what gives?

Can't win for losing.

Conservatives enact and promote policies that remove your liberty (detentions, free speech zones, no habeas corpus, torture jails throughout the world, policies that promote religions), while Liberals enact and promote policies that remove your property (eminent domain, asset forfeiture, and several forms of wealth redistribution (necessary though that is at times)).

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: More Asset Forfeiture Madness:

This is the problem with asset forfeiture laws, they flip the presumption of innocence upside down. The laws were ostensibly for the purpose of preventing criminals from profiting from their crimes, allowing the government to seize cash, jewels, homes and vehicles that were bought with drug money or used in the commission of a crime. But if you can seize cash or property without ever even charging the person with any crime, much less convicting them of it, the 4th amendment is pretty much turned into confetti.

This is accompanied by excerpts from an article describing several such incidents of theft by police, with this little tidbit thrown in:

Dorman's attorney, David Guillory, calls the roadside stops and seizures in Tenaha "highway piracy," undertaken by a couple of law enforcement officers whose agencies get to keep most of what was seized.

Guillory is suing officials in Tenaha and Shelby County on behalf of Dorman and nine other clients whose property was confiscated. All were African-Americans driving either rentals or vehicles with out-of-state plates.

Guillory alleges in the lawsuit that while his clients were detained, they were presented with an ultimatum: waive your rights to your property in exchange for a promise to be released and not be criminally charged.

At the national level, the laws that give the DEA exactly the same "freedom" to take your stuff effectively without charging you for a crime were submitted by Vice President Joe Biden.  They've been used extensively throughout California and Oregon, where medical marijuana has been legal for quite some time.

Remember, Jefferson's original words were Life, Liberty, and Property, not "Pursuit of Happiness". Jefferson's only 1 for 3 in what his country has become in the last 15 years.

Of course, there are several cases where BOTH sides are screwing up and taking the same (wrong) side, with various forms of censorship and control of the media (especially the creation of a new form of political correctness where criticizing religions is rendered unethical and illegal - the right love it because it protects their particular madnesses from criticism while the left love it because it shows "tolerance" and "respect"), and in their collective giveaways that allow the media empires to circumvent the public's side of intellectual property rights and the loss of the public domain.

Medical mythbusting

Top 10 Common Medical Myths - The List Universe:

At the List Universe we love to dispel myths - so here we are, yet again, presenting another list of common myths that need to be debunked and forgotten once and for all. This time we look at medical myths - of which there are thousands. This is a selection of the ten most common

myths include sugar hyperactivity, 8 glasses of water, knuckle-cracking arthritis, and turkey sleep.

you go, girl

see more...

3 from Ed remind why we almost shouldn't have bothered...

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: A Billboard Battle of Stupidity:

I've already written about the Freedom From Religion Foundation's dumb billboard in Ohio. Turns out they have the same billboard up in Rhea county, TN, where the Scopes trial took place. And a group of clueless Christians in the area have responded with their own billboard that declares, oh so cleverly, "evolutionists came from monkeys." I'm sure that got a good little giggle going among the Tennessee Minute Women and Defenders of the Faith, who put up the billboard. But it's not only stupid, it's childish.

That is not surprising once you read some of the idiotic statements from the leader of this group in this Worldnutdaily article.

"We're supposed to lie down and take it and say, 'Jesus loves you,'" argued June Griffin, spearhead of the counter-Darwin billboard campaign. "Well this is payback time."

Oh gosh, and you sure did pay us back. Giving others the opportunity to laugh at you for your stupidity is hardly a compelling form of revenge, lady.

"Organizations like Freedom from Religion and the ACLU - they've taken over the courts and the schools; they run that philosophy out there night and day so they can promote their god, Darwin," Griffin told WND. "We're not going to be run over any more."

Griffin further told WND that she considers herself "the meanest woman in Tennessee" and that her group plans on unveiling another, even more flagrant billboard tomorrow.

Oh goody. This should be amusing.

Her goal, she said, was for the controversy to awaken people to how Darwinists use taxpayer money to support legal and educational enforcement of their doctrine.

"I'm speaking not only as a Christian," Griffin said, "but as a taxpayer.

"Chattanooga State [Technical Community College], for instance, is having a whole evolution month, and they have these little captive students that have to sit down there and listen to this," Griffin told WND. "Well, who's paying the bills? Let their own god fund them, and get out of the tax pot."

Why did Jesus bother, I sometimes ask...

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Why Gay Marriage Matters. Again.:

A woman sues a Florida hospital that refused to allow her to be at her partner's bedside while she died:

As her partner of 17 years slipped into a coma, Janice Langbehn pleaded with doctors and anyone who would listen to let her into the woman's hospital room.

Eight anguishing hours passed before Langbehn would be allowed into Jackson Memorial Hospital's Ryder Trauma Center. By then, she could only say her final farewell as a priest performed the last rites on 39-year-old Lisa Marie Pond.

But since she wasn't legally related, they wouldn't let her in:

Jackson staffers advised Langbehn that she could not see Pond earlier because the hospital's visitation policy in cases of emergency was limited to immediate family and spouses -- not partners. In Florida, same-sex marriages or partnerships are not recognized. On Friday, two years after her partner's death, Langbehn and her attorneys were in federal court, claiming emotional distress and negligence in a suit they filed last June.

And guess what? They had all that paperwork that we hear makes it unnecessary to allow them to be married:

At Friday's hearing, Langbehn's lawyers argued the case should be tried because Langbehn had the proper documentation to make medical decisions on behalf of her partner, and was not consulted about Pond's condition for hours despite seeking answers every 20 minutes.

''This is not just about same-sex couples,'' said attorney Donald Hayden, who is also representing the Langbehn family. ``This is about protecting the legal access that a parent has to see a child, or an essential loved ones right to be aware of what is going on with their loved one.''...

Though Langbehn had documents declaring her Pond's legal guardian and giving her the medical ''power of attorney,'' Jackson officials refused to recognize her or the kids as family.

The woman lays dying in a hospital room and the hospital won't allow her to see her wife or her children. Why? Because that would violate "family values." How sick and twisted is that? Worse yet, the hospital says it's all okay because they don't have any obligation to let anyone see anyone else in the hospital:

Jackson attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case on grounds that the hospital has no obligation to allow patients' visitors.

Right. So the fact that they do so automatically for straight couples and discriminate against gay couples - AND children of gay people - is irrelevant. So come on, all you opponents of gay marriage who say that you're all for gays having rights like this one as long as they don't call it marriage. I can't wait to hear you speak out against this hospital's actions and condemn their behavior. What's that I hear? Crickets? That's what I thought.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Radical Muslims Duck Into Punch:

I liked the response of Ezra Levant when a "human rights" commission in Canada brought him up on charges for reprinting the infamous Danish caricatures and asked him what his intent was in publishing them:

We published those cartoons for the intention and purpose of exercising our inalienable rights as free-born Albertans to publish whatever the hell we want no matter what the hell you think. I've probably given 200 interviews with people other than the state where I give a very thoughtful and nuanced expression of my intent. But the only thing I have to say to the government about why I published it is because it's my bloody right to do so. And it's my right to do so for reasonable intentions and it's my right to do so for extremely unreasonable purposes. I refuse to concede to you that what my political thoughts in my mind are or my heart are will determine whether or not an artifact is legal or illegal.

I don't care how noxious Levant's political views on other things might be, this is precisely the right tone to take when the government threatens our freedoms.

It's also worth going through the arguments of the Western defenders of these protestors, because they too aren't going away. Already I have had e-mails and bloggers saying I was "asking for it" by writing a "needlessly provocative" article. When there is a disagreement and one side uses violence, it is a reassuring rhetorical stance to claim both sides are in the wrong, and you take a happy position somewhere in the middle. But is this true? I wrote an article defending human rights, and stating simple facts. Fanatics want to arrest or kill me for it. Is there equivalence here?

The argument that I was "asking for it" seems a little like saying a woman wearing a short skirt is "asking" to be raped. Or, as Salman Rushdie wrote when he received far, far worse threats simply for writing a novel (and a masterpiece at that): "When Osip Mandelstam wrote his poem against Stalin, did he 'know what he was doing' and so deserve his death? When the students filled Tiananmen Square to ask for freedom, were they not also, and knowingly, asking for the murderous repression that resulted? When Terry Waite was taken hostage, hadn't he been 'asking for it'?" When fanatics threaten violence against people who simply use words, you should not blame the victim.

Quite so.

And the Vatican and several other churches throughout Europe and America are insisting that statements against churches, ANY church, should be made illegal, effectively using the Islamic reaction of violence as their own smokescreen.  Thus the churches are validating that most horrid of behavior against fellow man far more than their spoken words could ever denounce them.

Wonder why except as a tourist looking at the art and architecture, or out of attendance at a funeral or a wedding, I may never step foot in a church again?

there's a very strange irony...

...when immediately after submitting that last post, Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus comes to mind.