Tag: government overreach

Homeland Security Seized $2 Billion in Cash From Travelers at U.S. Airports

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other Department of Homeland Security agents seized more than $2 billion in cash from travelers in U.S. airports between 2000 and 2016, according to a new report by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.

The institute’s report is the first to comprehensively analyze the use of civil asset forfeiture by federal law enforcement in airports, where multiple news investigations have revealed horror stories of passengers having their money taken even though they weren’t ever charged with a crime.

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We Do Not Consent

It is clear to me as a physician-lawyer that the disinformation about both Covid-19 and the Constitution has caused us to turn a medical issue into a legal crisis.

The scientific usefulness of a mask has been so aggressively overstated, and the foundational importance of the Constitution has been so aggressively understated, that we have normalized people screaming obscenities at each other while hiking.

The Covid virus was supposed to be contained in the kind of lab where people wear astronaut suits and go through triple sealed doors. It is a con of massive proportion to assert that now, having escaped those environs, a bandana will magically do the trick.

After all, size matters.

The pore size of cloth face coverings range from ~ 20-100 microns.   The Covid virus is 200-1000x smaller than that, at 0.1 microns. Putting up a chain link fence will not keep out a mosquito. Even the most esteemed medical journals admit their purpose is to calm anxiety. “Expanded masking protocols’ greatest contribution may be to reduce the transmission of anxiety …”

Of course, by knowledge or common sense observation, most Americans already know that masking everyone is superstition. But unlike privately carrying a lucky charm, mandating facial coverings requires the consent of the governed.

Many cultures mandate clothing that appears totally irrational to outsiders. Never have those cultures pretended that there is a scientific basis for their clothing requirement. Their leaders rule, and their citizens accept, that their choice of clothing is due to religious or cultural preference.

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MARICOPA COUNTY MOVED HOMELESS PEOPLE TO SWELTERING PARKING LOTS IN RESPONSE TO COVID-19

There are usually hundreds of tents sprawled out in an industrial zone southwest of downtown Phoenix. For years, roughly 500 people experiencing homelessness have camped out there on the streets surrounding Arizona’s biggest homeless shelter, Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS), though the shelter doesn’t have any room for them.

Since April, roughly 200 of those people and their tents have instead been fenced in on black asphalt lots near the encampment as part of Maricopa County’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. Although Phoenix has managed to avoid a major outbreak among its homeless population so far, many of the steps taken by the city and by the county since the pandemic began have been questioned. The decision to corral people into the lots is perhaps the government’s most controversial choice. 

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Legal Docs: St. Louis Prosecutor Tampered With Evidence In McCloskey Gun Case

The gun Patricia McCloskey waved at a mob surrounding her home last month was inoperable at the time, but the St. Louis prosecutor’s office ordered the city’s crime lab to re-assemble it into working order after confiscating the firearm, according to a local Missouri TV station reporting Wednesday.

Missouri law requires the government to prove firearms be “readily” capable of fatal harm in order to score a conviction based on the charges filed against McCloskey and her husband this week for their attempt to use legal weapons to deter rioters from their home. Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner charged Patricia and her husband Mark McCloskey each with unlawful use of a weapon, a felony that can carry up to four years in prison, for defending their $1.15 million home.

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