Freedom of religion and freedom from religion are not the same thing at all

By Seth Richardson

Military Religious Freedom Foundation leader Mikey Weinstein is once again brewing up a tempest in a tea pot over a memo from the Academy’s chaplain’s office that included a link to “Judaism 101.” The memo was one of nine sent out by the chaplain’s office in February to inform interested personnel about diverse religious festivals and observances taking place in the near future.

The memo mentioned the Jewish observance of Purim on February 23-24 and provided the website link to those who might have an interest in learning about or observing Purim. No one was ordered to go to the website or observe Purim, it was merely information provided by the Academy’s religious counselors for the benefit of those with an interest in Judaism.

Weinstein complained that “cursory perusal of the website’s contents indicates the perniciously hateful predilections and prejudices of its bigoted and virulently homophobic author.” Weinstein’s attack on the site’s author, Tracey Rich, is unjustified hyperbolic mendacious mischaracterization of the facts.

I visited the site through the link to Purim and in that entry the only reference to sexual orientation is a single reference to Nazi mass-murder Hermann Göring’s rumored penchant for cross-dressing. The notion that Göring was a transvestite is a popular meme among Jews which may or may not be true. British historian David Irving characterized him as “…a near transvestite…” in his biography of Göring. Jews may perhaps be forgiven for turning a rumor into conventional Jewish wisdom given the fact that Göring was the head of the Gestapo and the architect of the concentration camps that murdered some six million Jews.

What Weinstein actually seems to be upset about is a passage in a section of the website titled “Kosher Sex” that discusses homosexuality in the context of Jewish religious practice. The passage that Weinstein evidently refers to says:

“I have seen some modern Orthodox sources suggest that if homosexuality is truly something hardwired in the brain, as most gay activists suggest, then a man who acts upon that desire is not morally responsible for his actions, but I am not sure how wide-spread that opinion is. In any case, it is not quite as liberal a position as some would have you believe: essentially, it is equivalent to saying that a kleptomaniac would not be held morally responsible for stealing.”

Nothing in this passage suggests that homosexuality is equivalent to kleptomania, nor does it suggest that Rich is perniciously hateful, prejudiced, bigoted or virulently homophobic. He is discussing whether or not a genetic predisposition or orientation can be used to excuse an individual’s behavior in Jewish religious law. The simile he uses does suggest a pejorative connection, but then again, Jewish religious belief does in fact condemn specific homosexual acts, as Rich states:

“Sexual relations between men are clearly forbidden by the Torah. (Lev. 18:22). Such acts are condemned in the strongest possible terms, as abhorrent.”

In the same section Rich takes pains to distinguish between homosexuality as a sexual orientation and homosexual acts in the Jewish faith:

“It is important to note, however, that it is homosexual acts that are forbidden, not homosexual orientation. Judaism focuses on a person’s actions rather than a person’s desires.”

So what Rich is doing is explaining the tenets of Judaism, not excoriating homosexual orientation. Weinstein obviously objects to the pejorative link, but the simile is apt as it pertains to Kosher Jewish religious practice. After all, a genetic predisposition that causes someone to fantasize about murdering people en masse in a movie theater does not absolve the actor of moral or religious responsibility for actually doing so.

The condemnation of male homosexual acts is a tenet of the Jewish religion, just as it is in the Catholic religion, and like it or not as such information about it is protected against government censorship by the First Amendment’s Free Exercise of Religion and Free Speech clauses. Weinstein may object to that tenet of the Jewish faith if he likes, but as the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (emphasis added), Weinstein appears to be rather more than a little hypocritical as he engages in what appears to be a malicious, prejudiced and bigoted attack on the Jewish faith by attempting to coerce and malign the Academy into censoring information on Jewish religious observances and practices at the Academy, something which Academy officials are forbidden by law from doing.

Weinstein appears to be advocating freedom from Jewish religious practice at the Academy, not freedom of religious practice. Perhaps he should change the name of his organization to better reflect its true agenda.

Kudos to the Academy and it’s Commander for ignoring Weinstein, it’s what he deserves.

© 2013 Altnews

Presumptive marijuana limits, like presumptive alcohol limits, are administrative shortcuts that may do more harm than good.

By Seth Richardson

With the decriminalization of marijuana in Colorado, prohibitionists are all atwitter over the prospect of stoned drivers flooding the highways. While drivers high on marijuana are certainly of concern, the recent kerfuffle largely ignores the fact that people who use marijuana to get high and then go out and drive have been doing so roughly since the invention of the automobile. The same thing is true of those who use other substances that impair cognition and reaction time, including alcohol, meth and prescription drugs. It’s not new ground we’re plowing here.

Colorado already has a law adequate to the task of dealing with those who drive unsafely under the harmful influence of drugs or alcohol. It says:

“It is a misdemeanor for any person who is under the influence of alcohol or one or more drugs, or a combination of both alcohol and one or more drugs, to drive a motor vehicle or vehicle.”

“Under the influence” is defined as:

“…driving a motor vehicle or vehicle when a person has consumed alcohol or one or more drugs, or a combination of alcohol and one or more drugs, that affects the person to a degree that the person is substantially incapable, either mentally or physically, or both mentally and physically, to exercise clear judgment, sufficient physical control, or due care in the safe operation of a vehicle.”

For trained police officers, detecting people who are substantially incapable of safe driving is little more than child’s play. They do it by observing the driving behavior, demeanor, physical appearance and responses of a suspect. Drivers who are under the influence are detected precisely because they are substantially incapable of driving safely. They weave, they ride the center-line, they sit through traffic light cycles, they drive slowly or too fast, they forget to turn on their headlights and they do all sorts of things that police officers are trained to look for. Their behaviors are so predictable that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), after decades of careful scientific study, produced a booklet, “The Visual Detection of DWI Motorists” for use by police officers. It lists 24 easily observable “driving cues that have been found to predict blood alcohol concentrations (BAC) of 0.08 percent or greater.”

This booklet is used by police all over the world, and anyone trained and certified in DUI detection can tell you long before they stop the vehicle, and without any need for a chemical test, whether or not the driver is intoxicated, and they are very rarely wrong. Indeed, in many DUI cases, at trial the District Attorney will not even present the blood or breath test because the officer’s observations alone are sufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The reason the DA would keep the test out is because the various chemical tests are prone to error and mistake. A competent DUI defense attorney can often successfully challenge the accuracy of the test, which is a devastating blow to the prosecution. A prosecutor can provide rock-solid testimony by the officer proving beyond any reasonable doubt that the driver was substantially incapable of driving safely, but if the chemical test evidence is successfully impeached by the defense, it’s more than a little likely that the officer’s testimony will be rejected by a jury as erroneous or even fabricated and the defendant will be acquitted.

Drivers are most often caught through the officer’s observations of driving behavior (weaving, driving slowly, etc.) that is so egregiously bad that the officer can say with a high degree of confidence that the driver is intoxicated even without knowing the particular intoxicant or its absolute level in the blood of the driver. The observations themselves provide both reasonable suspicion to stop and probable cause to arrest long before the traffic stop ever occurs. Roadside sobriety tests and chemical tests are generally nothing more than icing on the cake for the District Attorney. What’s often misunderstood about the law is that a 0.08 BAC is a presumptive limit, but a person can be convicted of DUI if their actual driving behavior meets the “substantially incapable” standard, regardless of what or how much they have ingested. You see, it’s not illegal to have either alcohol or THC, or any other drug in your system while driving. It’s a crime if those substances actually make you substantially incapable of safe driving, whether those substances are legal or illegal and regardless of how little you have consumed. Take too much over-the-counter cough medicine and drive badly and you can be arrested and convicted, as no few otherwise responsible citizens have discovered to their dismay.

The key in both cases is the observed demeanor, appearance and behavior of the suspect, and a well-trained officer has little difficulty in distinguishing someone who is substantially incapable of safely operating a vehicle from someone who isn’t. All the officer needs to do is accurately observe and report and in most cases the suspect will be convicted based on how he behaved, not on what the absolute level of intoxicants in his bloodstream were. In fact, absent any observed intoxicated behavior, a blood test that is below the presumptive limits does not give the officer probable cause to arrest.

The standard of an individual actually being observed to be substantially incapable of safe driving is the proper constitutional standard that society ought to be adhering to, particularly when it comes to marijuana use. If the person is not observed to be substantially incapable of safely operating the vehicle, then the officer should simply release the suspect and let them go about their business, or better yet not stop them in the first place.

While the state has a valid interest in both revoking the driver’s licenses of and prosecuting drunk drivers, citizens have an important civil liberties interest in requiring the prosecutor to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Driving while drunk “per se” laws impinge on the rights of citizens to the presentation of convincing evidence that the defendant was in fact substantially incapable of driving safely. While the science stands behind the presumptive limits for alcohol, it does not do so when it comes to marijuana, which affects some people severely, and others to only a minor degree. Unlike alcohol, which has reasonably (though not absolutely) predictable effects on the vast majority of people, there is scant and contradictory evidence that marijuana impairment can be accurately predicted based only on the absolute levels of THC in the suspects blood.

In practical terms the person must actually be substantially incapable of safe driving before he can be arrested.

If a hard forensic standard for THC in the blood is imposed, defense attorneys will have a field day attacking the credibility of the science upon which the standard is based, and this will lead to fewer convictions and much higher trial costs as prosecutors will be required to retain scientific experts by the boatload in order to back up the standard set by the legislature. This will lengthen criminal trials, make them more expensive, and will persuade many more people to fight a conviction rather than admitting guilt or pleading to a lesser charge. It’s best to simply let the police do what they are good at, observing and recording unsafe driving behavior and we should base prosecutions on that evidence, not on presumptive limits.

© 2013 Altnews

Of all the unlikely compatriots in the defense of the Second Amendment, Pravda has to be the strangest.

By Seth Richardson

I’m going to let someone who knows whereof he speaks tell you why it’s important to resist Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi’s (along with many others) assault on our right to keep and bear arms:

Americans never give up your guns

28.12.2012 12:15

By Stanislav Mishin 

These days, there are few few things to admire about the socialist, bankrupt and culturally degenerating USA, but at least so far, one thing remains: the right to bare arms and use deadly force to defend one’s self and possessions.

This will probably come as a total shock to most of my Western readers, but at one point, Russia was one of the most heavily armed societies on earth. This was, of course, when we were free under the Tsar. Weapons, from swords and spears to pistols, rifles and shotguns were everywhere, common items. People carried them concealed, they carried them holstered. Fighting knives were a prominent part of many traditional attires and those little tubes criss crossing on the costumes of Cossacks and various Caucasian peoples? Well those are bullet holders for rifles.

Various armies, such as the Poles, during the Смута (Times of Troubles), or Napoleon, or the Germans even as the Tsarist state collapsed under the weight of WW1 and Wall Street monies, found that holding Russian lands was much much harder than taking them and taking was no easy walk in the park but a blood bath all its own. In holding, one faced an extremely well armed and aggressive population Hell bent on exterminating or driving out the aggressor.

This well armed population was what allowed the various White factions to rise up, no matter how disorganized politically and militarily they were in 1918 and wage a savage civil war against the Reds. It should be noted that many of these armies were armed peasants, villagers, farmers and merchants, protecting their own. If it had not been for Washington’s clandestine support of and for the Reds, history would have gone quite differently.

Moscow fell, for example, not from a lack of weapons to defend it, but from the lieing guile of the Reds. Ten thousand Reds took Moscow and were opposed only by some few hundreds of officer cadets and their instructors. Even then the battle was fierce and losses high. However, in the city alone, at that time, lived over 30,000 military officers (both active and retired), all with their own issued weapons and ammunition, plus tens of thousands of other citizens who were armed. The Soviets promised to leave them all alone if they did not intervene. They did not and for that were asked afterwards to come register themselves and their weapons: where they were promptly shot.

Of course being savages, murderers and liars does not mean being stupid and the Reds learned from their Civil War experience. One of the first things they did was to disarm the population. From that point, mass repression, mass arrests, mass deportations, mass murder, mass starvation were all a safe game for the powers that were. The worst they had to fear was a pitchfork in the guts or a knife in the back or the occasional hunting rifle. Not much for soldiers.

To this day, with the Soviet Union now dead 21 years, with a whole generation born and raised to adulthood without the SU, we are still denied our basic and traditional rights to self defense. Why? We are told that everyone would just start shooting each other and crime would be everywhere….but criminals are still armed and still murdering and to often, especially in the far regions, those criminals wear the uniforms of the police. The fact that everyone would start shooting is also laughable when statistics are examined.

While President Putin pushes through reforms, the local authorities, especially in our vast hinterland, do not feel they need to act like they work for the people. They do as they please, a tyrannical class who knows they have absolutely nothing to fear from a relatively unarmed population. This in turn breeds not respect but absolute contempt and often enough, criminal abuse.

For those of us fighting for our traditional rights, the US 2nd Amendment is a rare light in an ever darkening room. Governments will use the excuse of trying to protect the people from maniacs and crime, but are in reality, it is the bureaucrats protecting their power and position. In all cases where guns are banned, gun crime continues and often increases. As for maniacs, be it nuts with cars (NYC, Chapel Hill NC), swords (Japan), knives (China) or home made bombs (everywhere), insane people strike. They throw acid (Pakistan, UK), they throw fire bombs (France), they attack. What is worse, is, that the best way to stop a maniac is not psychology or jail or “talking to them”, it is a bullet in the head, that is why they are a maniac, because they are incapable of living in reality or stopping themselves.

The excuse that people will start shooting each other is also plain and silly. So it is our politicians saying that our society is full of incapable adolescents who can never be trusted? Then, please explain how we can trust them or the police, who themselves grew up and came from the same culture?

No it is about power and a total power over the people. There is a lot of desire to bad mouth the Tsar, particularly by the Communists, who claim he was a tyrant, and yet under him we were armed and under the progressives disarmed. Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question. They hate guns in those whom they have slated for a barrel to the back of the ear.

So, do not fall for the false promises and do not extinguish the light that is left to allow humanity a measure of self respect.

Stanislav Mishin

The article reprinted with the kind permission from the author and originally appears on his blog, Mat Rodina

Дмитрий Судаков

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California Marine stands to and shows us all our duty to our children

By Seth Richardson

For 237 years the soldiers of the United States Marine Corps have been dedicated to protecting each and every one of us from all enemies, foreign and domestic and have honored the Marine Corps motto “Semper Fidelis“, with faithful obedience to their oath.

Few exemplify the “Always Faithful” motto better than Marine Sgt. Craig Pusley of Hughson, Calif, who responded to the horrific and heartbreaking massacre of innocent schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in the very best traditions of the Marine Corps.

Rather than rail against fate, argue over gun policy or wring his hands in helpless fury, Sergeant Pusley put on his desert camouflage Marine uniform and stood to duty at Hughson Elementary School, his orders coming only from his conscience and his oath.

Without a firearm, but hardly helpless, Pusley presented himself to Principal Laura Fong at 0730 Wednesday and offered to stand guard at the entrance of the school, an offer that Principal Fong gladly accepted. After saluting the American flag in kindergarten teacher Annette Diliberto’s class, Pusley spent his seven-hour watch, from 0730 to 1430, vigilantly guarding and greeting children. The Modesto Bee quotes him as saying, “I just want to have a word to this community that I stand between them and any danger.”

And so he does, just as every Marine has done since 10 November, 1775. “I don’t need to be armed to do this. I don’t have a fear in the world that if someone came here I’d have the strength and the ability to protect them,” Pusley said. There is little doubt that he, or any Marine could do just that.

We should all be heartbroken that Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school Psychologist Mary Sherlach did not have the training or the right equipment to take on a heavily-armed deranged murderer when they flew at the killer without a single thought for their own safety and were killed on that terrible day.

Their sacrifice, and the sacrifice of teachers Victoria Leigh Soto, Anne Marie Murphy, Lauren Gabrielle Rousseau, and Rachel D’Avino, who all died trying to protect their students with nothing more than their bodies, along with all the other teachers and staff who responded quickly to the attack by sheltering children and doing everything they could do, must never be forgotten or minimized.

What should be forgotten forever is the name of the rampaging murderer. It should be extirpated from our national memory to deny him the infamy he sought.

The lesson to us all given by Sgt. Pusley and every adult and child at Sandy Hook Elementary School is that someone else is not responsible for the safety of our children, we are. Each and every one of us. We have a duty just as important as Sgt. Pusley’s duty to the honor of the Marine Corps to stand to and sacrifice our own comfort and safety to ensure that no one can attack our children unopposed.

In Israel, volunteers guard schools every single day, carrying firearms and sacrificing their time to keep Islamic terrorists from rampaging through the hallways. Since Israel approved this volunteer effort, armed attacks on schools in Israel have ceased.

It’s time we learn this lesson and take to heart the words of Sgt. Pusley and make them our own. We must all say “I stand between this community and any danger,” and we must stand to and perform, as Sir Robert Peel, founder of the London Metropolitan Police said, “…the duties that are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

There are not enough police officers or soldiers to man the entryways of every school in the United States. There is only we, the People who can protect our precious children, and that is what we must do.

 Update:

New reports in indicate that Craig Pusley may have lied about his service record as a Marine, including his rank, which is unfortunate, but that does not change the value of the act or the important message to all of us, in my opinion.

© 2012 Altnews

Drugs and guns have some things in common

By Seth Richardson

The election is over and the people of Colorado have spoken out loud and clear about recreational use of marijuana. Whatever the Drug Enforcement Agency thinks, the state constitutional amendment passed by voters achieves one important goal; it forbids state and local law enforcement to harass, ticket or arrest pot users for growing, possessing, smoking, eating or selling less than one ounce of marijuana.

It’s unlikely that the Feds are going to waste their resources harassing individual pot users, but it’s all but certain that until federal law is changed, which it should be under President Obama in his lame-duck term if he has any guts at all, major growers, drug cartels and those who profit from the drug trade will still be under the gun.

And speaking of guns, it seems that President-elect Enrique Pena Neito’s main adviser is “rethinking” Mexico’s commitment to putting a stop to marijuana smuggling across the border. Because the plant is now legal in some states, Luis Videgaray, head of the new President’s transition team seems to believe that Mexico may not have any obligation to prevent drug smuggling across the border. Not that Mexico has ever had any real interest in securing its border with the United States to begin with.

Far too much money flows south into Mexico from both drug smuggling and human trafficking operations that Mexico has for decades pretended it wants to prevent. It’s been an open joke to everyone but the politicians who try to garner votes on both sides of the border for at least 50 years. Mexico has no desire to halt illegal border crossing by anyone, so it’s efforts to secure its own borders are virtually non-existent.

So what’s all this about guns?

Well, one thing Mexico, and the Obama administration have been carping about is the alleged massive gun-running operation from our border states into Mexico which, they claim, is fueling drug cartel violence. Mexico’s border towns have become killing fields as the cartels war with one another, and hundreds if not thousands of innocent Mexican citizens have been slaughtered in the out-and-out uncivil war going on in Mexico…in large part thanks to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which has been illegally exporting thousands of U.S. firearms to Mexico for some time now. One of the sub-rosa intents of this program has been to justify more restrictions on U.S. gun dealers and firearms owners by falsely claiming that the American gun market is “supplying the cartels” with guns.

This violence, which is spilling over into the United States in places like El Paso and Phoenix, among other U.S. border towns, was only exacerbated by the ill-advised and flatly illegal gunrunning schemes orchestrated by the Obama administration. The scandal of Operation Fast and Furious has fallen off the media’s radar what with hurricane Sandy and the election, but people are still dying on the border, including our own Border Patrol agents.

Don’t expect Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder to be held to account for these felonies, which it’s clear they knew of and approved all along, because the fox is still guarding the henhouse and Holder’s minions will quash any attempts to get to the truth or hold anyone responsible, including the President, accountable for their criminal acts. That’s just business as usual in Washington.

But back to Mexico’s “rethinking” of its anti-smuggling policies. The implication appears to be that since pot is now legal in several states, presumably trafficking in marijuana ought to fall under the North Amerian Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Mexican drug cartels ought to be given a free pass to import as much “legal marijuana” as they like for U.S. consumption. I may be stretching Videgaray’s intent here, but I have a good reason to do so.

My question is how does that implication square with Mexico’s objections to the smuggling of guns into Mexico? Believe it or not, guns are legal in Mexico, though factually and practically nobody can succeed in getting a permit to possess one except perhaps corrupt government officials and their drug-cartel friends. Not all guns of course and not in all places, but that’s exactly the same as Mexico’s argument about pot.

This only makes sense. If the United States wants to stop drug smuggling, then it’s up to the United States to use its law enforcement and military resources to seal the border and prevent that smuggling. Mexico’s certainly not going to do it. In fact, the Mexican Army has been caught on many occasions hauling pot loads across the Rio Grande in Humvees provided to them by the United States, and Mexican Army personnel have not infrequently fired on U.S. Border Patrol agents from across the border in order to protect those loads, including firing on agents with .50 caliber Browning M2 heavy machine-guns also supplied to Mexico by the United States.

So, if Mexico doesn’t want people to import firearms into Mexico, it’s up to Mexico to seal its side of the border to prevent that smuggling, just as it’s our duty to seal our border to prevent drug smuggling and human trafficking.

Marijuana may be legal in Colorado and other states, but that doesn’t mean we have to allow it to be imported in bulk from Mexico.

Seal the border against drugs and human trafficking using the U.S. military troops who are being recalled from Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s what our military is for, after all, securing our own borders, not nation-building half a world away. Let Mexico seal its border against gun smuggling if it wants to do so.

© 2012 Altnews

Reasonable security for presidential debate requires moving the debate, not shutting down I-25

By Seth Richardson

The Secret Service is well-known for their paranoid tendencies over security for the POTUS and its other protectees, but the shut-down of Interstate 25 through Denver to accommodate the presidential debates at DU are a ridiculous and offensive excess. The Secret Service will not say why exactly it deems it necessary to disrupt traffic flow and inconvenience hundreds of thousands of people, but we can presume that the debate venue is too close to the interstate and they fear that a truck-bomb or shoulder-fired missile or some other long-range weapon might be used from the freeway.

Fine, they are the experts at threat assessment and far be it from me to criticize their judgment. But what the heck persuaded the candidates to hold the debates at such a vulnerable facility in the first place? Evidently the Commission on Presidential Debates decided that DU presented the best package. Peter Eyre, a senior adviser to the Commission is quoted by reporter Kristen Leigh Painter from the Denver Post as saying “One of the things that was really unique was the proximity of the debate hall to the media filing center.” In her article, Painter says “Eyre said at the end of the day, DU’s proposal displayed a willingness to do whatever it took, and had the infrastructure to support it.”

Yeah, everything it takes except some basic respect for motorists who need to get from point A to point B on a public highway that they paid a lot of money for and who don’t have the time or patience to put up with political pandering as they try to eke a living out of this floundering economy.

It seems more than coincidental that the debates landed in Colorado, which is a swing state in this election, although Eyre says that “Geography is not factored in.” Too right it’s not. One of the most essential elements of planning such an event is security for the candidates, and ignoring the obvious security threat of I-25 in making the selection smacks of political pandering over good event management or presidential security.

Why couldn’t they have booked the Pepsi Center? That’s where the Democrats had their convention four years ago, and security there was easy. I was there. They managed to keep the hordes of people hundreds of yards away from the venue, and made the pathway to the government-approved “free speech zone” (here’s a constitutional aside for politicians: the whole of the public lands in the United States is a “free speech zone” and you’d best not forget it) was such a byzantine maze of fences guiding protesters literally nearly a mile to an obscure corner near the press tent that the protesters, with about three individual exceptions, refused to be herded out of sight and sound of the delegates.

It’s  no more acceptable for the Commission to shut down a major traffic artery through Denver for the debate than it was to shut it down so that Barack Obama could grin and gloat on his Olympian dais at the Bronco’s football stadium at the end of the Democrat convention. It was a bad decision to hold the debate at DU, and just because the politically greedy administration at DU wants to score a public relations “coup” doesn’t mean it’s wise or fair to “do whatever it took” without due respect and regard for the citizens of Colorado whose ability to travel efficiently is going to be massively disrupted by this self-serving arrogance.

We cannot blame the Secret Service though. They don’t make the political decisions about where the POTUS goes. They just have the unenviable job of doing what they can to secure him wherever he chooses to go. Just a few weeks ago he appeared at CU in Boulder and on a whim he went to one of my favorite restaurants in Boulder, The Buff, to press the flesh with the college students who eat there in hordes because of the outstanding food and service. According to co-owner Jackie Sproul, the Secret Service haunted the place undercover for a day or two before the visit, but didn’t notify anyone at the restaurant of Obama’s plans till about 45 minutes before the visit. This sort of public contact is the Secret Service’s worst nightmare because they can’t vet everyone who comes within contact range of the President, especially in a state where concealed carry with a permit is legal.

What numb-nut forced what’s going to be a highly unpopular and aggravating closure of six miles of I-25 on the Secret Service? Whoever it was, they should be ashamed of themselves for disrespecting the traveling public in such an arrogant and disdainful manner.

© 2012 Altnews

United Nations bigots call for criminalizing blasphemy against Islam

By Seth Richardson

There is an insidious Islamic agenda at work in the world today. Some idiot filmmaker or preacher makes an insulting film or burns a Koran and Muslims worldwide riot and kill each other and call for killing of all non-believers and the destruction of the United States. But that’s not the agenda, the riotous Muslims are just useful idiots heeding the call of the radical Islamic leadership to engage in violence whenever Islam or their Prophet are (in some Imam’s opinion) “insulted.” It’s been this way since 610 A.D.. But now as soon as they start rioting, the radical Islamic leadership begins calling for restrictions on the free speech of infidels so that Islam can be protected from its critics rather than its customary practice of sending out armies to destroy the Christian Empire directly. It’s more insidious and deceitful nowadays. And insidious deceitfulness, not to mention outright lying to infidels, is an approved Islamic practice, which makes it impossible to trust what any Muslim says to an infidel.

Usually it’s some fringe Islamic zealot like Iran’s Ahmahdinejad, but now the United Nations are getting in on the agenda.  “The international community must not become silent, and should criminalize such acts that destroy the peace of the world,” said Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s president, at the U.N. on Tuesday. What he meant is that blaspheming Islam should be criminalized, but he’s right, although not in the way he intends. His sentiments were echoed by other Islamic U.N. leaders, and tacitly agreed with by President Obama in his disgusting attempts at pre-election appeasement of the Muslim world in a desperate attempt to solicit votes.

The acts that “destroy the peace of the world” are not the bigoted and hateful comments or expressions of Islamophobes, they are the evil and inhuman acts of “outraged” Muslims who riot, murder, pillage, rape and terrorize the world merely because their religious sensibilities are offended.

You won’t hear any of these Muslim zealots calling for criminalization of hate speech directed towards Christians or other “infidels.” No, it’s only Islam and Mohammed that must not be insulted. Christians are fair game, literally, not only for insults and hates speech, but as the targets of religious intolerance, murder and terroristic acts.

Tens of thousands of Christians in the Middle East have been murdered, terrorized and driven out of their homes and communities by intolerant Islamic religious zealots. Churches have been burned and children chopped down with machetes in Africa by radical Muslims “defending” Islam. And all this violence is the product of the twisted minds of those who openly called for killing and enslaving the infidels of the world because only their religion is sacred.

And if the radical Muslim fringe has its way, the Caliphate will be expanded to cover the whole world, and every non-Muslim will be killed or enslaved to the intolerance and hatred of radical Islam. So-called “peaceful” Muslims try to distance themselves from the zealots, but it’s mostly hollow sentiment and transparent denials of what is written in the Koran, and it’s an act of cowardice by these peace-loving Muslims who mouth platitudes but take no direct action against the apostates of their own religion.

The first step in the program to expand Islam and the Caliphate worldwide is to use violence and terrorism as a threat against any opposition to Islam and it’s evil intentions for the rest of us. Thus the calls for criminalizing speech rather than concerted efforts to educate, pacify and put a stop to violent, illegal acts by whipped-up Muslim fundamentalists. Blame every infidel for the acts of one or two ignorant bigots, fire up the ignorant bigots of Islam to riot and cause chaos and then lay the blame on every non-Muslim rather than on the inciting Imams and those who actually go out and destroy the peace of the world.

This insidious agenda must be stopped and opposed at every turn because no one has even the smallest right or justification for rioting over words, no matter how hateful or insulting those words may be. Civilized people control themselves and use civilized discussion and debate to resolve differences and disputes over social, political and religious issues.

So yes, Mr. Ali Zardari, the world should “criminalize… acts that destroy the peace of the world,” specifically the acts of violent, ignorant, intolerant Muslim bigots who insist on creating chaos, death and destruction over words.

© 2012 Altnews

Sierra Club ecozealots don’t like coal, and you will pay for their frivolous lawsuit.

By Seth Richardson

Cutting-edge pollution control technology being tested at the Drake power plant is threatening the ecozealot Sierra Club’s political agenda to shut down all fossil fuel power production, so they are threatening to sue Colorado Springs for alleged unpermitted “major modifications” to the plant. Gazette reporter Daniel Chacon outlines the Sierra Club’s claims in today’s Gazette, quoting club organizer Bryce Carter as saying that the Neumann Systems Group technology being tested, and soon to be installed at Drake was “definitely a consideration” in the club’s lawsuit.

The last thing the Luddites at the Sierra Club want to see succeed is pollution control technology that far exceeds all federal limits because the organization is dedicated to eliminating the use of all fossil fuels, including coal, natural gas and oil. Ignoring the obvious facts of physics that “clean energy” like wind and solar power cannot possibly take over the load from coal and gas-fired power plants any time in the next couple of centuries, if ever, these ecozealots insist on raising energy costs for everyone by filing frivolous lawsuits all over the country.

The club jumped on the Drake controversy precisely because it fears what it calls “experimental and unproven NeuStream technology” will actually succeed in dramatically reducing pollution from coal-fired power plants, which it shows every sign of doing right now. Colorado Springs is today at the forefront of technological innovation that can keep coal a cheap and viable source of power for the next century or more.

Coal is one of the United States’ most abundant and energy-dense fuels, and our low-sulphur coal is the envy of the world. So much so that we exported 27 million tons of coal to countries like Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, India and China. Sixty-five percent of the exports were “metallurgic coal” used for steel-making, which makes it a valuable national strategic resource, or it would be if the U.S. was still a major producer of steel.

Because of the enormous cost of federal regulatory compliance, many power plants have switched over to natural gas, which is another abundant source of energy in the U.S. This has caused continuing declines in coal consumption of almost 19 percent in 2011. This switch-over has actually resulted in dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions. Reason.com reporter Ronald Bailey wrote, “In a surprising turnaround, the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years, and government officials say the biggest reason is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal.”

But even that’s not enough for the ecozealots at the Sierra Club. Carter is quoted as saying, “There are broader questions that tie to a broader dialog” and that the city could have “paved the way to retire these old, dangerous an financially risky coal plants and transition to clean energy.” This is of course not true. Coal power technology is very mature and it’s anything but dangerous or financially risky. Coal power plants fueled the economic and industrial expansion of the nation into the economic powerhouse that it became, and the technology is quite safe and mature. Rare indeed is the explosion of a power plant’s coal stacks. Not necessarily so for natural gas fired plants.

From a tactical and strategic perspective, coal-fired power plants are more reliable than natural gas plants because they usually stockpile days to weeks worth of coal in their yards, which allows continued electric production even if delivery of coal is temporarily disrupted. Gas-fired plants can be shut down immediately simply by damaging or destroying the natural gas distribution pipelines that feed the power plant. That’s something that any competent terrorist understands. Disrupt a few major gas distribution points that feed gas-fired plants at the same time and their failure can easily cause a cascade shutdown of the entire region’s electrical grid. We see these sort of disruptions during severe weather, and the panics and riots in New York during the brownouts and blackouts in the Seventies and Eighties lead to chaos and death. Combine a deliberate disruption of power plant fuel supplies with other coordinated terrorist activities in a major city, like a “dirty bomb” or dissemination of a biological agent like Anthrax in weaponized form and the human toll could be enormous.

Nor is it wise to allow our power grid to be dependent on only one source of fuel. Wind and solar and other renewables have their legitimate place in the hierarchy of electrical power production, but they will never replace the energy-dense, abundant resources of coal and natural gas, at least not in our or our grandchildren’s lifetimes. Besides, who wants to see 400 foot tall wind generators that kill eagles stretching from horizon to horizon everywhere in the U.S.? Certainly not the late Ted Kennedy, champion of the eco-left, who vigorously objected to a plan to install wind turbines off-shore of his family compound near Martha’s Vinyard.

If NeuStream technology is effective on a large scale, it paves the way for a resurgence of clean-burning coal-fired power plants. And that terrifies the Sierra Club because they are dedicated to having us all living in wattle-and-daub huts and grubbing in the ground with sharpened sticks just to suit their religious worship of nature. So, they file frivolous lawsuits and obstruct the advancement of clean coal technology and burden taxpayers with the costs of litigation in their quest for ecological purity at the expense of human lives, economic prosperity, and national sovereignty.

And all this obstructionism is perfectly in line with President Obama’s pledge that “under [his] plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket” and the Sierra Club, which used to be dedicated to the preservation of wilderness areas has become just another group of mindless proletarian drones in the left’s war on capitalism and prosperity.

© 2012 Altnews

Anti-gun CU physics professor Jerry Peterson threatens to defraud students if he finds a gun in his classroom.

By Seth Richardson

In the Denver Post today, a story by Boulder Daily Camera writer Brittany Anas says that CU physics professor Jerry Peterson has threatened to cancel classes if he finds that one of his students is lawfully armed. “My own personal policy in my classes is if I’m aware that there is a firearm in the class–registered or unregistered–concealed or unconcealed–the class session is immediately cancelled,” Peterson is quoted as saying. “I want my students to feel unconstrained in their discussions.”

This sort of irrational fear of law-abiding citizens who go to the trouble of getting a permit to carry a concealed handgun is typical of hoplophobes. The word was coined in 1962 by one of the leading figures in armed self-defense training, the late Col. Jeff Cooper, who coined it in his book “To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak The Truth.” Cooper opined that hoplophobia was a “mental disturbance characterized by irrational aversion to weapons.” It derives from the word “hoplite,” which refers to the ancient Greek citizen-soldier who was expected to procure his own weapons and armor in order to serve in the militia when called to duty. The Spartans are perhaps the best known hoplites thanks to movies like “300.”

In the present usage, it means, broadly, “those who have an irrational fear of an armed citizenry,” a mental disturbance that’s quite typically seen in academia, which is these days severely infested with liberal panty-waists, Progressives and outright Marxists, all of whom see an armed citizenry as both a threat to their personal aggregations of power and privilege, and as an obstacle to their left-wing political agenda that requires a disarmed public in order to facilitate the sort of oppressive government control that these sort of wanna-be despots so desperately want in power.

An armed citizenry has always been an obstacle to tyranny and despotism, as well as a deterrent to criminality, as the Spartans and the authors of the U.S. Constitution well knew, which is precisely why the Founders forbade the federal government from infringing upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

When the Colorado General Assembly passed the Concealed Carry Act in 2003, it intended to divest not just the Regents of the University, but also every state employee, which includes professors, of any authority to regulate the lawful carrying of concealed weapons on campus. So when Professor Peterson threatens to cancel classes if he finds someone lawfully carrying a handgun, he’s violating state law. That’s bad enough, but what’s worse is that he is also defrauding the students who have paid to attend his classes, and the people of the State of Colorado who pay his salary. We don’t pay him to make hoplophobic political statements, we pay him to teach classes and ignore students who are lawfully exercising their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

If he can’t bring himself to be in the classroom with a lawfully-carried handgun, then he needs to be dismissed from his position at a public university and told to seek employment somewhere else. And if the Regents won’t do it, then some student who is defrauded by Professor Peterson by having a bought-and-paid-for class dismissed because Professor Peterson suffers from hoplophobia should sue the University and force them to either fire Peterson or order him to obey state law and do his job.

© 2012 Altnews

When will the Regents of the University of Colorado bow to the authority of the General Assembly?

By Seth Richardson

When it comes to the lawful carrying of concealed handguns on campus, the University of Colorado Board of Regents has been stubbornly resistant to either abiding by the law, respecting the constitutional rights of students, faculty, staff and visitors to its campuses in Boulder and Colorado Springs, or obeying the rulings of the Colorado Supreme Court.

For decades the University has ignored the requirements of a 1994 state law regarding the carrying of concealed weapons pursuant to a valid concealed carry permit on campus. The Regents stubbornly insisted that the University was not subject to the control of the Legislature or state law and that they could make up whatever rules they wanted. Even when the Legislature created a statewide comprehensive law regarding the carrying of concealed handguns in 2003, the Regents continued to flout the law with rules that flatly defied the new statute. The University was eventually sued by a group of students who objected to the continuing absolute ban on concealed carry.

While the Regents of the University are something of a power unto themselves when it comes to operating the University, it’s still a department of the state government and is under the general supervisory control of the Legislature, but it took a Colorado Supreme Court ruling to finally convince them that they are not an independent power.

In Students for Concealed Carry on Campus v. Regents of the University of Colorado the Court ruled that “citing ‘widespread inconsistenc[ies] among jurisdictions,’ the General Assembly enacted the CCA [Concealed Carry Act] to ‘occupy the field of regulation of the bearing of concealed handguns’ and to ‘provide statewide uniform standards for issuing permits to carry concealed handguns for self-defense.’ “ In legal parlance, “occupying the field” means that even home rule cities must bow to the state’s authority to exclusively regulate in that area.

Decided in March of this year, the Colorado Supreme Court held that the Legislature had “divested the Board of Regents of its authority to regulate concealed handgun possession on campus.”

But evidently even that clear declaration hasn’t gotten through to the Regents, who today announced new regulations for freshmen students and public attendance at events on campus that once again purport to ban and/or regulate concealed handgun possession on campus.

The rationale used this time is “contracts.” The University maintains that has the authority to limit the possession of concealed weapons in campus housing facilities as a function of landlord/tenant contract law. As expressed in an article in the Denver Post by Ryan Parker, Patrick O’Rourke, vice-president of the Board of Regents is quoted as saying, “In contrast to other public buildings, student housing presents a relationship that is essentially landlord-tenant.”

The same sort of rationale is used to justify banning concealed handguns at public campus events like football games and theater events. “We are treating that ticket purchase as a contractual agreement that you won’t bring your weapon to the venue,” says CU-Boulder spokesman Bronson Hilliard in Ryan’s article.

The problem with this reasoning is that while the concealed carry law explicitly permits private property owners to forbid concealed handguns on their property, the University is not private property, it’s public property, and that includes every single building on every campus, including dorms and sports venues.

Impeaching the supposed need to weasel around an absolutely crystal clear Colorado Supreme Court ruling is the University’s own claim that the number of over-21 students eligible to even obtain a concealed carry permit is only four percent at the Boulder campus. Ryan goes on to quote Tom Hutton, spokesman for the UCCS campus as saying, “Of the total UCCS student body population, which should exceed 10,000 this year, we estimate that less than 1 percent will have a concealed carry permit.”

Two questions come to mind from this information: What’s the problem that they are trying to fix, and what part of the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that the General Assembly has “divested the Board of Regents of its authority to regulate concealed handgun possession on campus” is unclear to the Regents?

© 2012 Altnews

Stormwater control is necessary, but who should pay for it?

By Seth Richardson

On June 6th, an epic thunderstorm squatted ominously over Colorado Springs and dumped more than four inches of rain and hail in a few hours in places, causing localized flooding and lakes of hail four feet deep near the Citadel Mall. The flooding reignited the controversy over Colorado Springs’ obligation to control storm water flows, with threats coming in from Pueblo County to revoke the SDS pipeline permit if more is not done to control overabundant flows in Fountain Creek. “Stormwater is not being captured and is going into Fountain Creek at an alarming rate,” Pueblo County Attorney Dan Kogovsek said a day later.

Colorado Springs agreed to do more to control storm water flows as a part of the permit it obtained from Pueblo County to build the SDS pipeline. But the question is not just what ought to be done and who must pay for it, but whether that agreement is even legal and binding, given the nature of Colorado water law.

In Monday’s Gazette, editorial page contributor Terence Fraser hits the conundrum and inequity of the “storm water tax” directly on the head when he says “Whoever owns the [storm]water should be responsible for managing their property…isn’t that property rights 101?” Yes, it is. or at least it should be.

Colorado’s water law is exceedingly complex but what is absolutely clear is that every drop of rain that falls on the ground is owned by someone, and it’s not often the person who owns the ground it falls upon. The doctrine of Prior Appropriation means that the first person to divert water from a natural stream and put it to beneficial use owns not just that water, but the right to divert that amount of water each and every year forever, so long as it’s put to beneficial use. This “first in time, first in right” doctrine controls what anyone else may do that might interfere with the delivery of that water to its rightful owner at the point in the river that it’s been historically diverted. Those restrictions include doing anything on your land that interferes with, interrupts, slows or in any way diminishes the flow of rainwater or snow melt downhill into a stream or river and from there through the network of rivers and streams to the rightful owner.

This is why it’s illegal to put a rainbarrel under your rain gutters and collect the water flowing off your roof for use on your vegetable garden. According to the law, it’s not your water to store or use. You can’t even design your landscaping to retain that water on your lawn, even though science has proven that little more than than three percent of the rainfall and snowmelt actually reaches a natural river or stream in an average year. The vast majority of rainfall is absorbed by the ground and used by vegetation and is transpired back into the atmosphere by plants and evaporation long before it makes it to a river.

But the Colorado Supreme Court has long guarded the rights of senior water owners by using an expansive definition of “natural stream” and by making the demonstrably false presumption that all rainfall that hits the ground ultimately makes it to the river. If the Court were to consistently apply this ridiculous logic, then anyone who was not a senior appropriator would be required to pave over their property and allow every drop of rainfall to flow into the river in order to serve the legal and financial interests of the true owners of that water.

The irony of the situation as it applies to Colorado Springs is that this is exactly what has happened. As houses are built and roads are paved, the amount of rain that used to soak into the ground that never reached the river has increased massively, and now the taxpayers are on the hook to do exactly what they are forbidden to do on an individual basis…store and control the flow of excess natural rainfall that’s theoretically (but not in fact) on its way to its rightful owners downstream. Storm water flows from urban areas and suburban rooftops are actually a huge and artificial net increase in the “natural” delivery of rainwater to rivers to which the prior appropriators are actually entitled, something the Court has not considered in its rulings.

You, as an individual, cannot legally capture rainwater or even delay its travel to the river under one set of laws, yet Colorado Springs the city, which is nothing more than the people who reside here considered as a group, is required by another set of laws to both slow, diminish and control that flow of rainfall and pay for the infrastructure to do so. This makes no sense at all unless you completely ignore the state constitutional requirement that forbids doing precisely that because it interferes with the flow of rainwater to its rightful owners.

Colorado Springs should take this opportunity to challenge this inequity and hypocrisy in the law by refusing to control maximum storm water flows in Fountain Creek at all, and it should argue that because the Supreme Court has ruled that all rainfall belongs to senior appropriators and that such rainfall may not be diverted or interrupted, that Colorado Springs has no duty or obligation, and is in fact legally forbidden to interfere with such flows of water, lest it diminish the amount of water eventually reaching its owners downstream.

Instead of taxing the public to pay for controlling flows in Fountain Creek for the benefit of Pueblo County or anyone else downstream, Colorado Springs should only tax residents to pay for efficient storm water delivery into Fountain Creek, to prevent damage to property in Colorado Springs and to meet its legal obligation to deliver every drop it can of that privately-owned rainfall to its owners downstream. Let Pueblo County deal with its own flooding issues and meet its own obligations to deliver the water to who owns it.

And both Colorado Springs and Pueblo should send a bill for the costs of delivering that water to the people who own the water, not to the residents of the city.

Perhaps this will persuade the Colorado Supreme Court, and the State Legislature to bring some sanity and consistency to Colorado water law and apportion the costs of delivering rainfall to its owners properly, rather than shifting the burden to urban taxpayers.

© 2012 Altnews

Proposed Colorado constitutional amendment initiative would restore fundamental fairness to home foreclosures

By Seth Richardson

Tired of waiting for the Colorado legislature to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing, citizens are proposing to amend the state Constitution to require banks that foreclose on property to first prove that they have the legal right to do so because they actually own it. Initiative 84 is being prepared for petition circulation, and when it comes to your community, you should sign it.

Predictably, bankers, in the persona of the Independent Bankers of Colorado, a community bank trade group, are objecting to the notion that they should not be allowed to simply assert that they own your house and then force you into an expensive foreclosure that may not even be legal or justifiable. The group wants the issue to be dealt with by the state legislature rather than by amending the state Constitution.

But the state legislature refused to do so when it rejected a bill sponsored by Rep. Beth McCann, D-Denver, in a House committee, leaving an initiative as the only option for this no-brainer correction of a gross inequity perpetrated by the banking industry itself in cahoots with the state legislature back in 2002 and 2006. Inserted deep in the depths of a much larger piece of legislation, the law now says that all a bank has to do is get a lawyer to file a “statement of qualified holder,” which is nothing more than a bald assertion by the bank’s lawyer that they own the paper and have a right to foreclose, but does not require the bank to prove with documentary evidence (like the actual deed signed by the homeowner) that they either own the mortgage or that the homeowner has actually defaulted on the loan.

Worse, if your mortgage holder sells your note to someone else and then fails to tell you where to send the payments, causing you to send them where the original contract specifies, you not only have to sue them to get back the wrongfully-collected funds, but you also have to make those missed payments to the new mortgage holder, if you can find out who that is before they claim a default and foreclose on your home. The fact that you made the payment as specified in your contract is now meaningless as a protection against default if the bank you signed with fails to forward that payment to the new owner.

That’s an intolerable injustice.

Proving that you own a debt owed by another with credible, verifiable evidence is a simple core requirement of any legitimate attempt to collect on a debt. I can say that you owe me money, but if I don’t have some proof of this allegation, my claim can, and should be rejected by you and by the courts. There is no reason to give community bankers, or anyone else, a free pass to claim ownership of a debt that would legally permit them to foreclose or collect that debt without adequate proof, and many reasons not to do so.

To the banks, this is, as usual, about money. For them to prove ownership of a mortgage they would have to record each transfer of the mortgage with the county clerk and recorder in the county where the home is each time the mortgage is sold to someone else. This is a nuisance to the bankers, and costs them money…all of ten bucks for the first page and five bucks for each additional page, plus the time and trouble of sending someone to the county clerk’s office to record the transfer, so they played shenanigans with the law to keep them from having to do so without any concern for the rights of the homeowner. The bankers whine that this will “dry up the secondary mortgage market” according to CBA executive director Don Childears.

Cry me a river. Also, hogwash and balderdash.

If a bank or other mortgage holder claiming ownership of a mortgage and a right to foreclose can’t produce the original mortgage signed by the homeowner along with a recorded chain of title showing that they have clear title to the note, then the law should forbid them from beginning foreclosure proceedings at all. Proving lawful ownership and proper chain of recorded title should be a requirement to even file the paperwork.

And just to make things even more clear, if the putative owner loses the original signed mortgage paper, screws up the chain of title, or fails to immediately notify the homeowner that his mortgage has been sold, and specifically to whom it has been sold along with accurate contact information for the new owner so he can send the payments to the right place and the entire debt should just evaporate and be unenforceable as a penalty for fraud, incompetence and un-professionalism.

That would make bankers and mortgage brokers, and companies that bundle mortgages and try to peddle them as securities to overseas investors, which is precisely what caused our current economic recession, dot their “i’s” and cross their “t’s” and act like banking professionals instead of acting like rapacious and evil banker Henry F. Potter from “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Requiring mortgage owners to show proof they own the mortgage (in the form of the actual piece of paper signed by the borrower), that they obtained it legally, and that they have just cause to foreclose on the note before they are allowed to foreclose is not just the right and moral thing to do for Colorado, it’s the right and moral thing to do nationwide.

Not only should this ballot initiative be passed by a landslide, the concept should make its way to the Congress and should become the law of the land nationwide.  If it dries up the overseas toxic-mortgage derivatives market that nearly destroyed our economy, and did destroy many homeowner’s lives, so much the better. Bankers will just have to be satisfied with the profits they will make on the original mortgage, or they will have to proceed carefully and thoroughly when selling it to someone else.

Demand that they do their jobs properly…what a concept.

As for the costs to the bankers…well, they’ll just fold those costs into whatever they charge for the mortgage, as they should, and it won’t impact either their bottom lines or the availability of the secondary mortgage market one little bit. It’ll just put a stop to one of the most heinous frauds ever perpetrated on homeowners  by the Colorado legislature.

Carving this requirement in stone in the state Constitution is the only way to prevent the banker’s sycophants in the General Assembly from doing again what they did before.

“Show me the the mortgage” should be the rallying cry for everyone who is falsely or wrongly foreclosed on in this country, and “no show, no go” should be the rule of law for lenders attempting to foreclose without the proper proofs.

© 2012 Altnews

What the “experts” won’t tell you about what to do in an encounter with a mountain lion

By Seth Richardson

On Monday morning, a mountain lion was seen hunting near Manitou Springs Elementary School. Although school officials and police used extra vigilance during the day and police removed the raccoon the lion had killed, hoping that it won’t return, the attitudes of both the Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife and the school Principal Russ Vogel towards this event are disturbingly blithe to the danger to the public this lion poses.

Vogel is quoted in a Gazette story by R. Scott Rappold as saying “We try to keep it in perspective for (students), that it’s part of nature and a beautiful animal that we need to be safe and smart around.” Yes, mountain lions are beautiful, and dangerous, and to be “safe and smart” about them when they come near a schoolyard in a densely populated area like Manitou Springs we need to do one thing: track down and kill that lion immediately.

Randy Hampton, spokesman for the Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife attempted to, as is usual for the Division, shift the blame to residents who “feed little critters” in their backyards which “jeopardizes the safety” of the neighborhood and that “a bird feeder can become a mountain lion feeder.” While it is true that the public shouldn’t be feeding wildlife,  mountain lions don’t show up in foothills or mountain subdivisions or near schools because people are feeding the birds, they show up in the urban/wildland interface zone because lion population pressures in the back country and abundant prey sources in the urban/wildland interface bring them there.

There are many reasons why this is so, not the least of which are local regulations that prohibit deer hunting in or near mountain subdivisions and a misguided “can’t we all just get along” bunny-hugger attitude about the presence of mountain lions near human populations.

But here’s the dirty little fact that Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife is loathe to tell the public: Whenever a mountain lion sees another living creature it’s engaging in a careful calculation and it’s making a decision that boils down to “can I attack, kill and eat this creature without being injured or killed, or do I need to flee from this creature because it’s more powerful and dangerous than I am?”

And that includes encounters with human beings, and in this case, elementary school children.

There is no wild animal in Colorado that is more dangerous to human beings, and especially children, than a mountain lion that has become habituated to human beings and their activities, because such lions no longer fear humans and are therefore easily capable of viewing them as prey when the opportunity arises, as it has here in Colorado. In the past 20 years, the three fatal attacks by mountain lions in Colorado have been on small children or, in one case, a high school student running alone on a trail in Clear Creek County.

But the chances of a fatal encounter with a lion go up dramatically when habituated lions start feeding in human-populated areas. It starts with the lion, for whatever reason, predating on family pets, and the more comfortable the lion becomes around human activity, the greater the danger to humans.

In the back country of Colorado, where mountain lions are both hunted by and are not habituated to humans, it’s very rare to ever see one up close. Ask any lion hunter how difficult it is to find, much less get close enough to shoot one with a rifle in the back country if you disbelieve this.

But in places like Boulder County, mountain lion “encounters” in the foothills, and even inside the city limits of Boulder, are not in the least bit uncommon. Lions have been seen stalking hikers and runners on Boulder’s extensive trail system and have even been seen perched in trees overlooking popular trails, just waiting for a meal.

But the bunny-huggers in Boulder, and the DOP&W, go right on insisting that your odds of being attacked by a mountain lion are very small, statistically speaking. And they are right, but that means nothing if YOU are the one the lion picks for dinner.

The “experts” constantly repeat the mantra that if you encounter a lion you should “look big” and “back away slowly” and take other defensive actions, but what they never, ever tell you to do…unless pressed, is take out your handgun and shoot the lion dead on the spot.

Now, relatively few people carry guns when going for a day-hike in the foothills, and I like to call those who do “Darwinian Winners.” Everyone else is a candidate for natural selection.

So, here’s some advice: If you are a Darwinian Winner, and you see a mountain lion while out hiking, or walking down your residential street in Manitou Springs, and you can see anything at all but the lion’s rear end as it flees from you, you’re in jeopardy. If the lion is looking at you, crouching down or approaching you, you are in immediate mortal danger because a mountain lion can cover 40 feet horizontally with a single leap, which means that even if you’re 50 yards away, you’re about four seconds away from being taken down. If you are close enough to hit it with your handgun, no matter what the range, you should do so, immediately, and don’t stop shooting till it’s dead. Do society and your neighbors a big favor by removing that dangerous predator from the community permanently. And if you do, and some nitwit from the state tries to say you weren’t justified in shooting the lion and gives you a ticket, let me know and I’ll provide the tape recordings of state wildlife officials admitting that it’s perfectly lawful to kill a mountain lion if you feel you’re in danger. And as I said, if the lion is anywhere close to you, sees you, and fails to immediately flee from you, you are absolutely in imminent danger.

The actions of the school in response to this lion sighting of having “more staff than usual outside on the grounds” was grossly deficient and negligent unless every one of those staff members was armed with a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with #4 buck shot, which is highly unlikely. A lion could easily dart out of the brush and grab a child and be gone before anyone without a gun could do anything effective.

Fifty years ago, a mountain lion sighting in or near any town in Colorado would have resulted in a posse being formed of armed citizens and lion-hunters with dogs who would have tracked down and killed that lion no matter how long it took, which is the only rational and reasonable response to an invading, habituated dangerous mountain lion around our children.

Mountain lions have their place, and it’s far away from human settlements, in the vast areas of forest and wilderness that Colorado affords them as proper habitat. There, they should be respected and left alone, and carefully managed. But when a lion ventures into human territory, it needs to die, and die as quickly as anyone with a firearm can make it dead, because merely by being accustomed to human beings and their habitat, they have become too dangerous for society to tolerate a moment longer than it takes to find and kill them. That’s just the hard, cold fact.

Until this lion is tracked down and killed, no resident of Manitou Springs should leave their child at a bus stop in the early morning without an armed guard there to protect them, and outside activities at schools should be curtailed completely unless the school also provides for an adequate number of trained and armed playground guards.

Let’s hope nothing bad happens, but let’s prepare for the worst while hoping for the best.

And let’s find and kill that lion.

© 2012 Altnews

If you don’t want the police to be interested in what you are doing, don’t do things that the police find interesting

By Seth Richardson

There’s a very common misunderstanding about the Fourth Amendment, particularly on the part of Catherine Roper, a Pennsylvania ACLU attorney, who really ought to know better. Roper complains in an Associated Press story about the NYPD’s intelligence-gathering practices on college campuses in the Northeast concerning Muslims student groups, that the NYPD “should be spending their time looking at the more specific behaviors that ought to draw their attention and make them investigate a person or a group” rather than gathering intelligence on and infiltrating Muslim college student groups simply because they are Muslims.

Here’s the problem with Ms. Roper’s argument; the police cannot distinguish those groups that are harmlessly exercising their civil rights from those groups that are engaging in unlawful acts or are planning terrorism without spending some time monitoring and getting to know all the groups and their members.

The Fourth Amendment explicitly prohibits “unreasonable” searches, not all searches, and not all law-enforcement intelligence gathering efforts. The Supreme Court says that an “unreasonable search” takes place when police physically invade private property or violate a person’s “reasonable expectation of privacy” without a warrant.

But while the police have a duty not to violate a reasonable expectation of privacy, they also have a duty to serve and protect the public by investigating and keeping tabs on potential threats to public safety.

Quite simply, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the actions of any campus political, religious or social club when a police agent is a member of that group.

The parameters of police surveillance of potentially seditious terrorist groups and other criminals were set back in the 1920s, when federal agents infiltrated criminal gangs during Prohibition clear through the 1960s when police undercover agents infiltrated groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other revolutionary student groups who were advocating violent overthrow of the government and were bombing, killing and maiming people nationwide. A notable example of such domestic terrorism where more infiltration and surveillance was needed is the case of SDS founder William Ayers, a friend of Barack Obama, who admitted to blowing up police stations and other terrorist acts in the 60s. He’s an unrepentant terrorist who should still be the subject of FBI surveillance.

The hoary old canard tossed out by Ms. Roper that it’s improper “religious profiling” for the NYPD to scrutinize Muslim student groups ignores the obvious and well-established fact that Muslim student groups are some of the primary places where Islamic radicalism, recruiting and terrorist plotting takes place. Is this true of all Muslim student groups? Of course not. But it is nonetheless true of some such groups, and the NYPD has every right, and indeed a duty to winnow the wheat from the chaff by infiltrating and gathering intelligence on such groups, within the strict boundaries of the Fourth Amendment, in order to determine which is which so they can focus on the real threats.

The adage in gold mining is “gold is where you find it.” The corollary is that you won’t find gold unless you go looking for it, and in the process you’re going to look at a lot of rocks that aren’t gold before you find a nugget. The same thing applies to police intelligence investigations of potential terrorist or criminal groups. They have to look at a large number of groups to determine which ones are harmless and which ones are threats, and then focus their efforts on the threats.

This obviously means that “innocent” individuals will be the subject of police interest and scrutiny, but the fact of the matter is that there is no constitutional right to be free of police interest and scrutiny, there is only a right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure by the police. Those groups and individuals who are innocent of any wrongdoing or potential threat will be of interest only peripherally to the police, and once the police are satisfied they are not a threat, the surveillance will cease and be focused on the actual threat groups.

Is it “religious profiling” for the NYPD to focus its attention and efforts on (in this case) Islamic groups? Yes, it most certainly is, but then again there’s nothing inherently wrong with or illegal about religious, political, ethnic or racial profiling if the religious beliefs, political activities, ethnic practices or race of an individual are primary aspects of suspect identification. If the witness description of a suspect in an armed robbery is that of a Caucasian male, it’s not racial or sexual profiling for the police to be looking more closely at white males than black females. The same is true of any other suspect descriptor, and unfortunately for peaceable Muslims, the violent radical terrorists within their ranks have certain traits and behaviors in common with innocent Muslims. That’s not a reason to ignore the fact that radical Muslims intent on terrorism, or recruiting others into terrorism, are highly likely to be found associating with other Muslims.

As a side note, I don’t hear Ms. Roper complaining about the FBI’s infiltration and surveillance of right-wing radical groups like the Freemen or various other “militia” groups, which smacks of rank hypocrisy to me.

In the case of Muslims, the vast majority are peaceful people, but there is a small, extremely radical and violent sub-set of Muslims who comprise a clear and present danger to national security, and the primary characteristic that binds all of these dangerous radicals together happens to be the religion of Islam. Just as the justification for infiltrating the SDS with undercover police agents was the primary characteristic that bound together murderous radicals of the 1960s, radical Marxism, the justification for gathering intelligence on Muslims is that one of the primary characteristics of violent Islamic extremists is Islam.

It’s therefore far from “unreasonable” for the police to show interest in Islamic groups on college campuses and for them to lawfully infiltrate and gather intelligence on their activities in order to separate the sheep from the goats, provided that the police do so within the well-established rules for such activities, which have been honed and refined in the four decades since the SDS was routinely infiltrated by police agents on college campuses nationwide.

The activities of any group that unknowingly invites a police undercover agent into the group are Fourth Amendment fair game for intelligence gathering. The police are not required to identify themselves as police officers in such situations, any more than an undercover officer infiltrating a drug cartel or organized crime network is required to do so. The invitation negates any reasonable expectation of privacy.

And if the activities of the group turn out to be harmless and lawful, then the police intelligence gathering will actually benefit the group by freeing them from continuing surveillance, no one’s privacy will have been unlawfully invaded, and the police will be able to better do their duty to ferret out and destroy actual Islamic terrorist cells on university campuses.

And there is little question that such Islamic terrorist cells exist on our university campuses. That much we do know.

© 2012 Altnews

Another outrageous example of government waste and pandering to PETA

By Seth Richardson

So there’s these 59 feral domestic cats on this scrubby little Navy missile-target of an island off the coast of California who were doing their cat-thing on cormorants, gulls and a threatened lizard…

No, it’s not the latest bar joke, but it is a bad joke of the Obama administration and animal-rights zealots on all of us, to the tune of more than $51,000 per cat.

Your tax dollars, more than $3 million of them, were spent on a program to live-trap and remove the offending cats, which are now being “acclimated” to humans and will be put up for adoption, presumably with diamond-encrusted government-issue collars and solid-gold transport cages.

Now, it may have been desirable or necessary to get rid of the cats to preserve the birds and lizard, but I mean really, $51,000 per cat?

I know legions of hunters who would pay the government good money to spend a few days hunting feral cats on an island off of California.

Or, we could send out our SEAL team snipers on practice missions to hone their stalking, camouflage and sniping skills by killing feral cats. They’re getting paid to shoot at paper targets every day anyway, so why not give them some live-target exercise for free, and get rid of the cats much more quickly?

This asinine waste of taxpayer money is just another in a series of idiotic panderings by the government to “animal rights” organizations when it comes to dealing with harmful feral domestic animals like wild cats or wild horses.

Out in the deserts of the west, wild horses, which are not a native species but are the feral progeny of horses imported to the Americas by the likes of Cortez and other European explorers, are eating themselves and everything else out of house and home. These horses are out-breeding the forage supplies in the desert west and large herds are causing enormous damage to plants and other native species of wildlife and they need to be culled or removed entirely from our public lands because they have become pests, just like the cats on San Nicholas Island.

But try to send a mangy feral nag to the glue-factory (or some French dining establishment) and watch out, because horse-lovers and “animal welfare advocates” will crawl out of the woodwork to complain, object, file lawsuits and physically obstruct government operations, notwithstanding the fact that the wild horses are starving and dying of thirst and it would be far more humane to just shoot them.

If a private owner does to his horses what the wild horse advocates insist we do to over-large wild horse herds, he’d be arrested for felony animal abuse. Which means the government should be ignoring, not pandering to these zealots.

But I digress. Back to the cats, which aren’t horses and aren’t even arguably a “symbol of the West” that some people think needs to be preserved. They’re just feral cats. I’m sure your neighborhood has plenty of them too, because feral cats are a pestilential plague on society. They kill songbirds, they crap on your patio, they spread disease, they yowl and fight all night long and they serve no useful purpose except perhaps to kill Preble’s meadow jumping mice.

Now I acknowledge that it’s impractical and unsafe for neighborhood residents to be sniping feral cats from their bedroom windows in densely-populated urban areas (although a silenced .22 properly handled would do the job nicely, and covertly), but out in the boonies, why not? Whacking feral cats, or dogs running at large and chasing livestock (something I’ve had to do a couple of times) is a hoary old rural tradition that never used to raise an eyebrow, but today can bring a criminal animal abuse charge if you’re not careful. So, farmers and ranchers are much more careful to shoot, shovel and most importantly shut up these days, which ought to be thought of as an outrageous accommodation to the tender sensibilities of nutbars like PETA zealot Ingrid Newkirk, who once said, ““There’s no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all animals.”

True enough that cats and rats are animals and so are humans, but when it comes to “rights” not even all humans have an unalienable right to life, as our recent disposal of Osama bin Laden proves. Why a feral cat, or a feral horse is due more rights than Osama is something neither Ms. Newkirk nor any other animal-rights zealot cares to address.

When an animal becomes a pest, it’s perfectly prudent to kill it, whether it’s a feral cat that’s just trying to make a living by killing cormorants and lizards or it’s an animal like a mountain lion, or Osama bin Laden, whose vocation is killing human beings.

Either way, prudence dictates that you only expend as much money as is necessary to accomplish the task of disposing of the pest with a minimum amount of time and money and you don’t waste the taxpayer’s dollars with unnecessary fripperies and bureaucratic nonsense like federally-paid biologists and expensive kitty-trackers.

And there are few government expenditures more nonsensical than $51,000 to kill one feral cat. I can do it for about a buck, and I’ll even pay for my own travel to San Nicholas Island. Besides, even if the SEALs don’t, I need the target practice.

© 2012 Altnews

Despite Maher’s denial, Atheism these days is clearly a religion, and Maher’s a religious zealot

By Seth Richardson

Back on February 4th, comedian Bill Maher decided on a “new rule” on his television show “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Maher’s new rule is: “Until someone claims to see Christopher Hitchens’ face in a tree stump, idiots must stop claiming that atheism is a religion.” How about idiots like Maher stop claiming it’s not a religion instead? That’s the actual truth of the matter.

Maher tries to support his “evidence-based” rule by defining religion as it suits him to define it, not as it’s actually defined by the people whose job it is to do so. He says, “religion is defined as the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power and atheism is precisely not that.”

One little problem Bill, you’re wrong. Atheism is a religion, at least as you and most other vocal Atheists practice it, because you make it a religion. Religion, you see, is not what you believe in, it’s how you go about it. You’re improperly conflating theism and religion, so don’t be an idiot and go look up the actual definition next time.

Religion, as defined by those whose job it is to examine the customary usages of words and record them in reference books, does not necessarily include either worship or a supernatural deity. That’s theism, and theism is clearly a category of religion, but not vice versa. We know, for example, that Secular Humanism is a religion. Its creators at first defined the belief/practice set as a religion, only turning their backs on that label for ideological and political reasons associated with intolerance of religion and a desire to not be associated with religion, but the fact remains that it meets all the basic requirements of a religion. Indeed, Secular Humanism is probably one of the examples used in broadening the definition of religion in the contemporary age to include non-theistic belief/practice sets.

It’s useful at this point to point out the actual, official definition of religion for Bill’s edification:

re·li·gion
noun \ri-ˈli-jən\
Definition of RELIGION
1a : the state of a religious <a nun in her 20th year of religion> b (1) : the service and worship of God or the supernatural (2) : commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
2: a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices
3archaic : scrupulous conformity : conscientiousness
4: a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith

Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion

—

re·li·gion
/rɪˈlɪdʒən/ Show Spelled[ri-lij-uhn]
noun
1.a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
2.a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.
3.the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religions.
4.the life or state of a monk, nun, etc.: to enter religion.
5.the practice of religious beliefs; ritual observance of faith.
6.something one believes in and follows devotedly; a point or matter of ethics or conscience: to make a religion of fighting prejudice.

Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/religion (accessed: February 09, 2012).

Pay particular attention to definitions four and six above, because they are the stake through the heart (or the serpent’s tooth through the horcrux if you will) of Mahr’s entire diatribe.

I’ve pointed out in the past the distinction between “implicit” and “explicit” atheism, and there’s a wiki entry on it for your reference, so I won’t belabor it here except to say that I’ve never met an implicit atheist who self-identified as an “atheist.” I think that it would be an oxymoron to do so, because self-identifying as an atheist necessarily implies that the person has been exposed to, and has rejected, theistic concepts.

This in and of itself places the explicit atheist perilously close to religion, and it takes but a little more on the part of the atheist to drop them firmly into religious belief and practice. Rare is the explicit atheist who hold no opinion about either atheism or theism that would make the belief a matter of conscience or ethics and therefore would qualify as a religious belief. Certainly any atheist who is, or argues secular activism falls into the religious atheist category because secularism implies a political agenda of excluding religion from government, which pretty clearly must be a matter of conscience or ethics, and activism meets the “follows devotedly” component of the broadest legitimate and accepted definition of religion.

Some people claim that explicit atheism is merely a philosophy, but I would disagree. One may philosophize about religion, or atheism, or anything else, but when one’s philosophy becomes a matter of faith, and faith is often (though not always) a component of religion, the lines are blurred beyond recognition and the philosophy (such as Secular Humanism) becomes a religion.

As to faith, while it is one of the often-seen components of religion, it is often narrowly defined by atheists as faith in a deity, so as to exclude their version of faith from the debate and evade the natural consequences of their actions. Properly, faith is defined as:

faith
noun \ˈfāth\
plural faiths \ˈfāths, sometimes ˈfāthz\
Definition of FAITH
1a : allegiance to duty or a person : loyalty b (1) : fidelity to one’s promises (2) : sincerity of intentions
2a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof (2) : complete trust
3: something that is believed especially with strong conviction; especially : a system of religious beliefs <the Protestant faith>
Source: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faith

Removing, for the purposes of argument, the references to theism, we find applicable to this discussion: “Belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion; firm belief in something for which there is no proof; complete trust; something that is believed especially with strong conviction.”

Let us examine how Atheists (the religious kind like Bill Maher) “believe in the traditional doctrines of atheism.” Being explicit atheists, religious atheists have faith in the traditional atheist doctrine that theistic claims are false and that God does not exist. This belief is far more than a mere lack of belief in gods, it is a positive rejection of theistic god-claims that is a central component in virtually all argumentation seen from atheists with the sole exception of when they are accused of being “religious” in their atheism, at which point they reverse course and try to claim that they have nothing more than a “lack of belief in god(s).” This, of course, is nonsense, as anyone can see merely from examining their rhetoric and arguments, and it’s just a convenient pettifogging evasion and nothing more.

Maher himself demonstrates this point nicely when he says, “You don’t get to put your unreason up on the shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken; the stuff that is not evidence based. The stuff that religious people never change their mind about no matter what happens.” Note that he’s talking about theism, not religion here.

This is not a simple lack of belief in god(s), it’s an active, positive, deeply-held (and on Maher’s part anyway), viciously defended belief/practice system. It might more properly be defined as “radical anti-theist zealotry,” but I think calling it big-”A” Atheism is far more appropriate, since Maher and most other self-professed Atheists call themselves that.

On to “complete trust.” Most Atheists place complete trust in their belief that God does not exist. I think that’s pretty obvious. The zealousness with which they make their arguments is proof enough of that. Mahr is explicit in his faith and says of God’s potential appearance at the Superbowl, “…that’s not gonna happen.” That it didn’t means nothing to the analysis of his religious faith because God, if He exists, is not obliged to satisfy Maher’s skepticism.

And clearly Atheists are faithful to their system of beliefs “with strong conviction.” Maher is an excellent example of just how fundamental and strong Atheist beliefs and faith are.

Now we move on to how Atheists hold a “firm belief in something for which there is no proof.” The traditional Atheist claim that the claims of theists are false are usually based in the statement “there is no evidence showing that the claim is true, therefore it may be discounted.” That’s what Maher says in his comedy routine.

This is purported to be a “scientific” analysis of theistic claims, but it’s not, it’s a firm belief in something for which there is no proof. Most often the “no evidence” claim is based not in a true lack of evidence that’s proven not to exist, but merely in a refusal to even critically examine the evidence that is put forward by theists. It amounts to a mere dismissal of the claims of theists based on the atheistic belief that the claims, being “supernatural” in nature, are therefore axiomatically false based on the “scientific” presumption that nothing supernatural can exist. This is an iteration of the logical fallacy I’ve labeled “The Atheist’s Fallacy.”

Dismissal of a claim is not, however, in and of itself a disproving of the claim by the use of countervailing facts and evidence, it’s just dismissal. God may exist. Even the Archbishop of Atheism Richard Dawkins admits this possibility. The fact that human beings inaccurately describe or make claims about God does not change the fact that God may exist, and neither Maher nor any other Atheist has a single shred of proof that God does not exist.

Therefore such dismissals constitute a firm belief in something (the falsity of theistic claims) for which there is no actual proof. No Atheist has ever proven that God does not exist, which is the proof required to make a dismissal of a theistic claim that God does exist a valid conclusion rather than faith in the religious belief that God does not exist.

Maher says, “I’m open to anything for which there is evidence. Show me a god and I will believe in him.” Then he goes on to say that if God shows up at the Superbowl, he’ll admit he was wrong. Maher wants evidence before he’ll believe in God, but that’s beside the point. What’s important is not what Maher believes in, but how he goes about practicing what he does believe in. That’s what defines religion and his actions are what constitutes the practice of religion.

So the reality is that Atheists have a set of beliefs in which they have faith, which beliefs are based in a complete lack of evidence or proof of the truth of their beliefs (that God does not exist), which constitutes faith, a component of religion (though not a necessary component I must add). How they practice those beliefs is what constitutes religious practice, and any atheist who is an activist for secularism (including comedians), or atheism, or uses atheism as a label or justification for their political or social actions or activism, including self-identification, congregation (think atheist meetings or going to a Richard Dawkins talk) debate, support for atheist causes and media or otherwise actuates that belief set is, in fact, practicing religion in every essential and historical respect save deistic worship, which we have seen is not a required component of the definition of religion.

Why is this important? Because the real point of Maher’s diatribe was to “call out” those who “label any evidence based belief a religion.” His objection is that his “evidence-based stuff” cannot be “put on the same shelf” with religion, by which he means theism. Problem is, the reason that some of his “evidence based stuff” is labeled a religion is because it is a religion…like global warming. There may be a kernel of truth in the claim that temperatures are rising globally, but it’s far from certain that it’s being caused entirely by humans, that humans can actually do anything about it, or that it’s not part of a natural warming and cooling cycle earth has been going through for billions of years.

The anthropogenic global warming hysteria, and the faith, ardor and strength of belief with which some people cling to it, along with the lack of proof that all, or indeed any of the dire predicted consequences will come to pass meet every requirement of a religious belief, particularly when its on the part of people who accept uncritically the orthodoxy of the Global Warming Inquisition. It may be true that anthropogenic global warming will destroy the planet, just as it may be true that God exists, but that doesn’t mean that those who believe in the dogma of either are not engaged in religious practice.

So yes, Atheism is very, very often a religion. Not inexorably or always, but certainly when it comes to Bill Maher, who is a fundamentalist religious zealot every bit as much as Ted Haggard is, and just about as hypocritical about it. He’s just of a different religious faith than Haggard.

© 2012 Altnews

Colorado’s medical marijuana law can and should be defended by Attorney General Suthers

By Seth Richardson

In a guest opinion in Sunday’s Gazette, Attorney General John Suthers tries to justify his refusal to defend Colorado’s medical marijuana laws by patting himself on the back regarding his opposition to Obamacare while simultaneously kowtowing to a Supreme Court ruling about marijuana that has a different set of facts than those presented by Colorado’s medical marijuana state constitutional amendment.

Suthers refers to the Supreme Court case Gonzales v. Raich, in which the Supreme Court held that marijuana illegally grown within a single state (California) and used solely within that state by a private person pursuant to a legislative statute authorizing the use of marijuana for medical purposes was still “interstate commerce” which allows the Congress to prohibit marijuana possession and use even when it takes place completely within a single state.

But one of the primary justifications for the Court’s ruling is that cultivation of marijuana within a state is one of a number of “purely local activities that are part of an economic “class of activities” that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.” The argument holds that even home-grown, home-consumed medical marijuana may have a “substantial effect on interstate commerce.” Justice Stevens wrote, “Congress had a rational basis for concluding that leaving home-consumed marijuana outside federal control would similarly affect price and market conditions.”

The basis of this reasoning is a case called Wickard v. Filburn, a Depression-era case in which the Supreme Court upheld one of FDR’s Progressive laws that set quotas for how much wheat a farmer could grow on his own land. In that 1942 case, the Court said, “even if appellee’s activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce.” Using this justification, the Court upheld charges against a farmer who grew wheat on his own land for his own consumption, saying that because he would not therefore have to buy wheat for his own consumption at the market price set by the FDR administration, which was set artificially high in a vain attempt to prop up the markets, his growing of his own wheat would, in aggregate (if everybody else did the same thing) substantially affect the price of wheat.

In Gonzales v. Raich the reasoning was the same, that by growing marijuana herself, Raich was “affecting” the illegal market for marijuana, both as a consumer and potentially as an exporter, and that like Wickard, if enough people grew marijuana at home for personal use, it would “substantially affect” the price of illegal marijuana traveling interstate to supply demand, which thereby authorizes Congress to regulate the entire “class of activities” (marijuana cultivation and use) under its Commerce Clause authority.

But Colorado’s medical marijuana industry is different is several respects. First of all, our law is based not in a legislative act, but in an amendment to our state Constitution, which is a much stronger expression of the public will than a legislative act that sets up a head-to-head conflict between Colorado’s Tenth Amendment rights and federal exercises of Commerce Clause authority. Second, the close state control and oversight of the industry ensures that the industry does not substantially affect interstate commerce, legal or illegal, in medical marijuana.

Suthers says “Because of the rule of law, until a change of policy by Congress, medical marijuana remains in violation of federal law. The state attorney general cannot change that.”

What Suthers is evading is his responsibility to stand up and defend the rights of Coloradoans to make constitutional amendments and legalize matters that are purely in-state issues by challenging the incremental expansion of Commerce Clause authority by the Supreme Court in cases like Wickard and Gonzales as being improper decisions leading to improper exercises of federal authority over strictly local matters.

Even if he inevitably loses the case, merely by vigorously defending our state’s rights he is making a potent political statement that may affect change in Congress. He owes this duty of fidelity to the Colorado Constitution to the people of Colorado, irrespective of what the Supreme Court has said in the past. Supreme Court rulings are always subject to challenge, as are the laws of Congress, and this is how a good attorney general goes about it.

Wickard v. Filburn, which is the modern era root of nearly all Commerce Clause overreach by the federal government was decided by a Supreme Court that was very liberal and very sympathetic to FDR’s Progressive pretensions, and although it stands as precedent, precedents can be overturned  by the Court, or by the Congress, but not unless someone stands up and challenges the inequity and overreach of the previous decision and forces change.

Colorado’s medical marijuana laws are substantially different from either Wickard’s wheat field or Raich’s home-grown marijuana. Because there is a substantially different set of facts involved, it is incumbent on the Attorney General to defend the just and reasonable decision of Colorado voters to amend their foundational document to permit a carefully-regulated and entirely domestic medical marijuana industry, even in the face of a seemly, but not irrevocably hostile Supreme Court ruling decided under a different set of facts.

Perhaps if he directly challenges the federal government’s authority to interfere in our medical marijuana laws, and other states join Colorado in demanding that the federal government respect the Tenth Amendment and the rights of the people to control domestic in-state matters, Congress will finally see the turning of the tide of public opinion and will relent by rescheduling marijuana so that it can be lawfully used under federal law for legitimate medical purposes.

But if Suthers does nothing, he is implicitly approving of the erroneous and harmful expansion of federal Commerce Clause power, which puts paid to his self-congratulatory maundering about his attack on the “unbridled power” of the federal government regarding Obamacare in his editorial.

Call Attorney General Suthers and demand that he defend the laws of Colorado and our rights under the Tenth Amendment to decide how to regulate the use of medical marijuana.

Secularist’s at the Freedom From Religion Foundation are reaping what they’ve sown

By Seth Richardson

It seems the FFRF has it’s panties in a twist because a bunch of Rhode Island florists refused to take their money to deliver flowers to Jessica Ahlquist, a teenage Secularist and First Amendment activist who succeeded in having a religious banner removed from her Rhode Island high school.

The Blaze reports on the controversy:

…According to FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor, Twins Florist, one of the businesses that refused to deliver, violated the Civil Rights Act when the business discriminated based on Ahlquist’s atheism. Gaylor released the receipt order from the florist, which reads, “I will not deliver to this person.”…

Gaylor goes on to claim:

“We have basic civil rights standards in our society. A business can‘t shun you because you’re an atheist,” the atheist leader said. “You do not have the right to refuse to do business with someone based on categories and that includes religion. It‘s as if they said ’I will not deliver to a black person.’”

Problem is, Ahlquist is not black, the florists didn’t refuse to deliver to her because she’s black or because she’s an atheist, they refused to trade with the FFRF because it’s an activist Secularist organization and they refused to deliver to Ahlquist because she is a Secularist political activist. It’s not illegal for a business to discriminate based on political categorization. It’s perfectly legal for a business to refuse to serve Democrats, or Progressives or Communists…or Secularists.

The Civil Rights Act says that everyone shall be entitled to “full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.” Nothing is said about political discrimination, however. Moreover, according to the definitions found in 42 U.S.C. §2000, a florist’s shop is not a “place of public accommodation” covered by federal law to begin with.

Ahlquist’s objection to the banner in her high school was based on constitutional First Amendment Establishment Clause legal principles, and therefor her claim was a secular political argument (and a fully-justifiable one) about the appropriateness of the clearly religious banner being displayed in a public school. Since secularism is not a religion and Ahlquist’s political Secularist activism does not fall under the protection of the Civil Rights Act, business owners are free to refuse to serve her, or the FFRF, which is equally a Secularist political activist organization, if they wish.

So, Ms. Gaylor is simply wrong and people have every right to discriminate against and shun Secularists, just like they can discriminate against and shun Progressives, Communists or Marxists based on any category they choose other than those specifically listed in the Civil Rights Act.

Such “category” discrimination is called “freedom of (dis)association” and it’s guaranteed by the First Amendment as a right to each and every individual, including Rhode Island florists.

© 2012 Altnews

Federal intrusions into Colorado’s medical marijuana industry must be stopped, and A.G.Suthers has a duty to do so.

By Seth Richardson

Colorado has the most carefully-regulated medical marijuana industry in the nation. Every plant is tracked from seed to consumption to ensure that it is used only in Colorado by authorized medical patients and that every seed, stem, leaf and bud stays in Colorado. Even the destruction of unused parts of the plant is closely regulated and documented. If ever there was commerce that cannot be defined as “commerce among the several states” it’s Colorado’s internal commerce in medical marijuana.

The federal government derives its authority to regulate marijuana based on the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause authority which permits Congress to regulate commerce “among the several states.” This constitutional authority has been grossly distorted over the decades by politicians and judges and like a rubber sheet has been stretched and expanded so that it now covers quite literally almost all commerce that takes place anywhere in the United States or abroad under the Supreme Court approved rubric that commerce within a state may “affect” commerce outside that state.

This expansion of federal power and control began long ago, in 1824 with the declaration of Chief Justice John Marshall in Gibbons v. Ogden, where he wrote, “This power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the constitution.” But in that same ruling Marshall admitted that Congress’ power to regulate commerce is not plenary. He wrote, “The enumeration presupposes something not enumerated; and that something, if we regard the language or the subject of the sentence, must be the exclusively internal commerce of a State.” (emphasis added)

For more than a hundred years after Marshall’s ruling, the federal government largely confined itself to actually regulating commerce that passed between states. But during the Roosevelt New Deal administration, the Court radically expanded the scope of the commerce clause in Wickard v. Filburn, where a farmer growing grain on his own property for consumption by his own livestock, which were intended to be consumed by his family was charged with a crime under FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, in which the federal government assumed the power to regulate how much wheat could be produced by farmers nationwide in order to limit wheat supplies and drive up wheat prices through artificial shortages during the Great Depression.

With this ruling, almost no activity was beyond the reach of Congress under the commerce clause, and it wasn’t until 1995 that the Court began restricting Congress’ power to interfere in strictly in-state local matters. In United States v. Lopez (1995), Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, writing for the majority, struck down a federal law that made it a crime to possess a gun within 1000 feet of a school, reasoning that the mere possession of a firearm does not qualify as “commerce” and that the supposed justification that schoolchildren eventually grow up to be workers who may travel interstate was too tenuous and insubstantial a connection to “commerce among the several states” to be upheld, and that therefore the federal regulation of the simple possession of firearms within the boundaries of a state was beyond the authority of the commerce clause and the Congress to regulate.

This particular ruling is important when it comes to analyzing the Obama Administration’s interference in Colorado’s medical marijuana industry. U.S. Attorney John Walsh is quoted by the Associated Press as writing in a letter to 23 marijuana dispensaries located near schools, “When the voters of Colorado passed the limited medical marijuana amendment in 2000, they could not have anticipated that their vote would be used to justify large marijuana stores located within blocks of our schools.”

That, Mr. Walsh, is not only an arrogant presumption and dismissal of the will of the People of Colorado, but it’s also absolutely none of your business. They are not “your” schools, they are Colorado schools, and where Colorado chooses to permit strictly in-state commercial activities is not within your authority to regulate.

In fact, the issue of marijuana dispensaries near schools has been the subject of considerable debate by both the public and by every level of government responsible for permitting dispensaries. The people of Colorado, through their elected representatives have expressed themselves clearly in the laws of Colorado, which are not your concern.

It is not the business of the federal government to interfere in those sovereign state decisions about siting and permitting of dispensaries. This is strictly a matter of state and local concern and we, the People of Colorado, don’t need or want your advice or your arrogant interference in our purely in-state, absolutely non-interstate medical marijuana industry. So butt out.

Of course, being an arrogant federal bureaucrat, Walsh won’t butt out, so this issue is no longer about how Colorado approves dispensary permits, this is about a purely local state constitutional amendment duly voted on and approved by Coloradoans versus an overreaching, arrogant federal agency that has decided to flex its power and in doing so is treading squarely upon our rights as Coloradoans to determine our own laws and future regarding strictly in-state commercial activities.

This is about state’s rights and it’s time for a straight-up fight with the federal government about the rights of Coloradoans under the 10th Amendment. If Colorado’s heavily regulated completely in-state medical marijuana industry is not immune from the interstate commerce clause power of Congress and overreaching federal bureaucrats, absolutely no human activity is, which would make a mockery of the words “among the several states” even more so than it has been, and would erase all constitutional constraints on Congress, and would effectively repeal the 10th Amendment and destroy the very idea of the Republic and the rights of states to determine, within their own boundaries, how the people shall consent to be governed.

Because medical marijuana must be both grown and consumed exclusively within the state, and it cannot be lawfully imported or exported from the state, the federal government has no authority whatsoever to regulate it because it’s not interstate commerce, nor does it affect interstate commerce in marijuana because transporting marijuana interstate is a federal crime.

Now is the time and here is the place for Colorado and indeed all of the states to stand up to defend the 10th Amendment and directly challenge the authority of the federal government to interfere in sovereign state affairs.

There has not been a better, stronger case for reining-in an out-of-control federal government in decades, and it is Colorado Attorney General Suther’s duty and obligation to take this fight to the Supreme Court and win it.

Anything less is dereliction of his duty to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the State of Colorado and our rights as citizens.

Call A.G. Suthers and demand that he put everything he has into this fight, or resign his office if he cannot find it in him to uphold his duty to our Constitution.

© 2012 Altnews

Most City Council Members know that lawmaking is not an adversarial process

By Seth Richardson

On Monday, Council members Scott Hente, Jan Martin, Lisa Czelatdko, Tim Leigh, and Brandy Williams stood up for the Colorado Open Meetings law and open government by opposing a move by Council members Merv Bennett, Angela Dougan, and Val Snider to take the Council into closed executive session to discuss a proposal for banning free speech downtown placed on the agenda by City Attorney Chris Melcher.

Herpin blasted the notion that free speech restrictions ought to be discussed outside the view of the public. Good for him and good for the Council members who voted with him.

City Attorney Melcher then withdrew his proposal, “lawful limitations on activities in public places” from the agenda, claiming that by revealing to the public his report on the current state of the law and his advice on “the strengths and weaknesses of proposed ordinances” it would be “communicating to potential opponents of an ordinance what our legal strategy is and what the city’s legal interests would be.”

Well, yes, that’s true, but so what? Public lawmaking must be done in open session precisely so that the public can know what is being proposed and what the legal and moral justifications are for the law.

Melcher’s problem is that he’s looking at this ordinance like it’s an adversarial courtroom procedure where battling attorneys attempt to present their case to a jury in the best light, by deciding what to reveal and what not to reveal, in hopes of persuading the jury to rule in their favor.

The problem is, public lawmaking is not an adversarial process and the City Council is not a courtroom with complex rules of evidence and attorney-client privilege. Public lawmaking is an authority granted to the elected City Council by the people themselves, and therefore the people are entitled to know exactly what the legal and moral justifications for any law under review are. Moreover, they are entitled to have input on those justifications in open public meetings and they are equally entitled to know what the legal interests and strategies of the city are.

It’s their city. It doesn’t belong to the City Council. They are just representatives of the people. So when Melcher complains that revealing his report would compromise the city’s legal interests and strategies what he’s really saying is that the people who elected the Council and the people who pay his salary are not the source of all legal power and authority and that their interests are somehow different from those of the Council.

This is nonsense, and worse it shows a misunderstanding of Melcher’s duties to the people he actually works for.

If his proposal has legal faults or weaknesses, then it’s imperative that the public be made fully aware of these faults, so that the minds of the many people who have a direct interest in whether or not their right to speak freely in Colorado Springs will be infringed may be brought to bear on the issue so that they can give the Council their advice and opinion on a law that stands to substantially impact their fundamental civil rights.

Those members of the Council who resisted the attempt to consider this law in secrecy should be lauded, and those who advocated keeping the public in the dark, including Mr. Melcher, should be ashamed of themselves. And voters should keep in mind who defended essential liberties and who did not come election time.

© 2012 Altnews

Mayor Bach’s “Free Speech Zones” are an unconstitutional solution in search of a non-existent problem.

By Seth Richardson

Mayor Bach is wasting taxpayer dollars and staff attorney time trying to figure out how to pander to the complaints of business owners in the downtown area who are fed up with the shenanigans of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Business owners are complaining that protesters are ruining their businesses with their continued presence, and they want the Mayor do to something about it.

Fortunately, Mayor Bach already has adequate authority under existing public order ordinances and laws to keep the Occupy Wall Street protests, or any other protest or rally under appropriate control to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public. What he does not have is any power or authority to suppress the political speech of the Occupy protesters in order to protect the economic interests of the merchants of downtown Colorado Springs.

Mayor Bach is having his staff attorneys work on some sort of “free speech zone” regulation that would attempt to relegate political speech to out-of-the-way locations so as to prevent them from disrupting commerce. That he’s even entertained the notion demonstrates a serious lack of constitutional knowledge and understanding on the Mayor’s part. The simple fact that any elected official ought to know is that the entire surface area of the United States is by law a “free speech zone,” and one of the only ones left on the planet. We must all vigorously defend against every attempt by government to change the presumption that each of us is free to speak and express ourselves in a peaceable manner wherever we are, particularly on public property, because failing to do so will lead to a complete reversal of a fundamental tenet of our Constitution.

The Constitution does not give Mayor Bach or anyone else the power or authority to flatly prohibit speech on any public property anywhere under any circumstances. If a person has the right to lawfully occupy a public space, that person has the right to lawfully engage in free speech and expression and government cannot simply silence him. To grant Mayor Bach the power to silence citizens on public rights-of-way by establishing “free speech zones” and restricting speech to such areas as the government deems appropriate is neither reasonable nor constitutional, it’s pure idiocy unworthy of our Mayor, and we should all stand with the Occupy protesters to defend the right to freedom of speech so long as such speech is exercised lawfully and peaceably.

First Amendment jurisprudence holds that the government cannot lawfully discriminate against any particular type of otherwise lawful speech based on its content. Content-based review, discrimination and prior restraint on free speech is flatly unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court has said so in no uncertain terms. Therefore, if the Mayor restricts free political speech to some specified area, this means that no one will be free to speak anywhere else, regardless of the content of their speech. This is too ridiculous to even contemplate as it would prevent people from saying “hello” in passing outside the authorized “free speech zone.”

It may seem silly to even suggest that this would be the result of Mayor Bach’s notion, but because prior-restraint content-based regulation of speech is unlawful, that’s exactly the construction that would necessarily be given to such a regulation. This would of course mean the ordinance’s immediate rejection by the courts, making the whole exercise one of futility and embarrassment to the city and to Mayor Bach.

But that does not leave Mayor Bach helpless to control the activities of protesters downtown.

What the Occupy protesters refuse to acknowledge is that their right to engage in free speech and expression is not limitless, and the government has the power and authority to reasonably regulate the time, place and manner in which free speech is exercised. Just as the Occupy protesters cannot chant and wave banners in a courtroom or engage in disruptive behavior at a City Council meeting, their activities on public sidewalks and in public parks can be reasonably regulated as required to maintain public peace, order and dignity.

This means, for example, that erecting camps on public land can be prohibited, as can obstruction of sidewalks or access to private property, such as storefronts. Disruptive behavior such as spitting, harassment, disorderly conduct, assault or other breaches of the peace against passers-by are already unlawful and can be enforced by the police. Parks can be closed at night if health, safety and welfare issues make it reasonable to do so. And the regulations needed to control such activities already exist and have been well-tested and approved by the courts. All the Mayor needs to do is direct the Chief of Police to neutrally, objectively and firmly enforce the existing ordinances.

But Mayor Bach cannot constitutionally prohibit individuals from engaging in free political (or other) speech, or relegate the exercise of free speech to specific places merely to protect the image of downtown or the profits of business owners.

© 2012 Altnews

Soldiers who violate their oath, endanger their fellow soldiers and give aid or comfort to the enemy must be harshly punished as an example to others.

By Seth Richardson

As Private Bradley Manning’s Article 32 hearing gets underway, Manning’s defense attorneys are throwing in every thing but the kitchen sink at the bench in an attempt to persuade the court that a) the information Manning stole and release wasn’t really all that classified; b) that the government really shouldn’t be classifying all those documents; c) Manning was upset because he’s either gay or has a sexual identity disorder or both and therefore can’t be held responsible for his actions; and d) that the Army is responsible for Manning’s actions because it is lax in its security measures for classified information.

However, the one thing they aren’t arguing is that Manning didn’t do the deed. That would be a hard claim to support, given the fact that Manning has admitted on several occasions that he did it. With that in mind, let’s review a few other salient points:

“I, Bradley E. Manning, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”

That is the oath that the Army Private First Class who is charged with leaking classified documents swore when he became a soldier.

One of those orders from officers appointed over him, and one of the regulations he swore to abide by was to keep classified information secret. The oath he took does not give him the right to make an independent judgment about the intelligence policies of the United States or the right to violate those policies because he feels slighted as a gay soldier ro because he disagrees with how the United States prosecutes a war or engages in diplomacy.

No, Private Manning’s duty was clear, and it’s just as clear that he knowingly and deliberately violated orders, regulations, laws and his oath. In doing so he substantially aided America’s enemies, placed his fellow soldiers at additional risk, and damaged our diplomatic efforts to an extent that is still not fully known.

That’s treason.

Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution states that, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” The penalty for treason is death.

The espionage law, 18 U.S.C. 784 states that, “(a) Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, … transmits… to any foreign government, or to any faction or party … either directly or indirectly, any document,  or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life.

If Manning is convicted of either espionage or treason, he should be executed, as should any other person involved in the leaking of classified documents to Wikileaks, including the founder of Wikileaks and any other co-conspirators involved with Wikileaks, who should be tracked down by the FBI, taken into custody and transported to the United States for trial, regardless of where they may be found.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech and the press, but it does not protect traitors or spies.

© 2012 Altnews

Free religious speech is a powerful tool, but it requires dedication and ingenuity to frustrate Atheists

By Seth Richardson

The Blaze reports on a New York artist who has managed to beat the Scrooges of the New York Transit Authority and the Atheist cranks at their own game. Atheists sued New York for allowing Christmas decorations in their bus and ferry terminals, so the city banned all Christmas decorations in a capitulation to atheist oppression of free religious expression.

But Scott LoBaido, a long-time resident objected to the sterilization of public property by the forces of secularism, so he created a Christmas-tree costume and spent some time walking around the Staten Island Ferry terminal to bring back the spirit of Christmas to New Yorkers.

And in mid-December, videographer Benny Johnson organized and filmed a living Nativity scene at the Occupy D.C. protest site, just to see what would happen, as reported here by the Blaze.

What a brilliant plan!

Because it’s a costume, and it’s not a display erected by or paid for by the city, the entire controversy is turned on its head. While the city can’t “advance or inhibit” religion, private citizens can engage in free speech, including symbolic religious speech on public property, and there’s little the police or the Atheists can do to prevent them from doing so.

So, for those who wish to honor the birth of Christ in public, rather than erecting a static display, which is sure to draw Atheists and their pet lawyers, why not create living Nativity Tableau societies of people in Nativity costumes who appear, like a flash-mob dance group, at various public buildings and venues at unpredictable times to exercise their right to free religious expression, free of the interference of Atheists?

More importantly, it would actually enlist the protection of the government in preventing Atheists from interfering with the rights of people of faith to openly and proudly display their religious beliefs.

Not only would this frustrate the Atheists to no end, it would be an example of the sort of personal dedication to celebrating the birth of Christ and the Christmas spirit that would make an excellent example for others to follow.

© 2011 Altnews

Far from being a “clear-thinking oasis,” Dawkins’ website is a seething mass of unreason, hypocrisy, religious intolerance and bigotry

By Seth Richardson

If anyone were to wonder why it is that Atheists are disliked, mistrusted and marginalized, one need look no further than the Richard Dawkins Foundation website for salient examples. According to a study from the University of Minnesota, 47.6 percent of people asked said that they would disapprove of their children marrying an atheist and 39.5 percent said that atheists do not share their vision of American society, a higher percentage than the same question about Muslims, homosexuals, Hispanics, Jews, Asian-Americans and African-Americans.

ABC News puts it this way: “Atheists are seen by many Americans (especially conservative Christians) as alien and are, in the words of sociologist Penny Edgell, the study’s lead researcher, “a glaring exception to the rule of increasing tolerance over the last 30 years.” ”

This should come as no real surprise to anyone in Colorado Springs, where our local Atheist pest, Mikey Weinstein, is constantly in the news over his hyperbolic indignation at any public display of religious faith, particularly at the Air Force Academy.

I need to point out a contextual usage here. I’m distinguishing between “atheists” (small “a”) and “Atheists” (big “A”) for a very specific reason. Small “a” atheism is nothing more than a lack of belief in god or gods. Big “A” Atheism, however, meets the definition of a religion, and those that adhere to the tenets of Atheism are themselves very often religious practitioners (and they absolutely hate it when someone points this fact out).

The details and arguments are a bit complex, so I won’t go into them deeply, but for those who wish to look up “implicit and explicit atheism” at Wikipedia, the distinction is that there is a substantial difference between those who simply have no belief in god because they have never been exposed to theistic concepts and cannot therefore form a belief about them (like small children) who are “implicit atheists,” and those who have been exposed to theistic concepts and has made a deliberate decision to deny or reject that such concepts are true, who are “explicit” atheists.

The distinction is important because “explicit atheists” can, and very often do (though they will universally deny it), meet the necessary criteria for holding religious beliefs and can be part of an atheistic religion built around the foundations of anti-theism, religious skepticism, and science. Big “A” Atheism meets the definition of “religion” because it is “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe,” and “something one believes in and follows devotedly; a point or matter of ethics or conscience,” and “the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices.”

Unfortunately rather than clear thinking, the hallmarks of militantly-religious Atheism are unreason, irrationality, illogic, prejudice, bigotry, hatred and intolerance. And no one exemplifies that religion better than Richard Dawkins, self-described “fairly militant atheist,” the High Priest of militant Atheism and relentless critic of all things theistic and religious. Dawkins, a former professor at Oxford university, noted biologist and prolific writer, is also a lapsed Anglican who has taken up radical anti-theistic religious Atheism as a post-academic avocation, apparantly funded in part by donations to his foundation.

In 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and opened what came to be one of the most active and vibrant atheist discussion forums on the Internet, with more than 70,000 members at its peak. On February 23, 2010, the world’s busiest atheist form was suddenly and unexpectedly shut down by Dawkins, leaving tens of thousands of atheists puzzled as to why. The controversy raged for months, and continues even today, with lawsuits flying about the Dawkins Foundation over alleged fraud and mismanagement. It’s never been made clear to former members why the forum was shut down.

The latest incarnation of the website is not a discussion forum per se, but does provide a blog-like discussion section where selected discussions that have been carefully vetted by the moderation staff are posted and people can (at least in theory) make and respond to comments.

It’s a kludge of a discussion site, but then again it’s intended to be limited and hard to use, and it’s very closely monitored by the Inquisitors of the Congregation for the Propagation of Militant Religious Atheist Orthodoxy, who censor anything that they find displeasing or disturbing (which means anything that might intellectually challenge an Atheist), so as not to ruffle the feathers of the Illuminati of Atheism or disturb the sheep-like complacency and comfort of the Atheist congregation, and particularly so as not to annoy or bother the Vicar of Atheism, Dawkins himself, who doesn’t like anyone questioning his revealed wisdom.

Today’s incarnation of radical militant Dawkinsian Atheism is as arrogant and intolerant of diversity of opinion and devoid of reason and rationality as it ever was.

How do I know this? Well, as a proud and unapologetic long-time secular critic of the bigotry and prejudice of radical, militant Atheism and it’s relentlessly negative, insulting and often libelous attacks on religion and people of faith, I have been banned from both the original Dawkins forum, the spin-off “lifeboat” forum Rational Skepticism, which was organized by former staff at the Dawkins forum after the Great Purge, and now the new incarnation of the Dawkins website.

Why? Well, for asking nettling questions and critically examining and challenging the often-fallacious and irrational and illogical claims and pronouncements of militant Atheism in ways that leave on-line Atheists fuming and furious that they can’t manage to win an argument I’m involved in by trying to try to dismiss me a as a delusional theist, which is the classic Atheist response to debates involving theism. Because I’m so tenacious, and so expertly deconstruct their fallacies and unreason, their only recourse to salve their wounded egos is to cut me out of the conversation, which is a sign of serious weakness in their dogma and their rhetorical skills.

The fury that militant Atheists feel at my criticism is magnified by my status as a non-theist, to the point that the Inquisition at RichardDawkins.Net has flatly stated, “We don’t believe your claim not to be a theist.”  Solicitation of a more detailed explanations and indeed any attempt to discuss their decision was refused by the moderating staff, which said, “All moderation decisions are entirely at our discretion, and we will not be entering into any further correspondence with you about this. ”

Fair enough, it’s their website and they can run it however they please, but that’s hardly upholding the mission statement of the Foundation “to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.”

Evidently they think that “critical thinking” is enhanced by dogmatic militant Atheist religious fundamentalism, intolerance, censorship and the suppression of criticism or analysis of Atheist arguments that violates their religious orthodoxy.

I won’t go into detail about the dispute, but I will refer readers to the website and discussion that resulted in the Inquisition declaring me to be a heretic. It can be found in this discussion, starting at comment 213 on page 8, for those willing to wade through the swill to find the pearls of wisdom.

It looks very much like Richard Dawkins and his Foundation can dish it out, but can’t take it. Not that this is any surprise to anyone familiar with Atheists like Dawkins and Weinstein.

© 2011 Altnews

New revelations of the Federal Reserve’s duplicity and secrecy justify some objections of the OWS movement, but not all

By Seth Richardson

We’ve always been left to wonder why the bailout of the Big Six banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup,Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley were so painless for the banks and how they were able to weather the financial tsunami that has devastated our economy and indirectly the economy of the world and instead flourish.

Turns out it’s all Ben Bernanke’s and the Federal Reserve’s fault.

A story in Tuesday’s Denver Post by Bloomberg News reporters Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun and PHil Kuntz illuminates just how it is that these six firms avoided their natural free-market fate of bankruptcy. It was the Federal Reserve that saved them, and it was the Federal Reserve, in collusion with the Big Six, that kept taxpayers in the dark, deliberately, about how much the Big Six were getting from taxpayers. The staggering total is far, far more than the $700 billion in TARP funds. When it’s all said and done, the Big Six took 63 percent of the funds you and I will be paying for, and worse, through secrecy, chicanery and manipulation they managed not just to avoid bankruptcy, they all managed to grow substantially, collectively by some $2.5 trillion dollars, or 39 percent, between 2006 and 2011, while innocent homeowners who had never missed a payment had their homes foreclosed upon merely because local property values made their homes worth less than the balance remaining on their mortgages.

The maths are complex, and I refer you to the article for a good explanation of exactly how it happened, but the upshot is that the Big Six banks that should have been shut down by the Federal Reserve and the FDIC because they were failing and genuinely under-capitalized, were instead not just saved at public expense, but were given preeminent position in our banking economy, at the cost of many thousands of small, independent banks that were, and continue to be shut down by the government because their loan portfolios and cash capitalization are sub-par, in large part due to the machinations and malfeasance of the Big Six and the Federal Reserve itself. No bank bailouts for your local bank who, through no fault of their own now hold precarious or non-performing loans. Just arrogant FDIC auditors walking in and shutting the bank down without notice and selling its assets to a bigger bank.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: It is reasonably clear that this administration is attempting to concentrate all US banking in the Big Six and perhaps a few other interstate and international large banking networks, at the expense of local banking, in order to consolidate the Progressive-in-Chief’s power and control over the economy. The Federal Reserve is complicit in this centralization of banking because it’s the non-governmental, immune-from-scrutiny, un-audited controller of, quite literally, the entire economy of the world. When the Federal Reserve speaks, nations listen. It’s easier for the Fed and the Progressives to control a few large banks, and consequently the economy, than the tens of thousands of local banks we have in our independent banking network.

So I come to common cause with the Occupy Wall Street protesters insofar as they argue that the Big Six should be put out of business as punishment for their fiscal malfeasance, their officers (and Ben Bernanke) prosecuted for fraud and collusion, the Federal Reserve should be either disincorporated or placed under the close scrutiny and direct control of Congress and required to be fully transparent and its officers identified and held personally accountable for their actions, and that people should immediately withdraw all their money and investments from all of the Big Six and place them in their locally-owned banks and credit unions, as a way to protect our nation from the devastating evil of central banking.

Perhaps the OWS movement should change its name to “Kill the Big Six and the Fed.” With that agenda I completely agree.

© 2011 Altnews