Archive → February, 2014
Questions you were told not to ask, #1
Why does global warming feel so record-setting cold?
US Supreme Court decides straight forward case with weird outcomes
Fernandez v. California was decided yesterday by the US Supreme Court. Everything about it is just…weird.
In a holding that is enraging advocates of private property rights, limited government, and citizen privacy, the Court’s conservatives were joined by two liberals to allow the police to enter a private home without a warrant, even if one resident says they cannot enter, because another resident said they could enter.
In other words, if the police get a resident of a home to grant permission to enter that home for the purpose of searching for something illegal, which the police now do not have to specify in writing, the police may enter. What they are looking for could be unknown, or undocumented. Maybe they are on a fishing expedition, just looking for anything they could use against the person who said they did not want the police to enter. It seems like planting evidence would be a lot easier, now. In any event, your home is no longer your castle, if a pissed off teenager inside decides to take out their misplaced teenage aggression against their loving parents.
Seems like a recipe for disaster.
Justice Ginsburg wrote a dissent, noting the obvious erosion in Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches and seizures that result from holdings like this. Ginsburg is the court’s most liberal member, an extremist who has spoken out against the US Constitution she is sworn to uphold, and an authoritarian statist who otherwise just loves, loves, loves state power over citizens.
And here’s the really weird stuff: The facts involve “illegal guns,” which in California is anything down to and including a Daisy BB gun, and documented domestic violence.
The person blocking the police from entering the home to search it was the Mr. Wife-Beating Fernandez, a scumbag who held his cringing wife prisoner under brutal circumstances. After he was momentarily out of the picture and not a direct threat, she allowed the police to search the house, where they found the illegal guns (let’s be clear – California is on the path to making all gun ownership illegal, except by the police, which is otherwise known as a police state, a separate topic).
Thus did Mr. Macho Wife Beater get into even more and more serious trouble with the legal system, and thus did he subsequently attempt to suppress the evidence the police found, which really put him away behind bars for a while.
Ginsburg and other liberals typically trumpet the rights of domestic abuse victims, but here they are clearly ranking them beneath the rights of the gun-owning wife beater. Weird.
Conservatives like Alito typically champion the rights of gun owners and are split 50/50 on privacy rights. But here they are so obviously opening up the flood gates of potential abuse by police. No warrant? No documentation for probable cause? Husbands and wives typically cannot testify against each other, but here they are now allowed to defy one another in the family ‘castle’ so the state apparatus may enter at will.
Seems like a pretty huge detonation of American citizens’ privacy rights. Weird.
Endless natural resources? Don’t blame us
For decades, the left has done a better job at advocating for natural resource protection. They often go overboard, demanding practices that are unsustainable for a growing nation. But it’s true the the right has been at best tone deaf on environmental protection. How odd, then, that the left now demands the immediate addition of ten million new citizens to public rolls, public schools, welfare rolls, public water sources, public parks and other public lands, etc. Is this environmentally sustainable?
Hell no, it’s not.
But the lust for power and control and dominance has never stopped the left from violating its own avowed principles. Those ten million new voters are the key to electoral dominance, which trumps all else.
As Stalin taught them, the ends justify the means.
As an American, I reject everything Stalin. If you live here in America, you should reject it, too.
Huffington Post: No democracy for you!
A Huffington Post headline reads “Congress Inaction Prompts Obama to Act Alone.”
American civics class 101 teaches citizens that the executive branch cannot act alone, not really. If Congress is inactive, the president can only enforce laws that are on the books. He cannot create new laws. That would be dictatorial.
Ah-hah. There’s the point. Obama fans LOVE his dictatorship. Unashamedly.
Just remind us of that love when we have a new president from the other party, surrounded by angry citizens demanding retroactive corrections to the Obama years. You’ll learn to love it then, friends.
Warmer weather can’t come too soon
What began as a happy trip to the wood shed for a load of seasoned oak in the Fall is now a crabby trudge through deep snow and ice, a drudgery opposite the cheerfulness felt with the first flames to beat back Winter’s early chill.
Spring warmth cannot come too soon. Naturally, it will arrive, melt the Arctic snow cap occupying my lawn, and probably result in some Biblical flood carrying my home down river to the Chesapeake Bay.
Speaking of floods, and flood insurance, I am hopeful that the insane congresswoman Maxcine Waters will have her bizarre legislation permanently overturned, so that people can either afford to own their homes (something she is not familiar with or supportive of) or the Federal government will buy out the landowners so the societal costs and benefits are not concentrated on just the private property owners. Government cannot change the social contract in one week. Well, under liberals it can, of course. Let’s rephrase that: Government should not restructure the social contract in such a short time that private property owners see their investments destroyed overnight. That would be good government, something unknown to Maxcine Waters and her fellow liberals.
It’s official: Sunday hunting in VA
Two weeks ago the Virginia state House passed a Sunday hunting bill out of a committee that had bottled up similar bills for decades before. It was a surprising statement that it actually got through committee. Then it passed the full state House, which surprised even its most ardent sponsors.
Well, today the Virginia state Senate passed the companion bill. It allows hunting on private land on Sunday, a private property rights win if there ever was one. If you pay property taxes, say on a remote mountainside property, and you are deprived of 14.2% of your full use of that property for some vague reason, you might get frustrated. It is your property. You can shoot 1,000 bullets at a target on Sunday, but you cannot shoot just one at a squirrel. Laws like this are by their definition arbitrary, the bane of democracy.
Virginia’s governor says he will sign the bill into law.
Welcome to the modern era, Virginia! We are envious of you.
Kudos to Kathy Davis of PA-based Hunters United for Sunday Hunting (www.huntsunday.org), who has devoted the past two years of her life to this issue, and who helped a great deal with getting the Virginia law passed and the lawsuit filed there. The lawsuit compelled the state legislature to act, before a judge ruled against the state and the entire state was opened up. While I would like to see public land open for Sunday hunting, I am satisfied with private land as a start to implementing it state-wide. This really is an issue of the most basic American rights.
Dickinson College – always good to visit
Thank you to Professor Anat Beck and her very interesting students, for hosting me today. I know it is not easy to hear ideas you do not agree with, and you all did a marvelous job of listening and asking questions, and seeing photos of hunting and trapping. It was an honor to be with you. Just remember: Your entrepreneurialism cannot succeed with more onerous government regulations and requirements, like ObamaCare. When there are more takers than makers, the system collapses. Capitalism has generated more liberty, freedom, and opportunity than any other approach.
Last year I spoke to Dr. Andrea Lieber’s class, also at Dickinson, and we had an excellent dialogue on “climate change.” What surprised me was how little the students knew about the politicization of “climate change” “science.” It is to Dr. Lieber’s credit that someone like me was invited to address her students.
Dickinson has a fascinating, really neat environment and hands-on sustainability program, replete with a new green house/ lab. I hope I am invited back again, because, I like it a lot. The students are inspiring.
No snow plows: Harrisburg’s new policy
Former Harrisburg mayor Linda Thompson had issues, no question about it, and she’d probably be the first to admit it.
But at least she got the snowy streets plowed.
This is something the new “brilliant” administration is not doing. They’re a failure on this basic count.
I guess that if your election competition is artificially removed, so that “winning” is practically guaranteed, you might think that it’s easy, this governing stuff.
If our streets are not going to be plowed, then what is the role of government?
UPDATE: Fifteen minutes after this post went up, a snow plow cleared a lane here in Uptown Harrisburg. First time all winter. I cannot claim responsibility, but I will admit to being surprised. I had been under the impression that the city’s snow plows had all been sold off to pay for Andy Giorgione’s incinerator debt.
OK, belay that last “let it snow”
Like you and most everyone I know around Pennsylvania, I feel done with the snow. Yes, did I say “let it snow” a bunch yesterday? Well, that was then and this is now. Now, we are expecting another eight to twelve inches of snow in the next day. On top of the six to eight inches of hardened crust, ice, and snow already on the ground, another foot is going to keep spring from arriving for a long time.
This much snow puts a stranglehold on our business operations. Shuts down machinery. Trucks cannot pick up, guys cannot cut, or even drive their trucks, let alone get their machines moving.
What really is telling about this cold is that at home, we have burned a solid three-plus cords of seasoned oak firewood. We may be closing in on four burned to date. We have enough to take us into the end of the longest cold winter, but that just means more work felling, cutting, hauling, splitting, and stacking. You know the old saw — “Firewood warms ya twice.” You work hard making it, and then it warms you as a fire. Indeed.
Hold on there, fellow Pennsylvanians. Spring must be just around the corner. Just a few weeks from now, the air should be in the mid-forties, smelling slightly earthy and damp, and a robin here and there will join the cardinal in the back yard. Then you know relief is upon us. Hold on. You are in good company.