Category Archives: Police State

Robert Prechter on Closing Doors..

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The July 2009 Elliot Wave Theorist by Robert Prechter has some ominous warnings.

Prechter warns that as the depression deepens, more and more avenues of escape are going to be shut off. He lists three that have become difficult:

1. You used to be able to invest in tax-free foreign annuities. Now you have to pay tax on them.
2. You could deposit your money at any Swiss bank. Now, harassment by US authorities has led many of those banks to shut the door on American depositors.
3. You could emigrate to New Zealand easily. Now, independent operators without a government license who try to help immigrants face trouble.

Police Overpower “Dangerous” Double Amputee

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Will Grigg at the Lew Rockwell blog:

“Responding to a domestic violence report, police in Merced, California helped child “protection” workers abduct the two-year-old daughter of 40-year-old Gregory Williams, a double amputee who is confined to a wheelchair.

Williams, a father of three who lost his legs to deep vein thrombosis six years ago and is currently unemployed, had been arguing with his wife. Rather than trying to defuse the situation, the police summoned a CPS worker who decided to seize the two-year-old, Ginni.

When Williams objected, the police placed him under arrest and attempted to force him into the familiar “prone-out” position….

This act of instinctive self-preservation was described as “resisting arrest”

So Officer John Pinnegar shoved his Portable Electro-Shock Torture device into Williams’ ribs and pulled the trigger twice.

At least one other officer, Sgt. Rodney Court, assisted the valiant Pinnegar in subduing the legless man. Hey, can’t be too careful — “officer safety” and all that. At one point Court shoved a knee into the middle of Williams’ back while Pinnegar cuffed the victim.

The double-amputee was left sitting on the pavement, handcuffed behind the back, with his pants pulled down below the waist — in broad daylight, in full view of the residents of his apartment complex.”

Government to Introduce Biometric ID in India

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“While Brits are longing for less surveillance in their electronic snoop state, the government in India seems to want to take Bharat Mata farther down that road. Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of India’s tech giant, Infosys, and now the head of the Government’s Unique ID project, is proposing an
Indian biometric ID.

What’s incredible is he thinks it’s feasible to extend this to the whole population. Apart from the logistics, the level of technology, and the cost (1.5 lakh crores – a number I’ll translate later), there’s the vulnerability to abuse, considerations which deterred Britain from going ahead with its own biometric ID scheme.

They don’t seem to bother Nikelani – one of “Flat Earth” globalist Tom Friedman’s favorite people. He discussed the objections in an interview with CNN-IBN’s Karan Thapar, published in the Hindu.

Here’s a short excerpt:

“Karan Thapar: You said a moment ago that you would create checks and balances. I put it to you that you can never create sufficient and the reason say is this — In the UK, in the US and in Australia, because the authorities couldn’t respond to public concerns about misuse, they have effectively put on the backburner consideration of similar schemes for those countries. Now if developed countries cannot tackle the problem of misuse, then how can India, where 35 per cent of the people are illiterate and 22 per cent live below the poverty line? How can India claim that we can tackle these problems?

Nandan Nilekani: What these developed countries have put on hold is giving national ID cards to people. But both the countries, US and UK have a number. For example in the US, you have the social security number, in the UK there is the national insurance number. They already have a numbering system, which is what we are going to propose.

Karan Thapar: Except for the fact that is is nowhere near as extensive or as complete in terms of the biometeric details as what you are proposing in India. The national insurance in Britain has been around and developing slowly but it doesn’t have any details that could lead to an invasion of privacy. It doesn’t have any details that can be misused for profiling. Yours could have both?

Nandan Nilekani: As I said, these are legitimate concerns and I think we have to address them in the public as well as in the laws and so on. But notwithstanding these concerns, the social benefit, the inclusivity that this project will provide for the 700 million people in this country who are outside the system is immense enough to justify doing this project…”

My Comment

Notice, once more, that’s it’s “social uplift” that’s the excuse for the expansion of the state, the same reasoning given for the sale of IMF gold. And as suspect in this case as it is in that. It seems as if public officials hardly get a wink of sleep cooking up schemes to help the poor.

Consider that the British biometric scheme was put on the backburner because it cost too much. The London School of Economics calculated that it would cost between 10 and 20 billion pounds, and Britian is about 1/20 the size of India. Now figure how mind-boggling the Indian scheme is likely to be be…..in every respect.

New Labor Turns Brits into Libertarians?

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From The Guardian:

“A poll run by PoliticsHome this week revealed a fascinating result to the question: “Do you think in general, the state has too much or too little of a say in what people can and cannot do?” Nearly four-fifths of the sample (79%) answered that the state had too much of a say, while only 8% believe the state has too little say.
If the poll is an accurate reflection of the nation’s mood this is an important finding. For some time I have been aware of sharp change in the public’s attitudes to surveillance, as well as a general feeling that the government is too quick to seize personal data and tell people how to lead their lives.”

Cops Allowed to Draw Drivers’ Blood Forcibly..

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In the news:

“The nation’s highest court ruled in 1966 that police could have blood tests forcibly done on a drunk driving suspect without a warrant, as long as the draw was based on a reasonable suspicion that a suspect was intoxicated, that it was done after an arrest and carried out in a medically approved manner. The practice of cops drawing blood, implemented first in 1995 in Arizona, has also raised concerns about safety and the credibility of the evidence….”

More here at AP on another symptom of a system out of whack.

Christians Should Look Outside the Two Parties…

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Greg at The Holy Cause writes this, after reviewing the GOP’s record during the Bush administration:

“Christians should be leaving the Republican Party in droves. Christians should be crawling on broken glass as penance for blindly supporting the Republican Party. Christians should be repenting in sackcloth and ashes for thinking the Republican Party was the party of God.

Instead, even as more and more crimes of the Bush administration come to light, I fear that Christians who are outraged, and rightly so, at the crimes of the Obama administration and the Democrats will look in the next election to the Republicans as their savior instead of the champions of war and torture….”

My Comment:

I agree with the post that neither party is consonant with Christian values. But I fear that the tendency to identify one’s party with “the good and the true” isn’t limited to Christians. Liberals are equally convinced of it. I also question the findings of the Pew study cited by Greg that finds that evangelicals are more likely to support torture. As I noted when I posted the study a while back, the sample size jt uses seems too small to be useful.

Fred Reed on US Government Inc.

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Fred Reed:

“Americans really are good folk. The government isn’t. It’s the gravest problem we face, both internationally and domestically.

(6) The Constitution really is going away, or has gone. It never did work as well as it should have, but few things human ever do. Habeas corpus is dead, right to an attorney, congressional right to declare war – it’s not even worth listing the list……

(7) The increasing, detailed, intrusive regulation of life, the national desire for control, control, control. Everything is the business of some form of government. Want to paint your shutters? The condo association won’t let you. Let dogs in your bar? Never. Decide who to sell your house to? Racial matter. Own a dog? Shot card, pooper-scooper, leash, gotta be spayed, etc. Have a bar for men only, women only, whites or blacks only? Here come the federal marshals. What isn’t controlled by government is controlled by the crypto-vindictive mob rule of political correctness. This wasn’t always in the American character.

Add the continuing presence of police in the schools, the arrest in handcuffs of children of seven, the expulsions for drawing a picture of a soldier with a gun. Something very twisted is going on.

How much of the public knows what is happening, or even knows that something is happening? I don’t know. But I don’t think that it’s going to go away. In ten years it will be an entirely different place with the same name. Almost is now.”

Hans Hoppe on Citizens as Public Property

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Lew Rockwell cites some arresting insights from Hans Hoppe on the Constitution and on the ultimate nature of democracy and the total state:

“History bears this out. Hoppe dates the onset of modern democracy to World War I and following, and he has scandalized many by calling the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany all democracies, but he means this in his special sense: the people neither own themselves nor are owned by anyone. The citizens are public property and are said to all participate in their own governance understood as an elected executive state. This was a modern form of government that displaced the old form – and it goes a long way towards explaining the advent of total war and the total state.”

The End of Locational Privacy…

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Adam Cohen has a great piece at the New York Times on the end of locational privacy:

“Verizon online knows when I logged on, and New York Sports Club knows when I swiped my membership card. The M.T.A. could trace (through the MetroCard I bought with a credit card) when and where I took the subway, and The Times knows when I used my ID to enter the building. AT&T could follow me along the way through my iPhone.

There may also be videotape of my travels, given the ubiquity of surveillance cameras in New York City. There are thousands of cameras on buildings and lampposts around Manhattan, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, many near my home and office. Several may have been in a position to film dinner on Elisabeth and Dan’s roof.

A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up “locational privacy.” Even in low-tech days, our movements were not entirely private. The desk attendant at my gym might have recalled seeing me, or my colleagues might have remembered when I arrived. Now the information is collected automatically and often stored indefinitely.

Privacy advocates are rightly concerned. Corporations and the government can keep track of what political meetings people attend, what bars and clubs they go to, whose homes they visit. It is the fact that people’s locations are being recorded “pervasively, silently, and cheaply that we’re worried about,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report.

People’s cellphones and E-Z Passes are increasingly being used against them in court. If your phone is on, even if you are not on a call, you may be able to be found (and perhaps picked up) at any hour of the day or night. As disturbing as it is to have your private data breached, it is worse to think that your physical location might fall into the hands of people who mean you harm….”

My Comment

And of course, that’s what I’m liking about my stay down south. The feeling of having someone always looking over your shoulders diminishes a lot once you leave the country.

To add to Cohen’s litany of surveillance, take Google accounts. There’s an option that lets Google keep track of your web browsing, of every site you opened, and all it takes is a check against the box. Say someone hacks your Google account. Or a Google employee decides to do it as a prank or from malice. They could check that box and keep tabs on what it was you were reading and investigating.

That’s only one possibility. Obviously, someone could also hack your account and browse through it to create a fake history of what you were investigating or browsing. You could without your knowledge have been reading “jihadi” sites….or racist sites…or hate sites of some other type…or child pornography…or anything else your enemies might want to recreate you as.

People who think Google and wiki are going to bring down the establishment have got to be kidding or very naive. Google and wiki can, have, and will work with the establishment when it suits them.