Archive for the ‘Police/law enforcement’ Category
DWI arrest at BAC 0%
Saturday, July 5th, 2008Radley Balko blags about an Arizona designated driver who was arrested for DWI with a blood-alcohol content of 0%. Balko and the newspaper columnist he cites both thought the arresting officer might have been getting back at the designated driver's husband, a lawyer who defeated the officer in a DWI ...
Kill switches and remote control
Friday, July 4th, 2008Bruce Schneier, the computer-security guru whom Brad at WendyMcElroy.com often links to, wrote a pretty chilling post on kill switches and remote control. This type of technology is an example of why government is not your only enemy, but its creation of the national-security state enables private companies and individuals ...
Lynch mobs, stones, and glass houses
Friday, July 4th, 2008I urge you to read this column published at Wendy McElroy's website ifeminists.net, written by one WolfmanMac, about the increasing criminalization of being male: Lynch mobs, stones, and glass houses. The nuanced insight and analysis of one man's child-porn charges in particular and society's attitude about sexual predators in general ...
An anecdotal story about incompetent police and gun control
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008On the WRIF-Detroit morning show I heard a story from a caller about a ridiculous ordeal he went through as a result of his attempts to protect his next-door neighbor's property. He called in response to the show's discussion about Joe Horn, a 61-year-old Texas man (not an Atlanta Falcons ...
Gonzalo Guizan: another death by drug war
Friday, June 13th, 2008Radley Balko writes of another victim of the paramilitary-style drug raids that Republocrats and their myrmidon voters continue to support in the name of protecting our liberties or our morals or some such. On May 18, police in Easton, Connecticut conducted a heavily-armed drug raid on the home of Ronald Terebesi, ...
Wendy McElroy: the State discourages helpfulness and decency
Sunday, June 8th, 2008Many libertarians have come to consider the police and other law-enforcement divisions of the State as the most directly vicious and physically dangerous branches of the State to deal with. Wendy McElroy wrote about why you should never voluntarily talk to agents of the State or offer them any unnecessary ...
Why I oppose monopolistic justice (sic) systems
Thursday, June 5th, 2008The only remaining halfway-decent argument against the unregulated free market that I've encountered is that private police, courts, and retribution systems would be unaccountable to the actual justice of natural law and result in an increase in unchecked use of force against innocents. This would happen, they say, because there ...
Child faces prosecution for calling the Cult of Scientology a cult
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Jacob Sullum reports at Reason's Hit and Run that a British teenager has been summoned to court and faces a fine (and, presumably, a mark on his criminal record) for holding a sign outside of the Cult of Scientology London headquarters with the word "cult" on it. I don't understand ...
Juror conscription is not a civic duty
Friday, May 23rd, 2008I wonder if anyone but myself, who is pretty thoroughly obsessed with quotations from famous figures throughout history, enjoys our random quote generator that Kel put at the top of our page. (He didn't write the code, he just put it up there; the plugin is by Dustin Barnes.) I ...
To the Home Office, everyone is a terrorist suspect
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008It's a shame George Orwell didn't foresee the advent of computers and the computer age because if he had, 1984 would have been so much more frightening. The Home Office of Great Britain plans to create "Big brother" database for phones calls, emails and web use. This fascism hasn't been ...
Protest = Terrorism
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008That's the point we're coming to under this national-security state in 21st-century America. Republicans and Democrats and the people who continue to support them like a battered wife who won't leave her abusive husband are to blame. Karen De Coster on the LRC blag: If you are going to St. ...
Anarchy and law and order
Saturday, May 17th, 2008That's it. Anthony Gregory is my favorite political writer. Living, that is. I mean, no one could ever surpass Bastiat, Mencken, and Rothbard. His latest achievement is a beautiful explanation of how anarchy would promote order and natural law better than Statism does. I urge everyone of every political variety to ...
“But the State has to protect the children!”
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008"Or else stupid and negligent parents would cause all sorts of harm to them!" It is an understandable position, one I used to take in my darker, minarchist days. However, it is hard to deny the reality that often, the harm that a parent does to a child is not even ...
Can anarchism save Somalia?
Sunday, April 27th, 2008"Good government" is a paradox. Any people so decent as to be capable of implementing it would be better off without it, and any people so rotten as to need it would be incapable of implementing it. —unknown Somalia's condition, its history, and the attempts by the U.N. and U.S. to impose ...
Statolatry on the radio
Monday, April 21st, 2008A quibble I have with women, by and large, as regards their moral-political thought processes is that they are too hesitant to take a definitive side, to make a polarizing statement, to pronounce a strong (negative) judgment of people, ideas, or institutions. I made sure to say "by and large" ...
More rational thoughts on FLDS kidnapping
Sunday, April 20th, 2008I have decided I am an inadequate blagger. This is because I don't have enough time for writing and can't focus and materialize my thoughts into excellent blag posts, unless I take a lot of time for it. So I just link to other, (semi)professional writers who do it much ...
Insightful thoughts on the Eldorado polygamy compound raid
Saturday, April 19th, 2008I felt the need to chime in about the potential rights and certain wrongs of the raid by Texas police of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints polygamist ranch in Eldorado, but I think Wendy McElroy expressed thoughts very similar to my own much better than I could have. If I have ...
Hated attorney thinks he’ll get a biased jury
Saturday, April 12th, 2008When he's on the stand for illegal-campaign-donation and obstruction of justice charges. Article from the Detroit News. As much as he probably deserves some kind of punishment for all the defendants whose rights he's violated over the years, any charge relating to "excessive" campaign donations and almost any charge relating to ...
Orwellian Real ID tyranny
Sunday, April 6th, 2008After Anthony Gregory's announcements on the LRC blag and Mises blag introducing the Independent Institute's new blag, The Beacon, I realized that my recent lament that Gregory has only recently resumed regular blagging was misinformed; he has apparently been writing for that blag since October and was, in fact, its ...
The State is NEVER wrong
Friday, February 1st, 2008A good post about more law-enforcement abuses, which was one of the blag posts that trackbacked to J.D. Tuccille's aforementioned blag post. (Oh, but imagine the horror of a law-enforcement agency that wasn't the highest instance of legal authority in a state! Why, bad things would happen to good people ...
It IS happening here
Friday, February 1st, 2008Republocrats currently use fear-mongering on two big issues to garner support for their various State interventions into our lives—terrorism for some, global warming for others. Perhaps it can be said that libertarians also use something akin to fear-mongering in our debate and discussion, though of course I think it is ...
How the British government protects its subjects
Thursday, January 24th, 2008By shielding them from the dangers of watching TV without paying an unjust and exorbitant fee to the State, of course. I happened across this web page about one Briton's experience with the TV licensing arm of the State, and the first thing it brought to mind was, of course, ...
Habeas Wha?
Friday, December 28th, 2007Is posting a speech a total cop out when it comes to submitting a post? You bet. But that doesn't make this speech, concerning the ever growing disdain the Federal Government has for every American's natural right to habeas corpus, any less relevant. Please, enjoy the wonderful Judge Napolitano. ...