Posts Tagged ‘Patterico’

Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day

Friday, May 25th, 2012

I don’t have much to say about the thuggish convicted liar and killer Brett Kimberlin, mostly because everything that needs to be said has been said.

Patterico was subjected to a false SWAT raid.

Radley Balko commented:

What’s happening to him right now is terrifying. It’s an attempt to terrorize political opponents into silence.

A couple commenters here have suggested there’s some sort of lesson in all of this about SWAT teams or police or something or other.

No. There are no lessons here. The sociopaths who are harassing Patterico and the other bloggers involved need to be arrested and charged with about a dozen different crimes.

Patterico is an L.A. prosecutor. He has spoke out repeatedly in favor of SWAT raids and the drug war in general, and schadenfreud is a serious temptation here.

But this is indeed one of the situations where a SWAT raid might well be justified, if the call had been legitimate. I’m siding with Patterico here.

And Kimberlin is just a dangerous loon who shouldn’t be out on the streets or allowed to file suits in court. It’s too bad he doesn’t live in a nation filled with armed citizens willing and able to defend themselves.

Stacy McCain has blogged the most about “Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin.

Aaron Worthing has been victimized as badly as anyone.

Diplomatic Wikileaks

Monday, November 29th, 2010

Random Wikileak thoughts:

I remember a certain amount of glee over the CRUtape Letters, the big global warming email/data/code dump that was critical to breaking the Goreacle’s back. It is not immediately clear to me that this is much different, although I suppose it could be argued that the CRUtape letters were much more tightly targeted, in that it only revealed the activities of a very narrow group. The State Dept. leak reveals the secrets of other nations, secrets which are not exactly ours to spill.

If our government were not the overwhelming behemoth it is, we would not care so much about its actions. As a result, we’d be able to trust it much more to keep its necessary secrets by whatever means.

As it is, if we the people aren’t allowed to keep our secrets, our government can’t expect us to keep its secrets.

The two Wikileak dumps make it clear that when you have too many secrets, it’s impossible to keep any of them.

Update:
Aaron Worthing at Patterico exposes the difference between how the Dog Trainer of Record handled the Wikileaks:

The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.

and the CRUtape/Climategate dumps:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

Just to emphasize: the Wikileaks dumps weren’t just obtained illegally, they were obtained by what was likely treason, and I believe publishing them is treason as well.

On the other hand, the CRUtape dump exposed a great perversion of science in the service of tyranny, activity that was fundamentally dishonest.

Although, again, I suppose that you could argue that a great deal of what any government does is essentially illegal when that government has gone so far out of its Constitutional bounds as ours has.