Independence From What?

Chairman Burr

I. Fourth of July Questions

Independence from wars, the mother of all feudalism (American Feudalism, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) ?

Independence from the immunity of the king or queen (Follow The Immunity, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) ?

Independence from official conspiracies with foreign governments designed to take away the rights of the citizens (Dept. of Justice Conspiracy - 3) ?

II. Senate Report Answers

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is currently composed of Senators: Richard Burr, (R-NC) Chairman; Mark Warner (D-VA) Vice Chairman; James Risch (R-ID), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Susan Collins (R-ME), Roy Blunt (R-MO), James Lankford (R-OK), Tom Cotton (R-AR), John Cornyn (R-TX), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Angus King (D-ME), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Kamala Harris (D-CA).

The day before "Independence Day" they released a report that was in factual opposition to the House  Committee whose chairman forgot how to recuse himself:

"WASHINGTON – Today, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) released the Committee’s unclassified summary of its initial findings on the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russian activities in the 2016 U.S. elections. The Committee finds that the overall judgments issued in the ICA were well-supported and the tradecraft was strong. The course of the Committee’s investigation has shown that the Russian cyber operations were more extensive than the hack of the Democratic National Committee and continued well through the 2016 election.

Vice Chair Warner

'The Committee has spent the last 16 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft and analytic work underpinning the Intelligence Community Assessment and sees no reason to dispute the conclusions,” said Chairman Burr. “The Committee continues its investigation and I am hopeful that this installment of the Committee’s work will soon be followed by additional summaries providing the American people with clarity around Russia’s activities regarding U.S. elections.'

'Our investigation thoroughly reviewed all aspects of the January 2017 ICA, which assessed that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign to target our presidential election and to destabilize our democratic institutions,” said Vice Chairman Warner. “As numerous intelligence and national security officials in the Trump administration have since unanimously re-affirmed, the ICA findings were accurate and on point. The Russian effort was extensive and sophisticated, and its goals were to undermine public faith in the democratic process, to hurt Secretary Clinton and to help Donald Trump. While our investigation remains ongoing, we have to learn from 2016 and do more to protect ourselves from attacks in 2018 and beyond.'

The summary is the second unclassified installment in the Committee’s report on Russian election activities."

(Press Release, emphasis added). That comes down to independence from traitorous activity designed to thwart the will of the people expressed by their votes (July 3 2018 Senate Report, PDF).

III. Conclusion

The shape shifters are a clear and present danger (The Shapeshifters of Bullshitistan, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13).

Happy Fourth of July.

Global Warming Induced Climate Change Is A Matter of Law

Downtown Tomorrow

The federal courts have a line of cases that make global warming induced climate change one of the, if not the, major ongoing types of litigation in our judicial system (health care is another).

A case in the Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia illustrates the point.

By way of background, in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could regulate green house gases (GHG), including carbon dioxide (CO₂).

Not only that, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA must do so as a matter of federal statutory law (in other words EPA has no discretion to not regulate GHG).

In a case containing one of the most odd of circumstances, it was the EPA that had been a climate change denier, siding with neoCon T-Bagger denier types in the lower courts:

Based on respected scientific opinion that a well-documented rise in global temperatures and attendant climatological and environmental changes have resulted from a significant increase in the atmospheric concentration of “greenhouse gases,” a group of private organizations petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to begin regulating the emissions of four such gases, including carbon dioxide, under §202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act, which requires that the EPA “shall by regulation prescribe . . . standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class . . . of new motor vehicles . . . which in [the EPA Administrator’s] judgment cause[s], or contribute[s] to, air pollution . . . reasonably . . . anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” 42 U. S. C. §7521(a)(1). The Act defines “air pollutant” to include “any air pollution agent . . . , including any physical, chemical . . . substance . . . emitted into . . . the ambient air.” §7602(g). EPA ultimately denied the petition, reasoning that (1) the Act does not authorize it to issue mandatory regulations to address global climate change, and (2) even if it had the authority to set greenhouse gas emission standards, it would have been unwise to do so at that time because a causal link between greenhouse gases and the increase in global surface air temperatures was not unequivocally established.
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Massachusetts and other state and local governments, sought review in the D. C. Circuit [... which held...] that the EPA Administrator properly exercised his discretion in denying the rulemaking petition.
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[Supreme Court Conclusion:] The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

(Massachusetts v. EPA, 127 S. Ct. 1438 (2007), emphasis added). The Supreme Court disagreed with the EPA and the Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia.

It reversed the decision, holding that among other things:

The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized. The Government’s own objective assessment of the relevant science and a strong consensus among qualified experts indicate that global warming threatens, inter alia, a precipitate rise in sea levels, severe and irreversible changes to natural ecosystems, a significant reduction in winter snowpack with direct and important economic consequences, and increases in the spread of disease and the ferocity of weather events.

(ibid, emphasis added). Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has addressed the threats of "precipitate rise in sea levels" which constitute a greater danger to national security than terrorism does (New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 12, The IPCC Record on Global Warming Temperature Projections - 2, The Evolution of Models - 4).

Anyway, on remand from the Supreme Court, EPA regulations were advanced, and Oil-Qaeda quickly filed more lawsuits to challenge them:

In the latest court ruling on climate change, the federal court of appeals in Washington refused to block clean air safeguards that cut dangerous carbon pollution from the biggest new power plants and other industrial facilities.

The court on Friday rejected industry efforts to block Clean Air Act permit provisions that require large new industrial facilities to use the "best available" pollution controls for heat-trapping carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases.

The ruling means that industries building big new power plants and other industrial facilities will continue to be required to install and use modern, state-of-the-art pollution controls to curb their climate-changing pollution, just as they must for other kinds of dangerous air pollution.

(Court Rejects Latest Industry Ploy, emphasis added). It is the law of the United States that climate change is real, and that it is really dangerous.

The congress acted to pass The Clean Air Act, the Supreme Court upheld it, the President emphasized the point:

And no challenge -- no challenge -- poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.

2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record. Now, one year doesn’t make a trend, but this does: 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.

I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what, I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and at NOAA, and at our major universities. And the best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we don’t act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration and conflict and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.

(SOTU Transcript, emphasis added). The new crop of neoCon T-Baggers do not know the law or the science, so they listen to the Apostle of Agnotology, Senator "God Is In Cliimate Change" Inhofe.

With outlaw Republican global warming induced climate change deniers at the helm, we are going to run hard aground on the rocks and reefs of reality, then sink like a stone into ignorant darkness.

The next post in this series is here.

On This Date Some Years Ago

Once upon a time

Occasionally we take a look at the past on Dredd Blog to see how much things are the same or how much things have changed.

One thing going on back then that we did not know about, which we know now, is that psychologists, who are supposed to be doctors were torturing people as if that was their calling (Psychologists Torture).

The stress of 911 developed weird religious reactions in some folks, more so than in others (examples of weirdness: Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 2, Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 4).

Anyway, here are three Dredd Blog posts from this date in 2009:

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We Killed More Of US Than They Did

In a recent article here we asked who is the enemy, took ourselves back to a very popular president who warned us to beware of militarism, and mused that we would be better off economically if we just invaded ourselves.

The military is very stingy with data which they think puts them in a bad light. For instance, they have not been allowing the public to even view coffins of the dead coming back from Iraq.

But they, for some reason, have had to disclose that suicides killed more soldiers last month than the wars did:

"The Army is investigating a stunning number of suicides in January — a count that could surpass all combat deaths on America's two warfronts last month."

(Fox News). I think we must congratulate them for not covering up this news item.

The old saying that "many hands lighten the load" reminds me that they would do well to let many psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, in and out of the military, take a meaningful look at this trend.

Then do some treatment.

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Supreme Arrogance

One of the Supremes who instilled us with Bush II in 2000 via the decision in the still infamous Bush v Gore case, scolded a student who asked him a question during a question and answer session.

Justice Scalia has often said of the Bush v Gore decision, "get over it", when asked about it, as if it was the stare decisis maximus case of all time.

It is as if he has no intellectual position on it, but says we must live with it and that is that. A case that should not be talked about in terms of a good or bad decision?

We are trying to "get over it" Scalia, but your boy just will not go away. His wars are still with us, his voodoo economy is still with us, and his corruption is still with us.

Thank you so much o supreme one for your gift of Bush II to the American people.

One that keeps on giving us pain and suffering to this very day.

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President Warns Republicans

The President is becoming relentless in his focus on the political posturing the republicans are conducting.

They seem to think their stonewalling and threatening to filibuster is good politics, but Obama seems to think it is voodoo economics.

He said:

President Barack Obama warned on Thursday that failure to act on an economic recovery package could plunge the nation into a long-lasting recession that might prove irreversible, a fresh call to a recalcitrant Congress to move quickly.

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, the president argued that each day without his stimulus package, now exceeding $900 billion in the Senate, Americans lose more jobs, savings and homes. He painted a bleak picture if lawmakers do nothing.

(The Star, emphasis added). The voters clearly stated which ideas they want and trust and which they do not.

Senate and House republicans seem to have not received that memo yet.

President Obama also issued and executive directive which will put some wind into the sails of the ship of state.

He directed them to use all dispatch to save energy and promulgate regulations toward that end.

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That's all folks. Except for a timely song:

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The Common Good - 10

Some of those who focus a very accurate eye upon the economic dynamics of American culture use the word "oligarchy" to describe those dynamics (dynamics which actually constitute what is technically a "plutocracy"). 

The use of "oligarchy" is a ~2,300 year old mistake commenced by Aristotle (Wikipedia: Oligarchy), but it is still in use by a lot of people in the alternate media who contemplate the structures of our "economy."

As the video at the bottom of this post shows, Chris Hedges uses the word "oligarchy" tens of times, as Aristotle was wont to do, in order to describe what is technically a plutocracy (Wikipedia, Plutocracy), not an oligarchy.

The improper use of the term, however, does no damage to his understanding of the Ferengi system (Life In The Ferengi Home World - 3) he is describing.

Truth be known, the economic system is complex, so, analyzing it is somewhat akin to the ancient story of the blind men describing an elephant.

The economic system looks and feels a bit different, depending on the part of it that one uses for an analysis.

For example, I have used the terms "plutocracy", "plutonomy", "wartocracy", "military-oil-media-complex", and "American Feudalism" to describe "it."

IMO, the main thing, in any valid analysis of "it," is to determine what is being done, in terms of doing the common good v. doing the common bad (The Common Good, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Interview of Chris Hedges:

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Interview of John Perkins (reformed economic hit-man) ...

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The Common Good - 9

A heart grown cold.

In this series we have been reviewing the seemingly extinct concept of the common good, a.k.a. the public good (The Common Good, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).

Meanwhile, the number of homeless children in the U.S. is at a high (Number Of Homeless Children In America Surges To All-Time High) and military corruption climbs way high too (Prosecutors Troubled By Extent Of Military Fraud).

In today's post we will discuss that concept of the common or public good in the context of "The Public Trust Doctrine", specifically focused on the question of whether or not the doctrine applies to the federal government.

The vehicle for the discussion is a federal lawsuit involving a recent petition to the U.S. Supreme Court:

Today prominent national leaders, including legal scholars, economic and national security experts, religious groups, climate scientists, conservation and social justice organizations, native communities, business and government leaders, and cities filed amicus briefs with the United States Supreme Court in a major climate change case. The case, Alec L. v. McCarthy, Supreme Court Case No. 14-405, seeks a decision that the federal government has public trust obligations to protect essential national natural resources for present and future generations. The three amicus briefs, representing scientists, legal scholars, and diverse national interests, displayed resounding legal support for an October 2014 Petition for Writ of Certiorari filed on behalf of group of young Americans with the United States Supreme Court.

 (Our Children's Trust, cf. Alec L. v McCarthy Main Docket, Supp. Docket; Alec L. v McCarthy, Petition, PDF). The issue is "does the public trust doctrine, a facet of the notion of the common good, compel the government to be trustworthy in terms of the well being of future generations?"

It would seem to be a no-brainer, however, our nation has some severe mental problems whereby we project our self-generated cultural aggressions against each other into other nations and places:

The "foreigner" is, moreover, outside the principal immediate system of law and order; hence aggression toward him does not carry the same opprobrium or immediate danger of reprisal that it does toward one's "fellow-citizen." Hostility to the foreigner has thus furnished a means of transcending the principal, immediately threatening group conflicts, of achieving "unity" —but at the expense of a less immediate but in fact more dangerous threat to security, since national states now command such destructive weapons that war between them is approaching suicidal significance.

Thus the immense reservoir of aggression in Western society is sharply inhibited from direct expression within the smaller groups in which it is primarily generated. The structure of the society in which it produced contains a strong predisposition for it to be channeled into group antagonisms. The significance of the nation-state is, however, such that there is a strong pressure to internal unity within each such unit and therefore a tendency to focus aggression on the potential conflicts between nation-state units. In addition to the existence of a plurality of such units, each a potential target of the focused aggression from all the others, the situation is particularly unstable because of the endemic tendency to define their relations in the manner least calculated to build an effectively solidary international order. Each state is, namely, highly ambivalent about the superiority-inferiority question. Each tends to have a deep-seated presumption of its own superiority and a corresponding resentment against any other's corresponding presumption. Each at the same time tends to feel that it has been unfairly treated in the past and is ready on the slightest provocation to assume that the others are ready to plot new outrages in the immediate future. Each tends to be easily convinced of the righteousness of its own policy while at the same time it is overready to suspect the motives of all others. In short, the "jungle philosophy"-which corresponds to a larger element in the real sentiments of all of us than can readily be admitted, even to ourselves-tends to be projected onto the relations of nation-states at precisely the point where, under the technological and organizational situation of the modern world, it can do the most harm.

(Comparing a Group-Mind Trance to a Cultural Amygdala). One result of this madness is that our concept of "the common good" could morph to eventually mean "what is good for my group" and "to hell with your group."

So, we have 2.5 million homeless children in our country while we spend an estimated 10 trillion dollars subsidizing Oil-Qaeda in the middle east oil war zone (The Peak Of The Oil Wars, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) as our infrastructure crumbles (Mega Infrastructure Bill To Make Jobs? - 2, A Decline Of The American Republic - 4).

The answer to today's question is a resounding "yes, the public trust doctrine applies to the 2.5 million homeless children in the U.S. and to our future children too."

Yet, the 2.5 million homeless children among us now is a witness against whether or not we still have our traditional concept of the common good.

The infiltration of every group and movement, including environmental groups, by Oil-Qaeda is another indicator that "the common good" now has the look of a game board to the powers that be:

Klein goes so far as to argue that the environmental movement has itself become little more than an arm (or perhaps one should say a column) of the fossil fuel industry. Her proof here is that several major environmental groups have received sizable donations from fossil fuel companies or their affiliated foundations, and some, like the Nature Conservancy, have executives (or former executives) of utility companies on their boards. “A painful reality behind the environmental movement’s catastrophic failure to effectively battle the economic interests behind our soaring emissions,” she writes, is that “large parts of the movement aren’t actually fighting those interests—they have merged with them.”

(NY Books, emphasis added). The toxins of power, in a toxic form of emergence, have occasion to build fences around elitist conclaves where they ought not be.

Anyway, in the case we are contemplating, the lower courts ruled that the public trust doctrine does not apply to the federal government, it only applies to the state governments.

Let's hope that the increasingly brain-locked supreme court holds to its past cases that came to the opposite conclusion - the federal government is also subject to "the public trust doctrine."

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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How unlikely it is for reality to make news (click the youtube button bottom right) ...

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A Cure For Congress & The Supreme Five: Fickle Fecal Transplants

Extinction is about bad timing

Timing is everything in some circumstances ("I'm such a profound believer that timing is everything; I would tattoo that on my arm." - Drew Barrymore).

The Supreme Five conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court have really, really bad timing.

In the case of Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency, (EPA), they weakened the ability of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.

In fact, they have weakened the EPA at the worst possible time.

But more than that, they have done so at the worst possible time in recorded history and in the history of that court as well, as shown by recent NOAA data:

“With records dating back to 1880, the combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces reached a record high for May, at 0.74°C (1.33°F) higher than the 20th century average. This surpassed the previous record high anomaly of 0.72°C (1.30°F) set in 2010. Four of the five warmest Mays on record have occurred in the past five years: 2010 (second warmest), 2012 (third warmest), 2013 (fifth warmest), and 2014 (warmest); currently, 1998 has the fourth warmest May on record. Additionally, May 2014 marked the 39th consecutive May and 351st consecutive month (more than 29 years) with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average global temperature for May occurred in 1976 [38 years] and the last below-average temperature for any month occurred in February 1985 [29 years].”

(NOAA, emphasis added). To make that simple and clear:

2014 – hottest May
2010 – second hottest
2012 – third hottest
1998 – fourth hottest
2013 – fifth hottest

This is not the time to weaken the EPA, because a whole host of dangerous events are taking place because the air, land, and seas are being polluted by Oil-Qaeda and its minions (Oil-Qaeda: The Indictment - 3, Insecticides Endanger Food Worldwide).

The President indicated a few days ago that even our national security is at stake because of our Earth destroying ways (Will We Destroy Food - The Bees? - 2).

The timing of congress has also been so bad that it is polling at its lowest in history as things heat up.

Nevertheless, there are more global warming deniers than ever ... bad timing.

The timing of scientific discoveries and their application to medical procedures is a bit off as well.

For example, and to tie in the title of today's post, Darwin indicated that our human appendix was untimely.

He said it was a leftover relic of evolution that had moved on, but he was not correct:

"Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks," says William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of surgical sciences at Duke and the senior author of the study. "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ.'"
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The lowly appendix, long-regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact, won newfound respect two years ago when researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a critical function. The appendix, they said, is a safe haven where good bacteria could hang out until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea, for example.
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"Darwin simply didn't have access to the information we have," explains Parker. "If Darwin had been aware of the species that have an appendix attached to a large cecum, and if he had known about the widespread nature of the appendix, he probably would not have thought of the appendix as a vestige of evolution."

(The Appendix of Vestigial Textbooks). The appendix is now said to be a safe haven for microbes that aid in our digestion and immune system dynamics:

Parker’s idea, his hypothesis, predicts individuals with their appendix should be more likely to recover from severe gut infections than those without. To test this prediction, one could compare the fate of individuals with and without their appendixes after being experimentally infected with a gut pathogen.
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And then, second, the big result …. Individuals without an appendix were four times more likely to have a recurrence of Clostridium difficile, exactly as Parker’s hypothesis predicted. Recurrence in individuals with their appendix intact occurred in 11% of cases. Recurrence in individuals without their appendix occurred in 48% of cases.

(The Appendix of Vestigial Textbooks - 4). Add to that a healthy diet and we can deduce that the medical procedure of removing the appendix is problematic in general.

Since once the appendix is gone it is not coming back, what can be done to correct the bad timing we are talking about?

Doctors have a medical procedure now which is named, on main street, as "getting your shit together" --or just "shit transplants" for short:

Fecal microbiota transplantation --- the process of delivering stool bacteria from a healthy donor to a patient suffering from intestinal infection with the bacterium Clostridium difficile --- works by restoring healthy bacteria and functioning to the recipient’s gut, according to a study published this week in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

The study provides insight into the structural and potential metabolic changes that occur following fecal transplant, says senior author Vincent B. Young, MD, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Internal Medicine/Infectious Diseases and the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The transplants, which have been successful at curing more than 90 percent of recipients, have been used successfully since the 1950s, he says, though it hasn’t been clear how they work to recover gut function.

“The bottom line is fecal transplants work, and not by just supplying a missing bug but a missing function being carried out by multiple organisms in the transplanted feces,” Young says. “By restoring this function, C. difficile isn’t allowed to grow unchecked, and the whole ecosystem is able to recover.”

(Fecal Transplants - ASM). So they take out the hideout of gut microbiota, the appendix, then eventually due to bad diet, antibiotics, and other bad poisons and bad timing, the gut ecosystem is damaged or destroyed and we get sick.

The doctor says bring in a bag of crap from a close relative who is healthy, and we will inject it into your southern parts.

Wow, you just can't make this stuff up folks ... it is so now ... which is a bad time on many issues:

One day in 2008, Ruth, a Long Island teacher, walked into her doctor's office with a container of a relative's feces, lay down, and had her doctor pump the stool inside her.

(Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 8). Whoopie, the cart before the horse thingy.

Timing is everything.

We now find out that those gut microbiota also have an impact on our brains, which seems to tie in with these timing problems of our culture:

U.S. spending on mental illness is soaring at a faster pace than spending on any other health care category, new government data released Wednesday shows. The cost of treating mental disorders rose sharply between 1996 and 2006, from $35 billion (in 2006 dollars) to almost $58 billion, according to the report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At the same time, the report showed, the number of Americans who sought treatment for depression, bipolar disorder and other mental health woes almost doubled, from 19 million to 36 million. The new statistics come on the heels of a study, released Monday, that found antidepressant use among U.S. residents almost doubled between a similar time frame, 1996 and 2005"...

(The Undiscovered Side of Science & Life - 3). Our war on microbes, as I have called it in other posts, is a war on ourselves and is bad timing.

In closing, let me mention that there is a timing delay with respect to the things the EPA is trying to do.

Warrantless Searches - Unreasonable - 2

In the first post of this series we considered Arizona v Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009).

That Supreme Court case affirmed an Arizona state appellate court's opinion that a warrantless search was unconstitutional under the circumstances of that case.

In today's post we consider a case of first impression in the Eleventh Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, which held a portion of a federal statute to be unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment:

Davis’s Fourth Amendment argument raises issues of first impression in this circuit, and not definitively decided elsewhere in the country. The evidence at issue consists of records obtained from cell phone service providers pursuant to the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”), 18 U.S.C. §§ 2703(c) and (d). Under that Act, the government can obtain from providers of electronic communication service records of subscriber services when the government has obtained either a warrant, § 2703(c)(A), or, as occurred in this case, a court order under subsection (d), see § 2703(c)(B). The order under subsection (d) does not require the government to show probable cause.
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Davis objected to the admission of the location information in the district court and now argues to us that the obtaining of that evidence violated his constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment. That Amendment, of course, provides that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or Affirmation . . . .” U.S. CONST. AMEND. IV. It is a “basic principle of Fourth Amendment law” that searches and seizures without a warrant “are presumptively unreasonable.” See, e.g., Groh v. Ramirez, 540 U.S. 551, 559 (2004). The SCA does provide for governmental entities requiring records from communication service providers by warrant under subsection (c)(A). However, as noted above, the prosecution obtained the evidence against Davis, not by warrant under subsection (c)(A), but by order under subsection (d). As further noted above, that section does not require probable cause, but only a showing “that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the . . . records or other information sought, are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) (emphasis added).
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Therefore, it cannot be denied that the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures shields the people from the warrantless interception of electronic data or sound waves carrying communications. The next step of analysis, then, is to inquire whether that protection covers not only content, but also the transmission itself when it reveals information about the personal source of the transmission, specifically his location.
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Having determined that the privacy theory of Fourth Amendment protection governs this controversy, we conclude that the appellant correctly asserts that the government’s warrantless gathering of his cell site location information violated his reasonable expectation of privacy. The government argues that the gathering of cell site location information is factually distinguishable from the GPS data at issue in Jones. We agree that it is distinguishable; however, we believe the distinctions operate against the government’s case rather than in favor of it.
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In short, we hold that cell site location information is within the subscriber’s reasonable expectation of privacy. The obtaining of that data without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment violation.

(U.S. v Davis, 11th Cir., June 11, 2014, emphasis added). This may go to the en banc court, but I doubt it.

More than likely it will go up to the Supreme Court directly from the three judge panel's unanimous decision.

See also: ACLU vs. Clapper, Alexander, Hagel, Holder, and Mueller - 8

The previous post in this series is here.

This Is Your Brain On Propaganda - 5

Epigovernment Gun-boats

This Memorial Day is a day of memory.

The true memorial can only be as accurate as the true memory of the events to be memorialised. 

The ideal of the concept of a memorial is supposed to be to remember what really happened, however,  when the reality does not match the ideal it is not a memorial, it is one of the forms of propaganda.

It is sometimes a bit shocking to realize how much of what we think is actual history is really not actual history, it is instead the work of revisionist historians.

One new facet of that is how the U.S. Supreme Court revises the decisions it makes sometimes years after the fact:

Hiding in plain sight at the top of a Supreme Court opinion when first issued is a formal notice that “this opinion is subject to formal revision.” Readers have long assumed that any such revisions are both rarely made and entirely nonsubstantive in nature. Neither is true. Apart from the anticipated routine proofreading corrections of typographical errors, misspellings, and incidental grammatical mistakes, which are many, the Justices routinely correct mistakes in majority and separate opinions relating to the arguments of the parties, record below, historical facts, relevant statutes and regulations, opinions of their colleagues, and Court precedent. The Justices also, even more significantly, sometimes change their initial reasoning in support of their legal conclusions. To all these ends, they sometimes add, delete, and substitute words, phrases, and sentences. Unaware of the existence and degree of such changes, the public routinely refers to versions of opinions of the Court and of Justices that, while superseded, are nonetheless perpetuated through lower court opinions, websites, and even leading academic casebooks.

This article is the first to explore the Court’s practice of revising its opinions after initial publication, which one Justice privately referred to as “a strange and reverse basis” and a Court official described as “completely at odds with general publishing practices.”

(Harvard Law Review Article, The (Non)Finality of Supreme Court Opinions, 128 Harv. L. Rev.____, (forthcoming 2014), emphasis added). This form of revisionist history is problematic, because, as it ends up "lower court opinions, websites, and even leading academic casebooks" all pass around multiple versions of the "same case."

Time and again Dredd Blog has pointed out our cultural proclivity to habitually practice revisionist history (e.g. American Feudalism - 5, Corp Germ > Corp Seed > Corp Monster - 4, In Mother-Country MOMCOM: "Text Acts You!").

This is true of past "good" wars too:

The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.

(The Virgin MOMCOM - 6, quoting 1944 book; cf. MOMCOM And The Sins of Libya - 2, The Fog of War - McWarster McNamara, On The Origin of The Bully Religion - 2).

The wars fought since the 1900's have been primarily about the control of oil and war profiteering (The Universal Smedley, The Universal Smedley - 2, Viva Egypt - 2).

The previous post in this series is here.

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Daily Show Video
On Veteran's treatment over the years: PART-1 PART-2

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Wouldn't It Be Loverly: Big Bank Justice

This Gives New Meaning To "Bank Robbery"

The American people inhabit a nation that has been held hostage by an inability to apply accountability to the "Too Big To Jail" Plutocracy.

The Plutocracy that sits on top of several governments in the west, the Plutocracy that dictates economic policy through a form of legalized extortion.

They have the power to move massive amounts of money in and out of banks as well as in and out of nations, and they also have massive buying power.

Their wars in Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq flushed them with money from their military sector businesses, and the oil flows that were seized in Iraq and Libya add more cash into their coffers.

Criminal greed on steroids being what it is, they wanted more from the 99%, more from the poor, so they went after what they called entitlements and what the 99% calls Social Security Insurance which they paid for all their working lives.

So the inane "sequester" episode, composed of the privatization of plunder along with the making public of the Plutocracy's gambling debt at the Wall Street Casino, set them back.

All the "we are bankrupt" talk took a chunk out of their military munitions cash flow, so now we have a new mantra for the neoCon robopunks to mouth incessantly:

"House Speaker John Boehner broke from some Republicans on Sunday when he agreed with President Obama and other Democrats who say the country does not have an immediate debt crisis.
...
His comments were backed up by fellow House Republican Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee."

(Fox News, emphasis added). This propaganda babble will soon morph into "so now we can reinstate those tax cuts for the 1%, and reinstate the military budget that has doubled since about 2000."

The wimpy DOJ section on bankster fraud, led by the itsy bitsy Holder of a Big Heart, is not going after the Plunder Barons because they are "just too big to fail."

But just now the U.S. Supreme Court has in essence said that private individuals can go after them because they are just too big for their britches:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc suffered a defeat on Monday as the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a decision forcing it to defend against claims it misled investors about mortgage securities that lost value during the 2008 financial crisis.

Without comment, the court refused to consider Goldman's appeal of a September 2012 decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Goldman shares sank more than 2 percent.

That court let the NECA-IBEW Health & Welfare Fund, which owned some mortgage-backed certificates underwritten by Goldman, sue on behalf of investors in certificates it did not own, but which were backed by mortgages from the same lenders.

Goldman and other banks have faced thousands of lawsuits by investors seeking to recoup losses on mortgage securities. The bank has said that letting the 2nd Circuit decision stand could cost Wall Street tens of billions of dollars.

(No Supreme Plunder Relief). Thank you courts, in this case, for once staying on the side of the people -- for whom the U.S. Constitution was written.

And thanks to Senator Warren:

"I agree with Elizabeth Warren 100 percent that it’s a real problem," he said.

He also sided with Warren against those banks and others who suggest that having gigantic banks is not really a problem at all.

"Too Big To Fail was a major source of the crisis," he added a little later, "and we will not have successfully responded to the crisis if we do not address that successfully."

(Bernanke & Warren Agree). It is politically significant that the Fed Chair agrees, so let's go get them gang, because itsy bitsy Holder is afraid to.

Related posts/series: The Graphs Of The Age Of Plunder - 3, Bush II Eradicated The Robber Barons - 4, You Labour In Vain & Get Plundered.

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Is 'Insanity' A Valid Defense To Ecocide? - 2

In the first post of this series we talked about a mock trial of the type law schools hold each year for their students' edification.

As it turned out, the issue of whether or not insanity is a valid defense was not considered in that trial we spoke of.

The issue of ecocide is quite serious, causing the United Nations to consider adding ecocide to its list of crimes against humanity, because of the damage, death, and destruction already being done:

But should the bosses of polluting companies and the leaders of environmentally-unfriendly states join those responsible for mass murder in the dock. They could if a fifth crime against peace - ecocide - joined that list of human evils? The United Nations is now considering the proposal and the first test of how a prosecution for ecocide would work takes place on Friday, with fossil fuel bosses in the dock at the UK supreme court in London. It is a mock trial of course, but with real top-flight lawyers and judges and a jury made up of members of the public. The corporate CEOs will be played by actors briefed by their legal teams.

(Guardian). That trial the Dredd Blog post spoke of was intended to show what such trials in the International Criminal Court would look like.

Anyway, the jury took a short time of it to return a guilty verdict on two cases, even though that verdict was said not to be a forgone conclusion, since one defendant was found not guilty:

Two verdicts of guilty, one not guilty: that was the conclusion of the mock ecocide trial (details below) held at the UK's supreme court on 30 September. Real lawyers, judges and a public jury found the CEOs of fictional fossil fuel companies guilty of "extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) to such an extent that the peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory, and of other territories, has been severely diminished", as a result of their company's extraction of oil from tar sands in Canada. The jury found one of the CEOs not guilt on the count of damage caused by an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

(ibid). One beneficial effect of these types of trials is that it focuses on the evidence and arguments that are at issue.

The recent Dredd Blog post Thin Ice brings up the story of Al Gore's current trip to Antarctica, one key area of focus in this Ecocide Is A Crime saga.

A post on his blog The Climate Reality Project, written from Antarctica, explains the situation in subdued language, taking the path that projects the least amount of damage from rising seas, yet the post also mentions that several scientists project a far greater sea rise and subsequent damage.

Al's post is a good read with useful links.

If I was Al I don't think I would get too close to "the people's House" of representatives, since they do not like those who resist Ecocide:

Josh Fox, whose HBO documentary “Gasland” raised questions about the safety of the natural gas drilling technique known as horizontal hydraulic fracturing, was handcuffed and led away on Wednesday as he tried to film a House Science Committee hearing on the topic.

The Capitol Police said that Mr. Fox, whose film was nominated for an Academy Award last year, was charged with unlawful entry.

Mr. Fox brought a crew to film a hearing of the energy and environment subcommittee that was looking into an Environmental Protection Agency finding that fracking, as the technique is popularly known, was probably responsible for groundwater contamination in Pavillion, Wyo.

Mr. Fox is preparing a sequel to “Gasland,” which has contributed to widespread concern about fracking, which uses large volumes of water and chemicals under high pressure to free gas deposits from underground shale.

The chairman of the subcommittee conducting the hearing, Representative Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican, objected to the presence of Mr. Fox and his crew as well as another crew under contract to ABC. A committee chairman has the discretion to bar cameras from hearings, according to a committee aide.

(NY Times). One wonders what the "strict constructionists" of the GOP think "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of ...  the press" in the First Amendment means?

It is clearly time for an ethics investigation of the fascist republican heading up that puppet committee.

In a real trial, Monsanto was found guilty of killing a farmer by poisoning him.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post is here.

The Supreme Five Will Ride Again

The five "conservative" justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are the "supreme five", and those who watch the court know that it has been that way for a long time, at least since Bush v Gore.

Many people think Bush v Gore was an election that happened a long time ago, which is true in a sense, but most don't remember it was also a Supreme Court case where The Supreme Five voted to elect Bush II over the majority popular vote.

In that election 50,999,897 Americans voted for Gore, while 50,456,002 voted for Bush II (Gore got 543,895 more votes than Bush II; see Wikipedia).

The Five Supreme votes were worth more (50,999,897 / 5 = 10,199,979) than the 50,999,897 American majority who voted for Al Gore.

Thus, The Supreme Five each have a vote worth at least 10,199,980 other American votes, because they are exceptional, perhaps because they misunderinterpretated "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion" (Article IV, Section 4).

The next Bush v Gore was Citizens United v FEC (Bush v Gore, II), which affected the recent landslide election, for neoCon conservatives (the congress which had 438 + 100 = 538 votes, were outvoted by their 5 votes).

The Bush v Gore, III case is headed to the Supreme Court, and should get there in about a year, more or less, under the Conservatives vs. Obama Health Care cases.

Two courts have ruled in favor of the legislation, one against, and one is pending in Florida.

The basic thrust of these cases is that the federal government does not have authority to make people buy health insurance on pain of some penalty.

The states have forced people to purchase insurance for decades, and will put a citizen in jail for not driving with insurance, for example (i.e. not having insurance is not a privilege).

Likewise, banks force people to purchase home owner insurance as a condition of getting a mortgage.

Even though The Supreme Five (Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas) are well oiled, they need to be normalized.

If not, it is likely that they will hold Obama's Healthcare provision, which compels American citizens to have health care coverage, unconstitutional.

Corp Germ > Corp Seed > Corp Monster - 2

In the first post of this series, Corp Germ > Corp Seed > Corp Monster, Dredd Blog exposed the false notion of history which the neoCon Tea Baggers who use the term "free market" tend to have.

We noted that they are voracious practitioners of revisionist history so as to distort the writings, beliefs, and ideology of those historical figures they claim to be following.

In other Dredd Blog posts we equate these neoCon Tea Baggers to The Ferengi of Star Trek infamy.

Now that they have a majority of "brethren" on the Supreme Court they have decided to revolutionize, through what they claim to have disdain for - judicial activism, the constitutional law concerning The First Amendment.

Not only that, in so doing, they have dabbled into The Separation of Powers Doctrine in as much as they have removed from Congress the right to regulate corporate campaign contributions.

The Ferengi have now been unleashed upon Wee The People.

From the cases The Supreme Five Ferengi are taking on, it looks like that revolution of First Amendment Law may continue for a while.

Like the guy spinning the roulette wheel says, "where she stops nobody knows".

The next post in this series is here.

Politicization Of Internal Revenue - 2

We discussed political persecution in the post Politicization Of Internal Revenue, and specifically mentioned the Don Siegelman case.

In that case Governor Siegelman was not given the same "treatment" Senator Stephens was given by Eric Holder, who denied Siegelman.

The Supreme Court has vacated the judgment of the Federal Appellate Court for the Eleventh Circuit, which had affirmed Seigelman's conviction.

That court will now have to reconsider the decision it made, per the Supreme Court's order:

The judgment is vacated, and the cases are remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit for further consideration in light of Skilling v. United States, 561 U.S. ___ (2010).

(ORDER LIST: 561 U.S. ___, TUESDAY, JUNE 29, 2010).

Supreme Insubordination

The noticeable drift to the right in politics has a not-as-noticeable twin, a drift to the right in the federal judiciary, "the courts".

The replacement for Justice Stevens, Kagan, is another move to the right, which legal scholars take note of, as do practitioners before the court.

It is just a matter of how far to the "right".

Yesterday a federal judge in the states where Deepwater Horizon oil is washing up on the beaches, stopped the moratorium on deep water oil drilling.

Over half of the federal judges in those gulf states have strong ties to big oil, as do members of congress, according to the links above.

Clearly then, when we mention that "we are addicted to oil", it does not mean only those who drive vehicles that burn fossil fuel.

It means that our entire political, governmental, judicial, and economic system is so addicted that there seems to be no way out psychologically, even though there may be ways out physically and scientifically.

Supremespeak To Be Normalized - Leahy

Dear [Dredd],

Today we begin the process of undoing the great harm done by a narrow majority on the U.S. Supreme Court in its recent Citizens United v. FEC decision. I just returned from our first Senate Judiciary Committee hearing focused specifically on how, in light of the Court's misguided decision, we can protect our political process from excessive corporate spending.

The Founding Fathers crafted a Constitution and adopted a Bill of Rights to guarantee the fundamental rights of the American people, not corporations. After all, corporations are different from individual citizens. They do not have the same rights, morals, or motivations. They cannot vote. They are legal constructs designed to conduct commerce, nothing more.

The differences between people and corporations are obvious, and they were not lost on the great Chief Justice John Marshall when he wrote in 1819 that, "A corporation is an artificial being ... the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it..."

When the conservative activist majority on the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have the same rights as individual citizens to spend as much as they like to influence the political process, they ran roughshod over longstanding precedent and effectively redrafted our well-established campaign finance laws.

At the core of the First Amendment is the right of individual citizens to speak and to be heard in the political process. But if the Supreme Court's recent decision goes unchecked, it would not take much corporate money, relatively speaking, to outspend every candidate for every political party at every level of American government.

When the Citizens United decision was handed down, I said that it was the most partisan decision since Bush v. Gore. As in Bush v. Gore, the conservative activists on the Supreme Court unnecessarily went beyond the proper judicial role to substitute their preferences for the law. But Citizens United is broader and more damaging, because rather than intervening to decide a single election, the Court intervened to affect all future elections.

In the coming weeks and months I will call on you to help enact specific legislation aimed at restoring our democratic process in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. Until then, please forward this email to your friends and family to continue building awareness about the grave implications of this wrongly decided case and the importance of closing the floodgates of corporate spending in American elections.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Patrick Leahy
U.S. Senator

P.S. Please encourage your friends and family to join our community by following the link below -- and I'll make sure they too know about specific advocacy opportunities in the near future, aimed at undoing the harm posed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision:

http://www.LeahyForVermont.com/Join

Scalia Disses Perry & A Few Tea Baggers

A guy was writing a screen play.

His brother was a lawyer.

The screenplay was about Maine seceding from the United States.

His brother, in an attempt to help the play, wrote all of the justices of the Supreme Court to ask them what their thoughts were on the subject.

Only one justice replied. Justice Scalia wrote back:

I am afraid I cannot be of much help with your problem, principally because I cannot imagine that such a question could ever reach the Supreme Court. To begin with, the answer is clear. If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede. (Hence, in the Pledge of Allegiance, “one Nation, indivisible.”) Secondly, I find it difficult to envision who the parties to this lawsuit might be. Is the State suing the United States for a declaratory judgment? But the United States cannot be sued without its consent, and it has not consented to this sort of suit.

I am sure that poetic license can overcome all that — but you do not need legal advice for that. Good luck with your screenplay.

(WSJ Law Blog). It is clear from this that those who refuse to learn from history, who refuse to absorb Civics 101, can still make it to governor of large states (e.g. Rick Perry R-TX).

States that already took a sh*t kicking for thinking that way long before cars came into existence.

I am telling you people, stupid is contagious. Immunize yourselves, move out of stupid states and stop drinking kool-aid tea!

Troy Davis Lives Again

What do former President Jimmy Carter, Civil Rights icon John Lewis, Nobel Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Pope Benedict XVI, as well as the European Union, the European Parliament, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, former FBI Director William Sessions, and former and current members of U.S. Congress Bob Barr, Carol Moseley Braun and John Lewis have in common?

They think Troy Davis is innocent but was falsely convicted, and they are happy that the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a district court hearing so that new evidence may be looked at.

This Supreme Court case was unusual in that it was an original habeas corpus application directly to that court, without first going to lower courts.