Vote For Hillary

       Last week, it was announced that Hillary Clinton is to receive the Liberty Medal in a ceremony at the Constitution Center in historic Philadelphia in recognition of a lifetime spent in public service.

       Mrs. Clinton is often praised for having been the most widely traveled Secretary of State in history having visited over 100 countries during her term in office. And yet, no one has been able to name a single region, a single country…a single city block…that has been in any way improved by all those travels.

       In other words, after the expenditure of millions (billions?) of dollars, numerous speeches, conferences, meetings, showing ‘awareness’, even doing the Macarena in South Africa, but finally accomplishing…nothing, Secretary Clinton has managed to become a metaphor for 21st century  governments everywhere.

        A president for our time? Got my vote.

If you’ve suffered the TSA’s gate-rape at the airport, you have an inkling of life as a black or Latino man in dystopian New York City: at any time, while minding your own business and peaceably pursuing your affairs, cops may “stop and frisk” you just to see what turns up.

Jaenean Ligon’s 17-year-old son was one such collar. She sent him to buy ketchup for the family’s dinner one evening – only to have cops phone her to come “identify” him. She understandably panicked, assuming someone had injured or killed her boy. Instead, cops had “stopped and frisked” this innocuous teen running an innocent errand. They had no warrant, suspicion that he had committed a crime, or anything other than a general belief that guys his age and color are all criminals. New Yorkers have endured such humiliation something like 5 million times over the last decade.

The NYPD’s top cop, Ray Kelly, has long defended this insult. He whitewashes it as a “service” his uniformed thugs “provide” poor people. He dismisses critics as rich, out-of-touch misers, endeavoring to deprive the impecunious of protection they themselves enjoy: they “probably … live in buildings with doormen, and they have a level of safety that people who live in tenements … don’t have.”

I’ve often visited friends in buildings with doormen. Never once have any of these guards, who range from courteous to bored but who are harmless either way, demanded my ID. Nor has even one proposed that he fondle me before alerting my host of my arrival. They would not only be fired but arrested and prosecuted for “providing” such a “service.”

The NYPD has groped the public since the 1970’s, after Terry v. Ohio empowered its minions to ignore the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. But over the dozen years of his suzerainty, Nanny-sorry, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has dramatically escalated this abuse. He and his accomplices staunchly insist that everyone in the five boroughs is subject to “stop and frisk.” Theoretically, tourists from Iowa shopping at Tiffany’s and banksters striding along Wall Street are as liable to wind up spread-eagled against a wall with a cop’s hand between their legs as the 15-year-old black kid in the South Bronx or Staten Island.

But they don’t.

During stop-and-frisk’s reign of terror, I’ve walked an average of 3 miles per day in Manhattan. Yet I’ve never witnessed one of these legalized attacks. Why? Because I’m almost always in wealthier, white neighborhoods. Authorities ever reserve such egregious contempt for the poorest and most vulnerable among us, in this case young black and Hispanic men from 14 to 21 years of age.

But you needn’t take my anecdotal word for it. The NYPD’s own data on “stop and frisk,” and the exhaustive analyses various parties have run on it, prove that statistically, I am unlikely ever to see a “stop-and frisk,” much less become its prey.

As with its myriad other revocations of freedom, the government justifies “stop and frisk” because it supposedly protects citizens – except, of course, for those like Ms. Ligon and her son. Just as the TSA pretends that strip-searching grandmothers somehow vanquishes terrorists, so molesting teens of dusky hue fights crime and even “saves lives,” according to Nanny Bloomberg and Ray Kelly. In fact, the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner, Paul Browne, boldly quotes exact figures for that hypothetical: “5,628 lives saved—attributable to proactive policing strategies that included stops.”

This subterfuge allows another whopper as well: that the NYPD can save even more lives by pawing people in “crime”-ridden neighborhoods, i.e., ones populated by poor folks named “Rivera” or “Washington.” (And where much of the “crime” isn’t any such thing. Instead, residents exercise their inalienable right to keep and bear arms, to buy and sell without the State’s interference, to work or drive a car free of its license, to live where and how they please despite a bureaucrat’s displeasure.)

And so, while stop-and-frisk’s legion of enemies decry the NYPD’s obvious, nauseating racism, Nanny and various commissioners blandly insist that they’re fighting “crime” where they find more of it. Why assault Jewish grandmothers shlepping through Bloomingdale’s? How many of them are packing heat?

Because in the end, that’s what “stop-and-frisk” is all about: it strips guns from the “well-regulated militia.” And since most white New Yorkers are neither desperate nor courageous enough to defy Our Rulers’ hostility to self-defense, the battle is left to black and Hispanic teens. (Ah, but politicians have their revenge. They regularly imply that only murderers and thieves need guns, not the beardless child a couple of cops are bullying.) Nor are New York’s rulers reticent about that goal. Nanny Bloomberg has earned national disrepute for his obsession with depriving everyone but his bodyguards of firearms. And Paul Browne told Britain’s Guardian that “commissioner Kelly said he wants gunmen to be deterred from carrying weapons on them in the streets, particularly in those communities most victimised by gun violence.” Gun-violence apart from what the cops inflict, that is.

Meanwhile, Kelly himself provided the best of all reasons for abolishing not only stop-and-frisk, but the NYPD and all police-forces nationwide when he confessed, “Last year, stops by police resulted in the seizure of more than 7,000 illegal weapons, mostly knives, as well as nearly 800 guns. Stops are authorized by New York state criminal-procedure law.” Oh, well, then that makes it OK, just as the Nazis legalized slave-labor and genocide. “Every state in the country has a variant of this statute, as does federal law. It is fundamental to policing.” What’d I tell you? Abolish ”policing” and the labyrinthine bureaucracies that protect these sadists while also bankrupting us.

If you consider stop-and-frisk so un-American, so anti-Constitutional that any judge must immediately enjoin the NYPD from unleashing it on us … well, you’ll never warm a bench in New York City. Unbelievably, victims have brought lawsuits against this wickedness for years. Even more unbelievably, the courts continue excusing it. They see “good arguments on both sides of this debate.” Rather than objecting to the dehumanization and anti-Constitutionality, they quibble that potential victims don’t have “standing” – i.e., haven’t yet become actual victims – and thus cannot sue to stop this horror. They are equally punctilious of other technicalities and callous towards overriding concerns like liberty.

Nonetheless, four incurable optimists have once again asked the court to rescue them. Judge Shira Scheindlin is currently hearing arguments from them and from the City of New York. The latter persists in averring that black and Latino males lack any right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. That putrid position has the City defending the indefensible: when tapes of superiors ordering patrolmen to stop and frisk black teens surfaced at trial, Paul Browne protested that the conversation was taken out of context. And in another such “recording played for the court, … a NYPD captain told officers: ‘the summons [cops give some victims of stop-and-frisk] is a money – generating machine for the city.’” Imagine the gargantuan City of New York balancing its bloated budget on the backs of boys.

One possible outcome of the trial: the judge agrees with the City that “stop and frisk” does indeed curb “crime” while also acknowledging the plaintiffs’ point, that this “crime”-fighting falls disproportionately on them. And so, she grandly decrees, the NYPD’s pedophilia may continue so long as white teens in Manhattan experience their fair share. Wanna bet stop-and-frisk suddenly, ignominiously ends the first time a cop assaults the son of a particularly generous political donor?

This isn’t to say that stop-and-frisk doesn’t have its place. It could be an invaluable tool for protecting New Yorkers and Americans in general – provided cops use it correctly. But they’ll need to move their gangs of rapists from tenements and poor neighborhoods to the halls of legislatures, bureaucracies, governors’ mansions, the White House, courts, and Congress. The thieves, liars and murderers in office threaten us far more lethally than a kid buying ketchup.

If you've suffered the TSA's gate-rape at the airport, you have an inkling of life as a black or Latino man in dystopian New York City: at any time, while minding your own business and peaceably pursuing your affairs, cops may "stop and frisk" you just to see what turns up.

Jaenean Ligon's 17-year-old son was one such collar. She sent him to buy ketchup for the family's dinner one evening — only to have cops phone her to come "identify" him. She understandably panicked, assuming someone had injured or killed her boy. Instead, cops had "stopped and frisked" this innocuous teen running an innocent errand. They had no warrant, suspicion that he had committed a crime, or anything other than a general belief that guys his age and color are all criminals. New Yorkers have endured such humiliation something like 5 million times over the last decade.

The NYPD's top cop, Ray Kelly, has long defended this insult. He whitewashes it as a "service" his uniformed thugs "provide" poor people. He dismisses critics as rich, out-of-touch misers, endeavoring to deprive the impecunious of protection they themselves enjoy: they "probably … live in buildings with doormen, and they have a level of safety that people who live in tenements … don't have."

I've often visited friends in buildings with doormen. Never once have any of these guards, who range from courteous to bored but who are harmless either way, demanded my ID. Nor has even one proposed that he fondle me before alerting my host of my arrival. They would not only be fired but arrested and prosecuted for "providing" such a "service."

The NYPD has groped the public since the 1970's, after Terry v. Ohio empowered its minions to ignore the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. But over the dozen years of his suzerainty, Nanny-sorry, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has dramatically escalated this abuse. He and his accomplices staunchly insist that everyone in the five boroughs is subject to "stop and frisk." Theoretically, tourists from Iowa shopping at Tiffany's and banksters striding along Wall Street are as liable to wind up spread-eagled against a wall with a cop's hand between their legs as the 15-year-old black kid in the South Bronx or Staten Island.

But they don't.

During stop-and-frisk's reign of terror, I've walked an average of 3 miles per day in Manhattan. Yet I've never witnessed one of these legalized attacks. Why? Because I'm almost always in wealthier, white neighborhoods. Authorities ever reserve such egregious contempt for the poorest and most vulnerable among us, in this case young black and Hispanic men from 14 to 21 years of age.

But you needn't take my anecdotal word for it. The NYPD's own data on "stop and frisk," and the exhaustive analyses various parties have run on it, prove that statistically, I am unlikely ever to see a "stop-and frisk," much less become its prey.

As with its myriad other revocations of freedom, the government justifies "stop and frisk" because it supposedly protects citizens — except, of course, for those like Ms. Ligon and her son. Just as the TSA pretends that strip-searching grandmothers somehow vanquishes terrorists, so molesting teens of dusky hue fights crime and even "saves lives," according to Nanny Bloomberg and Ray Kelly. In fact, the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner, Paul Browne, boldly quotes exact figures for that hypothetical: "5,628 lives savedu2014attributable to proactive policing strategies that included stops."

This subterfuge allows another whopper as well: that the NYPD can save even more lives by pawing people in "crime"-ridden neighborhoods, i.e., ones populated by poor folks named "Rivera" or "Washington." (And where much of the "crime" isn't any such thing. Instead, residents exercise their inalienable right to keep and bear arms, to buy and sell without the State's interference, to work or drive a car free of its license, to live where and how they please despite a bureaucrat's displeasure.)

And so, while stop-and-frisk's legion of enemies decry the NYPD's obvious, nauseating racism, Nanny and various commissioners blandly insist that they're fighting "crime" where they find more of it. Why assault Jewish grandmothers shlepping through Bloomingdale's? How many of them are packing heat?

Because in the end, that's what "stop-and-frisk" is all about: it strips guns from the "well-regulated militia." And since most white New Yorkers are neither desperate nor courageous enough to defy Our Rulers' hostility to self-defense, the battle is left to black and Hispanic teens. (Ah, but politicians have their revenge. They regularly imply that only murderers and thieves need guns, not the beardless child a couple of cops are bullying.) Nor are New York's rulers reticent about that goal. Nanny Bloomberg has earned national disrepute for his obsession with depriving everyone but his bodyguards of firearms. And Paul Browne told Britain's Guardian that "commissioner Kelly said he wants gunmen to be deterred from carrying weapons on them in the streets, particularly in those communities most victimised by gun violence.” Gun-violence apart from what the cops inflict, that is.

Meanwhile, Kelly himself provided the best of all reasons for abolishing not only stop-and-frisk, but the NYPD and all police-forces nationwide when he confessed, "Last year, stops by police resulted in the seizure of more than 7,000 illegal weapons, mostly knives, as well as nearly 800 guns. Stops are authorized by New York state criminal-procedure law." Oh, well, then that makes it OK, just as the Nazis legalized slave-labor and genocide. "Every state in the country has a variant of this statute, as does federal law. It is fundamental to policing." What'd I tell you? Abolish "policing" and the labyrinthine bureaucracies that protect these sadists while also bankrupting us.

If you consider stop-and-frisk so un-American, so anti-Constitutional that any judge must immediately enjoin the NYPD from unleashing it on us … well, you'll never warm a bench in New York City. Unbelievably, victims have brought lawsuits against this wickedness for years. Even more unbelievably, the courts continue excusing it. They see "good arguments on both sides of this debate." Rather than objecting to the dehumanization and anti-Constitutionality, they quibble that potential victims don't have "standing" — i.e., haven't yet become actual victims — and thus cannot sue to stop this horror. They are equally punctilious of other technicalities and callous towards overriding concerns like liberty.

Nonetheless, four incurable optimists have once again asked the court to rescue them. Judge Shira Scheindlin is currently hearing arguments from them and from the City of New York. The latter persists in averring that black and Latino males lack any right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. That putrid position has the City defending the indefensible: when tapes of superiors ordering patrolmen to stop and frisk black teens surfaced at trial, Paul Browne protested that the conversation was taken out of context. And in another such "recording played for the court, … a NYPD captain told officers: u2018the summons [cops give some victims of stop-and-frisk] is a money — generating machine for the city.'” Imagine the gargantuan City of New York balancing its bloated budget on the backs of boys.

One possible outcome of the trial: the judge agrees with the City that "stop and frisk" does indeed curb "crime" while also acknowledging the plaintiffs' point, that this "crime"-fighting falls disproportionately on them. And so, she grandly decrees, the NYPD's pedophilia may continue so long as white teens in Manhattan experience their fair share. Wanna bet stop-and-frisk suddenly, ignominiously ends the first time a cop assaults the son of a particularly generous political donor?

This isn't to say that stop-and-frisk doesn't have its place. It could be an invaluable tool for protecting New Yorkers and Americans in general — provided cops use it correctly. But they'll need to move their gangs of rapists from tenements and poor neighborhoods to the halls of legislatures, bureaucracies, governors' mansions, the White House, courts, and Congress. The thieves, liars and murderers in office threaten us far more lethally than a kid buying ketchup.

Becky Akers [send her mail] new novel, Halestorm, is set during the American Revolution. Read it in paperback or on a Kindle.

The Best of Becky Akers

The Last Stoic
by Morgan Wade
Hidden Book Press, 2011
$2.99 for Kindle; $22.50 and 254 pages in the hard copy.

It’s become a truism that America is following the road to depravity, dictatorship, and brutality that ancient Rome paved. As the Feds sped down that path in 2001 with their War on Terror, a Canadian writer perused Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon was “a rich and rewarding read,” Morgan Wade tells us in his Author’s Note for The Last Stoic. “But what struck me most, in passages describing how the ancient ‘golden age’ had passed from prosperity and relative peace to decay and continual war, is how closely the trajectory of the contemporary American empire mirrors that of the Roman empire.”

Indeed, after more research, Mr. Wade “wondered how far one could go” with the parallels. The Last Stoic is his novelistic answer. It presents two boys, one named Marcus who’s a subject of the Roman Empire and the other, Mark, living in the American one. Eighteen hundred years may separate these doppelgangers, but their lives and experiences with tyranny mimic one another so closely that by the novel’s end, only one merged character remains.

A fascinating and very moral premise, one with implicit lessons. Yet the author eschews lecturing and propaganda in favor of analogy and plot. He pulls off his magic so deftly you’ll be gasping, nodding, and sometimes smiling but more often crying with shame for America, as I did.

The similarities frequently had me laughing. Here’s an employee of a government contractor justifying in terms wittily modern his fascist company’s exploitation of a country after Rome’s army has conquered it: “’[The native people]’d have to leave [their land] eventually,’ Gus said, ‘this whole area is going to be converted into olive groves. For oil.’”Likewise, Mr. Wade skewers America’s paranoia and surveillance by describing Rome’s after “barbarians” invade it: “The priest announced that the attacks on Rome were the beginning of the end, the first blow of a final battle between good and evil, that the good citizens of this city should now do their part.”

Our twin heroes, Marcus and Mark, are young adults when we meet them, about to embark on their careers. Both emigrate from small towns on their respective empire’s periphery to their capitals. Marcus travels from Britannia to a Rome that Emperor Caracallus “protects” after the barbarians’ incursion with domestic spying; increasing controls on what citizens may say, do and even believe; and torture for dissidents. Those same evils flourish in the 21^st century when George Bush exploits 9/11 as Mark drives from Canada to New York City. Yet enough prosperity and glamour remain in each nation for our duo of outsiders to promise themselves they’ll succeed and grab their share, whatever the price.

And so they leave their respective, identical families for their new jobs. Which yields Lesson #1: the more things change, the more they stay the same. At nightfall on the road, Marcus eats “goat meat, flatbread, crumbly cheese, pale beans drenched in garlic and oil, and a gritty porridge” at a caupona and sleeps in the stable because prostitutes have already occupied thecaupona’s rooms; meanwhile, Mark sips Budweiser and also prepares to sleep with – or, more accurately, in – his transportation when he pulls into “a rest-stop along a stretch of the freeway where the Interstate became the New Jersey turnpike.” There he watches a woman repeatedly hop from her car into whatever vehicle parks beside hers for half-hour visits. The essentials don’t change, nor do even the details by much.

This correspondence continues as both boys unwittingly pick up a nemesis in their travels, a stranger their own age who’s looking for fame and fortune. Mr. Wade never quotes the Department of Homeland Security’s infamous “If You See Something, Say Something,” but that is precisely the slogan both his villains adopt – though they go it one better. Each watches Marcus/Mark, hoping to spot something he can report and, when nothing materializes, manufacturing a “crime.” Informing on Marcus/Mark turns the nemeses into heroes while delivering their victims to the ancient and modern police-state.

The tortures Marcus and Mark endure as government’s minions try to force “confessions” from them is grotesquely, numbingly the same. The Romans waterboard Marcus; the Americans dehydrate Mark in his “cage.” And then the two trade agonies.

Which brings us to Mr. Wade’s fascinating and flattering technique. He treats his readers as adults, able to follow his leaps in imagination without his spelling everything out. Rather than continuing to describe identical-in-everything-but-the-technicalities incidents in each character’s life, he instead assumes we now realize that if a legionnaire has pummeled Marcus, an American soldier has likewise abused Mark. He may describe the beating from Marcus’ perspective, then switch to Mark’s as he lists the injuries. Once again, this tacitly (and inadvertently: Mr. Wade tells me he’s not an anarchist or even a libertarian) underscores the sameness of government’s atrocities, regardless of its minions’ identity or location in time and space, while emphasizing the State’s evil.

Also unifying the story is Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Both boys’ grandfathers present them with a copy before they leave home; both forget to pack it. Both receive other copies, which they learn to value even beyond their skimpy rations in prison. One unforgettable scene in a novel full of them is the Americans’ forcing Mark to use his copy as toilet paper – on another prisoner. That and the row of crosses with their victims still hanging that Marcus passes soon after leaving home encapsulate these matching empires for me.

Mr. Wade’s phrasings aren’t always felicitous. Some sentences are awkward, and the narrative was often overtaken by the passive voice. Finally, the f-word, other scurrilous language, and orgies sprinkle the pages. These don’t offend, though, because they aren’t gratuitous: rather, they illustrate the corrupt, weak and nauseatingly vulgar societies that mistake torture for “security.”

I strongly recommend The Last Stoic. Read it, but more importantly, urge it on friends and family whose “patriotism” compels them to cheer the American Empire. In this absorbing tale lurks the looking-glass that could persuade them otherwise.

The Last Stoic by Morgan Wade Hidden Book Press, 2011 $2.99 for Kindle; $22.50 and 254 pages in the hard copy.

It's become a truism that America is following the road to depravity, dictatorship, and brutality that ancient Rome paved. As the Feds sped down that path in 2001 with their War on Terror, a Canadian writer perused Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon was "a rich and rewarding read," Morgan Wade tells us in his Author's Note for The Last Stoic. "But what struck me most, in passages describing how the ancient u2018golden age' had passed from prosperity and relative peace to decay and continual war, is how closely the trajectory of the contemporary American empire mirrors that of the Roman empire."

Indeed, after more research, Mr. Wade "wondered how far one could go" with the parallels. The Last Stoic is his novelistic answer. It presents two boys, one named Marcus who's a subject of the Roman Empire and the other, Mark, living in the American one. Eighteen hundred years may separate these doppelgangers, but their lives and experiences with tyranny mimic one another so closely that by the novel's end, only one merged character remains.

A fascinating and very moral premise, one with implicit lessons. Yet the author eschews lecturing and propaganda in favor of analogy and plot. He pulls off his magic so deftly you'll be gasping, nodding, and sometimes smiling but more often crying with shame for America, as I did.

The similarities frequently had me laughing. Here's an employee of a government contractor justifying in terms wittily modern his fascist company's exploitation of a country after Rome's army has conquered it: "'[The native people]'d have to leave [their land] eventually,' Gus said, u2018this whole area is going to be converted into olive groves. For oil.'"Likewise, Mr. Wade skewers America's paranoia and surveillance by describing Rome's after "barbarians" invade it: "The priest announced that the attacks on Rome were the beginning of the end, the first blow of a final battle between good and evil, that the good citizens of this city should now do their part."

Our twin heroes, Marcus and Mark, are young adults when we meet them, about to embark on their careers. Both emigrate from small towns on their respective empire's periphery to their capitals. Marcus travels from Britannia to a Rome that Emperor Caracallus "protects" after the barbarians' incursion with domestic spying; increasing controls on what citizens may say, do and even believe; and torture for dissidents. Those same evils flourish in the 21st century when George Bush exploits 9/11 as Mark drives from Canada to New York City. Yet enough prosperity and glamour remain in each nation for our duo of outsiders to promise themselves they'll succeed and grab their share, whatever the price.

And so they leave their respective, identical families for their new jobs. Which yields Lesson #1: the more things change, the more they stay the same. At nightfall on the road, Marcus eats "goat meat, flatbread, crumbly cheese, pale beans drenched in garlic and oil, and a gritty porridge" at a caupona and sleeps in the stable because prostitutes have already occupied the caupona's rooms; meanwhile, Mark sips Budweiser and also prepares to sleep with — or, more accurately, in — his transportation when he pulls into "a rest-stop along a stretch of the freeway where the Interstate became the New Jersey turnpike." There he watches a woman repeatedly hop from her car into whatever vehicle parks beside hers for half-hour visits. The essentials don't change, nor do even the details by much.

This correspondence continues as both boys unwittingly pick up a nemesis in their travels, a stranger their own age who's looking for fame and fortune. Mr. Wade never quotes the Department of Homeland Security's infamous "If You See Something, Say Something," but that is precisely the slogan both his villains adopt — though they go it one better. Each watches Marcus/Mark, hoping to spot something he can report and, when nothing materializes, manufacturing a "crime." Informing on Marcus/Mark turns the nemeses into heroes while delivering their victims to the ancient and modern police-state.

The tortures Marcus and Mark endure as government's minions try to force "confessions" from them is grotesquely, numbingly the same. The Romans waterboard Marcus; the Americans dehydrate Mark in his "cage." And then the two trade agonies.

Which brings us to Mr. Wade's fascinating and flattering technique. He treats his readers as adults, able to follow his leaps in imagination without his spelling everything out. Rather than continuing to describe identical-in-everything-but-the-technicalities incidents in each character's life, he instead assumes we now realize that if a legionnaire has pummeled Marcus, an American soldier has likewise abused Mark. He may describe the beating from Marcus' perspective, then switch to Mark's as he lists the injuries. Once again, this tacitly (and inadvertently: Mr. Wade tells me he's not an anarchist or even a libertarian) underscores the sameness of government's atrocities, regardless of its minions' identity or location in time and space, while emphasizing the State's evil.

Also unifying the story is Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Both boys' grandfathers present them with a copy before they leave home; both forget to pack it. Both receive other copies, which they learn to value even beyond their skimpy rations in prison. One unforgettable scene in a novel full of them is the Americans' forcing Mark to use his copy as toilet paper — on another prisoner. That and the row of crosses with their victims still hanging that Marcus passes soon after leaving home encapsulate these matching empires for me.

Mr. Wade's phrasings aren't always felicitous. Some sentences are awkward, and the narrative was often overtaken by the passive voice. Finally, the f-word, other scurrilous language, and orgies sprinkle the pages. These don't offend, though, because they aren't gratuitous: rather, they illustrate the corrupt, weak and nauseatingly vulgar societies that mistake torture for "security."

I strongly recommend The Last Stoic. Read it, but more importantly, urge it on friends and family whose "patriotism" compels them to cheer the American Empire. In this absorbing tale lurks the looking-glass that could persuade them otherwise.

Becky Akers [send her mail] new novel, Halestorm, is set during the American Revolution. Read it in paperback or on a Kindle.

The Best of Becky Akers

How to read the "confidential Justice Department memo" whitewashing Our Rulers' outright murder of serfs: as a declaration of war on us specifically and the world in general or as a suicide pact?

That is, assuming you can read it. Not only does the Injustice Department write in its native Jargon, but its screed also suffers from run-on sentences, acronyms, citations, and the bureaucrat's bewildering disregard for clarity and grammar. Then there are the factual errors and outright lies: to cite just one of innumerable examples, a sentence on page 5 asserts, "The Department assumes that the rights afforded by the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause, as well as the Fourth Amendment, attach to a U.S. citizen even while he is abroad." But "the Department" clearly "assumes" no such thing since its entire memo pooh-poohs both amendments and all their protection.

Even more pernicious is "the Department's" deliberate misreading of the Bill of Rights. That document never refers to "citizens" but purposefully to "people." Nor does it enumerate their rights: it cannot, because said rights are infinite in number. Rather, it constrains the State. To that end, it absolutely prohibits government from various crimes, including those "the Department" now encourages, regardless of "the people's" whereabouts or nationality.

But worse than the impenetrable prose and the falsehoods is the memo's wickedness. Utter, unmitigated, fathomless evil shrieks from every paragraph — so overwhelming and so nauseating that while the Injustice Department claims authorship, I contend that this commentary originated not in its halls, demonic as they are, but in Hell.

As such, it declares war on everyone everywhere, though it presumably exempts a handful of Feds — the ones who wrote this balderdash and those who will execute it, so to speak. After all, this "white paper" "concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed" — sans charge or trial — "to be u2018senior operational leaders' of al-Qaida or u2018an associated force' … " We've seen how messy such assassinations are: when the Fedcoats slaughtered a 16-year-old American citizen because of his father's identity — yeah, I thought corruption of blood went out centuries ago, too — they butchered eight other folks as well.

Combine Our Rulers' errant aim with their elastic definition of "terrorist." One of George "War Criminal" Bush's lickspittles memorably insisted that the word could encompass "little old lad[ies] in Switzerland." Not to be outdone, the Department of Homeland Destabilization-sorry, Security included America's veterans, anti-abortionists, Ron Paul's voters — in short, everyone. It seems, then, that we taxpayers are all terrorists. That makes each of us ripe for a federal rubbing out.

Add to these sobering facts Our Rulers' barbarity, which has already rendered us personae non gratae overseas. Now that a drone could strike us anywhere, at any time, taking out all those unfortunates nearby… hmmm. "International pariah" doesn't quite convey the desperation of our plight, does it? What country in its right mind will accept American refugees as more and more try to flee Our Rulers' escalating war on us?

"Oh, it's not that dire," you scoff. "The memo limits federal hit men to snuffing '"senior operational leaders" of al-Qaida or "an associated force."' And I'm just a plain old taxpayer-terrorist." Ah, but expanding the target to taxpayer-terrorists will be child's play for tyrants who wrung from the Fourth Amendment's adamant prohibition of "unreasonable search and seizure" authorization for the TSA's gate-rape.

On the other hand, we might also construe the memo as a suicide pact from dictators so overcome with guilt they want to die.

You'll recall that Our Rulers have long excoriated anyone who "provid[es] material support to terrorists" — or those they allege to so be. And then, what-ho, "[Wicked Witch of the West and Secretary of State Hillary] Clinton Admits US On Same Side As Al Qaeda To Destabilise Assad Government." Now, if fighting on the same side isn't "providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations" — and not just any old terrorists, either, but America's arch-enemy, Al Qaeda — I don't know what is.

Recall as well that Al Qaeda owes its very creation to American busybodies and bureaucrats. Again, I'd say that's pretty material support.

Yet in their own memo, Our Rulers decree death for "senior operational leaders" of "an associated force." And what is more closely "associated" with Al Qaeda than the sociopaths who spent $3 billion of our money birthing it and currently battle beside it?

After annihilating liberty, the economy, millions of lives worldwide, and basic decency, perhaps Our Rulers have finally plumbed depths so satanic even they can't stand themselves. Maybe they're pleading for someone to end their miserable existences with a drone.

Alas, I fear we're insanely optimistic. These unconscionable monsters will continue marching their megalomaniacal, murderous path until the rest of the world finally tires of them, as it did of Hitler. With their risible but deadly War on Terror, their international skullduggery and manipulation, their cruelty, corruption and now, the signing of our death warrants en masse, the Feds are as much a rogue regime as the Nazis ever were. And they are conjuring the perfect storm: stripping us of our guns while codifying "indefinite military detention" and their "right" to murder anyone anywhere.

Let us pray über Alles rise against this Axis of evil.

Becky Akers [send her mail] new novel, Halestorm, is set during the American Revolution. Read it in paperback or on a Kindle.

The Best of Becky Akers

Produced and directed by Joaquin Fernandez and Colin Gunn. Studio: Gunn Productions in association with Exodus Mandate. Running time: 1hour and 42 minutes. Becky's short review: I wish I were an octopus so I could award this terrific film 8 thumbs up!

Two quirks make me the wrong audience for Colin Gunn's documentary, IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Christianity in America. First, I dislike movies in general (I'd much rather read — a problem Mr. Gunn nicely resolves here). Second, I don't have kids. So while the government's "educational" gulag outrages my anarchist convictions, I have no personal stake in the issue beyond the years Our Rulers stole from my childhood and the taxes they pilfer to finance their scam.

But such is Mr. Gunn's genius, charming Scottish accent, and devotion to his Lord and Savior that his film riveted me nonetheless. I strongly recommend IndoctriNation to everyone: Christian or non-Christian; teacher, parent or student; and even the childless like me. But beware: if you have sacrificed Junior to the public schools, IndoctriNation's 102 minutes will number among your most uncomfortable and damning.

It's old news by now that Leviathan's schools have miserably failed to educate their victims in academic knowledge even as they wildly succeed at training them to obey the State. (Intriguingly, though most Americans understand this, they stubbornly insist that their school is different and better, according to polls Indoctrination presents). So the film only briefly rehearses the stats on illiteracy; American students' plummeting rank in the world; schools' extreme, even lethal, physical dangers; their immorality and sexual predation; the easy access to alcohol and drugs, whether illicit, prescription, or — most horrifying of all — administered by the school; etc.

Mr. Gunn then moves quickly to his primary thesis: that devout Christians committed to honoring the Bible will never entrust their kids to the State's brainwashing, however innocent, necessary, or beneficial Our Rulers claim that brainwashing is. Mr. Gunn and the scholars he interviews, such as R.C. Sproul, Erwin Lutzer, Voddie Baucham, Jr., and LRC's own Gary North, cite Scripture after Scripture while contending that pious parents will shoulder their God-given responsibility for "bring[ing] up [their children] in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." That means instructing kids at home.

Nor does IndoctriNation allow the dodge of "private" schools (which the State heavily regulates nonetheless), even if those institutions are Christian. The Bible charges parents alone with the duty of teaching their children, and IndoctriNation unflinchingly hews to that. (It unflinchingly hews to the Bible as a whole, in fact. There's no "let's-make-eternal-truths-and-the-Almighty-relevant-to-temporal,-fallen-man" squishiness here, thank God. If you like your religion pure and undefiled, IndoctriNation is for you.)

I imagine homeschooling is a daunting prospect, especially if you have several progeny. (Mr. Gunn is no hypocrite: he and his wife teach all eight of their kids themselves.) Perhaps that's why so many Christians insist that the Bible calls them — or, more accurately, their helpless offspring — to be "salt and light" in the public schools; these folks assume against all reason and Scripture that their children will live a Godly life among the mocking, hateful heathen. Mr. Gunn blows that rationalization sky-high with tragic figures on how many graduates of the State's propaganda-mills abandon their faith. And one young lady tells IndoctriNation that her school was so intensely hostile she not only hid her beliefs, she overtly denied being a Christian when so accused. Adults with many years of studying the Bible under their belts would quake at confronting such an adverse arena; what of a child who may have confessed Christ as Savior only a year or two ago? Are parents who expect their children to withstand the schools any kinder than the Romans who threw our spiritual fathers to the lions? As R.C. Sproul poignantly puts it, "We don't lose [our children], we give them away" to the government when we refuse to teach them ourselves.

Along with the "salt and light" crowd go those misguided evangelicals who want to "reclaim" the schools for Christianity. Mr. Gunn shows this for the fool's errand that it is as he explores the history and philosophy of public schooling in America. Such schooling was never a Christian endeavor; rather, it bitterly opposed Christianity from the very beginning. Statists in the early 19th century imported the system from Prussia, where the goal was to produce compliant, passive cannon fodder for Frederick the Great's militarism. A bit later, American socialists such as Horace Mann and John Dewey enthusiastically echoed Karl Marx's demand that the State rip children from their families. IndoctriNation proves that public schooling has always been a godless enterprise designed to strip Americans of their literacy, independence, and faith while inculcating reverence for Leviathan. Given this context, the evangelicals' dream of restoring prayer to the schools becomes utter blasphemy.

Mr. Gunn packages this treasury of information in a cute gimmick that becomes a metaphor. He bought an old school bus (which turned out to be as broken as the government's schools and which he demolishes at the movie's end — hint, hint). Into this dilapidated vehicle, he loaded his family for "the field trip of a lifetime," as the blurb on IndoctriNation's jewel case puts it. They toured the country for 3 weeks, visiting such sites as Dayton, Tennessee (scene of the "Scopes Monkey Trial") and New Harmony, Indiana (where Robert Owen established his socialist paradise and schools). Along the way, Mr. Gunn chats with several teachers and a principal who tried to work as Christians in the public schools' Satanic milieu. One of the teachers was fired; his colleague and the principal both resigned after realizing they could bring about as much "salt and light" to the schools as they could to a brothel.

Like the rest of Mr. Gunn's award-winning oeuvre, IndoctriNation is an exercise in excellence. Its imagination and gentle humor are as endearing as the filmmaker's Scottish burr. But don't take my word for it, given my lack of credentials on this subject. A professor of communications whose passion is educational reform also watched IndoctriNation at my request and was as enthusiastic as I; her only criticism was that it doesn't mention churches as handmaidens of parental teaching. Meanwhile, I can't wait to sample our hero's other works, including Act Like Men: A Titanic Lesson in Manliness ("In the face of that disaster [the Titanic's sinking], courageous men sprang into action to ensure that women and children would be saved. Yet, in the 21st century, manhood seems to be dying") and The Monstrous Regiment of Women ("Extolling Femininity, Blasting Feminism" according to its trailer).

If you still haven't resolved to rescue your child from Leviathan's fatal embrace, I leave you with words of shattering wisdom from the father of a student massacred at Columbine High School. This courageous and heartbroken man admits to Mr. Gunn that he knew how demonic public schooling is and that he had no business consigning his boy to it. "I was a Christian, a believer," he says, "but very weak, um, lukewarm. My son was in a public school… I knew how bad the public schools were, and I knew that because I was in the public schools. … It was my responsibility to make sure that my son was safe, that he was educated properly. But I failed that. I put him in a pagan school where they teach there is no God, there is no creation, there's evolution based on a cosmic accident, and evolution breaks down to one simple belief, and that is that the strong kill the weak as a form of survival, and that there's nothing wrong with that. … [The killers, one of whom wore a T-shirt reading u2018Survival of the Fittest'] had taken evolution much further than most people do, but if you stop and think through it, their logic was correct if evolution is true. And yet it is taught in the school, and I put my son there even though I'm a Christian.

"So when we talk about my son's murder," he continues, obviously struggling for composure, "yes, it's right to condemn these two murderers, it's right to condemn the school system that taught these wicked things. But you must remember, I'm the one who put him there.

"And I'm the one who's responsible for his death."

Becky Akers [send her mail] new novel, Halestorm, is set during the American Revolution. Read it in paperback or on a Kindle.

The Best of Becky Akers

Hold onto your hat: this is gonna be a wild ride.

We begin with a plunge off the mountainside, a stunner so shocking we'll question our sanity: John "The Pervert" Pistole, Chief Deviant at the TSA, has finally done something — gulp — right.

Go ahead, try to recover: I'll wait. Deep breath, relax, and repeat. All set?

OK, let's try it again. The Pervert, who legalized routine sexual assault on the public at large — an atrocity no regime anywhere, however brutal or totalitarian, has ever previously attempted or even contemplated –, has behaved laudably.

To wit, he stood up to the even more reprehensible lowlifes in Congress.

And poor Perv is taking heat for it, too. The TSA's army of critics — yay, guys, go! Pulverize this filthy, vile agency! — has excoriated him across the internet. "TSA claims Congress has no jurisdiction over it; refuses to attend hearings," screams one while another's headline blares, "TSA Claims It Is Above Congressional Oversight." As the latter explains, "The TSA has refused to attend a House Transportation hearing … , with agency head John Pistole personally refusing to appear and declaring that the Congressional Committee has u2018no jurisdiction over the TSA'. The hearing … [was] held by the Subcommittee on Aviation, a part of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (TIC). It is titled HOW BEST TO IMPROVE OUR NATION'S AIRPORT PASSENGER SECURITY SYSTEM THROUGH COMMON SENSE SOLUTIONS."

As such, this dog-and-pony show was one in an endless series of such "hearings" by various committees and subcommittees, all with similarly tiresome, falsely positive, PR-type headings. Your Intrepid Reporter has commented on several of these monstrosities. They're as common as corrupt politicians and do absolutely nothing to "improve" the TSA (an impossibility anyway, as absurd as "improving" cancer) or even change it. In fact, over the years that Congress has wasted its time and our money on this nonsense, the TSA has degenerated, if that's possible, going from an annoying, dangerous, and completely unconstitutional horror to an annoying, dangerous, completely unconstitutional, gate-raping and porno-scanning horror.

Even The Perv noted the multiplicity of these hearings — and the TSA's usual attendance at them. In a "Statement in Response to House T[ransporation] & I[nfrastructure] Subcommittee Request for TSA to Participate in Aviation Security Hearing," The Perv announced, "In the 112th Congress alone, TSA witnesses have testified at 38 hearings and provided 425 briefings for Members of Congress." Bingo. And has that achieved anything beyond providing make-work for the otherwise unemployable in Washington DC? Have passengers traipsed to an airport after any of these hearings and breathed freedom's fresh air sans blue-shirted thugs interrogating and strip-searching them?

And so I reluctantly submit that we should applaud The Perv for calling Congress on its charade. Here are politicians hoping to score points with us beleaguered serfs by scolding our assailants — all while continuing to "appropriate" the plunder that pays said assailants and buys their toys, whose manufacturers kick back-sorry, contribute to the politicians' campaigns. It's a tidy system in which only the serfs lose, nor has Congress any intention whatever of ending it. The Perv simply wearied of his duty as punching bag — though I grin as I imagine his fear of actual justice given his objections to Congress' anemic slaps on the wrist.

Notice, too, that Perv didn't defy Congress, as his legion of enemies charge, but only a committee he insists has no jurisdiction. That's not to say the TSA doesn't routinely flout Congress' dictates, proving that appointed rather than elected leeches control the country (and if we want to recover our freedom, we must extirpate the bureaucracies as well as the political offices.) To cite just two of hundreds of examples, an "acting director" at the TSA "refused to provide members of Congress with the newest version of the TSA’s screening manual," while another minion shrugged at the Senate's rebuke after he violated the Privacy Act.

Add to these institutional insults the personal ones the TSA's brutes have visited on congresscriminals. After Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) voted against unionizing the TSA, its lackeys "singled him out" for porno-scanning. And who can forget Rand Paul's "detainment"? Most recently, we learned that LaWanda exposed the chest of a 17-year-old girl whose uncle happens to be Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX).

You might think such challenges would have long ago driven Congress to annihilate the TSA. Alas, no. Even when the agency degrades their womenfolk, these wusses don't take a horsewhip to Perv and his ruffians. Instead, they mewl for a "federal investigation." If the TSA spits on Congress, it's because these nauseating sissies merely wipe it off and slink away with muttered thanks.

Meanwhile, The Perv seems to be factually correct when he claims the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee [TIC] lacks power over the TSA. But we won't take his word for it; heck, we wouldn't take this perpetual liar's word on where the sun rises. Still, it's curious that if TIC wields the authority over the TSA that its outgoing chairman, John "The Toupee" Mica (R-FL], claims, its website doesn't mention it. Under "Jurisdiction," TIC lists "Issues and agencies," including several of the latter by name ("Federal Aviation Administration…National Transportation Safety Board…"). But "Transportation Security Administration" is noticeably absent.

That didn't daunt The Toupee. Recall that this weasel and utter hypocrite says he created the TSA (until he first asserted this 2 or 3 years ago, I never heard anyone — neither the media nor his fellow politicians — credit this equally perpetual liar with such a crime). But now he pretends to despise his hatchling: "Unfortunately, … this mushrooming agency has spun out of control…" he thundered in answer to Perv's no-show. Rich, isn't it? Rather like a murderer's lamenting that his hatchet "spun out of control" to leave a trail of traumatized victims behind him, much to his helpless bewilderment.

But whether or not The Toupee established the TSA, he and his fellow sociopaths hold its purse-strings. Far from "spinning out of control," the TSA dances only as long as Congress pays the piper.

Becky Akers [send her mail] new novel, Halestorm, is set during the American Revolution. Read it in paperback or on a Kindle.

The Best of Becky Akers

As totalitarianism descends, Our Rulers wax increasingly absurd. No particular of our lives is too petty or personal to engross them; like a gossipy old retiree with nothing better to do all day, they monitor every detail of our existence, controlling and pitting us against each other. Even a miniature schnauzer named Mikey is no longer beneath the federal government's scrutiny.

In a suburb of New York City earlier this month, the Department of Injustice extorted $58,750 from a “senior citizen complex” on behalf of an elderly widower. It seems the "complex" prohibited pets, but when Jack Biegel and his 74-year-old wife moved there, she refused to relinquish her “comfort dog,” Mikey.

If you are fortunate enough to reside someplace sane, you may not recognize that term. Many apartments in New York City and its environs are co-operatives or condominiums (shortened to "co-op" and "condo," though both words can refer to either a single apartment or the building as a whole). Residents own these rather than renting them, and they elect a slate of their neighbors to manage the building. These "boards" decide an astronomical number of specificities; remember, no aspect of life is too picayune to escape regulation now, especially in the Big-Bureaucracy-on-the-Hudson.

Boards determine such minutiae as whether inhabitants may install washing machines in their units; to whom they may sell (yep: if you receive an offer to buy your property, you devoutly hope the board allows you to accept it); the conditions under which one may sub-let; whether owners may keep pets and if so, what kind. Nor do these diktats originate with the boards: the feds, New York State and New York City have compiled vast bodies of law and precedent that govern virtually all of them. For instance, regulations define the grounds on which a board may reject the sale of your apartment (acceptable reason: the buyer, who must submit his tax-returns for the board’s perusal, doesn’t earn enough to pay his share of the common expenses each month. Unacceptable: he looks deranged, or he sexually assaults people at airports as one of the TSA’s leeches, and the board fears he might pursue his vocation in the building’s elevators).

Naturally, such smothering regulation spawns industrious efforts to circumvent it. “Comfort dog” is one of them. Say you fall in love with an apartment in a building whose board has outlawed pets (which the law allows, though it controls how that prohibition plays out). But you also love your dog. What to do? Well, you claim that the dog is necessary to your health and well-being, and under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the board must exempt you from its rule — regardless of whether other folks bought homes there precisely to escape such nuisances as incessant barking, the cockroaches drawn to open containers of dog-food, etc.

The DOJ admits that the aptly named Mrs. Biegel suffered from an entire emergency room’s worth of diseases: “severe respiratory problems, depression, anxiety, cirrhosis, diabetes, and decreased vision and hearing.” The New York Law Journal adds that these maladies left her “very frail, … on oxygen twenty-four hours a day and … unable to leave her home without an ambulance” (the Journal does not post articles online; I take this quote from its issue of Nov. 13, 2012). Predictably, Mrs. Biegel died. But she had the prudence to do so one month after she and her husband finally obeyed the board’s repeated requests to honor its policy against pets. 

"So?" you ask. Ah, dear reader, such naïveté is why you'll forever languish as a mere taxpayer rather than ascending to the heights of gowned clown. Judge Arthur Spatt sided with the DOJ in pretending there was cause-and-effect here. Clearly, a very ill and elderly woman died not from her many infirmities but because the hard-hearted board compelled her to relinquish Mikey. And if you further demand, "Hey, now wait a minute. Did the board force these opportunists to live there? Why didn't they just buy an apartment someplace else?", you further prove your complete unsuitability for any position in government, even that of a lowly dog-catcher.

Not only will the grieving hubby make $58,750 on her death (and remember that, like the State, buildings have no money but what they collect from residents, so this greedball has robbed his neighbors with help from the DOJ), but the Law Journal reports that the board must henceforth “notify the office of the Eastern District U.S. Attorney … every time it denies a request from a resident for an accommodation for the next three years.” Which means that not only will the board micro-manage the luckless denizens' lives, but bureaucrats at the U.S. Attorney’s office will, too. Nor does that satisfy the DOJ’s lust for power: all the co-op’s “employees also will have to undergo training [sic for u2018indoctrination'] in compliance with the federal Fair Housing Act…”

Tragically, such utter nonsense, tyranny, meddling, and waste of time and money is entirely normal in New York. The rule of law and all common sense vanished decades ago from its intensively regulated real-estate market. In their places reign bureaucratic and political caprice. Very frequently, these conflict: for example, the New York State Department of Human Rights ordered one building to construct a ramp from the sidewalk to the front door after a resident complained of discrimination against her wheelchair, but New York City's Department of Buildings prohibited the ramp because its requirements for the slope of such things would have extended it to the middle of the street. Funny, yes — but not to Ms. Wheelchair's fellow residents. They footed the bills as the co-op's lawyers dueled with two sets of bureaucrats.

Government's stranglehold on co-ops and condos also voids private agreements. You may think you have moved into a building free of noisy mutts only to discover that your neighbor upstairs needs three German shepherds as "comfort dogs." This sows immense discord — whose arbitration excuses yet more intrusion from the State, as the Biegels demonstrate. Nor are dogs its only ploy: any issue, from whether residents may place potted plants on their terraces to the mold in the walls they claim the building hasn't eliminated, can become the next legal sinkhole. One disgruntled, avaricious owner or a bureaucrat looking for something to prosecute can cost each resident hundreds or thousands of dollars as the building pays legal fees, awards, and fines.

But dogs remain a favorite gimmick. In fact, attorneys specializing in real-estate law joke that only a fool would argue against the canine's side in any lawsuit because “the dog always wins.”

And liberty loses.

Becky Akers [send her mail] new novel, Halestorm, is set during the American Revolution. Read it in paperback or on a Kindle.

The Best of Becky Akers

You may remember Andrea Abbott: she was Mother of the Year in 2011 when she protested the TSA's ogling and groping of her teen-aged daughter at Nashville International Airport. "According to an affidavit, Abbott first refused to allow her daughter — then 14 — to go through a body scan machine, saying she didn’t want u2018someone to see our bodies naked.'" Good for her! If Leviathan employed normal people instead of psychopaths, the TSA's perverts would have profusely apologized for their voyeurism and pedophilia and slithered back to their sewer.

Instead, "Abbott and her daughter went through a metal detector and TSA Officer [sic for u2018deviant'] Karen King was sent to conduct a pat-down [sic for u2018sexual assault']. King testified that before the pat-down [sic for u2018sexual assault'], Abbott yelled in her face that she didn’t want anyone u2018touching her daughter’s crotch.'” See? Told you this lady is an exemplary mother!

But alas, she also committed an unforgivable sin in the totalitarian state: she assumed that her authority over her daughter supersedes Leviathan's, that bureaucrats may not interact with, let alone touch, the girl sans parental permission. "Abbott was accompanying her daughter to the gate but not flying herself. She eventually allowed" — intriguing but expected choice of words from the corporate media: wanna bet she "allowed" this the way most passengers "allow" the TSA to molest them? — "her daughter to undergo the pat-down, but then refused one for herself."

You can guess the outcome. In Amerika's police-state, cops arrest women resisting gate-rape.

Ms. Abbott's case came to trial this week. And yep, the jury found her guilty of "disorderly conduct."

I occasionally hear from intrepid readers who vow to defy the TSA when it attacks them or their families at the checkpoint. I always advise against this: a far more effective and prudent course is to avoid nationalized aviation no matter what. Defiance so mild or natural that no rational person would recognize it as such — for really, what is more natural than a mother's fight to protect her child? — will result in arrest. These folks then respond, "Fine, let the TSA call the cops, because any jury will exonerate me."

Au contraire. Courts and juries were once more of a viable weapon against tyrants, and intended to be so, too: the Founding Fathers could not conceive that self-respecting adults would side with a dictatorial, abusive government against one of their own, that they would applaud the State's savaging of a citizen who has done nothing wrong or, in Ms. Abbott's case, behaved heroically.

Tragically, juries have degenerated until they are nothing but another of the State's tools. Progressive government has assiduously infantilized Americans over the last century; most today are about 4 years old emotionally and intellectually. They look on Leviathan with the same trust and affection that they did their teacher in kindergarten. Like her, the State is always right. And anyone daring to challenge even its outright, obvious crimes is a troublemaker threatening the whole class. The good children want said troublemaker to stand in the corner while they cozy up to the teacher. They cravenly glow as she praises their obedience.

I applaud the vital and essential work of the Fully Informed Jury Association, but they struggle with a Herculean task. Until they succeed, no dissident should ever gamble his life and freedom on twelve snot-nosed, squalling babies.

Meanwhile, Ms. Abbott continues to stand tall, a heroine among pygmies. The judge scolded her as though she rather than her assailants is the malefactor and sentenced her to a year's probation. "Her defense attorney, Brent Horst, said she was disappointed in the verdict, but felt she got a fair trial. u2018She just wanted to stand on principle, because she felt that she had done nothing wrong,' said Horst, who handled the case pro bono. u2018And I admire her for that.'”

So do all free adults.

Becky Akers [send her mail] is a free-lance writer and historian. Her novel, Halestorm, is available in paperback or for Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony, or for your computer.

The Best of Becky Akers

In addition to death and taxes, we can add several more certainties to Benjamin Franklin's list. First, the TSA will savage passengers, particularly those who are sick, elderly or otherwise vulnerable, in ways that would have done the Nazis proud. And second, the agency will defend such savagery as "proper procedure" no matter how horrifying or barbaric.

Meet Michelle Dunaj, a 34-year-old woman with leukemia who will repair to a hospice on October 17 for her last few months on earth. Before surrendering to the inevitable, however, Ms. Dunaj decided to take one final flight, “…what I call an ‘end-of-life trip’ because you want to see your family and friends, …” she explained. She also planned to visit the Aloha State: "Hawaii was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen … Number One on my bucket list.”

And so Ms. Dunaj "call[ed] the airline ahead of time, asking for a wheelchair, carrying documentation for her feeding tubes and making sure she had prescriptions for all her medications, including five bags of saline solution." Grapple with that, if you will, and measure our enslavement thereby, that a dying serf must grovel to Our Rulers, corporate and otherwise, before she may travel.

Eventually, this plucky passenger flew from her home in Michigan to Seattle enroute for Hawaii; she reports "no problems" on the initial leg of her journey. From this we deduce that Ms. Dunaj is exceptionally easygoing since the TSA's gate-rape consists of nothing but problems — egregious, enormous, you-go-to-prison-for-years-if-you-prey-on-people-elsewhere-than-the-checkpoint-and-in-any-clothes-but-the-TSA's-polyester-uniforms problems. We can also infer that the medical tubes protruding from her body, and the bandages covering them, earned her the standard abuse all passengers endure.

But tyranny's arbitrariness kicked in on her flight from Seattle to Hawaii, when the tubes and bandages that had previously passed unnoticed suddenly snapped the Gestapo to brutal attention: "she received a full pat-down [sic for u2018sexual assault'] in the security line … and had to lift her shirt" — ponder that for a moment: the federal government ordering a taxpayer to expose herself. Does despotism come any more debauched? — "and pull back bandages so agents could get a good look. … Dunaj said a female agent performed the pat-down [sic for u2018sexual assault'] and asked her to lift up her shirt after feeling the tubes going into Dunaj’s chest and abdomen."

Yet this blatantly dictatorial, criminally callous atrocity isn't what agitated the long-suffering Ms. Dunaj. Rather, "she said everyone else in line got a look, too. u2018My issue is: It was in front of everyone, and everyone was looking at me like I was a criminal or like I was doing something wrong,' Dunaj [said]…'It shouldn’t have been in front of everyone.'” No, it shouldn't have been at all.

Recall that after annihilating liberty, the TSA substitutes a few measly "rights"; one of them is its version of "privacy": "All passengers have important rights during a pat-down [sic for u2018sexual assault']. You have the right to request the pat-down [sic for u2018sexual assault'] be conducted in a private room … "

And what happened when our terminally ill passenger "requested" just that? Our Masters refused. After all, what "rights" they grant, they can also revoke — precisely why the State hypes "civil rights" while liberty knows only "inalienable" ones. Ms. Dunaj "said her suggestion for a more private pat-down was dismissed. u2018I asked them if they thought [the checkpoint] was an appropriate location, and they told me that everything was fine,' she said."

Remember those bags of saline? Yep: they formed as irresistible a target for the TSA's psychopaths as Ms. Dunaj herself. "She said another agent punctured one of the saline bags she was carrying, ruining it." Perhaps her imminent death has exhausted Ms. Dunaj's outrage, because rather than berating the ruffian responsible, she simply tolerated the malfeasance. “I didn’t want to start getting upset" — "Start"? Heck, I'd have been screaming and throwing things by now — "and swearing and causing more of a scene or issue … But it definitely wasn’t handled properly.” That receives my vote for Understatement of the Year.

And what was Our Rulers' reaction to this unconscionable molestation of a dying woman? The usual: "u2018TSA security officers are trained to work with each traveler to ensure a respectful screening process,' the TSA said in a statement" — despite the clear and convincing evidence that they insult, mortify and endanger every passenger. "…a physical pat down is still necessary in some cases to resolve an alarm at the walk through metal detector or an anomaly detected by advanced imaging technology. TSA officers are trained to perform pat downs in a dignified manner" — just as the IRS's thieves are trained to steal our money "fairly" — "and, at any point, passengers can request a private screening with a witness present. We are sensitive to passengers [sic] concerns about their screening experience and take every passenger's complaint seriously. … We work to make our screening procedures as minimally invasive as possible" — go ahead and punch a hole in the wall at such contemptuously flagrant lies: I did, and aside from a broken hand, I feel better — "while still providing the level of security that the American people want" — yo, Goebbels: the American people have shrieked over and over that they want the TSA abolished — "and deserve." OK, we'll give him that: the sheeple do indeed deserve the TSA.

But this infuriating propaganda wasn't enough: a day later, the agency that lies about everything all the time libeled its victim as a liar: "TSA said in a statement, u2018At no point did a TSA officer open the passenger's medically necessary liquids and the passenger was never asked to remove or pull off any bandages.'" And yes, indeedy, out came the boilerplate on "procedures": "u2018We have determined that our screening procedures were followed,' [TSA Northwest Region spokeswoman Lorie Dankers] said late Tuesday."

Ms. Dunaj has publicized her ordeal because she "hopes" it "might change the way the Transportation Security Administration treats travelers with medical conditions." Alas, tragically similar stories from thousands of "travelers with medical conditions" — everyone from a state legislator to a man wearing a urostomy-bag — haven't diminished such persecution yet.

And even as the TSA's deviants were mortifying Ms. Dunaj in Seattle, their cohorts at Kansas City International Airport were torturing a "cancer survivor [who] had bilateral mastectomies in 2007." Though Marcia Deitrick "is no longer shy about her experience, she is protective of her body. u2018I do not want somebody touching me,' Deitrick said." Well, who does?

"Deitrick said she has always opted for the body scanner to avoid a pat down, but this time, that machine was not enough. Deitrick said the TSA agent asked if she was wearing something on her chest.  She soon realized it was her scars the TSA screener took issue with." Let us pause once more and muse: Amerika's police-state has criminalized scars, for pity's sake. "The employee radioed in u2018an anomaly,' … and told Deitrick she need [sic] to check her manually. u2018Then she ran the backs of her hands around my breasts in full view of everybody,” Deitrick said. u2018She was nice, she was polite. But she didn’t ask me if I wanted a private screening. … I’m not an anomaly. I’m the reality of breast cancer just like … 2.9 million women are, and I think that we deserve better … . We deserve to have TSA screeners who know what they’re looking at."

What is it with this tame acquiescence to utterly degrading dictatorship? Lady, you "deserve" to get on a plane without a pervert's pawing or ogling you. Demanding that the TSA commit either crime "better" is like demanding that a rapist in the alley woo you with wine first.

Chardonnay, anyone? Or does grass suit just as well? Baaaa, baaaaaa.

Becky Akers [send her mail] is a free-lance writer and historian. Her novel, Halestorm, is available in paperback or for Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony, or for your computer.

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Remember “fusion centers”? Under the Department of Homeland Security’s aegis, their bumbling bureaucrats unabashedly spy on taxpayers while painting anyone who opposes Leviathan in even the smallest degree as a terrorist. Or, as the DHS puts it, “State and major urban area fusion centers (fusion centers) serve as focal points within the state and local environment for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between the federal government and state, local, tribal, territorial … and private sector partners.”

Yep, “fusion centers” are yet another boondoggle that enriches Our Rulers and their corporate cronies while decimating liberty. No one who understands the State expected otherwise. But now “Congressional investigators” have caught on: they’ve announced that “fusion centers” have “failed to provide virtually any useful intelligence. … The report found that the centers ‘forwarded intelligence of uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.’” Oh, heavens, say it ain’t so.

Surprise, surprise: money went missing, too. “The investigators also discovered that federal officials cannot account for as much as $1.4 billion in taxpayer money earmarked for fusion centers and that some of the centers listed on paper by the Homeland Security Department do not even exist. … The fusion centers quickly became a black hole for taxpayer money …. The fusion centers were run by state and local officials, but were funded through grants to states from the Federal Emergency Management Agency with little oversight. That made it easy for state and local officials to divert the federal money earmarked for the centers to other things, including sport utility vehicles and dozens of flat-screen televisions for use by state and local agencies.”

Prepare for another shock: Our Rulers lied about these crimes. “Top officials of the Homeland Security Department have known about the problems for years, but hid an internal department report on the program’s flaws from Congress while continuing to tell lawmakers and the public that the fusion centers were highly valuable … . A 2010 internal assessment by the department discovered, for instance, that four of its claimed 72 fusion centers did not exist, even as department officials kept using the 72 figure publicly with Congress.”

Ah, but “fusion centers” do have their uses, chief among them those lucrative corporate contracts and tightening our shackles. So while “Congressional investigators” have exploded “counterterrorism” as the raison d’etre for these Orwellian, completely unconstitutional monsters, look for them to flourish and prosper. No heads at DHS will roll; no congresscriminals will propose reining in this horrific bureaucracy, let alone abolishing it; those wimps won’t even mind that the agency lied to them and repeatedly played them for fools. “Fusion centers” are not only intrinsic but invaluable to the police-state.

Becky Akers [send her mail] is a free-lance writer and historian. Her novel, Halestorm, is available in paperback or for Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony, or for your computer.

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Who's more obsessed with the fluids we ingest, Mayor Mike "Nanny" Bloomberg or the TSA?

New York City's Board of Health, whose members Nanny appoints, will vote this week to restrict the quantity of soda consenting adults may sell and other consenting adults may buy to 16 ounces. Though only in certain venues: we are still supposedly free to purchase two-liter jugs of such poison (nope, I don't drink soda. Hate it, in fact) from supermarkets. But if you wish to slurp from a 20-ounce cup at the movies, you'll have to head for China, Russia, or some other place freer than Bloom-burg-on-the-Hudson.

Because Nanny hasn't banned the stuff outright, he insists he's just your average busybody instead of a megalomaniacal dictator on a power-spree. "All we're doing here is educating," he lied. "[Compelling you to buy soda in the size I decree] forces you to see the difference."

Nanny's got plenty of accomplices among the mainstream media's morons. They obligingly continue to discuss the issue on Nanny's terms — the red herring of health — rather than frame it truly as yet another casualty among our few remaining freedoms. One of them blithered in the New York Slimes, "With 58 percent of adults in New York City overweight or obese and 5,800 deaths a year in the city because of obesity, it is evident that some people just aren't responsible enough to feed themselves." Yep, I'll pause while you catch your breath. The arrogance stunned me senseless, too.

But wait, it gets better. Though avoirdupois is an issue so specific to each individual that even the socialists haven't found a way to redistribute it, this dimwit tries hard nonetheless: "If New Yorkers reduced portion size to 16 ounces from 20 ounces for one sugary drink every two weeks, it would collectively save approximately 2.3 million pounds over one year." From this, Dimwit deduces, "A nanny is just what New York City, and the rest of America, needs." Bloomberg for president, oh, yay.

But while Nanny and lackeys like Dimwit presume we're foolish children who can't decide for ourselves how much to drink, the TSA runs to the opposite extreme. It pretends we're diabolically clever terrorists hoping to blow up our flights with our beverages.

A passenger waiting at his gate in the Port Columbus [Ohio] International Airport recently filmed two of the TSA's minions doing what they do best: harassing innocent, peaceful passengers. Blue shirts and gloves glowing (too much time near the X-rated X-ray scanners?), the duo ordered victims to present their potables for "testing." Then they waved a magic strip of paper over the liquid and dripped a potion the TSA won't identify on the paper. (As Bill Fisher, one of the agency's worthiest critics, put it, "Now the[y] expose people's drinks to some unknown chemical when OSHA regulations require a Manufacturers Safety Data Sheet for any substance that humans contact"). This song-and-dance supposedly proved that passengers were swilling water, not gasoline.

I suppose it's a weird sort of compliment: we're not only terrorists but superhuman ones who chug toxic chemicals. Anyone for a side of ground glass with your liquid explosive?

Meanwhile, our anonymous cinematographer points out that he recorded the TSA's hocus-pocus "inside the terminal, well beyond the security check and [with drinks] purchased inside" that area. In other words, screeners had already ogled, irradiated and groped these folks while rifling their bags. So even the TSA tacitly admits its security theater is bogus by repeatedly pestering passengers.

If you're thinking this story is déjà vu all over again, you're right. In July, KJCT-TV in Colorado reported that the TSA was snooping into travelers' drinks at the gate. That unleashed a national firestorm, with taxpayers vehemently condemning the gate-rapists' overreach.

The agency's response — or non-response — then was the same as now: "We've been doing this for years." Kinda like the shoplifter with bulging pockets telling the store's detective, "Hey, it's OK. I been takin' whatever I want for years."

The TSA blames this outrage — and its ridiculous restrictions of liquids and gels in general — on Britain's infamous "Liquid Bomb Plot" from 2006. Supposedly, 25 terrorists planned to smuggle fluids aboard several flights, mix them together in the planes' lavatories, and blow the jets sky-high.

That may be fine for a Hollywood thriller, but it's pretty much impossible otherwise. You don't just mix up liquid bombs as easily as you do a martini. Rather, the components require precise laboratory conditions and freezing temperatures, or they fizzle, singing the would-be bomber but not much else.

Terrorists know this even if politicians and bureaucrats don't. That may be why the British government's case against the "bombers" fell apart in court: no one seriously hoping to sabotage a flight would waste his time with a liquid bomb in an airliner's lavatory. Jurors convicted only three defendants — and on lesser charges, not terrorism.

But the TSA never allows facts to thwart its mission of training slaves to obey, however silly their masters' dictates. Nor am I merely speculating: another passenger who clashed with the TSA over her beverage caught the agency's admitting this on tape.

Seems that when the goons approached her at her gate and ordered her to surrender her water for testing, she outwitted them by drinking it instead. (I do hope she handed them the empty bottle with a shrug and an insouciant, "Throw it away when you're done, guys, OK?")

Ah, but having no ingenuity of its own, the TSA doesn't tolerate it in others. Its brutes promptly denounced her "attitude" and booted her off her flight.

ABC News transcribed the exchange she recorded:

Woman [sic for heroine]: Do you think I'm honestly a threat? Do you think that?

TSA agent: No, no, no but with your attitude . . .

Woman [sic for heroine]: Wait, let me get this straight, this is retaliatory for my attitude? This is not making the airways safer, this is retaliatory.

TSA agent: Pretty much, yes. [Inaudible]

Woman [sic for heroine]: Is that legal?

TSA agent: Yes it is.

As you no doubt expected, the excrement at the agency's HQ supports this rank abuse, just as it did its thugs' pedophilia and persecution of the elderly: "ABC News contacted the TSA which said, u2018In our initial review, we concluded that this individual was screened in accordance with standard procedures.'"

And in our initial review — and all others since — we concluded that the TSA flushes freedom down the drain. Time we returned the favor.

Becky Akers [send her mail] is a free-lance writer and historian. Her novel, Halestorm, is available in paperback or for Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony, or for your computer.

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Why are you an anarchist, minarchist, libertarian?

Or, more to the point, how did you become one?

Some of us researched the facts, analyzed the data, and voilá. But most folks don't. They rely on heroes, those legendary characters, real or imaginary, whom they admire. Heroes often help us become who we are. If you inhaled the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew as a child, you probably itched for a mystery to solve.

But kids aren't the only ones who take their cues from their heroes. At least one of the Supreme Court's clowns approves of torture if a fictional agent saves civilization with it.

Never underestimate the power of a story. Unfortunately, far too many of them cast the State in the champ's role. Whether it's the police detectives catching the killer in murder mysteries, the buff fireman in a romance novel, or the kings, queens, and warriors who star in historical fiction, Leviathan shines. Between the lines lurks the tacit message that we need government, the source of all blessings.

But as writers from Rose Wilder Lane to Robert Heinlein prove, fiction can serve freedom as ably as it has the State. Especially when the protagonist is as clever as Lt. Columbo and courageous as Serpico.

Meet Nathan Hale, the gorgeous, clever, witty, courageous protagonist of my first novel, Halestorm.

Yes, like Serpico, Nathan Hale really existed. Most of us know him as the spy the British Army hanged during the American Revolution, supposedly after he regretted having only one life to give for his country. (He didn't actually say this.)

You might also remember that he was only 21 when the State executed him. If you're especially conversant with the period, you realize that he died thinking the Revolution a lost cause, that the government would shortly capture Gen. George Washington and his Continental Army, that it was only a matter of days before the State triumphed and killed liberty as surely as it would him. Yet he refused to save himself by denying freedom.

Such a stark, exhilarating confrontation of Man against the State, the eternal and utterly mesmerizing contest between good and evil, makes for incredible fiction. So I was astonished to discover that no one had ever written a novel about the luscious Captain Hale. Oh, sure, there were several children's books, but nothing for adults. Why not? Can you imagine anything more cloak-and-dagger than Nathan's lonely espionage behind the enemy's lines, more edge-of-your-seat, hurry-and-turn-the-pages thrilling than his betrayal and capture, more dramatic than his death? Then, too, something much larger than his life depended on the success of his mission: his Cause, the freedom that permeated and drove the Revolution. No novelist could invent a more spellbinding plot.

While researching Halestorm, I soon learned that Nathan had been as magnificent in life as he was in death. He's the ideal hero: stunningly handsome (virtually everyone who remembered him praised his looks. "So handsome!" sighed one besotted lady); awesomely athletic (a witness recalled how Nathan "would jump from the bottom of one hogshead up and down into a second and from the second up and down into a third like a cat — used to perform this feat often — would put his hand on a fence high as his head, and jump over it…"); brilliant (he was fluent in Greek and Latin by the age of 14, when he matriculated at Yale College); playful (he signed a page of doodles "Nathan Hail"); and all-around adorable.

Astoundingly, the more I investigated him, the better he grew. Not many people, even the Founding Fathers, can tolerate such scrutiny, let alone emerge with their halos intact. Scratch Ben Franklin, and you find a self-promoting hustler far more interested in advancing himself than liberty. John Adams is a statist who's unbearably pompous about it, Alexander Hamilton a cocksure arriviste. Even George Washington loses his luster when he gains the presidency.

Not Nathan. Granted, he had only 21 years to mess up, versus their 84, 91, 47, and 67, respectively. But he never did. He always stood firm for Liberty — even when it cost the most.

I'm betting Nathan will win other people's hearts as thoroughly as he did mine. Folks who will never read Mises or Bastiat, who couldn't care less about politics and mistake the Austrian School for a European academy, will race through a novel about a cool, cute guy risking everything. Closely argued apologetics on liberty won't move them, but Halestorm might — not because I'm such a great writer, but because Nathan Hale is so compelling. And just as they imbibe the subtext of a benevolent, omnipotent State from Mission: Impossible or Fargo, so they'll take a fierce love of liberty from Halestorm.

Read Halestorm. Better yet, recommend it to your friends, Tweet and Twitter about it, post a review on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, urge folks to devour the story. Let's continue the Revolution — and spread it to a whole new audience.

Becky Akers [send her mail] is a free-lance writer and historian. Her novel, Halestorm, is available in paperback or for Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony, or for your computer.

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You couldn't ask for more convincing proof that we live in times of universal deceit than the uproar greeting Gina Rinehart's truth-telling, not only in her native Australia but worldwide.

For those of you too busy earning your own money to covet others', and who have therefore never heard of Ms. Rinehart, allow me to show off my new-found knowledge. Ms. Rinehart is the only child of a gentleman, now deceased, who left her the business he'd established, Hancock Prospecting, in Perth, Western Australia.

Alas, the company was bankrupt. Ms. Rinehart not only resuscitated it, her prudent management sent its profits into the stratosphere. (Her "fiercely loyal executive director Tad Watroba, 65, … a mining engineer who arrived in Australia 30 years ago after fleeing communist Poland with his wife Margaret" tells us Ms. Rinehart "waited seven years for necessary dental work after she took over a debt-laden Hancock Prospecting after Lang’s death in 1992…")

Naturally, the Australian media hates Ms. Rinehart for such probity. And the foreign media seems determined to match that virulence. They variously bill her as "Australia's richest person," "the world's richest woman," or, when they really want readers turning pea-green with envy, the "heiress" whose fortune "has easily surprised [sic for surpassed?] Forbes' calculation of the 16 billion estimation of Christy Walton, widow of John Walton and holder of a major stake in the American retail giant Wal-Mart. In an extraordinary accumulation of riches from the mining industry," — and not because of her own efforts, of course — "Mrs Rinehart's wealth has grown by an unprecedented 11 billion this year alone. She makes more than 630,000 every 30 minutes, say financial experts." Yet this hatchet-job astoundingly asserts that its victim "has never had a real job." Perhaps the reporter's thinking of Queen Elizabeth, not this workhorse with what The Australian called a "punishing schedule — she has been known to work through the night."

Ms. Rinehart is made of spunky stuff — the sort that Americans (and, presumably, Aussies, too,) celebrated before Marxism conquered the country. It wasn't enough that the world's trash was practically impaling itself with jealousy over her wealth; she apparently wanted it to despise her for her opinions as well. And so she has taken to dispensing what decent people recognize as common sense but politicians, unions and their foghorns in the media excoriate as "insult[ing]" and "dangerous."

Our heroine believes, you see, that folks should work hard if they expect to prosper. I know, I know: hang her higher than Haman.

Specifically, she "wrote in an industry magazine column" (I tried to link to the original article posted here so we can read her words in context, but the site only delivers an error message), "There is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire … If you’re jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain." Uh-oh: there goes the favorite pastime of way too many people. "Do something to make more money yourself — spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."

Whoa! Seems Ms. Rinehart didn't get the memo about one's finances never being the individual's responsibility, never the result of his choices, poor or prudent, his virtues and vices, his preference for or postponing of immediate gratification. Rather, poverty is always the fault of The Rich, who stole all the loot before the rest of us got there while lolling about on their yachts, drinking champagne and plotting how to exploit us further.

But I interrupted our champ. She also suggested that the aspiring Mr. Bigbucks "become one of those people who work hard, invest and build, and at the same time create employment and opportunities for others. … The millionaires and billionaires who choose to invest in Australia are actually those who most help the poor and our young." And, as an employer herself, she no doubt spoke from experience when she added that "lowering minimum wages and lowering taxes would make employers hire more people'…"

Now she's not only shattered the myth that The Rich keep the rest of us poor, she's also pointed to the culprit of more poverty than anything else: government. "Rinehart blamed what she described as u2018socialist', anti-business policies for the plight of Australia’s poor."

And the State's thieving leeches came out swinging. "These sorts of comments are an insult to the millions of Australian workers who go to work and slog it out to feed the kids and pay the bills," sniffed "Treasurer Wayne Swan." Slimy Swan is a "senior [minister]" as well as "an outspoken critic of Australia's mining billionaires and their deep-pocketed anti-tax campaigns." Oh, I'll bet he is. How dare The Rich try to evict his greedy mitts from their pockets!

Merely the fact that this loathsome politician opposes Ms. Rinehart recommends her, let alone her astute observations. And were I one of those slogging Australian workers, I'd find her "comments" far less insulting than the taxes, licensing, regulations and other horrors Swan & Co. dish out.

"Health Minister Tanya Plibersek" joined the attack. She "said it was u2018pretty easy for Gina Rinehart to say that people on the minimum wage should get paid less.'"

Straw men are always easiest to defeat. Though we're unable to read her entire article, Ms. Rinehart said nothing of the kind in any of the extracted quotes.

But the straw dog barked again in responses to further declarations from this irrepressible heroine. "In a video recorded for the Sydney Mining Club," she notes that miners in Africa "u2018are willing to work for less than $2 per day.' … she explains that u2018Africans want to work. Such statistics make me worry for this country’s future.'" Heck, Ms. Rinehart, I don't have even a zillionth of your expertise in business, but it makes me worry for Americans' futures, too. "'Indeed, if we competed at the Olympic Games as sluggishly as we compete economically, there would be an outcry.”

Again, such uncommon sense provoked Australia's Official Thieves as surely as it would ours. "PM Julia Gillard responded today, saying, u2018It’s not the Australian way to toss people … a $2 gold coin and then ask them to work for a day.'” And again, that's not what Ms. Rinehart said.

You won't be surprised to learn that "Australia’s mining union labelled her remarks u2018bizarre' and accused her of pursing a u2018dangerous' agenda. u2018At the same time as trying to import cheap foreign labour and avoid paying tax'" — ah, yes: when a mugger lurks in the alley, only the "bizarre" and "dangerous" choose a different route home — "'Rinehart claims it’s millionaires and billionaires who are the greatest for social good,'" sneered "mining union president Tony Maher."

But "legendary adman John Singleton," who also owns Macquarie Radio Network, claims the same thing. He said in reference to Ms. Rinehart that "if it wasn’t for mining … we would be living in a Third World country.” Whom to believe? Well, between a demagogue who breaks knees like Tony and a businessman canny enough to recognize Ms. Rinehart's brilliance, I'm going with the latter.

But Tony wasn't done spewing his bile. "She should spend less time ranting and more time sharing," he lectured, as if he should.

Here's hoping this cretin takes his own advice.

Becky Akers [send her mail] is a free-lance writer and historian. Her novel of the American Revolution is available in paperback or for Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony, or for your computer.

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I'm not much of a movie buff, but Lunch Scholars sets me laughing each time I watch it. Especially entertaining are the students' responses to the question, "In what war did the US gain its independence?" If they don't shrug or stare in silent confusion, they hazard such guesses as "The Civil War?" One girl giggles, "We just did this, and I don't remember!"

For a while, I attended meetings of the American Revolution Roundtable, convivial and festive affairs that "[bring] together a diverse group of people…," — many of them published historians — "united by a common interest in the Revolutionary era." One evening, a member advocated government's "protection" of some site dating to the war; I have forgotten whether she wanted it officially designated a landmark, or, if it already had been, desired an increase in its budget. At any rate, the crowd vigorously applauded her efforts to extend the State's power in honor of a rebellion against that very evil.

For all their "common interest in the Revolutionary era," these adults had little more understanding of it than the stars of Lunch Scholars. Sadly, ignorance of both the facts and the spirit of the American Revolution curses our society; it's one reason Leviathan has triumphed so thoroughly over a people formerly noted for their fierce autonomy and love of liberty.

In a sense, we can hardly blame folks for their indifference to the Revolution. The powder-smoke obscuring Yorktown had hardly cleared before the new country's politicians distorted the war into a glorification of the American State. Historians continued that misrepresentation in the 19th century until its latter half, when they portrayed the war as a Marxist fantasy of proletarian revenge. Thereafter, further perversions turned the Revolution irrelevant: the Founding Fathers fought against obscure, isolated points that no longer mattered, according to the government's indoctrination centers-sorry, schools, such as monarchy or taxation without representation. No wonder most Americans today care nothing for the Revolution, while its few enthusiasts completely miss its resounding rejection of government.

This week marks the 236th anniversary of one of the war's seminal and most heartrending battles — a lost cause overflowing with heroism, betrayal, outright miracles, and a thrilling escape that still amazes experts in military tactics and history. The Battle of Brooklyn (also known as the Battle of Long Island) isn't a musty old page in a textbook: it is instead an awesome clash of inexperienced but courageous lovers of liberty against the professional forces of the world's most powerful empire — of people like us defying an army as rigorously trained and murderously equipped for their day as US troops are now.

The Revolution was only 16 months old in August 1776. Those months had been heady ones for freedom's friends — and there were plenty of those on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans and Britons revered liberty as vehemently then as they do democracy now.

In fact, they fought the war over how best to preserve liberty (American independence, usually touted as the Revolution's raison d'etre, was only a means to the end of securing liberty). Some folks, whether in England or America, were appalled at their imperial government, with its bureaucracies and ruthless army; they wanted the empire to end its abuses; many of them even hoped to end the empire and, indeed, all government. The Revolution was intensely anarchic.

Others rejoiced in their strong empire and its troops, fretting lest powerful nations — by which they meant Catholic France — conquer England and its colonies. Eighteenth-century Protestants feared "Papists" as much as twenty-first century neocons do Moslems.

With criticism of his administration surging, King George III resorted to the same tack the Feds have: stifling dissent. Seven hundred of his soldiers marched from Boston in April 1775 to grab and indefinitely detain two of those dissidents, Sam Adams and John Hancock, then staying about 11 miles down the road near the village of Lexington. The Redcoats also hoped to seize guns, ammunition and rations (yep, prepping has a long and honorable history) the colonists had stockpiled, a la modern Americans who eye the metastasizing swamp on the Potomac.

By sunset, the Redcoats were back in Boston, sans Adams and Hancock but with the farmers and shopkeepers who had chased them there jubilantly besieging them. When His Majesty's Army tried to escape that June in the Battle of Bunker's Hill, the Americans ceded the hill — but they merely moved their lines to exclude it and resumed the siege.

The Redcoats admitted defeat the following March. They boarded ship and sailed for New York. At 16,000 residents, New York was the colonies' second largest city (Philadelphia was first with 25,000). It was also a strategic treasure because of its harbor and its situation at the head of the Hudson River — the indispensable highway to New England in these days before interstates and diesel engines.

Congress insisted that General George Washington march his Continental Army to New York and hold the area against the Redcoats. But obeying that order would prove impossible. Riparian New York — ocean and rivers lapped its three islands, Staten, Long, and York (now known as Manhattan) — immensely favored the enemy and its fearsome navy. Even without the navy, the upcoming contest tilted heavily against the Continentals thanks to the reinforcements London had sent: 32,000 Redcoats and Hessians, the pitiable farmers German princes kidnapped from their fields and sold to George III, would contend against Washington's roughly 15,000 men (that figure fluctuated daily and dramatically due to illness, desertion, the arrival and departure of militia, etc. On August 7, for example, the Continental Army officially counted 17,225 soldiers, but only 10,514 were "fit for duty"). The British Army could pulverize the outnumbered rebels on land if the British Navy didn't cannonade them from the water first. Worse, Washington didn't know which island, nor where on that island, the Redcoats would initially attack — and the non-existent American navy couldn't shuttle troops there even if he had. The Continental command solved this problem by dividing its forces, a foolish error even for such neophytes. About 7000 men dribbled to Long Island during the next weeks, with the rest remaining in Manhattan.

Perhaps the beleaguered Washington was exhorting himself as much as the troops — and he seems to shout down the ages to us as well — when he urged, "The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves: whether they are to have any property they can call their own … our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission … Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being… we shall have [our countrymen's] blessings, and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the Tyranny meditated against them. Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and shew the whole world, that a Freeman contending for LIBERTY on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth."

Alas, those slavish mercenaries landed without opposition on Staten Island, then cruised to Long Island. The Continentals there built outworks on the Heights of Guan, a ridge of hills about 4 miles north of the British beachhead. They constructed their main fort another 4 miles north, on the edge of Brooklyn, directly across the river from New York — when they weren't thrashing in their beds with fever (an epidemic of typhus ravaged the ranks) or scouting provisions (feeding so many mouths had become a daunting problem in Boston, and it worsened in New York). So wretched were the Continentals that one Loyalist crowed to his journal, "If my countrymen [i.e., the Redcoats] are defeated by these ragamuffins I shall be much surprised."

At nightfall on August 26, His Majesty's professional soldiers began stealthily marching across Long Island toward those starving, diseased, and nervous amateurs huddled in their forts and outworks. Tragically, the American command had no staff, no scouts, no rangers; the Redcoats effortlessly captured the five picket-guards who could have reported their movements.

By morning, the British Army had outflanked the Continentals as easily as it had disembarked earlier that summer. While a few troops skirmished with the Continentals' front, more swept in from behind, enveloping the terrified novices, killing or capturing over a thousand while driving the rest uphill along with their red flags emblazoned "Liberty" to their principal fort.

From that high ground, Washington watched the disaster — and the heroism of his recruits: one company suicidally charged the British lines five times to cover others' retreat. Washington famously groaned, "Good God! what brave fellows I must this day lose!"

By evening, the British Army had reversed its ignominy at Boston, besieging the Continentals in their fort on the edge of Brooklyn. The battle — and the Revolution — were over. The rebels hourly expected His Majesty's troops to finish the job, swarming the works and capturing its defenders. Or His Majesty's navy could sail into position behind the fort and bombard it, driving the men forward into the Redcoats' arms.

Unless you believe in the Almighty and the inalienable rights He provides and protects, you'll have a hard time explaining what happened next. No attack came that night, nor the next day. Rather than batter the fort, the British Navy inexplicably remained at anchor. And the British Army began not the climactic assault that would have finished things but a "regular approach." This involved digging a series of trenches zig-zagging ever closer to the defenders; it was correct, by-the-book procedure but hardly necessary, given the Redcoats' huge numbers and advantages.

The digging continued while Washington and his generals conceived a daring plan. They sent messengers to Manhattan for rowboats, schooners, anything that could float. That night, with the enemy tunneling nearer, the Continentals silently filed from their fort down to the landing and glided across the river to Manhattan's comparative safety.

Lest the Redcoats realize that their prey was fleeing, the Americans "began to retire from the lines in such a manner that no chasm was made. As one regiment left their station on guard, the remaining troops moved to the right and left, and filled up the vacancies," according to one of them, Benjamin Tallmadge. That stranded "several regiments" in Brooklyn at dawn. Just 22 years old, Tallmadge confessed that "those of us who remained in the trenches became very anxious for our own safety… At this time a very dense fog began to rise and it seemed to settle in a peculiar manner over both encampments. I recollect this peculiar providential occurrence perfectly well, and so very dense was the atmosphere that I could scarcely discern a man at six yards distance." The remnant safely embarked for Manhattan under cover of that "providential occurrence." As have generations of tacticians and historians after him, Tallmadge marveled, "In the history of warfare I do not recollect a more fortunate retreat."

The Continentals' desperate flight saved the Revolution but not New York. It fell to the Redcoats and remained under their control until the war ended. But the battle for liberty is never about territory: it seeks instead to win hearts and minds.

Becky Akers [send her mail] is a free-lance writer and historian. Read more about the Battle of Brooklyn in her novel Halestorm, also available on Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony, or for your computer.

The Best of Becky Akers

Anyone who
has ever driven — sic for "sat in traffic" — in
New York City would agree that speed is not a problem here. Quite
the opposite, in fact: thanks to Our Rulers' incompetence when it
comes to building and managing roads, the Big Apple's big jams are
as legendary as Charley
Rangel's corruption.

That would
explain why New York's potentates are slowing the flow even further.
Yes! Idling at the intersection while the light changes from red
to green 14 times is insufficient torture for serfs: Mayor Mike
"the Nanny" Bloomberg and his execrable "Transportation
Commissioner," Janette Sadik-Khan, want us waiting as those
demented Christmas trees flash 25 or 30 times so we all know who's
boss. This while the leeches glide about town in the limos we buy
them after "police escorts" clear the streets of mere
taxpayers.

No matter:
our dictatorial dimwits are foisting "slow zones" on a
City that is one gigantic "slow zone." Or, as the
mainstream media puts it, "The city is expanding its campaign
to stop speeding drivers cruising through the streets of the five
boroughs." Oh, right: as if we could speed. Ergo, the
limit of 30 mph — yep, you read that right: 30 measly miles
per hour. Politicians run for re-election faster than that. Tell
me, does 30 mph meet anyone's definition of speeding other than
Nanny's? — will shrink to 20 mph. Ha! Drivers caught in the endless
snarl that is New York City wish they could zoom along at
20 mph. Meanwhile, lest the serfs rebel against their betters' stupidity,
the risibly misnamed "speed bump" will also bedevil these
zones.

"Slow
zones send a strong message to drivers that our neighborhoods are
not shortcuts and speeding on our streets is really a matter of
life and death," Saddam Hussein-sorry, Sadik-Khan opined. Saddam
has targeted 13 localities for her "strong message"; does
she maintain a home in all of them, or is she merely a reflexive
socialist when she speaks of them as "ours"? By which,
of course, she really means they're "hers." But don't
take my word on her power-lust. Instead, listen to an expert on
the topic, one whose own hunger for authority has him trying to
decree what movies we watch while his
cameras watch us: "Dov
Hikind, a New York State assemblyman … said of Sadik-Khan[,]
u2018Listen, the commissioner enjoys having the freedom [sic]
she has. At night she dreams of these things, and the next day she
does them'…" No wonder New York's avenues are a nightmare.

Our Rulers
force us to waste more time behind the wheel with the same excuse
they cite whenever they impose their whims: to protect us. Saddam
steadfastly repeats that mantra even as her
subjects denounce her department for distorting and exaggerating
statistics. She alleges that "a
pedestrian hit by a car going 40 m.p.h. had only a 30 percent
chance to survive. Those struck by a car at 30 m.p.h., she said,
survive 80 percent of the time. At 20 m.p.h., the figure climbs
to about 95 percent." I am unable to confirm these "facts"
anywhere: as far as Google is concerned, Saddam pulled them out
of the air. ("Transportation for America" supposedly
posts a chart showing "Pedestrian survival rate by vehicle
speed," but its figures differ considerably from Saddam's.
In any event, I failed to find said chart on T4A's
website. And even if I had unearthed it, T4A is hardly an unbiased,
scholarly source: it lobbies for "housing,
business, environmental, public health, transportation, equitable
development and other" special interests; its "vision"
encompasses "less need to drive.") No matter: advertisements
of Saddam's claims sprinkle the City on our dime, indoctrinating
victims to shrug at her tyranny.

The "slow
zones" come atop another of Saddam's preferences: bike lanes.
About
six years ago, her department began reconfiguring streets, swiping
an entire lane of scarce asphalt from drivers and awarding it to
cyclists — though there are far fewer of the latter and they're
far less taxed, too. In a City where neighborliness is as rare as
competent bureaucrats, this further segregates citizens into the
groups Progressives adore, then pits them against each other: bikers
vs. drivers vs. pedestrians. Or, as a writer for New York Magazine
explains, "…in
crowded New York, space, and convenience, is finite. Any alteration
is an exercise in redistributionu2014to give to Column A, you have to
take away from Column B." Actually, when Leviathan controls
the resource under "alteration," that's true everywhere,
not just in "crowded New York." You'll never read of a
shortage of restaurants or cars or computers because the private
(albeit regulated) market supplies them — so far. But New York
Magazine emphasizes the moral behind every move Saddam, Bloomberg,
and Our other Rulers make: "We
are going to have to learn to accept a decrease, however minuscule,
in our individual freedoms." Oh, indeed. And it ain't so minuscule.

Bike lanes
and slow zones may content Saddam but not her führer.
Mayor "Nanny" Bloomberg also craves "speed
cameras…" And "he's furious that the state Legislature
won't give him the green light" — so furious he's plumbed new
depths of hypocrisy and double standards. Quoth the totalitarian
who considers it his business how
much soda we drink, the quantity
and quality of the fat we eat, and where we smoke, "The
first argument is it's not [the state's] business, it should be
the business of the city." Yo, Nanny: you listening to yourself?

Apparently
not, for he obliviously continued, "The city should be in charge
of its own destiny." Yeah, Nanny, we empathize. We want to
be in charge of our own destinies, too, rather than ceding them
to you. But when we suggested last month that in one such tiny area,
the amount of soda we imbibe, we should decide for ourselves, you
responded, "[I]f
government’s purpose isn’t to improve the health and longevity
of its citizens, I don’t know what its purpose is." Call me
crazily consistent, but that implies you ought to kowtow to Albany's
orders as obediently as you expect us to kowtow to yours.

Then came
the clincher. Here Nanny exceeded even his own record for illogic,
profound distortion, mendacity and incoherence: "That's why
we had the revolution in 1776," he
pontificated. "There's no difference why should the city
not be in charge of its own destiny…"

Now you know
the reason farmers died at Lexington and Concord, Nathan Hale hanged,
the Signers pledged their "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor,"
militiamen risked everything to defy the government at Saratoga,
and Continental volunteers starved at Valley Forge: so that Nanny
Bloomberg could rob drivers more outrageously than he already does.

July
13, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution. Her novel set during the
war will be published this summer.

The
Best of Becky Akers

Waste
no sympathy or admiration on Carol Price, the
passenger who complained about her gate-rape to one of the TSA's
supervising sickos. Carol had called for said sicko so she could
report her search as "inappropriate" (sic for "a
criminal assault"); apparently, while explaining, she also
demonstrated the molestation she'd just suffered for Supervising
Sicko's benefit — on Supervising Sicko. This "violence"
— yes, the TSA's precise term for doing unto its lackeys what they
do unto us — got her arrested. Leviathan has scheduled her trial
for July 3.

But Carol
is not the wronged innocent she seems: she once "worked"
(sic for "malingered") at the TSA. In fact, she
tortured passengers in the same terminal that turned the tables
on her, Southwest Florida International Airport near Fort Myers.
Yo,
Rand: Carol and Supervising Sicko offer a far better "solution"
to the TSA than anything you've proposed. Simply turn all the TSA's
degenerates loose on each other and let u2018em grope as much as they
please.

Obviously,
as a former brute, Carol is woefully short of brains. Not only is
that one of the job's requirements, she also proved her imbecility
by flying. Here's a woman who knows the extent of the TSA's evil
first-hand, knows that its
incompetent bozos endanger every flight, knows that its purpose
is to "dominate,
intimidate and control" the serfs. Yet she buys a ticket
nonetheless.

Some might
argue extenuating circumstances excuse her stupidity since she was
on her way to Cleveland, Ohio for her brother's funeral. Alas, Your
Intrepid Reporter made that exact trip a few years ago, though in
reverse: I happened to be visiting Cleveland when my uncle in Fort
Myers died. I threw myself, my suitcase, and assorted relatives
into a car and bam, 18 hours later, there we were.

Not Carol (then
again, she undoubtedly failed at finding anyone to split the driving.
Would you climb into a car with a pervert who previously
terrorized folks for a living? People
have died in far less menacing circumstances). She went to the
airport, where — big surprise — she "says
while going through security to catch her flight, a TSA agent
groped her. In response, … [she] put down her carry-on bags, turn[s]
to a TSA supervisor and grab[s] her – allegedly without permission
– to show the supervisor what Price says she went through."
[Emphasis added.]

Whoa!
you're thinking, now wait just a doggone minute. I never gave these
thugs permission to grope me, either.

No, the Supreme
Dorks-sorry, Court did for you. Decades
ago, they decreed that merely by patronizing a commercial airline,
you volunteer for whatever abuse federal psychopaths decide to heap
on you — though naturally, the Dorks didn't phrase it as honestly
as that. Instead, they babbled, "When
the risk is the jeopardy to hundreds of human lives and millions
of dollars of property inherent in the pirating or blowing up of
a large airplane, the danger alone meets the test of reasonableness
[per the Fourth Amendment], so long as the search is conducted in
good faith for the purpose of preventing hijacking or like damage
and with reasonable scope and the passenger has been given advance
notice of his liability to such a search so that he can avoid it
by choosing not to travel by air." Catch the false dichotomy
with which they justify this evisceration of the Constitution: any
"reasonable" person would rather become a sex-toy for
the feds than a target for terrorists — as if those are the only
options. Yes, this is what passes for logic among the nation's highest
Dorks.

Speaking of
dorks, back we go to Carol and Supervising Sicko (which, happily
and symbolically, abbreviates to SS). The latter took offense —
huge offense, just as her own prey does — at Carol's laying on of
hands. Indeed, SS sicced the cops on Carol, who duly arrested her,
while SS
hyperventilated over her humiliation: "Price suddenly and
aggressively grabbed my inner thigh and went up with her hands into
my pubic bone."

Oh, SS, your
victims empathize. Indeed, many
of them have described their assaults from you and your felons in
identical terms. And, SS, though I would never presume to speak
for those hundreds of thousands, let me say on my own behalf that
I'm grinning ear-to-ear! Really, Carol couldn't have "aggressively
grabbed" anyone who deserves it more than you, you miserable,
filthy germ!

Unfortunately
though not unexpectedly, given that the TSA used to employ Carol,
there are no principles at stake here. Carol was not defying the
agency's totalitarianism, indecency, criminality and cruelty: no,
she once actively dished all that out. Rather, she and SS indulged
in a cat-fight. Seems they've hated each other since their days
as fellow Warriors on Freedom-sorry, Terrorists, and each grabbed
an opportunity for revenge as "aggressively" as they do
"inner thighs."

As we might
also expect, the TSA has endorsed its ruffians' savaging of Carol:
“The pat down was conducted correctly in accordance with our procedures,"
it jabbered, as it does after all such violations, whether of 7-year-old
girls stricken with cerebral palsy or grandmothers
in wheelchairs. Its spokesliars added, "Violence against
our officers who work every day to keep the traveling public safe
is unacceptable.” Dang right. Our Rulers reserve such violence for
use against us.

To my knowledge,
only
two women during the
tragic decade of the TSA's predations have physically defended
themselves when gate-raped. Neither did anything more than reflexively
push her assailant away, yet such "violence" got both
of them tried,
convicted, and punished.

I suspect a
similar fate awaits Carol. Ironic, isn't it, that she'll pay not
for assaulting us but for defending herself from such wickedness.

Ah, karma…

June
21, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution. Her novel set during the
war will be published this summer.

The
Best of Becky Akers

Yeehaw! The TSA's "public image" is so "poor" that Congress is counseling the agency on how to improve it. Yes, Congress, that sewer of corruption, criminality, and incompetence, whose own "approval rating" crawled upwards to 17% from "a record-low 10% in February." Perhaps scheming to improve those scores, its Homeland Security Transportation Subcommittee lashed John Pistole, Chief Pervert at the universally hated TSA, with a wet noodle last Thursday because of the agency's “poor customer service image" (pssst, buffoons: the trouble runs way deeper than mere image).

Not surprisingly, the advice Congress' multi-millionaires dispensed is as out-of-touch and nonsensical as their other prattle. Oh, blessed day, should the TSA follow it, for the agency would implode. Alas, the TSA has made a career of defying Congress, so don't expect its autocrats to heed these elected dimwits any time soon.

Reviewing Congress' wisdom is always good for a laugh, so let's survey the pearls it handed out last week. First up is Rep. Bennie Thompson [D-Miss]. How to deal with the TSA, a bureaucracy that sexually molests everyone, even children; endangers the public's health; thieves from passengers as often as it paws them; and stuns with its profligacy and all-around ineptitude? Bennie proposes "an independent analysis of the TSA’s way of doing business. u2018Maybe we ought to have a fresh set of eyes,' Thompson told Pistole…"

Isn't that a congresscritter's classic reflex? Every day, the TSA traumatizes old ladies, expectant mothers, survivors of cancer, and little kids, including disabled ones; heck, it's even killed a man. But Bennie, perhaps the most ineffectual bumbler ever to disgrace mankind, doesn't demand its immediate disbanding. No, he pines for "a fresh set of eyes" — sic for "yet another commission living high on our dime as it rubs its chin and announces that the TSA only needs more power and money for even greater effectiveness." Wanna bet Bumbling Bennie sees himself chairing that commission?

Striving his hardest to surpass Bennie's self-serving imbecility was Rep. Mike u2018The Moron" Rogers (R-Ala.). He attributes the TSA's "problem" (sic for problems) to its recent groping of Henry Kissinger — a "VIP[,]…former Secretary of State," and "Nobel Prize winner," as Hank's flacks in the corporate media were quick to note. Nor is ole Hank the only "celeb" with whom the TSA got frisky: its deviants also manhandled his fellow psychopath, Donald Rumsfeld. That had The Moron spluttering, "There are certain people that are just so well-known that you’ve just got to use your common sense."

I daresay few folks loathe the TSA more than moi. Yet even I cheered its assaults on this diabolical duo. Between them, Hank and Rummy have slaughtered how many millions? For sure someone ought to vet them as thoroughly and humiliatingly as possible before turning them loose on normal, innocent people. Yo, Perv: cavity checks for both of u2018em next time. And no lubricant.

Meanwhile, how oafish a moron must Mike be to misunderstand this elemental fact: passengers object to the TSA's molesting them, their wives, their kids, and grandparents, not politicians who so amply deserve it. Imagine Joe Taxpayer's fury when the rich and powerful waltz past the gate-rapists while he stands spread-eagled with a blue glove probing his junk. Yet that is precisely what The Moron recommends: the TSA should desist “[b]ecause if you start patting them down, people are going to say, ‘They’re patting down Beyonce.’ I mean, she’s not going to blow a plane up.”

If that doesn't spark the revolution, I don't know what will. Leviathan's schools indoctrinate victims with thirteen years of drivel on democracy; graduates pretty much believe we're all the same, one happy, gigantic commune under Big Brother. If Joe Taxpayer is a threat to American aviation, so are Hank and Rummy and, yes, Beyonce, too, as well as Hither, Thither, and Yanni.

Pistole the Pervert apparently mistook the peanut gallery for serious critics and mounted a defense, lame though it was. His agency's utter evil and incompetence is OK, he told the congressional nuts, because passengers have quit grousing: "Pistole said of 525,000 calls to TSA's call center in 2011, only 6 percent or 7 percent were complaints."

Which indicates the smashing success of the TSA's "Traveller Redress Program." This bureaucratic shunt busies the aggrieved for years with filling out forms though Our Masters seldom respond at all, and never satisfactorily. Then there are the threats from the checkpoint's thugs that grumblers will miss their flights — or worse — if they don't hush, as well as the implication that they'll wind up on the No-fly List. All in all, I'm surprised as many as 6 or 7% of callers are still brave — or stupid — enough to object.

But while The Perv rejoices that few dissidents report their beefs to his bureaucracy, denunciations elsewhere have exploded. The corporate media remains reluctant to protest any of the State's droppings, even those that stink as badly as the TSA. But readers of its propaganda aren't. They scathingly and repeatedly call for the agency's abolition on virtually every article that permits comments — even puff pieces urging the peons to appreciate their fondlers.

And back when Obummer pretended he wasn't an emperor, he ballyhooed "Petition[ing] the White House With We the People." Almost 32,000 folks signed one of the first such entreaties to appear, demanding the TSA's abolition — again, not mere reform but annihilation. So enthusiastically did they affix their names that they easily beat the "threshold" of "5,000 signatures within 30 days" Our Rulers had established.

You'll notice that the TSA still flourishes, that it's nowhere near dissolution or even reduction, and that the only response these tens of thousands of Americans received was irrelevant and insulting boilerplate from The Perv. What to do? Earlier Americans, whose "repeated Petitions ha[d] been answered only by repeated injury," left us some guidance for such an occasion: "whenever any form of government becomes destructive of [liberty], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it…"

Those ancestors did indeed alter theirs. It didn't work. I say we try abolition this time.

Becky Akers [send her mail] writes primarily about the American Revolution. Her novel set during the war will be published this summer.

The Best of Becky Akers

Yeehaw! The TSA's "public image" is so "poor" that Congress is counseling the agency on how to improve it. Yes, Congress, that sewer of corruption, criminality, and incompetence, whose own "approval rating" crawled upwards to 17% from "a record-low 10% in February." Perhaps scheming to improve those scores, its Homeland Security Transportation Subcommittee lashed John Pistole, Chief Pervert at the universally hated TSA, with a wet noodle last Thursday because of the agency's “poor customer service image" (pssst, buffoons: the trouble runs way deeper than mere image).

Not surprisingly, the advice Congress' multi-millionaires dispensed is as out-of-touch and nonsensical as their other prattle. Oh, blessed day, should the TSA follow it, for the agency would implode. Alas, the TSA has made a career of defying Congress, so don't expect its autocrats to heed these elected dimwits any time soon.

Reviewing Congress' wisdom is always good for a laugh, so let's survey the pearls it handed out last week. First up is Rep. Bennie Thompson [D-Miss]. How to deal with the TSA, a bureaucracy that sexually molests everyone, even children; endangers the public's health; thieves from passengers as often as it paws them; and stuns with its profligacy and all-around ineptitude? Bennie proposes "an independent analysis of the TSA’s way of doing business. u2018Maybe we ought to have a fresh set of eyes,' Thompson told Pistole…"

Isn't that a congresscritter's classic reflex? Every day, the TSA traumatizes old ladies, expectant mothers, survivors of cancer, and little kids, including disabled ones; heck, it's even killed a man. But Bennie, perhaps the most ineffectual bumbler ever to disgrace mankind, doesn't demand its immediate disbanding. No, he pines for "a fresh set of eyes" — sic for "yet another commission living high on our dime as it rubs its chin and announces that the TSA only needs more power and money for even greater effectiveness." Wanna bet Bumbling Bennie sees himself chairing that commission?

Striving his hardest to surpass Bennie's self-serving imbecility was Rep. Mike u2018The Moron" Rogers (R-Ala.). He attributes the TSA's "problem" (sic for problems) to its recent groping of Henry Kissinger — a "VIP[,]…former Secretary of State," and "Nobel Prize winner," as Hank's flacks in the corporate media were quick to note. Nor is ole Hank the only "celeb" with whom the TSA got frisky: its deviants also manhandled his fellow psychopath, Donald Rumsfeld. That had The Moron spluttering, "There are certain people that are just so well-known that you’ve just got to use your common sense."

I daresay few folks loathe the TSA more than moi. Yet even I cheered its assaults on this diabolical duo. Between them, Hank and Rummy have slaughtered how many millions? For sure someone ought to vet them as thoroughly and humiliatingly as possible before turning them loose on normal, innocent people. Yo, Perv: cavity checks for both of u2018em next time. And no lubricant.

Meanwhile, how oafish a moron must Mike be to misunderstand this elemental fact: passengers object to the TSA's molesting them, their wives, their kids, and grandparents, not politicians who so amply deserve it. Imagine Joe Taxpayer's fury when the rich and powerful waltz past the gate-rapists while he stands spread-eagled with a blue glove probing his junk. Yet that is precisely what The Moron recommends: the TSA should desist “[b]ecause if you start patting them down, people are going to say, ‘They’re patting down Beyonce.’ I mean, she’s not going to blow a plane up.”

If that doesn't spark the revolution, I don't know what will. Leviathan's schools indoctrinate victims with thirteen years of drivel on democracy; graduates pretty much believe we're all the same, one happy, gigantic commune under Big Brother. If Joe Taxpayer is a threat to American aviation, so are Hank and Rummy and, yes, Beyonce, too, as well as Hither, Thither, and Yanni.

Pistole the Pervert apparently mistook the peanut gallery for serious critics and mounted a defense, lame though it was. His agency's utter evil and incompetence is OK, he told the congressional nuts, because passengers have quit grousing: "Pistole said of 525,000 calls to TSA's call center in 2011, only 6 percent or 7 percent were complaints."

Which indicates the smashing success of the TSA's "Traveller Redress Program." This bureaucratic shunt busies the aggrieved for years with filling out forms though Our Masters seldom respond at all, and never satisfactorily. Then there are the threats from the checkpoint's thugs that grumblers will miss their flights — or worse — if they don't hush, as well as the implication that they'll wind up on the No-fly List. All in all, I'm surprised as many as 6 or 7% of callers are still brave — or stupid — enough to object.

But while The Perv rejoices that few dissidents report their beefs to his bureaucracy, denunciations elsewhere have exploded. The corporate media remains reluctant to protest any of the State's droppings, even those that stink as badly as the TSA. But readers of its propaganda aren't. They scathingly and repeatedly call for the agency's abolition on virtually every article that permits comments — even puff pieces urging the peons to appreciate their fondlers.

And back when Obummer pretended he wasn't an emperor, he ballyhooed "Petition[ing] the White House With We the People." Almost 32,000 folks signed one of the first such entreaties to appear, demanding the TSA's abolition — again, not mere reform but annihilation. So enthusiastically did they affix their names that they easily beat the "threshold" of "5,000 signatures within 30 days" Our Rulers had established.

You'll notice that the TSA still flourishes, that it's nowhere near dissolution or even reduction, and that the only response these tens of thousands of Americans received was irrelevant and insulting boilerplate from The Perv. What to do? Earlier Americans, whose "repeated Petitions ha[d] been answered only by repeated injury," left us some guidance for such an occasion: "whenever any form of government becomes destructive of [liberty], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it…"

Those ancestors did indeed alter theirs. It didn't work. I say we try abolition this time.

Becky Akers [send her mail] writes primarily about the American Revolution. Her novel set during the war will be published this summer.

The Best of Becky Akers

"In
loco parentis" is a slogan the State takes seriously. Very
seriously. Throughout history and around the world, governments
have savaged citizens as lethally as the most abusive father when
they aren't smothering us worse than any helicopter-mom.

Leviathan also
interprets the phrase literally when preying on its youngest serfs.
Indeed, the beast and its apologists assume that bureaucrats and
politicians are far wiser, more loving, and more qualified to raise
children than the poor slobs who birthed them.

That satanic
fallacy drove the Orwellian "Department of Children and Family
Services" in Cleveland, Ohio, to abduct a boy from his family
last Thanksgiving. Its excuse? Timmy ate too well.

"At
more than 200 pounds, the third-grader [who, with his mother,
remains anonymous: I've dubbed him Timmy for convenience] is considered
severely obese and at risk for developing such diseases as diabetes
and hypertension." Busybodies kidnapped him because "case
workers" — whose judgment is never inaccurate or less than
astute since they "work" for Leviathan — "considered
this mother’s inability to get her son’s weight down a form of medical
neglect, said Mary Louise Madigan, a spokeswoman [sic for
u2018propagandist'] for the Department… They said that the child’s weight
gain was caused by his environment and that the mother wasn’t following
doctor’s orders — which she disputes. u2018This child’s problem was
so severe that we had to take custody,'" Madigan said."
Really? You "had to," huh? And just who was holding the
gun to your head there, Mary Louise?

But Mar wasn't
done justifying this atrocity. She piously continued that "the
agency worked with the mother for more than a year before asking
Juvenile Court for custody of the child…" No doubt the millions
of citizens caught in bureaucratic cross-hairs nationwide would
testify there's mighty little "working with" in these
situations. Rather, they overflow with threats, bullying, and whims
masquerading as Commandments That Mere Slaves Must Obey.

The State preys
most mercilessly on victims it has so impoverished that they accept
its handouts. Ergo, we might expect Ms. Anonymous to be unemployed
and reside in public housing while subsisting on food stamps. Au
contraire. Sheu2018s "a substitute elementary school teacher
who is also taking vocational school classes," while her city's
"median
income for a household" is $46,731. Nor is her son failing
in Our Rulers' juvenile prison: he is "on
the honor roll and participated in school activities."

Try to fathom
Timmy's excruciating anguish at his exile. Such senseless separation
from family and all that's familiar would destroy any eight-year-old
child; add to that the horrific insecurity Timmy probably suffers
because of his weight. Imagine the crushing guilt that must plague
him now as well: "They're punishing me, and it made Mom cry
when they took me away, because I'm so fat and worthless."

Or picture
his mother's grief, her desperation and eagerness to say or do anything
so long as her baby's assailants restore him to her: “They are trying
to make it seem like I am unfit, like I don’t love my child … Of
course I love him. Of course I want him to lose weight. It’s a lifestyle
change, and they are trying to make it seem like I am not embracing
that. It is very hard, but I am trying.”

But hey, it's
all worth it so long as the State saves Timmy from himself, right?
After all, he might develop diabetes. So cue government to ride
to the rescue — as it does with diabetic kids at checkpoints in
airports.

"Jacob
Wisnik is a 10-year-old who … wears a pump that delivers insulin
as he needs it[, ...which] sets off the scanner … and has to be patted
down by security agents…"

A few weeks
ago, Jacob and his family tried to fly out of Chicago's "O’Hare
airport. He was u2018put through borderline humiliation,' says his mother,
Eva…" There was nothing "borderline" about it, but
anyway, Ms. Wisnik reported Jacob's trauma — to a columnist, who
publicized the story — "from the car coming back from the airport,
still shaken by having to stand by while her 5th grader was marched
through the terminal by armed guards, put in a private examination
room, then poked and prodded."

Ms. Wisnik
included Jacob's heart-wrenching account as well: "…we got
to the security desk. In an instant, I felt dread enter my body."
Boy, Jacob, don't we all. "…It’s hard enough managing my diabetes
each day; the way I am treated by TSA makes me feel not only upset
about my disability, but worse of all they make me feel uncomfortable
with myself. … they have to pat me down or make me touch my pump
and then they swab my hand to make sure I am not carrying explosives.
For those few seconds they won’t let anyone touch me including my
mother. I feel alone and worse I feel as though I have done something
wrong."

Jacob, this
is precisely why the Anti-Federalists included the Fourth
Amendment in the Constitution: the State should never
empower its goons to torment anyone this way, and certainly not
a young man in your circumstances.

"…today
was a nightmare! … they saw that my pump was clipped over my groin
area so they would have to take me to a special screening room.
… My mom had to come with me to be screened, and my 12-year-old
sister said ‘what do I do?’ because all of our stuff was on the
conveyer belt. She looked scared. I felt more humiliated than scared.
When a thousand eyes are watching you because they think you may
be a deadly threat it is so uncomfortable and humiliating. I marched
to the screening room barefoot. I suppose they were trying to follow
regulations, but I was on the verge crying."

And yet government
insists that it provides for children and disabled folks, whatever
their age, far better than families specifically or the private
sector in general can.

Meanwhile,
the Department of Children and Family Services' website urges that
we "call [it] … to
report suspected child abuse or neglect." Wanna bet no
one burned up the line on Jacob's behalf?

May
5, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution. Her novel set during the
war will be published this summer.

The
Best of Becky Akers

The TSA’s
had a banner week. It began with former Head Cheese, Kip
Hawley – the guy who foisted the liquids-in-baggies nonsense
on us – bleating that the agency is “broken” and
it’s no wonder Americans hate it. As if to prove him right,
screeners beat up on little girls – twice. And it was
only Monday. By Wednesday, cops had arrested four screeners at Los
Angeles International who took a break from pawing passengers to
smuggle illicit drugs through checkpoints. Meanwhile, a Congressman
alleged assault after a “very aggressive … pat-down.”

Hmmm. Seems
there are several clues here that perhaps we might want to, oh,
I don’t know, abolish this vile agency.

Four-year-old
Isabella Brademeyer was flying out of Wichita, Kansas with her mother,
brother and grandmother after a stint as flower-girl in her uncle’s
wedding. Isabella successfully negotiated the checkpoint’s
charade, but her grandmother wasn’t as fortunate, and the TSA
ordered her aside for a groping. Isabella offered the lady a child’s
best comfort: she ran to her and hugged her for a “few seconds,”
according to her mother’s account on Facebook.

Or, in the
TSA’s words, Isabella “had completed screening but had
contact with another member of her family who had not completed
the screening process.” Uh-oh. That shot across the Homeland’s
bow galvanized the Warriors on Terror. Thank Heaven for their practice
in neutralizing cupcakes and strip-searching octogenarians: these
crack troops knew exactly how to protect us from affectionate grandkids.
Isabella’s mother reports that they began “yelling”
at the little girl, “demand[ing] she too must sit down and
await a full body pat-down.” Indeed, they scared her so badly
that she “did what any frightened young child might, she ran
the opposite direction. … I will never forget the look of pure
terror on her face.”

Ergo, the TSA
declared Isabella a “high-security-threat.” But fear not:
two Warriors chased this “not cooperating” “suspect”
(their actual phrasing, per Ms. Brademeyer) while ordering her mother
“to have no contact with my child.” Eventually, they captured
Isabella, frisked her to ensure that Granny hadn’t slipped
her a WMD during their brief hug, and allowed the family to board
their flight. “It was an awful sight,” Ms. Bradenmeyer
says in understatement as vast as the federal debt. “…My
daughter is very shaken up about this, and has been waking up with
nightmares.”

As should we
all. What has the country become that we permit such savaging of
children? Yet the TSA defended the indefensible, as usual: ”TSA
has reviewed the incident and determined that our officers followed
proper screening procedures in conducting a modified pat-down on
the child.” Parents, take note: the TSA justifies traumatizing
little ones as “proper screening procedures.” You may
want to boycott flying lest concerned citizens sic Child Welfare
Services on you.

Read
the rest of the article

April
28, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution.

The
Best of Becky Akers

Behold the
State's newest trophy in its War on Libert-sorry, Terror: four-year-old
Isabella Brademeyer, on her way home to Montana from her uncle's
wedding. In their efforts to protect us from this child, the TSA's
valiant bullies screamed at and then chased her while separating
her from her mother, whom they threatened. Yo, all you benighted,
shriveled souls worshipping government in general and its tantrum
over "terror" in particular: why doesn't beating up on
girls, large and small, immediately invalidate your idol?

According
to Isabella's mother, she, her children, and their grandmother were
flying out of Wichita, Kansas when the TSA's perverts ordered Grandma
to step aside and await their sexual assault. Isabella, who had
already endured the checkpoint's charade, dispensed a child's comfort
to her grandmother: "she excitedly ran over to give her a hug,
as children often do," her
mother reports. "They made very brief contact, no longer
than a few seconds."

You can imagine
the conniptions those "few seconds" induced among brutes
who strip-search octogenarians, insist that passengers
wearing flip-flops shed them lest said footgear hide explosives,
and pretend
that cupcakes sabotage planes rather than diets. Yep: "a
TSO [sic for u2018sociopath'] began yelling at my child, and
demanded she too must sit down and await a full body pat-down."
Equally unconscionable, Ms. Brademeyer "was prevented from
coming any closer, explaining the situation to [Isabella], or consoling
her in any way."

No rational
person would ever fantasize that Grandma was a sleeper-agent for
Al Qaeda nor suspect her of passing a bomb to her granddaughter
during their "few seconds'" hug. So we'll assume Ms. Brademeyer
describes Isabella's outfit for the TSA's two remaining apologists
out there among the sheeple: "My daughter, who was dressed
in tight leggings, a short sleeve shirt and mary jane shoes, had
no pockets, no jacket and nothing in her hands." That didn't
stymie the TSA's thugs: they abused her as though she were Obama-um,
Osama himself (why do I always confuse those two?). Ms. Brademeyer
tells us that Isabella "was obviously terrified" and "had
no idea what was going on, and the TSOs involved still made no attempt
to explain it to her. When they spoke to her, it was devoid of any
sort of compassion, kindness or respect. They told her she had to
come to them, alone, and spread her arms and legs. She screamed,
u2018No! I don’t want to!' then did what any frightened young child
might, she ran the opposite direction."

And her tormenters
did what any predator might: they "followed" her.

I do hope Isabella
led them a merry chase. (Sweetie, next time run hard enough that
Leviathan's obese leeches suffer a heart attack from their pursuit.)
Meanwhile, they "declared [her] a u2018high-security-threat'"
and, after capturing her, imprisoned her in a "side room."

Thank God,
Ms. Brademeyer now defied these criminals. "…I
was beyond upset, I disregarded what the TSO had said to me, and
I ran to my daughter. I picked her up. I hugged her. I tried to
comfort her." But her "sweet four-year-old child was shaking
and crying uncontrollably, she did not want to stand still and let
strangers touch her." Good for you, Isabella: none of us want
to, either. "My heart was breaking," Ms. Brademeyer continues.
"I will never forget the look of pure terror on her face."

Again, I ask
those of you who excuse the State and its pedophiles at the TSA
to explain yourselves. Are you as evil as Our Rulers? Or are you
merely stupid and ignorant (you are if you justify the assault on
poor Isabella as an isolated incident: the
TSA routinely abuses children to the point that they scream)?
Do you cravenly imagine the money the IRS just stole from you for
the bureaucracies there in Alphabet Town — money that bought this
little girl's savaging — the
price we pay
for civilization? If so, are you demanding a rebate? And are
you hypocritical enough to damn Germans who rallied behind Hitler
as reflexively as you do behind the Feds?

Eventually,
Ms. Brademeyer appealed to a supervisor. He decreed that she could
hold and console her daughter while his underlings pawed her. But
that didn't end the persecution: when the family reached their gate,
"I noticed that the TSOs had followed us through the airport,"
Ms. Brademeyer says. "I was told something was wrong with my
boarding pass and I would have to show it to them again. Upon seeing
the TSO, my daughter was thrown into hysterics." Then, "on
a connecting flight in Denver, an airport employee demanded
to know which of the family was Isabella – and ‘looked really confused’
when the girl was pointed out to her." No doubt she was expecting
someone at least 3 feet tall.

None of the
TSA's atrocities are complete without its managers' benediction;
as usual, they readily defended the indefensible: "…TSA
has reviewed the incident and determined that our officers followed
proper current screening procedures in conducting a modified pat-down
on the child." NB: terrorizing a child with a "modified
pat-down" until she's "hysteric[al]" is "proper…procedure"
in Our Rulers' eyes. May the Almighty forgive us that we haven't
long since rebelled against such fathomless cruelty.

Recall, too,
that while government's goons chase and molest little girls in airports,
their enablers lurk in the sewer we fund on the Potomac. Nor do
they ever consider abolishing this satanic agency. Rather, they
debate how to waste the $400,000 in change the TSA pilfers from
us and whether "privatized"
sadists will grope us more efficiently than the government's do.
All this while the
only presidential contender to condemn the TSA as a symptom of our
"police state" languishes in the Republican primary.
If you support any candidate other than Ron Paul, you are as guilty
as Congress and the TSA for Isabella's trauma.

Today the TSA's
multitude of victims mourn with Jefferson, "In every stage
of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most
humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by
repeated injury." Pray they will soon echo Patrick Henry as
well: "An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that
is left us."

April
25, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution.

The
Best of Becky Akers

In
2006, the courageous Ryan Bird from Wisconsin
approached a checkpoint after writing "Kip Hawley is an Idiot”
on the plastic bag said idiot had decreed for passengers' toiletries.
You can predict what happened next: the TSA's goons "detained"
Ryan for 25 minutes to punish his feistiness.

We'll trust
Ryan finally if tardily arrived at his destination and has thereafter
avoided airports. Otherwise, little has changed in the last six
years. The Idiot's mental capacity is still half that of wallpaper,
even if his circumstances now differ: he forsook his cushy seat
as the TSA's Alpha Male when the Republicrats lost the political
football to the Demopublicans in 2008. That fumble eventually subjected
aviation to the tender mercies of John "The Pervert" Pistole.
Idiot was a tough act to follow with his 3.2-ounce nonsense and
his baggies to neutralize explosive Listerine and cologne, but The
Perv managed to exceed this abuse. Under his suzerainty, the TSA's
thugs gate-rape and ogle us. It's enough to induce nostalgia for
mere lunacy from The Idiot rather than The Perv's outright sexual
assault.

Perhaps that
emboldened The Idiot to write a book (and no, I will neither read
nor review it: good gracious, there are limits to the risks Your
Intrepid Reporter will run, and addling my wits courtesy of The
Idiot's pablum lies far beyond that boundary), the dying
Palgrave Macmillan to publish it, and the equally moribund War
State Journal to feature 2500 words from The Idiot promoting
his tract. (The Journal restricts ordinary serfs to "600
to 1,200 jargon-free words" on its op-ed page; maybe that's
why The Idiot's screed appears in "Life and Culture."
That section doesn't post its requirements on length, but another
piece on which I randomly clicked numbered around 900 words.)

The TSA's multitudes
of enemies have gleefully hailed The Idiot's article because of
such lines as "Airport security [sic] in America is
broken … [TSA] end[s] up on the evening news when someone’s grandma
gets patted down [sic for u2018sexually molested'] or a child’s
toy gets confiscated [sic for u2018stolen'] as a security risk.
If you’re a frequent traveler, you probably hate us"–bingo,
Idiot, but so does everybody else–"… it is a national embarrassment
that our airport security [sic] system remains so hopelessly
bureaucratic and disconnected from the people whom it is meant to
protect [sic for u2018dominate']."

The fanatical
statists out there, including the staff at Palgrave and the Journal,
may listen now that even the TSA's former kingpin admits, "Airport
security has to change. The relationship between the public and
the TSA has become too poisonous to be sustained." But I doubt
it. Editors who can overlook toddlers'
screaming as the agency's pedophiles fondle them and a manhandled
pilot's
puking aren't likely to suddenly condemn these crimes against
humanity because an acolyte of the God-State confesses that the
deity's gilding is cracked.

Meanwhile,
The Idiot deliciously and completely proves his credentials as imbecile.
"I arrived [at the TSA] in 2005," he
tells us as though auditioning in the role of Mr. Smith for
Frank Capra, "with naive notions of wrangling the organization
into shape, only to discover the power of the TSA’s bureaucratic
momentum and political pressures." Breathes there a dumbed-down
prisoner of the public schools, even at the elementary level, who
doesn't understand that "bureaucracy" and "politics"
not only characterize but are the sine qua non of government?
Sorry, Idiot, no sympathy for you.

What's even
more damning is that after a review, albeit brief and euphemistic,
of the TSA's incompetence, The Idiot does not recommend the only
sensible solution, abolition. Rather, he fantasizes that we can
"fix" this bureaucracy of profoundly deceptive deviants
and offers five suggestions for doing so. I need quote only one
to illustrate how sadly, stunningly stupid Our former Ruler is:
"Give
TSA officers [sic for u2018sociopaths'] more flexibility
…TSA officers should have more discretion to interact with passengers…"
Right. Any more "flexibility" or "interaction with
passengers," and they'll
be gang-banging victims right on the concourse's floor.

But what else
than such drivel would we expect from a loser who also credits the
TSA's feeble-minded, blue-shirted terrorists with "well-trained,
engaged brains" and insists against all evidence that "No
security agency on earth has the experience and pattern-recognition
skills of TSA officers." Ahhhhh, so that's why they
mistake Granny and Junior for Al Qaeda's newest recruits, all that
"experience" and "skill" at "pattern-recognition."
(Yo, Journalites: I thought we were striving for "jargon-free"
prose here.)

I asked Bogdan
Dzakovic his opinion of The Idiot's maunderings. Bogdan is to the
federal stranglehold on aviation what Ron Paul is to Congress: a
man whose intelligence and integrity throw into even darker relief
the corrupt morons around him. Bogdan's
an expert on
security
who regularly blew
the whistle on the feds' malfeasance and threats to passengers
until the TSA exiled him to a cubbyhole in 2002. There he safely,
innocuously stuffs envelopes and photocopies fliers instead of embarrassing
the security theater's managers.

Bogdan
had earlier told me that "'the bigger threat' to our well-being
isn't terrorists … but u2018our own government's knee-jerk reaction'
to them." Yep, this hero sees things as they are, not as Our
Rulers decree.

No wonder Bogdan
began his response to me with the reminder that "when Kip Hawley
was in charge of TSA, … there was … a website where you could go
to get coffee cups, t-shirts, hats etc with his face and the words,
u2018Kip Hawley is an idiot.'  I’m serious."

See why I like
Bogdan?

He continued
that The Idiot "is right about airport security being broken,
but for the wrong reasons … His comments that the hardened cockpit
doors will prevent another 911 hijacking are wrong.  The doors
should have been constructed as double-hulled doors (two doors in
which only one could be opened at a time).  We practiced breaching
cockpit doors when I was an air marshal and it only takes a moment.  On
long flights pilots/flight attendants constantly open the doors.
…

"The sad
thing is that even if TSA was motivated to fix things, they couldn’t
do it.  The managers at TSA simply don’t have the intellectual
and professional skills.  I work at TSA HQ and the main
thing we do is service the bureaucracy.  Those that support
the bureaucracy are rewarded and those that don’t are ostracized. 
TSA should be disbanded, make the industry protect itself."

So there you
have it, folks: wisdom that the Journal and the rest of the
corporate media will go bankrupt, praise God, rather than print.

April
19, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution.

The
Best of Becky Akers

Versus
Nurture by Jonathan David Morris, Amazon, 2012. ($3.99 ebook,
$8.99 paperback)

Fiction can
— and has — changed the world.

Think Harriet
Beecher Stowe's warmongering Uncle
Tom's Cabin or John Steinbeck's novels and their advocacy
of socialism. On a far smaller scale, Ayn Rand tried to justify
narcissism, boorishness, and immorality by mislabeling them "individualism."

But fiction
can also improve the human condition. Versus Nature
lies in that elite class. This is no idle story, told simply to
entertain — though you will laugh and occasionally blink back a
tear as you skim its pages, racing ahead to answer those essential
questions all good stories provoke, What happens next, and
Why? If you prefer a moral to your riveting reads, you'll
love VN.

But let me
hasten to add that VN isn't propaganda. The author's underlying
message of peace rather than war and the blessings of freedom never
supersede his concern for his characters or the plot. In fact, his
message is subtle enough that it's mere background: for example,
the heroine's hatred for war after her brother enlists and dies
informs her reluctance to become a mother. On her first date with
the man she ultimately marries, she explains, "…[A]s long as
there are people in this world who still … think war is just a part
of human nature, it's just u2018what we do,' I could never have a kid.
I could never bring a person into this world when little girls are
still losing their brothers for wars not even their brothers understand.
… that's a world where kids are just pawns in some big game they
never asked to play in. My brother was eighteen. I was nine. And
for no good reason, they took him from me."

Were Mr. Morris
writing propaganda, his hero would respond with a long diatribe
against war. He doesn't. Instead, he reassures her, "I just
want to hang out … I don't want to knock you up."

VN follows
this couple from their initial meeting at an anti-war rally (which
Mr. Morris deftly and humorously handles; he is not preaching pacifism
to the reader but laughing with him at political correctness) to
a momentous decision they must make 9 years later, one that will
affect the entire human race. Along the way, VN offers something
for everyone: time-travel; a denouement with wham-bam fisticuffs,
lots of blood, and a fight to the death; an intense love story and
the extension of married love to the children it produces; a debate
over bearing those children; a wealth of ideas and issues.

Mr. Morris
excels at that last, again lightly injecting a moral view of each.
For example, neither he nor his characters condemn abortion, but
his heroine strongly protests any suggestion that she would murder
her own baby; in fact, she physically attacks the woman who tries
to persuade her to do so. Meanwhile, her beloved husband has been
lying to her since the anti-war rally, given his silence about a
very personal but pertinent fact. A sin of omission, which our secular
age no longer even recognizes, let alone damns, but which nonetheless
finds him out.

One of my few
criticisms of VN is its unrealistic ending. There's the time-travel
as well as some technology from the future that is never explained
— but Mr. Morris pulls both off. Instead, I found some of the logistics
unbelievable or inconsistent. For instance, it seems to me one of
Mr. Morris's characters from the future should be missing a hand,
given his earlier maiming. But I rarely read science fiction and
am certainly no expert on time-traveling's paradoxes, so perhaps
I'm wrong.

VN hooked
me from its dedication ("There are some pretty crazy ideas
in this book. But the idea of dedicating Versus Nurture to
anyone other than my beautiful, supportive wife, Rachael, would
easily be the craziest of all") and continued snaring me
with its first chapter. In it, a young husband and wife who obviously
and deeply love one another agree that he must kill them both that
very night; her only request is that he do so "efficiently."
The rest of the novella supplies the back-story to this shocker
— one you won't want to miss.

April
11, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution.

The
Best of Becky Akers

Nero fiddled
while Rome burned. And Congress holds hearings on the TSA while
the agency sexually assaults passengers, steals their valuables,
torments children, the elderly and handicapped, and spits on the
Constitution.

A "joint
hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure" last
week supposedly "focus[ed]" on the "Transportation
Security Administration (TSA) program challenges and failures."
This sham will neither restrain nor eliminate the TSA, no more than
have the innumerable other hearings on which Congress has squandered
our money — or those upcoming in this series ("The
committees plan to continue conducting joint oversight hearings
examining additional TSA issues in the coming months"). Indeed,
the hearings' sole purpose and achievement are fooling voters into
believing that Our Rulers care when the thugs they've unleashed
irradiate and grope us.

Leading the
show-trial were Darrell Issa (R-CA) and John Mica (R-FL). You needn't
wade through the dozens of reports and transcripts these hearings
generated to capture their flavor: Issa
supplied a taste when he remarked on a radio show, "This
is one of those where we have to start asking: One, are personal
liberties being protected?" Yeah, go grab a hanky: I laughed
so hard I cried, too. "Two, is the convenience and efficiency
of air traffic being affected adversely?" Ditto. "And
last, is there a more efficient way to do it?”

Sorta like
the Supreme Nincompoops pretending the Constitution may empower
the Feds to compel the purchase of medical insurance. There can
be no question here, no debate: those who insist that the Commerce
Clause authorizes Obummercare or that the TSA's atrocities "protect
personal liberties" are either shockingly venal or downright
stupid.

Which brings
us to Issa's accomplice. It's possible a more hypocritical charlatan
than John Mica leeches off taxpayers, but not probable. Mica
admits and on occasion has even bragged that he founded the
TSA. (We'll have to take his word for that: there's no independent
confirmation. His claim becomes even more doubtful when we remember
that "Democrats in Congress … saw how they could use the shock
value of 9/11 to force federalization of security, as they had been
proposing for years, ever since the Lockerbie bombing." [Susan
and Joseph Trento, Unsafe
at Any Altitude, p. 136]) Nor do the agency's barbarities
trouble Mica: when two air-marshals slaughtered a short-term missionary
named Rigoberto Alpizar — whom they alleged to have shouted about
a bomb; other
witnesses denied that Mr. Alpizar ever mentioned the b-word
–, Mica
chortled, "The system worked exactly as designed."
(Intriguing reversion to the passive, there; notice he doesn't say
"as I designed it" when an innocent man dies.)

But Mica's
recently changed his tune. Now he condemns "the
system" as too top-heavy. Never mind the TSA's pedophilia
and thievery: it pays its managers too much and hires too many of
them. Bloated bureaucracy, not murder, carcinogenic porno-scanners,
or irretrievably lost liberty, twist Mica's knickers. (Not that
bloated bureaucracy shouldn't perturb him — but oughtn't he have
realized the nature of the beast when he supposedly established
the TSA? What bureaucracy isn't bloated? And who spends even
a moment in Leviathan's employ without understanding that elemental
truth, let alone the
five terms in Congress that Mica had racked up by 9/11?)

Or perhaps
we can attribute his discontent with his brainchild to the "contributions"
he solicits from "private" security firms. No wonder
Mica wants to "reform" the TSA, restricting it to a supervisory
role while "private" goons staff the checkpoints. Passengers
won't notice any difference: since the TSA will still dictate "screening
protocols," X-rays and a proctologic exam will still torture
victims at airports, even if it's Acme Security rather than the
TSA thrusting its hands down our britches. But Mica and his cronies
will profit from the misery. No reason Chertoff
should hog the whole pie.

Mica's horribly
disingenuous priorities mirror those of the Committees and their
hearings. Our Rulers object to the porno-scanners not because they
denude and humiliate citizens while increasing our odds of contracting
cancer, nor from any revulsion at such gross insult to the Constitution,
but because "recent
reports suggest that whole body imaging technology [sic
for porno-scanning] may not be as effective as the Department [of
Homeland Security, TSA's über-bureaucracy] envisioned"
— "despite the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars already
spent on AIT." Yep, so much wasted loot is unconscionably criminal
and more than enough cause for abolishing the TSA. Now throw in
its sexual molestation and its swiping of laptops, cash and jewelry,
let alone its petty pilfering of shampoo and mouthwash, and annihilating
this Satanic agency becomes as mandatory as trial and punishment
for its sociopaths.

Instead, Congress
will conduct more "hearings
… [to] examin[e] the effectiveness and reported shortcomings
of TSA's security initiatives." Thanks, guys: that'll have
the TSA shaking in its jack-boots.

Meanwhile,
Rep. Gerald "The Conman" Connolly (D-VA) informed the
TSA at Monday's hearing, “We’re
not cattle…” Good gracious, Gerry, of course you're not: cattle
are useful. And they don't produce nearly as much BS as congresscritters
do. Then Conman "add[ed] that u2018barking orders' undermines the
good work of the Transportation Security Administration." Um,
Ger? What "good work"? Then again, you wouldn't sit in
Congress if you didn't consider robbery and lying "good work."

Rep. Tom Petri
(R-WI) must have figured it's never too early to campaign: he wildly
exaggerated when he denounced the TSA for "treat[ing]
traveling Americans u2018like prisoners.'” We wish: the State's
lackeys must at least suspect prisoners of committing a crime before
pawing them.

Our Rulers
threaten to stage more of these ludicrous hearings. You can bet
that not only will they waste as many of our taxes and as much of
our time as this one has, but that you'll never once hear the word
abolish at any of them.

April
4, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution.

The
Best of Becky Akers

By Allan
Stevo. CreateSpace, 2012. [$3.99
Kindle, $12.68
paperback -- but that's negotiable: "At the author's request,
in order to increase the distribution of this title, the price of
this edition has been set lower than usual for a text of this nature."
Likewise, Thomas Paine devoted his profits from Common
Sense to General George Washington's hungry, cash-strapped troops.

I didn't want
to read, let alone review, this
book.

It's about
the nuts and bolts -- in fact, one chapter even bears that title
-- of political campaigning. Specifically, campaigning for Ron Paul
so that he wins the Republican primary.

But I'm an
anarchist, with no faith in politics or the State and indeed, an
intense hatred of both. Author
Allan Stevo describes folks like me perfectly on page 38: we
"generally dismiss the role of government as a circus and a
waste of time and energy." We love liberty with every fiber
of our being; some of us, including me, even find political theory
and philosophy fascinating. But the down-and-dirty, how-to-win machinations?
No thanks. They exemplify everything we loathe about the State,
its lies and manipulations.

By page 13,
Allan Stevo had transformed my reluctance to raving enthusiasm.
Indeed, I'd go so far as to insist that this is one of the most
important texts friends of freedom can read in the next few months.
And it is incredibly empowering, too, because Mr. Stevo's central
idea is that our efforts, not those of the official Ron Paul Campaign
or even of the good doctor himself, let alone the corporate media
(or lack thereof), will crown him victor at the Republican Convention
this August.

And that, in
Mr. Stevo's opinion, is more essential than Dr. Paul's ultimately
winning the presidential election. Why? Because "America is
a place where neighbors rarely speak openly about politics, and
when they do, it is usually only to repeat media sound bites. An
Obama/Paul race will change that. Two differing ideologies will
Clash [sic]. One for greater individual freedom. The other
for more government. This competition of ideas will not occur with
other Republican candidates, since they are ideologically aligned
with President Obama when it comes to the power of the individual
over the power of the state." [p. 2]

Mr. Stevo believes
the echoes of Dr. Paul's debate with Obummer will reverberate for
decades: "These two men will face off and provide America with
two different choices for what the future holds. America will have
the opportunity to decisively choose which of those paths [to --
sic] take. Never in my life have I been able to experience
America the way America will look come autumn of 2012 as economic
conditions worsen and Americans look to two very different philosophies
to explain the cause and correction of the nation's problems."
[p. 2-3]

But given the
mainstream's studiously ignoring or venomously savaging Dr. Paul,
how can he win the Republican nomination? Mr. Stevo provides the
answer — a relatively obvious and simple but explosively brilliant
one — from his experience as both a worker on campaigns and as a
candidate himself (he ran for the US House of Representatives in
Illinois' tenth district during 2005). He advocates "reaching
across the aisle" to Democratic friends via "social media"
and asking them to register as Republicans — I know: ugh! But it's
only for the primary — then vote for the only guy in either party
firmly and consistently working against the Amerikan Empire.

After all,
he points out, "Ron Paul is the lone pro-peace vote for president
and his party affiliation doesn't change that fact." [p.13]
(Besides, voting for Dr. P will infuriate the "real" Republicans,
the Newts and Mitts and neocons and fascists, which is a fine goal
in itself.) Ergo, he suggests "writ[ing your Democratic] …
Facebook friends to try to open up dialogues of understanding, and
ultimately asking them to register Republican in order to vote for
Ron Paul. I hope you will write your friends through email or any
other social network you use. These people are what I will refer
to as your u2018social precinct'…"

Mr. Stevo theorizes
that "social precincts" are far more valuable and viable
than the geographic precincts they are superseding, especially for
Ron Paul's internet-savvy fans. He discusses the use of precincts
in Chicago, whose politics he has studied and in which he's participated
for over 20 years, and shows how our "social," online
ones trump them: "What Americans today are lacking in relationships
with their neighbors, they are making up for in relationships online
at a distance," he writes [p 40]. And you can very effectively
"work" this precinct for liberty, following the three-part
strategy he outlines in his book:

Step I. Communicate
with your friend.

Step II.
Get a promise from him to vote for Ron Paul.

Step III.
Make sure he gets out to vote for Ron Paul.*

*The third
step is twofold:

A. See
to it that your friend is registered properly in his state
to vote for Ron Paul.

B. See
to it that your friend gets out to the polling place or caucusing
location to vote for Ron Paul on election day.

Intriguingly,
Mr. Stevo contrasts the influence each of us wields over friends
and family with his efforts on phone-banks during various campaigns.
Though he invested dozens of hours calling strangers and asking
them to vote for Dr. P, he wonders if any of them actually did;
he compares that with his proven success in requesting friends do
so and urges us to follow suit. (This isn't an either/or proposition;
as he explains later, we should milk our "social precincts"
fully and then volunteer our efforts on the larger campaign.)

It's no wonder
Mr. Stevo convinces so many of his friends to pull the lever for
peace and liberty: he's conciliatory and diplomatic. His attitude,
even towards those with whom he disagrees, is collaborative: Both
I and my socialist, Big-Government Democratic friends crave peace,
and Ron Paul is the only candidate we can count on to give it to
us. Therefore, I am presenting my buddy with something he very much
wants — he just doesn't realize it's out there. Or if he does, no
one has yet given him the opportunity to to vote for it. So I am
not a pest, I am a chum explaining how together we can achieve what
we want.

Effective spokesmen
for liberty and its champion, Dr. P, don't argue with friends who
reject our message. We simply move on to those who agree and welcome
it.

Mr. Stevo also
recommends wisely using the limited hours until June 26 (the date
of Utah's primary, the last before the convention). He cautions
against wasting time on the pursuits so many of us erroneously rate
"important," such as participating in online polls or
commenting on websites denouncing Dr. Paul. These don't guarantee
any votes, he points out: our efforts are better spent educating
our "social precincts."

You've got
to love an author so devoted to liberty's ascension that he pleads
on page 74 (out of 215), "…please stop reading this book
now. Please put it down, and get to work." [Original emphasis.]
I didn't obey and lay the book aside because of its easy, friendly
style and charm (despite the many typos plaguing such a hastily
written and published manuscript). Still, I breezed through the
whole thing in a few hours.

You can, too.
I strongly echo one reviewer's advice on Amazon: not only should
you immediately read Mr. Stevo's book, you should "Buy several
copies, distribute them amongst your friends!"

March
14, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution.

The
Best of Becky Akers

The State owns
among its characteristics a hypocrisy as stunning, fatal, and over-the-top
as its double standards. And both are on horrific display in New
Jersey this week.

We first survey
the trial of Dharun Ravi, formerly a freshman at Rutgers University.
This week Our Rulers continued savaging him, as they have for the
past 18 months, because his roommate committed suicide. Yes, in
defiance of all justice and common sense, the socialist State now
holds us responsible for others' decisions.

Nor need the
"evidence" implicating us in their choices be any stronger
than a politician's promise, as Dharun's persecution proves.

It seems that
19 evenings into their first semester on campus, Dharun's roommate
kicked him out of their quarters because he had a "guest"
— a sin so common at college it's earned its own shorthand, "sexiling."

Ergo, Dharun
headed down the hall to Molly Wei's room; the two had known each
other since "middle school," as the State dubs its indoctrination
of kids 12 and 13 years old. There he borrowed Molly's computer
to check on his belongings via the webcam he'd activated in his
own room before leaving. He told Molly he was suspicious because
the "guest" was "an
older man and did not appear to be a Rutgers student."
Further, his "disheveled
appearance made him look u2018shady,' u2018scruffy' and u2018creepy.'"
Dharun didn't want his iPad and computer to disappear.

But theft
was not what the two saw on Molly's screen. Rather, they watched
the roommate and his paramour kissing. “We were both just kind of
really shocked, like, I can’t believe we just saw what we did,”
Molly
told her inquisitors in court this week. They have suborned
her by promising to drop their bogus
"counts of invasion of privacy" against her if she'll
rat out her friend. “It shouldn’t have happened and we saw something
that we didn’t expect to see and it just felt weird.”

Neither Molly
nor Dharun kept the filming or its streaming on the internet a secret:
within hours, many students, including the roommate, Tyler Clementi,
knew about his unwitting stardom in Dharun's webcast.

Call me a prude,
but had I learned my roommate filmed me in libre, let alone
flagrante, I would sure as heck have found someplace else
for my next rendezvous — and I'd have besieged the housing office
for a change in dorms. Not Tyler. He brazenly pulled the same
stunt in the same location two days later, with the same results:
another webcast.

And the day
after that, Tyler killed himself. He
left a laconic note on Facebook: "Jumping off the gw [George
Washington] bridge sorry.”

Never mind
that Tyler didn't mention Dharun, Molly, or the webcasts. Never
mind that "gay,
lesbian and bisexual students are … four times more likely to
attempt suicide [than others], according to a 2007 Massachusetts
youth risk survey." Never mind that Tyler's amazingly active
extra-curricular life could have furnished him with any number of
reasons for his lethal leap, including blackmail or depression:
Our Rulers arrested both Dharun and Molly within
days of the death. "For what?" you incredulously ask.
For "invasion of privacy." To Dharun's rap sheet, cops
added "witness
tampering for the messages he sent to Wei [asking what she'd
told cops], bias intimidation, and hindering arrest."

And while
the trumped-up charges and kangaroo court are a joke, the penalties
aren't: 20-year-old Dharun
faces the possibility of ten years in prison. Meanwhile, the
State has already flayed Molly. Not only have its minions forced
her to betray Dharun, they have enslaved her for 300 hours of "community
service" and tried to enroll her in "a
program on cyberbullying or dealing with people with u2018alternative
lifestyles.'"

Not that she
needs it: both she and Dharun are proud products of a century of
Progressivism. Neither seems to see anything the least bit immoral
in Tyler's behavior, despite the prosecutor's back-flips to portray
the opposite. In fact, much of the proceeding so far has consisted
of friends testifying to Dharun's tolerance. Behold the pathetic
pass to which American injustice has descended: a student who reacted
self-defensively at best and at worst pulled the sort of prank roommates
always have (even if technology and the modern contempt for decency
have raised the stakes on such shenanigans) has committed a murderously
malicious "crime." And the victim's strongest defense
is friends who swear that his opinions are appropriately PC.

It's already
beyond nauseating. Unbelievably, it gets worse. While the State's
phalanx of thugs beat up on college kids for supposedly invading
the privacy of one guy a couple of times, a secret “report” the
Associated Press “obtained” revealed how another troop of Leviathan's
sociopaths invaded the privacy of entire communities for a decade.

The New York
Police Department has been spying on all Muslims, not just ones
suspected of criminality, "across
the Northeast following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."
They apparently stepped up their unconstitutional surveillance in
2007, when "the
NYPD’s secretive Demographics Unit fanned out across Newark,
photographing every mosque and eavesdropping in Muslim businesses."

Nor did these
little forays across the Hudson satisfy their itch to invade the
serfs' privacy: "Police
have built databases showing where Muslims live, where they
buy groceries, what Internet cafes they use and where they watch
sports. Dozens of mosques and student groups have been infiltrated,
and police have built detailed profiles of local ethnic groups,
from Moroccans to Egyptians to Albanians." I daresay Muslims
and Moroccans aren't the only "ethnic groups" Our Rulers
harass, even if they're the only ones the NYPD mentions in the 60-page
report; indeed, "numerous
restaurants are also profiled in the report, including a branch
of Dunkin’ Donuts" — though even Christians and Jews occasionally
patronize such confectionaries. And of course, the Orwellian PATRIOT
Act extends the State's noxious nosiness to all Americans.

Meanwhile,
"the
NYPD’s intelligence unit also operates far outside its jurisdiction
and has worked to keep tabs on Muslims across the Northeast. The
department has cataloged Muslim communities in Long Island, conducted
undercover operations in New Brunswick, N.J., and has turned often
innocuous Internet postings by Muslim student groups into police
files." The
AP drily adds, "…residents [outside New York City] had
no reason to suspect the NYPD was watching them. And the department
is not accountable to their votes or tax dollars."

Nor have these
Keystone Kops shied from duplicating the very crime that may imprison
Dharun for ten years: they ludicrously and voraciously spied on
kids at "more
than a dozen universities throughout the north-eastern United States."
They even "sent
an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip with some college
students." With priceless irony, they also established "a
safe house in an apartment not far from [Rutgers -- yep, Dharun's
alma mater]. The operation was blown when the building superintendent
stumbled upon the safe house and, thinking it was some sort of a
terrorist cell," — oh, how right he was! — "called the
police emerency [sic] dispatcher."

Recall Leviathan's
prissy, hyperbolic outrage at Dharun and Molly's "spying,"
though their subject not only heard about it almost immediately
but almost seemed to invite a recurrence. And contrast the vengeance
the State has wreaked on these two with its defense of the NYPD's
"violation
of … Muslim students [who] want to have their own lives, their
own privacy and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that everybody
else has," according to "Tanweer Haq, chaplain of the
Muslim Student Association at Syracuse."

No matter:
"New
York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he didn’t see any reason to second-guess
the NYPD’s methods … [New York City's mommy-sorry, mayor Michael]
Bloomberg already has given strong public support for the police
department’s efforts." Indeed, he decreed them "'legal,'
u2018appropriate' and u2018constitutional…'" I may be going out
on a limb here, but I doubt either of these tyrants will recommend
even a day in prison or a minute of "community servitude"
for the perps.

None of whom
are even remotely contrite, by the way. Unlike Molly and Dharun,
who are mature enough not to lie when caught red-handed, they deny
they've done anything wrong. "Paul
Browne, the [NYPD's] deputy commissioner for public information,
said: u2018There’s been a suggestion that what we are doing doesn’t
comport with legal requirements, and that’s not the case. Everything
we’re doing is done constitutionally.'" The criminals' leader
blames taxpayers, incredibly enough: we're picky ingrates who don't
appreciate the NYPD's heroics. "'Not
everybody is going to be happy with everything the police department
does, that’s the nature of our business,' [NYC's] Police Commissioner
Raymond Kelly said." We ingrates are also forgetful: "[P]eople
have short memories as to what happened here in 2001," he scolded
— no fault of Our Rulers since they exploit every opportunity to
remind us. Nor does Kelly see any "need
to apologize for keeping tabs on some Muslims if that’s what
it takes to protect the city."

Unfortunately
for Rapacious Ray, his report turned up not a single instance of
any criminality. Seems that "keeping tabs on some [sic
for u2018all "within
a 250-mile radius" of the city'] Muslims" isn't
"what it takes to protect the city."

New Jersey's
politicians are scrambling to distance themselves from the NYPD's
snoops. They
knew nothing about it, they bluster, though the NYPD contends
it not only informed them of its activities, but "a
Newark liaison officer accompanied NYPD personnel when they
were in Newark." In any event, their alleged fury pales beside
the State's against Dharun and Molly — and is yet another exercise
in cynical hypocrisy: "Sen.
Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey … called on U.S. Attorney General
Eric Holder and CIA Director David Petraeus to conduct a separate
investigation [of the NYPD], saying he was u2018deeply concerned' over
the allegations." Expect that "investigation" to
go nowhere, and fast: "Millions
of dollars in White House money [sic for u2018our taxes']
has helped pay for New York Police Department programs that put
entire American Muslim neighborhoods under surveillance."

David Cohen
is "a
former CIA officer who went on to become the NYPD’s deputy commissioner
for intelligence." One of those responsible for designing this
unconscionably unconstitutional surveillance, he summarized its
philosophy: “Take a big net, throw it out, catch as many fish as
you can and see what we get."

Amerikans who
shrug at government's spying, who pretend it preys only on Muslims
solely to protect us, better learn to swim.

March
2, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution.

The
Best of Becky Akers

You might think
the New York Police Department, with its notoriety for abusing civilians
and a
list of scandals so long it requires its own page in Wikipedia,
would avoid furnishing us with yet another reason to despise it.

But no. Like
many such forces across the country, the NYPD has grown increasingly
fond of strip-searches — and not just of suspected criminals. Cops
want to denude all of us, all the time, even when we're merely walking
down the street, minding our own business.

The NYPD's
Commissioner, Ray Kelly, recently confessed this stunning ambition
during a speech at the New York City Police Foundation. He "said
the department was working with the Defense Department to develop
gun-scan technology u2018capable of detecting concealed firearms,'"
the
New York Times reported.

The Defense
Department? OK, New York City's host of bureaucrats could very
well collaborate with Al Qaeda, given how badly they gum up the
works. But otherwise, does the NYPD really need to sic the Pentagon
on the taxpayers who foot its bills?

Uniformed thugs
who expect us to divulge everything suddenly turn shy when we demand
the same regarding their mechanical Peeping Toms. We know virtually
nothing about Tom except his real name: Terahertz Imaging Detection.
The photo the Times ran with its article shows something
akin to thermal imaging i.e., the subject's waist glows green
thanks to a pistol stuck in his belt.

But this isn't
the only gizmo the NYPD and other cops nationwide focus on us. They've
also unleashed another, more invasive technology: "whole-body
imaging," or, as the perverts at the Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) now prefer to call it, "advanced imaging
technology."

You're far
too familiar with these scanners. They're the ones at the airport
that expose us while also irradiating us — the
ones that the European Union banned out of "health and
privacy concerns" and that have spawned such groups here as
wewon'tfly.com.

What you may
not realize is that police nationwide have been wielding these offensive
contraptions against the folks they supposedly "serve and protect"
for several years now. In September 2010, forbes.com revealed the
deployment of "more
than 500 backscatter X-ray scanners mounted in vans that can
be driven" around neighborhoods nationwide, "snoop[ing]"
into whatever rouses a cop's curiosity. "…the company says
law enforcement agencies have … been using them domestically…
u2018This product is now the largest-selling cargo and vehicle inspection
system ever,' says Joseph Reiss, AS&E’s vice president of marketing.
… The New York Police Department confirmed that it uses the technology
but wouldn’t divulge specifics."

Enough to make
you stay home except for those trips to the gym, isn't it?

Not surprisingly,
cops love these gadgets. And while the New York Times cheerily
pretends they'll only violate the Second Amendment with them, we
all know the boots on the ground will also aim their X-ray vision
at the wannabe actress on her way to an audition. Expect AS&E
to profit from hundreds of millions of our taxes over the next few
years.

But there's
an advantage to the ogling from Your City's Finest, one we've seen
with the TSA: punish law-abiding folks as though they're crooks,
and they learn to loathe you. TSA
now ranks with the IRS as the federal agency Americans most hate;
there's no reason that electronic strip-searches will be any more
popular on the avenues than they are in airports. Americans' inordinate
and craven love for cops may finally end.

Cops' excuse
for virtually strip-searching us is the same as the TSA's: we have
to thwart the bad guys. And the police-state's apologists are fine
with that, claiming that if you've got nothing to hide, you've got
nothing to fear. They seem oblivious to the fact that dragnets don't
punish only thieves and rapists but violate us, too.

And they chill
all sorts of things we value highly, such as free discourse. Are
you liable to mount your soapbox and declaim against Obamacare when
you know the van parked across the street is filming you au naturel?

What about
travel and socializing? Some flyers figure voyeurism is the price
they pay for a break on the Caribbean's sunny beaches — but is a
mere trip across town for dinner with friends worth flashing your
junk?

Meanwhile,
virtually everything the TSA finds on passengers is innocuous, embarrassing,
and of no relevance whatever to terrorism. Cops' gawking will produce
similar results.

For example,
searches have snagged passengers carrying more cash than Our Rulers
prefer. Stowing a generous wad in your pocket doesn't break any
laws. But the TSA "detains" such victims, forcing them
to justify their stash and grossly inconveniencing them — or worse.
In 2009, Steve
Bierfeldt of the Campaign for Liberty taped his interrogation and
bullying at the TSA's hands when he tried to fly home with $4700
from a political fundraiser.

Imagine cops
who are still leering over your scan accosting you in front of friends
and family, ordering you to assume the position, and then quizzing
you on where you got your $600 and what you intend to do with it
before finally, grudgingly releasing you.

Often it's
not money that triggers a physical frisking but a medical device
or a prosthetic limb. The TSA is infamous for tormenting invalids
when its "whole-body imagers" pick up "anomalies."
Cops will likewise investigate anything unusual their contraptions
reveal, despotically shaming tens of millions.

The TSA has
annihilated freedom for a decade now; police departments have done
so for almost 150 years, since their introduction here in the 1850's.
It's past time we rid ourselves of both enemies.

February
25, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution.

The
Best of Becky Akers

Seldom have
so many bragged so much about so little.

The TSA and
its flaks in the corporate media are currently shilling for the
agency's "Pre√ (yes, Jargon plumbs new depths here: that
cuneiform translates as u2018PreCheck') Program." The outrage with
the Orwellian name isn't anything new: it's haunted nationalized
aviation for almost as long as the TSA has. Sometimes, companies
who "partner" with the Feds but nonetheless insist
that they're "private" have offered it. Other times, as
now, the Thieves and Sexual Assailants are its sole sponsors.

The scam pretends
that serfs who divulge even more information to the Feds than their
dossiers already contain will suffer less persecution from the TSA
than the rest of us. The agency doesn't go so far as to claim they'll
completely escape its sexual molestation, nor even that they'll
breeze through checkpoints; rather, these self-snitches will merely
"undergo
expedited screening [sic for u2018unconstitutional, warrantless
searches']." Our Masters will "no longer" force them
to "remov[e] the following items: Shoes; 3-1-1 compliant bag
from carry-on; Laptop from bag; Light outerwear/jacket; Belt."
However, "TSA will always incorporate random and unpredictable
security measures [sic for u2018sexual assault and humiliation']
throughout the airport and no individual will be guaranteed expedited
screening."

Indeed, one
of the TSA's spokesliars insists that "random" groping
is "an
important element of the program." Wanna bet the groping
is no
more random than the porno-scanning is? (And by the way, where
are the feminists on this? Why have we heard diddly from NOW during
the TSA's decade of degrading women?)

Permission
to sometimes perhaps avoid Big Brother's fondling comes with a price:
$100. Since we're dealing with Leviathan here, assume this is a
yearly fee and that it will rise steeply as more passengers seek
relief, even if partial, from the agency's abuse.

But here's
the real kicker, something that should have every American, Occupier
or otherwise, screaming to abolish the TSA and indeed all government:
PreCheck is unabashedly, openly fascist. It splits with corporations
the power the Feds wield over us.

Not just anyone
can enroll in PreCheck, you see: "Travelers
who already submit background information to participate in
a frequent flier program with American and Delta airlines may
be invited by those airlines to participate in PreCheck. If
passengers agree, the airlines would share the background data with
the TSA." [Emphasis added.]

The fascism
will expand as other airlines exploit PreCheck: "United, US
Airways and Alaska airlines are expected to join the program this
year."

In other words,
you have to be rich enough to spend lots of money with a corporation
— you have to have earned the corporation's approval — before PreCheck
will consider your application. (Members of various unconstitutional
lists the Feds maintain, such as "Customs
and Border Protection’s Trusted Traveler program," are
also eligible. And even we plebs can apply — read: pay $100, non-refundable
— via the TSA's website, but we're gambling against very long odds
without a corporate supporter.)

Ironically,
this is exactly how aviation's security should function — provided
we strip the TSA from it. Airlines should bar customers they don't
trust from their planes. And would, were it not for Title
II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its evisceration of our
inalienable right to associate. That legislation renames private
companies "public
accommodations engaged in interstate commerce" and then
prohibits them from "discriminating," which the Feds interpret
as refusing to do business for any reason a bureaucrat hasn't approved.
And no wonder: the
State reserves the august authority to discriminate for itself.

Then, too,
absent the force that Leviathan always brings to its alliances with
business, corporations own no power over us: we are just as free
to break off transactions as they are, to make other arrangements,
to live life as we see fit, with or without a specific company's
cooperation.

For example,
let's say Linda tries to buy a ticket on Macho Airlines. Its CEO
is a raging misogynist who has prohibited his employees from transporting
women. Alas, barring half his potential customers from his airline
means that the other half picks up the slack in much higher prices.
So even if Linda could persuade Mr. Misogynist to fly her to Paris,
she'd far rather ride on his cheaper — and more welcoming — competitor.

In a freed
market, then, neither exercises power over the other, though the
wealthy Mr. M leads a corporation and Linda is merely an impecunious
traveler. Plenty of other companies will serve her when Mr. M declines
to do so.

But that's
no longer the case when government intrudes in the mix. Under its
control, Mr. M can't deny Linda passage because of her sex — but
the government can on the slightest pretext (the Feds refuse to
divulge their criteria for inclusion on the No-Fly List — probably
because anecdotal
evidence suggests they
ban passengers for a
lengthy list of "offenses" that wouldn't pass muster
if exposed). Nor does the government block Linda from only one airline:
it blocks her from all. She has no recourse, either. Since Leviathan
doesn't divulge the names on the List, she can't prove she's on
it, and therefore has no "standing" to sue for her removal.
And yes, courts
have upheld this Alice-in-Wonderland "logic." Enthusiastically.

Tragically
but predictably, the frequent flyers the media quotes love PreCheck.
"Oh, that would be a great thing," one
of them told CBS's affiliate in Chicago. "I'd really enjoy
that. It would be a time saver." I wonder if he'll as heartily
welcome government's working with corporations to restrict access
in other industries, too — ones where he doesn't have a leg up on
everyone else.

Meanwhile,
John-sorry, Janet Napolitano, the DHS's Secretary, smears PreCheck's
dupes as "our
trusted partners." How's that for a dire insult? Bear that
in mind, all you eager enrollees: totalitarians, thieves and pedophiles
consider you their accomplices.

February
15, 2012

Becky
Akers [send her mail] writes
primarily about the American Revolution.

The
Best of Becky Akers