Democrats are trying now to push their pork-zilla Wuhan coronavirus relief bill through the Senate.
As we previously reported, only about 9% of the bill has to do with actual virus-related relief, according to Republicans. Meanwhile there’s a ton of pork to all kinds of Democratic agenda items and constituencies.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) eviscerated the bill.
In Caniglia v. Strom, police want to be able to carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize lawfully-owned guns under the pretext of their so-called “community caretaking” duties. Under the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment, police can conduct warrantless searches of vehicles relating to accident investigations and provide aid to “citizens who are ill or in distress.”
At a time when red flag gun laws are gaining traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats, it wouldn’t take much to expand the Fourth Amendment’s “community caretaking” exception to allow police to enter a home without a warrant and seize lawfully-possessed firearms based on concerns that the guns might pose a danger.
What we do not need is yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety.
In Lange v. California, police want to be able to enter homes without warrants as long as they can claim to be in pursuit of someone they suspect may have committed a crime. Yet as Justice Neil Gorsuch points out, in an age in which everything has been criminalized, that leaves the door wide open for police to enter one’s home in pursuit of any and all misdemeanor crimes.
At issue in Lange is whether police can justify entering homes without a warrant under the “hot pursuit” exception to the Fourth Amendment.
The case arose after a California cop followed a driver, Arthur Lange, who was honking his horn while listening to music. The officer followed Lange, supposedly to cite him for violating a local noise ordinance, but didn’t actually activate the police cruiser’s emergency lights until Lange had already arrived home and entered his garage. Sticking his foot under the garage door just as it was about to close, the cop confronted Lange, smelled alcohol on his breath, ordered him to take a sobriety test, and then charged him with a DUI and a noise infraction.
Lange is just chock full of troubling indicators of a greater tyranny at work.
Overcriminalization: That you can now get pulled over and cited for honking your horn while driving and listening to music illustrates just how uptight and over-regulated life in the American police state has become.
Make-work policing: At a time when crime remains at an all-time low, it’s telling that a police officer has nothing better to do than follow a driver seemingly guilty of nothing more than enjoying loud music.
Warrantless entry: That foot in the door is a tactic that, while technically illegal, is used frequently by police attempting to finagle their way into a home and sidestep the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.
The definition of reasonable: Although the Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless and unreasonable searches and seizures of “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” where we run into real trouble is when the government starts dancing around what constitutes a “reasonable” search. Of course, that all depends on who gets to decide what is reasonable. There’s even a balancing test that weighs the intrusion on a person’s right to privacy against the government’s interests, which include public safety.
Too often, the scales weigh in the government’s favor.
End runs around the law: The courts, seemingly more concerned with marching in lockstep with the police state than upholding the rights of the people, have provided police with a long list of exceptions that have gutted the Fourth Amendment’s once-robust privacy protections.
Exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement allow the police to carry out warrantless searches: if someone agrees to the search; in order to ferret out weapons or evidence during the course of an arrest; if police think someone is acting suspiciously and may be armed; during a brief investigatory stop; if a cop sees something connected to a crime in plain view; if police are in hot pursuit of a suspect who flees into a building; if they believe a vehicle has contraband; in an emergency where there may not be time to procure a warrant; and at national borders and in airports.
In other words, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.
As the Biden administration debates what to do in Afghanistan, there is a great deal of talk about how the U.S. should not abandon the government there. Meanwhile, the Taliban has stuck to its pledge not to attack American troops for a year, and had promised that it would not allow terrorists a base in Afghanistan in the case of U.S. withdrawal.
Given these facts, supporters of continuing the war have come to realize that the national security case for staying is weaker than ever, and have centered their argument on moral appeals. What would happen to the Afghan government if the United States left?
But such arguments require that the Afghan government be morally superior to the Taliban and able to provide a better future for its people. In fact, there is little evidence to suggest that this is the case.
By all accounts, the Taliban is less corrupt than those the U.S. is defending. How could this be the case? The Afghan war has cost the U.S. over $2 trillion, which includes military spending on fighting the Taliban, aid to the Kabul government, and reconstruction projects. What is the Taliban spending on this war? There are no official numbers, but according to one report, they brought in $1.6 billion in the fiscal year that ended in March 2020. The Taliban can gain and hold territory in the face of overwhelming odds because they have better morale and more effective organization.
This has been admitted by officials of the Afghan government. According to Tooryalai Wesa, the former governor of Kandahar province, citizens told him that under Taliban rule “the money changers used to cover their money just under a sheet” as they went to pray because “people knew that law will be enforced.” Moreover, “when Taliban ordered to stop poppy cultivation, Mullah Omar could enforce it with his blind eye.” Under the U.S. occupation, drug production has been out of control, sometimes implicating Afghans at the top levels of government.
Taliban competence compared to government corruption is still a recurring theme of reporting on the conflict. A driver delivering a cargo of potatoes on Highway 1 recently reported that while he needed to pay the Taliban a one-time toll of the equivalent of $75, the government was worse, with 12 different checkpoints on the same road, each demanding up to $37, while providing inferior levels of security.
According to the New York Times, from the beginning of the American invasion, “the insurgents seized on the corruption and abuses of the Afghan government put in place by the United States, and cast themselves as arbiters of justice and Afghan tradition — a powerful part of their continued appeal with many rural Afghans in particular.”
While the West rightly criticizes the Taliban for its human rights abuses, the Afghan government also has blood on its hands. Secret units have carried out summary executions on flimsy grounds, including against children. And while the Taliban has been suspected of being behind an ongoing assassination campaign against civil society figures, recently credible reports have emerged that the Afghan government is secretly killing individuals advocating for reconciliation and the end of war.
The practice of bacha bazi, an Afghan custom in which a young boy dances for and is sexually abused by older men, made a comeback in Afghanistan during the war. It was the Taliban that originally made the practice illegal for being inconsistent with Sharia law. In 2015, it was apparently common practice among Afghan military and police, and American soldiers were told to ignore it. The Afghan government did not move to ban the custom until 2017. Revulsion over the practice was reported to be key to Mullah Omar’s rise to power, with locals in the south of the country objecting to warlords raping their young boys and throwing their support behind the Taliban and its effective, if harsh, form of justice.
Earlier this week, the internet was in an uproar amid the controversy over the company who owns the rights to Dr. Seuss announcing that several of their titles will no longer be sold because they were deemed to contain “insensitive and racist imagery.”
Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which preserves the author’s legacy, announced this week six books – “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” “If I Ran the Zoo,” “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” and “The Cat’s Quizzer” – would no longer be printed.
“These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement.
“Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ catalog represents and supports all communities and families,” it said, noting that they came to the decision internally.
Whether planned or not, the companies decision to stop selling these six titles sent sales of Dr. Seuss books through the roof. As of Thursday “The Cat in The Hat,” “Oh, The Places You’ll Go” and “Green Eggs and Ham,” three of Seuss’s best-known works, were all out of stock on Amazon and other places.
For a brief moment, the banned books were gaining premium prices of several hundred dollars on eBay as well.
People aren’t buying these now-cancelled books for hundreds of dollars each to preserve the imagery of the controversial content so they can teach their children racial stereotypes. They are simply snagging — what they think will be — a valuable collectable in the future because of nostalgia and to make sure the books don’t entirely disappear; which they should absolutely be doing.
While outlets like Amazon and others all continued to sell Dr. Seuss’s works, sites like eBay quickly moved to ban the sale of these six titles in a failed attempt at virtue signaling that was embarrassing on many fronts. What’s more, it exposed a hypocrisy that runs deep in the realm of big tech.
On eBay right now, there are multiple auctions for books on how to make improvised explosives and racism. Yet the auction giant is worried about questionably offensive children’s books with messages on how to be a good person.
Kurt Saxon, 88, is a former member of the American Nazi Party and author of The Poor Man’s James Bond, a series of books on improvised weapons and munitions. Currently, there are dozens of copies of these books for sale on eBay.
If Nazi bomb making isn’t your thing, there are also dozens of copies of the U.S. Army Improvised Munitions Handbook US Army Survival Paperback for sale on the platform.
In fact, there are countless “controversial” books that remain for sale on eBay despite the auction giant cancelling Dr. Seuss.
Have you ever wondered what NATO’s position on diversity is?
This week, the world’s most powerful military alliance tweeted, ‘Diversity is our strength’. The tweet featured a video of employees of various ethnic backgrounds, including both men and women, telling viewers to ‘respect our needs’ and ‘embrace our differences’. NATO encouraged Twitter users to share the tweet – which was in honour of ‘#ZeroDiscriminationDay’ – ‘to join us in celebrating the differences that make us stronger’. The organisation which bombed Iraq and Libya back to the dark ages is diverse. How nice.
It’s not just NATO that has leapt on the woke bandwagon. Former CIA boss John Brennan – the ‘principal coordinator’ of a US anti-terror ‘kill list’, who also oversaw American drone strikes – revealed his white guilt this week. ‘I’m increasingly embarrassed to be a white male these days with what I see other white males say’, he told MSNBC.
The US Army is in on the fun, too. It has its own ‘Equity and Inclusion Agency’, which launched ‘Project Inclusion’ last year. This operation included ‘listening sessions with soldiers and civilians worldwide to converse on race, diversity, equity and inclusion’. General James C McConville, chief of staff of the US Army, said on the army’s website that it ‘must continue to put People First by fostering a culture of trust that accepts the experiences and backgrounds of every soldier and civilian’. I wonder what the citizens of the many countries the US has attacked in recent years would have to say about that.
The military is signed up to the environmentalist agenda, too. Both the US and British armies are pursuing ‘Net Zero’ emissions targets. The army needs to be ‘on the right side of the environmental argument, especially in the eyes of that next generation of recruits that increasingly make career decisions based on a prospective employer’s environmental credentials’, according to senior British general Sir Mark Carleton Smith. The military, with its gas-guzzling tanks and fighter jets, is a significant emitter of CO2. So apparently, in order to attract recruits for the next foreign war, we need eco-friendly death machines.
“Digital giants have been playing an increasingly significant role in wider society… how well does this monopolism correlate with the public interest?,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on January 27, 2021.
“Where is the distinction between successful global businesses, sought-after services and big data consolidation on the one hand, and the efforts to rule society[…] by substituting legitimate democratic institutions, by restricting the natural right for people to decide how to live and what view to express freely on the other hand?”
Was Mr. Putin defending democracy? Hardly. What apparently worries him is that the Big Tech might gain the power to control society at the expense of his government.
What must be a nightmare for him — as for many Americans — is that the Tech giants were able to censor news favorable to Trump and then censor Trump himself. How could the U.S. do this to the president of a great and free country?
Putin made these comments at the Davos World Economic Forum, in which he and Chinese President Xi Jinping, sped on by the “Great Reset” of a fourth industrial revolution, used enlightened phrases to mask dark plans for nation states in a globalist New World Order. Thus did Xi caution attendees “to adapt to and guide globalization, cushion its negative impact, and deliver its benefits to all countries and all nations.”
In March 2019, Putin signed a law “imposing penalties for Russian internet users caught spread ‘fake news’ and information that presents ‘clear disrespect for society, government, state symbols the constitution and government institutions.'” Punishments got even heavier with new laws in December.
Meanwhile, opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to prison for more than three years (with a year off for time served), in part because he revealed photos of a lavish Russian palace allegedly belonging to Putin on the coast of the Black Sea. Its accouterments supposedly include an $824 toilet brush. Many of the thousands of people protesting Navalny’s imprisonment have since been protesting Putin by waving gold-painted toilet brushes.
How nice that American Big Tech companies is pushing democracy in Russia — even while it is denying it at home. Do you notice how many leaders in Europe have risen to condemn censorship in America even though many in Europe are censoring their citizens as well, and are not exactly fans of the person who was being censored, former President Donald J. Trump? Like Putin, they probably do not want Big Tech competing with their governments, either.
Hellbound and Down 
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