Monthly Archives: July 2012

DEA Uses Truck Under False Pretenses; Refuses to Pay Truck Owner $133,532 in Repairs Resulting from Botched Sting Operation

In the era of Fast and Furious, nothing should come as much of a surprise with how incompetent and reckless federal agencies can be but here, the DEA reaches a new low.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

The phone rang before sunrise. It woke Craig Patty, owner of a tiny North Texas trucking company, to vexing news about Truck 793 – a big red semi supposedly getting repairs in Houston.

“Your driver was shot in your truck,” said the caller, a business colleague. “Your truck was loaded with marijuana. He was shot eight times while sitting in the cab. Do you know anything about your driver hauling marijuana?”

“What did you say?” Patty recalled asking. “Could you please repeat that?”

The truck, it turned out, had been everywhere but in the repair shop.

Commandeered by one of his drivers, who was secretly working with federal agents, the truck had been hauling marijuana from the border as part of an undercover operation. And without Patty’s knowledge, the Drug Enforcement Administration was paying his driver, Lawrence Chapa, to use the truck to bust traffickers.

Chapa, who was working on behalf of the DEA paid with his life. It’s bad enough that someone was killed in one of Patty’s trucks but the story doesn’t end there.

The article continues:

But eight months later, Patty still can’t get recompense from the U.S. government’s decision to use his truck and employee without his permission. His company, which hauls sand as part of hydraulic fracturing operations for oil and gas companies, was pushed to the brink of failure after the attack because the truck was knocked out of commission, he said.

Patty had only one other truck in operation.

In documents shared with the Houston Chronicle, he is demanding that the DEA pay $133,532 in repairs and lost wages over the bullet-sprayed truck, and $1.3 million more for the damage to himself and his family, who fear retaliation by a drug cartel over the bungled narcotics sting.

[…]

Copies of letters and emails from Patty’s insurance company state that it won’t pay for repairs because the truck was part of a law-enforcement operation. Patty drew from his 401K retirement fund to repair the truck, which was out of operation for 100 days.

“I was not part of this,” he said. “I had absolutely no knowledge of any of it until after it happened.”

[…]

Houston lawyer Mark Bennett, who is advising Patty, said if Patty’s initial claim is not resolved, the next step would be to sue.

I sincerely hope the DEA is taken to the cleaners on this one. Beyond the financial hardship the DEA has caused to Patty, he now fears for his family’s safety.

Perhaps most unnerving, Patty says, is that drug mobsters now likely know his name, and certainly know his truck.

Panic at the Patty home these days can be triggered by something as simple as a deer scampering through the wooded yard or a car pulling into the driveway. One morning as his wife made breakfast, one of his young sons suddenly bolted across the house yelling, “Get the guns!”

This is no way to live. And for what? To keep a little marijuana from reaching people who will just as easily find another supplier?

The war on (some) drugs is no joke. There are real casualties in this idiotic and unrealistic goal of a “drug-free America.” Chapa and Patty are only among the war on (some) drugs latest victims.

Hat Tip: The Agitator

Reinventing Newspeak – The Fatal Error at the Heart of The Little Blue Book

Most people who are passionate about politics wish to convince others to see things their way. To that end, the world-famous linguist and partisan Democrat George Lakoff has written the Little Blue Book:

Voters cast their ballots for what they believe is right, for the things that make moral sense. Yet Democrats have too often failed to use language linking their moral values with their policies. The Little Blue Book demonstrates how to make that connection clearly and forcefully, with hands-on advice for discussing the most pressing issues of our time: the economy, health care, women’s issues, energy and environmental policy, education, food policy, and more. Dissecting the ways that extreme conservative positions have permeated political discourse, Lakoff and Wehling show how to fight back on moral grounds and in concrete terms. Revelatory, passionate, and deeply practical, The Little Blue Book will forever alter the way Democrats and progressives think and talk about politics.

from publisher’s description.

At first blush this seems like a great idea to the passionate person – they’re sure to win all the arguments if they follow the books recipe! But the book’s recipe is not a recipe for winning arguments, but rather a recipe for preventing the reader from losing arguments – from being convinced by the person they are arguing with. How? By preventing them from actually being able to consider the opponents’ arguments by removing the opponents’ language from the reader’s brain.

The book starts off from a profound starting point, that people make decisions based on their moral frames of reference. But then it goes in a very unexpected direction. It instructs the reader to completely ignore the interlocutor’s own moral frames.

  • Use your own language; never use your opponent’s language
  • Be aware of what you believe and repeat it out loud over and over; never repeat ideas that you don’t believe in, even if you are arguing against them.

Let’s contrast these instructions with those of the late Dr Covey who has a great video that starts from the same premise – but argues that to communicate, you must adopt your interlocutor’s frame of reference and to try to understand where they are coming from.

As a method of convincing people, this book is a disaster; it purposes shouting down the non-progressive by denying them any legitimacy to their ideas. One the interlocutor figures out that what he is saying is being ignored, he will probably reciprocate by not listening to anything the reader has to say.

So what benefit is there to the reader to refuse to think like the person they are arguing with? George Orwell explained:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression  to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.

The Principles of Newspeak – An Appendix to 1984 by George Orwell

The book is not a recipe on how to convince, but in fact is a recipe teaching the reader how to be intolerant and closed-minded.

Interestingly, this should not be a surprise. In a study of people’s ability to articulate political arguments, progressives had the worst performance when it comes to being able to articulate the ideas of people they disagree with. If you were to ask a Goldwater-conservative to provide you with the argument for Single-Payer Health-Care, he is far more likely to be able to do so than a progressive will be able to make the argument for a free market in health-care.

This book continues the trend, and if adopted by progressives will ensure the continued inability to attract new supporters to their movement… which is a very good thing.

I am an anarcho-capitalist living just west of Boston Massachussetts. I am married, have two children, and am trying to start my own computer consulting company.

Taxpayers made that happen

By now, everyone has heard Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

That quote? It’s fiction. There is no mythical “somebody else”. There is no class of people separate from entrepreneurs and workers who created those things. The political elite would claim otherwise, as Obama does. They claim they built those and we owe them fealty for that.

The truth is obvious. That government? Those public works? They didn’t build those. That research? They didn’t fund that. Taxpayers made that happen.

Quote of the Day: Following Orders Edition

Agitator guest blogger Maggie McNeil made some very good points in a post she titled “Godwin’s Law” that dovetail nicely with a point I was trying to make in another post about government enforcing immoral laws. Prior to reading the post, I wasn’t familiar with Godwin’s Law (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”) but very familiar with the phenomenon. When someone, regardless of political persuasion, makes comparisons to the Nazis or to Hitler, I generally start tuning them out because the comparisons are rarely appropriate, shows the commenter has little imagination, and most importantly, trivializes the Holocaust. Maggie does find there are some occasions when the comparison is appropriate, however; and does a fine job in her post making the appropriate distinctions (you need to read the rest of the post to understand the full context about what she wrote in the excerpt below).

At Nuremberg, Western society established the legal precedent that “I was only following orders” is not a valid defense against wrongdoing even if the offender was only a low-level functionary in an authoritarian system, yet how often do we hear police abuses (especially against prostitutes) defended with phrases like “they’re just doing their job” or “cops don’t make the laws, they just enforce them”? If a cop is tasked with enforcing a law he knows to be immoral, it is his duty as a moral man to refuse that order even if it means his job. If he agrees with an immoral law then he is also immoral, and if he enforces a law he knows to be wrong even more so. The law of the land in Nazi-era Germany was for Jews and other “undesirables” to be sent to concentration camps, and the maltreatment of the prisoners was encouraged and even ordered by those in charge; any German soldier or policeman enforcing those laws was the exact moral equivalent of any soldier or policeman under any other democratically-elected government enforcing the laws enacted by that regime. Either “I was only following orders” is a valid defense, or it isn’t; either we agree that hired enforcers are absolved from responsibility because “they’re just doing their jobs”, or we don’t. You can’t have it both ways, and sometimes Nazi analogies are entirely appropriate.

I think the same applies if you are called for jury duty. If you find that the accused is being charged with a crime that the law itself you find to be unjust, I don’t believe “following jury instructions” is an appropriate defense for finding the person guilty. We all have a moral duty to do what we believe to be right regardless of what the law is.

Eric Tweets The History Leading To The American Revolution

I’m posting this on behalf of Eric, who on twitter (@e_cowperthwaite) gave a series of tweets highlighting the key events leading up to the US Revolution & Declaration of Independence. I’m providing the whole list here:

How did the American Revolution happen? Did we really fight a bloody, 7 year war only because of taxes imposed by Parliament? #USHistory

If we care to find out, our Founders left a written record. They were committing treason and wanted to explain why. #USHistory

The roots of the American Revolution begin during the French & Indian War (aka the Seven Years War), which was very costly. #USHistory

The British govt required American products be shipped exclusively to England (Navigation Acts) in order to raise revenue. #USHistory

Next came taxes levied on molasses and sugar. Enforcing these taxes was difficult, at best. Rise of “Pirates of the Carribbean”. #USHistory

In 1765 & 66, Parliament passed: Stamp Act, Quartering Act & Declaratory Act. These led to the beginning of the rebellion. #USHistory

More info: Stamp Act http://bit.ly/niZbI Quartering Act http://bit.ly/LOaPeV Declaratory Act http://bit.ly/dD43rX #USHistory

In 1767, Parliament passes the Townshend Revenue Act to raise revenues for administration of colonies #USHistory

This results in riots & British Regulars occupying Boston. Colonial response is non-importation of British goods. #USHistory

Non-importation dries up British-American trade, and powerful British merchants get Parliament to back down. #USHistory

British occupation of Boston leads to Boston Massacre in 1770, a critical event on the path to rebellion. 5 colonists killed. #USHistory

British troops involved in Massacre are tried & acquitted or receive token punishment. Colonists react rebelliously. #USHistory

1773: Parliament passes Tea Act. This was not a tax, but rather let East India Co sell tea at very low prices in America. #USHistory

1773: the Boston Tea Party occurs when Colonists realize that Tea Act creates a monopoly on tea in the Colonies. #USHistory

1774: Parliament passes the Intolerable Acts in response to rebellious Colonists. More information: http://bit.ly/Ca315 #USHistory

Boston Port Act closes Port of Boston, gives King direct power to decide when to re-open it. #USHistory

Mass Govt Act unilaterally alters the govt of Mass, giving King direct control of Colonial Govt, limits town meetings. #USHistory

Admin of Justice Act allows Governor, not judge, to move trials of royal officials to locations outside of Mass. #USHistory

Quartering Act allows Royal Governors to house troops in colonial buildings if Colonists wouldn’t provide quarters. #USHistory

The Colonists view the Acts as a violation of their constitutional rights as British citizens and acts of tyranny. #USHistory

1774 the first Continental Congress is organized, acts to bring Colonial grievances before British govt. #USHistory

1774 Continental Congress also establishes non-importation of British goods via Association if Intolerable Acts not rescinded. #USHistory

British Govt do not allow Colonists (Franklin) to petition for redress of grievances, a right of British citizens. #USHistory

British Regulars decide to arrest Sons of Liberty leaders and confiscate arms and gunpowder of the militia. #USHistory

Ride of Paul Revere (The Regulars are coming! & lamps in North Church) to warn Revolutionary leaders. #USHistory

The battles of Lexington and Concord occur when American Militia confront the British Regulars. #USHistory

The first battle of the American Revolution is fought to prevent disarmament of British citizens by military. #USHistory

Read the Declaration of Independence for the full list of Colonial grievances against British crown: https://thelibertypapers.org/the-declaration-of-independence/ #USHistory

Taxation without Representation was merely one of about 30 grievances. Focus is violation of rights and tyranny. #USHistory

A clear understanding of American Revolution is that it is based on individual liberty and started because of gun rights. #USHistory

Enjoy!

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