Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

October 12, 2012

The central purpose of the government school system is socialization ? that is, programming students to think of themselves as part of a government-defined collective. This requires suspending critical thinking and suppressing moral objections in the service of what students are told is the good of the ?community.?

A related purpose involves the use of student populations to test new methods of social control. Those purposes intersect in Texas?s NorthsideIndependentSchool District, where officials are threatening to suspend or expel students who refuse to be tagged with a new student ID badge containing a Radio Frequency Identifier chip.

Maryland?s CarrollCountySchool Districtis the scene of another novel and troubling experiment involving tracking technology. School cafeterias are using a scanning system called PalmSecure, which scans a child?s palm at the checkout counter as a way of accessing the student?s lunch account.

School officials insist that this system is more efficient than other means of payment. This efficiency is paid for by a loss of individual privacy ? and it cultivates within schoolchildren a potentially fatal trust in the State?s supposed benevolence.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

October 11, 2012

A lawsuit filed against the Environmental Protection Agency accuses the EPA of conducting experiments in which human beings were exposed to potentially lethal concentrations of diesel exhaust. Participants were paid $12 an hour to breathe in heavy doses of particulate matter called PM 2.5 ? that is, particles that are smaller than 2.5 mircons.

According to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, ?Particulate matter causes premature death. It?s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.?

The concentration used in the EPA experiment was 21 times greater than the legal limit.

A recently published doctoral dissertation describes U.S. Army experiments that occurred for several years beginning nearly sixty years ago in St. Louis. As the Army Times reports, ?the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound [called zinc cadmium sulfide] into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas ofSt. Louis.? Many residents of the affected areas suspect that the secret tests led to a spike in cancer rates, including unusually high rates of childhood cancer.

German and Japanese officials who conducted experiments of this kind during World War II were prosecuted ?and executed ? as war criminals.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

October 10, 2012

Former Transportation Security Administration agent John Irwin has pleaded guilty to one count of grand larceny for stealing $500 from a passenger at the Norfolk International Airport.

In November 2011, a passenger with a medical condition opted out of being scanned by the backscatter X-Ray machine. Before being subjected to a pat-down, the passenger placed $500 and an expensive pen in a plastic bin. When he was told that he would have to undergo a more invasive secondary screening, the passenger complained about the treatment, Irwin decided to retaliate by swiping his cash.

After the traveler found that his money was missing, he asked Irwin if he had seen it. The TSA screener simply lied to him.

?When the passenger returned and I saw that it was the passenger who had given my fellow employees a hard time ? I just didn?t let on that I had the money,? Irwin later explained.

This is not the only incident in which a TSA employee has retaliated against an innocent air traveler. A woman in Houston was detained by TSA screeners and forced to miss her flight to punish her for displaying a ?bad attitude.?

There must be a limit to the docility of the public. Hopefully, we will reach it soon.

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

 Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

October 9, 2012

On the morning of October 4, Sandy, Utah resident Clayton Green was greeted at his door by a man displaying a badge and identifying himself as a police officer. Within seconds, the elderly man and his wife were thrown to the floor and handcuffed with zip ties while another man ? whose face was concealed ? held a gun to their foreheads.

The intruders were not police carrying out a so-called dynamic entry raid; instead, they were armed robbers of a more conventional variety posing as police.

A few days later another armed raid was carried out against an elderly couple in Salt Lake City. Michael and Teresa Ryan were terrorized by an armed gang that busted down their front door and held them at gunpoint. This time, it was the police ? specifically, a federally supervised joint narcotics task force ? that committed this act of terrorism.

According to Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank, the only problem with this raid was that it took place at the wrong address. Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Frank Smith, whose agency participated in that assault, blithely explained that ?law enforcement, unfortunately, is not a perfect science.?

In fact, law enforcement in contemporary America is practically indistinguishable from organized crime.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

October 8, 2012

What constitutes an arrest? Under what circumstances is it defensible to place a citizen under arrest?

The U.S. Supreme Court?s ruling in the 1983 case Florida v. Royer states that an individual in an encounter with the police is under arrest under any circumstances in which a reasonable person would assume that he is not free to leave. A recent police academy tutorial covering the legal aspects of arrest explains:  ?An arrest basically is a `seizure? of a person? ? whether permanent or temporary.

In contemporary America it?s quite common for police to detain and handcuff people ? or even to inflict summary punishment through the use of a Taser -- for the purpose of ?officer safety,? even though the officers will insist that people thus restrained are not under arrest.

This contrasts sharply with the events described in the 22^nd Chapter of the Book of Acts, in which Paul was bound by Roman police ? and then set free because it was illegal to bind and punish a Roman citizen before he had been found guilty of a crime. To that extent, the degenerate Roman Empire had a higher standard of Due Process than the one that prevails in the supposed Land of the Free.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

October 5, 2012

Last year, the Sarasota, Florida Sheriff?s Office approached thirty local doctors and invited them to join a criminal conspiracy to undermine several amendments in the Bill of Rights and a federal health privacy law called HIPPA.

The Sheriff?s Office provided doctors with a form entitled ?Authorization for Release of Protected Health Information? through which a patient ?knowingly and voluntarily agrees to the release of any and all protected health information for any and all purposes,? as well as waiving ?any doctor-client privilege.? The physician would agree to surrender all patient information ?upon either request by law enforcement, the State Attorney?s Office or any other prosecuting authority, or code enforcement?.?

Information of the kind made available through this waiver can only be obtained through a search warrant or a subpoena. That this document constituted a deliberate attempt to defraud patients is made clear by the fact that it didn?t indicate in any way that it had been composed by a law enforcement agency.

Public defender Mark Adams correctly calls this campaign ?a blatant violation of the Constitution.? It is typical of the dishonest and illegal means routinely employed by law enforcement to  obtain citizen information to which they are not entitled.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

October 4, 2012

A single mother from Friendswood, Texas was stopped by a police officer for failing to signal a lane change. The officer called for backup and conducted a search of the woman?s car that turned up a glass pipe and a bottle of Suboxone, a prescription anti-addiction medication she had been given to help her get off Vicodin following dental surgery.

The woman was arrested, strip-searched, and held for more than four hours. She had intended to be gone for fifteen minutes to buy dinner for her son, who had been left alone. The police blackmailed the woman ? who had a clean record ? into becoming an undercover drug snitch. The following day she made a controlled buy of a small amount of meth. When she tried to get out of the deal, the police escalated the blackmail by threatening to give her name to the drug dealer.

Police officers who work on traffic patrol are taught to ?build every stop? by finding probable cause to search the vehicle and the driver for contraband or cash. Because of the War on Drugs, each traffic stop offers police an opportunity to steal whatever cash they find, and blackmail the driver into becoming an informant.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

October 3, 2012

Antony Jon Jackson was taken to a detox center in Duluth, Minnesota. As he was being processed at the facility, the drunken man was surly and uncooperative. Surveillance video captured him making vaguely hostile statements about throwing his jacket at a female staffer.

Officer Richard Jouppi, who had brought Jackson to the facility, grabbed the smaller man?s right wrist in a control hold, and pulled his arm back behind his head. This had the predictable ? and, most likely, intended -- effect of provoking Jackson to swipe pitifully at Jouppi?s face. Jouppi retaliated by slugging Jackson ? who was in a wheelchair -- at least four times. The heroic officer then threw Jackson face-down on the floor before mounting him.

When the female staffer protested, Jouppi snarled:  ?Shut up ? back up, or I?ll arrest you, too!?

In his official report, Jouppi claimed that Jackson?s feeble swat at his face ?caused me to feel pain. ?

Jackson was originally charged with felony assault because he merely touched a police officer. That charge was dropped, and now Jouppi may be charged with fifth-degree misdemeanor assault for repeatedly slugging a man in a wheelchair.

Officer Jouppi, incidentally, is listed as an advisor to Duluth?s affiliate of the Police Explorers program, which trains Boy Scouts to become police officers.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

October 2, 2012

Fourteen-year-old Cassidy Goodson has been charged with first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse for suffocating her newborn son while the baby was still attached to her by the umbilical cord.

Goodson, who had concealed the pregnancy from her parents by wearing baggy clothes, gave birth to the baby boy in the bathroom of her home in Lakeland, Florida on September 19. In addition to the charges against Goodson, officials are considering criminal charges against adults who may have helped keep the pregnancy secret.

A spokesman for the Polk County Sheriff?s Office said that the high school freshman killed the child because she ?didn?t know what to do with it.? That casually dehumanizing description of the victim ? who was a baby boy, not an ?it? ? underscores the moral and legal paradox displayed in this hideous crime.

The Supreme Court?s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, which we are told is the ?law of the land? regarding abortion, did not specify that the right to life begins at the moment of birth.  The Roe decision put the government in charge of defining who is a ?person,? and who would be considered an ?it.?

If Roe is the law, then how is what Cassidy Goodson did a crime?

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

October 1, 2012

According to Patrick Clawson, Director of the Iran Project for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, war with Iran is inevitable ? and if Iran isn?t inclined to fire the first shot, something must be done to provoke them.

During a recent speech in Washington, Clawson reviewed the lengthy history of false-flag attacks ? war-provoking incidents that were either staged to provide a pretext for war, or were deliberately misinterpreted for the same purpose.

?Crisis initiation is really tough,? Clawson observed. ?It?s really hard for me to see how a president could get us to war with Iran?. If, in fact, the Iranians aren't going to compromise, it would be best if someone else started the war.?

On Friday, the State Department removed an Iranian terrorist group called the MEK from its list of terrorist organizations. For years, the MEK has been staging acts of sabotage and assassination inside Iran, with the active support of the U.S. and Israeli governments. The chances are very good that the MEK will be the ?someone else? responsible for starting a war with Iran.

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