Marooned in MA, aka Jay G, discusses this idiocy further here.

As I commented on the video, if we demanded the same level of regulation on lawmakers as they do on, say, hairdressers [see Code of Massachusetts Regulation 240-cmr-2.00] you’d be able to get their licenses pulled for malpractice.

Added to my daily feed.

The city surveillance video that shows a group of Fullerton police officers beating a homeless mentally ill man to death last year was finally released today, laying to rest any argument that Kelly Thomas was a threat to officers.

Another popular battle cry I’ve heard in other videos: “Stop resisting.”

The most terrifying thing is the calm, affectless voice these impossible commands are issued in. These thugs are not acting out of fear or even anger, just passionless professionalism.

Oh, look, the poor baby got his self hurted. Let’s all kiss his booboo and make it all better.

Here’s some additional information on the medical findings for the victim — no, no, not the murdering cops, but the dead man, Kelly Thomas.

First of all, it’s not “Money is the root of all evil,” it’s “Love of money is the root of all evil.” [1 Timothy 6:10]

Beyond that, though:

There is a large overlap between the people who want a society without money, and those who want a society without guns.

The link is that both guns and money are tools that allow individuals to exercise their power to choose how they will live their lives, and to resist those who would coerce them.

Socialists find this intolerable. According to socialist theory, individuals should, must, devout their lives and resources to the good of the collective, the state, in order to achieve the most good for the most people. And underlying this is the idea that individuals are not competent to live their lives as they choose. Better to let enlightened, expert socialists to run their lives for them. In order to to do this, the experts must have a monopoly on choice (money) and coercion (violence, especially guns).

As I noted the other night, the real root of all evil is the love of theory, that is, the insistence that, against the evidence, the theory can’t be wrong, do it again, harder.

Whittle points to William M. Briggs as the originator of the phrase.

By the way, it is a pet peeve of mine to call any intellectual model of something a “theory”. In science, a model is a explanatory, predictive description of some system or process. A hypothesis is a model that in principle can be falsified, that is, the evidence that would disprove the model can be unambiguously stated. A theory is a hypothesis that has, so far, survived all attempts to prove it wrong.

Socialism has been proved wrong many, many times. Nevertheless, it remains popular because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great if humans really worked that way?

American Digest proposes “rebranding ‘conservative’ and ‘Republican’ with ‘American’”.

I appreciate the sentiment, and you should definitely read his essay. Gonna have to think about it, because far too many people are convinced that “American” means imperialist, corporatist, fat, lazy, racist, homophobe, sexist, and on and on endlessly. Doesn’t matter that to the extent that those things are true, they mostly arose from the liberal progressive left; that’s what people have been trained to think.

I’m going to start using it nevertheless, if only to cleanse the name. It’s as good an escutcheon as any, and what stains and muck attach to it have mostly been thrown by its — our — enemies.

I’m going to have to explain it, every time I say it. That’s fine. People need to hear it.

I am an American.

Shortly after this picture was taken, he took his place amongst the victims, and was executed with them.

This is a classic example of passive, non-violent resistance.

Raise your hand, everybody who thinks it was effective.

Today we are facing a creeping rise of quasi-military tyranny. The war on drugs, the war on guns, and the war on (almost non-existent American patriot) terrorists, have created an increasingly arrogant police force. They have not yet fallen to the point of the Nazi army, willing to shoot civilians in rows like this, but they are willing to beat, shock, spray, and of course imprison those who resist in any way, even with words, even by merely taking pictures.

Of course, the form of “resistance” they most object to is any encroachment on their monopoly of force. Carrying and especially using any form of firearm by the unbadged is anathema to many.

How do we stop this?

Is it enough to vote Republican? How about simply withdrawing from society, stockpiling food and ammo in the name of disaster preparedness?

Is it enough to do what this man did, to passively resist violence hoping to shock the nation?

Or should we follow Solzhenitsyn’s advice, and make sure that when they come for us, we make it fatal for as many of them as we can?

The problem with the passive soldier in the photo is that we are only now, far too late, finding out what he did.

Every day people right now are finding themselves caught up in the state’s satanic mills.

Nobody hears about them because, like the German press in Nazi days, our press is on the wrong side. They are covering for a socialist government bent on tyranny.

Go ahead, campaign against Obama. Put clever bumper stickers on your car, Stay Puft Man versus Moving Torb signs in your yard, snarky teeshirts on your back. Hell, vote for Romney, or even the Libertarian candidate, whoever he is.

No, really, do that. Og explains why you should be active in the political scene, in a post that inspires me. If we don’t do at least this, the picture up there is inevitable.

Sure, you can go further. Hand out flyers on jury nullification in front of the courthouse. Give joints to the officers rolling out at the start of their shifts.

Attend Tea Party rallies.

No one will care. Reporters will not notice.

Or go the next step: Defend yourself against an mugger with darker skin than your own. Open carry without a license.

You will disappear.Oh, your arrest will show up on the police blotter page of your local paper. There might be a local newscast suggesting that you will be evaluated by a police psychologist. You’ll be allowed your phone call, if you survive your arrest, as is likely.

But mostly your brave resistance will go unnoticed. It will be as wasted as this soldier’s was. He could have gone down killing the agents of oppression and tyranny.

What are we supposed to do instead? I am lost here. I honestly don’t know the answer. I suspect that a civil war is inevitable, and I’m too old for that, far too unprepared. The damage it would do…I quail at the thought.

But what are we supposed to do?

[update to link to Og's post. And I'll add this: the liberal/progressive/socialist left wants us to despair, wants us to put ourselves out of the action either by disengaging or getting thrown into jail. They control the media, and acts of open defiance will not be reported.

[And what I'm coming around to is, Make noise. Vote. Don't sit down and shut up. Don't take the fight to the cops. Defend yourself, if need be. But no more than that. No first use of violence, remember? But maybe, just maybe, it's time to think about what you do when first violence has been offered. Crackheaded or jackbooted, thugs is thugs. Your home is your castle. Stand your ground.]

Now Deb Perelman, The Smitten One (or Smiting One) has a cookbook finished. Well, not out just yet, actually, but she’s completed it, and it comes out in October. I’ve preordered.

You should too. Thanks, Deb.

Own a gun? Want to keep it?

Then pledge. Otherwise, sit down, shut up, and do as your masters tell you.

The media will not cover this story. You know this. It doesn’t fit the narrative. It needs to be heard, though, and the only way to get it out is to do it ourselves.

We can do this:

The number of gun owners in the United States is staggering. All it would take to fund this project is for 400,000 people to pledge $1. How many gun owners do you know?

Via David Codrea’s War on Guns.

Deal is, Kos posted this video on Youtube. Limbaugh invoked the DMCA to have Youtube take it down. Youtube complied.

Kos immediately reposted at Vimeo.

Kos quite rightly says:

This isn’t 1823, no matter how much Limbaugh might wish it so. He gets the video pulled from one place, it’ll simply pop up somewhere else. If he really wants it offline, he’s going to have to meet us in court. And even that won’t do the trick.

That darn First Amendment will get in his way.

Rush, as often as I agree with many of your sentiments on this matter, swinging the DMCA hammer makes you an idiot. What were you thinking?

No, I’m not being ironic. No, I’m not making fun of Kos. No, I’m not parodying anybody’s manner of speaking.

You are an idiot for doing this. Plain and simple.

Stop embarrassing yourself, and those of us who agree with you.

Via leftist SF critic James Nicoll, Fritz Leiber’s (pronounced, contrary to my lifelong habit, “Lie-ber”) sparkling gem of Hope:

“So I asked myself then,” he said, “what’s the use of going on? What’s the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done. The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden I got the answer.”

Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain, shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn’t breathe.

“Life’s always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,” Pa was saying. “The earth’s always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you’ve seen pictures of those, but I can’t describe how they feel—or the fire’s glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that’s as true for the last man as the first.”

And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.

“So right then and there,” Pa went on, and now I could tell that he heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn’t hear them, “right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if we had all eternity ahead of us. I’d have children and teach them all I could. I’d get them to read books. I’d plan for the future, try to enlarge and seal the Nest. I’d do what I could to keep everything beautiful and growing. I’d keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the cold and the dark and the distant stars.”

I first read this as a teen, and completely missed the import of this passage. Shame on me.

No longer, though. It resonates perfectly with Andrew Klavan’s rejection of Earth Day:

Sunday was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, I’d like to say that as far as I’m concerned the Earth can go to hell.

The Earth — for those of you who may have fallen behind on your reading — is a piece of rock trapped in a slow death spiral into a cauldron of exploding plasma which, for lack of a better word, we’ll call the sun. Because that’s its name. There is exactly one interesting or worthwhile thing about this hunk of doomed space debris, and that is: it happens to maintain the conditions necessary for supporting life. (The odds against this would be ridiculously impossible, by the way, if there were no God — so impossible that scientists have been forced to invent all kinds of silly multi-universe scenarios solely for the purpose of convincing themselves that there is no God. But that’s their problem, and neither here nor there.)

So the earth supports life. Whoopee. And there is exactly one interesting or worthwhile thing about life — only one — and that is the mind of man.

“Holy cannoli, Klavan on the Culture,” you may be saying to yourself, or even out loud — because, let’s face it, you’re kind of an odd person — I mean, just look at you. Anyway, “Holy cannoli or even moley,” you may be saying, “how can you say the mind of man is the only interesting or worthwhile thing about life? What about the beauty of the running gazelle? The nobility of the flying eagle? The awesome awesomeness of the spacious skies above the amber waves running to the purple mountains above the fruited plains? And how about those glazed donuts with the yellow creme inside? I love those!”

First of all, stop talking so much, this is my blog. And b, there is no beauty, no nobility, no awesome awesomeness — not even the taste of a glazed donut — outside the human mind. The science is not yet settled, but reality itself may be in part a production of the human mind as there are some aspects of the world that don’t seem to resolve themselves until we observe them. But in any case, the gazelle would be fleet for nothing, the eagle would be a winged eating machine, the skies and the waves and the mountains would be dreams without the dreamer if man were not here to know them.
…
So screw Earth Day. I would like to declare today — and every day — the Mind of Man Day. Celebrate that — nurture that — glorify that — and the earth, believe me, will take care of itself.

Carl Sagan said it beautifully:

We are a way for the universe to know itself.