Monday, June 13, 2011 “You Can No Longer Think of Yourselves as Peace Officers”: Militarizing “Lockdown High”  It was Friday the 13th, and Skylar Walters thought he was going to die.  The 16-year-old inmate of Orangeville Jr.-Sr. High in Illinois was in gym class when a deranged-looking man barged into the school and began firing […]

Sunday, June 19, 2011 When the State Breaks a Man “How much does the State weigh?” Josef Stalin asked an underling who had been ordered to extract a confession from an enemy of his regime. Stalin understood that, given enough time, agents of State-sanctioned cruelty can break any man. Thomas J. Ball, who committed suicide […]

Monday, June 27, 2011 The Drug War’s Einsatzgruppen General Colin Powell’s Doctrine of the U.S. Armed Forces is that the United States should be the `meanest dog in town’ to frighten a potential enemy…. When force is used, it should be with `overwhelming strength and no half-way measures.’ In law enforcement, these principles are routinely […]

Wednesday, July 6, 2011 “For The Good of the Party” The Party comes first: Soviet dissidents are unloaded at Lubyanka.   “… the Party hands out to you no prospect of reward…. We propose no bargain and we promise nothing. There is a passage in your journal which impressed me. You wrote: `I have thought […]

Monday, July 18, 2011 Imperial Priorities: Obedience First – Character Last We want to live pure, we want to live clean — We want to do our best; Sweetly submitting to authority, leaving to God the rest…. “The Obedience Song,” as sung every week in American Sunday School classes It is with pride that we […]

Monday, July 25, 2011 The Missing Lesson from Norway: Never Trust a Man in Uniform  Roughly a decade ago, Al Pacino starred in a movie entitled S1m0ne, a cyber-era updating of the Pygmalion myth in which a film director creates an uncannily realistic digital actress. Despite the fact that “Simone” was a computer-rendered composite fantasy, […]

Monday, August 1, 2011 In Praise of “Rogue” Cops “His death was gang-involved, the way I see it,” lamented former Orange County Sheriff’s Detective Ron Thomas after viewing the mangled body of his 37-year-old son, Kelly. “A gang of rogue officers … brutally beat my son to death.”  The description of the crime is appropriate: […]

Wednesday, August 17, 2011 Ricky the Rent Boy Precocious Poseur: College-age Rick Perry displayed an early gift for role-playing. Treason, Talleyrand famously said, “is a matter of dates.” Rick Perry has amended and updated that principle as it applies to the Federal Reserve’s inflation of the money supply, and the official profligacy that results. Posturing […]

Tuesday, August 9, 2011 Pity the Poor, Persecuted Police The Man Who Terrorizes Sunriver, Oregon’s “Finest”? Robert Foster, with his daughter Rebecca. Michael Kennedy is Chief of Police in tiny Sunriver, Oregon, an unincorporated resort village in the Beaver State’s Deschutes County. Kennedy insists that his police force has been terrorized for years by a […]

Tuesday, August 23, 2011 Liquidate Your Local Police: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Updated, August 26)  Mary Lee Cook, an 84-year-old resident of Oak Hill, Florida, didn’t seem like the kind of person who would secretly cultivate marijuana behind her home. Yet on June 6, deputies assigned to the East Volusia County Narcotics Task […]

Tuesday, August 30, 2011 The Persecution of Jeremy Hill (Updated, 9/8) Jeremy Hill of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, shot and killed a grizzly bear that threatened his children. The federal government is seeking to imprison him for violating the Endangered Species Act. Idaho Governor Butch Otter wrote a nauseatingly sycophantic letter to someone he insisted on […]

Thursday, September 8, 2011 Where Have You Gone, Conn Conagher?   “Hey mister, who gave you that shiner?” “Nobody gave it to me, son – I fought for it.”  To get the full effect of that exchange between young Laban Teale and the rangy, rough-hewn cowhand Conn Conagher, it’s best to imagine the wry reply […]

Sunday, September 18, 2011 Abolish the Police, Arm the Citizens: The “Sagra Model” of Privatized Security No surrender, no retreat: Andrei (l) and Viktor Gorodilov at the bridge.  “What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return […]

Monday, September 26, 2011 “The Dream is Collapsing” “Who knows whether the other half of our life, in which we think we are awake, is not another sleep a little different from the former, from which we awake when we suppose ourselves asleep? And who doubts that, if we dreamt in company, and the dreams […]

Monday, October 3, 2011 The Awlaki Sanction: Who’s Next on the List? The links connecting Anwar al-Awlaki to anti-American terrorism were entirely suppositious, forged through unsubstantiated official assertion. He was, at most, a clerical propagandist who never exercised command authority. For that matter, no evidence has been presented that he ever had an operational role […]

Tuesday, October 18, 2011 Steven Pinker’s Statist Gospel Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who has said that he never “outgrew my conversion to atheism at thirteen,” has written a theodicy – a tract intended to validate the redemptive power of the Leviathan State. In his new book The Better Angelsof Our Nature, Pinker insists that humanity […]

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 “Rising” to Empire, Falling from Grace The following article is adapted from my contribution to a forthcoming collection of essays addressing America’s descent into imperialism. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” […]

Wednesday, November 2, 2011 Let a Thousand “Rogue” Grand Juries Bloom!   Amanda Culbertson has a conscience, which is another way of saying that she wasn’t well-suited to government “work.” Until recently she was employed by the Houston Police Department as a crime lab supervisor. In 2009, she became aware of serious problems with the […]

Wednesday, October 12, 2011 Framing Steele: A Case Study of Sovietized American “Justice” Edgar Steele (r.) confers with political activist Paul Venable. Yes, I’d give the Devil the benefit of the law — for my own safety’s sake.  — Sir Thomas Moore, as depicted in A Man for All Seasons When Edgar Steele was told […]

Friday, November 11, 2011 Where Justice Goes to Die Federal Court is in session. Ten years ago, a 21-year-old woman named Tonya Hart was shot to death in a Moscow, Idaho trailer court. Two years later, a local man named David J. Meisner, who confessed to the crime during a recorded police interrogation, was convicted […]