Surviving a Traffic Stop with an Anti-Government Extremist

Even the Establishment gets tired of people…

It is late at night and the rain beats down on the windshield of your patrol car. A Chevy Blazer speeds by, dousing your vehicle with a spray of fine mist. As the wipers clear your view, you notice that something is strange about that Blazer. The rear license plate had a lot of funny writing on it. They were obviously not plates from your state, but they didn’t seem to be plates from any other state you’d ever seen before, either.

Who would make up their own plates? It seems a little odd. But you pull out into the road and accelerate to catch up to the Blazer. It’s hard to see the plates because of the rain, but they are clearly not legitimate plates. In fact, you can just barely make out the wording on them: “Sovereign Private Property…Immunity Declared at Law…Non-Commercial American.” This is a little bit more exotic than a “Save our Lakes” specialty plate. You turn on your lights.

The Blazer ignores them, keeps going. Irritated, you turn on the siren. Finally, the vehicle in front of you pulls over to the side of the road. You get out of the patrol car, curse the rain, and walk up to the Blazer. The back of the vehicle is festooned with bumper stickers. “End Judicial Dictatorship.” “FREEDOM wasn’t won with a REGISTERED GUN.” “Sovereign Forever, New World Order–Never.” You’ve never seen stickers like this before. Judicial dictatorship?

As you walk past the vehicle, you see a message in vinyl letters posted on one of the side windows: “No One Is Bound to Obey an Unconstitutional Law and No Courts Are Bound To Enforce It, 16th Am Jur 2 Ed 256.” You reach the driver-side door. The window rolls down part-way and an angry face greets you. It is attached to a middle-aged man, Caucasian, scraggly hair, dressed in work clothes.

“Could you roll down your window, sir?” you ask.

“Are you arresting me?” the driver asks belligerently.

“Sir, could you please roll down your window?”

Instead of complying, the driver hands you a folded up sheet of paper. You pull out your flashlight to take a look at it, trying to protect it from the rain. It seems about as strange as the license plates and the bumper stickers.

“NOTICE TO ARRESTING OFFICER WITH MIRANDA WARNING,” it reads. It identifies the driver as a “Civil Rights Investigator.” It’s hard to read the fine print on the document, but it seems to be saying that you cannot arrest the driver without a warrant unless you immediately take him to a judge to determine if the arrest was lawful. It threatens to sue you “in your INDIVIDUAL capacity” if you improperly arrest him without a warrant. Near the bottom it states that if you ignore these warnings, “it will show bad faith on your part and prima facie evidence of your deliberate indifference to Constitutionally mandated rights.”

You shine the flashlight on the driver. He is smiling at you.

What do you do?

My Top 10 DVD wish list

Damnit, I can’t be the only one out here that wants these… This doesn’t include the real obvious ones that everyone wants like Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Heavenly Creatures, or the Max Headroom series, but my own list of titles that I haven’t seen other folks yelling about.

  1. Slacker. Linklater’s Austin classic
  2. The Horsemen. Totally awesome action/adventure movie about buzkashi players in Afghanistan. I recall seeing this in the late-70s (it came out in 1971). Frankenheimer directs. Omar Sharif and Jack Palance star
  3. Vanishing Point. Uber-cult movie about existential nihilism and long distance high-speed driving. Again, one of my major favorites.
  4. Desk Set. Wonderfully charming Hepburn and Tracy movie about early computerization. Lots of Big Iron hardware (IBM is namechecked several times in the credits) and a freaky Mondrian-esque opening titles.
  5. Them! Giant ants. Los Angeles storm drains. What more could you want (except the fscking DVD!)
  6. The Monolith Monsters. Wonderfully absurd monster movie with no monsters – just growing rocks. Always a favorite of mine because the hero is a geologist, the fictional town of San Angelo looks like it’s in the Eastern Sierra desert, and the humans win with their wits and not with a gun.
  7. Lord Love A Duck. Incredibly insane movie about sweaters and, er, quacking, with a groovy soundtrack.
  8. Action In The North Atlantic. OK, so it’s a formulaic war picture from 1943 except for two things: 1. Bogart. 2. It’s a forumulaic war picture about the Merchant Marines in WWII
  9. Dragnet. The 1966 TV movie with Jack Webb and Harry Morgan. Pretty hard boiled and superior to much of what aired on the subsequent series.
  10. The Driver. It’s another dark, brooding car chase film, but off-kilter with a heavy noir feel to it.

The Smurfs as Marxist parable

Remember that scene in Slacker about the Smurfs being a subconscious method to ease children into accepting the arrival of Krisha? Here’s a competing theory which puts the Smurfs at dead-center of a Marxist utopia.

What does Gargomel want to do with the Smurfs? He has two ideas. The first is to eat them. This is unusual, because the Smurfs are small and rare, and would not make as good eating as, say, a deer. It is similar to Sylvester’s obsession with eating the golf ball sized meal that is Tweety Bird. There are two explanations.æThe first is that metaphorically, he wants to devour socialism, as the West wanted to do to the USSR and its satellites during the Cold War through its tactic of encirclement. The second is that as a pure capitalist, he wishes to turn everything into a commodity – including people. The second thing Gargomel plans to do to the Smurfs once he catches them is to turn them into gold. As the ultimate supercapitalist, he is more concerned with his own wealth than with equality and fairness. Like any Adam Smith style capitalist, it is his ‘natural’ state to want as much money as he can get.

Gargomel is a cold, bitter and ultimately empty man. This is because he has nothing else in his life but a soulless quest for wealth and possessions. A definite statement about the anti-social effects of economic rationalism.

[via bOing bOing]

Bruce Schneier on firewalls

The latest Crypto-Gram centers on electronic liability and (and versus) security, but one paragraph in particular eloquently crystallizes one-half of my objection to firewalls (the other being that they’re more to do with monitoring and/or blocking access from folks within the firewall)

Think about why firewalls succeeded in the marketplace. It’s not because they’re effective; most firewalls are installed so poorly as not to be effective, and there are many more effective security products that have never seen widespread deployment. Firewalls are ubiquitous because auditors started demanding firewalls. This changed the cost equation for businesses. The cost of adding a firewall was expense and user annoyance, but the cost of not having a firewall was failing an audit. And even worse, a company without a firewall could be accused of not following industry best practices in a lawsuit. The result: everyone has a firewall, whether it does any good or not.