At LRC blog, Will Grigg describes the massacre of an elderly man by government goons:

“Mallory woke up to find armed men in his home. The elderly man’s glasses were on the nightstand beside him. His handgun was also within easy reach. After the panicking man reached for his gun, the intruders shot him six times.

The deputies who had invaded Mallory’s home weren’t responding to an emergency, nor were they pre-empting a criminal plot. They were serving a narcotics warrant issued in response to a claim that someone who had passed by the property smelled ingredients used to manufacture methamphetamine.

After shooting the helpless old man in his bed and leaving him to die, the intruders assaulted and bound his terrified wife, Tonya Pate, then ransacked the property. Although they found no evidence that Mallory was an aspiring Heisenberg, they did locate an insignificant amount of marijuana – something not listed in the search warrant, but seized upon as validation of the murderous home invasion.

The Fourth Amendment, which was rendered irrelevant long ago, requires that in order for a warrant to be valid it must specify the items being sought. Additionally, a vague report of a suspicious smell doesn’t meet the Fourth Amendment’s standards for probable cause. This was acknowledged by the California Supreme Court in a decision announced a few hours after LA County deputies slaughtered Mallory. The Court ruled that police were not permitted to search a closed shipping package because it reeks of marijuana.

In that case, which arose from a 2010 arrest of a man accused of trying to ship pot to Illinois via FedEx, the police insisted that what they call the “plain smell test,” coupled with “exigent circumstances,” justified a warrantless search and seizure of the package. That argument didn’t pass the Court’s smell test.

If police aren’t permitted to seize a package that exudes the aroma of marijuana, it can’t be considered permissible to mount a daybreak no-knock raid of a residence on the basis of an unsupported claim that something in the surrounding air made an informant’s nostrils twitch.

Since the warrant was invalid, and the search was illegitimate, Mallory was within his legal rights to use lethal force to defend himself. However, department spokesman Steve Whitmore insists that “The lesson here is … don’t pull a gun on a deputy.”

A more suitable lesson is this: We live in a country where criminals in uniform feel entitled to gun down elderly men in their beds”consequence of just leaving people alone to pursue their own desires.

Comment:

Fumbled for your handgun when someone busted in your door, eh? Can’t have any of that.

Seriously, why is this outrageous? It’s not…not today.

If you talk back to a traffic cop when you’re pulled over, even in broad daylight, if your hands aren’t visible, you might very well receive the same rough injustice.

They can..and will..blow you away.

In case you think that is idle speculation on my part, it’s not.

One of the strangest things about American society is how often you can have run up against the cops, the courts, and the mafia, all without doing anything more than going about your routine business.

But, while this might offend some,  police officers are not innately much more evil than the culture in which they’re raised. We live in a culture of home invasions, gang-violence, self-indulgence, belligerence, and contempt for the old and the weak.

Our police reflects and amplifies that broader culture, and also in turn reinforces it.

Power no doubt attracts a lesser breed of human-being, but your average cop wannabe, like George Zimmerman, is not evil so much as thoughtless, self-important, conditioned, and ready to lash out.

Add a badge and a gun, and what you have is not Milton’s Satan but a faulty chain-saw.

A chain-saw is not evil. It’s merely insensate.

The first law of not getting chopped up by a chain saw is – get out of its way.

In poor Mr. Mallory’s case none of this obtained.

The chain-saw came to him.

Moral of the story:

Disarm the police.

Allow them to carry nothing more than mace when serving warrants, unless they are cornering someone with a history of assault and/or notable violence.

Second.

End the war on drugs.

Meanwhile, if you do encounter the cops, here’s what I’ve learned:

1.  Don’t talk more than you need to. Don’t issue invitations and volunteer information. Talk too much and you will be arrested or cited as some kind of trouble-maker. Maybe you will earn a record as a crazy.

2. Be civil, even deferential, as the case might be. Soft soap often accomplishes  much more than belligerence.

3. Keep your hands visible at all times. Don’t for anything put them into your pockets.

4. Do not make sudden unannounced movements.

3. Record, if possible.

If not, take accurate notes, with date and time. If you don’t have pen and paper, turn on the audio of your cell phone, but let everyone know first. If not, you could be arrested for that, since tape-recording conversations unilaterally without permission is illegal in many states.

4.  Admit nothing.

5. Sign nothing, except under the threat of arrest, and even then, only if you’ve read and understood what you’re signing, and have spoken to a lawyer. Otherwise, arrest is probably a better choice. If the arrest is unlawful, you will have legal recourse.

6. As a general refrain, use the phrase “I’d like to talk to my lawyer.” You can intersperse this with
“My lawyer will address that,” “Talk to my lawyer,” and “Can I have a lawyer?”.

Use these phrases even if you don’t have a lawyer.

7. If the police man does something clearly wrong, address them as officers and point out what they are doing wrong in as technical, respectful, and legal a manner as possible.

If they mock you in any way, tell them coldly that as officers of the law, they are obliged to do their duty and no more.

Maintain your dignity, however much they show disrespect. Thank them as appropriate.

Do not issue verbal threats of any kind, no matter how much you’re provoked.

So far,  I suspect the following to be intelligence created or linked:

Lasha Darkmoon

Rense (this is pretty well-known)

Israel Shamir (also well-known)

Paul Craig Roberts

(all that extreme anti-Western language…meant to create a following among gullible immigrants maybe?)

I’m not too sure about Henry Makow. Lots of good information, coupled with some wild statements, but they could just be the errors of a zealot and not evidence of anything else.

There are many more, of course.

Lasha Darkmoon was a bit of a shot, but I suspect that she is a cover/front created by amalgamation from several other genuine web dissidents.  Or she might be a real person who has been roped into an intelligence project.

I base this theory on her extreme focus on Jewishness, while herself being Jewish; on certain aspects of her work, which seem derivative; on the suddenness with which she surfaced….and a few other telling things I’ll keep to myself.

That’s besides all the others-  Alex Jones, Benjamin Fulford, Bollyn (I’m in two minds here, because so much of his research is so reliable, but his resume is a give-away), and a bunch of others, like the Assange, Snowden, Greenwald group. I’m really not sure if Manning was just a patsy or something else.

That’s not to say that Mr. Greenwald didn’t do some excellent blogging on many issues…at least for a while.  I’ve linked his writing many times.

95% accurate and then a big, smelly red herring tossed in. That’s the modus operandi.

There are lots more sites, many of them baited with  “anti-Western” or “anti-Zionist” or even “anti-Jewish” red meat for disaffected Muslims or Muslim sympathizers, I suppose. Get on those sites and be sure someone is dredging up your IP address and tracking you.

You might even get to know what Miriam Carey meant by electronic harassment.

Also, when the proportion of rhetoric to fact rises, beware.

Look at the date the blog began and the number of posts. Does the blog seem to have come out of nowhere? Did it suddenly ride in on a tide of sentiment over some particular economic or political crisis?

Does it sound like an echo chamber of many voices that lacks one distinctive one?

When intelligence creates web persona, it amalgamates language from several bloggers, especially those the powers that be might want to side-line and neutralize.

This is probably computer-generated.

Memes that are circulating in public debate are captured and redirected through the fake dissident’s voice, creating an uneasy sense of deja vu in readers, who will recognize something uncanny in the writing. Something that sounds like an echo of their own words.

Beware of people who tell you what (they think) you want to hear…

Beware of people whose links stay close to the establishment alternatives.

Remember the intelligence agencies are constantly spying on blogs, hacking them, stealing information and then passing it off to their own tools.

So when you see your material surfacing elsewhere, it’s not always because some individual plagiarized you, although that too. Sometimes it’s because intelligence/or computer programs used by intelligence pass on the information to other bloggers and writers whom they then use as mouthpieces.

C.S.Lewis:

“There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips…. We grow up surrounded by propaganda in favor of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance.”

and

“You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act, that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage.  Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?  And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was some equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?”

[Lila: “Queer” as in odd/strange}]

Christian blogger, Bruce Charlton, sees Moldbuggery (neo-reaction) as leftism in disguise.

Charlton argues that reactionaries, like many libertarians, are only tolerated by the liberal-left because they help the left achieve its goals.

Here below is a response by Charlton to a comment on his post about Moldbug.

Note: I’ve never read Charlton’s blog before; don’t know what else is advocated on it; do not endorse it and am only quoting it because I think there’s something to his point about Moldbug:

@GR – You misunderstand my opinions. MM wants to be a reactionary, but does not want to become religious – he wants the socio-political effects of religiousness, although he thinks that religion is untrue.

I expect that sooner or later he will recognize the necessity of religion, then the truth of religion, and will then be converted (probably to Christianity).

I would guess Foseti is probably in this category too.

MM’s followers vary – but are mostly anti-Christian, rather than currently-unconvinced.

About ‘doing something’ you may have misunderstood what I wrote – since the MM-influenced self-styled reactionaries are actually Leftists (as are Libertarians) then it is possible that they are indeed moving towards some kind of ‘success’, in the same sense that self-styled libertarians may have successful careers in writing, academia, the media and think tanks.

Libertarian ideas are ‘used’ by the mainstream Left to generate arguments and evidence in favour of mainstream Leftist policies such as mass immigration and attacks on the Christian church, marriage and the family, and the military.

In these areas of policy ‘libertarians’ serve ‘Liberal’ goals – and this is indeed the reason why the Left tolerates libertarians.

MM’s followers are – unlike libertarians – mostly socially conservative (they are mostly, I think, disaffected secular libertarians) but since they have the same basic goals as Leftist (i.e. this worldly, hedonic goals) then there is no reason why some specific Moldbuggian ideas, analyses and policies may not be appropriated by mainstream Left/ Liberals.

This kind of thing happens all the time. Any influence my own ideas have had (e.g. on UK medical education) have been by appropriating specific ideas in what seemed to me a distorted and incomplete fashion to produce results I opposed – but that is the nature of influence.

I don’t suppose Nietzsche would have been happy to know he was the official Nazi philosopher; while Heidegger, who actually put in an application for this job, was rejected.

If MM has a real world effect (which is certainly not impossible) he will almost certainly come to despise the distorted and counter-productive nature of his own influence – since the people with power enough to make influence effective are the people who will use it for their own (anti-Moldbuggian) ends.”

Gizmodo on Google Glass and a new generation of aggressive voyeurs:

“Up until now, obtaining a creepshot has been a relatively simple endeavor, but one not entirely without risk. The ubiquitous nature of smartphones and the way people constantly engage with them are developments that ensure hardly anyone anymore gets suspicious when someone comes near them holding a recording device—they’re probably just checking Facebook, right? Still, there’s only so long a person can hold their iPhone at an awkward angle, and only so close they can get to you, before you realize that they’re photographing you and you put a stop to it.

This is where, in the right hands, Google Glass has the potential to be one of the more devious pieces of technology yet created. Because Glass allows a person to photograph and videotape whatever they’re looking at, hands free, the potential for creepshots skyrockets. When in the wrong person’s possession, Google Glass could make it so virtually every interaction a man has throughout the day becomes a creepshot, from staring down a cashier’s top at breakfast, to leering at his coworker’s cleavage, to glancing over at his daughter’s teacher’s ass after picking his kid up from school. Worse still, these women will have no idea they’re being photographed for some dude’s spank bank, because instead of a weirdo coming at them holding up a phone, they’ll just see a normal guy—their friend, their regular customer, their tennis partner—looking at them how they always do.

To hear men like Mark Hurst—president of the tech-consulting agency Creative Good and Glass doomsayer-in-chief—express terror at the next-level eavesdropping abilities Google Glass affords is reasonable to a degree, but they’re mostly just flattering themselves. Perhaps a celebrity like George Clooney should shudder at the thought of how Glass will make his life even more scrutinized than it already is, but the average man just isn’t interesting enough, at least not in the way that would find strangers on the subway desperate to record their every move.

The real victims of Google Glass are going to be women, who have long suffered the ogles of strange men. Glass, however, is going to supercharge those ogles, turning them into images that can last a lifetime on an unfamiliar person’s computer, only to be passed around the creepshots forums that currently exist and ones that have yet to be birthed. Men are already taking advantage of women every day with their bulky smartphones. When the cameras are sitting snugly and indiscreetly on their faces, it will only get worse.

When I emailed Google to ask about the impending explosion of creepshots in the wake of Glass, a spokesperson gave me this statement: “It is still very early days for Glass, and we expect that as with other new technologies, such as cell phones, behaviors and social norms will develop over time.”

The statement is right, if only because a social norm is a far cry from a social good. When cellphones were first released, who could have expected that eventually they’d be used to shoot secret photos of young women that men would then share on the internet and masturbate to? I expect nothing less from Google Glass.”

Fighting back against “creep-shot” culture, cyber-vigilantes are now “naming and shaming” men who take photographs of women..and in some cases under-age girls…solely to ogle and pass around on the Internet, reports Jezebel.

Yes, that Jezebel, the magazine that published the “no-kiss-but-plenty-of-tell” account of a supposed encounter between some John Q. Trashbag and conservative politician and continence advocate Christine 0’Donnell, an account that was so vile that even left-wing magazines that mainline manure for a living managed to wrinkle their noses.

“One afternoon in late September, Coweta County Sheriff Investigator Jason Fetner asked Christopher Bailey, a 35-year-old substitute teacher at East Coweta High, to meet with him regarding a school theft. But when Bailey arrived, Fetner told him the real reason for their meeting: he knew that Bailey had been posting photos of his students — “Hot senior girl in one of my classes,” read one charming caption — on the subreddit r/CreepShots, some of which had been viewed thousands of times.

Most of Bailey’s CreepShots contributions were relatively “innocent” (for example, you couldn’t see the senior girl’s underwear) and therefore legal, but the content Fetner subsequently found on Bailey’s cellphone — including multiple texts and nude photos that he sent to girls as young as 16 — were not, and police are now pursuing charges. But how did Fetner know that the substitute teacher with a clean record was a secret sexual predator? Thanks to a tip from a group of anonymous Redditors who are sick of seeing the CreepShots community gleefully post teen upskirt photo after teen upskirt photo while telling the “internet morality police” to “fuck off” and stop ruining their fun.

Fetner told us that the tipster’s anonymity made it extremely difficult for him to convince a judge to sign a search warrant for Bailey — it took “several hours of arguing” before he conceded — but that he sees no real alternative for the time being. “In my personal opinion, not all speech deserves to be protected,” he said. “But until the laws in this country catch up to technology, we’re going to continue to see these types of problems. There’s nothing wrong with people looking out for this sort of thing and taking legal efforts to do something about it.”

One of the leaders of these “people” is Samantha*, a 25-year-old Redditor who recently launched Predditors, a collection of incriminating personal information — photos, social media accounts, screencaps of CreepShots posts — that she plans on using to “out” Redditors whom she considers sexual predators. One day, she hopes, the site will allow users to report men to a select group of moderators, who will then investigate and verify claims and report the worst offenders to the appropriate local authorities.”

Cosmopolitan has an excellent piece describing the perils and pain of cyber-harassment and cyber-rape.

Victims experience exactly the same feelings as rape victims do, including post-traumatic stress disorder, severe social anxiety, depression, and paranoia.

The piece describes five things you can do to fight back against a cyber rapist:

“5 WAYS TO SHUT IT DOWN

When Charlotte Laws’ daughter was a target of revenge porn in 2012, the social ethics PhD and former California councilwoman began a crusade to end what she calls cyber rape. She tells what to do if a photo leak happens to you.

COPYRIGHT YOUR PICS: If you took the photos, you can send take-down notices to any site using them, including hosts and search engines. To strengthen your case, register the snaps at Copyright.gov.

TAKE IT TO THE TOP Even if you don’t own the photos, contact the web host for the site. Large or U.S.-based companies don’t want to get sued, says Laws. She worked with the company hosting the site with her daughter’s photos to block the pics within days.

GET BACK OUT THERE: “The first thing girls want to do is shut down all their accounts,” says Laws. She says to do the opposite: Join online groups, make profiles, blog. The more material you post, the further down your photos get buried.

STAY ALERT: Set a Google Alert for your name: If a pic pops up, you’ll be ready with a take-down notice.

GET PAYBACK: Visit ArmyOfShe.com for a list of attorneys and advocates. Lawyers building a class-action suit may represent you for free.”

For all the clueless people who still think cyberharassment is some kind of imagined “victimology,” here’s the kind of thing going on:

Washington Post:

“The first man who knocked on the Fauquier County woman’s door told her they had been e-mailing and he was there for sex. Shocked and perplexed because they hadn’t corresponded, the woman sent him away.

But the men kept coming. They arrived on her doorstep as many as six times a day, sometimes traveling from other states. One had a crowbar. Others refused to leave. Another rammed his car through a security gate that she installed.

In all, there were about 100. Each said he had communicated with her. All expected sex.

The unrelenting onslaught was organized by an angry ex-boyfriend, who had assumed the woman’s identity online and crowdsourced his harassment to dozens of unwitting accomplices he lured to her home, prosecutors say in court papers.”

I came across this useful quotation from Etienne Gilson about the limits of reasoning, in a piece at First Things criticizing  Princeton University’s star utilitarian, Peter Singer, who, it seems, has been wondering out aloud what the exact harm in necrophilia and bestiality is:

“A third way of recognizing the false sciences which idealism generates is by the fact that they feel it necessary to “ground” their objects. That is because they are not sure their objects exist. For the realist, whose thought is concerned with being, the Good, the True and the Beautiful are in the fullest sense real, since they are simply being itself as desired, known and admired. But as soon as thought substitutes itself for knowledge, these transcendentals begin to float in the air without knowing where to perch themselves. This is why idealism spends its time “grounding” morality, knowledge and art, as though the way men should act were not written in the nature of man, the manner of knowing in the very structure of our intellect, and the arts in the practical activity of the artist himself. The realist never has to ground anything, but he has to discover the foundations of his operations, and it is always in the nature of things that he finds them: operatio sequitur esse.”

Comment:

Why should reason always trump something like, say, experience or tradition, which embodies the collective reasoning AND practical experience of generations of communities spanning the globe?

I don’t fault Singer for wanting rational grounds for moral assertions. That is fair.

I fault him for thinking that because one cannot always find the rational grounds for a moral position, one must therefore abandon the position, even though it may be advocated and defended by tradition, experience, and instinct.

It should be the burden of those wanting to upend traditional morality to make persuasive arguments for their position, rather than the reverse.

I got a long critical comment responding to my blog post on First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh’s support for a narrowly defined anti-cyberstalking law. The comment deserves thought, so here goes, with my response in italics:
M. Terry said…

(Quote)

“Consider someone who takes a picture of her body, for medical reasons, and, by accident leaves a copy on her computer. Say someone gets hold of it and tried to pretend the person sent the image to a porn site. It is easily done.”

(End Quote)

Now that’s like the non-sequitur of the year.

Lila: Not at all.  It shows the same principle at work. A private image was created.  Someone misused the image. In both cases, there was NO CONSENT.

M. Terry :A woman, along with sexual partner, or perhaps with a photographer present, engages in photographing herself

Lila: I DELETED some words you wrote. Knock off the graphic text, please.

Also, you made up that bit about a photographer to make it look as if she had the intention of making the images public. But even her boyfriend hasn’t said there was any  such photographer.

M. Terry: And complains later. She should have had the sense to obtain a contract for the images, or videos.

Lila: It was her boyfriend of 3 years, remember. And she was 23 at the time. Do people usually enter into legal contracts with their boyfriends?

By the standards of modern America, this is what a lot of younger people do. It’s Internet culture. She is not all that exceptional. Just Google sexting.

What you are arguing is that if a close friend comes to your house as a guest and then walks away with your watch, you’re to blame, because you didn’t get your friend to sign a contract not to take anything. Is that reasonable?

M. Terry: What next? Ban literature that includes the worn out N word?

Lila: Now, that really is a non-sequitur.

There’s no similarity at all between the two instances.

Literature is created with  the intention that someone will read it. It is intended to be public

Also, to be deserving of the legal protection given to art/literature,  a  piece of writing usually has to have some verifiable artistic content, even if slight.

Porn, especially unintended porn, is a different category altogether.

A private picture becomes porn only when it’s made public.  Porn (at least, the kind that is adjudicated) is a sexual act that is spectacular –  that is, created for public viewing.

So you are eliding the legal and moral difference between a PRIVATE and a PUBLIC act. And  the difference between a CONSENSUAL and a NON-CONSENSUAL act.

M. Terry; Sorry, but this idiotic concept is far removed from anything regarding Article I of the Bill of Rights.

Lila: Name-calling is an admission that you don’t have arguments.

Eugene Volokh  is well-qualified  to judge  and he has written that the Framers would have regarded much of what is called free expression on the net merely libelous, even though the Framers also didn’t create a right of privacy.

M. Terry:

Good taste is one thing. Producing porn, then complaining about it is another thing.

Lila: Her good taste or judgment or lack thereof is irrelevant, because it doesn’t rise to the level of contributory negligence.

One more time. She didn’t produce porn. She was engaged in a private sexual interaction.

Porn is for public viewing. She sent it privately to a boyfriend.

It might not be to your taste, but it’s not , by definition, pornographic.

Her private actions might offend your moral sensibility, but that does not give you a right to deprive her of the legal protection of her life and property (and being able to hold a job is included in that word).

Her private action might be repugnant to you. But so are most contemporary sexual practices repugnant, and most contemporary fashions obscene, to traditional observers.

The average modern woman in the west, at least, would be considered obscenely dressed by most traditional cultures.

So I ask you, do you consider women like that to be voluntarily participating in their degradation and therefore not deserving of legal protection should someone threaten their professional and personal lives?

Because that is what you’re arguing.

If your wife or daughter got raped when she went into a traditional culture, should I tell you that it was their own fault for dressing in short skirts and form-fitting clothes and making “porn” out of themselves?

Bikinis and swimsuits, halter tops, crop-tops, shorts, low necklines, tight clothes, make-up – all look pretty slutty to traditional cultures.

So I guess Western women should take responsibility for it if they get raped because someone else’s cultural standard is different from theirs.

Personally, if you take off most of your clothes in public on the beach, I don’t see how that’s different from stripping in a night-club. Seriously.

So does that mean women on beaches are also porn stars in the making?

Stripping in PUBLIC is surely more offensive to other people by definition than photographing yourself in PRIVATE where other people aren’t involved.

So Holly Jacobs, in my view, did something far less provocative than millions of Western women do daily, when they take their clothes off in public on beaches, and let themselves be photographed by strange men (and women).

But their actions are perfectly acceptable and not offensive to you, even though they are done in public.

Personally, I consider books like Naomi Wolf’s recent one,  describing the author’s sexual history and  body parts,  a kind of soft- core porn, yet no one would argue that the author doesn’t deserve the protection of the law if someone cyberstalks her.

So it’s a matter of cultural standards. And it’s a matter of differentiating between private acts and public ones.

M. Terry: Fuck personal responsibility, right? Everyone is a “victim.”

Lila: Personal responsibility has nothing to do with it. If I forget to lock my house one day and a neighbor decides to walk in and beat me, it’s still assault, regardless of my carelessness.

If she doesn’t want some image on the net and didn’t enter into a contract, it’s both fraud and force to put them on the net.

M. Terry:

BTW – I did a Google search for the images after I read an article about “victim.”

My thought was – she wanted everyone to search for the photos. If she’d kept quiet, few people would know.

Lila: And I guess when women are raped in the third world and they complain, it’s because they wanted it and wanted to star in their own “native” rape fantasies.

Strictly speaking, one shouldn’t look at such images any more than one should buy stolen goods.

Do you also Google child porn – the children didn’t object to their pictures or demand contracts, did they?

Do you also download copyrighted material?

Same thing.

This case isn’t hard.

Did she agree to put it out there? No.

Was she foolish?  Yes.

But no more foolish than thousands of teens and twenty-somethings these days.

Do foolish people deserve crimes committed against them?

No.

Otherwise, each time you exceeded the speed limit, ate too much sugar, lost your temper, or did any of the foolish things we all do, you would deserve to have a crime committed against you.

Case closed.