Monthly Archives: February 2015

Free Ross Ulbricht, Proprietor Of Silk Road

Criminal Injustice, Drug War, Justice, Law, Private Property

He operated through “the ‘Dark Web,’ a network of computer servers around the world accessed only through The Onion Router or TOR” (USA Today). He facilitated voluntary, victimless trade in drugs, online. He is “Ross Ulbricht, the operator of Silk Road, a sprawling underground Internet drug bazaar.”

Enter the criminal syndicate known as Uncle Sam. It had outlawed the commerce Mr. Ulbricht had facilitated between consenting adults. In order to catch Ulbricht, Uncle Sam put to work its vast resources, culled from robbing us, its subjects. Now, federal agents are auctioning off Ulbricht’s private property, which is tantamount to legalized theft.

Federal agents shut down the Silk Road site in October 2013 and seized 29,655 bitcoins, now worth about $7.2 million, from the Silk Road server where buyers and sellers stored the currency. The government also seized 144,336 bitcoins, now worth $35 million, from Ulbricht’s computers. A judge in January ordered the sale of Ulbricht’s bitcoins.

The March 5 sale is the federal government’s third bitcoin auction stemming from its Silk Road prosecution. The federal agency will accept e-mail bids from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on March 5. Bidders must pre-register by March 2 (USA Today).

Not content with stealing a young man’s life and property, the federal government has subjected Ross Ulbricht to a Stalinist show trial, during which due process was practically denied. Via Target Liberty:

The following statement has been issued by the family of Ross Ulbricht, who was recently convicted of being the mastermind of Silk Road:

Ross’ trial is now over.

We were shocked — horrified really — at how unfair it was. Day four saw a reversal from when we last wrote you. Before that we expected evidence favorable to Ross would continue to be presented, and the complete story told.

Instead, the government’s own exculpatory evidence was suppressed; defense witnesses were blocked from testifying; and Ross’ attorney was hamstrung, unable to effectively cross examine government witnesses. It was a one-sided presentation that suppressed facts essential to Ross’ defense.

This is a good overview from Forbes, read here. You can also read about the trial here, and about Ross during the trial here. We will continue to post more.

Ross’ attorney said he will appeal. This is not over! We believe it’s essential for everyone to have a fair trial. When a trial isn’t fair, it is a threat to us all.

Meanwhile, this is a very hard time for Ross and our family. Thanks to everyone who has reached out to us. Your love and support mean so much.

Please send Ross a note. It’s easy to feel cut off and despairing in prison. We know it will help him to hear from you. His address is below.

ROSS ULBRICHT
#18870-111
MCC NEW YORK
METROPOLITAN CORRECTIONAL CENTER
150 PARK ROW
NEW YORK, NY 10007

As always, this is an expensive fight. We are facing a mountain of debt from the trial and need funds to pursue the appeal. Please spread the word, and donate if you can.

Thank you,

The Ulbricht family

NICE SITE:

Since When Do Words Speak Louder Than Actions?

Free Speech, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Political Correctness, Race

The Bell Curve authors, Charles Murray—an American Enterprise Institute Scholar and the 2009 recipient of the Irving Kristol Award—and the late Richard Herrnstein, a Harvard professor, used multiple regression analysis and other perfectly conventional and uncontroversial statistical methods to arrive at some irrefutable correlations, linking the G Factor (general intelligence) to other social and demographic indices.

Frank Borzellieri, a dedicated educator in “a predominantly black and Hispanic Catholic elementary school located in the Bronx, New York,” spoke and wrote of the same facts, for which he lost his job and was expunged from our increasingly Sovietized society, accused of a thought crime: a belief in “white supremacy.”

Via Jack Kerwick:

Borzellieri is the author of six books, some of which treat racial and cultural issues. His great sin seems to consist in the fact that he dared to note that there are interracial IQ differences that correlate to some extent with other social indicia. …

… Borzellieri chose—he chose—to ply his craft as an educator tending to the needs of New York City’s black and Hispanic students. He was also elected thrice to the New York City school board where he resisted efforts to replace literature on such Western heroes as Columbus and Washington with a curriculum requiring children to read books on homosexuality, masturbation, abortion, and birth control.

“Today,” writes Jack, “Borzellieri lives a lonelier—and dramatically harder—existence. The man who wants for nothing more than to resume his duties as an educator is jobless. Branded with the “R” label, he’s been shut out in the cold.

Mike Abel, the caretaker of an orthodox church, has started a ‘Go Fund Me’ page for Borzellieri. Please consider helping this casualty of Political Correctness.

As Mike Abel says, Borzellieri could be any of us.”

[SNIP]

Let me add this: The substance of Borzellieri speech is irrelevant. As this column has explained, policing what people say for political propriety is … “a dance adopted by the political establishment to cow contrarians into submission. By going on the defensive—allowing themselves to be drawn into these exchanges—libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed for propriety, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone, and deserve to be purged from ‘polite’ company.”

Help Frank Here.

Islam Enmeshed In America Since Founding? More Lies!

America, Founding Fathers, History, Islam, Judaism & Jews

Written mostly at an eighth-grade level (as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test), Barack Obama’s ramblings are getting harder and harder to address seriously. The ISIS-is-un-Islamic absurdity overwhelmed all else in his latest address on “extremism”—so much so that another of Obama’s absurdities on that occasion has been neglected. Said the ass with ears: “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.”

That’s news to this writer. It’s true about the Jews of America, to whom George Washington promised peace and goodwill in a 1790 address to a synagogue congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. “The highest ranking Jewish officer of the Colonial forces was Colonel Mordecai Sheftall.” Why we Jews even had a Confederate colonel, Abraham Charles Myers.

In any event, “[a]fter President Barack Obama said this week that ‘Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding,’ Glenn Beck asked historian David Barton to come on his radio program” and get to the bottom of this fiction:

“In all the reading I’ve done, thousands of books, there’s nothing there,” Barton said on Friday. “I mean, we know that Muslims were the folks who captured the slaves sent to America, largely out of Africa. … The Muslims did the slave hunting and the slave trading, et cetera. The first Muslims came to America as a result of the Muslims capturing them and sending them to the Dutch traders.”

Barton said that beyond their heavy involvement in the slave trade, America was at war with the Barbary pirates shortly after the founding of the country, but those were “the two biggest contributions.”

“This is the fabric,” Beck said with heavy sarcasm. “I mean, it’s practically the whole blanket.”

Barton added that there were a number of Muslims whose activities were recorded in the 1800?s, but it might be a stretch to say they are part of the “fabric of the country.” One such Muslim helped the American military raise camels, he said.

MORE.

Timeline in American Jewish History.

History of the Jews in the United States.

“History of the Jews in Colonial America.”

How Imam Obama Apostatizes Against Islam

Barack Obama, History, Islam

“How Imam Obama Apostatizes Against Islam” is the current column, now on Britain’s Libertarian Alliance. An excerpt:

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is not Islamic, announced Barack Obama, during a White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (with an emphasis on violence inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition). “They [ISIS] are not religious leaders, they are terrorists,” he asserted—an assertion that begs the question, as it assumes that a terrorist cannot be a religious leader as well.

President Obama further ventured that when we call them “Islamic,” we grant ISIS the “legitimacy” for which they thirst. For they are “desperate to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam.” Yet another non sequitur: Christening the group Islamic or not is unlikely to change that its members and a good many Muslims across the Ummah regard ISIS as thoroughbred Islamic.

What else did Imam Obama—who professes Christianity—proclaim in the name of the ISIS Islamic eschatology? Obama claimed that ISIS has “perverted the religion [of Islam]” and that it is peddling a “twisted ideology used to incite others to violence.”

“Weighing in on matters of Islamic theological debate,” warns Graeme Wood, editor at The Atlantic, is something Western officials would probably do best to avoid. “When he claim[s] that the Islamic State [is] ‘not Islamic,’” Obama, in fact, has “drifted into takfiri waters,” explains Wood. For “non-Muslims cannot tell Muslims how to practice their religion properly.”

“In Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically perilous,” cautions Wood, in a seminal exposé on the Islamic State entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.” “‘If a man says to his brother, ‘You are an infidel,’ the Prophet said, ‘then one of them is right.’ If the accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The punishment for apostasy is death.”

His theologically and existentially perilous practice of takfir, notwithstanding, Obama lies about ISIS being antagonistic to Islam. Wood portrays “the group [that] seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom,” as Islamic as the Prophet Muhammad of the later, Medina period. …

Read the rest. “How Imam Obama Apostatizes Against Islam” is the current column, now on Britain’s Libertarian Alliance. An excerpt:.