South Puget Sound Libertarian

 
The LA Times reports:

In a 6-3 vote, justices say human rights advocates can be prosecuted if they advise members of a foreign terrorist group, even if they urge them to settle their disputes through peaceful means.

[snip]

The law had been challenged on free-speech grounds by several human rights advocates, including USC professor Ralph Fertig. He had worked with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, an outlawed group which supports independence for the Kurds in Turkey. Fertig said he firmly opposed violence and terrorism, but he believed he should be permitted to advise the groups on resolving its disputes through the United Nations.

[snip]

“We are deeply disappointed,” said David Cole, a lawyer who represented Fertig. “The Court said that the 1st Amendment permits Congress to make it a crime to work for peace and human rights. That is wrong.”

Obama = Bush. No law = no law, but the Congress reads the 1st Amendment to include the hidden meaning that no law means no law except if Congress wants to override your freedom of speech. Then no law means whatever the Supremes want it to mean. You don’t have unalienable rights; the Congress can simply take away whatever it wants. This is an oligarchy of unelected judges doing whatever they decide. The re-interpretation comes after the fact not before.

 
From ChannelWeb:

Major carriers blasted the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) and its push to have more authority to regulate broadband Internet and classify it as telecommunications service following the FCC’3 3-2 vote to continue considering new federal broadband regulations.

Carriers like AT&T (NYSE:T), Comcast (NSDQ:CMCSA) and Verizon (NYSE:VZ) lashed out in statements cutting down the FCC decision to move forward with an inquiry on whether broadband should be classified as a telecommunications service, a move that would give the FCC more control and regulatory power over carriers and the services they provide.

“This is impossible to justify on either a policy or legal basis, and we remain confident that if the FCC persists in its course – and we truly hope it does not – the courts will surely overturn their action,” Jim Cicconi, AT&T senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs, said in a statement posted on AT&T’s public policy blog, which called the FCC’s vote “troubling” and “unsettling.”

Meanwhile, Tom Tauke, Verizon’s executive vice president for public affairs, policy and communications, criticized the FCC further.

“Reclassifying high-speed broadband Internet service as a telecom service is a terrible idea,” Tauke wrote in a statement from Verizon. “The negative consequences for online users and the Internet ecosystem would be severe and have ramifications for decades. It is difficult to understand why the FCC continues to consider this option.”

Tauke added: “Rather than attempting to make the new world of broadband fit into the regulatory scheme of the old telephone world, the FCC should acknowledge that this is an issue Congress should address.”

Classic bureaucratic move. The government has been trying for years to figure out a way to take control over content delivered over broadband. And this is the result — reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service and apply ancient regulations to control content.

Somewhere Hillary (GateKeeper) Clinton is smiling.

 
From the NY Times:

Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human genome was complete, medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits.

For biologists, the genome has yielded one insightful surprise after another. But the primary goal of the $3 billion Human Genome Project — to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and then generate treatments — remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.

One sign of the genome’s limited use for medicine so far was a recent test of genetic predictions for heart disease. A medical team led by Nina P. Paynter of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston collected 101 genetic variants that had been statistically linked to heart disease in various genome-scanning studies. But the variants turned out to have no value in forecasting disease among 19,000 women who had been followed for 12 years.

The old-fashioned method of taking a family history was a better guide, Dr. Paynter reported this February in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Statistical linkage is the problem. What, in fact, can medicine say for certain other than that you are alive or dead? And even there the decision is not always clear cut. So X is correlated with Y and Y is correlated with Z and on and on. Where does this analysis get us? Not far.

Once again, we have known the molecular defect or point mutation in the genome that results in sickle cell anemia. We have known it for 53 years and have not been able to do much about it. Now the NY Times gives us permission to note that progress in treating uncommon and common diseases through our knowledge of the genome, has been miniscule.

Ten more years of research, this time on RNA?

 
I  am up to my eyeballs in the non-stop "news" about the Gulf oil spill. Thank Heaven that Congress is really on the ball and has introduced HR 4869: The Restroom Gender Parity in Federal Buildings Act. I kid you not; the link is here. Here’s the text:

111th CONGRESS
2d Session
H. R. 4869

To provide for restroom gender parity in Federal buildings.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

March 17, 2010

Mr. TOWNS (for himself, Mr. ISSA, Mr. VISCLOSKY, and Ms. CLARKE) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and in addition to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned

A BILL

To provide for restroom gender parity in Federal buildings.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ‘Restroom Gender Parity in Federal Buildings Act’.

SEC. 2. REQUIREMENT TO REVISE FEDERAL ACQUISITION REGULATION.

(a) In General- Not later than 2 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the Federal Acquisition Regulation shall be revised–

(1) to direct any Federal procurement executives involved in the acquisition, construction, or major renovation (including contracting for the construction or major renovation) of any facility to increase infrastructure gender parity by–

(A) constructing buildings in such a way that the number of toilets in women’s restrooms will equal or exceed the number of toilets (including urinals) in men’s restrooms; or

(B) if such a number is unachievable or not feasible, receive a statement by the Administrator of General Services as to why such a number of toilets is not needed; and

(2) to direct Federal procurement executives involved in leasing buildings to give preference to the lease of facilities that meet or exceed the female toilet to male toilet (including urinals) ratio of 1 to 1.

(b) Guidance- Not later than 90 days after the date of promulgation of revised regulations under subsection (a), the Director for Federal Procurement Policy shall issue guidance to all Federal procurement executives providing direction and instructions to renegotiate the design of proposed facilities, renovations for existing facilities, and leased facilities to incorporate improvements that are consistent with this section.

In case it’s not clear, the upshot of this bill is that, if there is one woman working in some fed bureaucrat agency and a thousand men, then, if there are (e.g.) 100 toilets for men, then there must be 100 for women, too, even though there is only one woman.

Makes sense if you are a total idiot. Bring back the news about those other idiots, BP and the President.

 
CIA? FBI? BP? CFR? UN? WHO? He wrote this:

Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: “Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that…. You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.

“Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second…. Did any of you ever see Dr. Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: ‘I don’t give them time to die,’ he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. ‘Fucking undisciplined cells!’ he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.”

A young man leaps down into the operating theatre and, whipping out a scalpel, advances on the patient.

Dr. Benway: “An espontaneo! Stop him before he guts my patient!”

(Espontaneo is a bull-fighting term for a member of the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the bull before he is dragged out of the ring.)

The orderlies scuffle with the espontaneo, who is finally ejected from the hall. The anesthetist takes advantage of the confusion to pry a large gold filling from the patient’s mouth….

Update, June 6, 10:31 AM: This guy is William S. Burroughs, heir to the Burroughs adding machine fortune (ante Bill Gates), and the quote is from his book, Naked Lunch . It’s wild ride and Burroughs looks nothing like someone you’d expect to write such a thing. When I started using drugs, thousands of years ago, a friend and I would take turns reading Burroughs out loud to each other. He and I were both medical students when marijuana came into the white middle class.

 
According to the BBC:

A French court has fined Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux for making racist comments about a young party activist of Algerian origin.

The court fined Mr Hortefeux 750 euros (£622) and ordered that he pay 2,000 euros to an anti-racism group.

Mr Hortefeux was recorded saying: “We always need one. It’s when there are lots of them that there are problems.”

[snip]

Immediately before Mr Hortefeux’s controversial remark, one activist is heard saying: “Amin is a Catholic. He eats pork and drinks alcohol.”

Mr Hortefeux then says: “Ah, well that won’t do at all. He doesn’t match the prototype.”

A woman is then heard to say: “He is one of us… he is our little Arab.”

The interior minister then says: “We always need one. It’s when there are lots of them that there are problems.”

The court ruled that his remark was “incontestably offensive, if not contemptuous”.

The court did not issue a criminal conviction, judging that Mr Hortefeux had not intended the comments to be heard in public.

It found him guilty instead of the lesser offence of racial insult, AFP news agency reported.

"Incontestably offensive, if not contemptuous". But it wasn’t criminal, only "a racial insult". Phew! Blagues ne sont pas autorisés en France. Vive la France.

 
The NY Times reports:

European criticism of the World Health Organization’s handling of the H1N1 pandemic intensified Friday with the release of two reports that accused the agency of exaggerating the threat posed by the virus and failing to disclose possible influence by the pharmaceutical industry on its recommendations for how countries should respond.

The WHO’s response caused widespread, unnecessary fear and prompted countries around the world to waste millions of dollars, according to one report. At the same time, the Geneva-based arm of the United Nations relied on advice from experts with ties to drug makers in developing the guidelines it used to encourage countries to stockpile millions of doses of antiviral medications, according to the second report.

The reports outlined the drumbeat of criticism that has arisen, primarily in Europe, of how the world’s leading health organization responded to the first influenza pandemic in more than four decades.

“For WHO, its credibility has been badly damaged,” wrote Fiona Godlee, the editor of the BMJ, a prominent British medical journal, that published one of the reports. “WHO must act now to restore its credibility.”

I know that you’re as shocked as I am that the WHO is corrupt and incompetent. And it’s hilarious that the WHO is described as "the world’s leading health organization". I wonder what world they’re talking about; certainly not this one.

 
Well, perhaps I should have put, secret , in quotes. According to the Washington Post:

Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.

Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.

That’s how you run an empire — soft-spoken on the outside, murderous in private. Obama, like G.W. Bush, is a psychopathic killer. Bush is publicly proud of waterboarding and invading Iraq. Obama thinks his job is the best one in the world. Where else do you get to threaten or kill with no accountability. Quite a step up from street activist in Chicago. No wonder he’s such an arrogant pig.

75 countries? Wow! So do you think public diplomacy means anything? In public: we hope country X will do the right thing. In private: do what we want or else. Ever wonder why John Wilkes Booth said, "Sic semper tyrannis", after he shot Lincoln in the head? They never taught me in public school that Lincoln was a dictator. And they’re not teaching that Obama is a dictator, too.

 
The BBC News reports:

A new geological study has shown that many low-lying Pacific islands are growing, not sinking.

The islands of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia are among those which have grown, because of coral debris and sediment.

The study, published in the magazine the New Scientist, predicts that the islands will still be there in 100 years’ time.

However it is still unsure whether many of them will be inhabitable.

In recent times, the inhabitants of many low-lying Pacific islands have come to fear their homelands being wiped off the map because of rising sea levels.

But this study of 27 islands over the last 60 years suggests that most have remained stable, while some have actually grown.

Insert cliché here:                                     

 
From the NY Times:

President Obama vowed Tuesday to pursue criminal inquiries into the cause of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, as the crisis he called “the greatest environmental disaster of its kind in our history” threatened to engulf his second year in office.

“We have an obligation to determine what went wrong,” Mr. Obama said, appearing in the Rose Garden after meeting with the two men he has appointed to lead an inquiry into the cause of the spill, former Senator Bob Graham of Florida and William K. Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

“If laws were broken, leading to death and destruction,” Mr. Obama said, “my solemn pledge is, we will bring those responsible to justice.”

Typical. How does government respond to a perceived crisis? Threats, of course. That’s what government does. It steals your money, increases its power and robs you of your freedom in order to "protect" you. How imaginative.

SOP.

 
From the Telegraph:

In these tough economic times, a long-tailed tit tries to feed her 11 chicks.
Yes, she looks pretty frazzled.

An illegal immigrant — the snapper, that is. He’s from North America and wound up in a lake in China.

 
David Laws, the senior Brit Liberal Democrat resigned as Chief Secretary of the Treasury, after admitting that he stole £40,000 of taxpayer money to rent an apartment from his lover. This revelation came just 18 days after the elections. Unsurprisingly, Brit bureaucrats describe this as a tragedy, not for the taxpayers but for Mr. Laws.

Right. We should feel sorry for a government thief when he steals even more taxpayer money. Poor guy. What’s a gay politician to do?

Sad and sickening.

 
The adjective, great, is too often misapplied so I won’t use it to describe the work of Dennis Hopper who died at age 74. But I’ll call him wonderful. From Easy Rider  to Blue Velvet  to Apocalypse Now  to Hoosiers  to Speed , Hopper was terrific as an actor and director. Here are a few photos:

 
RIP and many thanks.

 
Well, he appointed that moron, Joe Biden, to head (get this) a Middle Class Task Force whose "charge is to get the middle class — the backbone of this country — up and running again".

So you can tell that Obama thinks you’re an idiot. He certainly knows that Biden is one as well. So it’s OK for Obama to insult your intelligence but if you criticize him then you’re a racist.

Ain’t democracy grand?

 
Fun and free web site: Wordle. It creates "word clouds" from text or URL that has an Atom or RSS feed. Click here to see what it did with this web site.
 

 
That god is the central government. It is quite amusing to watch the collectivists, the central planners and would-be controllers, get all in a tizzy over the fact that their prophet, Obama, has not been able to wave his magic wand and plug the damn hole in the Gulf of Mexico that BP’s arrogance, incompetence and collusion with government bureaucrats has created.

The collectivists/statists turn immediately to their god to solve any and all problems by force. Some of them wanted to call in the Army because, as we all know, military force is the real cure-all. And what was the Army supposed to do, shoot the oil? Call in an air strike? Bomb it with predator drones? Who knows. But if you don’t support the troops, you’re an enemy combatant, a terrorist, a terrorist sympathizer or a racist.

The statist god fails again, this time in prime time on cable TV, and the true believers are getting restless.

 
Answer: lying with a straight face. That’s his outstanding political skill. The most recent example concerns the Declaration of Independence. You remember:
 

 
Note that it is all men  who are created equal and who have unalienable rights, not just citizens of Britain’s American colonies of the 18th century. All men. (Yes, I know that the Declaration is not a legal document.)

So what does the Declaration have to do with Obama? Well, before he became president, he attacked the existence of the Guantánamo prison because it was "a legal black hole" designed to prevent access to the US federal courts and to prevent the exercise of legal rights by those imprisoned there forever (especially habeas corpus , enshrined in the Constitution). Hence, (pre-presidential) Obama was happy with the Supremes’ decision in Boumediene v. Bush  where the Supremes said that detainees at Guantánamo had the right to a habeas corpus hearing in federal court. (All men.)

How things have changed. Under president Obama, the Dept. of Justice argued in court that while prisoners taken to Guantánamo have the right to a habeas corpus hearing, those taken to Bagram AFB in Afghanistan do not (i.e., the DOJ has taken up Bush’s position on indefinite detention). Obama is happy with a federal appeals court decision that Bagram is different from Guantánamo and therefore prisoners in Bagram have no habeas corpus rights. (Some men?) What is the difference between Guantánamo and Bagram? Location. See Glenn Greenwald’s article for more details.

So now we have another instance of major lying by Obama about his love of civil liberties. Which is it, hope or change?

 
A  few days ago, Jacob Hornberger posted this quote from Robert Anderson on his blog:
 

 
I have a number of problems with this quote:
 

1. Is a system of laws the same as a government?
2. Is the role of government in a capitalist (or any other) society to establish and execute laws designed to keep the peace?
3. Are attempts by any to deprive others of their freedom to be prevented, and is the force of law essential to this end?

 
The first problem is crucial to the entire discussion because of the meaning of the word, "government". It is not an innocuous word. If you look at the definition(s) on the Dictionary.com web site, you will see this:
 

 
The words that stand out are: direction, control over the actions of members, etc., supreme authority, management, rule. In short, government means controlling the behavior of individuals. If that is correct, then a system of laws is totally unnecessary for a government. All it needs is overwhelming force. In fact, that is what government usually means — force. If you look at the US, we have hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations. Are they a system? Not really. They are a hodge-podge, a collection of mostly unrelated edicts and prohibitions promulgated by thousands of officials, judges and bureaucrats. It is truly unfortunate that the Founding Failures created an agency of the sovereign states by means of the Constitution and then chose to call it a government. In most people’s minds, this choice meant that the United States was supposed to govern us, to direct us, to control us, to manage us, to rule us. In my view, that choice was a major and entirely unnoticed event that helped send us down the road to democracy and collectivist tyranny. It set the intellectual/political background such that very few people ever asked why we needed to be ruled.

The second problem concerns the role of government in peacekeeping through laws. To be brief, laws do not make people peaceful and do not create peace. They only define the penalties administered by the government in the event that one is convicted of breaking the peace. And it’s the government that gets to decide what behaviors break the peace. Exercise of your right to speak freely, for example, can be defined as breaking the peace and get you executed. How’s that for peacekeeping?

The third problem is that the force of law is said to be essential to prevent attempts to deprive others of their freedom. This depends on who defines an action as an attempt to deprive someone else of his freedom. If government declares that you have a right to medical care and a doctor refuses to administer such care, can that refusal not be construed as an attempt to deprive you of your freedom to exercise your right to obtain care? If government defines freedom and makes laws concerning your freedom to get certain things from others, where is the freedom for the providers of those things or services?

In view of the above, it seems to me that government is not required for "the philosophical framework of the capitalist society". In fact, government is highly likely to be the enemy of a free market or capitalist society. We could create all kinds of supposedly free societies. The only one that would be truly free is an anarchistic society, one based on consent and consensus, and in which government does not create a system of laws ex cathedra .

 
Here we go again, following Britain down the road to total surveillance. The House passed HR 4614 which sets up a fund to hand out federal money (your money) to states if they will take (by force if necessary) a sample of DNA from anyone arrested for a particular set of crimes. That’s arrested, not charged and not convicted of anything. The DNA goes into the FBI database and who knows what happens after that.
 

 
Then there’s that pesky thing called the Constitution which has a Fourth Amendment which says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

And there’s that Fifth Amendment, too:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

These Amendments recognize the right to be secure in your person and the right not to be compelled to be a witness against yourself. Forcibly taking your DNA violates both Amendments. But it’s only the Constitution talking and nobody cares about that; certainly not Congress, the President or the Supremes.

I can’t wait to get on the road again.