February 2015

Here is my traditional Friday the 13th post:

Have you ever wondered why Friday the 13th is considered an unlucky day?
The short answer: Greed, the French Monarchy, and the Catholic Church.
Like most stories, the long version is more complicated. This is the
legend as I heard it:

“The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon” were a
military order of men who were living in Jerusalem in 1099 AD, at the
tail end of the Crusades. There were nine of them at the time, and they
were so poor that they were living in a stable and begging for food.
Legend has it that they discovered some of King Solomon’s treasure while
digging in the area.

They returned to Europe, and invented what was essentially the first
international banking society. They were involved in shipping, banking,
and other money making ventures. They formed a large society, which at its
peak was comprised of over 20,000 members. Members held different
ranks, with the highest being called Knight Templar. A Knight Templar
was similar to what a full partner or a member of the board of directors
would be today. The ‘board meetings’ only took place at night, and this
was because of the need for secrecy. Remember that this was in the age
of pure monarchy, when no one who was not a King could own anything
without the King taking a large cut of it.

One odd thing about them was that they practiced elaborate rituals that
were designed to ensure secrecy. Since it was a crime punishable by
death at the time to engage in any ritual not endorsed by the Catholic
Church, any person who took part in such a ritual was bound to keep the
secrets of the others, or he himself would be killed.

The Knights Templar hired many men of the free masons’ guild to build
large structures, such as the Cathedral at Notre Dame. At the time, the
free masons were not especially liked by the Church, mostly because the
masons were teaching that mathematics ran the world, and not a deity.
The Church had to put up with this to a certain extent, however, because
God was not in the business of building the Church’s cathedrals, and
the free masons were.

The free masons, having built many buildings for the order, needed to be
sworn to secrecy. So they were sworn in as minor members of the order,
and were taught many of the Templar rituals. 

All went well until October 13, 1307, when the King of France at the
time, King Philip IV, entered a partnership with Pope Clement V and
decreed that all of the Knights Templar would be declared to be Satan
worshipers and would be put to death. The king charged the Templars with
usury, credit inflation, fraud, homosexuality, heresy,
sodomy, immorality, and other abuses.

Many of the Kinghts Templar were killed at dawn that Friday the 13th, so
that their wealth could be confiscated while at the same time eliminating
the possible threat that the military order might pose to Philip’s quest
for more power. The ones who weren’t killed were tortured into
‘confessing’ to their crimes. The Pope, in
order to avoid the military action that Philip had threatened to take
against the Church, issued arrest warrants for all
of the Templars worldwide, which allowed the Church to confiscate their assets. The arrested members of the order were burned at the
stake in 1314, and the remainder of the Templars went underground and
became a secret society.

King Phillip and Pope Clement both died before the end of 1314, after
being cursed by one of the Templars they burned at the stake. According
to legend, he called out from the flames that both Pope Clement and King
Philip would soon meet him before God.
His actual words were recorded to be: “Dieu sait
qui a tort et a péché. Il va bientot arriver malheur à ceux qui nous
ont condamnés à mort” (free translation : “God knows who is wrong and
has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to
death”).

No one really knows if this is the true account of what happened, but
that doesn’t surprise me. History is a fiction that is written by the
winners. Even this morning’s
newspapers are seldom an account of what actually took place yesterday, but are instead an account of what the powerful want the public to hear.

From Brazil comes the story of a prison break where some women seduced prison guards and drugged them while having sex. The women then released 28 prisoners from the jail. The prisoners raided the police armory on the way out.

The inmates took three 12 caliber rifles shotguns, two 38 caliber revolvers
and munition

Layers of editorial oversight, indeed.

Guns are very strictly controlled in Brazil, and have been since 2002. That hasn’t solved the problems.The escapee who planned the prison break:

the escape was planned by the boyfriend of one of the women,
Bruno Amorim, 18, was was serving time for attempted murder, robbery and
firearms possession.

The obvious flaw with gun control is that stupid, inept, and corrupt government officials still have access to weapons, and are frequently the source of illicit items.

Brazil has the dream gun laws that the anti-gun forces here in the US claim will work, with less than nine firearms per 100 residents, compared to the US, where there are 90 firearms per 100 residents. With the US having ten times the rate of firearm ownership, one would expect, if it were true that more guns equals more crime, that the US would have a significantly higher crime rate.

The opposite is true: even though there are ten times more guns per capita in the US than in Brazil, Brazil is ranked 18th in homicide with an intentional homicide rate of 25.2 per 100,000 residents. The US has a rate of 4.7 homicides per 100,000 residents, and is ranked number 111.

Brazil’s homicide rate has risen 132% over the past 30 years, from 11.5 per 100,000 people in 1980 to 27 per 100,000 in 2011. Among those aged between 14 and 25 the rate in 2011 was around double that — 53 per 100,000. Each year, an average of 50,000 Brazilians are murdered- more than 3 times as many as in the USA.

It isn’t the guns.

Nebraska has a problem with its citizens legally buying marijuana in Colorado and illegally bringing it into Nebraska. What is Nebraska to do? Sue Colorado for the behavior of Nebraska’s citizens so you can prevent all of the people who aren’t breaking the law, of course.

This is the same logic we see applied to gun laws: one group of nanny staters doesn’t like what someone is doing, so we pass laws and assign blame on everyone, and not just the lawbreakers.

 and before you begin quoting Federal law to me, show me the part of
the Constitution that grants the Federal government the power to
restrict the production and sale of a product wholly within the borders
of a single state. Yes, the people smuggling are involved in interstate commerce, but that does not mean that Colorado has to stop EVERYONE from selling and buying marijuana, it means that the people who are smuggling can be prosecuted.

The concept of controlling everything using interstate commerce as the excuse didn’t begin until 1942, when a case titled Wickard v. Filburn went to the Supreme Court, and the court essentially held that everything affects interstate commerce, thus everything can be regulated by Federal law.

Stories like this one are why, when military recruiters were sniffing around my children in 2004, I did everything that I could to keep them out of the military. I served myself, and I see no honor in having my children fight for men such as these.
Our military is being run by political hacks who will destroy a man for doing his job, while they themselves are chasing prostitutes and guzzling taxpayer funded liquor.
I love this country and the ideals upon which it was founded, but I no longer feel that our military or our government are safeguarding those ideals. The men that serve have my respect, but the men that command them do not.

Remember how people are always saying that the police are the only ones who can be trusted to carry or own guns? When I point out that we are becoming a police state, people almost always tell me that we are nowhere close, because the police aren’t as bad as country X. My point is that waiting until it is as bad as some random totalitarian nation, it will be too late to stop it.

Let me give you some examples of a our police state:
In June of 2014, Lakeland, FL officers arrested Michael Burns for public masturbation.
It appears that the police got an anonymous complaint to their
non-emergency number, stating that Burns was masturbating in public.
When Burns filed a public information request for the police call
system, he traced the anonymous call to one of the police officer’s cell
phone. That’s right, the cops provided their own reasonable suspicion
by making an anonymous call, so that they could harass a citizen.

What
did he actually do? He was filming the officer performing his duties,
which is not a crime in Florida, so they had to invent one. According to
the police, this is not the first time he has done this.

Why is filming police officers such a major problem? Because even when they know they are being filmed, because they are the ones doing the filming, they say stupid things:

Alexandra Torrensvilas of Broward County, FL was the target of cops who pinned a DUI on her in 2009 for an accident one of them caused. The officers were caught on tape making up an intricate story to cover for a traffic accident involving a cop car.Officers Joel Francisco, Dewey Presley, Karim Thomas, and Sgt Andrew Diaz were caught falsifying evidence, conspiring to lie on official reports, and arresting the innocent woman, all to that Francisco wouldn’t receive discipline for getting in the accident.Throughout the tape, the cops acknowledged what they are doing is
illegal, but when you are the law, there is nothing wrong with bending
it for a fellow cop, one is heard saying. “I don’t lie and make things up ever because it’s wrong, but if I need
to bend it a little bit to protect a cop, I’ll do it,” Pressley tells
Francisco after reassuring him no one will ever find out. “She’s
freaking hammered anyway.”
In 2012, Officers Francisco and Dewey Pressley each received 90 days in jail, but none of the others were even charged. Sure, they were suspended, but were back on the job, free to frame others, within days.

We see this time and time again. In 2011, and NYPD detective admitted that New York detectives were arresting people because they had quotas to meet.

 A former NYPD
narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was
common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to
meet arrest quotas…Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was
busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as “flaking,” on four men
in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity had been low. The city paid $300,000 to settle a false arrest suit by Jose Colon
and his brother Maximo, who were falsely arrested by Anderson and
Tavarez. A surveillance tape inside the bar showed they had been framed.
A federal judge presiding over the suit said the NYPD’s plagued by “widespread falsification” by arresting officers.

 You get that? It happens so often that police actually have a word for it! The judge even said that the conduct is “widespread.”

 In 2013, a lawsuit accused NYPD detectives of again arresting people on false charges, so that they could meet a quota.

One study found that 10,000 innocent people a year are convicted for crimes that they did not commit.

There is the one thing that the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protesters have gotten right: police need to wear body cameras. That way, the good cops will be protected from false charges, while the bad ones will have to face some accountability.

I know police have privacy rights while off duty, on breaks, and other times. I get that, but they don’t have that right while performing their jobs. Everything that I say in their presence can be used against me, so I don’t see why the things that are said cannot be used in my favor. So, my proposal is this: pass a law that any time a police recording is not available for any reason, including technical problems, the police are assumed to be lying. After all, why hide something, if there is nothing to hide. Turnabout, as they say, is fair play.