Only the man who says no is free.

So servants of The Kenyan, they are asking the Congress to give them some laws that would explicitly permit the FBI to access people's intertubes browser history, and various other electronic data, and without a warrant.

FBI Director James Comey, he says the FBI actually already possesses such authority. Except said authority has been obscured by a "typo," introduced into the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. One that has encouraged certain Bad and Wrong companies to decline to provide tubular underpants-sniffing info that Congress clearly wished them to share with the FBI. This "scrivener's error," intones Comey, it is "needlessly hamstringing our counterintelligence and counterterrorism efforts."

Oh. Poor babies.

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It provides:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Fourth Amendment, it is a "typo." A "scrivener's error."

And has been, since the United States Supreme Court, it excreted Terry v. Ohio, back in 1968. Wherein the berobed ones invented the notion of "reasonable suspicion." From whence all the subsequent Fourth Amendment badness, it has flowed.

There was one dissenter to Terry. That was William O. Douglas. He wrote, in part:

[P]olice officers up to today have been permitted to effect arrests or searches without warrants only when the facts within their personal knowledge would satisfy the constitutional standard of probable cause.

The term "probable cause" rings a bell of certainty that is not sounded by phrases such as "reasonable suspicion." Moreover, the meaning of "probable cause" is deeply imbedded in our constitutional history. As we stated in Henry v. US: "The requirement of probable cause has roots that are deep in our history. The general warrant, in which the name of the person to be arrested was left blank, and the writs of assistance, against which James Otis inveighed, both perpetuated the oppressive practice of allowing the police to arrest and search on suspicion. Police control took the place of judicial control, since no showing of 'probable cause' before a magistrate was required."

The infringement on personal liberty of any "seizure" of a person can only be "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment if we require the police to possess "probable cause" before they seize him. Only that line draws a meaningful distinction between an officer's mere inkling and the presence of facts within the officer's personal knowledge which would convince a reasonable man that the person seized has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a particular crime.

To give the police greater power than a magistrate is to take a long step down the totalitarian path. Perhaps such a step is desirable to cope with modern forms of lawlessness. But if it is taken, it should be the deliberate choice of the people through a constitutional amendment. Until the Fourth Amendment, which is closely allied with the Fifth, is rewritten, the person and the effects of the individual are beyond the reach of all government agencies until there are reasonable grounds to believe (probable cause) that a criminal venture has been launched or is about to be launched.

There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today.

Yet if the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib, if they can "seize" and "search" him in their discretion, we enter a new regime. The decision to enter it should be made only after a full debate by the people of this country.

The other justices, they paid no attention to Douglas. By that time, 1968, most had concluded he was simply crazy: Douglas wanted, for example, to confer "standing"—that is, the right and ability to sue—on trees.

So they laughed off his warning that the "reasonable suspicion" standard they had crafted in Terry—and therein cabined solely to the seizure and search of a person suspected of being "armed and presently dangerous"—it would inevitably bleed out to coat the whole of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

Except that's exactly what happened. Especially upon the arrival on the high bench of the Four Horsemen of Richard Nixon's Judicial Apocalypse: Rehnquist, Burger, Powell, and Blackmun. The Terry exception, soon it commenced swallowing the whole. A process that continues to this day.

One can meanwhile leaf through the high court's opinions in the years immediately subsequent to Terry, and read Terry justices—Brennan, Marshall, Black, Stewart, White—one by one, admitting they had been wrong, and Douglas had been right. But by then it was too late.

The government, it is going to be in everyone's underpants, all and everywhere, and at all times. That's just the way it is. That is the North America that black people have lived in since they were first forcibly brought there, some 400 years ago. Now all the other Americans, they get to live that way, too. That's all.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td3mR9cQmfM]

The wingers, they have certainly enjoyed themselves, over the recent years, in smugly chortling, snickering, sneering, snorting, at the notion there might still be such a thing as racism, as anti-semitism, in the United States.

But now. They don't talk so loud. Now. They don't feel so proud. Now that the people of The Hairball. Are spilling their hateful bile. Upon them.

Take this fellow. Writing in National Review.

I was wrong.

The anti-Semitism I'd heard about from my grandparents—the country-club anti-Semitism, the alleged white-supremacist leanings of rednecks from the backwoods—was a figment of the imagination, I figured. I figured wrong.

Donald Trump's nomination has drawn anti-Semites from the woodwork. I've experienced more pure, unadulterated anti-Semitism since coming out against Trump's candidacy than at any other time in my political career. Trump supporters have threatened me and other Jews who hold my viewpoint. They've blown up my e-mail inbox with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. They greeted the birth of my second child by calling for me, my wife, and two children, to be thrown into a gas chamber.

Welcome to the world, dude.

Here's another winger, experiencing a similar come-to-jeebus moment:

The 2016 election has brought a very ugly side of America to the surface. Using the anonymity it affords users, social media—particularly Twitter—has become a haven of hate, harassment and threats. One targeted group has been conservatives, many of us Jewish, who have openly stated that we will not vote for Trump in November. Our reward? Harassment, anti-Semitism and threats of physical violence, including death. The perpetrators? Trump supporters and the alt-right, a white supremacist movement that is ecstatic to see Trump running for president.

These people are shocked—shocked, I tell you—to discover that they are so targeted. Because, after all, and as they always aver, it's not like they are of the dreaded "social justice warriors," out there identifying bigotry in all and everywhere, ululating without surcease in a skin-suit of "identity politics."

They still don't get the whole of it. Yet. Such people. That the original, and still most powerful, and pervasive, form of "identity politics," that would be—yes, Virginia—white identity politics. With white identity politics, that being the core of The Hairball's campaign. White identity politics, in fact, all that there is, to that campaign. There is no more.

[T]he critiques of identity politics from left and right both overlook the most powerful and consistent identity politics of all: white identity politics.

People tend not to see it as identity-based. That's because white identity politics has been so historically successful. Advocating for white people—and particularly for white men—is seen as normal, natural, and unremarkable. Of course, it was an unfortunate blot on his character that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but you couldn't really expect him to see "inalienable rights" as applying to black people, because whites naturally focus their politics on the interests of whites. Of course, the Republican party wins white people—and especially white men— while every other demographic group, including African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and women, votes for the Democrats. But that's a sign that the Democrats are mired in identity politics! White men have no identity, they’re the blueprint. Therefore, the party that rests solely on white male identity is the party that forswears identity politics.

The truth is, white identity politics in the United States isn’t just one of many identity politics. It is the identity politics: the one which has been most effective as a political force, and has created the groundwork for, and the necessity of, other identity-based politics. When Columbus sailed into the Caribbean, the native peoples greeted him with curiosity and enthusiasm; they were willing to treat him as a fellow human being. It was Columbus who decided that white identity excluded indigenous people, and that he was therefore justified in launching a genocidal campaign of murder and child rape. It wasn't black people who decided that humanity should be divided into different identities of white and black. Rather, it was slaveholders that built their own white identities on stripping other people of humanity. And it wasn't women who said that people's genitals determine whether they get to vote.

White men pioneered a politics designed to provide them with political, social, and cultural power. Oppressed people had little choice but to respond by working, as a group, against their own oppression. Black people—robbed, beaten, segregated, murdered—have responded by asserting that their interests are not adequately represented by white identity politics. Similarly, women have pointed out that their interests are not represented by male identity politics. Is that parochial? Or does it instead, reflect a wider, more inclusive vision—one in which rights, sympathy, and attention are afforded to everyone, rather than just to one, particularly vocal, particularly ingrown group?

As in the time of Columbus, and Thomas Jefferson, white identity politics continue to thrive today. Donald Trump demands a wall across the Mexican border, to protect white people from Hispanics. He demands a ban on Muslim immigration, to protect white people from Muslims. He sneers at Black Lives Matter protestors, and encourages people at his rallies to attack them, because, in his view, white lives are the ones that matter. If people on the left or the right want to critique identity politics, they might start with this: the one identity politics that consistently traffics in hate, divisiveness, and violence. The one identity politics that insists there’s only one valid identity, and that those who speak from other positions, or from other perspectives, are illegitimate, and must be silenced.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unh_CFlFdbg]

One of the reasons why children on other worlds, they are not permitted to view images from this planet, that is because they might be exposed to impressions of the annual Victory Day Parade in Moscow.

This is a shiveringly embarrassing spectacle, one in which mass quantitites of war toys and tots are lumbered past various platformed Russian potentates, both alive and dead.

This year, for the first time, the RS-24 Yars thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missile, it rolled along in the parade.

Which is literally insane. Passing a nuclear weapon by, for review.

Obviously, the next step, that would be to set up a shrine. And actually worship the thing.

Maybe that will happen next year. In the manner pioneered by the subterranean mutants of New York City. As shown in the true-life documentary film Beneath The Planet Of The Apes.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BfmPdut2x4]

Extraterrestrials, they also Block and Filter, radio waves, that travel from this planet, out and into space. And little wonder. For I am thinking that probably someone should start putting warning labels on the radios. Cautioning people that, if they turn on the radio, brain damage may result.

Recently I tuned into hate radio, for the first time in several weeks. (Like all people in occupied territory, I find it useful to occasionally monitor enemy communications.) And immediately I heard, from some scrub sub for Runt Limprod:

Muhammad Ali is Trump! They're almost the same person!

I turned it right off. And then I took Medicine.

The radio dial, both AM and FM, it is also heavily mined with get-yerself-to-jeebus transmissions. It is hard to avoid these. Sometimes, in fact, it is impossible.

My friend S., he once had to abandon as junk an automobile that was so filled with the Lord that the radio refused to broadcast anything but a Yahweh station. First the Jehovah-possessed instrument disabled its tape-deck function—any cassette thrust in there would immediately begin vomiting snarls of polymer. Then, no matter what radio button S. might push, the same come-to-Jesus station would sound howlingly from the speakers.

S. put me in his car once, to drive me around, so that I might experience this possession for myself. Once I verified it as Real, I commanded him to pull to the curb, and then I exited the vehicle.

Shortly thereafter, S. gave the car to a wino.

"Why didn't you just replace the radio?" I asked him.

"It was too late," he replied. "The whole car was infected. I could feel it through the steering wheel."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdV_Qj0NYSY]

Among several other bad habits that have drifted here from the burning wreckage of elsewheres on the tubes, that would be the penchant for defaulting to Donald Sutherland-style "troll!" pod-screaming, whenever is encountered someone who is Different.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUXHB5U-Vl4]

George Orwell. Known and practiced troll. Did you know that? Tis true.

Here he is, in a June 1936 letter to Anthony Powell.

I must apologise for not writing earlier to thank you for your letter & Caledonia. I liked the latter very much. It is so rare nowadays to find anyone hitting back at the Scotch cult. I am glad to see you make a point of calling them "Scotchmen," not "Scotsmen" as they like to be called. I find this a good easy way of annoying them.

Bad Orwell. Mean Orwell. Trolling the Scots.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKwhq-zgCX0]

Christiane Harlan was a young German actress; Stanley Kubrick saw her on German television, and cast her in the key role of the final scene of his Paths Of Glory. She played a German barmaid, in bondage, who is brought out, in tears, by a foul French innkeeper, to sing for a group of French soldiers, rendered callous and cruel by war. She sings, and, in time, the men are transformed. They understand that she is a human being. And so are they. And that all the war, is wrong.

Harlan's uncle, he was Veit Harlan.

"For me, my uncle was great fun. He and my father planned to join the circus. They were acrobats. They threw me around. It was a complete clown's world. Nobody can imagine that you can know someone who was so guilty so intimately—and yet not know."

It turned out that when Harlan wasn't clowning around with Christiane, he was writing and directing propaganda films for Goebbels. The most notorious was a film called Jud Süss, in which venal, immoral Jews take over and ruin a German city, stealing riches, defiling Aryan women, etc. The film was shown to SS units before they were sent out to attack Jews. Harlan was tried twice for war crimes, and exonerated, proving that Goebbels had interfered with Jud Süss, forcing him to re-edit and inject more antisemitism.

"Where my uncle was an enormous fool, as many talented people are, was that he mistook his gift for intelligence," says Christiane. "He was a great big famous film person. He looked better and talked better and had enormous charm. So he thought he was also far more intelligent than Mr Goebbels. Goebbels was 10,000 times smarter than my uncle." She pauses. "Film people, actors, are puppets. We are silly. We are silly folk."

Harlan and Kubrick married, and remained together until the latter's death.

Christiane says her uncle's story reinforced for Stanley and her their great principle in life: always be suspicious of people who have, or crave, power. "All Stanley's life he said, 'Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous.' We both were very nervous on journeys when you have to show your passport. He did not like that moment. We always had to go through separate entrances, he with [our] two American daughters upstairs, and me with my German daughter downstairs. The foreigners downstairs! He'd be looking for us nervously. Would he ever get us back?"

That's what people of power do. Separate humans. No.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ifRA0Kj-8]