Crime & Federalism

When TSA agents lay hands on a small child, people are helpless. We do not fear a TSA agent. We fear the criminal consequences that would follow from defending the child. We know that the government would arrest us, a prosecutor would charge us, and a judge would instruct a jury to "follow the law" by convicting us.

And yet that is all a lie. A juror has a natural law right to nullify a jury verdict. Moreover, a juror has a moral obligation to refuse to vote guilty when the prosecutor is enforcing an unjust law.

A police officer does not arrest everyone who breaks the law. A police officer has the discretion to not make an arrest - even when the person violated the law.

A prosecutor does not charge everyone who commits a crime. A prosecutor can exercise his discretion to not charge the person with a crime - even when the person broke the law. In nearly every case that is plea bargained, a prosecutor "pleads down" a case.

Consider this example: A young man commits murder, but accepts a plea bargain: He pleads guilty to manslaughter. Didn't the prosecutor nullify the crime? If, under the law, the man committed murder: By what right does the prosecutor not convict the man for murder?

Police and prosecutors nullify cases every day of their professional careers. And yet we're told that jurors cannot refuse to convict a man or woman whose may have violated a wicked written law? Why should police and prosecutors have the exclusive power to nullify?

Judges also hate jury nullification, and yet judges, too, have the power to nullify. Judges regularly shape evidentiary rulings - which other judges have said can be reversed not where the judge was actually wrong, but only when there was an abuse of discretion. (Judges almost never declare that other judges abused their discretion.) A judge can shape his or her rulings in order to ensure a result in a trial. Thus, a judge has the power to nullify the law.

Why should ordinary Americans - jurors - alone be denied the right to nullify the law? Asking the question answers it. Police, prosecutors, and judges - in sum, the Establishment - demand the exclusive power to nullify. Without this exclusive power, the government would not able to oppress.

Imagine you witness a TSA agent forcing a boy to undress. In any other situation, you would defend the child from an aggressor. Yet defending the boy from the TSA agent would lead to your arrest. You do nothing.

A fully informed jury would acquit you in a criminal trial. The jury would recognize that an unjust law is no law at all, and that any law allowing a TSA agent to molest a child is invalid. You would be free to fight governmental tyranny.

Of course, then, the government wants to keep juries ignorant. A fully informed jury would be able to fight the government.

Although the government tells many lies about jury nullification, this much is true: No one can arrest a juror for voting not guilty. Jury nullification is one of the few areas where people outside of the Establishment can change the world: It's just done one case at a time.

Nullify TSA.

Had I seen this occur in the streets, the molester would have been laid out on the ground. And yet the people in the video are forced to helplessly watch a child be molested. Anyone defending the child would have found himself in jail. Reform can only occur when everyone agrees that action must be taken.

At the very least, citizens must be reminded of their right to nullify a criminal verdict. If our fellow citizens will ignore to exercise their right to vote not guilty - even when the "evidence" points towards guilt - then people can begin taken action against child molester.  Jury nullification is not something I speak about often enough. It's time for that to change. Spread the work about the Fully Informed Jury Association. Once American citizens know their fellow citizens - acting as jurors - will protect them, then TSA agents will not think of touching a child.

Until then, helplessly watch this young boy get molested:

Some very interesting thoughts about Barack Obama:

The blogosphere has no shortage of opinions about the real reasons behind Obama’s ineffectiveness as a president. While he came to power on the crest of a great wave of ‘hope and change’, he has delivered neither. So what went wrong?

My take on this issue is different from most commentators. OK.. Ask yourself a few simple questions.

1] Would Lincoln have been elected if people knew about his mental illness (depression) and possibly homosexual experiences?

2] Would FDR ever be elected if people knew about the severity of his post-polio disability?

3] Would people have ever elected JFK if people knew about his personal life and health status?

When you focus on the trivial, trivial is what you get.

There's a lot of great work on "evil." The Lucifer Effect is the starting point, and there's an awesome book about how some normal soldiers transformed into murderers. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. We can see what's called the banality of evil today, with TSA:

Banality of evil is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt and incorporated in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

Mark Bennett collects some revealing quotes. Although I don't care if TSA grabs my junk, many Americans do. They find it immoral. Yet TSA agents defend their conduct: "We're just doing what the government has told us to do."

They don't want to play with your fat rolls or grab your junk. They would even prefer not to. Who can blame them? Take a look around an airport - especially in a place like Dallas. Would you want to touch those people? (And of course you are those people to someone else.)

TSA agents, however, will do the unpleasant and evil task because they have a job to do.

Most evil is so banal. It's boring. The German guards didn't want to murder Jews. They did it, though. And everyone we know would have been guards, too, had we lived in Germany during World War II.

What's the take-away of the literature on evil? Government must remain small. The banality of evil exists because people will do what the State tells them to do. Evil becomes ho-hum, just another punch-the-clock-part-of-my-day. Keep the State small, and you'll reduce aggregate evil.

Racial profiling is wrong, because it's an indignity that 99.999% of people must suffer because of the acts of the .0001%. Conservatives defend racial profiling for not totally retarded reasons:

After the 9/11 attacks, when 19 Muslim terrorists -- 15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and one each from Egypt and Lebanon, 14 with "al" in their names -- took over commercial aircraft with box-cutters, the government banned sharp objects from planes.

Only about a third of all Americans flew even once in the last year, and only 7 percent took more than four round trips. The majority of airline passengers are middle-aged, middle-class, white businessmen with about a million frequent-flier miles. I'd wager that more than 90 percent of domestic air travelers were born in the U.S.

Middle class whites are not going to blow up planes, yet we're spending billions screening them. Yet in a free society, it is inappropriate to single out a group of people for additional screening. What to do?

Profiling Muslim men imposes a burden on Muslim men. Coulter and other conservatives want to impose the costs of racial profiling without conferring a benefit. This is unjust.

TSA spends billions on worthless security. We could save money while respecting human dignity with a simple solution:

• Pay the people racially profiled.

Why is this idea so insane? When you pay a person, you recognize that the person has dignity. I work. If you tried making me work without paying me, we'd have a problem. When you pay me, you recognize my right to self-direction. Even if you're an "asshole boss," you still pay me. One might even say you have the right to be an asshole boss.

Of course, the people being racially profiled wouldn't be volunteering for it. Yet the government makes us do many things we'd never volunteer for. (Taxes, anyone?) And pay-for-profile isn't perfect, since it's still insulting.  Yet we could really make it worth their while.

Give every Muslim American man who has been "randomly selected for more thorough screening" $25,000 each year he travels and is subjected to an assault on his dignity. There aren't that many Muslim American men who travel within the United States. Twenty-five grand is a lot of money to a single person, but in the aggregate is cheap. If the Muslim man doesn't want it, donate it to his charity of choice.

Compensating Muslim men would be substantially cheaper than our current make-work, wasteful TSA screening process. It would also be more effective, because profiling should be done when non-radom patterns of terrorism emerge - i.e., if someone is going to blow up an airplane, it's going to be a Muslim man.

Whatever we do, it's time for we in the white majority to stop insisting that Muslims bears costs without being conferred benefits. It's easy to say, "Let's just racially profile" when we're not the ones being profiled. No one stopped me when I drove my U-Haul cross country - even though Tim McVeigh used a truck to blow up a building. Nor did I hear conservatives claim that whites should be racially profiled because of an extremist act.

If we're going to profile people, we should pay them. And if we're not going to profile people, what's the solution? Give TSA more power? Exactly how much more taxpayer money should be wasted on screening my grandmother?

I don't agree, but this is an interesting take:

Liberals like to attack the Tea Party as racist, and some on the far right embrace them as an evolving expression of “implicit whiteness” in America, but race is not what defines them. The Tea Party is fighting to transform America into a gerontocracy – a government of the old people, by the old people, and for the old people. More specifically, the old people who will be ruling are the Baby Boomers, the most narcissistic and avaricious generation in American history. The above-mentioned NYT report identifies the demographics of the Tea Party as being primarily old and white.

Even if he were right, how is that different from any of the other political parties? Democracy is legalized theft. Those who participate - either by making bribes/giving campaign contributions, or by forming huge voter blocks of old/gay/black/Hispanic/female - get to steal the most.

Old people are politically involved, and young people are not. Old people are attending political rallies while young people stand in line at Wal-Mart for the latest version of Call of Duty. The only way to conquer the "gerontocracy" is to shrink government or join in the theft.

A small government is unlikely, as The Futurist notes in his brilliant post, "Why Republicans Will Not Shrink Government." Young people are unlikely to become politically involved. Even those of us inclined to attend rallies are too busy working long hours. Old people, with unlimited leisure time, will always be able to out compete us.

The solution more productive young people are turning to is "checking out." Checking out comes in two forms.  Productive young males are not getting married, due to the Marriage Strike. Other men and women are expatriating. I personally do not anticipate living in the United States two decades from now.

Instead of spending all of my free time attending political rallies to outmaneuver old people who would enslave me, I'll simply leave my mastah's house.

This video is pure truth:

It's hard to do rage well. Rage, by its nature, is generally unfocused. Blind rage may be redundant, since rarely does rage allow us to see clearly.

Mark Ames and Yasha Levine both do rage very well, and produce a Drudge-like aggregation service called the Ames-Levine List. Check it out.

Incidentally, Ames and Levine hate the Tea Party. That's because they do not recognize the underlying rage the Tea Party symbolizes. The Tea Party is a party of rage. It stands for nothing. There is no platform. And yet I support the Tea Party, because rage can become something beautiful.

Rage gave Czar Nicholas and Marie Antoinette what they deserved, and rage may give Wall Street what it deserves. Rage is America's only hope for reform.

White folks are furious that TSA has decided to "grope" them. Guess what, white devils.  This is the same shit that black men deal with every fucking day of their lives:

Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but, once stopped, were no more likely to be arrested.

Fuck you and your indignity. You didn't care about the Constitution when someone else's rights were being violated.  Why then should anyone care about you when your rights are violated?

Oh, and those police-killing-dog videos that outrage you? Imagine if that was your child being murdered? In the ghetto, it's children being put into body bags.

Are you starting to understand "black rage"?

It'd be great if we could all learn something from TSA's disgraceful acts. It'd be great if white people would say, "Holy shit. This fucking sucks! Now I understand why black people hate cops so much, and why many of them have 'checked out' of society. Perhaps we should put an end to racial profiling, and stop treating black males like a permanent underclass."

None of that, however, will happen. Instead, white people will wrap up their rage in the Constitution. When blacks are harassed, the Constitution will resume its proper place as a refuge for criminals - who are always trying to get off on a technicality.  

What would happen if white people received black justice?