MatthewMaynard.net

ScotusBlog has lots of details on the latest from the Supreme Court, Kentucky v. King, in which the Supremes ruled that

The exigent circumstances rule applies when the police do not create the exigency by engaging or threatening to engage in conduct that violates the Fourth Amendment.

A guy gets chased by the cops, suspected of selling drugs. He loses them in an apartment complex. The cops come up to one door in particular, and claim to smell burning marijuana. They announce their intent to enter, at which point they claim to hear what sounds like someone destroying evidence. The cops enter, where they see drugs in plain view and find more evidence of a crime after a later search.

They never found the drug dealer, btw.

Anyway, they arrest the guy in the apartment, who promptly files for suppression of the evidence as inadmissible, because it was obtained without a warrant. The circuit court denied the suppression, but the state supreme court reversed, and the Supremes reversed the state supreme court.

The federal Supreme Court has denied a man the rights he has always had, rights which have been recognized by the state since Magna Carta. They have created a situation where, without consulting an impartial judge, a police officer may (after the fact) claim to have sensed the destruction of presumed evidence behind a closed door. This means that an officer may act unchecked against any citizen acting peaceably within their own home as long as they later claim that they thought destruction of evidence was occurring when they knocked.

This puts the officer at tremendous risk when he decides to barge in without a warrant. A law abiding person could reasonably suspect they were undergoing a home invasion, draw his weapon and fire on the invaders, resulting in officers firing back and killing him – all because a policeman thought they heard evidence being destroyed, when it was only a toilet being flushed.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was right on this one, and it is a shame she was the only one. In her dissent she wrote

The urgency [to go into the home] must exist, I would rule, when the police come on the scene, not subsequent to their arrival, prompted by their own conduct.

Chalk this up as another car attached to the long train of abuses and usurpations. I’ve updated the what’s left of the Constitution page accordingly.

The ruling was too broad. We are no longer free.

Texas burns, we soak. As I write this, we’re seeing another storm come down around our heads with raindrops the size of golf balls, moving about as fast as an errant shot off the tee. I suppose that’s better than the alternative of drops the size of .308 bullets, moving at a correspondingly faster rate. Being hit with anything at 2700 feet per second, regardless of viscosity or density, is going to leave a mark.

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It occurred to me the other day that I should get back into the Linux world and develop a project or two on my own. I ran a Linux machine back in my college days, when Red Hat was still a private company and hadn’t created Fedora yet. I tried a few distributions, but always came back to Red Hat. I started with 4.0, and switched around a bit. Slackware was running for a time, as was Mandrake and a few others. I even went so far as to installing it on a series of laptops, but that was in the days before, well, before everything found on a modern laptop, like USB and wireless everything and high resolution screens. Back then a 10 inch screen on a laptop could be expected to deliver 800×600, not 1280×1024.

I ended up on Windows because that’s what paid the bills back then, and still does now. Of course it always helps to have multiple means of providing for oneself and ones dependents, so it’s time I took up the old lessons and relearned the Unix command prompt. Assuming the distributions still have such a thing nowadays.

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Lileks mentioned a 1956 version of 1984 the other day, with the cast of 12 Angry Men.

It’s a great idea for a website, really: transplanting the entire case of one movie into another, and assigning roles. For example: everyone from “The Great Escape” into Star Wars. Steve McQueen as Han Solo, for sure.

Unfortunately there’s no Leia parallel, and I can’t see von Luger lifting a prisoner by the neck. Stratwitch maybe. Chewie could be played by Jud Taylor (Goff, Hilts’ friend). Not sure who Luke would be.

The Army (in their infinite wisdom) adopted the M21 as their sniper rifle after Vietnam. It was essentially a match-grade M14 with a scope attached and the ability to add a suppressor. It worked well enough, but the Army decided they needed the added accuracy necessary to reach out to 800 or more yards, and the M21 barely could do it. They switched to the M24, a long-action Remington 700 with a match-grade 7.62 NATO barrel attached, along with all the hyper-accurate bells and whistles.

This worked fine until war came along, and the Army realized they really needed a sniper rifle with about a 500 yard range for urban combat and the ability to deliver quick follow-on shots (read that as “semi-automatic fire”). By this time the M16 had been fielded for 40+ years, and the M14 was considered “obsolete” (don’t get me started). They decided that snipers would probably benefit from something that looked, felt, and operated like the M16, so they specified the M110 SASS (semi-automatic sniper system) as what amounts to a match-grade AR-10. This is nothing more than the 7.62 NATO version of the M16.

Jennifer had the opportunity to shoot one once, and loved it. I wouldn’t mind one myself, since I can always appreciate a good rifle. So if we were to buy a couple, with the intent of matching our M1A boomsticks in general reliability, what would I want? Here’s a short list of must-have features, from muzzle to buttstock:

• Flash hider and bayonet mount – I’m from the Chesty Puller school of backup weaponry
• 18″ barrel – long enough to send it at a decent clip and short enough to be maneuverable in close quarters
• piston driven action – NO DIRECT GAS IMPINGEMENT
• Fold-down iron sights, rear sight is a ghost ring aperture, front sight is a ring too, inner diameter equal to 4 MOA – the eye has an easier (faster) time centering two rings than it does centering a post in a ring. Ideally, both sights would be adjustable in windage and elevation, but at least the rear one must be adjustable in both.
• a short M1913 rail on the upper receiver for mounting an ACOG/long eye relief scope
• Forward assist and brass deflector on ejection side of upper receiver (not all AR-10s have this)
• Bolt carrier that doesn’t slide into the buffer tube when it cycles (there’s an AR-15 type out there with this feature. It has a folding stock too, but that’s not necessary for me) – this is so that when I smash the butt of the rifle into a zombie’s face and bend the buffer tube, I don’t have to worry about stopping the rifle’s ballistic operation.
• M14 magazine compatibility (I can accept having to cut a notch in the mags)
• Fully ambidextrous safety, bolt release, magazine release
• Match-grade two-stage trigger
• Hollow pistol grip, filled with a rifle-appropriate multi-tool for field repairs
• Collapsible buttstock with cleaning kit chamber

Oh, and if you could deliver that all for under $2000, that would be great.

Geithner Predicts Double-Dip if Congress Fails to Lift Debt Ceiling: The bankster in chief is still claiming we’ll default if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. I think I now understand why he says this. If Congress has demanded that spending occur, but hasn’t allowed for a corresponding amount of debt to be issued, Geithner is in a legal Catch-22. He has to spend the money, but he can’t exceed the debt ceiling. That only leaves one option, which is to sell assets, which he says would be unwise. This means that he must be able to sell assets, but is unwilling, so he tells Congress they must raise the debt limit. However, if he is legally not able to sell assets, he has no other option than to default.

He claims that this will push us into a double-dip recession, but that’s not really true. We never truly came out of the previous recession, because we never went back to the pre-recession levels of economic activity. Saying we would see a double dip ignores the dip we’re in now. This whole situation is what happens when politicians think they can play around with the laws of economics and not get burned.
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Way back when, I mistook Ayman Al Zawahiri’s AK+grenade launcher for a bullpup AK, and was promptly corrected by a commenter. Well, the CIA (Century International Arms) is now selling an actual AK-74 in bullpup configuration.

Still won’t buy it, since it’s lefty-unfriendly. Sigh.

Alan Greenspan was a friend of Ayn Rand, a fact I didn’t know until after I started listening to Atlas Shrugged several years ago. I learned the fact a few chapters in, and after contemplating his actions as chairman of the Federal Reserve (specifically his bubble-blowing inflationary policies) I couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t taken on the role of Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d’Anconia, one of the characters from Atlas Shrugged. With that in mind, I was amused when I saw Alan Greenspan “Betrayed” Ayn Rand and Ruined the Economy, Says Rand Institute President. Really, Dr. Yaron Brook should reexamine his premises to make sure he didn’t miss something.

For those who haven’t read the book, d’Anconia is the heir to a copper mining empire, and also a classmate and friend of John Galt. He adopts the persona of a playboy who fritters away his family fortune, apparently to no end. What he is really doing is dismantling it piece by piece so that the looters don’t get it. So what does that have to do with Greenspan?

If he’s playing the part of d’Anconia, he purposely devalued the dollar to remove it as a tool of the looters against the producers. Put another way, he is accelerating the dollar’s natural demise as a fiat currency in order to make it completely useless to the looters as a weapon, exactly like d’Anconia destroyed his own empire so that others couldn’t use it against him or other producers.

If this is true, he is either absolutely brilliant (it couldn’t work better if Rand herself had come up with the scheme) or he is too clever by half for underestimating the ability of the looters to manipulate the market and the ability of objectivists and libertarians to reject him as a traitor.

Either way, I get the feeling we’ll know soon enough which flag he flies.

I can’t help myself sometimes.

I’m going to spend some time revising the NaNoWriMo novel tonight. I’ve decided to recast it in Tucson, not Charlottesville. I realized that most people would not believe that a relatively quiet town like C’ville could have a crooked cop who plants evidence and carries out vendettas against individuals.

Not that there’s a lack of examples, it’s just that they’re not known. So I’ve decided to up the ante a little, and put the story in Tucson. William Cavanaugh (the antagonist) is a bit more believable as a bad guy if the story is set in a larger city near the border. You’ll see what I mean when I push out some excerpts.

In the meantime, check out Our Adoption Journey. Jennifer set it up this afternoon to chronicle our adoption effort. You can expect a fair bit of cross-posting and linking.

For no good reason, the synapse recycler kicked out Huey Lewis and the News this afternoon, and Hip To Be S quare popped into my mind around 4:30 today. I grew up without MTV, but that doesn’t matter in this day and age. YouTube provided the necessary distraction from .Net code for a few minutes:

I never realized you could get that intimate with a musician’s facial hair and not sleep with them in the process. It certainly is – what’s the word – congested? Confined? Close in like the middle seat on an airliner between two obese people for a claustrophobe?

Compare and contrast with Robert Palmer’s Simply Irresistible:

Women dressed in tight-fitting dresses, made up like painted porcelain dolls, dancing like tramps but not smiling at all, behind a guy in a suit crooning into a microphone. The women look like they’re just barely tolerating the filming, just waiting for the paycheck at the end of the day so they can exhale for the first time in seven hours when they take the dresses off.

I think it’s the hair – pinning it back like that makes their faces look pinched and drawn, and the makeup (particularly the lipstick) accentuates the look. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind seeing Jennifer in such a dress, but if she did her hair like that I would ask her to do it again. It’s just plain ugly.

If you know your pop culture, there’s no mistaking the decade this was filmed in. You don’t even need the sound turned on, you can tell just by look. On the other hand, If you saw the HL&N video without sound, you might guess it was done in the 80s, but you could honestly guess the late 70s or 90s and no one would fault you. The camera tricks in that video throw you off, since you’re used to seeing objects like drumsticks and drum pedals move, not stay stationary while everything else moves around them. It makes it difficult to pick up on small clues, like clothing.

Then there’s the music. In HL&N, the synthesizer plays a background role equal to the other instruments. In Palmer’s world, it is the centerpiece, equal only to the guitar, and only in places. Huey plays a tune that makes you tap your feet and hum along, while Palmer focuses your attention (or at least mine) on the fact that there’s no telling where the money went, even after all these years. Is he talking about a female politician and some embezzlement scheme? A prostitute? Did he have sex with her, so he considers her loving “simply irresistible”? I don’t know. At least with Huey you know he just wants to be popular, so he decides to let his geek flag fly.

They reflect two different takes on the same decade, and I’m not sure which one I like better. That’s probably why both of them are on my music player.

For those taking financial advice from this blog, please consult a psychiatrist, and take note that I placed a bet on silver today. The bet was that silver would rise in the short term, bouncing off $35 an ounce and continuing its bull run.

Hopefully, I’m on the Confederate side of this Bull Run, not the Union side. Get it? History joke – the Union lost the battles of Bull Run, so they would correspond to the Bearish view of Silver …

[crickets chirping]

Anyway, no, I don’t think the precious metals bull market is over, and no, I don’t think paper investments are a replacement for holding the actual metal. But for accounts where you can’t withdraw the money without a penalty, paper “equivalents” of precious metals make sense in this day and age.

Disclosures: I have paper and physical holdings in silver and gold, and anyone who thinks I am some sort of financial wizard has obviously had too many drinks while watching LOTR and consequently must have confused me with Gandalf. Put the sauce down so we can be a family again.