UPDATED: #JoshDuggar And His Folks Give Me The Heebie-Jeebies (Want Sympathy? Stay Off The Grid)

Celebrity, Family, Law, libertarianism, Sex

Don’t make me write about the simpering, sanctimonious Duggar family, and their priapic son who preyed on his many sisters.

Their enabler, Megyn Kelly, noticed not at all the Freudian slips tumbling from the mouths of these “parents” (and doesn’t the whiny mom give you the heebie-jeebies?):

‘The girls didn’t want their ‘record’ revealed. They wanted to tell their own story.” The girls don’t have a “record.” I was under the impression that the girls were victims of the son (and their fruitful, multiplying parents). And all that, “Over their clothes”; boy Josh Duggar only “touched his sisters over their clothes.”

Look, we libertarians like it when family, church and local authorities handle problems “in-house.” But this was not THAT!

As to Kelly! The woman was so eager to finesse the excesses and phoniness of these parents that she forgot, oops, to mention that Josh’s mentor was later charged with child pornography.

Yuksters all.

UPDATE (6/4): WANT SYMPATHY? STAY OFF THE GRID.

This is the first time I’ve heard of these people. But now that I have, let me say that I have as much sympathy for the Duggars for suffering a legal leak as I have for the Duggar parents for marketing their family, breeding for the cameras; as I have for celebrities who take images of their snatches, upload to some Cloud (cuckoo) and bitch about the theft of these pics. Who cares. Rule of law? What law! Stay private. Stay off the grid.

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UPDATE II: #UsaFreedomAct: #NSA Not Complete Liars

Business, Homeland Security, Law, The State

“Senate voted to curb the collection of millions of Americans’ phone records, the first significant retrenchment of government spying powers since the 9/11 attacks,” blared the headline on the Wall Street Journal. Yes, the sluts in the Senate signed something, but it was a classic case of bait-and-switch. The maneuver—the passing of the USA Freedom Act intended to replace Section 215 of the Patriot Act—will not prohibit the illegal collection of American metadata, but will simply co-opt the telecommunications companies into the service of the Surveillance State, a very dangerous state-of-affairs, indeed.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell worried that blocking “the House bill … would hamstring the government’s ability to detect terrorist threats.”

Would blocking the Bill have made safety worse than the 95 percent fail rate in the Transportation Security Administration’s ability to detect and stop armed passengers?

UPDATE I: Co-Opting Corporations Into The Service Of The Surveillance State. “USA Freedom Act: Privatization of the Patriot Act.”

UPDATE II (6/3): Good News: NSA Are Not Complete Liars.

It is encouraging that the NSA itself or its front people admits that “NSA’s bulk collection has not prevented a single terrorist attack.” My tongue is firmly in my cheek here. This preposterous admission means that our overlords who art in DC are not complete liars; they don’t always lie about their lies.

MORE @ CNN.

As to efficacy, if a purely utilitarian position is adopted: “A numerate analysis shows that the cost of NSA spying is substantially higher than the expected benefits.”

MORE @ EconLib.

UPDATED (6/7/2017) Political Pimps Feathering Their Nest On The Public Dime

Democrats, Ethics, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul

UPDATE (6/7/017):

The Post below is from 2015, but the problem is ongoing and undetected. Politicians arrive in DC and right away begin feathering the nest and flogging products, on the taxpayer’s dime. Conservatives detect nothing unethical. Sen Mike Lee is selling a book. AGAIN.

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What do you know? Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee were on Fox New today to flog their books, among other things. The problematic Patriot Act and its impending renewal seemed incidental to the job of promoting their products on our dime. So lax are the ethical standards that bind these politicians that they can move seamlessly between their roles as politicians, authors and all-round eternal self-promoters.

It sticks in one’s craw that we pay them to feather their nests. Ron Paul also used his celebrity to sell stuff (although I forgave him because of his outstanding service to liberty). To be honest, I’ve never read a book of his. He’s not a particularly good writer. I am sure the former congressman did not improve on Murray Rothbard when it comes to thinking about the Federal Reserve’s workings. I’ll stick with Rothbard. I have his books.

What #RandPaul Gives With One Hand, He Takes Away With The Other

Homeland Security, Intelligence, libertarianism, Regulation, Ron Paul, Terrorism, The State

Sen. Rand Paul went astray. His rousing remarks against the renewal of the PATRIOT Act were softened by a call for “the hiring of a 1,000 more FBI agents.” “We need more FBI analysts analyzing data,” said Paul.

Moreover, and as reported at Target Liberty, it is the legal opinion of Judge Andrew Napolitano “that the US government is lying to the American people with the claim that the mass surveillance would be suspended upon the expiration of the PATRIOT Act provision used to justify the mass surveillance program.”

Essentially, the Patriot Act will be revamped, only to reemerge as the USA FREEDOM Act.

Napolitano states:There are two other provisions in the law that the NSA relies on which will cause it to continue to spy on Americans even if section 215 of the PATRIOT Act does expire. One of those is a section of the FISA law called section 702, and one of them is a still-existing executive order signed by President George W. Bush in the fall or 2001, which has not been tinkered with, interfered with, or rescinded.

By Robert Wenzel’s telling, the “best analysis of the Patriot Act renewal and the USA Freedom Act” comes courtesy of “Glenn Greenwald in discussion with Jameel Jaffer, the Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU,” at The Intercept.

The question of whether “the sunset of Section 215 will be a meaningful step towards reform” is especially informative:

GREENWALD: That’s what I was going to ask next, actually.

JAFFER: That’s a good question. The problem –

GREENWALD: Let me just interject there: the argument that people make, and I’m sympathetic to it, which isn’t the same thing as saying I agree with it, is how significant would it really be?

The NSA has all of these other authorities. They can cite executive orders and other things, on top of which they’ve done a really good job of co-opting laws in the past. We had this FISA law that said you can’t eavesdrop on Americans’ communications without a warrant, and they did it anyway.

They invented this incredibly radical interpretation of the Patriot Act – of 215 – that says “This lets us collect everything we want,” and that was the interpretation the Second Circuit, ten years later, rejected, finally, just a couple of weeks ago.

So given how adept they are at kind of co-opting the process to do what they want – the other authorities – and their propensity to circumvent the law or even break it to do what they want, how significant would it really be?

… MORE.