Just When You Thought it was Safe to Fly Again.

An engineer shows how easy it is to defeat the new whole body scanners.

$1B of TSA Nude Body Scanners Made Worthless By Blog — How Anyone Can Get Anything Past The Scanners

H/T to Wendy McElroy

In Time of War

Jonathon Turley writing for Foreign Policy reports on a presentation by Eric Holder defending the claim the President has the authority to kill any US citizen he considers a threat.

On Monday, March 5, Northwestern University School of Law was the location of an extraordinary scene for a free nation. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder presented President Barack Obama's claim that he has the authority to kill any U.S. citizen he considers a threat. It served as a retroactive justification for the slaying of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki last September by a drone strike in northeastern Yemen, as well as the targeted killings of at least two other Americans during Obama's term.

Read the rest here

If you are one of those smart enough to find your way to this blog you are probably smart enough to know this is a bad idea on several levels. Holder is invoking the ancient principle of "Inter arma enim silent lex" or "In time of War the Law is silent." This was a bad idea when Cicero stole it from Thucydides and it is still a bad idea now.

My response to any President claiming this power is, "Ave Imperator. Potes meos suaviari culus!" For you that don't understand Latin that means, "Hail the Emperor. You can kiss my ass!"

H/T to The Blog formerly known as Arctic Patriot.

Federal Monitoring Word List

The "official" list of words DHS uses to monitor social network sites was obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) using a Freedom 0f Information lawsuit. This article lists them for your convenience.

H/T to Wendy McElroy

#EFAD at Number 2.

What is at number 1?

Really? I mean really? A wanna be Harlequin romance is beating out a free copy of Enemies Foreign and Domestic?

Operation #EFAD II

Here is the link. Go download a copy for your Kindle now.

Son of a Liberty's Bitch!

About a year ago I had one of those strange, vivid dreams that sticks in my memory and won't go away. In it I traveled through time to speak to Mike Vanderboegh about a matter of great importance. I established my bona fides with him by predicting the precise prices of some volatile stocks over a period of two or three weeks (it's a dream, OK? details from the subconscious can be a bit sketchy). Mr. Vanderboegh then asked me about the future. I told him, "The good news is, your side wins."

"What's the bad news?", he asked me with a grin.

"Your side wins."

Yeah, it's an old joke -- I know that. Still, the recent brouhaha between Vanderboegh and Kerodin reminds me of it. I am honestly beginning to wonder if it really matters any more whether we win this thing or not. Maybe I'll follow the lead of my buddy over on Living in Babylon and stock up on Ganja (do you guys still call it that?) then crawl inside a drug induced haze while the the assholes of the world fart in the general direction of each other.

Maybe tomorrow after the Southern Comfort wears off I'll feel differently.

Another Blood Dancer Speaks

Some one with the mouth filling moniker of Jenna Myers Karvunidis is not keeping up with current events. In a column for Chicago Now entitled Ohio school shooting: Time to ban handguns, guys she comments on the recent GFSZ shooting in Ohio writing,

Think about it. What is the purpose of a gun? Gun proponents will say the bad guys already have them anyway, so we all need to have access to protect ourselves and prevent more crime. Really? Tell me how many of the other students in that classroom today had a gun to protect themselves.

Apparently Ms. Karvunidis is unaware that schools from Kindergarten through the Twelfth grade are legally designated as gun free zones. The students and teachers are disarmed by laws ironically enforced by men with guns. They were not allowed the means to shoot back. This appears to be a good thing from her point of view.

At first I was tempted to be generous and assume this is just ignorance of science and history on her part. It may turn out she really is that uneducated but the tone of her article and her responses to some of the criticisms of her column prompt me to believe she just enjoys the opportunity to get on a soapbox and demand her fellow citizens be more tightly controlled -- doubtlessly by the aforementioned men with guns. This makes it logical that she support the existence and expansion of of Gun Free Zones. Such places are easy pickings for the violent and each new outrage perpetrated against disarmed victims provides more blood for her and her equally sick friends to dance in.

She should stick to spiked heels and white lipstick. They go well with an empty head.

H/T to Mike Vanderboegh over at Sipsey Street Irregulars who has his own take on the subject.

OPERATION #EFAD

I just heard about this:

So here's the plan: on Thursday, March 1, we will engineer a stratospheric spike in the number of free Kindle downloads of Enemies Foreign And Domestic, and continue this operation for up to five days, the max allowable under the terms of the free download program. Then we will sit back and watch the bewildered and alarmed MSM explore this sudden and frightening phenomenon erupting among the unwashed gun nuts and wild-eyed Constitution fanatics. You know, us. Real Americans, out here in fly-over countery[sic].

Sounds like a good idea. The book is already discounted to $0.00 for members of Amazon Prime so it has probably pretty much run its course in sales. Now the author is offering a chance for all Kindle owners to get the book for the same low price and to tweak the beard of the Res Nostrae and its sycophants -- a endeavor ever near and dear to my anarchist heart.

See you all at Amazon on March 1.

Expanded Castle Doctrine in Michigan

William Grigg, in his typically witty fashion, takes the Michigan police to task for opposing a proposed expansion of the castle doctrine in that state. The proposed legislation would expand the "castle" to include the surrounding yard and outbuildings and legally recognize that an innocent person has no "duty to retreat" in the face of criminal aggression. It also adds a "reasonable person" provision similar to the "reasonable officer" test currently used in police shootings. I think the hyperbolic reaction of the police leadership to this perfectly reasonable proposition reveals their true feeling towards the mundanes they allegedly serve.

An expanded castle doctrine and a no duty to retreat law is not a threat to the police unless they act in a way that make them look like criminals. The answer to the riddle of Officer Safety is quite simple: If a police officer does not want to be mistaken for a common criminal then he must not act like one.

Good Cause for a CCW.

A Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it is apparently OK for a Muslim to attack an atheist. Considering the number of Muslims in the United States this callous attitude should be good cause for an atheist to get a concealed weapons permit.

Yeah, I know it probably won't work.

In a civilized world, no one should need a to get permission from any official parasite to carry a weapon -- openly or concealed. OTOH, a civilized people would not tolerate someone being attacked for peaceably making fun of others' beliefs -- no matter how tasteless. The aforementioned decision reveals that at least one judge officially does not want this to be a civilized world. As I've contended for years now, freedom in the statist world is often found at the intersection of dumb and dumber. This decision certainly looks like that address.

H/T toThe Unwanted Blog