Rad Geek People's Daily

• L.A. Anarchist Bookfair: Actions + Conversations + Intersections 2010. Guy Debord, Los Angeles Anarchist (2010-01-16). L.A. Anarchist Bookfair: Actions + Conversations + Intersections 2010 Sunday January 24th : : Barnsdall Art Park 4800 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027 http://www.anarchistbookfair.com/ (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)
• Invictus (Clint Eastwood, 2009) Guest Contributor, Racialicious – the intersection of race and pop culture (2010-01-11). by Guest Contributor Geo, originally published at Prometheus Brown Morgan Freeman: the kind of black dude even an old white racist can't hate. Which is why he was cast to drive Miss Daisy, free a man from prison, become president (twice), help Batman, and become the literal, physical embodiment of… (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)
• Blame the Libertarians! Radley Balko, The Agitator (2010-01-11). Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Peyton Thomas has emerged as Sheriff Joe Arpaio's book-learnin' alter-ego, working with Arpaio to criminally investigate, indict, and otherwise legally intimidate anyone who dares to question the fearless lawman (as well as, now, anyone who dares to question Thomas). Thomas has gone after members of the… (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)
• BOSTON COPS ABUSE THOSE TAKING PIX OF THEM. UNDERNEWS (2010-01-18). The War on Photography (Cont’d.) (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)
• Creatures from the Conservative Id. Pro Libertate (2010-01-18). Dick Cheney and the triumph of enthusiastic sado-statism. [Trigger warning: the second half of this story includes graphic descriptions of torture and a photograph of its aftereffects.] (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)
• Another Brick in the Wall. Mises Institute Daily Articles (Full-text version) (2010-01-14). [Originally published as “Song that’s driving teachers up the wall” in Libertarian Review, Vol. 9, No. 9 (September 1980), pp. 42–43.] The British Band, Pink Floyd’s song, “Another Brick in the Wall” has been banned in South Africa, ignored by some radio stations in the United States, and attacked by… (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)
• Eminent Domain Abuse: What Would Homer Simpson Do? Division of Labour (2010-01-18). Resistance to Ratner in NYC (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)
• A Matter of Degree: The New York Subway. Mises Institute Daily Articles (Full-text version) (2010-01-11). [From chapter 14 of The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov.] The small State can do to Society everything the large State can do, but not so much of it. The tyranny and terrorism of modern communistic overlords is of a kind with the practices of ancient Sparta,… (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)
• Warwick Township Cop Assaults, Kidnaps and Imprisons Me Over My Request for Business Card. Arm your Mind for Liberty (2010-01-18). Gansters in Blue arrest George Donnelly for speaking when not spoken to. (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)
• Mises.org joins the fight for liberty online. David Veksler, Mises Economics Blog (2010-01-16). You may have heard that Google’s decided to stop censoring results from its Chinese search engine. After China attempted to access the email accounts of human rights activists, Google also decided to encrypt all Gmail traffic by default. The team behind Mises.org is also contributing to the effort to keep… (Linked Monday 2010-01-18.)

Hey everyone; it’s Sunday. Late Sunday — but it’s never too late for Shamelessness.

I’m back from Hawaii. My paper (a revised, expanded and paper-ified version of Women and the Invisible Fist) seems to have gone down well — at least, I got some good discussion and had a couple of requests for copies of the paper. L. and I did get to spend a lot of time by the water, and a bit in the forest. My next trip, coming up real soon now, is out to L.A., with some ALLies from Vegas and, hopefully, to meet up with some more from So. Cal., to represent ALL at the Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair. Busy busy busy.

What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

• Mary Rosh, Federal Agent. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-01-14). Cass Sunstein, head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has a plan for discouraging conspiracy theorists: Conspire against them! Raw Story reports: Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures," in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate… (Linked Thursday 2010-01-14.)

• Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson Were Anti-Slavery. Chuck Baldwin (2010-01-11). This article has perhaps the highest ratio of simple falsehoods to true statements in any article I have ever read. The man barely even pauses for a half-truth. But I look for the best in people, so let me just say that Baldwin says one thing I absolutely agree with: “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson … were the spiritual soul mates of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.” Well, yeah. (If you haven’t read my stuff on Lee before, cf. 1, 2, etc.) (Linked Monday 2010-01-11.)

So here’s something a judge on the Massachusetts Appeal Court recently said — in reply to government cops who forced their way into Wilbert Cruz-Rivera’s car, without any warrant, and opened up a pill bottle while rummaging around in his things, and then claimed that this invasive warrantless search, conducted on the private property of a man who was not accused of any criminal offense, was justified as an officer safety search:

On this record, it simply was not reasonable to believe that the defendant might, upon his release with a message that he was free to go, enter his car, reach into the console, open a pill bottle, extract a weapon smaller than four-and-one-half inches by one-and-three-fourths inches, and use it in an effort to harm the two nearby, fully armed police officers who had just released him.

— Quoted in The Boston Globe (2009-12-17): Court: Concern about tiny weapons didn’t justify search

I suppose I am glad that a judge said this. But the fact that a judge had to say it — to clarify to a gang of pushy government cops that officer safety really is not a excuse reason to go on a warrantless search for tiny weapons hidden in closed pill bottles — and that to do so they had to overturn a lower court’s ruling, which upheld this ridiculous opportunistic lie — does not really make me very optimistic about the reliability or effectiveness of those constitutional brakes on police power that the court is supposedly out to save.