#
Mas­sad Ayoob -

High Vol­ume Shootout: The Harry Beck­with Inci­dent — how one gun
store owner defended him­self from seven ban­dits, killing only the one
who tried to run him over with a car, and why it was impor­tant that he
had high-capacity rapid-fire arms at his dis­posal. [claire­files] [End the War on Free­dom]

From the smith2004-discuss list, in response to the news that local gov­ern­ments are already act­ing on the Supreme Court rul­ing against pri­vate property:

bq. >http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3239024
>
>FREEPORT (TX) — With Thursday’s Supreme Court deci­sion, Freeport
>offi­cials instructed attor­neys to begin prepar­ing legal doc­u­ments to
>seize three pieces of water­front prop­erty along the Old Bra­zos River
>from two seafood com­pa­nies for con­struc­tion of an $8 mil­lion pri­vate
>boat marina.

NetPlanetNews.com
Date­line: Freeport, Texas June 27, 2007

Freeport Police, the Bra­zo­ria County Sher­iff, and Texas Rangers are con­sid­er­ing
ask­ing the FBI and Home­land Secu­rity for assis­tance after a grisly dis­cov­ery in
Freeport Munic­i­pal Park this morn­ing. The bod­ies of twelve peo­ple, three of
them women, were found hanged from tall over­hang­ing branches and lamp posts in
the early morn­ing hours. All had expired. The exact cause of death is still
under investigation.

The city gov­ern­ment of Freeport is effec­tively with­out lead­er­ship, as all the
bod­ies were iden­ti­fied as mem­bers of the city gov­ern­ment and staff. Mayor Jim
Phillips, City Man­ager Ron Bot­toms, and Lee Cameron, direc­tor of the city’s
Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment Corp. were among the slain, as were all four coun­cil
members.

“Right now we have about a thou­sand sus­pects in the area alone,” said Sher­iff
Joe King. “It was a well-planned and well-executed oper­a­tion that left no
use­ful evi­dence and made very clear the motive for this mass lynching.”

The bod­ies had been com­pletely stripped, the only adorn­ment were plac­ards placed
around the necks of the vic­tims over the noose. Those plac­ards con­tained the
let­ter­head of Freeport Marina with var­i­ous insults included. “Use­ful Idiot“
adorned the bod­ies of the Mayor and City Man­ager. “Horsethief” was placed on
all four coun­cil­men. “Col­lab­o­ra­tor” was found on three peo­ple, two of them
women, iden­ti­fied as attor­neys involved in the emi­nent domain pro­ceed­ings that
forced the clo­sure of the West­ern Seafood pro­cess­ing plant and the loss of 300
jobs in the city for the Freeport Marina project.

The marina project was stalled by fed­eral demands for envi­ron­men­tal impact
stud­ies soon after the city suc­cess­fully dis­al­lowed over 50% of the peti­tion
sig­na­tures that would have forced a ref­er­en­dum on the emi­nent domain
pro­ceed­ings. Three of the ini­tial four hotels have pulled out of the project,
cit­ing delays and threats of a national boy­cott against their chains. Hiram
Walker Roy­all, the lead fig­ure in the project died in a car crash six months ago
and left the remain­ing part­ners squab­bling for con­trol. This leaves the
project, and the expected eco­nomic improve­ments on hia­tus for the forsee­able
future.

“We would like to see this inci­dent clas­si­fied as a domes­tic ter­ror­ism event,” a
spokesman for the Texas Rangers told Net­Plan­et­News. “This would invoke
pro­vi­sions of PATRIOT II that would give us free reign to inves­ti­gate all
sus­pects, begin­ning with the 300 for­mer employ­ees of West­ern Seafood.” Under
those pro­vi­sions, those employ­ees would be placed on a ter­ror­ist watch list.
Their last known loca­tions, all vehi­cles reg­is­tered in their names and the names
of their fam­i­lies would be included. A mass arrest of all may be con­sid­ered if
there is no progress on the inves­ti­ga­tion within a month. “We are plac­ing
every­one on notice that they are sus­pected and we are watch­ing. Some­one will
make a mis­take, and we’ll be there to take appro­pri­ate action.”

–30–

Frank Ney N4ZHG WV/EMT-B NRA(L) GOA CCRKBA JPFO ProvNRA LPWV

Iraq rebel­lion ‘could last years’: “The insur­gency in Iraq could con­tinue for over a decade, US Defence Sec­re­tary Don­ald Rums­feld warns.”

(Via BBC News.)

And it will, unless some future Pres­i­dent has the good sense to withdraw.

#
Barry Kauler -

Puppy Linux — an amaz­ingly fast and full-featured Linux
dis­tri­b­u­tion that takes up only 60 megs of CD, hard drive, or USB
drive and runs com­pletely from 128 megs of RAM. If you run it from a
write­able CD, it can save updates to suc­ces­sive ses­sions on the
CD. Worked well for me in a Vir­tual PC VM, once I used the Net­work
Wiz­ard to probe my DHCP server. [claire­files] [End the War on Free­dom]

I tried it on my work email machine, but it didn’t work. It seems to be dis­abling the key­board some­time dur­ing the boot process.

Ille­gal firearm found in col­lec­tion. From GUNED.COM– A Roanoke County man was con­victed Mon­day of hav­ing a machine gun among the col­lec­tion of high-power firearms he kept in the base­ment of his Vern­dale Drive home.

Samuel Mor­ris Over­street, 47, will face up to 20 years in prison when he is sen­tenced later in U.S. Dis­trict Court in Roanoke. [FirearmNews.com]

It’s obvi­ous from the arti­cle that Mr. Over­street has at no time done any­thing wrong, and in fact those guilty of arrest­ing and pros­e­cut­ing him are the ones who should be going to prison.

DUMMIES ‘R US. Link:

A recent Gallup sur­vey shows that just about three in four Amer­i­cans hold some para­nor­mal belief — in at least one of the fol­low­ing: extra sen­sory per­cep­tion (ESP), haunted houses, ghosts, men­tal telepa­thy, clair­voy­ance, astrol­ogy, com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the dead, witches, rein­car­na­tion, and chan­nel­ing. There are no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences in belief by age, gen­der, edu­ca­tion, or […] [The Light Of Rea­son]

More evi­dence that the Age of Enlight­en­ment has ended.

“KILL EVERY ONE OF THEM…” VERSUS THE BEAUTY OF LIFE. A sergeant writes about an event in 2003 in the sub­urbs of Baghdad:

“It was still dark. I dressed in that dark­ness. When I was ready I grabbed an MRE (meal ready to eat) and got in the truck. The tar­gets were three houses where RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) attacks had come from a few days […] [The Light Of Rea­son]

DOJ Wants ISPs to Retain All Cus­tomer Records.. DOJ Wants ISPs to Retain All Cus­tomer Records. dou­ble­doh writes “CNET reports that the Depart­ment of Jus­tice is ‘qui­etly shop­ping around’ the idea of requir­ing ISP’s to retain all data of their customer’s online activ­i­ties for at least sev­eral months. The SEC already man­dates
that pub­licly traded firms retain all com­pany emails for at least 2
years, but it looks like John Q. Pub­lic may also soon be sub­ject to
sim­i­lar Con­sti­tu­tional vio­la­tions. Big Brother, here we come.” [Slash­dot] [Pri­vacy Digest: Pri­vacy News (Civil Rights, Encryp­tion, Free Speech, Cryp­tog­ra­phy)]

This means that it will cer­tainly hap­pen. It may take a few years, and the FBI may need to hide it inside another bill as they did with the uni­ver­sal wire­tap­ping thing, but it will happen.

It’s best to pre­pare by learn­ing about tools like Tor for web brows­ing and PGP for email.

quote of the day. Sen­a­tor Dick Durbin:

When you read some of the graphic descrip­tions of what has occurred here [at Guan­tanamo Bay]–I almost hes­i­tate to put them in the [Con­gres­sional] Record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

bq. On a cou­ple of occa­sions, I entered inter­view rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal posi­tion to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they uri­nated or defe­cated on them­selves, and had been left there for 18–24 hours or more. On one occa­sion, the air con­di­tion­ing had been turned down so far and the tem­per­a­ture was so cold in the room, that the bare­footed detainee was shak­ing with cold.… On another occa­sion, the [air con­di­tioner] had been turned off, mak­ing the tem­per­a­ture in the unven­ti­lated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost uncon­scious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had appar­ently been lit­er­ally pulling his hair out through­out the night. On another occa­sion, not only was the tem­per­a­ture unbear­ably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal posi­tion on the tile floor.

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describ­ing what Amer­i­cans had done to pris­on­ers in their con­trol, you would most cer­tainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Sovi­ets in their gulags, or some mad régime–Pol Pot or others–that had no con­cern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Amer­i­cans in the treat­ment of their prisoners.

Via Daily Kos.

Added: Excel­lent com­men­tary from David Nei­w­ert. [Al-Muhajabah’s Islamic Blogs]

I dis­agree with the state­ment that “…that is not the case.” In fact, it most cer­tainly is the case. Any gov­ern­ment that behaves this way is by def­i­n­i­tion a mad régime with no con­cern for human beings. The mon­sters who rule the United States very clearly fit that description.

NO2ID: stop ID cards and the data­base state! — Pub­lic trust evap­o­rates as Government’s case for ID col­lapses.

Pub­lic trust evap­o­rates as Government’s case for ID collapses

When leg­is­la­tion is banned in China on human rights grounds you’d expect gov­ern­ments the world over to take notice.The Chi­nese Coun­cil of Grand Jus­tices has just stopped in its tracks the Repub­lic of China’s plans to impose com­pul­sory fin­ger­print­ing on all Chi­nese cit­i­zens, declar­ing the move unconstitutional.Not so in the UK, where the Home Office still insist that
“inter­na­tional oblig­a­tions” tie their hands, ‘forc­ing’ them to
fin­ger­print and iris scan every UK res­i­dent — con­ve­niently pop­u­lat­ing
the National Iden­tity Reg­is­ter that lies at the heart of the
government’s ID card scheme at the same time.
This oblig­a­tion is fic­tion: the EU requires only a facial bio­met­ric — that’s “dig­i­tal photo” to you and me. And last week Ire­land shelved its plans for bio­met­ric pass­ports
as the US looks like it will aban­don its demands for bio­met­ric travel
doc­u­ments amid con­cerns about tech­ni­cal infea­si­bil­ity and unreliability.An ICM poll com­mis­sioned by NO2ID last week­end shows that pub­lic
sup­port for the government’s ID pro­pos­als, far from being
“over­whelm­ing”, has fallen over the last six months to just 55%.
Labour’s “80% sup­port” touted up to and dur­ing the elec­tion has
evap­o­rated, just as it did in Aus­tralia — where an 80:20 split in
favour of ID cards shifted to 80:20 against, as cit­i­zens dis­cov­ered the
details of the ‘Aus­tralia card’ scheme. [Pri­vacy Digest: Pri­vacy News (Civil Rights, Encryp­tion, Free Speech, Cryp­tog­ra­phy)]

I find it ironic (and rather depress­ing) that the gov­ern­ment of a noto­ri­ously author­i­tar­ian coun­try has rejected a pol­icy on human rights grounds so soon after the allegedly free United States has adopted that very policy.

Not only that, but in Cal­i­for­nia com­pul­sory fin­ger­print­ing was already required by the DMV. Peo­ple often make jokes about the “People’s Repub­lic of Cal­i­for­nia,” in ref­er­ence to this state’s bla­tantly social­ist gov­ern­ment, but in this par­tic­u­lar case the People’s Repub­lic of China is actu­ally more free than Cal­i­for­nia, or the United States of America.