase of the coordinated destruction of freedom in America targets those who refuse to go along with it

A sustained media propaganda campaign in support of the move to swing the apparatus of tyranny away from phantom Muslim terrorists and towards the American people is in full operation and may pave the way for further attacks on US soil to be blamed on dissenting Americans who speak out against the war and the rise of the domestic police state.

Over the past decade we have witnessed an extreme acceleration of the physical implementation of a framework and infrastructure ready to receive those who will not go along with a coordinated destruction of traditional American values and freedom. With 9/11 came the first opportunity of the 21st century to radically alter the mentality of America and introduce a new order of society.

The corporate media is now preparing the psyche of the American public for a second major shift. This time the effort will be to direct the understanding of the manufactured and fraudulent "war on terror", away from "Islamofascists" and "Al Qaeda" and towards dissenting American citizens.

Over the past month or so we have highlighted this ongoing propaganda campaign in the following articles:

Complaints Flood CNN After Beck Smears Ron Paul Supporters As Terrorists

Neocon Attack on Ron Paul: Greasing the Skids for Implementation of H.R. 1955?

Framing The Truth Movement As Terrorists

Beck: 9/11 Truthers "Insane", "Dangerous Anarchists", "The Kind Of Group A Timothy McVeigh Would Come From"

Pitching For More Dead Americans: A Neo-Con Fetish

Establishment "news" hacks such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh are raising the same talking point ad infinitum, dubbing the global truth movement, along with the anti-war movement, as "anarchists" and violent individuals who are aiding terrorists.

In the event of another attack on US soil, an army of Neo-Cons secretly sharing the same fetish, would revel in exploiting a hollow opportunity to say "we told you so," even at the expense of thousands of dead dads, moms, sons, daughters and babies.

"But these are just the mindless frothings of talking heads looking for ratings" some might say. When you take them in context with the ongoing actions of the government, however, a clearer more deadly picture emerges.

Click here to read the rest of this mind-blowing article! (http://infowars.net/articles/november2007/161107terror_hell.htm)

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Sunday, November 18, 2007

The Dollar


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