Parasite Panic

All the Washington D.C. political class parasites on Capitol Hill were cowering in a pathetic state of "mass panic," after a confused woman with a one-year old baby in her car rammed an outer perimeter security barrier near the White House resulting in a multiple cop car chase predictably ending with her violent death in a hail of gung-ho police bullets.

The woman was later identified as Miriam Carey, age 34, from Stamford, Connecticut. A licensed dental hygienist since 2009, she also operated a business called Experienced Dental Placements out of her condo offering career counseling and employment placement for dental hygienists and assistants.

Officials said the incident began with a car chase, which started when the woman, driving a black sedan with Connecticut plates, tried to ram a barrier near the White House. A Secret Service source said when the woman drove up to a barrier at the 15th and E street checkpoint; she was approached by Secret Service officers who did not recognize her car.

At that point she hurriedly tried to drive away, executed a three-point turn, struck the barrier and backed into an officer before speeding off down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol, where security vehicles stopped her car at Garfield Circle. Officers then"came out with guns drawn" and approached her vehicle, pointing directly at her instead of simply shooting out her tires.

"At that point, the driver slammed into reverse, slammed into a cruiser, did a 180 (degree turn), took off," said a witness. "[A]t that point, there were a half dozen or so shots fired." Several police cars pursued her to a location near the Capitol building. When they boxed her in the unarmed driver got out, five or six more shots were fired, and the woman was hit several times.

In short, the frustrated and overly aggressive police goons gunned down an unarmed woman solely because she tried to elude them. One cop sustained minor injuries when he tried to stop her car, and another was injured slightly when his patrol car crashed into a barrier as he tried to join in on the short chase.

According to multiple sources, there is no reason so far to believe that the woman fired any shots or even had a weapon. Officers did not know a child was inside during the chase, officials said.

As of this writing, all the relevant authorities admit that that this appears to be an "isolated incident," which had "no nexus to terrorism." Never-the-less, the incident caused major panic on Capitol Hill with sirens blaring inside the building, the whole Capitol being locked down, and with lawmakers and their staffs being ordered to stay in place.

After the chase ended and the woman lay bleeding and dead, her body riddled with police bullets, the lockdown was lifted, the cowering parasite lawmakers returned to the floor, thanked the murdering police goons, and gave them a standing ovation.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier insisted that officers acted “heroically… "They did exactly what they were supposed to do."

Yes, these “hero’s” did exactly as they were supposed to do. They flat out murdered a 34-year-old mother of a 1-year-old baby who in all probability simply made a driving mistake and then panicked when approached by aggressive secret service goons.

Cops and government goons operating in America today are trained to shoot first and ask questions later … assuming, that is, that their unfortunate victim is still alive.

Of course the investigation has not been completed so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this woman and her little baby were actually terrorists out there trying to assassinate the president and take out both the House and the Senate with a bomb in the car trunk.

One thing is for certain, however: neither the President of the United States nor any member of Congress was ever in the slightest degree of danger during this entire ordeal. The murderers had to know that. The Secret Service had to know that, and so did the Capitol cops.

They are the ones who overreacted and caused all the parasites to panic.

Killing Jesus: A Fiction Dressed Up As History

He was “directed” by the Holy Spirit to write his new book: Killing Jesus: A History, staunch Roman Catholic author, Bill O’Reilly, of Fox News O’Reilly Factor fame, proclaims on CBS’s 60 Minutes last Sunday.  

O’Reilly insisted that it’s not a religious book. It’s a history book, he claims. The introduction explains that he and his co-author are Roman Catholics but see themselves as "historical investigators… interested primarily in telling the truth about important people, not converting anyone to a spiritual cause."

This is the third work in his trilogy of so-called best selling “history” books after “Killing Lincoln” and “Killing Kennedy,” which together have sold more than 5 million copies thanks solely, in my opinion, to his status as the host of the number one rated cable news show on television, where he is free to tout them at will to an audience of millions.

On his show, O’Reilly told his guests, a priest and a pastor, that the book is already creating a lot of controversy and there are some people who believe he’s “going to hell for writing it.”The pastor said that evangelicals “ought to love this book.” O’Reilly replied that “the anti-Christian people” don’t want anyone to read it.

The priest told O’Reilly that people won’t like it because it defends the Bible’s accuracy. O’Reilly then assured his audience that the book is footnoted with the facts. “I learned a lot,” gushed the priest.

But the only real controversy stems from the fact that Bill O’Reilly has demonstrated the unmitigated nerve to call his work a history book when all he does is regurgitate selected portions of the biblical stories found in the Gospels of the New Testament, and embellishes them with some accurate history of the Roman Empire, together with his own entirely speculative narrative of the “events.”

There is absolutely nothing original here. 

So, in the final analysis, Killing Jesus: A History is, in reality, nothing more than fiction dressed up as history.

Bill O’Reilly knows better.

He knows that there are billions of his fellow Christians out there desperately clinging to faith that Jesus Christ was a real human being, the son of God, born of a virgin and sent by the Father to show the faithful the way to eternal life with God in heaven. These people already believe in their hearts that Jesus is an historical figure. O’Reilly is cynically capitalizing on that religious belief to dress the fictional Gospel stories up as legitimate history.

As such, O’Reilly’s book represents not only unethical and irresponsible authorship; it is downright fraudulent, deceptive and dishonest. It is full of inaccuracies, anachronisms and outright non-existent historical falsehoods.

Anachronisms, such as calling John the Baptizer (or, as they call him later in the book, John the Baptist) a young man at 40, abound. They call the Apostle Paul a “former Pharisee who became a convert to Christianity.” This is impossible due to the fact that Christianity was still very much Jewish while Paul walked the earth.

The undeniable truth of the matter is that the Jesus of Nazareth, referred to in the Gospels, is NOT an historical figure. Outside of the New Testament of the Holy Bible, there exists not a shred of credible contemporary evidence whatsoever in book, inscription, or monument, archaeological or otherwise, supporting the existence of an historical Jesus or any of the apostles for that matter, and Bill O’Reilly’s book fails dismally show otherwise.

The Gospels, upon which O’Reilly completely relies for his “history,” contain historical falsehoods – “events” that never happened” – far too numerous to mention fully and in context here; mythological “events” which were never documented or recorded by any of the known historians who lived during the relevant periods of time. Thousands of criminals, for example, were crucified by the Romans and documented in historical records, but there is no record of Jesus.

Most legitimate biblical scholars agree that none of the Gospel stories had even been written until at least 60 or more years after the supposed crucifixion, and in the case of the Gospel according to John, upon which O’Reilly especially relies, until at least 80 years after. Furthermore, there exists no historical mention of Jesus or Christianity at all until well into the 2^nd century AD.

In the writings that come from the early stages of Christianity, the Gospels are not mentioned until long after the works of Paul; not until the middle of the Second century A.D. The Gospels are not biographies in any historical sense at all, but rather storytelling; preaching if you will, to an audience about the new religion. Even early Christians regarded the Gospels as purely symbolic. The crucifixion of Jesus also was unknown to early Christians until as late as the Second Century.

Any honest reliable historian knows these facts. They know that Jesus and Christianity are based entirely upon faith; not historical facts. Bill O’Reilly knows it too but deliberately chose with his book to depict the Gospel stories of the killing of Jesus dressed up as history.

U.S. Government Gestapo to Google: “Give Us Passwords”

According to Google and several other Internet industry sources, the Feds have been secretly demanding that Internet providers turn over complete access to stored user account passwords and associated master encryption keys as part of the government’s escalating clandestine bulk surveillance activities against all Americans.  

If the government Gestapo goons can get your Internet passwords they can log into your private accounts, rummage through your personal data and confidential communications, use your account to impersonate you on the Internet, and then use the ill-gotten information to decipher all your other passwords in order to gain access to all your private Internet accounts and all your most personal, intimate and private information.  

The goal of the United States government is to eventually make everyone’s life an open book.

"I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We push back."

Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.

"This is one of those unanswered legal questions: Is there any circumstance under which they could get password information?" ponders Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, "I don't know."

Well, I do know! That simple question was answered definitively more than 200 years ago with ratification of the Fourth Amendment and the Bill or Rights:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The sad fact is that today the federal government with the eager assistance of Congress thinks that it has the right to pass laws such as the Patriot Act which flatly violate the Fourth Amendment and the rights of privacy which were once enjoyed by all Americans.

The Patriot Act has been used to demand entire database dumps of phone call logs, and critics have suggested its use is broader. "The authority of the government is essentially limitless" under that law, admits Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence committee.

The U.S. Department of Justice has argued in court that it has broad legal authority to obtain passwords. First, “impersonating someone is legal," for police to do opines Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University and a former federal prosecutor. Second, the possibility that passwords could be used to log into users' accounts is not sufficient legal grounds for a Web provider to refuse to divulge them he said.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer says she fears winding up in prison for treason if she refused to comply with US spy demands for data. She admitted that Yahoo scrutinizes and fights US government data requests stamped with the authority of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but when the company losses battles it must do as directed or risk being branded a traitor.

Data requests authorized by the court come with an order barring anyone at the company receiving the request from disclosing anything about them, even their existence. "If you don't comply, it is treason," said Mayer. "We can't talk about it because it is classified… Releasing classified information is treason, and you are incarcerated. In terms of protecting our users, it makes more sense to work within the system."

So the U.S. government is now claiming the right, via the Patriot Act and other federal statutes, to simply trash the Fourth Amendment in the dubious cause of protecting national security. The goons believe that their authority is limitless. They can take over your account without your consent, impersonate you on the Internet without your knowledge, and throw innocent Internet providers in prison for treason if they don’t divulge your account passwords or comply with all their demands.

And it’s all happening in secret. It’s all classified. I’m sure we don’t know the half of it. It’s exactly the same as burglarizing your home while you’re away, rummaging through your private papers and effects, taking what it wants and knowing that you will never be the wiser. Your government thinks that is legal.

That’s the America we live in today: an American Gestapo threatening, intimidating and demanding everything about everyone including passwords. 

Bearing Arms: The Second Amendment

As a lifelong defender of the United States Constitution, and particularly the Bill of Rights, there has never been any doubt in my mind that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of individuals to bear arms and that means, among other things, guns.

Furthermore, the right to “bear arms” means the right, not only to own guns, but to carry them on one’s person whether concealed or otherwise for the purpose of self defense.

But, just as with many other provisions of the Constitution, the Second Amendment language, consisting of only one sentence, is confusing, imprecise and open to varying interpretations, some of which out rightly contradict my assessment.

II: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Gun control advocates insist that the founding fathers, using this language, meant to restrict the right of the people to keep and bear arms to members of only well regulated militias. After all, that’s what the sentence seems to say.

If founders didn’t intend that meaning, why didn’t they just leave the part about militias out of it and simply provide that the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed?

That would have obviated any confusion, right?

But wait a minute; it’s still confusing. They’re talking about the right of the “people.” Does that language encompass individuals or a collective, i.e., individual citizens, or a group such as a well regulated militia for example?  

Thankfully, the United States Supreme Court has clarified that matter, but only recently. The Court has finally ruled definitively that individual’s have the right to own guns. "The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense," opined the Court.

A High School in the State of Texas, however, is still using a history textbook which teaches students a synopsis of the Second Amendment that reads: “The people have a right to keep and bear arms in a state militia.”

That interpretation directly contradicts the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s a clear example of how many education authorities are attempting exploit the confusion in the Second Amendment to rewrite American history in an effort to indoctrinate kids to accept the premise that individual gun ownership is wrong, a problem with society, and should therefore be strictly curtailed if not outright banned.

Even the United States Senate’s official web page referencing the Second Amendment, published after the Supreme Court decisions, states: "Whether this provision protects the individual's right to own firearms or whether it deals only with the collective right of the people to arm and maintain a militia has long been debated."

Again, that flatly contradicts the Supreme Court.

"After five-and-a-half years of litigation, the Supreme Court unequivocally resolved the long-standing debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment," says Bob Levy, one of the lawyers who won the 2008 Supreme Court case. "No one on either side of the gun debate -- with the possible exception of those persons who devised the U.S. Senate's official website explaining the Constitution -- doubts that the Supreme Court has affirmed the individual rights view of the Second Amendment."

"Considering that this year the party in control of the United States Senate tried to ban many semi-automatic firearms and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, it does not surprise me that their website takes that position," Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, said. "Congress has shown time and time again that they ignore the two Supreme Court decisions that make it very clear that the Second Amendment is in fact an individual right."

Yes, of course, and I totally agree, but unfortunately there is still considerable confusion about the Second Amendment and its guarantee as to the right of individuals to bear arms.

The Supreme Court hasn’t cleared it all up quite yet. They didn’t, for example determine the validity of concealed carry laws or laws limiting the nature and types of firearms that individuals may own, not to mention bear on their person.

One might think that a strict originalist jurist like Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, would consider the fact that when the Constitution was established as law all firearms of the time were primitive at best, only allowing one shot followed by the time consuming necessity to reload before taking another shot.

With that fact in mind, together with Scalia’s proclivity to interpret the Constitution according to the meaning of the document at the time it was written, it would seem that he would uphold gun control laws restricting individual gun ownership to only the type of weapons available to individuals in the year 1789.

That eventuality, of course, would become the NRA’s ultimate nightmare.

Yet it is quite true that when the Constitution was ratified there was no such thing as machine guns, large magazine automatic pistols, assault rifles, or even simple revolvers which hold six cartridges.

Surely, few reasonable people would argue that there must be necessary limitations to the right of individuals to bear arms. After all, the founding fathers clearly didn’t contemplate that there would ever be a right to of individuals bear arms of mass destruction.

But what are those limitations?

Where does one draw the line?

I think we can look forward to a lot more of these vexing questions and legal problems in the years to come as the judges grapple with the confusion inherent in the Second Amendment and the corresponding right of individuals to bear arms.

Stupid: More Dangerous Than Terror

At least with Al-Qaeda terrorists we have some chance to prevent horrible catastrophe’s but we can’t fix stupid and that’s exactly what we face constantly with our own bloated, incompetent out of control government and it’s gung-ho military aggressors.

Yes, neither the Pentagon nor the Department of Homeland Security can safely protect us from the dangers posed by the government’s own incredibly stupid blunders. Sooner or later that stupidity will result in an American, perhaps global, apocalypse.

Fifty-two years ago it almost did. We all know about the infamous Cuban missile crisis which brought the United States of America to the brink of an all out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, a war which might have wiped us all off the face of the Earth. 

That was the result of stupid.

But did you know that in 1961 the U.S. Air Force nearly detonated by stupid mistake a hydrogen atomic bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that destroyed Hiroshima?

Of course, you probably didn’t know that, and neither did I, until just last Friday when The Guardian, a British news service, published a declassified formerly top secret report obtained from our government by way of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI).

The 1969 document, obtained by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, reveals a Jan. 23, 1961, B-52 crash near Goldsboro, North Carolina, in which two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs broke up in mid-air. One of them behaved exactly as a nuclear weapon is designed to function in wartime, and the only thing that prevented detonation was the failure of a single low-voltage switch.

Parker Jones, a senior engineer in the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., wrote in the report that "one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe".

Jones noted from the crash evidence, in which three of eight crew members died, that the bombs "did not possess adequate safety for the airborne alert role in the B-52," and concluded that the detonation "would have been bad news – in spades." Had the hydrogen bomb detonated as designed fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City, according to the report.

"The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy," Schlosser told the newspaper. "We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here's one that very nearly did."

So now we know after more than half a century of incompetent government cover-up that the U.S. military almost stupidly nuked a huge area of our nation which would have decimated our capitol city, Washington, D.C., the White House, Capitol Hill, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City, killing millions of Americans, and making the 9/11 Al Queada terror attack seem like a simple fireworks mishap by comparison.

Why in the name of all reason and logic was an Air Force B-52 bomber loaded with fully armed and ready to detonate hydrogen bombs flying around over North Carolina in U.S air space in the first place?

I’ll tell you why: it was stupid and stupid is more dangerous than terror.

Smokers vs. Kids

Libertarian Chris Tame opines recently that prohibiting smokers from adopting or fostering children is anti-liberty, wrong and would set a dangerous precedent. Just a few years ago, as a libertarian myself, I would have agreed with him, but not today.

Today it is a known, established, documented and widely accepted scientific fact that smoking makes people sick and too often makes them sick to death. 

Never-the-less, as a libertarian, I still do agree that individuals own themselves and therefore have the right to smoke as long as they can do so without subjecting other individuals to the stinking unhealthy consequences of the habit.  

“In both the US and Europe, anti-smoking activists are increasingly describing smoking as a form of child abuse that should be prohibited,” Tame observes. So adoption and fostering organizations are proposing a ban on allowing smokers to adopt of foster kids.

He is appalled at this “threat to civil liberties” posed by “political correctness” imposed by the Nanny State.

Tame claims that the evidence suggesting that environmental tobacco smoke can be harmful to non-smokers is “junk science.” Then he suggests that the pro-health proposals to ban smokers from adopting or fostering kids amount to “anti-working class” measures.

Nonsense!

He admits that: “working-class children are all at risk, and always have been, through their less generally safe environment and through alleged working-class values (such as immediate rather than “deferred gratification).”

“So, if safety is such a big issue,” he posits, “why stop with smokers? Why not forbid adoption and fostering by anybody who is working class? After all, working-class health, working-class education, working-class life expectancy, working-class life in general is, statistically speaking, less good than life for the middle and upper classes. Once you concede that environmentally unsuitable parents may not adopt, where does it stop? Why should “inappropriate” adults even be allowed to have children at all?”

Why indeed! If any parents, whether working class or not, provide a substantially unhealthy and harmful environment for their children they risk the possibility of termination of parental rights. Thus, alcoholics, drug addicts, abusers and the like who subject their children to real risks of harm can rightfully lose their rights to parent them. That’s the law everywhere. Working class has nothing to do with it.

In my own case, I’m ashamed to admit that I began smoking during my early teens largely due to the influence of my middle class parents, grandparents and just about every other adult around me from every social class at the time. 

It seems that almost everyone smoked during the late 1940’s, ‘50’s and 60’s while I was growing up. Humphrey Bogart did it. Edward R. Murrow did it. All the sophisticated people did it. It sure seemed cool. Smoking infused the entire American culture then; you saw it constantly in movies; on television; restaurants; theaters; trains; buses; airplanes; everywhere.

My dad tried hard to discourage me from smoking to no avail. Of course, he and everyone else knew full well even then, well before the scientific evidence confirmed it, that smoking is bad, very bad, especially for kids. Thankfully, the culture of smoking is slowly changing, but in my opinion not fast enough.

I was hooked on smoking for many years even though I witnessed both my grandfathers dying of lung cancer due to heavy smoking. My father died at an early age of heart disease brought on by, among other bad things, heavy smoking. Since then, smokers in America have been dying early deaths like flies.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that even after I had quit smoking altogether for 10 years, I now suffer with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) brought about from the years of smoking. Yet I consider myself one of the lucky ones so far. It could have been cancer.

Today when I am exposed to second hand environmental “passive” smoke, the stinking clouds of the poison make me physically sick. So don’t try to tell me that secondhand smoke isn’t harmful.

Maybe I’m selfish, but I hope the day comes very soon when people aren’t allowed to smoke anywhere in public. Better still, I hope that all the smokers of today come to finally realize as I have that smoking is a health hazard, a killer and it’s time to quit now. It won’t happen in my lifetime but someday no one on Earth in their right mind will smoke tobacco just like no one today knowingly ingests lead.

Smokers deserve and should rightfully be relegated to the social status of pariahs.

There is no right to adopt or foster kids. So if smokers today want to adopt or foster children I don’t think it’s too much to require them to either quit the habit altogether or at the very least never practice it in proximity with kids.

Beyond the Pale

I wonder whether SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts, the turncoat jurist who upheld the constitutionality of ObamaCare, was aware of the fact then that the law will require patients to tell their doctors the most intimate private information about their sex lives and other sensitive life history details – details that the doctors will in turn be required to disclose to the government -- even when such information has nothing to do with why they are seeking medical treatment.

Surely he was not aware. Surely none of the nine justices were aware, for if they were I’m confident that they would have all decided in unison that this law and these outrageously statist regulations are profoundly anti-liberty, un-American, and fundamentally unconstitutional.

As we learn more and more each day that we didn’t know before about this fast approaching train wreck, Obama’s so called federal Affordable Care Act, people are finally beginning to understand just how unimaginably intrusive, mind numbingly dictatorial, and Orwellingly tyrannical it really is.

It’s beyond the pale.

These new regulations, of which no doubt not even Congress or the President were aware, require that patients be asked to disclose much more personal information than previously thought to their doctors -- including how often they have sex and how with how many sexual partners. And once they do disclose it, it won't really be personal information any more. It becomes the property of the United States government.

Yes, that’s right; according to a report in the New York Post, the federal government is apparently insisting on knowing whether you do it doggy style, missionary, or cowgirl, how often, and with exactly how many different partners. Your doctor will be asking you to reveal all there is to know about your private and personal sex life, your history of drug use, etc., regardless of whether that information is related in any way with why you came to visit.

"Once you've shared your information with a private third party, the Supreme Court has ruled that is fair game for the government," explains Christina Sandefur, a lawyer for the Goldwater Institute. That’s a clear cut violation of the doctor patient privilege doctrine as well as the fundamental privacy rights of all patients under the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.  

Doctors and hospitals that refuse to participate could be cut-off from receiving federal funds, and, more importantly, individuals who decline to share sensitive information may have to pay the fines – “taxes,” according to Justice Roberts and his Supreme Court – as provided in the ObamaCare law.

So now you know that if you don’t tell the government everything it wants to know about the most private and intimate details of your life, the feds are going to come after you for another  pound of flesh, just like they do if you don’t report all your income.

It’s surreal. It’s unbelievable.

It’s beyond the pale.