About six months ago, my brother was arrested for a bench warrant for an outstanding ticket which he had failed to pay.  Under some circumstances, I might say that it’s his own damn fault and he should drive more carefully seeings as how many traffic laws are actually designed with safety in mind.  Unfortunately for him, the bench warrant was issued for a ticket given to him because the passenger in his vehicle wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.  Oh yes, a man with an unbuckled passenger truly is a menace to society.  I fail to see how someone can even be given a ticket, let alone arrested, for something someone else did or didn’t do.

This basically points to a shift in the law enforcement system in the US whereby ordinary citizens are now increasingly being forced to act in the capacity of law enforcers and tattle tale police.  For more of my views on making ordinary citizens act as police, see this link.

My mind, today, is thinking around the subject of private property rigts, and what is and is not acceptable for merchants to do on their private property.  I came across an old story about a man who was wrongfully detained by overzealous security guards at a Circuit City in Ohio.  The security guards proceeded to call the police who actually arrested the man, named Michael Righi, despite the fact that he had committed no crime.

It reminds me of an incident that I had at the mall in Aurora, CO last December.  Evidently, the mall requires patrons who appear to be under the age of 21 to show ID to enter the premises after 5 pm on Friday and Saturday because they feel this will curb gang activity–nevermind the fact that I’m almost 30 and look nothing like a gang member.  Of course, I refused to show my ID to the mall security guard posted at the door and walked into the building where I intended to drop several hundred dollars on Christmas presents with their merchants.  As it turns out, the Town Center Mall in Aurora, CO doesn’t believe that paying customers are vital to its survival as a center of commerce because I hadn’t made it 100 feet into the building before two actual Aurora police offers came running after me like they were on fire.  They demanded my ID, and again I refused, this time asking if there’s a law in the state of Colorado that I must show my identification to shop.  I was advised that there is no such law but since it’s private property, I must either submit to their ridiculous demands or leave the premises.  At that point I advised them that I would peacefully leave the premises but that I would never be shopping there again.  Lucky for me, my incident didn’t involve my arrest and subsequent legal battles as happened with Mr. Righi, but it did cause me to question exactly what this world is coming to that the city of Aurora could take my tax money and use it to put police officers in a mall to enforce private business policies instead of putting those same officers on the street to, you know, solve crimes.

I do suppose that any private merchant has the right to demand the ID of any person who wishes to shop at their store, but shy of forcing patrons to sign a waiver prior to entering the store indicating that they understand that they may be subject to an unreasonable search at any time while on the premises, I believe that it’s a civil rights violation.  The reason I believe this is that patrons have no way of knowing which merchants have store policies of searching customers without evidence of wrongdoing, and worse yet, no way of knowing which stores have policies of calling in the police to do the dirty work for them.  I believe that if the stores doesn’t require customers to show ID or sign a waiver upon entering the store, they’ve given up their rights to demand such a search and I, personally, will not ever submit to one.  The store’s policy on harassing it’s own paying customers should be made available prior to customers entering the store so that they can make an informed decision regarding whether or not they wish to continue on.

The Supreme Court ruled today that Washington, DC’s firearms ban is in violation of the Second Amendment and that individuals in the United States do, in fact, have a right to bear arms.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court’s 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

Frighteningly enough, 4 of the SC justices ruled against the majority decision, meaning that 4 out of 5 Supreme Court judges in the US believe that individual citizens should NOT be afforded the right to protect themselves in their own homes.

I think it’s necessary to examine some issues involving the DC gun ban.  First, DC has a ridiculously high crime/murder rate for a city in which residents have no right to bear arms. Second, many of the murders in DC are actually commited with the very handguns which are banned in the city, meaning that the ban hasn’t stopped criminals from illegally obtaining weapons but has prevented ordinary citizens from obtaining guns with which to protect their families. Third, studies have concluded that countries such as the US where individuals are allowed to keep guns in their homes have a lower instance of “hot” robberies, also known as home invasions, meaning once again that ordinary people and guns are not necessarily a bad thing.

I suspect that if the Supreme Court justices were actually forced to live within Washington, DC, none of them would have voted against this decision.  Since their annual salaries are far higher than the salaries of the individuals living in the dangerous DC neighborhoods where handguns were banned, the justices can live in neighboring states where crime rates are lower and the need for protection in the home is also lower.  I’m glad to see that 5 justices upheld the Constitution today, but I can’t wrap my mind around the idea that the 4 dissenting judges believe that the founders truly didn’t intend for individuals to have the right to bear arms.

Ten Men Dead by David Beresford is an in-depth and sometimes chilling look at the 1981 hunger strike in Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland. The prisoners went on their hunger strike in an attempt to gain rights as prisoners of war, as they considered “the troubles” between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland to be a war and their actions within the IRA to be military rather than criminal. Margaret Thatcher’s government, of course, refused to afford them their rights as prisoners of war and tried to hold them as common criminals despite the fact that Protestant groups were engaging in the same “terrorist” tactics as the IRA.

The most famous of the ten Irish hunger strikers to perish in 1981 was a man by the name of Bobby Sands, who was elected to Parliament during the strike and died as a member of the British Parliament. If he hadn’t been elected during the hunger strike, it would have likely had far less press coverage and impact. Unfortunately, the ten deaths did not have the desired effect of procuring the rights of the prisoners as POWs although it did rally additional public support within the Catholic and international communities.

The Irish prisoners involved in the hunger strike had five demands that Thatcher’s government refused to honor:

• The right not to wear a prison uniform;
• The right not to do prison work;
• The right of free association with other prisoners, and to organise educational and recreational pursuits;
• The right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week;
• Full restoration of remission lost through the protest.

Of course, by giving in to these demands, the Thatcher government would essentially be admitting to the fact that Britain was, in fact, at war with the IRA. This was an admission which the government couldn’t bring itself to make, and it cost the lives of the ten hunger strikers as well as countless others as the violence continued.

The 1981 Long Kesh hunger strike raises the question of whether or not hunger strikes are an effective means of civil disobedience. To this day, many within the Northern Irish Catholic and American communities see Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers as heroes. However, their lives were taken by the strike and they never had a chance to do anything more to further the cause of freedom in Northern Ireland.

In this case, I feel that the strike was poorly planned and executed with little to no understanding of the societal differences between Ireland and England. In Ireland, people carry a sense of shame, and one of the most shameful things you can do is to allow a person to starve himself on your doorstep. If you’ve wronged someone and he goes on a hunger strike against you, you can’t let it continue and must do something to make amends. Hunger strikes have a long history in Ireland going back hundreds of years. The English, for their part, feel no such shame and will gladly force feed Irish hunger strikers to death if need be.

Other historically important hunger strikes in recent times include those of Ghandi and prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. The fame of someone such as Ghandi is enough that his death during a hunger strike would cause massive public outcry, but marginalized people like prisoners at Gitmo have far less public support and a hunger strike would do less to help their cause. When considering whether or not to hunger strike as a means of civil disobedience, it’s important to first fully analyze the pros and cons given your own specific situation and the oppression that you’re fighting against. If you’re marginalized by society or your cause doesn’t carry widespread support, you’re likely to be seen as a crazy rather than a devoted activist and the strike probably won’t go over well in the public eye.

I personally believe that hunger strikes should be the absolute last resort in the arsenal of a civil disobedience activist. It isn’t that I believe the tactic is entirely ineffective, but rather it causes immeasurable harm to the body of the hunger striker, and sometimes harms the mind as well. After a hunger strike, if it ends without the death of the hunger striker, they may simply never be the same. It’s said that Matt Devlin, one of the Irish hunger strikers, spoke of bees during his strike and never forgot them.

I admire anyone who believes so strongly in a cause like liberty or freedom that they would put their own life on the line in a hunger strike. I only hope that they’ll consider the consequences before they let the strike go too far.

We’ve all heard the news that scientists have found antibiotics and other substances in the drinking water across the United States. But something that’s rather underreported is the issue of scientists–and government agencies–testing raw sewage to monitor drug use.

Law enforcement officials have long sought a way to come up with reliable and verifiable calculations of narcotics use, to identify new trends and formulate policies. Surveys, the backbone of drug-use estimates, are only as reliable as the people who answer them. But sewage does not lie.

Because people excrete chemicals in urine and flush it down toilets, measuring raw sewage for street drugs can provide quick, fairly precise snapshots of drug use in communities, even on a particular day.

Although the widescale testing of an entire city’s urine and feces to determine overall trends isn’t necessarily a civil rights violation, it could certainly become one. For example, it’s reported that there are high levels of methamphetamines in the sewage in Las Vegas. What if the police in that city were to do more specific testing and narrow down the highest use neighborhoods–or even individual homes–and target those specific areas?  No warrant would be required for this sort of police action because the drug user has voluntarily released his or her urine into the public sewage system and therefore bypassed any Constitutional protections.

The inherent problem with this is that all people must urinate, whether they want to or not, and therefore everyone who uses illicit drugs is self incriminating in the event of a warrantless search of the sewers.  This begs some frightening legal questions about the Fourth and Fifth Amendments that I’m not qualified to answer.   It seems to me that testing of the sewers to locate and crack down on drug use would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment since there is essentially no probable cause, and using any evidence obtained in such a search would be a violation of the Fifth Amendment since an unavoidable function of the human body is responsible for causing the excretion of drugs through urine in the first place, meaning that drug users don’t have an opportunity to avoid self incrimination.  Unfortunately, I can also see overzealous police and prosecutors forcing the issue all the way to the Supreme Court where the rights of the individual would most likely be ignored.

This drug testing in the sewers has police departments poised to take drastic action in the “War on Drugs” as soon as technology makes it feasible to use the testing in that way.  I, for one, hope we’re able to regain some of our rights before we reach that point.

The US dollar hasn’t been doing very well lately. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that typical Americans have no alternative which they are allowed to use. Most people conduct their daily transactions, and pay their bills either in cash, or with a credit card. Credit cards represent just one small part of America’s debt problem, but the issue goes far beyond the fact that many American spend beyond their means. Our monetary system is no longer based on value, but rather on debt. Since dollars can no longer be redeemed for any commodity on their own, but are rather IOU’s which the law mandates must be accepted, “for all debts public and private”.

The debt based Federal Reserve System, has given us nothing but inflation for as long as it has existed. The US has lost over 97% of it’s value since the creation of the Fed. This trend is predictable for any currency that lacks real backing, and will certainly continue for as long as the Federal Reserve continues to be in the business of printing money. There is a simple alternative that was discussed at great length by Ron Paul during his presidential campaign.

The solution is simply for the government to either allow transactions in gold and silver or for the US treasury to resume the practice of issuing notes that are redeemable in gold and silver. Politicians and the very few at the top of the finance industry like the current system because it allows them access to easy credit, which is essentially free money, while the vast majority of people and the economy as a whole suffers. To say that eliminating the Federal Reserve is nearly impossible, in the short term, is probably an understatement. However, allowing Americans to use gold and silver as money, may be much more realistic.

Both metals have been used as a means of exchange for thousands of years, and they are very stable in their buying power, when compared to paper currencies. They also act as a hedge against the eventual collapse of our current fiat money. Make no mistake, paper currencies collapse eventually, and hopefully ours will take a more gradual path to the bottom, but the dollar is headed in only one direction over time.

While the idea of multiple currencies might sound strange to some, the fact is that we live in a (mostly) free market society, where consumers choose among hundreds and thousands of competing products every day. It’s time to allow them a real choice in how they pay for those products and services.

When I was a child, my Catholic mother made me go to church with her on a regular basis on Sunday mornings. I was never a fan of church. I found it boring and the idea that everything (or anything) in the Bible could possibly be true was something that I simply couldn’t wrap my little mind around. Even today—although I now understand the basic human desire to believe in a higher power, life after death, to have answers to explain where we came from and where we’re going—I simply don’t understand how anyone could take the Bible literally, and I myself don’t find any comfort in the thought of sitting in a church listening to a priest tell me how wrong I’ve been or how some invisible omnipotent being is watching me. Personally, I take more comfort in the idea that once I die, it’s all over than the idea that I’ll go to some perfect heaven or indescribable hell. I take more comfort in helping those less fortunate because I want to than because I must. Sadly, I’m a terrible Catholic.

As punishment for arguing with my mom and refusing to go to church in grade school, I was made to stay home and watch Dr. Who on PBS with my dad. I feel the same way about Dr. Who that I feel about Catholicism—there’s no way these fantastical story lines could be true, and although I understand the basic human desire to believe that we’re not alone in the universe, I doubt if it’s possible to time travel back and forth to the ends of the universe in a phone booth (although in Tom Baker’s defense, he did wear a pretty cool scarf).

It may sound silly to compare Catholicism and Dr. Who, but there really are some interesting parallels, most of which revolve around the human need to know that we’re not alone in the universe and my extreme dislike of them. Both Catholicism and Dr. Who do have some redeeming qualities, though. Catholicism does give some people great comfort and happiness, and I even refer to myself as a Catholic, although I mean it in a non-practicing ethnic sort of sense. Dr. Who’s major redeeming quality, in my eyes, is that oh so awesome Tom Baker scarf. In fact, a friend knitted a similar scarf which I’m now in possession of and there’s nothing more fun early in the morning than to prance around the house in it pretending to slay very cheesy looking aliens.

If you aren’t Catholic, it might be a good idea to insert your own religion into this blog entry every time I used the word Catholic, and from that, you can decide if your life is better with religion or with Dr. Who (although they’re both a form of punishment to me).

Sometimes, you come across a news story that’s so outrageously stupid that you simply can’t help but wonder if it’s even real.  This morning, I came across two such articles, both out of Canada.  The first involved a court decision which held that a father doesn’t have the right to ground his daughter for posting inappropriate pictures of herself on the internet.

OTTAWA (AFP) — A Canadian court has lifted a 12-year-old girl’s grounding, overturning her father’s punishment for disobeying his orders to stay off the Internet, his lawyer said Wednesday.

The girl had taken her father to Quebec Superior Court after he refused to allow her to go on a school trip for chatting on websites he tried to block, and then posting “inappropriate” pictures of herself online using a friend’s computer.

The father’s lawyer Kim Beaudoin said the disciplinary measures were for the girl’s “own protection” and is appealing the ruling.

“She’s a child,” Beaudoin told AFP. “At her age, children test their limits and it’s up to their parents to set boundaries.”

“I started an appeal of the decision today to reestablish parental authority, and to ensure that this case doesn’t set a precedent,” she said. Otherwise, said Beaudoin, “parents are going to be walking on egg shells from now on.”

“I think most children respect their parents and would never go so far as to take them to court, but it’s clear that some would and we have to ask ourselves how far this will go.”

According to court documents, the girl’s Internet transgression was just the latest in a string of broken house rules. Even so, Justice Suzanne Tessier found her punishment too severe.

Beaudoin noted the girl used a court-appointed lawyer in her parents’ 10-year custody dispute to launch her landmark case against dear old dad.

The second involved a severely autistic non-verbal child who was thrown into the CPS system based on the school system’s use of a “psychic” to determine that she was being sexually abused.

On May 30, Leduc picked Victoria up from school, where she’s enrolled in an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) class with several boys around the same age. When Leduc returned home, there was an urgent call asking her to return to the Livingstone Street East school.

Frightened, Leduc rushed back to the school. She and Victoria entered a room where they were met by the principal, the vice-principal and the teacher.

Leduc said they advised her that Victoria’s educational assistant (EA) had visited a psychic, who said a youngster whose name started with “V” was being sexually abused by a man between 23 and 26 years old. Leduc was also handed a list of recent behaviours exhibited by her daughter.

Although the Canadians certainly have a right to run their country as they see fit, I can’t quite wrap my mind around the concept of allowing the government this kind of control over my life.  If my 12 year old daughter were caught posting inappropriate pictures of herself on the internet, she’d be a lot more than grounded, and the fact that the court system actually found in favor of the girl when she took her father to court over the issue is just proof that something seriously funky is going on north of the border.  As for the autistic girl, she’s clearly in no position to communicate with anyone if she should suffer from abuse at some point in her life.  However, the school trying to yank her away from her parents based on a vague “psychic” reading is beyond ridiculous in any country.  The United States is also headed in this direction and I encourage all who read this to take heed.

My mom, who lives in Missoula, MT, had an interesting conversation with one of her customers at her retail job.  This particular man was waiting in line for my mom to check him out and was discussing the finer points of how awesome Ron Paul is with the other customers in line when my mom chimed in and said, “You sound like my oldest daughter over in New Hampshire”.  The man, obviously in the know, asked her if I had moved here with the Free State Project, to which she responded that I had.  The man told her that although he believed the FSP is a good program, he thought it would be best if the freedom activists all elected Ron Paul president and moved to Montana.  It’s just like a Montanan to think that’s the center of the universe (and to be completely honest, I still think the FSP should pack everybody up and move to MT as well :).

The point I’m making by telling this little story is that you don’t have to join the FSP and move to NH to make a difference.  If you have reasons that would prevent you from moving to NH, you can stay where you live and work on civil disobedience and other forms of activism where you already are.  There’s absolutely nothing in this world that makes the FSP the only way to make changes in society.  Do what’s best for you, as long as you’re doing something!

Ever since the American system of Social Security started, the American government and society at large have become increasingly more intrusive in regards to using Americans’ SSNs as identifiers. It was once commonplace for the SSN to be used as a drivers license number or for a local video store to force patrons to hand the SSN over to rent a movie. Our credit histories are so entwined with our socials that if a problem should arise, not only will a person’s credit be ruined, but the issue will likely never be completely solved. Social Security numbers have become one more way for the government to ruin people’s lives.

Although Social Security numbers are protected far more fiercely than they were in years past, identity theft is at an all time high and the number of Americans suffering financial losses due to stolen credit card and Social Security numbers continues to rise. Most police departments won’t even investigate claims of identity theft and the criminals who are committing the crimes, assisted by the government’s forced issuance of SSNs for American citizens, are allowed to continue destroying people’s finances. Not only are people’s Social Security numbers being stolen to commit financial crimes, but irresponsible immigration policy has put many immigrants in a position to steal socials to obtain services such as schooling and even to get hired for jobs and pay taxes. Sadly, most American citizens don’t realize that if they walk into a bank to take out a loan, the loan officer has access to information detailing every person using any given SSN for credit purposes but due to privacy laws designed to protect a tax base made up of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of immigrants who are not legally afforded the right to work in the United States, the loan officer cannot disclose to the consumer that their social is being used by another party. This fuels the market for identity theft and unaware consumers are often so far in the hole by the time they find out that their social has been stolen that it literally takes hundreds of hours of work to sort the mess out. It has also led to problems for some retired people who have attempted to collect their Social Security (or Social Security disability) payments which they’ve paid taxes on for years only to discover that another party is already collecting their benefits and they are no longer eligible.

Instead of safeguarding Americans by detangling the wicked web of Social Security and credit history, the American Federal government has recently come up with a plan to intentionally make the problem even worse. Americans in most states will soon be forced to get a Real ID drivers license. States like Montana and New Hampshire stood up to the Feds and refused to change their drivers licensing standards despite threats that residents of those states would be forced to undergo special screening at airports and other unjust treatment at the hands of the Federal government in retaliation. The Feds allowed those states an “extension” despite the fact that they hadn’t requested one, and thankfully, at this point those states don’t appear to have any intention of complying with the Real ID Act. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans are living in states that will be changing their drivers licensing standards to conform to the Real ID Act. This will allow the government unprecedented access to the private affairs of ordinary citizens—even more abhorrent than the national health care ID card proposed by the Clintons in the 90s—and pave the way for a national ID card similar to the ones required by many European countries. It will also create a plethora of new ways for criminals to target Americans’ financial information, all courtesy of the Federal government.

Many people look at the Real ID Act and Social Security from a rather disinterested perspective, not realizing that the Federal government has inexorably linked itself to every aspect of their financial and private lives. Social Security numbers were originally issued as a means to track Social Security tax payments and nothing more. They’re now used to issue credit, obtain employment, track medical records, allow children access to school and many other things that have absolutely nothing to do with the SSA. The concept has evolved and grown so far out of control that the original concept of SSNs doesn’t even remotely resemble the system that we now have in place less than 100 years later. The Real ID card may be advertized as one more tool in the war on terror—and by golly, who wants to object to an ID card that fights terror—but 100 years from now, the Real ID card will pale in comparison to the privacy invasions it paved the way for. The Real ID card actually has very little, if anything, to do with terror and everything to do with keeping an eye on American citizens’ behavior in light of an ever increasingly fascist form of American government.

The writers at Happily Oblivious strongly encourage everyone to raise objections to the implementation of Real ID in their state of residence as well as to the privacy violations intended to protect criminals and government in the case of stolen Social Security numbers. Unless objections are raised, these problems won’t be looked at, let alone overcome.