The Brett Kimberlin Saga:

Follow this link to my BLOCKBUSTER STORY of how Brett Kimberlin, a convicted terrorist and perjurer, attempted to frame me for a crime, and then got me arrested for blogging when I exposed that misconduct to the world. That sounds like an incredible claim, but I provide primary documents and video evidence proving that he did this. And if you are moved by this story to provide a little help to myself and other victims of Mr. Kimberlin’s intimidation, such as Robert Stacy McCain, you can donate at the PayPal buttons on the right. And I thank everyone who has done so, and will do so.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

The Stupid Season

It’s often said that there are silly seasons in politics.  Well, right now we seem to be in a stupid season.

Let’s start with the Democrats and their latest stupid gun control proposal.

Now, stupidity and gun control go together like peanut butter and chocolate.  For instance, the same people who want open borders very often want strict gun control, as though the same people moving people and drugs across our borders freely would hesitate to move guns if there was sufficient profit in it.  Indeed, often we see single-city gun control.  Liberals in Washington, D.C., for instance, apparently think that no one will to Northern Virginia, buy a gun, and drive back.  If you are talking gun control without talking border control you are just a fool—or a cynic hoping to manipulate fools.

But even on that scale, the idea of blocking anyone on the no-fly list from buying a gun is a dumber idea than most.  Let me get this straight.  According to liberals, we think that there are a number of terrorists who will want to buy guns, in America, and will do so legally, submitting themselves to a background check using their real names.  Further, these same liberals that the FBI, upon seeing that these terrorists want guns, won’t send out an agent to grab that person?

Why is that?  In this country all you need to arrest a person is probable cause, which is a pretty low standard.  So one of two possibilities exist.

The first is we don’t even have probable cause to arrest the people on the no-fly list.  In that case, how do we know they are terrorists?

The second possibility is that we do have probable cause to arrest them, but we are choosing not to for some unfathomable reason.

So either the list sucks or the Obama administration is letting terrorists run free.  Take your pick.

(And don’t say “maybe we are waiting to arrest them until we have a stronger case and we don’t want to alert them” because being on the no-fly list would tend to alert them, too.  So if that is the reason, it is also stupid.)

And as you consider the question of whether it is a dumb list, or Obama is letting terrorists run free, consider this: 72 Department of Homeland Security Employees are also on the list.  And you know who isn’t?  The Speedway Bomber, Brett Kimberlin.  I mean, seriously, if you bomb a whole town for nearly a week, shouldn’t that instantly disqualify you from flying ever again?  Oh, and remember the San Bernardino shooters? Do you remember how Syed Faroook went to Saudi Arabia to marry Tashfeen Malik, before coming back here to be a sleeper cell?  Well, they apparently weren’t on the no-fly list, either:

Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik were married in California in August 2014. But before the wedding, he traveled to Saudi Arabia to bring her back to this country, specifically to Chicago. On July 16, 2014, he flew from Chicago to Heathrow to Jedda, Saudi Arabia. He then flew back in reverse order, with his fiance on July 27, arriving back in Chicago.

And even then, they (illegally) used a straw purchaser, anyway, something that is impossible to prevent—you can only punish after the fact.  And I am not opposed to punishing the man who helped them get their guns, but none of these measures are truly preventative.

You see, on the bigger picture, when you regulate something, you have to plan on people trying to evade the regulation.  For instance, one of the dumbest tax proposals in recent memory was Maryland’s “millionaire” tax.  Even if you like the idea of soaking the rich, it is stupid in that context.  The vast majority of the millionaires in Maryland are in the greater Washington, D.C. area, and generally work in Washington itself.  Because they are rich, they have the least trouble moving, so they can easily just find a house on the Virginia side of the Washington Area, where pretty much everything is cheaper and crime is under better control.  About one third of Maryland’s millionaires did exactly that, and this in turn cost Maryland $1.7 billion in tax revenue.  I mean I don’t care where you fall on the issue of how much the rich should pay, that is just stupid.

The same goes for gun regulation.  A gun regulation that 1) doesn’t account for the possibility of people evading the regulation or 2) doesn’t even try seriously to stop them, is worse than useless.  It means the most upstanding people who don’t break laws will be disarmed, while the criminals will continue to have the guns.

A liberal parry to that thrust is to say something like, “so you’re saying we shouldn’t have laws because people break them?  Then I guess prostitution should be legal, too?”

Well, there is an obvious difference between the two issues.  If one illegally obtains the services of a prostitute, one generally cannot use that prostitute to kill lots of other people.  And naturally, a prostitute can’t be used to facilitate self-defense.  The president of the NRA is never going to say “the only person who can stop a bad guy with a ho, is a good guy with a ho.”  Whatever you think of the laws prohibiting prostitution, those laws don’t work like that.

The point I am jokingly getting at is that the gun control fanatics literally can’t get it through their head that guns can be validly used in self-defense.  I mean if you really force them to focus on it, if you say, “well, what if a woman gets a restraining order on her abusive ex, and he shows up anyway, and she has to shoot the bastard?” they’ll suddenly remember that self-defense is an actual thing and occasionally justified.  But the rest of the time they forget, so they lament about our number of “gun deaths” or “gun violence” even though both categories include valid instances of self-defense.

Or take the comparison to automobiles.  Like guns, the broad ownership of cars has a death toll and so it is common for second amendment supporters to say, “well, cars kill x thousand people a year, why aren’t you calling for that to be banned.”  And the response from liberals is usually, “but cars have other uses than killing. All guns do is kill.”  Some conservatives try to deny this, but, no, that is pretty much right.  Guns only kill or wound.  It is not wise to use a gun to bang nails into your wall, or something like that: they are primarily designed to kill or at least seriously wound.  But that assumes, again, that all killing (or wounding) is bad, and that is the flaw in their logic.

(It is also worth noting that it is generally believed that in most instances self-defense with guns is accomplished merely by threat—that is, without killing or even wounding, but merely making the other person aware you are armed.  Many people report, for instance, that when a person is caught trying to steal from them, that all they have to do is pump a shotgun and the criminal flees.)

So any intelligent gun control policy, to the extent that is not a contradiction in terms, accounts for 1) the fact that bad people try to find ways around the law, and 2) good people can validly use guns for self-protection.

This by far is not the only stupidity going around these days.  There is also Donald Trump’s stupid proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country.  Now, since I am a legal geek, I will mention that this is dubious constitutionally.  There are many precedents by the Supreme Court saying that Congress has plenary authority over immigration, suggesting that they can do anything they want on immigration.  On the other hand, I suspect if such a law was passed, the Supreme Court would suddenly discover limits on that power.

And yes, I find it morally reprehensible.  The vast majority of, say, the Muslims leaving Iran are good Muslims who have had enough of that regime’s idiocy.  Some of the best Americans alive are first-generation immigrants who fled some tyrannical hellhole and therefore knows exactly what Americans are missing.  Some of the worst Americans alive are useful idiots who have decided that freedom of speech or democracy is a tool of the oppressor, because they have never experienced life in a dictatorship.

The real way to deal with the problem of terrorists sneaking across our border in the huddled masses genuinely yearning to be free, is to aggressively kill the terrorists where they live.  I mean that’s Warfare 101; kill your enemy at the source, instead of trying to play defense.  I’ve said this from the beginning of the war on terror: better to be aggressive internationally than play defense, not the least of which because “playing defense” often involves the violation of Americans’ civil liberties.

But that’s not why the policy is stupid.  The reason why it is stupid is it is logistically unworkable.

For instance, how do you find out who is a Muslim?  I mean it’s not like you can tell who is a Muslim just by looking at him or her.  There are certain countries that are dominated by Muslims, but it doesn’t follow that every immigrant from that country is a Muslim.  In fact, when you are talking about Islamofascist countries (like Saudi Arabia and Iran), you figure the non-Muslims are disproportionately represented among those fleeing those countries, because they tend to be intolerant toward Christians, Jews and so on.  Those are people ready to be those great Americans I was talking about who appreciate the freedoms we have here because they have been deprived elsewhere.  In any case, Trump’s proposal was to stop Muslims from immigrating, not people from Muslim-dominated or Islamofascist-dominated countries.

So what you are talking about, practically speaking, is simply asking a person whether or not they are Muslim.  Which can be evaded by lying, duh.  Furthermore, what kind of Muslim is most comfortable with lying to accomplish their goals?  Oh, right, the Islamofascist terrorist type, whose aforementioned goals include terrorist attacks.  Who is least likely to be willing to lie?  The good Muslims.

So it would be a policy perfectly designed to block only the Muslims we want most and not the ones we don’t.  Which makes it stupid.  It might help Trump politically, but that doesn’t make the idea less stupid; it just makes me more depressed.

And don’t tell me that they will investigate these people to see if they went to a mosque recently and so on.  Again, if you think killing the “infidel” will automatically get into heaven you could avoid the mosque for a few months—because they think that all their “sins” will be forgiven by martyrdom.  It’s the good Muslims who don’t think they are going to do anything so dramatic who won’t stay away from the mosques.  And, really, when has the government ever been good at vetting people?  They supposedly vetted Tashfeen Malik for her visa—how did that work?

No, this is a stupid idea on a mechanical reason.  It won’t actually work.

And in another case of stupidity, we have the offense du jour on relation to the current affirmative action case before the Supreme Court, which is Fisher v. the University of Texas.  Here we have people misrepresenting a transcript available to the public to try to paint Justice Scalia as racist.

For instance, here’s Adam Liptak from the New York Times:

In a remark that drew muted gasps in the courtroom, Justice Antonin Scalia said that minority students with inferior academic credentials may be better off at “a less advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.”

“I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible,” he added....

Justice Scalia’s questions were particularly hostile to racial preferences, which he said could leave minority students worse off. “Most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas,” he said. “They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.”

Talking Points Memo gives the headline “Scalia: Affirmative Action Sends Blacks to Schools Too Advanced for Them” and ThinkRegress gave the headline “Scalia: Black Students Don’t Need Affirmative Action Because They Benefit From A ‘Slower Track,’” breathlessly hinting that Scalia was like super racist or something.

What Liptak is not acknowledging and TPM and ThinkRegress is barely acknowledging is that Scalia was summarizing one of the arguments of the other side.  You can read the full transcript, here, but let me pull out the relevant passage:

JUSTICE SCALIA: There are there are those who contend that it does not benefit
African-Americans to to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less a slower-track school where they do well. One of one of the briefs pointed out that that most of the most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas.

MR. GARRE: So this Court--

JUSTICE SCALIA: They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they're that they're being pushed ahead in in classes that are too too fast for them.

MR. GARRE: This Court--

JUSTICE SCALIA: I'm just not impressed by the fact that that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer. And maybe some you know, when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks admitted to lesser schools, turns out to be less. And and I I don't think it it it stands to reason that it's a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.

So the first thing you notice is that he is citing other people—either unnamed others or one of the briefs—that made this argument.  And by the way, it is a serious argument.  There are some who contend that giving a person an unfair advantage—for any reason, whether it is because of race, family wealth, family alumni status and so on—doesn’t do the student any favors.  The idea is that by putting them in a school where they can’t handle the curriculum, they end up flunking out and giving up entirely, when if they went to a school that was more their “speed” they would excel.

(By the way, MSNBC admitted he was crediting someone else, but he must agree with that, because he didn’t say he disagreed, ignoring that it really isn’t his job to say that he disagreed at that point—his job was to see how the attorneys handle good arguments against their position.)

Now, I am not sure I agree with all of what these other people contended in Scalia’s recitation. I am not sure the differences between universities are as great as supposed, so a student being a little mismatched is as disastrous as they imagine.  I think we give the schools too much credit, pretending their admissions are much more scientific than it is.  And I am not convinced that some of the lower scores African Americans have isn’t due to racial discrimination, as I said here.  I am more inclined to support affirmative action when we are in the “developing potential” stage of life, rather than out in the workforce.  But while I am not sure I agree with that view, I don’t think it is automatically racist.

Another thing he is saying is that the goal shouldn’t simply be to get the maximum number of African-American students.  That is what the politicians typically want to see, but that goal is forbidden by the constitution because it is a simple race preference.

And by the way in all that controversy, no one paid too much attention to Justice Ginsberg’s remarks, which also suggested that black people benefitted from racial segregation.

As a little background, after one of UT’s affirmative action programs was struck down, they enacted the so-called 10% plan.  As I understand it, it guaranteed admission to the University of Texas by the top 10% of every high school in Texas.  If you read the opinion in the Fifth Circuit that is being appealed, you will see it has had a very strong effect on admissions.  The controversial element about it is that it was pretty explicitly designed to boost minority admissions, just not by explicitly referencing race.  So in essence it was like a grandfather clause, but designed to help minorities.

So that led Justice Ginsberg to make this comment:

But let let me ask you about the percent plan itself, because it seems to me that that is so obviously driven by one thing only, and that thing is race. It's totally dependent upon having racially segregated neighborhoods, racially segregated schools, and it operates as a disincentive for a minority student to step out of that segregated community and attempt to get an integrated education.

Sorry, wait, did she just say she thought that black people wouldn’t do very well in integrated schools?

Now part of what she said was not offensive.  The 10% plan was pretty explicitly about increasing minority enrollment at UT, and that seems to be premised on the idea that there were still minority-dominated high schools in Texas.

But still, the very premise of her question was that segregation was actually desirable for black people and that they would actually do much worse in white schools.  Which is actually closer to what liberals think Scalia is saying than what Scalia actually said.  So why isn’t that making headlines?

Oh right, because liberals like Ginsberg.

And what this really is, is a stupid clickbait game where liberals are waiting with baited breath to hear confirmation of all of their biases.  Oh my God, conservatives are such racists!  And lost in all of this breathlessness is the opportunity to have a serious discussion about the merits of this form of racial discrimination.  I don’t believe the argument is meritless, but it is equally wrong to smear Scalia as simply a racist, especially when it wasn’t even his argument.

Of course, the other thing brought out by these debates is the sheer unreality of the debate in the Courtroom.  From Liptak’s article:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said race was not the predominant factor in the university’s race-conscious admissions decisions. “I thought that what they’re looking for is leaders in diversity, not just of race, but of experiences generally,” she said

This was reflecting the tie-breaking opinion upholding affirmative action in University of California v. Bakke, where Justice Powell wrote that the First Amendment allowed for affirmative action:

The atmosphere of "speculation, experiment and creation"—so essential to the quality of higher education—is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body. As the Court noted in Keyishian, it is not too much to say that the "nation's future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure" to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples.

Thus, in arguing that its universities must be accorded the right to select those students who will contribute the most to the "robust exchange of ideas," petitioner invokes a countervailing constitutional interest, that of the First Amendment. In this light, petitioner must be viewed as seeking to achieve a goal that is of paramount importance in the fulfillment of its mission.

(Footnote omitted).  So the basic idea is that universities want a great wealth of viewpoints, life experiences and so on and that includes the life experience of growing up black, white, Hispanic, Asian, mixed, or what have you.  But that wouldn’t just be racial diversity, but geographic diversity—in this case all parts of Texas, and to a lesser extent all parts of America and the world—as well as diversity in religion, politics, work background.

All of which might seem more plausible if we had actual, you know, ideological diversity in the faculties.  Instead the schools come off like that woman in the cowboy bar in the Blues Brothers who told the lead characters what kind of music they normally play: “oh, we got both kinds.  Country and western!”  University faculties entertain all viewpoints, from Marxism to Stalinism.  They are diverse, that way.  So, hey, they end up with a rainbow of colors, all saying the same liberal platitudes.

I would go as far as to say that a clever lawyer might seek to undermine affirmative action by using that lack of ideological diversity, but so far no one has tried that.  In any case, that doesn’t make Sotomayor and the other justices stupid, just badly separated from reality.

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My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist (and adjudicated pedophile) Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years.  I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence.  If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the donation link on the right.  And thank you.

Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

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Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.


And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.

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