Emily Feder's piece entitled "At JFK Airport, Denying Basic Rights Is Just Another Day at the Office" on Alternet is excellent in a bone-chilling way. Feder writes, I was recently stopped by Homeland Security as I was returning from a trip to Syria. What I saw in the hours that followed shocked and disturbed me. She concludes, In the past five years I have worked for human rights and refugee advocacy organizations in Serbia, Russia and Croatia, including the International Rescue Committee and USAID. I have traveled to many different places, some supposedly repressive, and have never seen people treated with the kind of animosity that Homeland Security showed that night. In Syria, border control officers were stern but polite. At other borders there have been bureaucracies to contend with -- excruciating for both Americans and other foreign nationals. I've met Russian officials with dead, suspicious looks in their eyes and arms tired from stamping so many visas, but in America, the Homeland Security officials I encountered were very much alive -- like vultures waiting to eat.

Feder's observations accord with my own, far more limited travel experiences. Even the customs guards in Communist China were professional and polite (in a bored way) compared to almost every American security or customs official I've encountered. Travel agents up here (in Canada) say that one of the most common requests they hear is "How do I avoid making a connection in the U.S.?" Going through an American aiport is like being processed through a prison or an animal stockyard. And Feder is correct; one of the most unsettling aspects is that American guards are not just doing a job; they seem to be emotionally invested in it and swollen with an arrogant enjoyment of authority.

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A heads-up about an email I just received. KoPubCo -- owned by friend and long-time anarchist Victor Koman -- is having a summer sale of material that is difficult to find anywhere else...and nearly all of it is at least 20% off. The sale also includes: "an eBay auction of one hardbound edition of all 101 issues of New Libertarian Weekly assembled and bound in black leatherette. These are the actual issues of the longest-running libertarian weekly in a limited hardbound, numbered edition of only 32 copies. This is copy number 13. The edition appeared in the early 1990's when associate editor Victor Koman collated and professionally bound together file copies of the newsweekly. Bidding has already begun at a mere $9.99, but is expected to go up as the Thursday end date approaches. Get your bids in now for this extremely rare piece of history."

Vic concludes, "final preparations are taking place for the hardback first edition of Samuel Edward Konkin III’s lost classic, An Agorist Primer." To be placed on KoPubCo's email list, write to kopubcoATaolDOTcom.

Ah, another "spam morning." I've just received 140 email bounce messages from email that was rejected as spam, and that used the public ifeminists.net address as its return address.

Any email address that is posted on a web page or otherwise made "public" will get harvested by spam bots, first so they can send spam to it, but second so they can use it as a "legitimate" return address when they send spam to others. And then spam filters bounce them back, not to the originator, but to us. It used to be these arrived in a steady trickle. But lately I've noticed we'll go a month without any of these, and then get a blast of them in one day. The spammers are adapting their behavior....to what, I've no idea.

Of course, since I need to see real bounce messages from email that we've actually sent, I can't just filter all of these into the Junk folder. So I've now written filters to divert almost all bounce messages into a Bounces folder. (Unlike spam, which tries to sneak past email filters, bounce messages use a small number of unique phrases in the subject line.) Then when a bucketful arrives in a lump, I can toss them all in the trash in one operation.

You take the good news where you can find it, I guess:


Damned if I know why this was the Air Force's business, anyway. I suspect they started this because the mighty intellects at the Pentagon observed that the word "cyberspace" contains "space", though of course network technology and rocketry are two totally different fields. It's a relief to see this suspension, because it's a safe bet that they were working on cyberspace offenses as much as defenses.

I don't like Larry King -- something about the man makes me cringe -- but I may tune in to his show tonight in order to get more info on the 'did he or didn't he?' scandal surrounding McCain's performance during the Saddleback interview on Saturday. The interviewer mega-pastor Rich Warren will be the guest in the hot seat and I want to assess further whether or not I was deceived by McCain. In this week's ifeminists e-newsletter, I wrote:



(BTW, you can subscribe to the free e-newsletter at ]ifeminists ; click the "Subscribe" button at the bottom of the left column)

So what's the what of the scandal? It now seems likely that McCain's stellar performance was due to previewing the questions.

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We know about how various political systems would deal with your owning two cows, but what about various financial instruments?



(Hat tip to Groklaw NewsPicks.)

Common Dreams News Center trumpets the headline California Becomes First State to Condemn Use of Torture in 'War on Terror'. The condemnation was specifically "aimed at preventing California health professionals from engaging in coercive interrogations of detainees at Guantánamo and other U.S. military prisons. Senate Joint Resolution 19 instructs the state’s licensing boards to inform California doctors, psychologists and other health professionals of their obligations under national and international law [specifically, the Geneva Convention] relating to torture. The boards will warn the licensees that they may one day be subject to prosecution if they participate in interrogations that do not conform to international standards of treatment of prisoners."

I find it difficult to applaud the measure...not because I disagree with its content. I am still too stunned by the surrounding circumstances: SJR19 took three years to win approval in what is arguably the most 'progressive' state in America and 49 states have yet to make a similar statement. Moreover, the article states, The California State Senate gave final approval to the resolution in a 21-13 roll call vote. In other words, thirteen members of the California state senate voted to allow doctors to continue participating in torture -- 34% of them endorsed the policy explicitly and under their own names. That is, when their names were called, 31 senators spoke up to say (the equivalent of) "I endorse torture by doctors". This stuns me.

My thanks to LewRockwell.com for pointing me to this piece by Cory Doctorow, on the latest damnfoolishness of the recording industry. I particularly appreciate his observations on how the industry is trying to circumvent the rule of law:


As I've said before, just because a private enterprise has the right to do something, doesn't mean that libertarians have to like it or approve of it. And when the record companies and Internet Service Providers enlist the government in their schemes -- as in the U.K., U.S., and Canada -- then they deserve no respect at all.

Clay Bennett's Obama; Glenn McCoy's Olympic Score; Pat Oliphant's The Bear; Michael Ramirez's Russia's Most Effective Weapon; Steve Sacks' Democratic Convention Protest; and, Dan Wasserman's Putin's Soul.

I realize this has been blogged to death already, but it deserves quote of the week status:


I submit that anyone so thoroughly out of touch with reality has no business commanding the armed forces of Grenada, let alone the U.S. You call this "experience"?

Murray Rothbard's theoretical approach to history included the idea and importance of what he called "the lone crazy." The lone crazy is a wild card -- the individual (or small group) who seems to appear out of nowhere and acts in an unpredicted manner that dramatically and forever alters the world as we know it. An example would be the nationalist zealot Gavrilo Princip who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914 and, so, sparked World War I.

Murray's point was that the best-laid plans of policy-makers can be shattered by a single bullet fired from one man's hand; future history is neither predictable nor amenable to social engineering. This Rothbardian theory came to mind while I was thinking about the current conflict between Georgia and Russia which, admittedly, involves a whole lot of non-lone crazies. But the sudden conflict stands as another example of how the balance of global power can suddenly and surprisingly shift. While neocons were making other plans, Russia abruptly asserted its status as a super-power that would not brook interference with its zones of influence. (In stating this, I do not mean to show admiration or sympathy for Russia...or Georgia, for that matter.)

While the West (largely the U.S.) was busy planning to include Georgia in its zones of influence -- e.g. through inclusion in NATO -- Russia acted in a lone crazy manner that changed the conditions of history/politics in this region. Arguably, given how important Russia is to the Middle East, the conflict with Georgia has changed that history as well. Certainly, it has exposed the weakness of America/Bush who can do little more than shake a forefinger at Putin and Medvedev.

The latest addition to this site's archive is Liberty's Library...

Over the course of Benjamin Tucker’s periodical Liberty (1881-1908), the subscribers were often regaled with “recommended readings”—in essence, the “must” titles for individualists to have on their bookshelves. Those books and periodicals are listed here. The descriptions are Liberty’s own, usually rendered on the last page of the issue where books were offered for sale through the Liberty office (Boston) and then Tucker’s own bookstore (New York).

Access Tucker's recommended library here or by clicking on articles in the toolbar above and, then, proceeding to "Individualist Anarchism -- History."

Thanks to Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings, I learn that Barack Obama's real birth certificate has finally been unearthed. Also Glenn McCoy's I'd Take a Bullet For You, Clay Bennett with Ready to Lead! and Pawn Shop,
Berkeley Breathed's "Naughty CEO" nightmare, and finally xkcd with the clearest explanation yet of another problem with voting machines.

(First appeared April 2008; Foundation for Economic Eduction; The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty)

By Wendy McElroy

H. Beatty Chadwick, a former corporate lawyer, has been imprisoned in a Pennsylvania county jail for over 13 years even though he has never been arrested, criminally accused or tried. Chadwick is imprisoned on ‘contempt of court’ charges that sprang from a contentious divorce. His case dramatizes an ongoing debate over the use and misuse of civil contempt imprisonment.

Many people view contempt of civil court as an uncommon and relatively benign sanction that is flexed only to enforce court orders or respect for the court. If the sanction is seen to have bite, it is usually in connection with high-profile cases in which journalists refuse to reveal their sources and, so, are imprisoned until they relent or it is clear that further imprisonment will not compel compliance.

In reality, such imprisonment seems to be commonplace and it can devastate lives. Arguably, the most common form of civil imprisonment is for non-payment of child support. When a ‘deadbeat’ parent is jailed for non-payment by a family court judge, the actual charge is contempt of civil court. How many ‘deadbeats’ are imprisoned each year is unknown because family courts are not required to maintain such records and rarely do so. This means that family court judges act with less transparency and, so, less accountability than those in other venues. Moreover, there is no national database of ‘deadbeat’ parents incarcerated each year. In short, there is an amazing lack of data on such imprisonment, with estimates ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands.

What is contempt of court?

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Your article "Return of Debtor's Prison?"was outstanding. I had written a treatise on this (Contempt of Court--Arbitrary Excess of Power) several years ago, and it can be found at my website.

One of the critical issues with civil contempt is that it now has a standard of proof of clear and convincing evidence. This is higher than the civil standard of preponderance of the evidence, but lower than the criminal standard of beyond reaonable doubt. Clear and convincing evidence requires much more than a judge's say-so. Now, it requires a full-scale investigatory matter requiring a trial by jury, or at least the right to appointed, competent, effective counsel (I've had situations where real estate and patent lawyers were appointed to people facing contempt and jail time, when they needed an attorney knowledgeable in constitutional law, criminal law and family law). Given that 49 out of 50 states (NH is the only one that doesn't) now require appointment of counsel for indigent parents in child support enforcement cases, there is no difference in civil contempt and enforcing a child support order. In fact, child support orders have been declared as judgment debts on the date they are due by every state. Child support has been defined as a "civil" debt and not a "special kind of debt" by all of the the Federal Courts of Appeals that have had these cases before them on interstate criminal matters.

The issue is not whether the matter turns on the "civil" or "criminal" aspect of the case, but whether it deprives a person of liberty. If it does, according to most states' caselaw, statutory law and constitutions, then there can be no imprisonment without full criminal due process, e.g., right to trial by jury, right to appointed competent, effective counsel, right to present evidence, witnesses and testimony, right to an ability to pay hearing, etc.). In the Chadwick case, the PA courts are out-of-bounds with their ruling. This is because it has gone past the remedial and is now past the punitive. The theoretical ability to be jailed for the rest of one's life without any due process has been brought to fruition by this case.

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