Steam Valve

Blast from the Past

Here's a cartoon from 1948 that turns out to be timely today.

How's this for Scary?

While some ponder what to wear for Halloween, here's something really scary:

Update: What about Lord Monckton's assertion that "In the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away forever, and neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back again."

Pretty strong language. Is this an accurate legal statement?

It turns out that the US Supreme Court has never directly ruled on the issue of whether treaties are subject to the same constitutional limitations as statutes

It's difficult, if not impossible, to believe that the Founders went to the trouble to hammer out the federal constitution only to allow its guarantees of liberty to be undone with the stroke of a pen on a treaty with a foreign country.

But to say that treaties are subject to constitutional protections does not, of course, guarantee that our leaders will not agree to treaties with provisions that abrogate our constitutional rights, nor that our government will not enforce and facilitate the enforcement of such provisions.

Regardless of the precise formulation of any future US Supreme Court opinion on the issue of whether treaties must conform to the Constitution, the threat to our sovereignty is nonetheless real. As John at Powerline has recognized,

The creeping tendency to cede control over our domestic policies, including taxation, to international organizations and international treaty commitments represents an enormous threat to both our freedom and to our democracy.

The threat is real enough. We don't need to exaggerate it.

Need for Freedom

We need freedom.  Without it, we suffer.  How else can you explain why people are willing to risk their lives for freedom?

Unbelievably, the resistance persists in Iran, despite the iron fist of the government.  From twitter:

Nobody I know really has anything approaching confidence in the size of the demonstrations, but we will know very soon.  Estimates range as high as 3 million in Tehran.  The Mousavi/Karroubi people are of course hoping for a very big turnout, and they have taken measures (within their limited capacity) to protect their supporters against armed attack.  Everyone expects considerable violence from the regime.

It’s significant that top regime leaders, such as the Kurdish representative on the Assembly of Experts, are being gunned down.  This is obviously in response to the wave of arrests of family members of the opposition leaders.  Mrs. Mousavi’s brother, for example, has been in Evin Prison in Tehran for three months, and subjected to harsh torture.

Even abc reported on it:

One of the most repeated chants today: "Tanks, rape and torture have no effect anymore."

Harmony

Reading Dr. Zero's on-the-money post, The Death of the Individual, brought to mind the sickening Toyota Prius commercials that use humans as landscape.

The commercials display the pretty picture of "harmony between man, nature and machine," complete with a snappy little tune and cute kids.

Watching the video ("The Making of Harmony") where the commercial's creators congratulate themselves on their "epic" achievement, it's clear they have no clue that these commercials dehumanize people.  While these artistic folk give lip service to "human energy" and "humanity," their human actors portray docile slaves, dressed up as grass, flowers and clouds, swaying in the breeze created by a hybrid car.

It's a vision no doubt cherished by those who seek to have throngs of unquestioning people buy their sales pitch.  It's a picture of the alternate reality that liberals believe actually can exist, if only everyone altered their behavior in the right ways. 

It's a picture of an alternate reality where humans don't go to town halls and criticize their representatives, an alternate reality where nobody says anything bad about president Obama.  They call it "harmony."

Unintended Consequences in China

When you defy natural laws, you get unintended consequences. 

Governmental officials like to think that they are omnipotent, that they can decree new laws and thereby coerce their subjects to submit to their will.  They may tell you that they think that paying taxes (or otherwise complying with governmental edicts) is "patriotic," but that so-called "patriotism" is enforced with the jack booted thuggery of governmental power, which can toss you into prison or levy your income sources so that you can't feed or shelter your family.

They forget about those inalienable rights that have been given by a higher authority over which government has no power.

In China, the government has enforced a limit on procreation that most likely will backfire because it defies natural law.  Ed Morrissey at Hotair describes how this will likely happen:

What do you get when you combine a Big Brother governmental decree on procreation with a cultural preference for one gender?  A sociological bomb that will eventually destabilize the Big Brother government.  China now has 32 million more men than women, a disparity that will continue to grow, thanks to their draconian one-child policies.

Expect trouble:

    China has 32 million more young men than young women — a gender gap that could lead to increasing crime — because parents facing strict birth limits abort female fetuses to have a son, a study released Friday said.

    The imbalance is expected to steadily worsen among people of childbearing age over the next two decades and could trigger a slew of social problems, including a possible spike in crime by young men unable to find female partners, said an author of the report published in the BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal.

    “If you’ve got highly sexed young men, there is a concern that they will all get together and, with high levels of testosterone, there may be a real risk, that they will go out and commit crimes,” said Therese Hesketh, a lecturer at the Centre for International Health and Development at University College London. She did not specify what kinds of crimes.

    The study said analysis of China’s 2005 census data extrapolated that males under age 20 exceeded their female counterparts by a whopping 32 million.

Here's Some Good News

In these days when we are constantly inundated with bad news and many of us are convinced that the destruction of our country is at hand, I read some good news today.

We have a constitutional right to give the finger to a police officer, as well as to another driver who blocks access to a parking space that we are backing into. At least according to a federal district court judge in Pittsburgh.

Believe it or not.

As reported on the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog:

So what happened? The judge, David Stewart Cercone, ruled that the gesture twice demonstrated by Hackbart does, in fact, constitute speech protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution:

Hackbart, in this instance, was expressing his frustration and anger when he gestured with his middle finger to both the driver behind him and to Elledge. Both gestures are protected expressions under the First Amendment, unless they fall within a narrowly limited category of unprotected speech such as obscene speech or fighting words.

Just thought you might want some good news today.

Cross-posted at Truth v. The Machine

Gun Control Fails to Prevent Police Deaths

California, the home of gun control laws nobody understands, where honest people are unwittingly turned into criminals and forced to surrender guns that were legal when they bought them, shows again that gun control doesn't prevent criminals from shooting people.

Cross posted at Truth v. The Machine

Freedom vs. Tyranny

Many things lately have been causing me to wonder whether this is the same country I grew up in.  The most recent occurred at our town hall, where two township officials discussed whether the township should take away building rights from property owners under certain circumstances.

Jeff Otto, chair of our board of supervisors, expressed the view that a building right is a significant part of the value of a property, and once a building has been erected on a site, the right should be considered as having been vested and not subject to forfeiture. 

Ken Olstad, a planning commission member, argued that it's just like anything else:  if you buy some stock in a company, you have to understand that it can go "poof."

For any reader who finds this reasoning compelling, I'd like to explain why I find it extremely frightening. 

These people, whether elected or appointed, are entrusted with the job of serving the people in a way that complies with the basic fundamental guarantees of the Bill of Rights, not just the more modern laws like the Wetlands Conservation Act.

So what's the difference between somebody losing their shirt in the market and somebody losing their rights to the government?  If you understand basic fairness, you would know that the difference between the market and government is that government imposes its will by force and the market is no more than a conglomeration of people, all of whom are trying to make a good deal, and none of whom have the legal right to compel you to buy anything.

Nor do they have sheriffs, police, or prisons.

This is an important difference, one that caused our founders to enshrine the Bill of Rights into our constitution.  There needs to be something to temper the power of government.  Otherwise, we get tyranny, which is what our founders were trying to avoid.

And another thing.  There's that word "inalienable" in the Declaration of Independence. 

Somebody else said this better:

The government of the United States is the result of a revolution in thought. It was founded on the principle that all persons have equal rights, and that government is responsible to, and derives its powers from, a free people. To Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, these ideas were not just a passing intellectual fad, but a recognition of something inherent in the nature of man itself. The very foundation of government, therefore, rests on the inalienable rights of the people and of each individual composing their mass. The Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, is the fundamental statement of what government is and from what source it derives its powers.

If our governmental officials do not understand and respect these principles, we get the tyranny this country was founded to reject.

Cross-posted at www.envisionfreedomeureka.com

Are Some Truths Out of Date?

I was at a seminar today. The written materials contained a quote from an old 1880 Minnesota Supreme Court case concerning the homestead exemption, which shields a person's home from his creditors.

The court explained the policy behind the exemption with these words:

The law originated in the wise and humane policy of securing to the citizen, against all the misfortunes and uncertainties of life, the benefits of a home, not in the interest of himself, or, if a married man, of himself and family alone, but likewise in the interest of the state, whose welfare and prosperity so largely depend upon the growth and cultivation among its citizens of feelings of personal independence, together with love of country and kindred — sentiments that find their deepest root and best nourishment where the home life is spent and enjoyed.

The case was Ferguson v. Kumler, 27 Minn. 156 (Minn. 1880)

The court saw the exemption not just as an entitlement of the homeowner, but as a way of safeguarding "feelings of personal independence" that redound to the benefit of the state, its welfare and prosperity.  The court understood that personal freedom is necessary for societal welfare and prosperity, and protection of private property ownership is essential to personal freedom.

This way of looking at the homestead exemption seemed at once full of wisdom and truth and old fashioned at the same time.  I don't remember any modern court opinion expressing such sentiments.

I looked for other cases that quoted this language, and found a few.  The most recent opinion quoting this language was a 1986 Court of Appeals case, Oleisky v. Midwest Federal Savings and Loan Ass'n., 398 N.W.2d 627 (Minn. App. 1986).

After 1986, there was one more case that cited Ferguson, but it didn't quote the language quoted above.  After that, the opinions on the homestead exemption are content to simply cite the statute, without delving much into policy considerations.

I can't pretend to have read all or even most of the appellate court opinions in Minnesota since 1986, but my general impression from the ones I have read is that individual property rights are not often, if ever, linked with societal welfare and prosperity.

Instead, individual property rights seem to be considered to be in direct competition with the good of society.  We saw that in the notorious US Supreme Court case of Kelo v. City of New London, where one person's private property was taken for the benefit of another private owner to further economic development. 

Just 10 days ago, the Minnesota Court of Appeals followed prior precedent and held that, where governmental restrictions caused a significant decline in property value, a property owner wasn't entitled to compensation unless he could prove that the governmental restrictions deprived him of all reasonable use of his land, because "[t]he right to use property as one wishes is subject to and limited by the proper exercise of the police power in the regulation of land use."  The fact that "feelings of personal independence" of a property owner contribute to society's welfare and prosperity is overlooked in these cases.

Fortunately perhaps for society, most property owners remain blithely unaware of just how much power the government has claimed for itself in controlling the use of private property, and how little regard it has for  those "feelings of personal independence" previously thought important to society.

Cross posted at Truth v. The Machine

Whatever Happened to Human Rights?

At what point do people lose sight of basic human rights? After how many tiny bites chipping away gradually at the freedom to live one's life as one sees fit so long as it doesn't hurt others? How many fake causes do you need to use, one after the other, to squeeze the freedom out of normal lives, until a majority of people are either so apathetic that they don't care anymore, or they have so adjusted their expectations that they no longer feel outrage when an 81 year old man is charged with a crime for repairing his neighbors' lawnmowers for free? And a neighbor on the same street is threatened with legal action for selling home-grown plants to others.

Because the city in which they live has adopted commercial zoning bylaws that do not allow any form of home business whatsoever, and they carry severe penalties. The 81 year old who likes to tinker with lawnmowers could be fined up to $25,000.

The article in the local paper takes great pains to point out that the 81 year old handyman doesn't charge for his labors, and the gardener gives her proceeds to charity. The article's author apparently thinks that lack of a profit motive should perhaps protect these two. The article's author has been brainwashed just like those who believe these laws are just.

What's wrong with earning money from selling plants you grow or fixing other people's lawnmowers? How in the world does either of these activities hurt anyone else? Frankly, I am at a loss to understand this thinking.

Cross-posted at Truth v. The Machine