Month: June 2005

#
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 regime–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 regime 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.