Heretic’s Hideout

This is from www.startribune.com. I haven’t had the fortitude to write a post every time I read about someone getting killed by a Tasering. But it still seems like hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of another instance of Taser related death. This time it was a 29 year old man on his way to the airport to pick up his parents. He got into an accident in rush-hour traffic, and according to police became ‘uncooperative’.

According to the State Patrol, he was involved in a rush-hour crash on Interstate Hwy. 694 near Silver Lake Road in New Brighton. The State Patrol said troopers shot him with the Taser because he was uncooperative. He was breathing but unconscious when paramedics arrived, according to Allina Medical Transportation spokesman Tim Burke but was pronounced dead at Unity Hospital in Fridley.

Click here for the full story. Tasers are touted as a non-lethal alternative to guns and supposedly save hundreds of lives in instances where police would have otherwise resorted to deadly force. Are we to suppose that someone who becomes ‘uncooperative’ in a traffic incident is normally in danger of being shot? Police are routinely using Tasers to subdue people when ever the situation becomes uncomfortable or whenever the officers are having a hard time dealing with them, not in instances where they would have used deadly force in the past but may have resorted to forceful physical restraint. We need to seriously rethink the role of ‘non-lethal’ weapons in law enforcement or we will continue to see more and more of these senseless killings.

I wrote an entry a while back entitled the Fiat Money Fraud in which I expressed my concern with the Federal Reserve banking system. It his hard to comprehend how bankers can create money out of thin air, but I found a short video series that does a good job of explaining just how this magic trick is accomplished. Watch and be educated.

This is how the international bankers, or the ‘money trust’, control nations. The Federal Reserve ought to be demolished. Vote for Ron Paul in your state’s primary election so we can try to restore this nation to sound money principles.

From News.com.au (click this link for full article):

TASER electronic stun guns are a form of torture that can kill, a UN committee has declared after several recent deaths in North America.

“The use of these weapons causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture,” the UN’s Committee against Torture said.

“In certain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life events,” the committee of 10 experts said.

…

Portugal “should consider giving up the use of the Taser X26,” as its use can have a grave physical and mental impact on those targeted, which violates the UN’s Convention against Torture, the experts said.

It will be interesting to see if this has any impact on the US. It seems like we hear about a new Taser related death every few days.

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 — The Supreme Court agreed today to consider an issue that has divided politicians, constitutional scholars and ordinary citizens for decades: whether the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects an individual right to “keep and bear arms.”

The justices agreed to hear an appeal from the District of Columbia, whose gun-control law — one of the strictest in the nation — was struck down by the lower federal courts earlier this year. The case will probably be argued in the spring.

This will be an extremely important hearing. The right to keep and bear arms is essential to liberty, and also for defending one’s home and family against unlawful people. We need to pray that the Supreme Court justices will refrain from any judicial activism in this matter, and that the Constitution will be upheld as it is written. What part of ’shall not be infringed’ is so hard to understand? Click this link for the complete article.

I must admit that at times I am a little concerned over the divergence between what appears to be real grass-roots support for Ron Paul and the numbers that get reported in the polls. I believe Dr. No’s support to be considerably higher than the 1-3% that we are constantly shown in the media. Various explanations have been floated to account for this phenomenon, but this article at PrisonPlanet.com has got to be the most astonishing thing I have read regarding this whole business. Paul Joseph Watson quotes an unnamed reader who claims to have participated in a Zogby poll, and he found the questions in the poll took on a decidedly bizarre turn after he confirmed that he was supporting Ron Paul.

“The first part of the poll was about which candidate one prefers, with candidates from both parties being available as choices. Great! However, after I finished answering positively for Ron Paul, the poll got very interesting,” he writes.

“As anyone who is familiar with how polls work is aware, polls are branching in their structure. Answers you give to one section of the poll will determine what questions you will receive in the next section of the poll.”

The reader then relates his confusion about the fact that the poll threw up 20 questions about cooking rice before another extensive set of questions regarding personal sexual behavior.

“This went on for a number of pages and was rather intrusive,” he writes. “It dealt with sexual positions, sexual fantasies, sexual preferences and similar intimate subjects. Of course neither rice cooking or sexual behavior have very much to do with presidential elections or politics in general. Or at least it shouldn’t!”

I would have to take this with a grain of salt, but it sure does make you wonder. The article also exposes some standard polling industry practices that would easily explain why Ron Paul does so poorly in the polls. We can only pray that this type of manipulation will not heavily influence the outcome of the upcoming primaries. I know who I’m voting for.

From the New York Times:

Re “Clinton Plans to Consider Giving Up Some Powers” (news article, Oct. 24): The American Freedom Agenda, an organization of conservatives founded last March 20 to restore checks and balances and protections against government abuses, requested all presidential aspirants, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, to sign an American Freedom Pledge.

They were asked to renounce the following powers if elected: torture; presidential signing statements; indefinite detentions of American citizens as enemy combatants; military commissions that combine judge, jury and prosecutor; spying on American citizens in contravention of federal statutes on the president’s say-so alone; kidnapping, imprisoning and torturing suspected terrorists abroad; executive privilege to shield the executive branch from Congressional oversight; prosecuting journalists under the Espionage Act for exposing national security abuses; listing organizations as terrorist groups based on secret evidence; suspending the writ of habeas corpus during the conflict with international terrorism; and invoking the state secrets privilege to deny victims of constitutional wrongdoing any judicial remedy. Senator Clinton has balked at signing the pledge, as have all other candidates except Representative Ron Paul.

Bruce Fein
Chairman, American Freedom Agenda
Washington, Oct. 24, 2007

Is there something on that list that should keep someone from signing that pledge? I guess you never know when you might have to torture someone who has been indefinitely detained.

I never gave much thought growing up to where money comes from. I got money from relatives for my birthday, and spent it to purchase the things that I wanted. I suppose I had acquired the idea somewhere that money was backed by gold locked up in an impenetrable fortress somewhere, but doubtless I believed the paper bills that I and others passed back and forth had some intrinsic value. I have learned, however, that the modern central banking system that we have allowed to come to pass in this nation is a wicked fraud.

The Federal Reserve Notes in your wallet are what is known as ‘fiat money’. That is to say, it has no real value other than the value that the government says it has, by fiat (or ‘because we said so’). There is no promise to redeem your money for real tangible gold or silver. It is merely issued out of thin air by banks who loan it out, and then collect interest on the debt. The ‘value’ of the notes is depreciated when the banks issue more money, increasing the money supply and driving up the prices of goods. This is called inflation, which we are all familiar with, but what it does is it transfers the real wealth from the lower and middle-class working folks into the hands of the bankers. The love of money is the root of all evil, and the Federal Reserve system is no exception.

For an interesting, understandable explanation of this issue, see this article from the Idaho Observer (click here.) Many folks have opposed Ron Paul’s ideas of returning to a gold standard, but from a moral standpoint, I think it is the best recourse for our nation. We should return to the system of money authorized by the Constitution, and take the power to create money out of the hands of the bankers.

USAElectionPolls.com has written up a piece (Click Here!) proving how Ron Paul was treated unfairly at the CNBC TV Debate the other day. He was so offended by such gross bias that he decided it was right to donate to Ron Paul in defiance.

In fact, I am so upset right now that I am going to make a personal donation to the Ron Paul campaign. And I want your help. I usually pay SEO companies in India/Thailand to do what is called “link building” — they send out emails to other political sites asking them to link to me. In return, I get good search engine rankings. But I figure why give them money when I can use that money to give even MORE to Ron Paul in his quest to prove that the media does not always have to win.

More and more folks are waking up to the truth every day. The mainstream media outlets are doing their best to try and keep him under wraps while appearing ‘impartial’. But the internet is proving to be more than a match for mainstream media these days.

Full Story at MSNBC.com

PORTLAND, Ore. - Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, “now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”

This is some of the better news I have read this week.

I’m getting sick of reading about and seeing videos of people getting stunned with tasers for minor nuisance offenses. Some guy at FSU had the nerve to stand up at an open microphone and ask questions about why John Kerry didn’t contest the election that he lost to Bush, and why he hasn’t supported impeaching Bush, and the cops drag him out of the auditorium and hit him with a taser. Is this how a free democratic society is supposed to operate?

This happens over and over and over, and it is going to continue. See this article, The Tasering Will Continue Until You All Submit.

I have argued in the past that the device is just begging to be abused. When police have to decide whether to use lethal force, they are much more reserved in their judgment. But when you give them an option that is supposed to incapacitate without causing permanent damage, whats to think about? Just hit them with the taser and sort it out in court, right? Despite the evidence that tasers have been at least partly responsible for perhaps hundreds of deaths, the police continue to show that they are not squeamish about shocking someone into submission when ever they feel ‘threatened’. I know there are a lot of good officers out there and this type of behavior reflects badly on them. But this type of anti-American, anti-freedom abuse of authority needs to be addressed quickly, before addressing it gets you tasered.