Category Archives: The State

SCOTUS Legalizes ID Theft (While Gun Owner Is Nabbed)

Crime, Criminal Injustice, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, Justice, Law, The Courts, The State

The Supreme Court has “ruled in favor of an illegal alien convicted of using false social security numbers, reports BILL TUCKER for CNN’s Lou Dobbs.

“The court said an individual using a false identity cannot be charged unless prosecutors can prove that the individual knew in advance that the identity belonged to a real person. … Do you feel better knowing that it is now legal for an illegal alien to steal your identity if he or she doesn’t know it’s yours?”

“The courts ruled differently in the case of a Wisconsin gun owner, David Olofson remains in prison for something he didn’t know that his malfunctioning rifle would be classified as a machine gun by federal authorities.”

BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: David Olofson will remain in the federal penitentiary where he’s been for 10 months. He must complete his 10 to 30 month sentence for illegally transferring a machine gun. Olofson lent his AR15 rifle to a neighbor to shoot on a target range, the semiautomatic gun fired a couple of multi-round bursts after firing hundreds of rounds of single shots.
Instead of simply seizing the gun or ordering its repair, Olofson was put on trial, convicted and given a jail sentence. The judge at his trial said he had shown he was ignoring the law and had considerable knowledge of machine guns. The seventh circuit court heard his appeal in January and now has affirmed his conviction. It’s a ruling that gun rights advocates call chilling.

DAVID KOPEL, INDEPENDENCE INSTITUTE: The taking away if the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco Firearms wants to enforce the gun laws against you with the utmost stringency the courts are not going to provide any protection.

TUCKER: Part of Olofson’s appeal rested on the argument that his gun malfunctioned, therefore it didn’t fit the definition of a machine gun, but the jury, following the judge’s instructions, convicted Olofson.

PROF. MICHAEL O’HEAR, MARQUETTE UNIV. LAW SCHOOL: There is a very high degree of deference to jury decisions.

TUCKER: The court did not accept Olofson’s argument that he did not know he had a machine gun.

“On the same day, the Supreme Court threw out an illegal immigrant’s conviction for identity theft saying the government had not proved that the man knew the documents he received were false.”

KRIS KOBACH, IMMIGRATION ATTORNEY: It is interesting that the two opinions come down on the same day. The Supreme Court said in the case of the immigration identity theft statute, knowingly means knowingly and you have to know you stole a specific person’s identity.

[SNIP]

As I’ve said, “I know I can always rely on America’s deracinated elites to elevate the interests of the enemy above those of the people. In other words, I trust the government’s untrustworthiness. When it comes to breaching the public’s interests, the government’s track record is better than good.”

Still, the American state takes treason to new heights.

Update VI: The Swine (AKA The State) Are AWOL

Canada, Europe, Healthcare, Homeland Security, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Natural Law, Objectivism, The State

The excerpt is from my new, WND column, “The Swine (AKA The State) Are AWOL.” If you miss the column on WND.com, you can catch it weekly on Taki’s Magazine, the following day. It’s now up. (May 2)

“Whether they are armed with bombs or bacteria, stopping weaponized individuals from harming others—intentionally or unintentionally—falls perfectly within the purview of the ‘night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory,’ in the words of the philosopher Robert Nozick. …

“A well-policed barrier is the definitive, non-aggressive method of defense against these ailments and afflictions. You don’t attack, arrest, or otherwise molest undesirables; you keep them at bay, away.”

“Libertarian and leftist protest over any impediment to the free flow of people across borders is predicated not on the negative, leave-me-alone rights of the individual, but on the positive, manufactured right of human kind to venture wherever, whenever.”

Read “The Swine Are Loose,” (Taki title) to learn what “the quintessential ‘Renaissance woman,’ the late, dazzling, Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq.—expert aviator, health-care policy analyst, marksman, and musician—had to say about “the effects on the health system of the bleeding Southwestern border.”

Update I (May 1): I don’t think I’ve made any dogmatic statements about Objectivist thinking per se. What I will say is this: From all warring Objectivist sources, I’ve read oodles about waging war on the world, but very little that is coherent about stopping the Third World from invading the US.

As I wrote in 2004, “Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.” I have seen no evidence that “real” Randians have departed from this neoconservative perversion.

Yes, some Objectivists say borders ought to be protected against dem terrorists, but has any dared to venture that defending the country’s borders may have more than just a security dimension?
By all means, enlighten me (with citations/links, please).

The title of my near-complete book manuscript, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, is meant as a metaphor, and is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery. I have no doubt she’d have been appalled by the free-for-all on the border with Mexico — and not just because of the possibility of infiltration by a couple of malevolent Muslims.

By all means, provide links to a coherent, Rand-stamped, non-neoconservative view of immigration that does not focus exclusively on security to the detriment of cultural components, which are as essential to the survival of American liberty.

Update II: I don’t buy the allegation that views on immigration among Objectivists are shaped by the validity/legality of Ayn Rand’s visa. Rand was not swayed by positive law. Likewise, Objectivists would—or should—argue from the natural law.

Update IV (May 2): The Hispanic influx into the US is unprecedented. Writes my WND colleague, Vox Day:

“To describe the discourse concerning the mass inflow of foreigners that has taken place over the last 29 years [as] ‘the immigration debate’ is to use a misnomer. What has taken place since the 1980 U.S. census is nothing less than a mass migration of the sort that irretrievably transformed historical civilizations everywhere from Hellenic Greece to Moorish Spain. In 1980, the number of Hispanics living in the United States was 14.6 million. In 2008, it was 45.5 million. Hispanics now account for 15 percent of the total population, and because they are the fastest-growing population segment, the census bureau expects their numbers to increase by a further 67 million by 2050.”

Update V (May 3): Sigh. “The Swine Are AWOL (Or Loose)” was not complicated, at least not to the sensible, straight-thinking.

* The dread diseases delineated in the column happen to hail not from the first world, but from Latin America, with which we have an open border.
* The state has a minimal duty. It is not to “control disease” or test every human being crossing the border, but to enforce a border.
* Currently about a million, poor, deprived, and often depraved, ill people cross over each and every year into the US. By enforcing the border, so that far fewer get through, the number of locals killed or sickened by criminals or carriers will be reduced. Not eliminated; reduced. Is that simple logic unclear? I don’t think so.
* This policy should not be egalitarian, naturally. Canada and Europe are first-world destinations. The diseases making a come-back in the US do not come from North America or the Continent. We have a contiguous border with the first-world Canada, and the third, or second-world Mexico. We do not share a border with Europe, naturally.

Update VII (May 4): Jack writes:

Hi

Seems that the comments are closed for this item, so will send just one of the citations/links you asked for.

Within the narrow confines of the original article, I thought it was in writing but the only reference I could find was Yaron Brook stating that people carrying infectious diseases is one of the groups that would be excluded from coming into the country. (Bottom of the page, last video, within the first minute.)

Cheers
Jack

Torture Tempest: Turley Vs. Patrick The Great

Constitution, Just War, Natural Law, Terrorism, The State, War

On dunking Abu Zubaydah, the views of that great patriot, Pat Buchanan, jibe with mine, as expressed in “To Bug Or Not To Bug Abu Zubaydah’s Cage (That’s Not The Question).”

Arguing from the natural law, as is my wont and preference, and pitting it against the positive law, Jonathan Turley’s purview, an impassioned Buchanan put the torture tempest in perspective:

Dunking Abu Zubaydah “is a violation of positive law, it is not a moral evil. Do you mean that waterboarding [this fella] is worse than dropping two atomic bombs on innocent people and burning 120,000 of them to death, sentencing 40,000 more to death by radiation—all to convince the Japanese cabinet to change its mind? What was worse?”

Turley, ventured Pat, is right about the letter of the law, but not necessarily about the higher moral law.

Watch:

Ultimately, the faff over “torture” allows members of the Evil and Stupid parties to get away with murder, both having acquiesced in launching an unjust war against innocent Iraqis. This is the real war crime.

Statist Struggles With States’ Rights

Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, The State

States across the country are discovering the 10th Amendment to the Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Quaint, I know, but to the federal government were delegated only limited and enumerated powers (Article I, Section 8). Most everything it does these days is extraconstitutional.

Forced to take fiat currency from the federales, the states also realize that the price is too high to pay: not only must they heed the occupying force, they must bankrupt themselves in the process. For accepting these piles of paper implies expanding services and keeping them going in perpetuity.

So, governors and state representatives are invoking that which ought to have been the law of the land: the ingenious 10th Amendment.

But what happens if you are neoconservative, or have such proclivities, and think that the manner in which Lincoln sundered the federal structure was not only constitutional but moral?

Why, then, you’re in a bit of a pickle. To his credit, Harvard grad Ben Shapiro is a very bright neoconservative, who’s well aware of the contradiction inherent in a sudden support for the states in their rightful reclamation of sovereignty.

See what you think of the tack Shapiro takes:

The federal response to the slavery question was quick and right – President Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War restored for all time the founding promises of the Declaration of Independence. Despite the Civil War, however, the legacy of Jim Crow further eroded the moral authority of states’ rights. And the federal government, wielding the ethical imperative of racial equality, stepped in. States’ rights advocates were forever branded as bigoted Orval Faubus types, standing in the doorways of segregated schoolhouses.

Now states are surprised to find that their ability to resist federal directives has been all but extinguished. They are surprised that they are no longer able to set their own standards regarding social, economic or criminal policy. They are surprised that through a combination of moral blindness and drooling greed, they surrendered their role in the constitutional system.

Surrendered? Not quite.

It would seem that young Ben is equally surprised at the quest for the “reinstitution of local government” (a phrase that diminishes the idea of state sovereignty).