January 20, 2020

Why laws against hate speech are dangerous

fromGatestoneInstitute: Pending legislation seeks to bar all kinds of large cash payments to "fight crime and money laundering." Banning cash will allow the government to monitor all citizen transactions for approval.

Indoctrination and Censorship            Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

Top priority for California voters heading into 2020 primary? Homelessness

fromSacBee: Candidates visiting California will likely need to focus more of their energy on explaining how they’d tackle homelessness and work to make housing cheaper.

Politics and Other Official Acts of Corruption

Michelle Obama’s school lunch program faces new cuts on former first lady’s birthday

fromImpact2020: The proposed rule announced Friday would increase “flexibility” for vegetable requirements and allow schools to change fruit servings during breakfast in favor of meats or meat alternatives.

Regulation Nation 

Trump and Comey are united against encrypted communications

fromReason: Don’t worry—America’s ruling factions still disagree over who should be in charge of the snooping.

Government is Watching Every Move You Make

Australia aims to ban cash spending

fromAsiaTimes: Pending legislation seeks to bar all kinds of large cash payments to "fight crime and money laundering." Banning cash will allow the government to monitor all citizen transactions for approval.

Regulation Nation               The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

Proposed bill to make cellphone use under 21 a crime punishable by 1 year in prison

fromAsiaTimes: Pending legislation seeks to bar all kinds of large cash payments to "fight crime and money laundering." Banning cash will allow the government to monitor all citizen transactions for approval.

Regulation Nation                   Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

June 10, 2019

U.S. government’s moves against Julian Assange are a blueprint for making journalists into felons

fromTheStar: Empowering prosecutors to decide who does or doesn’t deserve press protections would restrict “freedom of the press” to a small, cloistered priesthood of privileged citizens designated by the government as “journalists.” The First Amendment was written to avoid precisely that danger.  

The Government is Not Us        Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

VIDEO: Homelessness - California's Ugly Growth Industry

fromLibertyPen/YouTube: California has an epidemic of homelessness that is hard to believe. A look at what is going on in Golden State’s richest cities. Karen Hix, Tucker Carlson.  

Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market      The Welfare State: Promoting Dependency

Hacking dirty government secrets is not a crime

fromCounterpunch: "Corporate media’s instant reversal on Assange—from rapist scum to First Amendment hero—elevates self-serving hypocrisy to high art. But that’s OK. Whatever gets Assange closer to freedom is welcome."  

The Government is Not Us        Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

Give up your password or go to jail: Police push legal boundaries to get into cellphones

fromNBCNews: “The world should know that what they’re doing out here is crazy,” said a man who refused to share his passcode with police.  

Police State America

You’re under arrest: How the police state muzzles our right to speak truth to power

fromRutherfordInstitute: "What the architects of the police state want are submissive, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority and don’t speak out against government misconduct."  

Police State America

Oakland, California decriminalizes magic mushrooms and peyote

fromUSAToday: The city council’s vote directed law enforcement to cease investigating and prosecuting individuals for using or possessing drugs sourced from plants, cacti and – most commonly – mushrooms.  

The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

Feb 5, 2019

A no-knock raid in Houston led to deaths and police injuries. Should police rethink the practice?

fromTexasMonthly:  The official HPD narrative is the only one we’ll have. Acevedo said none of the officers had been wearing body cameras during the raid. Tuttle and Nicholas will never be able to tell their side of the story.

Police State America

Government to Facebook pipeline reveals a corrupt mix of social media and the state

fromFreeThoughtProject:  The official HPD narrative is the only one we’ll have. Acevedo said none of the officers had been wearing body cameras during the raid. Tuttle and Nicholas will never be able to tell their side of the story.

Indoctrination and Censorship

‘Cooling is warming’: climate hoaxters panic as US freezes, media provides cover

fromWaatsUpWithThat?:  But here is my personal favorite headline from, where else?, NBC News…. “Yes, it can be this cold outside in a time of global warming.”

Political Correctness and Other Nitwittery

How to cop proof your cell phone

fromTargetLiberty:  The official HPD narrative is the only one we’ll have. Acevedo said none of the officers had been wearing body cameras during the raid. Tuttle and Nicholas will never be able to tell their side of the story.

Police State America      Individual Liberty: America's First Principle

Marine vet films traffic stop from his porch; California cop gives him a concussion

fromReason:  Adrian Burrell was well within his rights to record the officer.

Police State America

Walter E Williams: Is reality optional?

fromCreators:  Suppose I declare that I am a king. Should you be required to address me as "Your Majesty"? You say, "Williams, that's lunacy! You can't prove such nonsense." You're wrong. It's proved by my declaration.

Political Correctness and Other Nitwittery

April 16, 2016

Overdose deaths are the product of drug prohibition

fromCreators: The government's dirty little secret: Drug legalization will save lives.
The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

America's sinking public pension plans are now $1.4 trillion underwater

fromReason: More government malfeasance wherever you turn. Taxpayer contributions to pension plans have doubled in the past decade, but pension debt continues to increase.
Economic Policy: Statism Versus The Free Market

Drivers using mobile phones could be fined without even knowing they’ve been caught

fromNews.com: NEW hi-tech cameras that detect drivers using their mobile phones without them even knowing and automatically issues fines could soon change everything.
Regulation Nation

The way we shop online will be threatened in the Supreme Court this week

fromReason: Plus: Ketamine nasal spray gets boost from Johnson & Johnson study and Philly protests over jailing of rapper Meek Mill.
Regulation Nation

Canada's Liberal party considers decriminalization of all illicit drugs

fromTheGuardian: Drug cartels and police unions will join forces to fight this.
The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

VIDEO: During raid on wrong home cops kill innocent unarmed dad—no charges

fromTheFreeThoughtProject: Cops are allowed to shoot first and ask questions later. They are given special privilege as agents of the state and are not to be confused with public servants.
Police State America

December 2, 2017

We live in a police state, and our legal system is the cause 

from InsiderSources: Things have gotten so ridiculous in the search for victimless criminals that police have even taken to setting each other up, if only inadvertently. Recently, Detroit officers posing as drug buyers brawled with officers posing as dealers.
Police State America   The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

A non-political strategy for freedom

from LibertarianRepublic: You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Individual Liberty: America's First Principle   Justice is a Result, Not Just a Process

It's too easy for the government to invade privacy in name of security

from LibertarianRepublic: The use of the cellphone as a surveillance tool is at the heart of a major privacy case heard by the Supreme Court this week in Carpenter v. United States. At issue may be the very future of privacy in America.
Government is Watching Every Move You Make

Bill expanding concealed-carry gun rights advances in House

from NY Times: Gun rights legislation that would allow concealed-carry permit holders from one state to legally carry their guns to any other state passed a key House panel and appeared to be headed for a vote on the floor of the House.
2nd Amendment Assaults

When legal drugs harm and illegal drugs help

from ScientificAmerican: The frequently arbitrary nature of our drug classification schemes is causing more and more confusion.
The War on Unapproved Voluntary Exchange

Libertarians: Our rulers are wearing no clothes

from the Libertarian Institute: Libertarians have always said that our rulers are wearing no clothes.  Now it’s turning out that this figure of speech is the literal truth.
Politics and Other Official Acts of Corruption

US Bill Aims To Stop State Bans Of Encrypted Phones

by Lance Whitney.      Imagine not being able to buy an iPhone in your state because the device's data is protected by encryption. A couple of Congressmen are trying to make sure that can't happen. The Encrypt Act of 2016, short for Ensuring National Constitutional Rights of Your Private Telecommunications Act, would deny states the power to block  ... MORE

Police State Update: Ex-Cop California Assemblyman Wants Encrytion Keys For All Cell Phones Available To The Police

by Cyrus Farivar.    A second state lawmaker has now introduced a bill that would prohibit the sale of smartphones with unbreakable encryption. Except this time, despite very similar language to a pending New York bill, the stated rationale is to fight human trafficking, rather than terrorism. Specifically, California Assemblymember Jim Cooper’s (D-Elk   ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: Complicating The Obvious

Electronic "improvement" rears its ugly head.      Engineers who design computerized products and services seem to have an almost fanatical determination to avoid using plain English. It is understandable when complicated processes require complicated operations. But when the very simplest things are designed with needless complications  ... MORE

IRS Possessed Stingray Cellphone Surveillance Gear - Why?

by Nicky Woolf and William Green.     13th federal agency to use secretive dragnet!  The Internal Revenue Service is the latest in a growing list of US federal agencies known to have possessed the sophisticated cellphone dragnet equipment known as Stingray, according to documents obtained by the Guardian. Invoices obtained following a request  ... MORE

Evan Schuman: Turn That Old Phone Into A Privacy Device

New way to safeguard calls.   Most forms of communication used by enterprises these days are highly prone to being intercepted, whether by law enforcement, cyberthieves, corporate spies, or wayward employees and contractors. That leaves enterprise IT open to new approaches to safeguard communications. I just saw one creative idea on the   ... MORE

North Carolina Teen Prosecuted For Taking Naked Selfie

by Tara Culp-Ressler.  Gov't figures a little prison time should fix him. A 17-year-old in North Carolina struck a plea deal last week to avoid serving jail time on felony sex offender charges. His crime? Taking a nude photo of himself. The photo in question was discovered when the teenager’s cell phone was searched during a wider investigation   ... MORE

VIDEO: Nanny Of The Month - July 2015

USA Police State Celebrated As “Defense Of Freedom”

by William Boardman.      One needs a wicked sense of humor these days to fully appreciate the present moment in American history, as a supposedly free country debates which police state practices to adopt, while ignoring any thought that maybe the United States should not be a police state at all. For a brief shining moment early on June 1,   ... MORE

Federal Court Deals A Huge Blow To Cellphone Privacy

More warrantless searches for Americans ahead.        The government doesn't need a warrant to search cellphone tower location records, a federal appeals court in Atlanta has ruled. In a potentially wide-ranging ruling, the court said that because cellphone owners technically "volunteer" their location to providers when they       ... MORE

U.S. Secretly Tracked Billions Of Calls For Decades

by Brad Heath.   The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans' international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed. For more than two decades, the Justice Department   ...  MORE

Police State Update - Warrantless Searches: Chicago Cops Fight To Keep Cellphone Tracking Technology Secret

by Frank Main.   The Chicago Police Department is fighting to keep a lid on how, when and where officers have used covert cellphone tracking systems — with an outside law firm billing the city more than $120,000 to battle a lawsuit that seeks those secret details. Since 2005, the department has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on       ... MORE

One in Three Americans Hide Data From Government

by J.D. Tucille.    And you should too. My cell phone is encrypted. It also contains two apps—TextSecure and RedPhone—for conducting secure communications. All I really need in addition is something worth keeping secret, unless a few notes for articles and photographs of my kid and my dogs make the cut. Still, it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling to    ... MORE

VIDEO: Unconstitutional Domestic Spying

The CIA Campaign To Steal Apple’s Secrets

by Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley.   Researchers working with the Central Intelligence Agency have conducted a multi-year, sustained effort to break the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Intercept. The security researchers presented their latest tactics and achievements at a secret annual     ... MORE

VIDEO: 7 Creepy Robots For Cops