Liberty Minute March 28 2014

Charlottesville, Virginia resident Gerry Mitchell, who is confined to a wheelchair, was run down by a driver while trying to use a crosswalk. A few days later, while recuperating in a nearby hospital, Mitchell received a visit from the Charlottesville Police. He might have expected them to be there to take a statement. Instead, they issued him a citation ? despite the fact that the driver was at fault.

The driver, of course, was a fellow cop, Gregory C. Davis of the Albemarle Police Department. The ticket was eventually dismissed, but Davis wasn't charged with an offense.

More than four years after this incident, it was revealed that at the time of the accident Davis was texting and distracted at the wheel ? an offense far graver than a common traffic violation. If a citizen had been similarly distracted while running down a police officer, the offender would be charged with aggravated assault, or perhaps even attempted vehicular homicide.

Rather than seeking to make restitution, city and county officials used every dilatory and procedural tactic at their disposal to frustrate Mitchell's effort to hold Davis accountable and receive redress. Such are the ways of the privileged criminal class we call ?government.?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Liberty Minute March 27 2014

Is marijuana more dangerous than alcohol? Although death by alcohol poisoning is commonplace, there is not a single reliable account of a marijuana-induced overdose. Fatal alcohol-involved traffic accidents occur every day, and account for more than 10,000 deaths annually. Thousands of additional deaths ? through overdoses and accidents ? take place each year because of misuse, often unintentional, of legal prescription drugs, which are dramatically more dangerous than marijuana.

Some critics of the growing movement to decriminalize marijuana use concede that alcohol prohibition didn't work, and that misuse of alcohol is a huge social program ? but insist that marijuana should be illegal in order to avoid contributing to this existing problem. In a recent essay, one such critic suggested that the real problem was that ?the penalty for possession of marijuana has ? become the equivalent of being given a parking ticket.? This is a profoundly ill-informed generalization, given that there are many people currently serving lengthy terms behind bars ? including life imprisonment ? for marijuana possession.

The Bible treats drunkenness as a sin without prohibiting alcohol consumption. We should have a similar perspective on marijuana use ? and recognize that government has neither the authority nor the right to punish sin.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Liberty Minute March 26 2014 

Michael Smith was sleeping when he heard a loud noise outside his home in Norridgewock, Maine. Shirtless and annoyed, Smith opened his door to find a crew from the local electric utility cutting down trees in his yard. He complained about them in a loud voice, then turned around and went back to bed.

 Just a few minutes later, Smith was rudely awakened again by the commands issued through the loudspeaker of a police vehicle. His home had been surrounded by a SWAT team, which ordered him out of the house. The police were responding to a report that Smith had a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants.

 What appeared to be a firearm was actually a tattoo of a small-caliber handgun. The sight of what appeared to be a single handgun was so frightening to the work team that they called the police ? who responded by deploying dozens of armed men, some of whom wound up training assault rifles on the home of a perfectly innocent man they were prepared to kill.

 Why are some people driven to panic by the sight of an armed citizen ? but indifferent to the spectacle of armed government officials who have been given a license to kill at their discretion?

 Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Liberty Minute March 25 2014

 About a year ago, Nicholas Teausant, a 20-year-old college student from Acampo, California, made some ill-advised comments on social networking sites. In one post he expressed an interest in going to Syria to fight on behalf of an al-Qaeda offshoot called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is part of the U.S.-funded insurgency seeking to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad.

 In short order, Teausant's comments attracted the attention of a self-identified Jihadist who, predictably, was a paid informant for the FBI. Teausant's new friend offered to introduce him to a ?mentor,? who was also a member of the FBI's Homeland Security Theater Guild. This affair followed a familiar script in which the Feds carefully led this socially isolated young man step by step until he had agreed to take part in a supposed plot to bomb the Los Angeles subway system. In early March, he was arrested near the Canadian border.

 Because of his expressed intention to aid the Syrian al-Qaeda group, Teausant faces a 15-year prison term and a $250,000 fine. Federal policymakers ? including President Obama and congressional leaders ? continue to offer actual material support for that terrorist group without fear of prosecution.

 Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Liberty Minute March 24 2014

 Russian President Vladimir Putin is a career KGB agent who has surrounded himself with people of similar backgrounds from Russia's military and intelligence elite. These officials are called ?siloviki,? a term that means ?men of power,? and they exercise dominance within Russia's political and economic system.

 It is important to understand that our own political system operates in a very similar fashion.

 Recently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein have criticized the CIA for conducting illegal surveillance of Senate leaders as part of the agency's effort to thwart investigations of its illegal activities. The CIA's criminal misconduct involves illegal detention, torture, narcotics trafficking, and efforts to subvert foreign governments. It is accountable only to special oversight committees in Congress ? and the agency's illegal surveillance operations were intended to make committee members vulnerable to blackmail and other forms of retaliation.

 In Russia, this practice is called ?compromat? ? the collection of personal information by the intelligence organs to exercise leverage over policy makers and potential enemies. Although the KGB perfected this technique, it was actually invented by J. Edgar Hoover, the founder of the FBI. We can properly disapprove of Putin and his government, but they aren't as foreign to us as we might think.

 Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Liberty Minute March 20 2014

The creation of a totalitarian state could be described as a process in which government steadily appropriates all of the functions of the family. Benito Mussolini concisely summarized the same idea with a terse entry in his Fascist Dictionary, which read: ?Family ? see `Fascist State.??

One purpose of the Social Security System was to disrupt intergenerational family bonds by making society, rather than children, responsible for the care of elderly parents. The welfare programs created through the Great Society expanded on a model devised by Britain?s 19^th Century Fabian Socialist movement by encouraging unwed motherhood, creating several generations of fatherless children whose mothers are effectively wedded to government.

Obamacare is a product of this contemptible mindset. The Rhode Island Obamacare exchange system has created what it calls a ?Nag Toolkit? to help parents brow-beat their children into enrolling in Obamacare  -- something that is necessary in order for young, healthy people to subsidize the system on behalf of older and less healthy consumers.

Totalitarianism is a religious cult in which everything is subordinated to the state ? and whose priests demand the sacrifice of our families on the altar of what is supposed to be the ?common good.?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Liberty Minute March 19 2014

Georgia resident Adam Bennett was a passenger in a truck driven by his girlfriend. A police officer stopped them and said that the truck was missing a rear bumper. Rather than performing a license check, the officer immediately asked if either the driver or the passenger was on probation or parole. Bennett volunteered that he was on probation for drugs. Eventually, a small amount of drugs was found during a search of Bennett?s clothing.

Bennett filed a motion to suppress the drug evidence. A state appeals court ruled that the search was impermissible because the officer had not prolonged the pretense that it was intended to address a traffic violation. Instead, the officer dropped the pretext and went directly to a search for narcotics.

The typical traffic stop pits a vulnerable citizen against an armed stranger who is given a license to lie. Yes, there are decent and conscientious people who become police officers ? but their social function is to extract revenue from you and put you in a cage if they can find an excuse to do so. Obviously, people shouldn?t commit acts that would justify prosecution ? but they also shouldn?t underestimate the ability of cops to devise an excuse to do so anyway.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Liberty Minute March 18 2014

For people of an entrepreneurial perspective, technical innovations are a blessing that can be used to improve human life. Those burdened with a statist view see such advances as the means of controlling other human beings and inflicting punishment and destruction on those who resist.

One extreme and speculative example of the latter disposition is a theoretical proposal to use life extension methods to prolong the suffering of people convicted of exceptionally heinous crimes, such as child-murder. Dr. Rebecca Roache, who describes herself as a ?philosopher,? has suggested that the use of a mind-altering drug called a ?time distortion pill? that could give convicts the sense of interminable punishment.

Others have pointed to the punitive possibilities of so-called singularity theory, in which human consciousness could be digitized and transferred into a non-biological platform. By manipulating that program, a condemned criminal would supposedly experience the equivalent of a thousand-year sentence within the space of a few hours of actual time. 

Roache suggests that the use of such methods would offer the possibility of inflicting ?an eternal sentence? for crimes against humanity. 

Christian believers understand that eternal sentences do exist ? and that it is not within our province to impose them.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Liberty Minute March 17 2014

In 1999, the US government, with the aid of the NATO alliance, bombed Serbia for 78 days, killing thousands of people and inflicting billions of dollars? worth of damage to the country?s infrastructure. Serbia never attacked or threatened the United States.

The purpose of the campaign was to force Serbia to surrender the province of Kosovo into the hands of ethnic Albanian separatists. In other words, Washington made war on Serbia?s government to aid a secessionist movement. This nearly led to open military hostilities with Russia, which has cultural ties to Serbia and didn?t approve of the bombing campaign.

That was in 1999. Today, the Obama administration is refusing to recognize the results of a referendum in Crimea that may result in the region withdrawing from Ukraine and allying with Russia. The Crimean separatists are following a similar ? but less violent ? path to the one taken by Albanian separatists in Kosovo. Yet Washington now insists that secession is impermissible, and that residents of Crimea have no choice but to be ruled by the new Ukrainian government in Kiev that was installed in a US-backed coup.

Given the Russian government?s history and character it is nearly impossible to cede the moral high ground to Moscow ? and somehow Washington has managed to do so.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. 

Liberty Minute March 14 2014

Prosecutorial misconduct is ubiquitous, in large measure because it is almost impossible to hold a prosecutor accountable. Last year, South Carolina State Supreme Court Justice Donald Beatty gave a speech in which he took note of the rampant and well-documented abuses by prosecutors in his state.

Judge Beatty warned that his court ?will no longer overlook unethical conduct, such as witness tampering, selective and retaliatory prosecutions, perjury, and suppression of evidence. You better follow the rules or we are coming after you and will make an example.?

In response, 13 of the 16 prosecutors across the state have demanded that Beatty recuse himself on criminal cases coming out of their districts.

Writing in the Washington Post, Radley Balko points out that in Santa Clara County, California, a corrupt prosecutor sought to boycott a judge who had disciplined her for misconduct, and also sought to restrict the power of the state bar to discipline prosecutors.

As Balko notes, cases of this kind across the country demonstrate that ?prosecutors just don?t want to be held accountable by anyone but themselves.?

As I?ve said before: If you don?t despise prosecutors, you?re not paying attention.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.