I'm serious; it's time for our nation to undergo a divorce.

The "liberal enclaves" of NY, Oregon, California, Chicago and similar all claim to be the "bastions of our economy."  The problem is that they don't give a crap about how this nation was founded, why it was founded, or what the Constitution is -- or why.  When one of their politicians does something that's illegal and unconstitutional (e.g. DACA) they don't care but when a later politician tries to reverse it they find a black-robed dickhead who has no right to sit on anything but a toilet seat to order that the original illegal act be continued.  The same is true for the 2nd Amendment; they can't get the votes to actually repeal it so people like Cuomo try to put anyone who disagrees with them out of business.  To boycott would be fine except that this isn't a boycott of willing people; it's a felony (18 USC 242) as coercion under color of law or authority is involved and the 2nd Amendment is a civil right. When a leftist AG runs firearms to known international criminals running drugs it's ok, but if you are someone he doesn't like you go to prison.  When a sailor takes a photo of a submarine and never shares it with anyone he goes to prison for violating the law with regard to classified information but when a leftist has 30,000 emails, including thousands of classified ones on her server in violation of the same law and they get stolen by the Chinese due to her incompetence and law-breaking the very same federal law enforcement officials are too busy eating donuts or looking for fake Russian spies.  Meanwhile a real Chinese spy was employed by a sitting Senator -- Feinswine -- and she skates and the spy is allowed to "retire"!  Speaking of cops you lefties seem to have a problem with cops who can't shoot straight and those who just shoot anyone they want, then plant evidence.  Too bad all your lefty surveillance crap catches you once in a while -- not that any of you care since that jackass isn't in jail either!

To top it all off the NY Times, your "gray lady 2-bit whore", just hired an avowed racist with a multi-year public record of her hated of white people -- and cops.  When called on it the paper doubled down and claimed they knew of her record before they hired her.  Well now that tells me everything I need to know about both the NY Times and NY the State and City; you can all go fuck yourselves blind and should a block-wide asteroid hit dead-center in Manhattan tomorrow I will tip a glass of Glengoyne 21 since God will have finally demonstrated that he actually exists.

I could literally fill up the disk on the server where this blog resides with a bullet-point list of your crooked crap but you don't give a fuck -- right?

I don't give a flying fuck if you're gay, straight, claim to be any of some four hundred genders or like sheep -- as long as the sheep consents. Oh, that consent thing applies to humans too, and that they be adults, both of which seem to be foreign concepts to a lot of leftists -- including a shit-ton of priests and essentially all of Hollyweird.  How many of those people have you lefties shielded from going to prison for buttfucking boys, to say nothing of the girls and women those jackasses have sexually assaulted or sold into slavery?  I literally can't count them all.

Then there's Portland, where the cops were ordered not to arrest a mob that was laying siege to a government building.  Why were they doing it?  Because that government agency was enforcing a law they didn't like.  They couldn't get it repealed or changed in Congress so instead they lay siege and got away with it.

So let's cut the crap eh?

I want a divorce and I think we need to discuss terms.

You see, those of us you hate -- we make most of your energy and food.  We make the chemicals that purify your water and treat your sewage.  We drive the trucks that bring all the cheap crap you want from Chinese slaver factories into your cities so Pajama Boy can play his "video game sports."  In short without us you're utterly fucked, but without you we lose..... facefuck, twatter, goolag, crapple and the stock exchange.  Wow man, that would be bad.  Oh, and we have about 80% of the nation's landmass too.

I think we have the better negotiating position, to be frank.  Can you live without something to eat, clean water to drink, working sewage disposal, natural gas to heat your homes and businesses, electrical power and fuel for your vehicles -- to say nothing of the trucks bringing all that crap into your city (including all those nice hypo needles in San Francisco)?  Oh, and by the way eventually one of the salafists you love so much is going to cart a few kilos of carfentanyl into one of your towns (he can probably have it sent over by ePacket for pennies!) and figure out the rather basic mechanics of getting it into your water supply, at which point a half million or more of you are all going to die at once.  You did pay attention to the recent Toronto jackwad who's brother was caught with something on the order of fifty kilos of that crap, right?  He's in a drug-caused vegetative state (my best guess is an accidental own goal while trying to handle it without the rather serious clean-room lab style precautions necessary) and thus we can't exactly ask him what he really intended to do with that much but I can assure you of this -- he wasn't going to sell it to junkies, given that one grain of salt worth of that crap is enough to kill you.  Oh, incidentally, the original source was almost-certainly your most-favored "free-trade" Asian nation -- China.

I suggest that this divorce can be quite peaceable and it's not very hard to achieve.  We return to the Federalism we were contractually promised, and you agreed to be contractually bound to in 1789.  You want your shootings, corrupt cops, jackbooted mayors and insane salafists?  Have 'em.  You figure out how to tax enough to pay for it and how you're going to deal with all the shit -- both literal and political -- that come with it.  If one of the wonderful people you insist be allowed in poisons your entire city, you deal with it.

But we won't put up with any of that crap any more nor will we tolerate any attempt to force us to, and that includes paying for it.  Your unfunded mandates shoved down the throat of the states that don't want them won't be tolerated for one more second.  Nor will your willful refusal to honor to the letter the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, not to mention the Tenth.

I think it's time for those of us who have had enough of NY, Portland and San Francisco thinking that Federalism is some quaint notion to point out where the actual necessities they enjoy today come from -- and who makes it possible for them to have same.

Let's have peace -- but only through mutual respect and a cessation of not only your intentional and wanton violence but theft besides.  I propose repeal of the 17th Amendment, returning the Senate's election to the State Legislatures, as a good starting point and indication of good faith on both sides.

I suppose you can call this a request.

I suspect you'll refuse, and when, not if you do (likely by simple silence and further aggression toward those of us who disagree with you) I'm not going to be the one who starts shooting -- you've already got that distinction in your pick-a-mob for today, tomorrow and yesterday. Eventually, however, I suspect you'll find that the 80+% of the nation's landmass that disagrees with you will reach a point where they give no more of a fuck than your mob-of-the-day does and then the time for politeness will have passed.

I hope I'm wrong about that, by the way -- but given how corrupt you are, and how you think you can just take whatever you want, whenever you want -- I doubt it.

Can you stop the caterwauling already?

Look folks, just cut the crap.  Seriously.  There's nothing legitimate about SCOTUS at the present time.  Nothing.

And no, neither left or right did that to the SCOTUS -- not Bush, not Obama, not Clinton and certainly not Trump.  The SCOTUS did that to itself, and we the people then ratified it -- and it happened a long time ago.

To make the example and underline the point I shall go back to the root of the problem we have today with the Judiciary, with the SCOTUS and with the Federal Government generally: The 17th Amendment, proposed on 5/12/1912 and ratified less than a year later on 4/8/1913.

Following that came Wickard .v. Filburn, 317 US 111, decided in 1942.  That decision was unanimous.

I bring this up because I was sent the following on Kavanaugh, which is a decision he filed a dissent on related to Obamacare, known as Seven-Sky .v. Holder.

Kavanaugh has been "credited" with giving Roberts the idea that he could "recast" Obamacare as a tax, and by doing so providing him the means to "save" Obamacare.  Nonsense.  Kavanaugh argued in his dissent that the Anti-Injunction Act prohibited the court from granting relief and never reached the merits at all.

This is important because, if you remember, Roberts didn't just recast the "penalty" (impermissible) as a tax -- he recast it as a Direct Tax, which is constitutionally impermissible on its face and has been since the founding of the nation except on a capitated basis.

In other words it is Constitutional to lay a $10 per-person direct tax -- but you can't condition or vary it.

There were multiple attempts to lay an income tax and every one was struck down as a violation of the Constitution, leading to the 16th Amendment, which permitted same.  But the 16th Amendment only authorized taxes on income; it did not override the general prohibition on non-capitated direct taxes in the Constitution.

That is, Roberts re-wrote an unconstitutional "penalty" into an Unconstitutional Tax -- a black letter unconstitutional tax that was unconstitutional in 1789 and remains so today -- and yet nobody has done a damned thing about it.

This is, I remind you, despite the Congressional Record from the time of the crafting of the PPACA containing evidence that Congress knew they couldn't define the "penalty" to be a tax as they knew that was a facially-unconstitutional direct tax so they intentionally worded it as a penalty to try to get around that infirmity!

I bring all this up, especially the elements of Wickard .v. Filburn, because if you read the above linked opinion -- not Kavanaugh's dissent but the opinion that was issued -- you will in fact find myriad references to Filburn as controlling precedent.

But Wickard .v. Filburn was nothing less than a complete re-write of the Constitution so as to remove the separation of power between the Federal Government and the States!

The decision held that a farmer who grew a crop for his own internal consumption -- that of his family and his animals on said farm, never entering one grain of same into commerce, was nonetheless subject to federal regulation on how much of said crop he could grow or whether he could grow it at all.

The claim was that because his act of growing same would mean he wouldn't need to buy as much, or none at all, of the same product or something that provided the same benefit (e.g. was food and thus sustained life) that affected interstate commerce.

By this decision the Supreme Court completely tore up the entire Constitution; it rendered literally no subject matter beyond federal regulation.  You can, under this premise, have a federal law passed making it illegal for you to have a toilet in your house with the intended effect of forcing you to go down the street and pay $1 to take a crap each time.  Why?  Because if you have a toilet you will not need to use the public one at $1 for each use as much, or even at all.  Since the pipe (for the water!) might travel in interstate commerce this affects same, and thus federal regulation attaches.

So given that precedent, and that the correct and immediate response to that decision was not taken by the States (specifically, to immediately secede and call up their National Guard units to enforce same until and unless the Constitution was restored as the contract with the States had been breached egregiously and without any possibility of recovery through peaceful means) what do you think was going to happen with Obamacare?

Here lies the problem with Kavanaugh -- and all the rest of these black-robed bastards: They know good and goddamn well the Constitution prohibits nearly everything in Federal Law today and they don't give a shit.

More to the point neither do you so long as the violations are to your liking!  Nowhere is the Federal Government empowered to regulate public schools.  There is no Federal Constitutional right to an education -- of any sort.  Yet there is title after title bearing on exactly this, forcing expense down the states' throats.  The States have constitutional guarantees at the state level for a public educational system but nothing allows federal reach into same.

THE SUPREME COURT DOES NOT HAVE THE POWER TO REWRITE THE CONSTITUTION YET IT ROUTINELY HAS DONE EXACTLY THAT.

The Founders were very specific on creation of a weak federal government and strong states.  They did it for the specific reason that they fully expected and anticipated exactly the sort of schism between the people we have today.  They expected and designed the federalist system so that 13 (now 50) political laboratories would be empowered to each come up with their own set of rules, regulations, taxes and benefits.

The Federal Government's role was to (1) prevent invasion whether by stealth or force (gee, they're doing that today, right?), (2) to prevent states from trying to rig the outcome of their political experiments by laying what amount to tariffs on goods and services crossing state lines and (3) to protect against infringement of individual rights (all of which pre-exist government and are not granted by same) such as the right to speak, the right to freedom of worship, the right to self-defense (thus the Second Amendment) and the various collection of due process rights such as the right to a trial by jury, to confront one's accuser and to be free from searches and seizures except upon issuance of a warrant containing the specifics of probable cause, and strictly limiting what was to be searched for, and where.

To the extent a state wished to enact a tax and spending program that issued welfare they could.  But they couldn't compel any other state to go along with it or pay for it as absolute control of the upper house -- the Senate -- rested in STATE LEGISLATURES.  In other words the people had their proportional representation (in the US House) and the State Legislatures had theirs (in the Senate.)

To pass a federal law, say much less a Constitutional Amendment, you needed concurrence of both.

The 17th Amendment ended that.  The State Legislatures were permanently stripped of the foundation of their power at the Federal Level -- the requirement that they concur through the Senate before any Federal Law could be passed.

Further, let me point out that at the time of Wickard, and indeed continually both before and since, the US Congress could have constrained the power of the US Supreme Court.  Congress has the power to establish tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court (and over which it has appellate jurisdiction), and has (Article I, Sec 8)

But the Constitution also says this in Article 3 Section 2 about Congressional Regulation of the Supremes:

2: In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Congress can control the boundaries of any appeal, for instance.  And while Congress cannot prevent any case in which Original Jurisdiction rests these are a tiny, in fact vanishingly small, percentage of the whole of what the Supreme Court hears.

But it hasn't.

So what about Kavanaugh personally?  Well, he's opined that assault weapon bans are unconstitutional.  He's right -- they are and so are all other federal gun laws except those bearing on interstate commerce.  Laws banning or regulating, including licensing or permitting, the "keeping and bearing" of arms are black-letter unconstitutional.  Period.

But he's also opined that the President is immune from indictment.  Uh, no.  That's not in the Constitution; I know how he reaches that viewpoint but it simply isn't in the enumerated powers and with good reason.  A primary principle of statutory and Constitutional construction is that words that are present mean what they say and those that are omitted cannot be added in; the writers are presumed to have omitted the words you might imagine you'd like to see on purpose.  Indeed the founding principle of this nation is that all are created equal.  One cannot be equal if one is immune from the legal strictures that apply to anyone else as a consequence of being elected or appointed to a political office.  Finally the Constitution is a negative document not just by inference but by actual word in the 10th Amendment; that which is not specifically delegated as a power does not exist at the federal level -- including for federal office holders!

Does Kavanaugh have an excellent intellectual background and ability to reason?  Absolutely.  But is that the test?  It ought not be yet the usual pablum of "obeying the written Constitution" was trotted out by him at the lectern (it is not a podium folks -- learn the difference Mr. President!  You stand on a podium, and you speak behind a lectern!) -- which is an utterly common yet blatant and outrageous lie uttered by all Supreme Court nominees.

When you wind it all up what you have here is a nominated man who has the very same idea of making the Constitution read the way he wants it to that Sotomayer and Kagen have -- along with others before them and plenty of robe-wearers right now.  Nor can you point to Scalia, who once again "found" things that simply never existed.  They simply have a different idea of how they want the Constitution to read.

Yes, it is a fact that actually obeying the dictates of the Constitution means that a huge percentage of the alleged laws on the books -- like 80% of them or more -- simply go "poof" like a fart in a Church.  That's how it's supposed to work.  Nearly the entire federal gun law set, for example, is unconstitutional.  Ditto for the "scheduling" of drugs; Congress knew damn well they had to pass an amendment to ban alcohol.  Alcohol is a drug, and a drug of abuse.  Well?

Then there's Roe.  If you haven't read the actual opinion you should; it has a quite-full exposition on the history of abortion included in it.  It's an extraordinarily well documented piece of judicial reasoning, whether you agree with the conclusion (and its limitations; there was no blanket right to abortion contained in the opinion) or not.  But Roe, in the end, turns on whether you have an individual right to privacy, which the justices found.  Well, if you do and it vests in the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, how come it hasn't been applied to anything else?  Why can a private entity collect all manner of private data and sell it to anyone who they want including the government, without a warrant?  Why can the government use a DNA database without a warrant?  Why can the government (and it does, by the way, in many if not all states by now) collect DNA from all newborn children and catalog that?

In short how do you have a constitutional right to privacy if you can't actually enforce it anywhere except in the abortion doctor's office?

Cut the bullshit folks.  Those screaming on both sides of the aisle are simply demanding that the government put its boot on your neck as they want it to, and not as the other side wants.

NOBODY is arguing for a return to the boundaries of the Constitution, never mind that pesky 17th Amendment we can't get rid of without a revolution.

With that said I predict Kavanaugh will be confirmed -- before the election.

So says Judge Nap

Because the Supreme Court has ruled that there are no word choice errors in the Constitution and the words of its text mean what they say, the Framers must have carefully and intentionally chosen to protect every person, not just every citizen. "Person," in this context, has been interpreted to mean any human being on American-controlled soil against whom the American government is proceeding, irrespective of how the person got there.

That's correct, but that doesn't prevent Trump from stopping an invasion without implicating said due process rights.

And let's be clear: Those coming here are not "immigrants"; they're invaders.

An "immigrant" presents themselves at a legal border crossing, explains their intentions, and requests a decision on entry, which they abide.

An invader claims they need no authorization nor will they abide the decisions of officials; they claim a right (which they do not have) to take what they want.

How do you stop invaders?

Order the border sealed, except at legal crossing points which are not US territory until you are past them, enforced by the military.

The Constitution not only authorizes this action it REQUIRES said action (Article V Section 4):

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

It is not an option or choice for the federal government to do this.

IT IS A DUTY FOR THE EXECUTIVE TO PREVENT THE INVASION OF ANY STATE BY FOREIGN NATIONALS.  PERIOD.

No entry except through lawful means at a legal border crossing, period.

And yes, period means period.  It means if necessary you shoot those who, after clear warning (which a fence plus a pointed gun certainly is, and admits no language barrier!) choose to attempt to proceed.

There is no due process right implicated in preventing an invasion.

A person coming here for the pure reason of accessing someone else's economic wealth is in fact invading for the purpose of plunder.  War is, in virtually every case, about plunder.  The taking of territory is plunder.  The taking of people (e.g. rape, assault, murder, etc) is plunder.  The theft of things (e.g. oil, cars, money, etc) is plunder.

An invader comes for the specific purpose of plunder.  Millennia of international law recognizes the right of nations to a border, to stop those who come for the purpose of plunder, and to enforce that prohibition by any means necessary including physically stopping said person by causing them to cease to be alive.

Attempt to proceed across a marked border when there are rifle barrels pointed at you is a clear declaration of your intent to invade. 

The solution to the problem of illegal immigration is to make clear that plunder will not be tolerated and it will be stopped.  There is no due process right for someone who is in the process of invading another nation.  Such an individual has in fact declared war on your nation and intends plunder upon it.

We both can, should and indeed must stop that.  A wall, along with sufficient sensors to detect attempted breaches whether over or below, may be part of the answer but it must include, in any event, fair notice that attempts to plunder our nation will be repelled before the invader sets foot on our soil and must be enforced.

So now Lennar is going to put "Alexa" in all their new homes.

That's ridiculous folks.

Look, I have ready-to-go, right now, the software interface necessary (including an app to control it all which is working, but still a bit rough in appearance) that gives you full control and monitoring of your home but does not give anything away to the cloud.

It's your damned house folks, not Amazon's, not Google's, and not Apple's.

HomeDaemon-MCP requires no outside connection at all, other than for you to control it.  It runs over SSL and talks to only you.  It's a master-slave system, so if you want a second controller in the garage or a rainproof box out near the pool or sprinkler gear (or both), that's fine -- they all work together.

It speaks standard Z-wave for thermostats, switches, motion detectors, energy management, locks and more.  It does passive security as you define it (e.g. "arm yourself 1 hour after the garage is closed if no movement is seen inside during that time), or pretty much anything else you want.

The homeowner can modify the event list in a nearly-indefinite fashion to what they want.

You can see and control it all from any web browser or an Android app (which I am about 90% done with functionality wise, and ~60-70% done appearance wise.)

It supports any number of users each with a separate set of defined permissions that allows for control over what a given user can see, change or both.

The builder or third-party installer who wants this can buy it wholesale from me, own it, and have a unique and entirely private advantage.  While you could probably teach Alexa how to do this (I'm sure I could write a "skill" to do so easily) you'd be nuts to do it because then authentication information has to be in he cloud somewhere and if' it's in there some jackass can steal it.

Don't buy a house with a "cloud" implementation of something like this and don't, for God's sake, install it either in an existing house.  You are literally giving away when you're home and the keys to your castle to an unknown set of people and that assumes nobody ever breaks into Amazon's, or whoever else's "cloud" gear.

That will happen, and when it does you're going to get robbed at best and home-invaded at worst since it becomes trivial for a bad guy to know everything they want to about when you're home and when you're not along with where you are in the house and if you're sleeping, for example.

No, No and NO!

Yes, this technology is cool, it saves energy and it's damned convenient.

It both saves money and adds tremendous convenience but you must never, ever link that to any sort of "cloud" or third-party environment.  Ever, if you give a damn about privacy and security in your house.

Instead if you're one of these firms in that space get ahold of me today (look to the right) and let's have a conversation.  You can own the real deal with only the homeowner having the data and access right here, right now, today.

No kidding, and if you buy it lock, stock and barrel you own it and your competitors do not.

It's really quite-simple folks.

Yes, it's 20 minutes.  Watch it.  Distribute it.  Then enforce it.

If companies want to back those who advocate for and declare they will commit millions of murders they need to be put out of business -- lawfully, through irrevocable boycotts.  Those who support or work for any organization or firm that lend support to those advocating for millions of murders need to become unemployed -- and permanently unemployable.  No exceptions, no ifs, no ands and no buts.

There are those who say that there's a "cold civil war" going on right now culturally.  Well, maybe.  But the people on the left are not arguing for a "cold" civil war -- they are advocating, supporting and declaring intent to commit mass-murder, in America, on the scale of Rwanda -- or even Nazi Germany.

If someone tells you repeatedly and to your face that they intend to murder you what is your response? Do you actually associate with and buy products from those who state they are willing and intend to commit millions of murders to achieve a political goal?

That's what all those who support banning or registering any sort of firearm in America are actually stating.  It is a fact that some percentage of Americans believe the words of the 2nd Amendment mean what they say: shall not be infringed.  We can have whatever debate you wish on what percentage of Americans believe this but I am absolutely certain of one thing: It's not zero.  If that figure is even 0.1% of the American population then a demand to ban any gun is a declaration of intent to murder 300,000 Americans to get what you want.  If it's 1% then that number is 3.3 million murders.  And if it's 3%? Then there are 10 million people who everyone that supports such a ban is stating they intend to murder simply because those individuals believe that the Constitution is not a dead letter and means exactly what it says.

Not a single one of the people arguing for "gun bans" or "gun registration" wants to actually reduce gun violence.  It is an outrageous fraud to claim you're "against gun violence" when the actual position you are taking is that you're willing to murder millions of Americans to obtain a political goal.

That this declaration has not resulting in an immediate shooting war -- a civil war on our own soil -- is simply because with the exception of the criminally insane a simple declaration of intent to murder millions doesn't contain enough credibility for people to take it seriously.

It is a grave error to believe that this will continue beyond the point that the first people are actually murdered in furtherance of that declaration of intent.  It is a further grave error, and one that can easily lead to an actual civil war with millions of Americans lying dead on both sides of the debate, for you to fail to point this fact out every time you hear such a phrase as "common sense" gun restrictions and take corrective action to demand that those who have and do adopt such positions declare their true intent in public -- that is, to force them to publicly admit their intention to murder all who disagree while accepting the social, economic and political consequences of doing so.