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2023-09-10 07:48 by Karl Denninger
in States , 332 references
[Comments enabled]  

One has to wonder what sort of insanity has gripped the governor of New Mexico:

The Democrat issued an emergency public health order on Friday, suspending the right to carry guns in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding Bernalillo County for at least 30 days following the shooting deaths of three children in the area.

Local law enforcement officials expressed concerns that the governor's order violated Second Amendment rights. The governor acknowledged the ban may face legal challenges and addressed these concerns during a press conference.

Uh, not "might."

Given the extant Supreme Court decisions not only is it unconstitutional the Governor knows it.

Then again so was demanding you wear masks and take shots.

The Constitution is not the 10 suggestions, and if we are going to have Governors and others issue edicts that they know are unlawful right up front then we do not live in a Constitutional Republic.

What percentage of the population has to decide that not only is this unacceptable but that if she will not observe the Constitution neither will they and there will be no limits to said refusal?  Oh wait, we already have that in our cities, right?  "Gimme dat" -- otherwise known as "smash and grab", "mugging", "migration" and similar.  Well?

She has no power to take this action in the first place -- and didn't back in 2020 with the orders then either.  Oh sure, you can claim some statute gave her this or that but in fact an order or "law" contrary to the Constitution is void ab-initio.  So has said the US Supreme Court:

An unconstitutional act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation as inoperative as though it had never been passed.

So if you are "detained" under such an Unconstitutional Act that is not the act of a police officer, it is an armed felony assault and all of the actions you have a right to take to stop such an assault become lawful as is the case for any other armed felony assault.

There are some people who have raised the argument that a Bivens action should be considered (which provides the capacity for a person to sue a police officer in their personal capacity, and no qualified immunity claim succeeds to bar it.)  Well, probably not -- because Bivens applies to federal acts.  But -- and this is important, the New Mexico Governor signed a law in 2021 eliminating qualified immunity for police officers!

Thus you don't need Bivens; a cop in New Mexico bears personal liability for any unconstitutional act.

Oh by the way this is not a toothless statute either; you can personally sue the cop(s) involved for $2 million if you choose to pursue this via such a fashion rather then immediately terminating the felony assault in the first place.

And no, New Mexico does not have an unlimited homestead bankruptcy exemption and their "tools, vehicle and similar" personal property exemptions are fairly limited as well.

You have a purdy house, Ossifer.

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2023-09-08 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Social Issues , 270 references
[Comments enabled]  

All of it, when you get down to it.

The Genesis, if you will, of this column was a conversation I recently had with a woman who would like to get married again, and in fact that's her "gating factor" to dating someone -- that the other person want that too, in the Christian definition of marriage.

Ok, as far as it goes.

Except you can't have that in America today.  Indeed, odds are she didn't qualify in the first place given that she'd been married before (I didn't pry sufficiently to discover whether this was true -- but I bet it was.)

"Yes you can!" you may protest -- and she certainly did.

Nope.

There is no faith community that calls itself "Christian" that actually adheres to the Biblical standard of marriage and all of them are directly involved in false swearing before God at the time of the marriage.  That includes hers, incidentally, which means she is acting adverse to her own claimed desire yet she believes she can have what she's personally has a hand, every Sunday by being a part of that faith community, in destroying!

When I went through confirmation as an adult Catholic I challenged the church on this.  The pastor got rather annoyed with me for doing so too, since I was the only one going through RCIA that was not in the room because I wanted to marry a Catholic and the Church refuses if both are not Catholic.

Given what everyone else was doing there (I was doing it to take the sacrament, not because I needed a chit for something else, in this case marriage to a Catholic) I thought it was both a timely and in fact necessary conversation to have in that context.

Perhaps I should have paid better attention to the pastor's response to that as the same dynamic is why the Church didn't stomp on priests that abused kids over the decades prior to it blowing up in public where everyone could see it (and sue them over it.)

Contemplate how this works.  The current "social and government" structure of marriage is that you head down to the courthouse and apply for a license.  You ask permission of the Government to get married, in short.  This is claimed to be about record-keeping but that's a lie; the historical record is that the reason it was imposed was to place a "poll tax" on marriage and to prevent miscegenationthat is, to block marriage between white and black people and, before America, to keep other "undesirable" combinations from taking place.  Prior to that marriages among Christians were recorded in the family's bible, and in the Church's registry.  There was nothing wrong with this and may I remind you that the Christian churches predate and continue beyond the lifetime of most modern governments, so it is not possible to argue the "record-keeping" function of government is superior to that of faith communities.  Objectively it is not.

Yes, I know, the "protection" against miscegenation is longer effective as such was struck by the Supreme Court in America but that is in fact why it was instituted.  I could leave that alone but not what came with it and which none of the faiths will stand up and address.

By applying for said license and voluntarily executing it you submit to the statement of what marriage is by the State, all of which claim that "you're married until one of you doesn't want to be and, if one of you doesn't want to be then you agree that the process to dissolve that marriage will be whatever the State says now or in the future and you have no control over, or even an idea, what that process might be in the future."

Picture the person who was married in the 1950s and 30 years later his or her spouse wanted a divorce.  Do you think they had any reasonable expectation that the process of the 1980s would be what they'd have to undergo?  Not a prayer in Hell.  How many people married just a few years ago would consider "I believe my son is actually a girl!" to be valid reason for divorce if the other party disagreed and that such would be used to force the disagreeing party to pay support costs to undertake direct medical acts that, in the other party's view, are both immoral and unsupportable never mind being outrageously and permanently harmful to the child.

There is no contract of any sort ever that contains such a demand other than this one.  If you contract to borrow money for 30 years to buy a house the terms are entirely on the pages of the contract.  They cannot be changed unilaterally without your consent.  The same is true if you contract to buy a car or do any other thing, from the most-mundane (e.g. buying a hamburger at the local eatery) to the most-complex.

But your Church says otherwise and in fact explicitly endorses the actions of a State that it claims to disagree with.  Now some faith communities truly don't treat "marriage" as a lifetime commitment with no "outs" except for outrageous misbehavior.  And to be fair not even the most-stringent of evangelical Christian faiths demand continued cohabitation with a monster.

Many Christian churches do indeed enforce the premise that one cannot simply leave a spouse and then remarry.  But all of them will sign a formal government document that states that indeed you can do exactly that and in fact they will demand you go do that and bring it to them to execute if you want them to marry you even though they factually know that over the last decades there has been no actual "contract" in that the terms have been unilaterally changed and forced down their adherent's throats as soon as one party to said "sacrament" changes their mind.

Everything that is wrong with our society is encompassed right there.  It is the exact same premise that you find in so-called "college debt forgiveness" that so many scream about today.  You signed a contract that says you will pay the money back in exchange for its use to be paid to the college.  You then go to the college and, after having done so, you want to void the part that says you must pay the money back after receiving what they agreed to provide to you.  The demand you issue for "forgiveness" is a second sin in that it is a lie; nothing is being "forgiven" it is being shoved on someone else to pay, specifically the taxpayers of the country, and it is shoved upon them by force.  There is no charity -- that is, "forgiveness" -- involved.

Notice that nowhere in such demands is the claim made and litigated that you got screwed -- that is, that the college did not uphold their end of the bargain.  I have no quarrel with someone suing over that and, if successful, forcing the college to eat the debt.  They got paid originally so if they didn't deliver as promised the correct place for that to land is on them.  We have an adversarial process for such disputes and its perfectly fine to enable its use in such a case.

How is this different than what you see all around you with marriage and divorce?

It isn't; both instances occurred because one or both parties demanded the right to retroactively screw the other; that is neither actually intended to follow through on their commitment when it became difficult.  As long as it was easy all was good, but as soon as it wasn't easy then there had to be a way out even though the agreement did not include this provision.

What prevents a congregation from standing up as a group and insisting that their faith community not do that?

Nothing.

In fact The Constitution prohibits government interference with free exercise of religion in the First Amendment, so a faith community that performs religious marriages and refuses to execute government marriage licenses is entirely in the right and would win any such challenge.  Yes, you would not be "married" in the eyes of the State but that's irrelevant to the sacramental element of the rite; you are married before God and they can keep said records independently of the State, making them public so that if someone attempted to (for example) commit bigamy in the secular sense that could be trivially prosecuted.  Further, the Church could insist (as the Catholics currently do) that should either party want to end that in order to actually break that commitment in the sacramental sense the criteria they set forward as they see it in Scripture would have be met and proved.  If you don't then while they certainly can't stop you from going outside the faith (e.g. to a JP or other church) they have every right to refuse to marry you again.  Again, the Catholics already do that and as such there is no argument that they "couldn't"; that debate is settled.

Indeed in 2012 I penned a column on the rank hypocrisy of the Catholic Church on this exact point -- but it is not simply a function of marriage -- its everywhere in our society today and it is all equally wrong, foolhardy and a negative sum game that has a very high probability of eventually screwing you.

So why hasn't this happened in, for example, Baptist and other evangelical churches?

For the same reason it hasn't happened when it comes to student loans.  Indeed Barack Obama explicitly took all student lending onto the Federal Balance Sheet for the explicit purpose of destroying the contractual obligations of the borrowers when it came to private enforcement, rendering all of it under federal control where it could be changed and abrogated unilaterally and by force in an adverse way to uninvolved persons upon the mere protest of those who would be given the capacity to steal from the public.  Students, their parents and universities could have said "NO!" to all of this when Obama federalized the system but they all did not because every one of them wanted and in fact loves the idea of the capacity to abrogate said contract down the road AND STEAL FROM EVERYONE ELSE.

I was one of the few people I know who refused to participate in that garbage.

This is the precise same sin folks in that the sin was committed in contemplation in advance of its execution and the mess we have with college costs has been directly created by parents and students alike doing so.  Said cost issues were in the process of blowing up and being corrected by the marketplace on its own when Obama took this action.  Private lenders will not intentionally lend at a loss because they can't force someone else to cover the bill.  Government can and does but everyone who gave consent to and acted in consent beyond that point is a co-conspirator and committed the exact same sin by their participation.

The exact same thing is true when it comes to Obamacare and the health system.  Your refusal, as citizens, to put a stop to it is precisely why, three years ago, that was weaponized and then used to steal trillions of dollars of purchasing power across the entire economy by almost-literally everyone and today we're paying for precisely that in the form of a foldback in our economy and high, persistent inflation.

Now contemplate the couple that is married, remains married (they actually like each other), the kids are grown and gone and they blow through all of their savings, start ramping the credit cards and then whining that they're owed something more!  Some go even further and intentionally take actions that ruin their health then expect "someone else" to cover it.  Who and where is this "someone else" and why does that other person owe them this?

I have another example of this from yesterday among people I know but if I include it I'll have to put this article on the other side of the site.  So I'll leave it out because its just another example and not necessary to make my point.

An even more extreme example can be found with most of the "homeless" and "immigrants."  First they demand that you pay for their lodging in NYC, for example and then they trash the place and harass the citizens already there who go to work and pay taxes.  Exactly why are they "owed" lodging, food and clothing at all when they've not done a single minute of productive work in return for it and why is it that once you let them take that you're surprised when the next demand is that they have a right to have sex with anyone they think looks cute and, if refused, will take that too.  What do you think "A Girl in Iowa" was about?  A person who had no respect for the law deciding that he was going to take what he wanted -- and we all know what the result was.

Why are all these "migrants" coming to the United States?  It is precisely because they believe they are entitled to have housing, clothing and food without earning exactly as you believe you're entitled to a "marriage" that allegedly "complies" with God's commandments when you know damn well it does not because at the time you allegedly contracted it you agreed it does not.  Likewise you're "entitled" to all the "health care" you wish to consume without paying for it even if the reason you require it is that you ate yourself into a diabetic 500lb blob over the preceding 20 years -- or just had bad luck.  You're entitled to a college degree without being able to pay for it.  The bum on the street is entitled to break into a vacant hotel and crap all over the sidewalk, despoiling the property of others and the community at-large.  The migrant that raped and murdered A Girl in Iowa, and the other one who recently did the same thing to a much younger girl in Texas were both entitled to all the sex they wanted whether said girl was willing (or even of legal age) or not, weren't they?

All of this, when you boil it down, is the same thing folks.

And before you say "oh none of this would ever work" in America in the context of marriage alone..... may I present to you the Amish?

Can't be done eh?  Well then how come they do?

Yeah, I get it that some of those who are born there decide they don't like it and leave.  That's fine; its voluntary to be Amish.  So is choosing to be involved in a faith community that commits the sin of intentionally falsely representing things before God and allowing a government to continue to operate that will steal from you simply because someone stuck out their hand and said "gimme!"  Just as a church that loses all of its congregation's support will collapse so will a government.

People say that we should turn back to faith -- whether its "come back to Jesus", "come back to God" or similar.  Indeed I've often heard the quote from John Adams: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

True, however you are neither a moral or religious person if you permit your "House of Worship" to commit apostasy and remain in the building, never mind filling the tithe plate with your hard-earned funds.  Never mind that the very premise of voting for a lesser of two evils is to explicitly give license to evil through personal and intentional sin as you are committing an actual and explicit affirmative act.  If you do that you are not a moral or religious person and that is an irrefutable fact.

Indeed while you might escape judgment (I'm not qualified to speak for God of course) for turning one's head that which you formally and voluntarily participate in is another matter.  If you claim to be Christian then please explain how giving license to Beelzebub is different in form and character than giving license to Satan.

It is precisely because we as a people permit this and even explicitly act to further it that all of the above have and continue to occur.

Resolving the problem begins right here and until I see a faith community in the "mainstream" United States that will do so all of you who engage in that rhetoric are lying.  You personally want that escape route for yourself that allows you to "put" your issues, whether through your own hand or simply bad luck on others by force and sacramental marriage, as claimed by Christians, is just a small part of it.

And while fixing it in the context of marriage would be good, fixing it everywhere would be much better -- and, in fact, if we intend to avoid the collapse of our modern society it is the only rational set of actions that has a reasonable expectation of success.

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2023-09-05 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Social Issues , 375 references
[Comments enabled]  

What sort of insanity is this?

"We know very well we cannot litigate our way or arrest our way out of the problem, but our police need some teeth to start dealing with the squatting," Knell told the outlet. "They’re just causing so many problems."

You can't "litigate or arrest" your way out of squatting and third-world human waste?

That's a lie.

Indeed you'll do exactly that (arrest!) someone who takes their camper, sits on a piece of land within your jurisdiction and runs the waste hose out onto open ground.  Justly so too, I might add.

The difference between a modern society's health problems and those of the 1600s and 1700s, indeed all the way through the 1800s, were largely about sanitation.

We don't allow someone to use a chamber pot and toss it on the curb in the morning rather than pay their water and sewer bill, or have a permitted septic system and well, for this very reason.  Diseases such as dysentery and cholera were all about sanitation, or rather the lack thereof.

"Squatting" is a term for adverse possession where there's no forcible entry.  If you walk onto someone's vacant land, with no signage and no fence, then camp on it without despoiling where you are, you're "squatting."

What these people did wasn't "squatting" -- it was burglary, which is a criminal felony.  In addition in virtually every case felony destruction or conversion of said property also is a separate and distinct subsequent offense.  The "squatting" can't happen without first committing the felony; this is like saying that someone raping a corpse has merely committed abuse of a corpse while ignoring the murder they committed first to create the corpse.

"Burglary" is the act of entry with the intent to commit a crime inside, including but certainly not limited to the despoilation of the place or its contents.  It is a crime to reside in someone else's home without permission or to commit waste or theft upon the contents.  No physical damage is required either; lifting a closed window is sufficient, even if it isn't locked.

Many states have separated the crime of "breaking and entering", restricting it to those places that are not typically occupied.  A commercial or residential structure that has as part of its essential purpose occupation renders the entry burglary and a felony.  All of these offenses carry prison terms, often of five to ten years or more.

"There’s a certain part of the homeless population, whether substance abuse or mental illness, that is getting them to where they don’t want to conform to society’s rules," Knell told the outlet. "When they do that, they’re not allowed to go in the shelter, which means they’re just out and about in our community raising hell.

This has been true forever.  In the 1990s there were homeless living on Lower Wacker Drive in Chicago, especially in winter months.  It was a bid to avoid freezing to death; the street has three levels in many areas and the bottom one has air vents that the various high-rises exhaust air through.  Chicago sees negative temperatures in the winter on a fairly regular basis and with the wind its even worse, of course; being below grade and having some above-freezing air exhausted is a pretty dramatic difference, literally that between living and not.

The city also had homeless shelters but you can't bring booze, drugs or weapons in them, nor can you be wild-eyed crazy and abusive toward the other people in there. A large percentage of the homeless are homeless because they're wild-eyed crazy and either unwilling or incapable of spending the night or day in a place without a bottle, shooting up or being verbally (or physically) abusive to others in their presence.  We decided back in the 1980s (thanks Reagan!) to close the various state nuthouses in the general case with no plan to deal with those who were certifiable or seriously drug and alcohol-addled other than leaving them alone.

Ok, fine, if that's the choice -- right up until they crap on the streets or break into property owned by someone else.

One is a serious public health hazard and the other a felony.

Can we provide for a place for homeless people to go take a dump?  Probably.  But if someone abuses the privilege of said place to do so and either degrades or destroys it then we have to treat that as a felony offense and arrest them, throwing them in prison because if we don't then we are inviting the return of literal medieval disease outbreaks!

We don't need new laws.

We need enforcement of existing laws, specifically those against burglary and it is simple enough for there to be a presumption that if someone is living in filth with no water, sewer and electrical service in a place that they got there by burglary which is a criminal felony because no landlord is going to knowingly permit that situation to exist.

Throwing anyone "squatting" in prison unless the owner of said property confirms the person there is in fact a valid tenant with the very-reasonable presumption that if the place is in disarray or utilities are not functional that said person broke in and you've got an answer -- don't you?  The reasonable presumption is that they committed burglary and that's a criminal felony carrying years in prison so start treating that event as what it is.

STOP MAKING EXCUSES MAYOR!

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2023-09-04 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Market Musings , 316 references
[Comments enabled]  

Tossing back some beers today along with the grill cooking up some steaks, chicken breasts or hot dogs?

Most of America is.

Funny, isn't it, how we get one day called "holiday" if you go to work and actually well, you know, labor, but if you have blue hair and 245 different genders, or are queer or whatever you get a whole month for your "pride."

Last time I looked one was a function of personal "fulfillment" and didn't benefit society in any way.  The other pays for literally every single government program along with putting a roof over your own head, food on the aforementioned grill and beer in the fridge.

Why do I think we have this all backwards?

Never mind all the other "months" yet.... one day for being industrious.

Just like one day for kicking the British Monarchy out of this land -- and plenty of people gave their lives in order to do it too.  Their personal scoreboard might have had some number greater than zero on the "Home" team side but the "1" on the "Visitors" side was quite clearly-scored.

Speaking of labor we were of course treated to the Biden Administration "touting" their economic record Friday after the jobs report came out.  I don't blame them for the obfuscation or even outright lies: They're politicians, so what do you expect whenever their lips -- or fingers, nowadays -- are moving.

It is my considered opinion that the markets, for what its worth, are ridiculous.  Then again they were in 2006 and '07 too, and kept on for a while.  Its rather interesting that one of the hedgie folks that was putting together complex instruments for others to buy and then shorting them is doing the "pump up things" game once again.  I argued at the time in 2008 that all the people involved in this should go to prison with every nickel clawed back not just from them but also from their investors, at absolute minimum, because their actions were, quite clearly, in bad faith.  None of that happened of course and thus here we are with the same sort of "pump it up" game being played again, this time in AI.

You can "rah rah" all you want but what I see around here -- and in my travels over the last months -- is an economy that is quite soft.  Rooms (and vacancies) over Labor Day at rates that, for the time of year, remind me of 2009 -- or 2000 and 2001.  What has historically been three days of "sold out" around here is not even one; only Saturday had wildly-jacked room prices and a decent number of "sold out" displays.  Wanted a room here Friday or Sunday?  No problem and, while more expensive than in the dead of winter, not the crazy-land pricing that you'd expect from a holiday weekend.

Just here in TN?  Uh, no.  Down in my old stomping grounds much the same deal.  Wanted a room Labor Day weekend on Saturday?  No problem.  Sunday?  Cheaper, and not a little; even less of a problem.  On Labor Day weekend.

Oh you really couldn't get better weather here for the weekend either. Now down there, well, its the usual mix in NW FL this time of year, meaning it might storm real good, but not for very long.  You know, rain?  No impact from the recent hurricane there so that's off the table as an excuse as well.

Something unexpected this way comes in the next few months folks.  The various touts all over the media and political sphere can put all the lipstick on the pig they wish but a pig it still is, and if you kiss it you'll figure that out rather quickly.

I don't expect the charade to hold for much longer in the economy and markets.  By the time snow flies my wager is that we'll be talking about Grinchmas.

Enjoy the beer but I'd keep something stronger around you can take a few good belts of along with a stick for your teeth.

You're likely to need it.

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2023-09-02 15:54 by Karl Denninger
in POTD , 131 references
 

No, not your lips silly..... the cute artist's work.

If this doesn't suit your fancy, check out the rest!

 

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