By Nathan Barton

Wired (and many other sources) report and are outraged that Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life, “On Friday [Ross] Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for his role in creating and running Silk Road’s billion-dollar, anonymous black market for drugs. Judge Katherine Forrest gave Ulbricht the most severe sentence possible. The minimum he could have served was 20 years.” Gee, what a shocker!  The war on some drugs was so over-rated by all these people, obviously.  The deep desire of the FedGov and other authorities to strike back meant no other result was really likely, no matter what the various states do with cannabis, yet all these people were content to live in a dream world.

Same thing for those upset with the USA PATRIOT ACT: they need to wake up to the real world.  As FND reports (from the Bellingham (WA) Herald): No deal: Legal fig leaf for NSA’s unconstitutional spy program will lapse “The National Security Agency is losing its authority to collect Americans’ phone records in bulk, after GOP Sen. Rand Paul stood in the way of extending the fiercely contested program in an extraordinary Sunday Senate session. But that program and several other post-Sept. 11 counter-terror measures look likely to be revived in a matter of days. With no other options, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in an about-face, reluctantly embraced a House-passed bill that would extend the anti-terror provisions that expire Sunday at midnight, while also remaking the bulk phone collections program.” This is NOT going to make a single dime’s worth of difference in what the NSA is doing, or what any other part of the squatter’s administration is doing to spy on anyone they please. Come on, people, wake up!

Mama’s Note: Made no difference at all, of course. A new and even worse “patriot act” was passed almost immediately.

UPI is seemingly shocked by the real world also, as they report “Police in United States shoot more than two people a day.” “A data analysis by The Washington Post suggests that police in the United States shot and killed an average of more than two people a day so far in 2015 — double the number suggested by federal data. The newspaper released a report on Saturday using interviews, police reports and local news accounts to compile a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015. It concluded that police shot and killed 385 people nationwide in the first five months of the year — a rate of 2.6 per day.” I suggest that even the WaPo is probably undercounting, based on their bias and their methodology and the lack of reporting.  After all the cops do more than gun people down, choke them to death, or hit them with their prowl cars: many accidents and fatalities can be attributed to the seeming inability of too many cops to obey traffic laws and common sense, families of cops “enjoy” record levels of domestic violence, and many people are just plain hounded to death by the various law enforcement agencies.  Again, in a dream world cops – even a majority of cops – are the good guys.  But we don’t live in a dream world.

Is this living in a dream world, or just the usual government stupidity?  Can no one do it? Fox News tells us, “Maryland has become the most recent state to drop the parallel-parking requirement from its road test, sparking debate about whether the next generation of motorists will be adequately prepared to safely navigate streets. A Maryland Motor Vehicles Administration spokesman said the requirement was officially removed May 19 after state officials had determined the maneuvers and skills required to parallel park (which include backing up, using mirrors and depth perception) were already being evaluated in other parts of the test.”  Daily I see people who supposedly DID successfully parallel-park failing to do so properly or safely.  Maybe they should drop the requirement for people to use turn-signals, also; leaving them off new vehicles would save consumers money, and so few people use them – why bother?  I do wonder what the insurance companies are thinking, saying, and doing about this sort of thing.  We can’t trust government to do anything right, even if they are doing things for which they have no authority.

Speaking of government stupidity and inability to do anything right, we have Kentucky, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle: State “overhauling” broken system of testing rape kits, or supposedly trying to.  But the real news is how badly the state has failed for decades. “Michelle Kuiper remembers the cold table against her back, how she laid there so long the blood on her legs dried and cracked. The white box the doctor was filling, labeled “rape kit,” seemed impossibly small for its purpose. ‘That kit held every horrific moment of what happened to me,’ Kuiper says. Yet for more than a decade after she was dragged off her porch in Louisville and raped by a stranger, Kuiper had no idea what became of that box. Kentucky has no procedure for tracking rape kits. There is no standardized policy for getting them from hospitals to law enforcement to the Kentucky State Police crime lab. No one knows how many are sitting untested at agencies across the state. Estimates range from 2,000 to 10,000.” We expect better for a blood test for blood sugar or to diagnose a fever, but then, that is not “official state business” (at least not yet in most places).  Clearly the police authorities and politicians in Kentucky don’t really care about protecting innocent victims or finding the criminals.

Mama’s Note: Collecting forensic evidence does nothing to protect innocent victims. The best response to a rapist is his death or grave bodily injury at the hands of the intended victim. Women everywhere must take responsibility for this into their own hands, and everyone else needs to encourage them to do so. And no, owning and using a gun isn’t enough all alone. There is so much more needed for effective self defense – but it’s a darn good place to start.

CNSNews.com reports that the Lipan Apache Tribe has won a victory when a Federal Nazgul refused to dismiss their case regarding use of eagle feathers.  The tribe is recognized by the State of Texas but NOT by the BIA or any other FedGov gang, and this is a matter of religious freedom for members of the Tribe, as federal law only allows recognized tribes to own the feathers even for religious purposes, and therefore stole one member’s feathers back in 2006.  Now the tribe hopes they might be forced to give them back as soon as 2016.  Some justice, eh?  Some liberty, some freedom of religion.  (Even if the chief Nazgul rule for the tribe, I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting the FedGov to give back the stolen goods.)