Under US law knowns as “civil forfeiture,” governments claim they can take property suspected to be involved in a crime without arrest, prosecution, or conviction of the owner of the property. They don’t even have to prove any crime was committed. All they have to do is state the property is suspected to have been used in a crime or to have been acquired as a result of a crime. Nobody has to be convicted for the owner to lose the property to the government. The government can then liquidate it and keep the proceeds unless their victim is wealthy enough to be able to fight them in court at significant expense.
How are the proceeds from government theft (civil forfeiture) used? There are few if any restrictions. The use is typically at the discretion of whomever runs the agency receiving the proceeds of the government-backed theft. The funds can be used to pay a police chief’s salary, or to buy private gym memberships for law enforcement officers, or to throw a Christmas party for the cops involved in the theft.
Motel Customers Can Cost Motel Owners Their Properties
The Caswell family of Lowell, Massachusetts, is about to lose its motel to the Federal government because criminals who rented motel rooms sold drugs or committed crimes on the premises.
The Institute of Justice, which is helping the Caswells fight the government action, points out that only about 0.05% of their 125,000 room rentals over the past two decades resulted in arrests of customers committing crimes. That works out to around 3 or 4 arrests per year.
Despite this, the government plans to take the motel valued at over $1 million. If they succeed, it will be a windfall for them because the motel is free and clear without a mortgage. They then plan to split up the proceeds between the US Federal Government and local law enforcement.
This same abusiveness is often applied by the government against many others, not just owners of motels. A more common example is that you loan your car to a friend who then uses it to do something like transporting yet another person who was carrying drugs or stolen property. Even though your car was used to commit a crime without your knowledge or approval and your friend may not have even known what was happening either, you will likely lose your car to the government without any reimbursement.
Police Dogs Help Cops Steal
The cops don’t even have to file a case against you to do steal your property. They don’t even have to arrest anybody for a crime. All they have to do is claims there is a suspicions of a crime involving your property. All they need to do is to get a police dog to act suspicious around your property and they can then take your property. Read more…
As the government continues to treat citizens as guilty upon accusation without evidence, even mothers who have been traditionally favored in all matters of family are being faced with arrest when falsely accused of crimes against their children absent any supporting evidence. This is a familiar but disturbing occurrence for many fathers, but mothers should realize that they may face the same offense of being treated as guilty by accusation and arrested without evidence simply because of a malicious allegation.
Tammy Cooper was arrested by the La Porte Police Department after her neighbor Shelley Fuller reported that she had “abandoned” her children, ages 6 and 9, by letting them play outside. She claims she told police that she was home the whole time and her children were merely riding their scooters in the cul-de-sac outside their home.
They then went to talk some more with the neighbor.
Police then say that the neighbor alleged she had hit one of the children playing in the street with her car. This prompted the police to arrest Tammy Cooper, despite there being no evidence of either child being hit by a car and Cooper and her children saying it is not true. Read more…
On August 16, 2012, decorated US Marine combat veteran Brandon Raub of Virginia was detained and incarcerated in a mental hospital by the FBI, Secret Service, and local law enforcement of Chesterfield County acting on Federal government requests. The Rutherford Institute obtained his release after about a week of incarceration because the government had nothing to charge him with and could not show there was anything wrong with him.
Federal government agents, with police backup, showed up at Raub’s home to “interview” him. Below is a video of the cops hauling Raub away. Chesterfield police claim this was not an arrest, but the video shows what looks to any ordinary honest person to be an arrest. The video was reportedly filmed on the cell phone of a relative of Raub’s:
Raub was treated to what amounts to unwarranted arrest and incarceration because he posted controversial song lyrics and political views on his Facebook pages. In particular, the government claims he should be detained for psychiatric evaluation because he wrote “ominous” posts on Facebook on August 13 and 14, 2012.
In one message earlier this month according to authorities, Raub wrote: “Sharpen my axe; I’m here to sever heads.”
Police — acting under a state law that allows emergency, temporary psychiatric commitments upon the recommendation of a mental health professional — took Raub to the John Randolph Medical Center in Hopewell. He was not charged with any crime.
Sharpen up my axe and I am back, I’m here to sever heads.
On one of his multiple Facebook pages, Raub lists that he works for the “Ron Paul Revolution”, clearly referring to US Congressional Representative Ron Paul and his Libertarian political views. But the government interprets Raub’s Facebook post “The Revolution is about to start” as a sign that he is mentally ill.
Raub also questions how the government even learned about some of his posts because some of them were made on a private Facebook page he used to communicate with his relatives that was not visible to the general public. Read more…
Leila Marie Tarantino (DOB 10/24/1976) of Citrus Springs, Florida, claims that on July 17, 2011, she was pulled over by Citrus County Sheriff Department officers on South Columbia Street in Beverly Hills, Florida, for rolling through a stop sign, an offense she denies committing. She claims she fully stopped at the stop sign, then a police car did a U-turn to stop her vehicle. She says her two kids ages 4 and 1 were in the car with her and got a full view of the malevolent antics of the police as they pointed a gun in her face, removed her from her car, and put her in a squad car for two hours. She claims that when backup arrived, the cops then proceeded to strip search her along the side of the road, and forcibly pulled a tampon out of her in a search for contraband. She was then released with a traffic citation for violating restrictions on her driver’s license.
Here’s a copy of the lawsuit filed against the Sheriff Jeffrey Dawsy (who is alleged to have personally approved of the strip search in this incident), the department, the Citrus County government, and six other unnamed officers including five men and one woman. The female police officer is the one alleged to have pulled the tampon out from Tarantino.
(1) As used in this section, the term “strip search” means having an arrested person remove or arrange some or all of his or her clothing so as to permit a visual or manual inspection of the genitals; buttocks; anus; breasts, in the case of a female; or undergarments of such person.
(2) No person arrested for a traffic, regulatory, or misdemeanor offense, except in a case which is violent in nature, which involves a weapon, or which involves a controlled substance, shall be strip searched unless:
(a) There is probable cause to believe that the individual is concealing a weapon, a controlled substance, or stolen property; or
(b) A judge at first appearance has found that the person arrested cannot be released either on recognizance or bond and therefore shall be incarcerated in the county jail.
(3) Each strip search shall be performed by a person of the same gender as the arrested person and on premises where the search cannot be observed by persons not physically conducting or observing the search pursuant to this section. Any observer shall be of the same gender as the arrested person.
(4) Any body cavity search must be performed under sanitary conditions.
(5) No law enforcement officer shall order a strip search within the agency or facility without obtaining the written authorization of the supervising officer on duty.
(6) Nothing in this section shall be construed as limiting any statutory or common-law right of any person for purposes of any civil action or injunctive relief.
In his blog post My Virgin experience as a Paedophile!, Sydney firefighter John McGirr details how Virgin Australia treated him as a pedophile because he was assigned a seat next to two unaccompanied boys around age 10. When an airline stewardess observed he was sitting next to the kids, she demanded that he give up the seat. She then asked a woman to take his seat, telling her that he was not allowed to sit next to minors. In other words, she implicitly defamed him as a child sex offender simply because he is male.
Since this story showed up on the Sydney Morning Herald’s website on August 10, there have been more than 800 comments and over 44,000 votes on Virgin’s policy against men. 87% of the votes cast say that Virgin’s policy is sexist and suggests all men are potential pedophiles.
Let Virgin Australia know that you will not be flying with them so long as they maintain a policy of sexism and defamation against men. Here are email addresses for their executive officers:
Sweden seems like a progressive country to the uninformed. It has parental leave policies for both genders. While mothers have always availed themselves of such leave, fathers seemed reluctant. So the parental leave laws have changed over time to encourage fathers to take time off of work after the birth of a baby. At present, two months of the 390 leave days allocated for parents must be used by the father or they are lost.
Consider contemporary family life in Sweden. In the past, new parents split 390 days of paid leave however they liked—monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly. Women used far more of it than men. But today, new fathers no longer rush back to work, leaving the mother to raise little Sven all by herself. The reason for the change? Smart public policy.
In 1995, Sweden passed a simple but revolutionary law: couples would lose one month of leave unless the father was the one who took it. A second use-it-or-lose-it month was added in 2002, and now more than 80 percent of Swedish fathers take four months off for the birth of a new child, up from 4 percent a decade ago. And a full 41 percent of companies now formally encourage fathers to go on parental leave, up from only 2 percent in 1993. Simply put, men are expected to work less and father more.
By altering the roles of the Swedish father and the Swedish worker, Sweden’s paternity-leave legislation has, in turn, rewritten the rules for Swedish men (and, by extension, women). “Swedish dads of my generation and younger have been raised to feel competent at child-rearing,” writes Slate’s Nathan Hegedus, an American who experienced the system firsthand. “They simply expect to do it, just as their wives and partners expect it of them.” If a man refuses time at home with the kids, he faces questions from friends, family, and, yes, other guys. Policy changes produced personal changes—and then, slowly but surely, society changed as well.
On the surface, this sounds quite progressive. The United States lacks similar leave policies and American men often feel discouraged from taking time off from work for family matters. They fear they will be looked down upon, ridiculed, or passed over for promotions if they take more than a short time away from work for a new baby.
But the reality is that Sweden’s progressiveness is merely a veneer over a solid core of the same false feminist male-bashing that predominates in the Western world. Children in Sweden, you see, are treated as property of the mother. If the mother doesn’t want to share, she simply starts making false abuse allegations. No proof is required, obviously a mad mom’s word is more reliable than all the evidence in the world. She will be quickly and easily rewarded with sole custody, marginalizing the father to no more a few days per month with the children.
Many fathers quickly see even this small amount of contacted whittled down to just a few hours of supervised visitation, supervised because obviously fathers cannot be trusted with children if the mother says so. In Sweden, as in the United States, men are guilty upon accusation and must struggle to prove themselves innocent, a task which is effectively impossible in many cases. After all, if you are a man who was accused of some crime that nobody else saw and there is no evidence of it occurring or not occurring, how are you to prove that you didn’t do it when a mom says you did? You can’t, so her lies win.
If a father fights for equal child custody, Swedes will consider him a brute. If he is beaten senseless by false accusations from a malicious mom, his life in tatters, he will suffer in many ways including by very limited contact with his children. Then Swedes will consider him a deadbeat. Being a father in Sweden is a losing proposition, the only chance of success is at the whim of a woman. But if she changes her mind, for any reason — her affair, her drug abuse problem, etc. — the father is instantly a degenerate who should be banned from seeing the children without the watchful eyes of the state closely monitoring his every move.
This is no different, really, than the United States and many other nations in which men are not even second-class citizens in all matters involving families and children. Not only is this extremely unfair, it contributes to a wide range of social problems including gender conflict, parental alienation child abuse, and harming children’s educational attainment and mental health.
To their credit, many women understand these issues very well and fully support equal rights. Some of them are strident enough about it to actively support both the father’s rights movement and going to significant effort to ensure their own ex-partners stay involved in their children’s lives. Unfortunately, there are more than a few naysayers remaining. Some of them are quite intent on not only denying equal rights but going so far as to even any messages that advocate for changes they do not approve.
Amnesty International Shows Its Sexist Bias
A lot of children in Sweden are upset about deprivation of access to a loving parent, generally their fathers. Four Swedish high school students, Sara Sivesson, Jerry Wallén, Sandra Atas, and Oskar Krantz, set out to expose Sweden’s human rights crimes against children and fathers to the world. They produced a video which they submitted to Amnesty International for a human rights video contest. Their video explains what happens to so many Swedish fathers who long to spend time with their children but who are prevented from doing so by the typical false feminist tool of false accusations.
The video made it to the finalist stage. The students were of course very excited by this.
But then a woman’s violence organization in Uppsala reportedly demanded that Amnesty International remove the video from the competition and its website. Read more…
Domestic violence is typically an issue of control and learned abusive behaviors stemming from childhood. Nobody deserves to be abused, but contrary to popular misinformed opinion, it is clear that both genders are often responsible for abuse. Yet men continue to be wrongly blamed as nearly always being the abusers.
The result of this bias is that domestic violence problems do not get resolved. The false feminist fringe’s male-bashing propaganda seems to claim that the only good man is a dead man, or perhaps one who obeys and subordinates himself to a dominant woman. It turns out that physical violence often results from attempts to wrongly control another person. While abusers certainly use physical violence to control, victims also use it to resist control. Children in the home suffer and may learn to become abusers themselves, and these future abusers are likely to attack both genders.
Police seldom believe male victims of DV. They often allow the female perps to go right on abusing. It’s not uncommon for them to arrest the male victim because they refuse to believe that women can be violent. Some police departments even have “must arrest someone” orders for DV calls, so if the cops can’t figure out what happened, by default they arrest the man. Read more…
Given the lack of psychological education for children, many suffer badly from child abuse with no help coping. Many of these abused kids go on to become abusers themselves.
Few know how to identify these abusive adults until after they marry them and discover they are being emotionally, verbally, and sometimes physically abused on a frequent basis. It is far too easy to inadvertently marry a sociopath.
Even when you figure out you have married an abusive person, the courts will often, perhaps even usually, not protect you from these people. Instead, they take the abuser’s side and help them commit even more abuses. “Take the kids, take the house, it’s your reward for terrorizing your spouse” is the common refrain of the black-robed bandits in American family law courts.
Is it any wonder why more and more people are wondering whether marriage in America is even safe any more?
The US Senate is at its typical deceitful antics again. Senators are once again debating more repressive legislation, this time in the form of the Food Safety Accountability Act of 2010. This legislation is designed in part to silence those who cite research on foods and supplements that have beneficial effects to health. The main sponsor of the legislation, Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat from Vermont), claims he’s trying to protect Americans from unsafe contaminants in foods and supplements. But the legislation is so defective that, if passed, it will almost certainly be used by the FDA to continue to attack, persecute, and shut down companies and organizations that publish citations of scientific research that shows their food and supplement products are beneficial.
If after reading this article you are persuaded that this new legislation has some problems and should not pass in its present form, please take action by contacting your Senators to oppose the bill. It takes just a couple of minutes to do this.
FDA Happy to Sacrifice Your Health, Life, and Freedom for Its Money and Power
Why does the FDA want to silence these people? Simple, they are a threat to its income and influence.
Innovative food and supplement companies sell a wide variety of highly beneficial products that often out-perform expensive and side-effect laden drugs at a fraction of the cost. The FDA would rather have you buying the latest and greatest statin drug to lower your LDL cholesterol, not eating healthy foods and taking cheap and effective supplements like niacin, plant sterols, red yeast rice, and fiber supplements that all have scientific backing for lowering LDL cholesterol without the dangerous side effects of statins.
Why does the FDA prefer statins? Again, follow the money. Statin makers are big pharmaceutical companies. They pay billions in fees to the FDA to approve these drugs. The FDA is addicted to these fees. While the drug companies “complain” about the high fees, they are actually very happy to participate in this plot because it enables them to introduce pricey new products every year, many of which work not much differently from the dozens of similar products already on the market, and keep smaller competitors from cutting into their markets. The FDA is a very good business partner in that it helps create drug monopolies and destroy any competition that may arrive before it can take too big a cut out of big pharma and FDA profits.
Small companies can’t afford $1 billion plus drug approval processes that take several years, even more than a decade, to get a drug approved. So many small companies that want to offer consumers products to help solve their health problems have turned to foods and supplements as the only route available to them. Read more…
A few weeks back, we published an announcement about the Canadian Symposium for Parental Alienation Syndrome. The regular registration fee is $195 per person. However, ACFC (American Coalition for Fathers and Children) supporters can get a discounted rate of $150 and bring along a second person (new spouse, friend, grandparent, etc.) to the conference for free. Here’s the full announcement from ACFC: Read more…
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