Did the New U.S. Ambassador to S. Korea Whitewash Military Homicides at Gitmo?

The new U.S. ambassador to South Korea is Adm. Harry Harris. He was born in Japan to American father and Japanese mother, and has been a career military man, in the Navy.

The only other time I had heard of Harry Harris was a few years ago when Naval Postgraduate School economics professor and Hoover Institution research fellow David Henderson wrote about the time when Harris spoke to the student body and faculty and Henderson asked him an important question during Q&A. Dr. Henderson advocates a non-interventionist foreign policy from an economist’s perspective.

Dr. Henderson wrote:

Wondering more about who Admiral Harris was, I checked the web. And, lo and behold, I found something interesting: in 2006, he assumed command of the prison at Guantanamo in Cuba. Not only that, but it was on his watch that three prisoners, Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi, Salah Ali Abdullah Ahmed al-Salami and Yasser Talal Al Zahrani, died in the custody of US forces. Harris claimed that these were all suicides and said at the time, “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” When I read that statement, I recalled having heard it; I just didn’t remember the name of the Admiral who made it.

Reading further, I learned that Harper’s Magazine writer Scott Horton, in a March 2010 article titled “The Camp Delta ‘Suicides’: A Camp Delta Sergeant Blows the Whistle,” raised some doubts about whether these really were suicides:

“According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.“

Here was Dr. Henderson’s question for Adm. Harry Harris:

When you were in command of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, three prisoners died at around the same time. Those deaths were reported as suicides. At the time, you stated, “I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Later, Harper’s Magazine published a story suggesting that they had died as a result of accidental manslaughter during a torture session, and that the official account was a cover-up. Now, with hindsight, do you still think the deaths were suicides and do you still think that they were acts of asymmetrical warfare?

Henderson wrote that Harris’s answer was “You’re right … that happened on my watch. That was on my watch. I’ve looked at all the reports and I’m still sure that those were suicides.” But Harris didn’t answer the last part about “asymmetrical warfare.”

Henderson said that he asked those questions, tough but fair questions, to benefit the military students in the audience, because, he wrote, “few of them seem to know much about what their own military does.” And he wrote that, “I feel a moral obligation to model a certain kind of behavior for them: speaking truth to power or, at least, asking powerful people about the truth and putting them on the line to defend, deny, or admit.”

Hmm, Which Authoritarian Statist Will Trump Pick to Be the Next Supreme Bureaucrat?

On Donald Trump’s list of judges to be the next SCOTUS Justice is 11th Circuit Judge William Pryor. In May I wrote this about Judge Pryor:

According to Reason, “Pryor came out firmly in defense of every state’s unbridled power to incarcerate consenting adults for the supposed crime of having same-sex relations in the privacy of their own homes. ‘The States can and must legislate morality.’ To rule otherwise, Pryor’s brief declared, would be to enshrine a ‘sophomoric libertarian mantra’.”

Reason noted that Pryor believes in judicial deference, in which judges ought to defer to government bureaucrats’ authority and judgment (i.e. he’s a fascist, not a protector of the people, not a supporter of liberty).

Well, Judge Pryor is at it again, in his rubber-stamping of suspicion-less searches of cell phones at the border.

“We see no reason why the Fourth Amendment would require suspicion for a forensic search of an electronic device when it imposes no such requirement for a search of other personal property. Just as the United States is entitled to search a fuel tank for drugs, see Flores-Montano, 541 U.S. at 155, it is entitled to search a flash drive for child pornography.”

The “United States is entitled”? Yech. Just let the government go on a fishing expedition for child pornography? Even if you don’t suspect someone specific of committing some specific, actual crime?

He is saying that the Fourth Amendment does not require suspicion for searching “personal property”?

The Fourth Amendment: “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.”

Pryor also writes in this latest bad decision: “Although it may intrude on the privacy of the owner, a forensic search of an electronic device is a search of property. And our precedents do not require suspicion for intrusive searches of any property at the border.”

It doesn’t matter whether it’s at the border, within the border, or wherever. The Fourth Amendment is referring to the “right of the people to be secure…,” the right to be free of intrusions or aggressions into one’s person or effects, etc., which is a part of the people’s natural rights, their unalienable rights to life and liberty as referenced in the Declaration of Independence. The “right of the people to be secure” is not a right that has been granted to us by the government.

So given how authoritarian and anti-American Donald Trump is in his anti-due process, anti-civil liberties neanderthalism, I wouldn’t be surprise that Trump would pick Pryor. (Would Richard Pryor have been better?) William Pryor is only 56, although Trump has stated that he wants to have someone in there who will be there for the next 40-45 years. I haven’t heard of a 96-year-old SCOTUS Justice, so maybe not. But he is among the 6 front-runners.

Another potential Supreme Bureaucrat nominee, 53-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, has rubber-stamped Gitmo as legitimate and approves of “qualified immunity” claims by cops. Based on just those issues, let’s hope it’s not Kavanaugh.

In fact, Roger Stone thinks that Trump may very well pick Judge Andrew Napolitano for SCOTUS. However, given how anti-immigration and anti-foreigner the national socialist Donald Trump is, how anti-freedom and anti-private property Trump is, and how lacking in any understanding of moral scruples and basic decency Trump is, chances are that he’s going to go with whichever authoritarian statist the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society will tell him to pick.

Some Misc. Items on the Feds’ Wars, Militarism, Idiotic Central Planning, and Civil Liberties Intrusions

Justin Raimondo asks, Who is responsible for Honduras being a hellhole? He says Hillary Clinton, U.S. imperialism, and criminal cronyism. I say it’s probably those things, but mostly the drug war. And Mark Thornton says ending the drug war would contribute to Central American countries returning to a more normal state.

Laurence Vance discusses 500 days of the Trump administration: 500 days of the welfare/warfare/police state.

Ray McGovern asks, Did Sen. Warner and Comey “collude” on Russia-gate?

Ryan Gallagher and Henrik Moltke discuss the NSA’s hidden spy hubs in 8 cities.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers say that Julian Assange should not be punished for publishing the truth.

Jacob Hornberger discusses the Supreme Bureaucrats’ deference to the Pentacon.

Alex Emmons discusses a new House bill punishing U.S. companies that boycott Israel.

Sheldon Richman on why Palestine matters.

Richard Ebeling says the best answer to Trump’s tariffs is free trade.

And Marjorie Cohn asks, North Korea agreed to denuclearize, but when will the U.S.?

“Justice” Anthony Kennedy Leaving SCOTUS – YAY!

U.S. Supreme Bureaucrat Anthony Kennedy has announced that he is retiring and leaving. Good! And I think it’s perfectly acceptable for me to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” After Kennedy’s votes and opinions upholding the worst of the feds’ abuses of our liberty, prosperity, and security.

For instance, Kennedy joined the 6-3 majority for the rubber-stamping of ObamaCare in 2015. For that ruling, Kennedy’s fellow Justice (sic) Antonin Scalia called the Kennedy-Roberts et al. majority’s opinion “interpretive somersaults” and “interpretive jiggery-pokery” in Scalia’s dissent.

Apparently, while Chief Bureaucrat John Roberts turned against our liberty and the Constitution for both that opinion and the first ObamaCare rubber-stamping in 2012, it took Anthony Kennedy until the second ObamaCare case to LOVE Government medicine and its illicit intrusions.

And in 2005 Kennedy joined the majority opinion in the Kelo vs. City of New London case, in which the “High” Court created a new right of the government to steal private property in the name of private commercial interests.

In 2012, Justice (sic) Kennedy wrote the majority opinion that uphold police strip-searches of people arrested for minor offenses such as overdue parking tickets or walking a dog without a leash. Not convicts in prison but presumably innocent people arrested for, quite frankly, non-arrestable offenses!

Kennedy wrote that “jails can be even more dangerous than prisons because officials there know so little about the people they admit at the outset…” Which is why they need to strip search innocent people, including arrestees “instructed to remove their clothing while an officer looked for body markings, wounds, and contraband … (and) … looked at their ears, nose, mouth, hair, scalp, fingers, hands, arms, armpits, and other body openings.… Petitioner alleges he was required to lift his genitals, turn around, and cough in a squatting position as part of the process.”

They’re afraid that someone who walked his dog without a leash might have DRUGS up his rectum! (Sickos!)

The petitioner in this particular case was arrested for an unpaid fine that was paid! But because of bureaucratic incompetence (sorry for the redundancy), the “warrant remained in a statewide computer database.” And really, Kennedy? Treat human beings this way who are unjustly and criminally detained for walking a dog without a leash? Or for overdue parking tickets? How sick are these bureaucrats?!

Kennedy wrote that “people detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals.” Ooooh!

I was just saying the other day, “I hope my neighbor Bob whose grass is higher than the city’s grass-height limit doesn’t turn out to be a serial murderer! They better arrest and strip-search Bob!”

So is this sicko police-goon totalitarianism why the police bureaucrats have expanded their lists of arrestable “offenses” now, so that anyone can be arrested for any minor “offense”? So that goons and badged thugs and rapists can get their thrills, like they work for the TSA now?

And in 2011 Kennedy joined the 8-1 (!) majority deciding that “police do not need a warrant to enter a home if they smell burning marijuana, knock loudly, announce themselves and hear what they think is the sound of evidence being destroyed,” according to the New York Times.

“Evidence” of WHAT?! Evidence of non-crimes? What the hell kind of Orwellian-fascist world is this? It’s Amerika, folks. Drug-war Amerika.

So, in the name of the failed and impossible-to-win drug war and telling U.S. slaves what they may or may not put into their own bodies, and in the name of the failed and impossible-to-win drug war that is a main contributor to the societal collapse in Central and South America and why refugees are fleeing to the U.S. That is why the Supremes are rubber-stamping violent anti-liberty drug fascism.

And in the name of the goody-two-shoes men-in-blue trying to save their helpless victims from drugs, they have a right to criminally and violently break into someone’s home, the home of a “suspect” who is not suspected of actually harming others, and abduct and detain innocent people without a warrant, totally violating the Fourth Amendment these brave flatfeet have sworn an oath to support and defend!

For some reason, Anthony Kennedy doesn’t understand that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t mention “exigent circumstances.”

I really don’t know who will replace Kennedy, and at this point I don’t think it matters. The Supremes are clueless when it comes to protecting private property rights and contract rights, and individual liberty. And they are clueless when it comes to protecting innocent people from the criminal savagery of armed and uniformed government police goons enforcing unjust laws that need to be thrown into the dustbin of history.

Robert Bork And the Anti-Private Property “Conservatives”

In the discussion on conservative talk radio regarding who should replace U.S. Supreme Bureaucrat Anthony Kennedy, some people have mentioned their beloved conservative judicial hero Judge Robert Bork. Thank goodness Bork was voted down by the U.S. Senate — he got “Borked.”

Bork was a communitarian, a majoritarian who believed that if the majority of the community felt “anguished” by something that private people were doing in the privacy of their own home (their own private property), behavior that was consensual and not harming others, then the community had a right to legislate against such private behavior (and sic the government police after the sinful wrongdoers).

In other words, he was against private property rights, in the name of imposing a subjective moral view of behaviors enforced by the government. And enforced by the government police, of course. It is difficult to find any good items on the Internet regarding these views of his, but I know it to be the case, as I was glued to his confirmation hearings every day when he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987.

Bork believed there was no right to privacy, and he stated arrogantly that the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was an inconvenient “inkblot.” (However, now that I see that the Supreme Bureaucrats are all bad, the leftists are against the rights of the individual and private property, and the so-called “conservatives” are also against the rights of the individual and private property. So, it doesn’t really matter anymore. And is there any possibility that Trump would nominate a Judge Napolitano? Don’t. Make. Me. Laugh.)

So, if Bork were still living and had still been a judge these days, if he were consistent with his anti-private property and majoritarian-communitarian views, he would have to uphold cases such as transgender bathroom bills or laws, and other “civil rights” legislation in which the enforcement of such crapola violates private property, in the name of preventing private discrimination from “anguishing” the community. Am I wrong about this?

Do You Want “X” on Your License Or Birth Certificate?

First, this crap with using “they” and “their” because you don’t want to say, “he” or “her.” I don’t know what is wrong with people — they’re just words, they’re merely pronouns. And what you are doing is using incorrect grammar for the sake of, what, avoiding emotional discomfort? This is pathetic. If someone has an issue with what one’s gender is, then obviously it reflects some kind of wider problem the individual has with one’s identity in general.

But now the news writers are doing this crap with “they,” a plural pronoun, when discussing a singular individual person! News “journalists“! Please, no, not the news writers! Shame on them, as far as I’m concerned. But that’s WGBH news, i.e. public radio, NPR, etc., so I suppose that’s understandable.

The “news” article tells about a push to make Massachusetts another state that will allow “X” rather than “F” for female or “M” for male, on identification cards such as drivers licenses or birth certificates. Maine, Oregon, and some other states are doing this now.

“Last year, as a freshman in high school, Ella came out as non-binary, which means neither male nor female,” referring to the activist mentioned in the article. (Non-“binary”? Are you sure you’re not referring to John Byner?) In other words, Ella just doesn’t want to deal with the fact that she is a female, or that he is a male. It’s one or the other, kid. And that’s the truth, as Edith Ann would say.

At first I was against all this. However, now I’m for it. We’re talking about government-issued identification cards here. The least amount of personal information government has about me the better, as far as I’m concerned. So in the case of sex or gender, it actually might be a good thing that bureaucrats don’t have it on record that I’m a male. (Because what if the bureaucracy is filled with feminazis who hate men, at some point? Not good.)

Further Comments on the Trump Anti-Immigration Fiasco

The ignorant totalitarian Donald Trump says that he doesn’t care about due process and wants to send immigrants detained by ICE back to where they came from. Judge Napolitano clarifies that under the U.S. Constitution non-U.S. citizens actually do have a right to due process when apprehended by ICE agents. (I know, the conservative sheeple many of whom hate furrners don’t believe that the Bill of Rights actually applies to non-U.S. citizens. But yes, it does.)

You would think that The Donald might come to the defense of someone who is accused by the government of something, or perhaps falsely accused. What if an ICE agent just doesn’t like the way a traveler looks, and might be falsely accusing someone of being here “illegally”? Trump himself now does know a thing or two about being falsely accused, such as his being accused of “Trump-Russia collisions,” by the “deep state” and the government media, based on absolutely no evidence that actually exists. Due process is important, Donald.

And another point is the talk radio ditto-heads and other so-called conservatives who are constantly criticizing CPS and the social worker child-snatchers. But in the case of ICE seizing children away from their non-government-authorized immigrant parents, that’s okay. The conservative talk radio ditto-heads should just admit that they simply hate furrners.

Black Sites, Gitmo for Immigrants? Is the Tea Party Next?

The winner of the Democrat primary in New York for a Congressional seat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has claimed that the immigrant detention centers at the border that ICE is operating are “black sites.” As in, “CIA black sites” such as the ones overseas that CIA operate to torture terrorism suspects.

I agree with Ocasio-Cortez, at least in part, given the secret nature of the detention centers. The ICE gulag enforcers are turning away Congresspeople and won’t let them in those places. So, what the hell are they hiding? If what these ICE goons are doing is “legitimate,” then they have nothing to hide, right? What are they doing, getting the CIA there and interrogating (and torturing) the teenage immigrants in a fishing expedition to find out who might be an “MS-13 gang-banger”? If so, they’re looking for a needle in a haystack.

This whole thing is just sick. This central-planning socialist policy of immigration fascism is thoroughly immoral. But the talk radio ditto-heads love it. They are not really “conservatives,” quite frankly. Just statists, nationalists, collectivists, and without actual moral scruples.

Journalist and professor Karen Greenberg discusses the Gitmo logic (or illogic) of the anti-immigration, anti-foreigner Trump gestapo. And here is an article on the Daily Beast on the totalitarian nature of putting innocent, peaceful detained immigrants in U.S. military bases. (And the Tea Party Patriots out there, do you think you’ll be safe under a Hillary or Chuck Schumer administration? Good luck.)

But Trump reflects the resurgence in nationalism of the day, the anti-freedom, anti-individualism, anti-free trade philosophy of dumb clucks. And pushing this Washington central planning on steroids. Dumb Donald.

And it’s unconstitutional, as well as immoral.

According to the Mises Institute,

Judge Andrew Napolitano argues that it seldom if ever does. In an article from 2015, Napolitano, who can scarcely be classified as anti-libertarian or be accused of ignorance of the Constitution, makes a simple but powerful distinction about the limits of federal power: “the Constitution itself—from which all federal powers derive—does not delegate to the federal government power over immigration, only over naturalization.” Constitutional arguments for specific powers over immigration tend to focus on the Migration or Importation Clause. However, Ilya Somin further clarifies that this Clause originally referred to the slave trade, not to voluntary immigration, and is therefore a dead end.

And, as “Independence” Day approaches, and in celebration of the Declaration of Independence, Jacob Hornberger asks whether immigrants have the right to pursue happiness.

Do the talk radio ditto-heads believe in the idea of unalienable rights? Do all human beings have such rights inherently, or just “Americans” or those who have “citizenship”? Obviously, if citizenship is required to have unalienable rights, then they aren’t “unalienable,” are they? But I’m sure that Rush Limbaugh et al. can demagogue their way to convince their many sheeple listeners that only American citizens have the rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

2018 Candidates for State-Wide Offices: New Jersey

So far I have written about the 2018 candidates for Massachusetts and Utah. Now it’s New Jersey’s turn.

Today is primary day in several states, including Utah, in which Willard Romney might win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate against Mike Kennedy. If Romney does win, that means that the Republican voters of Utah will be telling us that they DON’T want to “drain the swamp”! But, whatever.

But maybe that will be different in New Jersey.

So while there are congressional races in New Jersey, I want to concentrate on the election for U.S. Senate. The incumbent is Democrat Bob Menendez, whose recent corruption trial ended in mistrial by a hung jury. (Hmm, since when are politicians corrupt?)

Menendez is bad on just about every issue, a typical statist bureaucrat against our liberty. For instance, according to Wikipedia, he voted for the post-9/11 hysteria bills, including Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) and the Constitution-eviscerating Patriot Act and its subsequent reauthorization.

As opposed to the hysterical, irrational response to 9/11, the correct and practical response to 9/11 would have been recognizing that the U.S. government shouldn’t have invaded and bombed Iraq in 1991 in the first place, including the destruction of civilian water and sewage treatment centers and imposing sanctions which prevented their rebuilding, shouldn’t have been continuing bombing Iraq throughout the 1990s along with continuing sanctions and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, shouldn’t have been invasively and illicitly occupying foreign lands including the Muslim Middle East, all of which occupations and bombings had been provoking those foreigners throughout all those years, that could have led to a possible retaliatory attack, which had been warned about by the prescient Ron Paul.

And the correct and moral policy would have been to make the U.S. government and military stop doing all those things! End the occupations, bombings and sanctions, close down all those foreign U.S. military bases and bring all the troops back to the U.S. where they belong (and preferably, putting them back into the private sector).

More recently, warmonger Menendez voted in 2013 to bomb Syria. Oh, well. He also supported President Clinton in the bombing and ethnic cleansing of Yugoslavia. So he’s a career-long warmongering militarist. Yech.

On social issues, Menendez sponsored the failed “Student Non-Discrimination Act,” which would have expanded Title IX to LGBT students. Thank goodness it failed.

In her book, Rape Culture Hysteria: Fixing the Damage Done to Men and Women, author Wendy McElroy called for the outright repeal of Title IX, and noted the courts’ expansion of the Title and the erosion of due process and denial of the rights of the accused. Statists and collectivists do not seem to understand the importance of due process.

And on gun rights, according to Wikipedia, Menendez received an F from the NRA and a F-minus from Gun Owners of America. Apparently, he doesn’t believe that people have a right to self defense. (F-minus? That’s pretty bad, Bob.)

So if the Democrat in this election is very bad, a corrupt warmongering ignorant SJW, then should the people vote for the Republican candidate? Nope.

Republican Bob Hugin is the retired CEO of Celgene, a Big Pharma company. I am not particularly fond of Big Pharma, as most of you know.

On policies, Hugin says he supports “equal pay for equal work,” even though there’s no such thing as “equal work.” And does he mean government-mandated “equal pay,” as determined by the commissars of the State’s labor bureaucracy? At the expense of an employer’s right to set salaries for employees?

Does the government own the businesses? I think Democrats think so. Oh wait, Hugin’s a Republican. Never mind, as Emily Litella would say.

Hugin is also “pro-marriage equality,” which I suppose means that every husband is equal to every wife, which is not possible. No, I think he means that gay marriage is “equal” to opposite-sex marriage. How about just marriage freedom? Keep marriage contracts as private, voluntary contracts and keep the government out of it. Unfortunately, I don’t expect someone who shows a lack of respect for contract rights to understand this.

On foreign policy, Hugin writes on his website, “Bob considers Israel a beacon of democracy and innovation in the Middle East and throughout the world, and as Senator he will seek to strengthen our commitment to Israel and the Israeli people.” (I know I’m committed to Israel.)

Another one for making Israel the 51st state.

“Bob will vigorously oppose any future Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) that targets New Jersey’s military installations, which are imperative to our national defense and a major source of jobs and economic investment throughout New Jersey.” (Ugh! See above.)

So Hugin seems to think that military bases exist so that the feds can redistribute your confiscated earnings over to the military industrial complex.

“In the Senate, (Bob Hugin) will be a proponent of increased defense spending to ensure a highly-prepared, trained, and effective armed forces.” But they’re already getting hundreds of billions, Bob.

When it comes to socialism, it’s never enough for parasites.

However, there actually is a viable alternative to the two Government Party statists. Besides the several Independents running for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, the Libertarian Party’s nominee is Dr. Murray Sabrin, a professor of finance at the Ramapo College business school.

On civil liberties, Sabrin writes on his website,

Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to petition our government for redress of grievances, habeas corpus, the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right not to be executed or have our liberty or property taken away from us without due process of law, the right to a speedy trial, the right of trial by jury, the right to effective assistance of counsel, the right to confront witnesses, the right to be free from cruel and unusual punishments – All this is what it means to be an American.

Unfortunately, however, the federal government, in the name of “keeping us safe” in its “war on terror,” has seen fit to infringe on many of these critically important rights. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have engaged in indefinite detention, torture, assassination, and secret surveillance without warrants. They have denied speedy trials, used military tribunals instead of federal courts, admitted hearsay evidence and evidence acquired by torture, and denied effective assistance of counsel. These are the hallmarks of totalitarian regimes. They have no place in a free society.

As a US Senator, I would be committed to upholding the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. I want to restore civil liberties to the American people.

I have no complaints there.

On foreign policy, Sabrin writes,

A noninterventionist foreign policy is not only the policy of our country’s founders, it is a sane, moral, and common-sense policy as well. It is not the job of the United States to be the policeman, fireman, mediator, or social worker of the world.

…

If any American feels that the authoritarian leader of some country should be removed from power, he is free to use his own resources and enlist others to help him undertake a regime change.

The same idea applies to taking sides in other countries’ civil wars, bolstering other countries’ armies, rendering earthquake or typhoon relief, helping to build infrastructure, etc.

Of course, no Americans who do any of those things could or should depend on U.S. military might to rescue them if they get into trouble. They would travel at their own risk, using their own money, with only the assistance of like-minded volunteers.

On the drug war: “My plan to win the War on Drugs is simple: End It.”

Duh.

On taxes: “Libertarians see things quite differently from Democrats and Republicans. From a Libertarian perspective, the optimal top marginal income tax rate is zero.”

On regulations, “…from the medical sector to the housing sector and everywhere in between, there are regulations that hurt consumers and small businessmen for the benefit of well-connected special interests…In Washington, I will focus on eliminating these onerous regulations that restrict personal choice and undermine our economy. I want more doctors, cheaper drugs and less government control over what we can buy and have in our own homes. I will never support a bill that makes regulations more burdensome and I will introduce bills to eliminate laws that unnecessarily burden our economy and lead to a lower standard of living for the average person.”

Dr. Sabrin does say he’s for immigration reform. I am not sure I totally agree with the specifics. I would repeal all laws pertaining to immigration, because the Constitution does not authorize the federal government to get involved in immigration. Just leave people alone, as long as you don’t suspect someone of committing acts of aggression, theft or fraud. It doesn’t matter whether the individual is within the “borders” or on the outside and traveling in.

Freedom means that no one needs to ask a bureaucrat for permission to travel and go from one place to another. Just don’t trespass on private property. Unfortunately, some people seem to believe that public property is a form of collectively-owned private property.

Now, Libertarian Party activist and Platform Committee member Tom Knapp wrote in this recent update on the LP’s immigration plank:

When I sought appointment to the Libertarian Party’s 2018 platform committee, I made a few commitments (including):

To seek a committee recommendation that the Libertarian Party delete the final sentence of Plank 3.4, “Free Trade and Migration,” as follows: “We support the removal of governmental impediments to free trade. Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders. However, we support control over the entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a credible threat to security, health or property.” Thanks to the committee for considering, and passing, this proposal!

I presume that Tom’s issues with that last sentence could include the problem of who is to decide who is a credible threat to security? The central planners in Washington? They have said that Iraq was a threat, Iran, Libya, Afghanistan. And Donald Trump thinks that free trade with China, Canada or the U.K. is a threat. So, why should we entrust those idiots in Washington to determine what and who “threats” are?

In my view, some people think the threat comes from those who are seeking a better life for themselves and their families, and are willing to work at “jobs Americans won’t do,” etc. Sadly, some people (or should I say, “sheeple”) prefer a police state rather than freedom.

So, all in all, regarding the New Jersey Senate race it appears that if people are looking for someone to get in the U.S. Senate to “drain the swamp,” they really ought to just go for the Libertarian Party, Dr. Murray Sabrin, this time. What do you have to lose? (You have a lot more to lose, such as your savings and your freedom, if you continue to vote for Democrats and Republicans, that’s for sure.)

Irrationality in Culture and Economy – in Amerika

The American Library Association has decided to remove the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder from a major book award, according to Charles Burris, because Wilder’s novels contain “expressions of stereotypical attitudes…” Hmm, are librarians unable to distinguish between expressions by a fictional character in a novel and those of its author? Are these Orwellian SJWs trying to sweep history and the truth under the rug? That is, that some people make racist comments.

On the other hand, as Charles Burris comments, “The Little House books champion individualism, self-reliance, loyalty to the nuclear family and community. These are forbidden values today’s progressives abhor.”

Individualism being the opposite of collectivism, which is exactly what racism is a branch of. But the denial of history and the throwing of a great novelist under the bus by these history deniers, like the book-banners including banning the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the schools, and book-burners and censors, are examples of the irrationality of today’s “modern” society.

And Donald Trump’s trade wars, tariffs and other intrusions into private economic matters, are already causing businesses to move some of their plants outside of the U.S., such as Harley-Davidson, and possibly causing an important producer of nails to go bankrupt, according to Robert Wenzel.

What the hell is wrong with The Donald, except for being a “low-IQ” President? His idiotic tariffs are backfiring already, and causing today’s DJIA to go way down, about 400 points down right now, out of “trade war” concerns. This anti-free trade fascism is counter-productive, and anti-America, quite frankly. But most of all, extremely irrational.

Why can’t these dumb government bureaucrats just leave people alone? There’s this anti-free market mentality in Washington and Trump is a huge proponent of that crapola. And his anti-foreigner nationalism with the anti-immigration stuff is also part of the anti-free market mentality.

So, we have the irrational censorship history-deniers on the Left, and the irrational economy-wreckers on the … hmm, The Donald and his anti-market idiocy are also on the Left. Go figure.

Pardon Michael Milken and All Other Innocent Victims of the State’s Crusades

According to Bloomberg, treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House advisor and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner are advocating for a Presidential pardon for Michael Milken, who was known as the “junk bond king” and pleaded guilty for securities and reporting violations but was not convicted of the “insider trading” witch hunt that then-U.S. attorney for New York Rudy Giuliani viciously led. Ironically, Giuliani is now a part of the group advocating on behalf of a Milken pardon, mainly because Milken supposedly had helped Giuliani to get rid of his prostate cancer which Milken himself had also survived.

Bloomberg notes that “until now presidents have declined requests to embrace a man who came to be viewed as a symbol of greed on Wall Street.” Well, there may or may not have been greed on Milken’s part. But whatever dealings he may have been a part of, it probably wasn’t criminal. And as I have noted in this article, “insider trading” is not a real crime. It’s just another made-up “crime” that government bureaucrats came up with to persecute people who make money the honest way: voluntarily, not through coercion including the coercive arm of the State, and by being productive.

Unlike most people in the market and in business, the parasites in government exercise their greed the involuntary way: through living high off the hog from tax dollars that are seized from the people’s earnings and bank accounts. Why do you think the area in and around the Washington, D.C. area is the wealthiest in the country?

And the judge in the 1990 Milken case, Judge Kimba Wood, is now overseeing the Michael Cohen case. Cohen is Trump’s former personal lawyer, who (based on what I’ve read about him) seems to be a corrupt sleazebag. But regarding Judge Kimba Wood, as I wrote in this post,

The Mueller investigation came up with nothing against Trump so they went after Trump associates Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn and other associates. And now they are harassing Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen to try to find any possible evidence of any technical violations of non-crimes or whatever they can find and make up. I’m sure “insider trading” will come up, as with Martha Stewart based on criminally corrupt government prosecutors’ socialist envy and hatred of capitalism and their hatred of private sector entrepreneurs, and as the feds also did in their persecution of Joseph Nacchio of Qwest in Nacchio’s refusal to act as an NSA stasi against his innocent customers. Government sucks.

Judge Kimba Wood, the “Love Judge,” is the judge who ordered Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen to reveal the names of other clients, whether or not they were involved with Donald Trump. During the 1980s, she presided over the Michael Milken trial, in which Milken was railroaded by the New York U.S. attorney thug Rudy Giuliani. Prior to being an evil judge, Wood’s field of expertise was anti-capitalism known as “antitrust” law. These government apparatchiks hate the market, the free market and voluntary exchange in which bureaucrats don’t get to stick their fat noses into the people’s private business.

Robert Wenzel of Economic Policy Journal notes the possible Milken pardon and brought up Murray Rothbard’s 1989 article about the Milken case. In Michael R. Milken vs. the Power Elite, Rothbard pointed out how John Kenneth Galbraith, Donald Trump and David Rockefeller had one thing in common: “hatred of making money and of ‘capitalist greed’,” in their criticism of Michael Milken at the time. Rothbard wrote, “People like Rockefeller or Trump are not appalled, quite obviously, at high incomes per se; what appalls them is making money the old-fashioned way, i.e., by high personal wages or salaries. In other words, through labor income.”

You see, as Rothbard further details, the Rockefellers were the ones who were dishonestly greedy in their turning to the redistribution schemes of the federal government to bail them out when their corporations were being run by incompetent managers or when consumers rejected them. In their collusions with bureaucracy and force and with government taxation-thefts of private wealth, Big Banks and Big Finance helped Wall Street fat cats to remain fat cats, and to keep those at the bottom of the economic ladder at the bottom, with the State’s fiat money printing, regulations, fees and restrictions.

Rothbard explained how Milken’s “greed” i.e. productivity helped others,

People like Michael Milken perform a vitally important economic function for the economy and for consumers, in addition to profiting themselves. One would think that economists and writers allegedly in favor of the free market would readily grasp this fact. In this case, they aid the process of shifting the ownership and control of capital from inefficient to more efficient and productive hands—a process which is great for everyone, except, of course, for the inefficient Old Guard elites whose proclaimed devotion to the free markets does not stop them from using the coercion of the federal government to try to restrict or crush their efficient competitors.

What we have had for a long time are prosecutors who have been life-long government bureaucrats i.e. parasites living off the labor of the workers and producers of society, via tax-thefts, prosecuting and persecuting innocent entrepreneurs in the private sector who actually serve the consumers. Government parasites such as Giuliani went after Milken, James Comey went after Martha Stewart, and you can just look at the whole team of Robert Mueller who are going after Donald Trump on behalf of the parasitic national security state. They’re all still around, ooozing and slithering in Washington and causing trouble.

And don’t forget the evil Carmen Ortiz who went after the young entrepreneur Aaron Swartz, driving him to, allegedly, commit suicide.

Those in the government “justice” branch, and the crony capitalists such as Trump, the Rockefellers and Romneys of society, and many on the Left have what Ludwig von Mises called an “anti-capitalistic mentality.” I think a lot of it comes from envy, covetousness, and a lack of appreciation for the concept of “live and let live,” sadly.

I wish the people on the Left out there, who think they hate “greedy capitalists,” could see the State for what it is. It is a vicious monster that crushes freedom whenever it can, steals as much wealth from the people over whom it illicitly rules, and persecutes those who are successful at independently making something of themselves without the “help” of their betters in government.

More Articles on the Evil of the State and Its Groupies

Bruce Fein explains why Trump’s next pardon should be CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou.

James Bovard says that the pro-war media deserve criticism, not sainthood.

Mike Riggs on Congress’s new legislation to give Jeff Sessions unprecedented new drug-war powers.

Mondoweiss with an article on Israeli Jewish settlers celebrating the burning of a Palestinian baby.

Philip Giraldi on breaking in a new President.

And Nicolas Davies on the myth of U.S. precision bombing.

The Supreme Bureaucrats Narrowly Protect Your Cell Phone Data from the Police State

The U.S. Supreme Court decided 5-4 that government police must get a warrant to acquire location data in people’s phones. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion and was joined by the four liberals, with the four “conservatives” dissenting in their support of the police state and criminal gestapo tactics for government police to search and track people.

The data in your cell phone are what I would call part of one’s personal “effects,” and are protected by the Fourth Amendment which states, “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.”

Your whereabouts are also part of your personal effects, in my view. And I think this should apply whether the data in question exist in one’s cell phone or on the provider’s servers (which obviously are the provider’s property). Perhaps there needs to be a specification in one’s cell or phone provider contract that specifically addresses one’s data and who may access the data and with whose permission. There needs to be more providers like Joseph Nacchio who attempted to protect his Qwest Communications customers from the criminal intrusiveness of the feds in their post-9/11 hysteria.

And what is wrong with “conservatives” like Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Anthony Kennedy in their shameful defense of the police state?

The true conservative’s answer to these questions of police searching without a warrant is that the laws they are enforcing are bad laws and should be repealed. They shouldn’t even be enforced. There needs to be a moral reinforcement by the Supreme Court in addressing bad laws by outright asserting that the laws themselves are resulting in the violation of the lives and liberty of the people, and for no good reason.

Government should not be tracking an individual unless it has a reason to suspect someone of criminal activity. And by “criminal,” I mean actual criminality, such as assault, theft or robbery, fraud, rape, murder, etc. The aforementioned case in particular did happen to involve robberies. But the problem with many of these cases is that they revolve around drugs and the goddamn drug war, as well as the many, many laws on the books regarding finances, laws which shouldn’t be on the books. So in many cases the government and its enforcers are the criminals in their violating the right of the people to be secure in their persons, papers, houses, and effects, in the government’s attempts to enforce the thousands of laws on the books which should not exist.

And it’s not as much regarding the “right to privacy” as it is the “right to be secure.” The “right to be secure” means to be protected from over-zealous, incompetent or corrupt and possibly criminally-minded government enforcers of illicit rules of bureaucracy and immoral prohibitions, many enforcers of which have caused great damage to the lives and liberty of innocent, peaceful people.

Trump’s Soviet Regime

The Center for Investigative Reporting reports that the innocent children who are being kidnapped and involuntarily imprisoned by U.S. government criminals are being given psychiatric drugs, involuntarily. In some cases they are held down and being made to receive injections, or are being given pills they are told are “vitamins,” but all which seem to be making the kids “dizzy, listless, obese and even incapacitated.” This story was discussed on Democracy Now.

According to the Center for Investigative Reporting,

One child was prescribed 10 different shots and pills, including the antipsychotic drugs Latuda, Geodon and Olanzapine, the Parkinson’s medication Benztropine, the seizure medications Clonazepam and Divalproex, the nerve pain medication and antidepressant Duloxetine, and the cognition enhancer Guanfacine.

“Parents and the children themselves told attorneys the drugs rendered them unable to walk, afraid of people and wanting to sleep constantly, according to affidavits filed April 23 in U.S. District Court in California” in their lawsuit against attorney general Jeff Sessions.”

There are other abuse allegations as well:

Shiloh is among 71 companies that receive funds from the federal government to house and supervise immigrant children deemed unaccompanied minors. These are the places set up to receive the more than 2,000 children separated from their parents in the past six weeks under the new Trump administration policy as they leave temporary way stations at the border.

An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that nearly half of the $3.4 billion paid to those companies in the last four years went to homes with serious allegations of mistreating children. In nearly all cases reviewed by Reveal, the federal government continued contracts with the companies after serious allegations were raised.

Jordan Peterson vs. Social Justice Warriors

Reason TV has this video of John Stossel featuring Jordan Peterson vs. Social Justice Warriors.