WordPress Interferes with Political Speech?

For seven or eight days I was unable to write any blogs or access anything on my website, until the Charter guy came out to the house and switched the box, making a new IP address. My suspicion is that this was done intentionally by WordPress or by the FBI using WordPress, though there is of course no telling. It could be any hacker with an interest in allowing me to access my website, but disallowing me to write or go from one page to another on the website. As I have written before, I removed three WordPress downloads from my computer, where they have no permission to be. But the website seemed to work ok from the library, though I did not have to check during the seven or eight days. Again, what it is costing us as a nation in drag on the GNP- to allow these companies to pay off Congress then do whatever they please with us and our information, while the FBI enjoys the policy because it allows them to spy on everyone- the cost is astronomical, and we are only beginning to see the harm these things can cause. But for the present, if I ever was trying to run for Congress, this would not be possible, as our Bill of Rights has been suspended and we have no more regard even for the free speech clause of the First Amendment, let alone the Fourth and Fifth, while the only right we remember is the second, and the only ethical causes are bodily health and race and gender equality. The purpose of government is to secure rights, and when private companies prostitute our rights, it is the purpose of legislation to secure these rights which our Constitution forbids be given even to our government.

Praise and Happy Birthday to John Dingell, who took the opportunity of his ninety-somethingth birthday to remind us that we are ignoring our Bill of Rights. Thanks for a life well spent at making things better!

Eric Lichtblau Discusses Surveillance on NPR’s Fresh Air

   It is very nice to know that the FBI is now unlimited in setting undercover agents on absolutely anyone, due to that nice secret FISA “court.” The Justice department and the agencies think that they do not even need a warrant, say, to commit rape for the purposes of surveillance, as I believe occurred in my own case. Everyone agrees that such things are being done, though if one asks that a particular instance be looked into, nothing will be done, and our representatives are simply intimidated. The agencies are free to stage any scene, long or short term. We consider this to be a violation of liberty which indeed requires a warrant. Again, I believe my former fiance was a person set on me due to proximity to the CIA in my education, and no one cares or will do anything about it. Billions of dollars are spent turning one third of America into spies upon another third, and this is just fine with the majority. Nothing is spent repairing damages, and these criminals, who violate our fundamental law, are never held accountable: They just keep ascending, say, to positions where they might use their practice at psychological torture. To us they say: “If you let us rape and blacklist that one person, we will keep you safe from nuclear attack and terrorism, but if you do not allow us to suspend the Bill of Rights we are sworn to uphold, why, there are just no guarantees.

   Again, I want Congress to ask, and those involved to be required to tell the truth regarding everything, now, that was ever done to me in my education and following, because it destroyed my career and chance to have a family, and was for thirty years a kind of blacklisting and psychological torture. It is likely that I did not please a professor who was also an undercover agent, or that my father was slandered by Michigan and Washtenaw County police, or that I angered the cops when I protested about weed and a woman was set on the protest, or had a Russian friend in college, or did not please the Catholic orthodoxy at my schools, or wore my hair too long, or expressed libertarian cynicism, or perhaps expressed that fourth assertion of the second sentence of the Declaration, which says it is our right and duty to overthrow our government when it ceases to secure these rights. And we will ask all these cops, too, do you believe that assertion, or not? Do you uphold that Declaration, and would rebel against tyranny if it were established over our land in subversion of our Constitution? Perhaps they can get themselves on the list, even for swearing to uphold the Constitution.

   Eric Lichtblau did not discuss the use of women or the imitation of love in spying, as this is just too sensitive yet to discuss, and of course, we do not want to reveal their Machiavellian methods to the enemy. We are a half step from genuine domestic torture, because hey, you know, one just can never be too sure.

Madness or Reason? A Rubic’s Cube Not For Math But Psychology

Here are the facts that all will agree upon, that lead me to say there is plenty of reason that we inquire into the covert activity of executive agencies in domestic matters. Anyone who wishes to call me mad for attempting to raise the obvious questions that would occur to a person in these circumstances will note that it is I who appeal to reason, and they who shut down the discussion and are unable to inquire. People indeed are disturbed by the question, and simply silence all explanation- but that is not reason. These will also admit that they do not really care whether what I say is true or not, and are too afraid of their own government to think anything contrary to its powerful wishes. The facts are these:

1. My former fiance, by remarkable coincidence, came from about a mile and a half from my graduate school, the University of Dallas in Irving Texas, thought I met her up here in Michigan.
2. My former professor, the first reader in the processing of my dissertation, has refused to even speak to me from the day the defense was completed.
3. My schools are connected with the CIA in some way. I was invited to apply and can prove this proximity, and could discuss this in much more detail.
4. When sought, I learned that my academic files have disappeared from the University of Dallas.
5. Police and Federal agents do indeed use women in a strange sort of meta-rape or meta-prostitution for the purposes of spying.
6. No one in government at any level, after most persistent effort, will inquire into the obvious questions that the previous agreed facts do raise.

 The possibility, which looks probable, is that the woman was something like an FBI agent recruited, perhaps by a student of my professor or through some connection to the executive agencies, such as the FBI. She just happened to come from Irving, just happened to be the secretary at my friend’s company where I produced the copies of my dissertation drafts, just happened to attend my class called the Salem Academy, just happened to be involved with me and my friend in the John McCain campaign, and just happened to get me to fall in love with her. We lived together for about ten years, and I gave her a nice ring, though she would not marry me. She also just happened to have no genuine interest in philosophy, to never have loved me, but to have had access to every part and aspect of my life, every phone call, tax form, piece of paper going in and out (I was forbid use of the fireplace in her home), all e-mails, all computer files, etc. I was treated as temporary from the beginning, my stuff confined to a single room and never integrated into the house, a temporary job from the beginning, as became more apparent through the years. I would have left after a year or two, due to suspicions of her affairs, but I could not afford to do so, and was in love, however unfortunate. I realized the possibility that she was set on me, but thought they would not do this, and chose not to deny the possibility of love for what might indeed have been delusion. Four years ago, after gaining some distance on the circumstance, it began to look quite obvious, and so I began to ask for the assistance of Congress, both the House and Senate, filling out the forms, and such assistance has been denied. This was addressed in a previous blog about the failure of Representative Walberg and Senators Stabenow and Peters to do a thing to oversee the executive agencies in violations of the Bill of Rights, which is a part of the Constitution they have sworn to uphold, as have all the executive agents.

On election day, I stayed at the library for six hours calling for a trusted federal agent before going to the polls to set up a table and launch the CLC, a centrist political party.When I showed a librarian a blog posting which I took to be a possible death and torture threat, and explained to her why I thought I may have received it, another woman came in the room and interrupted us, just as I was getting to the last sentence. I showed this to the librarian because, whether it was a death threat or not, It is so vulgar and vicious that such things on the internet ought be reported. Consequently, my father came to believe that I was “Schizophrenic,” because of “Some things that I said at the library.” It may be that this was the librarian’s own opinion, as I am a strange looking person, with an odd haircut, twitching eye and missing teeth. I have been extremely impoverished. But I do not believe that this is the opinion of the librarian, but rather that someone did indeed show up, though not to receive a report of wrongdoing by persons employed by our government, but rather to spy on and interfere with me. I would sue them, but not the librarian, for a slander which indeed has some effect. Following my father’s suggestion, or perhaps on their own, because I say these things and they will not inquire, others too now say that I am mad or such things. A sister says she is “concerned about me,” but not enough to follow three sentences of the question. I may indeed be in error somehow, but rather, mad is a nation that calls itself free and allows such things to occur, refusing to subject the agencies to the rule of law. Further, just because a person is mad does not mean that these things could not have occurred, nor is madness likely to cause someone to say such thing so persistently, things that do indeed occur. We are not talking martians here, but things everyone agrees do occur and things we all agree we do not oversee our government regarding. Indeed, if a secret CIA school were set up with a PhD program to attract promising students of politics, and one were invited but declined to apply, and the things he said were not understood, the possibility of these things or something like them is just what might occur, just what one would expect to occur in an environment, pre-Snowden, where there is no oversight and no one thought our government would ever do such things. And so we insist that this matter be inquired into, if we are a free people, and if not, well, they know what follows, since we are sworn too not to allow tyranny and adhere to the Declaration. Hence I am in protest, petitioning my government for the redress of grievances. It is absolutely unacceptable that so much reason to inquire be presented and there be no inquiry.

As I told the librarian, if anyone wishes to inquire into my personal psychology, a good place to begin would be my published works. I will next take up a question from these works, as someone has suggested that my thought is “gnostic” and dangerous, like the Kabbalists or Zoharists say of certain kinds of the inquiry into the higher mysteries. Another important part of such an inquiry is to gain an understanding of madnesses such as “Schizophrenia,” as our current theoretical basis is extraordinarily weak, and I have invited theoretical efforts to advance our understanding of the mind, if anyone has suggestions to improve our psychology. I have begun to publish my own efforts in the psychology page of this website. Madness, or as they call it “mental illness” is surely not defined by a person saying things we do not understand or have the motive to consider.

So where is sanity and where is madness in this perplexing question? I(s it madness or reason? A Rubic’s Cube for psychology.

Surveillance Legislation

Say, why do we not suggest to our legislators a new law giving the FBI and the police the powers to set prostitutes onto the citizens to get the suspicious individuals to fall in love. Then we could be as sure as possible that these odd-balls are not bad actors. And if these targets have a friend, we could give the prostitutes the powers to also “date” the friend, get the two accusing one another, and thereby, for every ten we target, we ought catch at least one spy or mobster? How many such have been missed by our failure to do so?

And, in section 2 of such a law, we could give the CIA power to hire certain professors, so these are wearing two hats, as it were, and are then able to watch the development of the young plants in their crucial phases, looking for any sign of terrorist tendencies, nascent communism or white supremacist? These are fairly inexpensive measures, and one just cannot be too sure now-a-days. We will further authorize any measures at all, from our book on princes, in order to protect these deeds of our intelligence agents from being considered as crimes or in any way brought to light.

Then in section 3 of such a law, we will forbid any looking into these measures if anyone ever figures out what their government has been doing, say, like Snowden with his documents, we will authorizes the agencies to chase them all the way to Moscow to preserve our government secrets and secret methods. Let us, in fact, pass this whole law in secret, and authorize the threatening of anyone who even thinks, say, of having Congress call FBI agents to tell the truth at hearings, or other such measures mortally dangerous to democracy.

You see, just because I am in the CLC does not mean I could not be a legislator in this political climate.

Marijuana, Microsoft and the FBI

Microsoft, as the BBC informs us, has decided to get into the business of tracking Marijuana businesses, inventing programs that help regulate and for example control seeds, to make sure the seeds are from the legal rather than the “illegal” market. This is a very strange report, since such a program would be a very small part of the Microsoft business. But we have suspected a Monsanto style attempt to control seeds was in the works. Farmers, say, in India, are already having difficulty with the ten thousand year old practice of selecting and saving seeds for the following year, of every kind of plant, due to dominance of hybrids and the money to be made by controlling seeds. By “Illegal” market, I believe the report, taking their language from Microsoft, means nature.

Perhaps Microsoft will also help track the use of chemicals for profit in Marijuana growing, track which are carcinogenic, and who might be growing inorganic weed. Perhaps they will help the legislators figure out how not to encourage growing poisonous weed, as they did tobacco to increase yields once limits were set in acreage or number. Most of all, perhaps they will track where the illegal market leads kids to the heroin dealer, or track where corrupt police use the medicinal law to seize property contrary to the Constitution and divide the profits with organized crime and the municipalities, and even where these two are becoming less distinct.

It is time for a supreme Court decision recognizing that if one grows ones own weed and smokes it, no Constitutional law could possibly be violated. One simply avoids supporting organized crime, and that is the major effect on commerce, though this does prevent the corporate control of nature for profit as well.

In a separate report, the FBI was hiring, but, in addition to other stringent requirements, one may not have smoked weed in the past three years. The FBI, and society in general, have long selected for a certain kind of ignorance, the sort behind such sayings as “could not even pass a drug test.” The FBI has a culture, an in-group that treats pot smoking as a crime, now even above sodomy and gamory, which are allowed, while pot smoking, even as a part of religious exercise, is forbidden. We want the FBI, our FBI, and all law enforcement, to spend one tenth the effort they spend “enforcing the law wherever they see the law violated” to enforcing the law when they see corrupt police and judges giving and taking payoffs and kickbacks to pervert their badges and our courtrooms. Perhaps they might also watch for when corporations like Microsoft track human beings, exposing them to criminals, such as hit men or the Orlando shooter.

In our FBI, we have cultivated a certain kind of ignorance. I believe they have done a fairly good job of weeding out corruption in the FBI hiring process, but they also select for a certain kind of dumb jock. Thought and imagination are selectively excluded. Steve Jobs could not apply to work for the FBI. That is part of why crime is simply out-thinking us lately, not to mention the Russians in internet land. How many artists, say, will be running to apply for the FBI now, or musicians? These types of souls, if not necessarily these particular persons, are a portion of human ability, and they are too free to be able to live according to convention, where everything cultivated is artificial. Their categories sometimes do not match up with the suburban contemporary American categories, but they think of things the dumb jocks cannot even understand when they are directly told. Try calling the FBI to tell them of an obvious scam, say, that the bank is asking for the first five digits of our social security numbers, or that hit men are welcome for a bit of effort to track us using the internet and all modern technology that spies on us for marketing. Do not even try to ask how they expect to find the resources to keep us safe once we have bought such a world. The FBI phone operator will most likely ignore you, but if they pay any attention at all, they are more likely to spy on you because calling the FBI and saying things they do not understand is annoying to them, too much for them, that they are to understand, say, that we are often asked for the last four digits, 5 + 4 = 9 and all our phones are hacked, meaning that the bank is very likely taking kickbacks from someone selling social security numbers.

ERAD: A New Low in Police Corruption: Huffington Post

Ok, when do we realize we have a Fifth Amendment, before this leads to civil bloodshed? I am absolutely stunned beyond speech at the stupidity of the Americans and the corruption of the badge that was once honored. We call for all honest cops top stand up and but the dishonest cops when they see them breaking the law, and legislators to make this tyrannical garbage illegal, like, tomorrow.

“Get a Warrant!”-

Rand Paul

Here is the Huffington Post article:

Oklahoma police agencies are being equipped with devices that allow officers to scan prepaid debit cards and target funds linked to them for civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcers to permanently seize property they suspect is connected to criminal activity.

The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety has purchased Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machines for installation in Oklahoma Highway Patrol and Oklahoma City police cruisers, according to an Oklahoma Watch report published Tuesday. The device tells officers the balance of prepaid debit cards and gift cards, and allows them to seize the money if they determine it’s suspicious. ERAD readers also can provide limited information about pretty much any card with a magnetic strip, including bank debit cards and credit cards.

Oklahoma has become a battleground in the debate over civil asset forfeiture reform in recent years, prompted by high-profile cases of cops using the practice to take cash and property from innocent people — often without charging them with a crime. Thanks to the new ERAD readers, police can now access people’s electronic funds as well.

Each ERAD reader is costing the state about $5,000, plus about $1,500 for training. The state has agreed to pay the manufacturer, ERAD Group, 7.7 percent of all funds forfeited with the readers.

Law enforcement officials in Oklahoma and elsewhere describe civil asset forfeiture as an important weapon against the drug trade, allowing them to target illicit proceeds that may not be in proximity to contraband. They say ERAD technology is a necessary tool to keep up with criminals who have begun putting money on prepaid cards in order to avoid having cash seized by police.

“If someone has 300 cards taped up and hidden inside the dash of a vehicle, we’re going to check that,” Lt. John Vincent, public information officer for the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, told Oklahoma Watch.

In this scenario, the presence of the cards alone may give an officer probable cause to run each card through the ERAD reader and seize the associated funds.

To avoid losing the money permanently, the owner would have to fight an expensive and time-consuming legal battle to prove the property wasn’t connected to criminal activity. In civil forfeiture proceedings, the legal principle of “innocent until proven guilty” is effectively inverted.

A hidden stack of hundreds of cash cards may seem inherently suspicious, but critics of civil asset forfeiture say hypotheticals like this obscure concerns that the practice is overused, often in ways that violate people’s due process and property rights.

“Whether someone has 100 debit cards or one, that in and of itself is not illegal,” state Sen. Kyle Loveless (R), who has spearheaded an unsuccessful push to overhaul Oklahoma’s civil forfeiture laws, told The Huffington Post.

Loveless said he has little confidence that ERAD readers will only be used in the most conspicuous cases.

“Law enforcement’s going to say that there are good uses for it and that they use it on a limited basis, but this is deja vu all over again,” he said. “We heard that last year and we’ve seen innocent people’s stuff taken. We’ve seen how [law enforcement] spins it and it’s just not right.”

In April, police in Muskogee County drew nationwide backlash over reports that the sheriff’s department had seized more than $50,000 from the manager of a Burmese Christian rock band. Police held the money — which turned out to be donations to an orphanage and proceeds from the group’s concerts — for nearly two months before returning it due to a lack of evidence.

Elsewhere in the state, a prosecutor came under fire for using money from a forfeiture account to pay off student loan debts, and a sheriff was charged with extortion for attempting to extract cash from a motorist through civil forfeiture.

Critics say these cases underscore the problematic nature of a system that has weak protections for property owners and incentive structures that feed forfeited proceeds into law enforcement coffers. Oklahoma’s deal with ERAD Group adds a twist — giving a share of the seized assets to a private company.

Proponents of reform say civil forfeiture encourages law enforcement to seize property first and ask questions later, and to pursue activities that enrich their departments, regardless of the effect on public safety.

Loveless has introduced legislation that would require a criminal conviction before property can be forfeited in most cases, heighten the standard of proof needed to justify civil forfeiture, and shift the burden of proof onto the state, so that property owners would no longer have to prove their innocence. His proposal also includes transparency measures to track seizures and determine how forfeited money is spent.

Law enforcement groups have lobbied hard against the legislation, calling it a gift to criminals and an unnecessary attack on their profession.

Matt Miller, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm that believes all forfeiture should be tied to criminal proceedings, said ERAD readers may compound law enforcement abuses of civil forfeiture.

“More and more employers are going toward paying people on these debit cards, these prepaid cards … and through this technology, you are giving police access to people’s bank accounts, because there are a lot of people who no longer have a traditional bank account,” Miller told HuffPost. “You have a police officer on the side of the road with this scanner who can get total access to this person’s account and potentially seize it and then make them go to court and prove that it’s not connected with criminal activity, and in the meantime their funds are tied up by this reader.”

He added, “If the police are willing to seize $1,000 worth of cash, I think they’re going to be just as likely to seize $1,000 that they find on a debit card.”

Vincent, of the Highway Patrol, was quick to downplay these concerns. He told Oklahoma’s News 9 that the ERAD devices so far were being used to focus on “identity theft,” not seizing funds from motorists’ prepaid cash cards.

Loveless said the state’s lack of reporting standards makes it impossible to know how the new technology will affect civil asset forfeiture.

“There’s not a record,” Loveless said. “There’s not a procedure in place. There’s not policy in place. They don’t have to report it to us if they had used it.”

Loveless said police didn’t discuss the ERAD machines with lawmakers before making the decision to buy them. He learned about the development after reading the report from Oklahoma Watch.

“This is another slap in the face of Oklahomans,” Loveless said, pointing to a recent survey showing that an overwhelming majority of residents in the state support measures to reform civil forfeiture laws.

“At what point do we need to admit that we have a problem?”

Jeffrey Rosen on NPR: The Chilling Passage

   Terry Gross has just interviewed Jeffrey Rosen on Fresh Air regarding his new book Louie D. Brandeis, American Prophet. On the air, they read a passage from the opinion of Brandeis in the Olmsted case, the most important privacy case, regarding wiretapping. Brandeis foresaw a time when government or private businesses would be able to watch us through the technology in our homes such as the television and computer. Do they realize that this is being done as I write? That if you query on google, Microsoft, Toshiba, Roku and Magnavox have given themselves the liberty to spy on us in our homes through cameras and microphones even after some are supposedly disabled? From fear of terrorism etc, the FBI is using the private companies, while Congress will not question anyone in hearings, but will take campaign contributions from these companies to pervert the law to allow infinite marketing-spying to occur on the American citizens? I wish Mr. Rosen were here the night Microsoft took a picture of me. It was surreal: a camera came on the screen without my consent and snapped a picture, just like when one snaps a picture from the phone cam. Both the FBI and hit men find such pictures and such surveillance useful.

   Lets get one thing clear first. The purpose of government is “to secure these rights,” in the second sentence of the Declaration. While the Bill of rights directly limits the national government, our government certainly does have the power to pass laws that require the private companies to secure these rights. Congress is just made up of a bunch of thoughtless, ignorant, slavish sissies. Again this started with drug testing, and perhaps directly the marijuana issue. “I will piss in a cup for no man living,” I like to say, because I am a Scotsman. But the thought behind it is this: the law forbidding marijuana is unconstitutional to begin with, and a private company cannot test applicants to see if they violate a law, because a law might just be unconstitutional. The unconstitutionality of the whole circumstance is obvious if one smokes on Sunday while reading scripture, and is, like a Rastifarian, exercising religion, truly and honestly. Only a slave, and not an American, would piss for some employer to see if they violate such a law.

   But the citizens through their elected representatives- are you listening, President Obama?- must require government to compel the companies to secure these rights, through laws that are enforced. The American people just cannot and will not stand up, yet.

   The Chilling passage that Rosen selects from the Olmsted opinion of Brandeis is this:

   “Brandeis noted that at the time of the framing of the Constitution, a far less intrusive search — namely breaking into someone’s home and riffling through their desk drawers to identify a critic of King George III — was the quintessential example of an unreasonable search,” Rosen says, “[Brandeis added] that it was now possible to invade the privacy of people on both ends of a telephone wire. And then … Brandeis looked forward to the age of cyberspace. He said, “Ways may someday be developed — without breaking into desk drawers — to extract papers from home and introduce them in court before a jury… The court should translate the Constitution and recognize that you don’t need a physical trespass to create an unreasonable search.”

Terry Gross adds:

   Rosen says it took decades for the Supreme Court to embrace Brandeis’ insights. In 1967, the high court overruled Olmstead v. United States in the case Katz v. United States, which extended the Fourth Amendment to include all areas where a person “has a reasonable expectation of privacy.” Law enforcement agents were then required to obtain a warrant before wiretapping suspects.

   The whole issue, too, we might remember, does not even begin to address the circumstance where courts would grant all warrants, or grant warrants without cause and call it cause.

   I will say again, Mr. Rosen, that I believe my former fiance was a person who was set on me due to proximity in my education, involuntary or compulsory proximity, to agents of the executive agencies, and that no one will even inquire as to whether what I say might be true. This woman came from a mile and a half from my University, the University of Dallas, and by coincidence I met her up here. By coincidence, I was invited to apply at the CIA after about a year at the university of Dallas, and by coincidence she was the secretary of my best friend at his company where they helped me to print my dissertation and book- all by coincidence. Astonishing, and it is also astonishing that our publications at UD were routinely pre-screened, and no one minded, astonishing that I figured out where the application offer came from and astonishing that that professor’s son now works for the CIA. Astonishing too that I have not had a moment’s peace since that discovery, have seen my hopes for family and career destroyed, etc, etc. Astonishing too that now these people have an interest in my being thought mad, and astonishing too that I have screamed bloody murder to my representatives and my university and nothing is done and no one will even inquire. Astonishing that WordPress blocks my search engine traffic so that all my traffic is word of mouth. Astonishing too that I am now much like Snowden, but I won’t leave. I have never seen a classified document in my life, and what I figure out for myself is my own. Much of this can be proven and demonstrated. Astonishing, though, that my fellow citizens, former teachers and fellow students, no one cares. Want to keep things secret? Don’t set women on people, get them to fall in love with them, then set them between friends so they will accuse one another and you all can glean the info.

   These methods are a bit more advanced than wiretapping. But modern spy theory, and advances in our political theory due to our reading especially of Machiavelli, have made these new powerful means possible, means no doubt to secure the representative democracy that Jefferson and Madison envisioned.

Civil Asset Forfeiture or Property Seizures: Martin Kaste Reports for NPR News

New Mexico has tried, like Michigan, to pass laws ending “civil asset forfeiture” or more frankly, property seizures. NPR has been reluctant, though, to explain why this issue is so important: For the government to seize property by saying that the property is guilty is a violation of the Fifth Amendment and a very fundamental principle of American liberty. The Fifth Amendment just says…nor take property without due process of law,” and common sense used to secure our liberty in this matter because common sense once knew that the police ought not use their badges and their powers to steal, even if the police, the municipalities and their relatives in the chop shops find it profitable. One gets a sense of who it is that is behind property seizures, and the astute eye, I believe, can see the subtle corruption that this practice is working upon our police, judges and municipal governments. One might look behind what appears to see the mobsters laughing at the success of their retaliation for the drug kingpin laws, which is where property seizures began.

The New Mexico case occurs much as I suggested to my representative Rebekah Warren: “You watch,” I told her, “They will just keep on doing it.” The Kaste report included a statement from a New Mexico woman that her experience was “like a bad dream,” because they just passed all these laws correcting the issue and the municipality of Albuquerque was still doing it, practicing property seizure like nothing had changed, and making the dumbest most ridiculous excuses, while the people, unable to think for themselves once a word is spoken by an authority figure, stood paralyzed. Police are using the powers of their badge to steal, and if this goes on, the mob will be surprised, because, as in the recent Oregon example, it will lead to civil bloodshed. They are wrong to think that American liberty will sleep forever. My suggestion is that on this issue we stand up, dust off our Constitution, and get rid of some corrupt politicians, police chiefs and city administrators. It is a good issue for housecleaning because it so obvious and explainable to the people, if only one would explain it to them. Stealing dishonors your badge, and if your pride in the badge is not enough to get you to reconsider, perhaps we will lead a class action raid on the impound yards, when the corrupt judges ignore class action lawsuits with their bullshit about how property is guilty.

For Mr. Kaste, a new hero of mine, I refer to the Detroit News article by a journalist named Hunter, from perhaps November 11-12 2009. The full reference is in my earlier blogs on the issue. The Hunter article explores the Supreme Court basis for the corrupt decision that property is guilty super-ceding the U. S. Constitution and the Fifth Amendment. Some Spanish ship was seized in 1840, and this, the property of an enemy during war time, was used as a precedent for seizing the auto of those red cross workers who took their case all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court to find, oh, they are “immune” and get to keep the poor girl’s car because she glanced at at a cop in a prostitution area, literally. These courts are corrupt, and these judges need to find work more suitable to their level of integrity. Mr. Gilke stood up, and perhaps now it is only the journalists who are heroically facing down death to do the right thing against what is quickly becoming just unbelievable corruption in government at every level. This is not how one prepares their nation for a war, which, in case no one has noticed but David Gilke, is now underway. Internal corruption is the number one threat to homeland security. Duh.

Libertarianism and Peaceful Protest

Martin Luther King Jr saved our nation with the idea of peaceful protest. In the face of blatant injustice, as a Christian minister, he saw from Gandhi and Socrates that unarmed civil disobedience was the only way to win a victory worth having. The movement was concerned primarily with equality, but also secondarily with liberty. What I am suggesting is the conjunction of the idea of peaceful protest and the primary concern with our vanishing American liberty.

   The recognition of equality has now become so well established in popular opinion that its excesses are ignored. The idea that keeps recurring is to join the quest for the re-establishment of liberty with the methods and the idea of Martin Luther King and peaceful protest.

   As a student at a conservative Catholic school. we studied the American founders in an exciting spirit of the recovery of our political tradition. Yet we did not study even Thomas Jefferson very much. The Bill of Rights was generally neglected, and we did not even begin to learn about Martin Luther King.

   King found what may be the only way for Christians to participate in politics rather than withdraw from the world’s injustice to the peace and safety of the monastery. As it turns out, they were a government school, and St. Martin was still considered as J Edgar saw him, as a something closer to a communist than an American, despite King’s constant appeal to the Declaration and the Constitution, and to justice.

   Whether the reader can realize it or not, our nation is facing some changes, and is headed for some serious internal dangers. Armed protest has broken out occasionally, with the blacks in Baltimore and the Whites in Oregon most recently. Violence at political speeches surrounding the presidential campaigns is becoming routine. The reason is that the Americans are missing something, and what appears is then drawn toward the emerging opposites or extremes. Meanwhile, in the face of blatant injustice, our politicians will do nothing, at least until complaints are converted into money and power. We could scream bloody murder, about the most obvious abuses, and its like the whole nation is on Oxy, or has been so dumbed down that it goes in one ear and out the other, like we were speaking to a box of rocks.

   But violent protest strikes those who are innocent, like the officers of the peace who daily risk their lives to protect the citizens, and are thrown into the front lines as in the protest in Baltimore. There is no addressing the hidden powers responsible for the problems, we can only scratch and claw at one another.

   It always amused me, studying politics at that Southern Catholic Conservative School, that they did not appreciate the peaceful protest of St. Martin. They were into this idea like the problem with the Christians is that they are too meek and contemplative, and did appreciate the masculine idea of violence or fighting. Christianity turned mankind away from the body, and what we need to do in modernity here is to recover the concern with the things of the body, with wealth and power, and war in defense of liberty. They of course were thinking of our foreign enemies and the suppression of crime, and there is some truth to these Machiavellian thoughts, if it does not quite come out the way the Machiavellians would have it.

   But it remained an enigma, why they were against St. Martin, or why they did not seem to notice what a blessing the idea of peaceful protest is, especially in domestic but also, when possible, in foreign matters.

   Our Declaration of Independence states that it is our right and duty to rebel against our government when a tyranny is established, or when government fails “to secure these rights.” This idea is behind the advocates of the second Amendment, who see the government seizure of arms, or gun control, as the first step toward tyranny. But armed rebellion in our age will fail, and again, would harm innocents. The officers who work a peaceable assembly, where citizens exercise their constitutional right to petition their government for the redress of grievances, have nothing to do with the billionairs who devised the heroin-oxy scandal or the corrupt politicians who cannot even hold office anymore without “campaign contributions,” which are indistinguishable from legal bribery. We cannot get at the invisible internet billionaires who work to stifle free speech even as I write. Nor can we approach the drug companies that persuaded the doctors to set aside medicine for the practice of legal drug dealing. And as has been said regarding the armed opposition to federal property seizures, they do not have a George Washington to lead a rebellion, and the far right in armed rebellion is in fact the straightest road to tyranny.

   What I am suggesting is that this idea be joined not with armed rebellion, but with peaceful protest. As Martin addressed injustice by taking blows like Jesus, without even striking back, so libertarian protest can proceed, and may only be able to proceed, by following Dr. King in non-violent protest.

   The true revolution is within, within ourselves and in the soul, not the body of our nation. We are sliding toward tyranny, but bloodshed will only make things worse. The way to address this slide is within: we just say no to the profiteering doctors, the corrupt internet companies and the corrupt politicians, beginning with us, the people, or from within. We will simply stand upright. Then we will simply sit down, and not participate, like Rosa Parks and the Birmingham bus boycott. We will step aside from the corrupt world, and only live in the just world. We will leave aside the internet, the cell phones now useless because they are so marketed and hacked, and perhaps, for women, even the public restrooms. Much of modern technology has become useless, because without integrity these things do more harm than good. Then, perhaps the voters get off their opium couch and elect some representatives who are capable of more than selling used cars and lining their own pockets to the great applause of the many, when they look up between their serious pursuits of porn, drugs and video games. We will simply not participate, and we will say why, and keep saying why, whether or our speech is blocked and anyone ever listens, or not.

Who Investigates the FBI and DHS?

For years, ever since Herbert Hoover, the FBI has been a sovereign unelected agency without oversight, whom no one has the power to investigate. The same will be true of the CIA and what we call the ETC., the departments few or none even know about. If one submits an inquiry then regarding FBI files, they can say there is nothing, while these are actually in the ETC. Congress has done little or nothing to oversee these agencies since the Church Committee investigations of the Seventies, and the members get all touchy, as though national security depended upon rogue agents being able to torture and do absolutely anything at whim, because you know one just cannot be too sure.

A few years ago, when we were not so paranoid- scared into believing that national security depends upon the suspension of the Fourth Amendment- our political science textbook had some interesting things to say about the Department of Justice and the FBI. The text is Cummings and Wise, Democracy Under Pressure, 2005. Here are some samples:

Senate and House investigations of the FBI during the seventies, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, revealed that for years- while the FBI enjoyed a highly favorable public image- the bureau had systematically engaged in illegal activities that violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. FBI agents, for example, engaged in hundreds of burglaries of individuals and groups to plant microphones or to photograph documents. From 1956-1971, the bureau, through its counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), harassed American citizens and disrupted their organizations through a wide variety of clandestine techniques, some of which broke up marriages or endangered lives.

Moreover, it was disclosed that since the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the FBI had gathered intelligence on domestic groups and individuals with only the shakiest legal authority to do so. It had files on entertainers…even on justices of the U. S. Supreme Court. For years the bureau compiled various indexes or lists of people it considered politically unreliable who were to be rounded up in an emergency. And as the congressional investigations also disclosed, the FBI opened first class mail in violation of the law.

Even presidents respected Hoover’s power, and under his reign the FBI, although an arm of the Justice Department, became largely independent of the attorney general…

…other Americans worried about the concentration of power in the hands of the FBI, and they feared that its wiretaps and dossiers might be used for political ends, or to enhance the power of the director. Because Hoover’s political views were generally conservative, liberals feared that the FBI was more concerned about pursuing domestic radicals than organized crime…

…in prosecuting anti-war protesters, the government sometimes relied on informers who encouraged or committed the same acts for which their associates were later tried. During the same period, federal grand juries were used to gather intelligence against the peace movement and to suppress political dissent. And as mentioned earlier, through COINTELPRO, its domestic counterintelligence program, the FBI secretly harassed American citizens and in some cases even endangered lives…

Clearly the role and power of a secretive police agency raises disturbing problems in a democracy …

…or indeed in any free nation, especially a representative democracy.

Now, do you think, without any significant oversight from Congress, and with the President himself dependent upon the agencies for intelligence, things have become better in these respects, or worse? And do you seriously believe the door busting agents perspective that such things are necessary for national security? For God’s sake, Congress, grow some Kahunas and some subtlety of intellect to secure American liberty before it is simply too late! National security requires, in fact that these agencies not, for example, harbor KKK members or Nazis, and that the good cops be able to enforce the law to clear out the bad cops, who will do anything, without being told why they are doing it. Do mobsters peddle oxy and Heroin for the Russians, or vice versa, without asking what political scheme their little capitalist project is a part? And having softened up America for them, it will be too late by the time they realize their new obligation to bow toward Moscow or Mecca. Typical capitalists, forgetful of the political context of money-making. Machiavellianism assured of itself as the possessor of the philosophic truth about national security is again one of those tragic ironies, and will destroy security in a big and decisive way while appearing to preserve national security in some small way. Was John Lennon good or bad for America? And who was ever held accountable for what was done to Martin Luther King? And what are they doing now to the very citizens on whom American liberty depends, because they are not selected especially for their being able to tell the difference?

Get a Warrant!