Tuesday, June 11, 2013

An Inverted War in a Surveillance State

Via Daily Timewaster

 Surveillance State

Excerpt

We have a sort of inverted war going on and sadly, that war has enthusiasts on both sides of the aisle. This war is being waged by people who send F-16 fighter jets to Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt, while seeking to limit American citizens to seven bullets in their own defense. It's a war in which our armed forces are emasculated even as domestic agencies amass military weaponry and hardware at an alarming rate, thereby leaving the law-abiding citizen vulnerable to both foreign enemies and his own government. This is a war in which an American ambassador and staff are left defenseless during an attack overseas,  abandoned by a  Commander-in-Chief who has yet to account for his own actions that day, but who nevertheless scurried about the land for weeks fraudulently insisting that responsibility rested on the head of an American video producer who remains incarcerated to this day. It is a war in which our government labels an attack on US soldiers by a Muslim shouting "Allahu Akbar" as, "workplace Vvolence," while labeling Americans who embrace the freedoms enshrined in our founding documents as potential terrorists.

We live in a time in which an Air Force wing commander removes from a base dining facility a Bible verse reading, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God," on word of an unhappy atheist, thereby discovering a heretofore unknown constitutional right not to be offended. An Army Master Sergeant is reprimanded for reading books by conservative authors while Air Force personnel are directed to avoid accessing stories regarding the government's surveillance of American citizens from government computers (often times the only way military members serving overseas can read the news).

We have an IRS that openly persecutes American citizens on the basis of their political beliefs while the EPA flies unmanned drones over the heads of American farmers just to make sure they are behaving. Our government monitors the phone lines of journalists suspected of printing leaked information all while illegally passing along the private information of individual citizens it has gathered to political opponents for purposes of harassment and intimidation. Is there now any wonder why so many of us rejected the idea of a national firearms registry? It is in this larger context that the government's snooping on law-abiding citizens becomes even more problematic. 

Complete piece @ Ricochet

School Firearm Safety 1956

Via The Lonely Libertarian

Lee Rigby, British Army drummer, deserved what he got.

Via The Broken Patriot

image 

This is Sam Cantley from London. Below is a picture that he has posted on Facebook on which he says Lee Rigby deserved what he got.


State took guns of man for mischief night egg fight

Via The Feral Irishman

 Norwalk Compressor employee James Gorham poses at his place of work in Stratford, Conn. on Friday June 7, 2013. Gorham has his gun permit revoked because he turned up in a database during a check for a misdemeanor arrest when he was 19 in 1971. Photo: Christian Abraham / Connecticut Post

A longtime gun owner who recently had his permit revoked over a 1971 Halloween egg fight was the inspiration for an amendment to the state's new gun law.

James E. Gorham, a 61-year-old Norwalk gun collector and target shooter, received a letter in January ordering him to turn in his guns; his one instance of teenage mischief disqualified him from legal gun ownership.

"I was first contacted by the Norwalk Police Department before I got a certified letter from the State Police," said Gorham, a businessman. "It was a real surprise. They told me I had been involved in domestic violence and I told them, `You've got the wrong person.' "

The letter referred to a misdemeanor charge for the egg fight, for which Gorham paid a $10 fine when he was 19.

So Gorham, manager of customer service and sales for the Norwalk Compressor Co., turned in his seven handguns to state police at Troop G in Bridgeport..

More @ CT Post

NC: Restaurant/ Campus Carry Heads For Senate Floor

 http://www.soderstrome.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/feelsafe.jpg

Senate improves on HB 937

House Bill 937 passed the NC Senate Judiciary I Committee today and will head for the Senate floor as early as tomorrow. Please see below for immediate actions required.

Due to the efforts of Senator Buck Newton (R- , GRNC ****), Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger (R-Guilford, Rockingham, ****) and Senate Rules Chair Tom Apodaca (R, Henderson, ****), the version passed by the committee was far stronger than what left the House.

Although debate was limited, when asked for public comment, the chief of security for the University of North Carolina, along with security heads from all 17 campuses stood, in uniform, to express "concerns" about the bill's campus provisions. Afterward, GRNC president Paul Valone addressed the committee by noting that UNC objections to campus carry on the premise that it would harm their ability to "protect" students rang false in light of the fact that violent crime on campuses across the state, plus attempts by two schools to suppress reports of violent crime, reveal that UNC is doing a poor job of "protecting" anyone.

GRNC wishes to thank Senate leadership for working with our organization to strengthen laws, better enabling lawful North Carolinians to protect themselves and their families.

Improvements to HB 937

In addition to restaurant carry, guns in locked vehicles in state-owned parking lots and a limited provision for guns in locked vehicles on state college campuses, all of which were in the House version of the bill, the Proposed Committee Substitute passed by the Senate:
  • Expands the guns-in-locked-vehicles provision for concealed handgun permit-holders (CHP-holders) to include all campuses rather than simply institutions of higher learning. As before, employees of the institution living in detached dwellings could still transfer firearms to and from their homes, but also added is a limited measure for employees who do not have CHPs.
  • Enables CHP-holders to carry at assemblies of people for which admission is charged and any establishment serving alcohol unless the person in control of the premises posts against firearms. As before, permit-holders would be prohibited from imbibing alcohol.
  • Narrows and clarifies the definition of "recreational facilities" within parks where municipalities may still ban concealed carry in parks, specifically prohibiting bans when organized athletic events are not taking place, and prohibiting bans in greenways, biking and walking paths and other open areas.
  • Removes handgun permits from public record, rendering them unavailable to the media.
  • Repeals the current prohibition on firearms for CHP-holders at funerals and parades.
  • Repeals NC's Jim Crow-era handgun purchase permit system in its entirety.
  • Requires sheriffs to revoke CHPs from permit-holders convicted of disqualifying crimes.
  • Expands hunting to include use of sound suppressors.
  •  
  • Action, please

Coming To Our Streets? New Holiday Entertainment in Turkey

 

More @ bonmaier

Seecrypt

Via Steven  

Seecrypt 


Protect your private conversations with Seecrypt Mobile - a new software-only communications app and service which allows you to make and receive unlimited, secure voice calls and text messages between Seecrypt Mobile-enabled devices, anywhere in the world. 
 
More @ Seecrypt

Bill Coby on Muslims: We should all be more like them


It is almost becoming a faith. We have to continue to say these words, we must not give up.

SHELVE THE DIRTY LAUNDRY
 
There should be marches in every neighborhood every day telling the people about the negativity of drugs and how the drugs help us to behave negatively.

Now, if a white person does it, sells drugs to black people, then we’re up in arms, then we’re marching, but when a black person sells another black person crack cocaine, heroin or something that will give us addiction and cause us to not want to support our children and even give our children the same disease, nothing is said, nothing is done. But it has got to be hammered over and over.

More @ NYP

WARNING: GRAPHIC PICTURE - 15 Yr Old Publicly Executed for Blasphemy in Aleppo


Peaceful Islam........
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported Sunday that Islamist rebels in the city executed 15-year-old Muhamma Qatta’ in the Sha'ar neighborhood of Aleppo, before the horrifed eyes of his parents.

The punishment came after the boy was overheard by someone during an argument while he was working. “Even if Muhammad comes back to life, I won’t lend,” the boy reportedly said in his workplace, where he sold coffee and from where he was detained at 10 p.m. Sunday. He was later returned by the rebels to the area, his shirt covering his head and with his body marked from torture and beating.

The punishment came after the boy was overheard by someone during an argument while he was working. “Even if Muhammad comes back to life, I won’t lend,” the boy reportedly said in his workplace, where he sold coffee and from where he was detained at 10 p.m. Sunday. He was later returned by the rebels to the area, his shirt covering his head and with his body marked from torture and beating.

The men who escorted him then announced to the crowd in classical Arabic that apostasy and cursing the prophet is a “terrible vice” and that anyone who does so will face a similar fate. The SOHR reported the boy was then shot by the two men with an automatic rifle in front of the crowd – which included the boy’s mother and father -- once in the neck and once in the head. The two men then drove away in their car, leaving the boy’s body behind.


More @  Arutz Sheva

IRS tells ministry: You can't talk about that


An audio recording captures an Internal Revenue Service agent stumbling and hesitating her way through a telephone call in which she tells a leader of a pro-life group that her organization must keep its religious beliefs to itself.

The Alliance Defending Freedom said the group, Pro-Life Revolution, did not get its tax-exempt status until last week – nearly two and a half years after starting the process.

In the recorded conversation, IRS agent Sherry Wan tells Ania Joseph: “You cannot, you know, use your religious belief to tell other people you don’t have a belief, so I don’t believe you need the right to do this, start confrontation, protesting, uh, prot, uh, protest. … You don’t apply for tax exemption.”
ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley said the IRS “is a tax collector; it shouldn’t be allowed to be the speech and belief police.”

More @WND

Australia faces ammo shortage due to gun buying frenzy in U.S.


Gun owners in the United States are stockpiling ammunition at such a high rate that Australia is expecting one of the biggest ammo shortages in recent history.

"Basically the American community is consuming the ammunition and the ammunition manufacturers can't keep up," firearm importer Jade Cleaver told ABC. While eight main firearm wholesalers is based in Australia, 80 per cent of their stock is imported from manufacturers in the United States, Yahoo!7 reported. As a result, some of the most popular bullets will soon be unavailable in Australia and New Zealand and will not be restocked for about another six months, ABC news service said Thursday. "There's only so much they can produce," Cleaver told ABC.

"There's only 24 hours in a day." The solution? "We've been stockpiling ammunition in a sense so we don't run out," he added.

Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA?

Via  comment by  Horace on Ex-CIA Worker Revealed as Source of Spy Agency Leaks

 

Ed Snowden, NSA leaker. Honest man. Doing what was right. Bravo. 

That still doesn’t preclude the possibility that, unknown to him, he was managed by people to put him the right place to expose NSA secrets.

Snowden’s exposure of NSA was a righteous act, because that agency is a RICO criminal. But that doesn’t mean we have the whole story.

How many people work in classified jobs for the NSA? And here is one man, Snowden, who is working for Booz Allen, an outside contractor, but is assigned to NSA, and he can get access to, and copy, documents that expose the spying collaboration between NSA and the biggest tech companies in the world—and he can get away with it.

If so, then NSA is a sieve leaking out of all holes. Because that means a whole lot of other, higher NSA employees can likewise steal these documents. Many, many other people can copy them and take them. Poof.

If the NSA is not a sieve, it’s quite correct to suspect Snowden, a relatively low-level man, was guided and helped. 

Does that diminish what Snowden accomplished? No. But it casts it in a different light.
Or you can believe a scenario like this:

Mali manual suggests al-Qaida has feared weapon

Via avordvet

 http://militaryfactory.com/smallarms/imgs/sa7-grail.jpg

 The photocopies of the manual lay in heaps on the floor, in stacks that scaled one wall, like Xeroxed, stapled handouts for a class.

Except that the students in this case were al-Qaida fighters in Mali. And the manual was a detailed guide, with diagrams and photographs, on how to use a weapon that particularly concerns the United States: A surface-to-air missile capable of taking down a commercial airplane.

The 26-page document in Arabic, recovered by The Associated Press in a building that had been occupied by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in Timbuktu, strongly suggests the group now

possesses the SA-7 surface-to-air missile, known to the Pentagon as the Grail, according to terrorism specialists. And it confirms that the al-Qaida cell is actively training its fighters to use these weapons, also called man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADS, which likely came from the arms
depots of ex-Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

More @ Fox

Dallas CAIR Director: “Muslims Are Above the Law of the Land.”

Via Cousin John


I for one welcome this new CAIR policy of honesty and openness. Any day now, maybe one of their directors will admit what they truly stand for.
A Council on American-Islamic Relations leader told a crowd at a rally for Islam that members of the faith should not be bound by American law.
“If we are practicing Muslims, we are above the law of the land,” said Mustafa Carroll, executive director of the Dallas-Fort Worth CAIR branch.
More @ Front Page

Pell City woman talks about participation in roadside saliva, blood sample survey

Via Billy

police lights.jpg

It was a little bit after midnight, early Saturday morning, when Erika Skeivelas said she saw the flashing lights.
Her 8-year-old daughter, sitting next to her, thought it might be a wreck. Skeivelas, 32, said she was traveling on Alabama 34 toward her lake house to "check on the cats." She had worked until 10:30 that evening, but had stopped by the Hometown Block Party in downtown Pell City until it had ended.

What Skeivelas saw were two St. Clair County deputies cars, with flashing lights, stopping traffic on the highway. She was then asked to be part of what she was told would be a brief roadside survey.

What she participated in was a national survey looking at blood alcohol and drug levels of drivers
Skeivelas said she didn't think anything about taking part, because she hadn't been drinking. However, she said she didn't think it was clear the survey wasn't mandatory.

"I tend to do what an officer tells me to do," she said. "I wasn't too comfortable with it. I had a minor in the car. But the officer told me it was just a safety survey, so I said, 'OK, fine, whatever.' I don't like to blow smoke up the dragon's nostrils."

She was told to pull into a car wash at the side of the road. Skeivelas said about three cars were stopped at the same time, and deputies were stopping cars on both sides of the road. She also saw some cars that turned around at the sight of the roadblock.

"There's a pretty popular bar about a half a mile from where they did the thing," she said. "That was kind of funny."

The survey took about 10 minutes, 15 at the most she said. When she had parked beside the road, a man identified himself with the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. He wore navy blue pants and a navy blue shirt with a reflector vest. He read her several questions: Do you drink and drive? Do you take over the counter medications? Do you take prescription medications? Do they have warning labels?

Later on, she was handed an iPad to answer about 25 questions, some of which were similar to ones she had already been asked.

"I didn't get the feeling these were certified people," she said. "They looked like they had been hired by a temp organization just to read the questions."

More @  AL

NOPE!

DoubleTapper
Students of the Institute of Technology for bakery and pastry making in Israel thank Obama for screwing up the USA and now Israel! NOPE!

Photo: Share this if you think Obama should just go away!

Hey Obama, Thanks for bringing the rockets with you!  

Students of the Institute of Technology for bakery and pastry making in Israel thank Obama for screwing up the USA and now Israel!  NOPE!!!!!  (made out of chocolate!)

Jefferson Davis Birthday Tribute, June 8, 2013


A stormy, soaking start to the day did not stop the Va Flaggers from forwarding the colors...or flagging Scalawags.

The Flaggers were shocked and disappointed to find Museum of the Confederacy President and CEO Waite Rawls in attendance at the Jefferson Davis Birthday Ceremony. In a quiet, but effective show of disgust, we stood and turned our backs on him as he addressed the audience, in protest of his refusal to fly a Confederate flag on the grounds of the Museum of the Confederacy at Appomattox.

When the ceremony ended, the rain was still heavy, and it was decided cooking on the grill as planned might not be the best idea, so we left to get some lunch and met back at the VMFA at 1:00. By this time, the sun was shining and the weather was BEAUTIFUL! In spite of the earlier stormy weather, over two dozen Flaggers lined the sidewalk, stretching the line from the Chapel all away around the Boulevard to the main entrance of the VMFA. We had several new Flaggers join us and were pleased with the heavy traffic and great conversations that were held.


At one point, Waite Rawls was spotted heading into the UDC HQ for the Massing of the Flags, and several Flaggers took position outside the building and were able to keep him on the hot seat as he entered the building. When Mr. Rawls exited the building for a smoke break…and later to leave the event, he was again met by Flaggers, who reminded him that his refusal to fly a Confederate Flag would not be forgotten…and that we would not stand down until a Confederate flag is flying…or he is removed from the museum. 


Throughout the day, we were greeted by many who had attended the days’ events, and were offered words of encouragement and support. We posed for many pictures, including the one below, when a nice lady who was leaving the Massing of the Flags asked to take a picture with our “beautiful” flags...and were thrilled when Commander Givens took time out to visit with the Flaggers.    :)

A few from Ol' Remus


art-link-symbol-tiny-grey-arrow-only-rev01.gif Photo on Obama's campaign website - Look at this picture of gramps, Stanley Ann and the two Soetoro children, Barry and Maya.   Look closely! Look at Stanley Ann's right hand. It's balled up in a fist, AND IT'S BLACK!
Hat tip: Bill Schanefelt at americanthinker.com

To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.
Rurik, in an email

"When I'm Gone"

Via randir_telemnar

 

Karzai: US Must ‘Explain’ to Muslims Why Radicalism Is Growing Amid War on Terror

Via NC Renegade

 Karzai

  Afghan President Hamid Karzai is asking whether an increase in radicalism across an Islamic world “in turmoil” is the result of the U.S.-led campaign against terror. In a speech on Sunday, he said the U.S. “needs to explain itself” to Muslims.

In a series of veiled criticisms posed in the form of questions, Karzai in an address to the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar put the onus on the West to clarify its intentions in its dealings with the Islamic world.

After summarizing progress made in Afghanistan since the toppling of the Taliban – for which he said the Afghan people were grateful to the U.S. and other allies – Karzai said that was only “one side of the story.” The other side, he s

“By waging this war on terrorism, have we brought less radicalism in the Muslim world, or have we caused more radicalism in the Muslim world?” he asked. “The argument is definitely that the Muslim world has seen more radicalism – from Pakistan to Afghanistan, all the way to Mali and Nigeria.”

“Is this an unintended consequence of the war on terror, as some would argue? Or was this intended by the United States and the West, as some others would argue? In my view, the West – as led by the United States – needs to explain itself to the Muslim world.”

More @ CNS News

What If?

Via NC Renegade

 

A different "What If" piece on TV got him canned.

What if government officials have written laws that apply only to us and not to them? What if we gave them the power to protect our freedoms and our safety and they used that power to trick and trap some of us? What if government officials broke the laws we hired them to enforce? What if they prosecuted others for breaking the same laws they broke?

What if the government enacted a law making it a crime to provide material assistance to terrorist organizations? What if that law was intended to stop people from giving cash and weapons to organizations that bomb and maim and kill? What if the government looked at that law and claimed it applied to a dentist or a shopkeeper who sold services or goods to a terrorist organization, and not just to financiers and bomb makers?

What if an organization that killed also owned a hospital or a school and the law made it a crime to contribute to the hospital or the school? What if the Supreme Court ruled that the law is so broad that it covers backslapping, advocacy and free speech? What if the court ruled that the law makes it a crime to encourage any terrorist organization to do anything -- fix teeth, educate children, save lives or kill people? What if the law makes it a crime to talk to any person known to be a terrorist? What if the law is so broad that it punishes ideas and the free expression of those ideas, even if no one is harmed thereby?
What if it is a crime to backslap terror fighters and to encourage their terrorist-affiliated organizations to fight, except if the backslapper is an FBI agent or a senator?
What if FBI agents pretended to be members of these terrorist organizations and set out to find people in America who were willing to join?

More @ Fox