There was an interesting confrontation in Seattle this week where a man flew a drone just feet away from a family home. The drone was camera-equipped and the mother called police. Before the man left, he insisted that he had a right to use a private drone to surveil his neighbors. No it is not John Ashcroft’s neighborhood. I wanted to clarify a couple of points before others take to the air for some private snooping.
Continue reading “Man Uses Private Drone To Spy On Neighbors”
It was not that long ago that we passed the 15,000,000 view mark but we have now done one million better, according to WordPress. In addition, we just passed the 11,000 post mark on the blog. Congratulations everyone.
This video shows a confrontation between a couple in Cotati, California and police after the police were called to investigate a domestic violence complaint. The couple tells the police that they were simply yelling in an argument and refused to allow the police to enter without a warrant. The police respond by kicking down the door and tasering the couple.
Sheikh Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, the head of Saudi Arabia’s religious police, has gone public with a renewed attack on the use of social media sites, particularly Twitter. He warned citizens that the use of sites like Twitter guarantees that the user “has lost this world and his afterlife.”
Convicted Philadelphia abortion doctor has reached an agreement with prosecutors to avoid the death penalty: he has waived his right to appeal in exchange for a sentence of life without parole. I have no problem with the conviction of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, who performed late abortions in violation of state law under the most gruesome and horrific conditions. However, the use of the threat of the death penalty to waive appeal is a serious concern for civil libertarians.
Continue reading “Gosnell Agrees To Waive Appeal To Avoid Death Penalty”
Many defense lawyers and drivers have complained that the blood-alcohol level used by states is too low and allows charges for relatively low amounts of alcohol consumption. Nevertheless, it appears that the National Transportation Safety Board will recommended that all states drop the blood-alcohol level at which motorists can be charged with driving drunk to .05, down from the current rate of .08. That will mean that an average woman will cross the threshold with only a single drink. For men, it will be a two drink maximum.
Continue reading “One Drink Maximum: Administration Moves To Lower Blood Alcohol Level To .05”
I wanted to post this on Sunday for all of our mothers, but here is a belated Happy Mother’s Day anyway.
I recently published a column on how Barack Obama has publicly assumed many of the powers that were once cited as the basis for the investigation and attempted impeachment of Richard Nixon. One of those areas was the Obama Administration’s crackdown on journalists. This week Attorney General Eric Holder appears to have yet again added to this ignoble record. It appears that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press. This disclosure follows another recent disclosure that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeted conservative groups associated with the Tea Party. Yet, once again, most Democrats remain silent in a type of cult of personality where principle is discarded in favor of loyalty to the President.
Saudi Arabia has added yet another infamous case of religious intolerance and hatred after a Lebanese man was given 300 lashes with a whip and sentenced to six years. His crime? Simply helping a Saudi woman who wanted to convert to Christianity. While Saudi Arabia continues to object to any slight of Islam in Western Countries, the Kingdom continues to deny the human right of people to choose their faith — and impose medieval punishments for those who try to exercise their faith under the Sharia system. The woman fled the Kingdom in the hope of being able to worship the God of her choice.
In a true crime against culture, a construction company in Belize City has destroyed one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids to use it for gravel for road fill. Archeologists and locals say that there is no way that the company officials were unaware of the historical meaning of the pyramid when they took backhoes and bulldozers to it. Before they succeeded in eradicating the structure, locals took pictures showing the center of the pyramid still standing with a Mayan room exposed at the top.
Continue reading “Ancient Mayan Pyramid Destroyed For Gravel In Belize”
This is a sign from Union Grove, Texas where licensed and trained teachers and administrators now carry a firearm. Is this sign supposed to convince killers to move down the road to the less defended school?
I have previously written about how the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) set out to create a crime never approved by Congress: the crime of making a joke in an airport about security issues. The TSA has long appeared to chafe at the notion of an agency dependent on Congress or the public for its authority. That appears the message being sent to John E. Brennan. You may recall Brennan from a story last year when he stripped in the Portland International Airport in protest of increasing invasive TSA security measures. He was cleared by a judge who found his stripping was a form of protest. However, the TSA was clearly miffed by decision of the judge, so Brennan was pulled into the administrative abyss by TSA with an agency charge. It appears that, if the law will not punish a citizen, TSA will.
There are many pet lovers on this blog and the article below reaffirms your pet-loving lifestyles is not just emotionally but physically good for you. The American Heart Association (AHA) issued a scientific statement last week saying owning a pet may help to decrease obesity, blood pressure and cholesterol. Notably, for those of us who are dog lovers, dogs showed the greatest benefit for pet owners in terms of health benefits.
Continue reading “Study: A Pet A Day, Keeps The Doctor Away”
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence E. Rafferty (rafflaw)- Guest Blogger
Recently, the ICIJ, better known as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released a report detailing hundreds of thousands of off-shore companies whose sole product or service is to hide income from many countries tax authorities. “A cache of 2.5 million files has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over.
The secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists lay bare the names behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and other offshore hideaways.
They include American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as families and associates of long-time despots, Wall Street swindlers, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian corporate executives, international arms dealers and a sham-director-fronted company that the European Union has labeled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development program.” ICIJ.org Continue reading “Tax Havens For the Wealthy, But What About the Rest of Us?”
by Gene Howington, Gust Blogger
As previously discussed in the column “Fantastic Plastic?“, the advent of cheap 3-D printing (or additive manufacturing) is changing the nature of how we can manufacture anything including guns. At the time the original column was written, a pioneer in additive manufacturing of guns – Defense Distributed of Austin, Texas – was making headlines for using this technology to make lower receivers for AR-15 style assault rifles. Although in the proof of concept stage, Defense Distributed had rapidly shown that they could make such a component capable of firing over 600 rounds before stress failure. I speculated that such a weapon was not as threatening due to size and some materials constraints and that even more dangerous was the possibility of all (or nearly all) plastic handguns and other easily concealable weapons that escape normal detection techniques.
In this instance, we have a case of science rapidly catching up with speculation. Last week Defense Distributed released the following video of their plastic handgun design. The only metal component of the weapon is the firing pin. It is called (rather dramatically) the Liberator.
In a move that is not entirely unexpected as self-described crypto-anarchist Cody R. Wilson and his company Defense Distributed continue to push both the boundaries of the technology as well as gun laws, the government took action. It is no secret that escalation often begets escalation. Is this the first salvo by the government in their dealings with Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed?