RashyNullPlanet

Some well-meaning but very stupid folks in Ypsilanti, MI catalyzed another unnecessary police escalation and derailment of a family’s lives:

While she returned to the car to get her cell phone so she could locate her friend, Emily Brumbaugh said, her husband approached the group.

“I heard, ‘Give me my kid,’ and ‘You’re not getting him,”’ she said.

At that point, that crowd was guilty of kidnapping.

The idiot cops who arrived on the scene didn’t help by sorting things out or dissipating tension:

Egeler said Lloyd Brumbaugh ran to the boy and picked him up, but Washtenaw County Sheriff’s deputies had arrived by then. He said he was told to put the boy down so they could talk. Brumbaugh complied, but when Deputy Katrina Bourdeau reached for the boy, Brumbaugh pushed her away and grabbed him, Egeler said.

There is no dispute that the Lloyd is the father of the boy, so when the deputy attempted to take Brumbaugh’s son, she became guilty of attempted kidnapping. Getting between a parent and his child is like getting between a grizzly and her cubs: you’re just asking for serious? trouble. Surely even a cop knows that, and should be able act accordingly without escalating the situation.

Emily Brumbaugh said she was placed in a patrol car until she calmed down and Brumbaugh was taken to a hospital, and didn’t learn where her husband was until he called her from jail at 7 p.m. that night.

And at that point the police made themselves guilty of kidnapping both Emily and Lloyd.

Unfortunately for everyone, cops everywhere are increasingly shooting first and asking questions later, if they bother to ask questions at all. As far as I can tell, they operate on only one premise: their authority must be respected at all costs.

“What if I can best help others by redistributing their wealth to the community? By gunpoint if necessary?”

My answer:

You’d be misconstruing “best”, for all involved. And you’d be ignoring what’s right.

You’d be a thief and an enabler, and probably a kidnapper and a murderer.

And you’d rightfully be dead if you had the stupidity and nerve to try to impose that premise on your own. Instead, you’d rather delegate your collectivist fantasy, via some cowardly vote, to a gang of bipedal rottweilers who have been trained to ignore their own consciences.

Charley Hardman recently had another close encounter with the thin blue spine, and that encounter revealed that cops no longer need any evidence at all to derail your life:

the modern cop definition of suspicion ? of criminal activity ? is what he doesn’t know. have lost count of the times i’ve sat in my car listening to all the woes that will befall the world because i refuse the “papers please” dance of bullshit. why?

he doesn’t know if i’m a terrorist.
he doesn’t know if i’m a burglar.
he doesn’t know if i’m a stalker.
he doesn’t know if i’m a serial murderer.

some can keep at that for about 7 items. things he does not know! that’s what these decrepit assholes now consider RAS (reasonable articulable suspicion). without my ID they don’t know if i’m “wanted”. without my ID they don’t know all sorts of shit, jack. and that is fucking “suspicious”.

There is no limit to what anyone doesn’t know. That means cops no longer need any reason at all to stop you and wreck your life, based on the fact that they don’t a know damn thing about you.

Salon has an article about yesterday’s raids in Minnesota on potential protesters at the Republican National Convention. This sums things up pretty well:

Yet how is our own Government’s behavior in Minnesota any different than what the Chinese did to its protesters during the Olympics (other than the fact that we actually have a Constitution that prohibits such behavior)? And where are all the self-righteous Freedom Crusaders in our nation’s establishment organs who were so flamboyantly criticizing the actions of a Government on the other side of the globe as our own Government engages in the same tyrannical, protest-squelching conduct with exactly the same motives?

“Land of the Free”, my ass.

My comment, at a local forum:

What you’re saying is exactly the same as claiming that a mere bystander at a game of roulette must pay for the losses of some gambler who deliberately chose to put his money on the table.

…

Would you have the audacity to come to my house and do to me what government does to me on your behalf?

Have many times does it have to be said?

The only people who get to complain are people who don’t roll the dice.

I’ve been chipping away at the essays in Martin Luther King’s “Why We Can’t Wait” for a little while now. In “The Summer of Our Discontent”, King writes:

The old order ends, no matter what Bastilles remain, when the enslaved, within themselves, bury the psychology of servitude.

Very, very few voters I’ve met realize they’re selling themselves into slavery when they presume to make decisions about other people’s lives. They cast their vote, as if they believe it were some sacrament to impose their mere preferences on their neighbors.

I see no reason to hope that any of these votistas will ever recognize that they’re propping up a structure that is devouring them.

The old order will never end, so long as voters refuse to question what they’re doing to themselves and their neighbors.

Trying to catch up. Been traveling to central america, and the last couple weeks, trying to get back into things here.

Billy has a couple things that are required reading, the first here:

Law & Order types rarely take an effort to distinguish the ethics of any given law and despise doing so. Therefore, it is enough for them to hear that a given person is in-hand, and then Due Process will sort it out. The thinking here is, roughly, “If he was charged, then he must’ve been doing something wrong.” Such a person rarely or never considers the open-ended implications: what if one of his values, the pursuit of which causes no one harm, becomes proscribed at law?

A couple things to note: 1. “Law & Order types rarely take an effort to distinguish the ethics of any given law and despise doing so,” and 2. ‘The “thinking” here is…’

A couple points: 1. law and order types I’ve encountered almost universally crave abdication of their moral responsibility to distinguish right from wrong, preferring instead to rely on easy excuses like, “It’s the law,” even if the law is obviously contrary to what is clearly right, and 2. there is no thinking involved in believing that being charged is the same as guilt. It’s a Pavlovian response, not thinking.

The second item from Billy is here:

Think about “The United States”. These days, you hear politicians and other mouthy twits rattling on about “unity”. Of course, this is part & parcel of the entire socialist theme, but it also has a most unfortunate aspect in its standing in the American political heritage. It’s a long-bone in our political lexicon. What’s grievously unfortunate is that the only thing about American politics that “united” this country was dying lip-service (known as “the Constitution”) to the ideals originally set forth in the Declaration of Independence. It was the essential idea of freedom that was the object of the “union” — no matter how badly it was served, ever after.

No socialist idea was ever a part of that, and this is the ghastly perversion of the concept of “union” that we face now: the socialists have something in mind that is simply not American. When they talk about “unity”, they are not talking about agreement on fidelity to the idea of freedom. They’re talking about a hive.

“agreement on fidelity to the idea of freedom.” That is the essence of the origin of America. And it’s been misunderstood, spit on, ridiculed, manipulated, robbed, beaten, pitchcapped, raped, and murdered since its birth.

What can be done? Well, it ain’t much, but get familiar with jury nullification.

Richard Rahn at the Washington Times points out a despicable practice: the US government taxing its citizens who earn a living outside the US, but in the course of his article he reveals that he harbors a contradiction:

the U.S. Congress has just passed a law that places a higher tax burden (and in some cases wealth confiscation) on those who choose to permanently leave the United States,

Taxation is wealth confiscation. There is no difference. Wealth is property. Property confiscation is theft, no matter who, or what, perpetrates it.

This quote from George Carlin speaks for itself:?

You may have noticed that there’s one thing I don’t complain about: Politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says, “They suck”. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. No, they come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and they’re elected by American voters. This is the best we can do, folks. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

….I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”, but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.

I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.

I’ve been saying it for many years: legal does not equal right. This lovely specimen comes from Lawrence Taylor:

In other words, although the crime is having .08% alcohol in the blood,?you can?t offer evidence about the amount of alcohol actually in the blood!

The California Supreme Court imagines it can alter the laws of physics and chemistry with its ridiculous opinion.